crack, head bowed, he listened, not seeming to breathe. Finally without a word, he pushed them both outside and the bolt slipped home.
That night, Pavel explained how the organisation was structured and what she was to do in the event of his arrest. She listened until morning, clocking the detail. Throughout she watched herself with a kind of third eye, the eye of the secret sleeper. She watched Roza Mojeska fall helplessly in love again, only this time far more deeply than before. It frightened her. She found herself bottoming out, reaching the soft sea bed; a place reserved for the elderly and those who know that their time together has been cut short.
‘When did you first learn that your husband was an associate?’
Roza was being interrogated again. Once more Brack was in the major’s shoes, one arm dangling, his hollowed eyes levelled upon her. The pond green jacket of the secret police didn’t sit well on his shoulders. He was still thin, seemingly undernourished.
‘I first heard words to that effect one hundred and fifty-four days ago.’ She’d scratched them on the wall with the nail of her thumb. Brack frowned. It sounded like an admission, that he might be getting somewhere, but he knew something was wrong. Roza explained. ‘You told me on the night of my arrest.’
The drawer slammed shut.
Pavel had said none of the Friends knew each other. The only link between them all was Pavel. Only Pavel had a link to the priest, and only the priest knew how to get to the Shoemaker. By the same token, the Shoemaker only knew of the priest. All the other Friends were unknown to him. Roza, then, was a figure completely outside the organisation, a kind of wild card in the brutal game against the secret police: unknown to everyone, she’d been entrusted with the key to any future operation. Pavel and the priest had fixed the one flaw in the security system: they’d prepared for betrayal. In that event the Shoemaker could still speak and Roza would spread his words, fronting a new organisation of Friends.
They’d moved just in time. Two months after Roza’s initiation, Pavel had lingered at the door. Unusually preoccupied, he’d given Roza his wedding ring. ‘Father Nicodem’s idea,’ he’d said. It had been a first slip of the tongue: he’d used a name. Three hours later the front door had splintered under a sledge hammer and Otto had stepped over the debris followed by four men in coats the colour of mud.
The drawer opened, snapping her reverie.
‘Tell me what you know, Roza.’ It was the first time that Brack had used her name. ‘We’re not going to let you out until you tell us.’ He was staring at her swollen stomach and the hidden life. A hint of the attic came across his face. ‘You don’t understand, Roza. You don’t know what harm the Shoemaker has done.’
‘Harm?’
‘Harm.’ The bark had gone; he still seemed trapped. He was still in a tunnel of filth trying to find his way out. Roza pitied him. Major Strenk had trusted him to break the girl while he dealt with the men.
‘There’s nothing you can do to me,’ she declared, obliquely.
Brack twitched and slid the drawer shut.
Thirty-two days later the cell door opened.
Two guards helped Roza to her feet and brought her slowly down the stairs to the cellar. Ahead, to the left, was the entrance to the room with the cage. The grey iron door was open. But Roza was pushed on to a chair standing incongruously by the corridor wall. Moments later came the sounds of scuffling and dragged feet. A man whom Roza had never seen before was pulled down the stairs. He was disfigured and cut, his chest gurgling like a blocked pipe. His feet were bare, bouncing along the concrete as if he were a marionette without strings. The guards hoisted him into the room with the cage. Moments later a heavy shot crashed into the corridor. The echo was still ringing in Roza’s ears when she heard more noise from the staircase, more groaning and dragging.
Another man was hauled along the passageway This time the guards stopped at the grey door. The prisoner lifted his battered face towards Roza. She hadn’t recognised him because of the quantity of blood… but it was Pavel. His body was limp in the arms of the green thugs, his shoulders horribly high, as if he were meat hanging on two hooks. He gaped at Roza, and sobbed, seeing for the first time the great swelling of life in her stomach. He tried to raise a crushed hand but all his energy went into a shake at the neck. As they dragged him into the room he coughed a sort of ‘No’.
Brack stepped out, a revolver in his hand. He stood, hangdog and determined, grimacing at Roza, waiting for her to make another choice. She pressed her thumb against the two rings on her finger and made a confused shake of the head. Her ears were ringing. A black hole was quietly expanding, rising from her depths. Brack’s mouth sagged open and he stepped slowly into the room.
The silence seeped into Roza’s mind.
She waited for the sound, her knees shaking uncontrollably Then, a compressed bang seemed to tear open her side.
They took Roza back to her cell as if nothing had happened. As the lock turned, she sank to her knees and the mental thread between her mind and her mouth snapped. She started gibbering. Her words became jumbled, losing shape and sense. Sounds poured out from her stomach like vomit. An arm came around her shoulder. The woman with cropped blonde hair was stroking her brow, saying ‘Shush’. Lights flickered and popped behind her eyes. The agony of childbirth was under way and she could feel nothing. Standing over her was the grey, distressed woman, wagging her finger, screeching nonsense.
Chapter Fifteen
Roza was transferred to the prison infirmary, a ward of evenly spaced iron beds, just like the dormitory at Saint Justyn’s. There, in a state of delirium, she moaned, looking up at some figment of Major Strenk. Cradled in his arms was a big fish, gasping for air, its tail flapping as if it were a kind of wild applause. A door slammed in a draught.
The following weeks were lost to Roza. She couldn’t scratch them on a wall to mark their passing. Exhaustion gradually shut down the hallucinations. A dark cloud settled on her consciousness, its density drawn from the pain it absorbed. She recovered the basic functions of living without quite being alive. When she could hear and respond to simple questions, they took her to a nursery on the same corridor.
‘It’s yours,’ said a nurse with a square jaw.
‘Mine?’ Roza cried, wanting wonder, feeling only a terrifying weight.
‘Have you thought of a name?’
Roza sank to a chair, tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t look down. She’d already glimpsed the vast ocean-blue eyes, the gangling limbs. She could hear a soft sucking sound. She’d seen the lips, the little tongue working, the nails on small fingers hooked on to the blanket.
‘Name. Have you got one?’ The jaw was pushed forward as if she were holding a pin between her teeth. She tapped a pencil on a pad. ‘There are forms to be filled in.’
In abject misery, Roza turned her head aside, away from the bulky nurse with the muscular fingers, away from her pad, the notes, and the endless requests for names and dates of birth. Opening her eyes, Roza saw a window The frame was large, with bars fixed on the inside. Beyond lay the sky, puffs of cloud and, most agonising of all, a tree. Roza could see the pink cherry blossoms. A light breeze came in short gusts, plucking them free. They floated away by the handful, like scared butterflies.
‘I have a form.’ The pencil tapped impatience.
Roza looked at the large pad of blue paper with its columns and boxes, the gaps and dotted lines. ‘There will be no name.
‘Just a surname?’
‘Nothing.’ Roza couldn’t do it. She couldn’t reduce this mystery of life to just another fact in prison. ‘No name at all.’
‘I’ll leave it blank, then.’
Roza had a consuming dread that her milk would dry up from grief and the devastating guilt that came from bringing life into a prison. But as she fed the murmuring infant she looked out of the window and received something that made her strong and able to cope with the shock of hearing that first murder and the sound of Pavel’s execution, all set against the grotesque monotony of prison existence. She’d seen pink blossoms. She’d seen
