‘Nope.’
A couple of burgundy armchairs, the leather shabby and worn, faced the stone hearth, their feather cushions plumped and yielding. Between each stood a small round table with a faded military insignia dated 1916. They’d been picked up way back for a few quid by Father William at a Salvation Army second-hand furniture store in Manchester. Like all Larkwood’s cobbled furnishings, they carried the secret histories of many unknown lives. They linked the community to the world they served. Anselm handed John his drink and then sank into his chair.
‘You asked about the person I met in the graveyard?’ said John, as if they were still in Anselm’s chambers at Gray’s Inn.
‘Yes.’
‘I need to wind back first, to December of nineteen eighty-one, just after midnight. That’s when it all began.’
John sat hunched forward, nursing his glass with both hands. Reflected flames danced on his dark glasses. He angled his head slightly attuned, as always, to the breathing of anyone nearby.
‘Tanks rolled on to the streets and within days ten thousand people had been thrown into detention camps. The army were in charge. Helped, of course, by the secret police… the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the SB, the ubeks… to use their more polite names. This was martial law People called it stan wojenny: a state of war.’
Most of the Solidarity leadership had been captured. The free trade union that had pressed for reform and change — wielding industrial chaos to speed up things — had been decapitated. Remaining activists had gone underground and settled into a long war. For their part, a war of words. They didn’t take up the gun, they took up the typewriter. Illegal publications burst out from hidden places. By the time John arrived there were hundreds in Warsaw alone. In March 1982 one of them caught his attention: Wolnosc i Niezaleznosc… Freedom and Independence. Running along the bottom of the page in
tiny letters was this mysterious declaration: PRINTED BY THE SHOEMAKER FOR THE FRIENDS OF THE SHOEMAKER
‘The Shoemaker?’ echoed Anselm.
‘His selected essays are available in translation. You’ll find a lengthy appraisal of his work (with citations) in my doctoral dissertation, a copy of which — furnished with a warm dedication — was presented to you in the manner of a gift.’
‘I still recall the lucid opening and the magisterial conclusions. Remind me about the cobbler.’
‘Every child in Warsaw knows the story. A dragon ravages the kingdom. All the knights are slain. Eventually a poor shoemaker turns up with a scheme to blow it to pieces, a sheepskin filled with sulphur
… think takeaway kebab stuffed with Czech Semtex. The dragon has a night on the town, fancies a quick bite after closing time, and bang. Peace returns to the land.’
The meaning was stark (‘and concludes Chapter Two’) — the Shoemaker was back to save the kingdom, this time with another kind of foreign explosive: words and ideas. John’s interest in the publication, however, wasn’t only limited to an enticing by-line. A few probing questions revealed that the Shoemaker’s paper had first appeared before the Second World War. It had continued in print right through the transition to Communist rule, abruptly disappearing off the streets in 1951 during the Stalinist Terror. For those old enough to remember — ‘Ring any bells? Chapter Three?’ — the reappearance of Freedom and Independence in 1982 was a wake-up call. The title was heavy with the meaning of struggle. It situated martial law squarely alongside the Occupation and the subsequent burden of totalitarian rule.
‘In retrospect, it was extraordinary,’ said John. ‘The response of ordinary people to the tanks and guns was spontaneously democratic. They set up “the other circuit”, drugi obieg. They devised their own secret institutions, run by and for themselves. Freedom and Independence was a perfect example… it was produced by friends. Someone printed it, obviously but the operation didn’t end there. A whole distribution network was set up, right under the noses of the army and the ubeks. Teams of volunteers, kolporters, people who believed in the Shoemaker’s ideas, spread the paper all over the city. They called themselves the Friends and, to this day, nobody has the faintest idea who any of the key players might have been. I first came across a copy in a cafe near my apartment. The owner had a pedal bin that functioned as a kind of secret magazine rack. Those in the know would turn up, buy a coffee and wait for the nod to go and fish out their morning paper.
A nod given in John’s presence, telling him that he was trusted. A nod that told him the owner had some link to the Friends of the Shoemaker. John saw his opportunity to get to the voice behind the paper: he left a message asking for an interview.
‘Instead I met Roza Mojeska,’ said John. ‘The most remarkable woman I have ever met in my life. And she doesn’t even feature as a footnote.’
She had two wedding rings on one finger, he said, running ahead of himself. He’d never had the courage to ask why It had been a priest’s idea, that’s all she’d said, seeing John’s gaze. But it was the single most potent ‘message’ that accompanied every movement of her hand, every gesture and action. She was not alone; she was two people. She was part of an alliance. Anyway returning to that request for a meeting, a week after leaving his message with the owner, he’d been stirring his coffee when a huge bearded guy in a checked jacket loomed over the table and told him to wear his overcoat like a cloak and wait at the grave of Boleslaw Prus in the Powazki cemetery, a writer famed for his love of children.
‘Where you were arrested six months later?’ asked Anselm.
‘Yes.’
‘What happened in between?’
John had become a friend of Roza, as much personally as professionally He’d been her link to the western media and she’d been his entry to the underground, but something else had grown: the sort of confidence and affection you can’t choose or nurture; it’s already there, waiting to catch light. But there’d been no meeting with the Shoemaker.
‘I asked every time I saw her and she always said no, which frustrated me no end because whoever did the writing wasn’t only a Vaclav Havel, he was a pimpernel known by his shoe rather than his glove. The paper just turned up out of nowhere. Every page kept alive the dream of an independent culture and society. There was poetry in the simplest lines.’
And Roza was the only link to this central figure of resistance: no one else knew who he was or where he was hiding. Then on the morning of the first of November, while walking to work, John felt a big hand grab his elbow Turning to his side, he saw the towering figure who’d loomed over the cafe table. ‘The Shoemaker wants to meet you. Tonight. Six p.m. At the grave of Prus.’ Then he crossed the road and was gone, leaving John stunned in the middle of the pavement.
‘It was All Souls’ Day’ John was still leaning towards the fire. He sipped his whisky ‘The place was alight with thousands of candles. People were gathered everywhere, but Roza was nowhere to be seen. And then I saw her walking over to one of them… a hard-looking bastard with a dead man’s face.’
John leaned on the huge stone lintel and looked down, unseeing, towards the complaining fire. His jacket was a neat fit, a slate grey herringbone, on top of a black roll neck sweater. He was tall and slim, the black trousers well pressed and shoes highly polished.
‘I was arrested, too,’ he said, stroking his jaw ‘For some reason, taking photographs of the secret police in action was considered bad taste. I got a good kicking and then they threw me on to the street.’
But not before learning that Roza had been taken to Mokotow prison.
‘I found her home address through a contact in the jail. I had to tell her it wasn’t me, that I’d been careful, that no one had followed me, but she wasn’t listening, she wasn’t present. That’s when I realised she’d told others, and they’d been waiting like me, the Shoemaker among them… but she’d seen one of the ubeks. She’d handed herself in. It had been a spontaneous, desperate signal to whoever was watching to make a run for it. So she’d won. They got no one else and they had nothing on her… and yet she was a broken woman. She was completely shattered.’
Straightening up, he tapped his jacket pockets. ‘May I?’
‘Yes.’
He’d always smoked Sobranie Black Russians, ever since his student days when he’d first got hooked. Like the Zeha East German trainers he’d picked up in Carnaby Street, they’d given him a sort of nonconformist allure. He still had the sheen as he fumbled for the crumpled packet, bent his head and struck a match.
‘I told her I’d find out who it was,’ stressed John, gesticulating with a sweeping arm towards Anselm. ‘I said I
