Roza didn’t dare to lift her cup of tea for fear her hand might shake. All at once she felt terribly old, too old for this. And Sebastian didn’t understand that no lawyer could penetrate that lost time; no one could cross the divide constructed by Otto Brack. Sebastian was leaning forward, unaware of the abyss yawning in front of him.
‘Roza, there’s hardly anyone left who survived the Terror,’ he said, quietly ‘You’re the only one alive who knows what happened in fifty-one. Strenk is dead. Only you know what crimes took place when the questions were over… you and Otto Brack. He was there, too, at the beginning of his career. He’s still alive.’
Their eyes met. Oddly it gave Roza a kind of support; she held on to the gaze as if she might fall over.
‘Do you know what Otto Brack did after the fall of Communism?’
Roza shook her head. She’d often wondered, not wanting to know; yet wanting to know, with the terrible heat of an old, quiet fire.
‘He took early retirement and began stamp collecting: He nodded at Roza’s vacant face, crediting a surprise that she hadn’t shown. ‘Yes, that’s what he does to while away the hours. He collects little pictures of days gone by the good old communist days. That’s what he was doing when I asked him to comment upon your interrogation papers. He was going over his stamp collection.’ Sebastian came an inch or two closer. ‘He regrets nothing, Roza. He remains convinced of the cause and the merit of the cost. It’s as if he’d done nothing wrong…
Sebastian’s eyes dropped remorselessly upon Roza’s left hand. They both stared at the two wedding rings on her third finger, the one public avowal of what had happened in Mokotow when Roza was barely 22.
‘Roza, help me bring him to court.’
‘Why?’ The whispered question was patently disingenuous born of a desperate longing to not know the answer.
‘For murder and torture. Your torture. And the killing of two men
… one of whom was Pavel, your husband.’
The sun had slipped away A pink light warmed the apartment, illuminating a shabby brown sofa, a landscape painting hung askew, a half empty bookcase, an oval dining table and three matching chairs: the detritus of a life crushed by the secret police. Roza looked calmly upon her new inquisitor. She’d been in this type of situation before. After the exhaustion that comes with dodging questions, there’s a strange second wind, an energy born of knowing you’ve won, at least for the time being. Roza knew when it was time to make a controlled confession, and it was now. It was time to give the other side a little bit of what they wanted so as to keep back an awful lot more.
Chapter Two
Roza fetched out the bottle of Bison Grass. With two small glasses cupped in her other hand, she resumed her place at the oval table. A feeble light trapped by a thick orange shade just about reached them from the standard lamp in the corner. It picked out strands of Sebastian’s roughly parted black hair. There was a pallor round his eyes and Roza concluded he didn’t eat many vegetables. She filled each glass.
‘How old are you, Sebastian?’
‘Thirty-six.’
‘You were fifteen when the Wall came down:
‘Yes.’
Roza sniffed at the coincidence. ‘My age when Stalin replaced Hitler.’
This was an apt meeting point. At fifteen Roza had seen the birth of totalitarian communism while Sebastian, at the same age, had seen its death: the corpse seemed to lie between them, stretched out on the table.
‘I didn’t join the resistance immediately’ said Roza, her mouth and tongue warmed. ‘But one day I was given a secret. I was brought as close as you could get to the Shoemaker. And, like it or not, that made me a Friend… shortly afterwards, a Friend in prison.’
‘Roza, who was the Shoemaker?’ asked Sebastian, tentatively ‘That era has been and gone. They lost, we won. The fight’s over, isn’t it?’
‘No, not mine.’
‘Even though it’s-’
The question died on Sebastian’s lips. He was looking over Roza’s shoulder as if Otto Brack had stepped from behind the curtain.
He’d seen the bullet.
Roza kept it standing upright on a shelf beneath a wall mirror. Most people didn’t spot it; and if they did few dared or wanted to venture a question. But that little brass jacket with the lead on top, once seen, grew large and filled the room. It changed those who saw it: changed how they saw Roza. And Sebastian’s eyes, finding again the old woman in the white blouse with a silver brooch clipped at the collar, were no longer so sure of themselves. He’d just learned something new about surviving the Terror.
‘They came for me in November nineteen fifty-one and took me to Mokotow prison,’ continued Roza, as if the air between them had been cleared. ‘I remember the night even now, the biting cold, and the snow crunching underfoot. They’d already lifted my husband and others whom I’d never met or even heard of… people who’d never been told the secret. Maybe that’s why Otto Brack thought of me. He was a young man, then. An angry, unquiet man. He’d just joined the secret police.’
Sebastian nodded. Impatiently, to clear his line of vision, he flicked back his fringe.
‘He asked your question,’ said Roza. ‘He wanted to know about the Shoemaker and Freedom and Independence. He, too, said the fight was over, though it had only just begun. And I didn’t give him any answers either.’
Roza took the smallest sip, letting the heat suffuse her lips and attack her throat. She couldn’t continue with the chronology of her confession. To do so would only bring back the dim grey cell, the sound of thundering water in the cellar. To do so would only bring back the sound of the pistol.
‘They let me out in nineteen fifty-three,’ she said, airily vaulting the years. ‘All I had left was a secret. I came out burdened by knowledge of the one thing that Otto Brack had wanted to know Only I could bring him close to the Shoemaker.’
The muffled sound of a television came from the flat below, a smudge of noise made of high voices and laughter. Observing Sebastian, Roza sensed his disappointment: he was still in Mokotow; he wanted a statement about the torture and the killings. He was trying to find a way into the cellar.
‘I was helped by good friends, continued Roza, drawing him on. ‘Ordinary, decent people whose names will never be immortalised by the IPN. People I would defend with my life. But I did nothing for the struggle, not for thirty years. And then, one morning, I went back to the Shoemaker.’
‘Why?’
‘The time was right.’
‘And the Shoemaker… he’d been waiting?’
‘No. Grieving.’
Sebastian nodded, outmanoeuvred. ‘And this brings us to nineteen eighty-two?’
‘Yes.’
‘The year when Freedom and Independence reappeared on the streets?’
‘Yes. Eight months later Otto Brack came to arrest me again. Oddly enough, it was a freezing cold November. Once more I was taken to Mokotow.’
Only there was no cage; no endless interrogations during that eternal twilight that emerges when you’ve no idea whether it’s night or day This time it was a single session like a brief visit to an undertaker. Unknown to Roza, the coffin had been sized beforehand. Brack was simply waiting with the lid in his hands, a hammer on the table, the nails in his teeth.
‘I’ve read the papers, Roza,’ Sebastian said with a note of warning. He’d picked up the crisp edge to Roza’s voice. He’d seen her face stiffen. ‘I’ve reviewed the operational file from eighty-two. It was cleansed. Brack got there first. All that’s left are a few vague clues, marks on the wall… Brack looked after his informers. He made sure they were safe, that no one could trace them. You’ll have to accept that-’
‘I’m not bothered about the file,’ said Roza, suddenly brittle. ‘If you’re really interested in what happened off
