justice for Roza Mojeska then.’ who knows, maybe I’ll have the right to walk on the same side of the street. That would be nice.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Disgust and melancholy tailed Anselm through the dark, empty streets of Praga. History — always alive in this city — asserted itself once more. It was precisely because the Soviet Army had been camped here during the Uprising across the river that the buildings in Praga had remained standing. This was all that was left of the old Warsaw that Roza would have known. And it was here that Marek Frenzel, the cute investor in people’s mistakes, had made his fortune, bleeding profit from Stalin’s shameful failure to stop the slaughter. The irony was toxic. Hands in his habit pockets, Anselm dwelled upon another history of destruction, that of Roza, and the murmur of her uprising.
Irina may have been undecided, but Anselm was certain: Roza had given birth to a child in Mokotow He hadn’t considered the possibility because he hadn’t known what the blue paper might represent. But now he knew. And, thinking now of her statement, he understood at last why children lived and breathed on every page.
‘Even so, I should have seen it from the pavement,’ he said, out loud. ‘The writing was on the prison wall.’
He recalled the young woman in the Rolling Stones T-shirt. Her emotions had imploded, disappearing comprehensively with shocking speed. At the time he’d simply perceived the incongruity at the heart of Roza’s statement: there was no hint of visceral feeling on the page despite the traumatic events she recounted. Intellectual commitment to the Shoemaker, yes; but no fire in the belly; no stabbing passion.
‘I knew then that your emotional life had remained in Mokotow. And now I understand why you wanted to stay there. It was the place you last saw your child.’
There was another certainty — Anselm looked up to take his bearings, retracing his steps towards the river.’ noting the streets were less dirty the buildings smarter; that the tide of investors was on the way, bringing all sorts of changes for the good, Frenzel riding the wave like a sea slug on wreckage — Roza arrived at the Kolbas alone.
‘You let go,’ he declared, opening his hands with dismay ‘Why? Because you looked into the eyes of someone who, one day, would have to be told about their father; someone who could be spared unnecessary pain. This is what it all comes down to, isn’t it? It’s always about avoiding suffering. Your child’s, Kaminsky’s.’ the Church’s.’ anyone’s, but never yours. You just accept it, for them.’
Roza had accepted adoption. She’d let her child out of prison. She’d let another family take her place: a better, simpler, happier family where people laughed and cried for all the usual reasons, where no one spoke of torture, martyrdom and the magnitude of the Shoemaker. But Roza had still made a big mistake, because shielding other people from suffering isn’t always possible. It’s not always a good idea. Which is why her decision to see Brack in court had become her last obsession.
‘You realised what had always been obvious,’ said Anselm, compassionately, ‘easily missed because you were guided by love; you saw, at last, that you had a debt to your child greater than your loyalty to the Shoemaker and the Church, greater than the claims of any political cause or institution. You faced what you’d run away from; the obligation to bring your husband’s killer to justice, in the name of your child, even if that child never knew it.’
He passed a brooding, abandoned factory, its windows sealed with breeze blocks; he nipped through an arch adjacent to a substantial residence that had been halved, the outline of floors and rooms like scars on the wall, its doorways bricked up. Rotten fruit lay on the pavement and strips of white plastic banding curled up in the gutter. A cheap market had been and gone. The warm smell of decay entered Anselm’s lungs. He increased his speed, trying to escape the sudden recrudescence of the Dentist.
A chess match came to mind.
Anselm had been toying with an unusual sacrifice: a queen for a pawn — something to shock and disturb his abstracted opponent.
‘I had this source,’ John had said, moving a bishop to QP4. ‘He listened at closed doors. Told me what he’d heard. Fed me good stories.’
He’d been a voice on the other end of a telephone, a man who’d called himself the Dentist. His stories turned out to be sweeteners, because the Dentist turned out to be a high-ranking officer in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, trying to lure John on side.
On side for what?
John had said he didn’t know, because he’d been kicked out of Warsaw.
Only, thanks to Irina, Anselm had learned a little bit more about this episode in John’s life. Before taking that plane to Heathrow, John had been locked in a prison cell, his jaw swollen from a good kicking. He’d called Brack, and Brack had come to say goodbye… and all this happening in the immediate aftermath of Roza’s capture.
‘Which isn’t surprising,’ replied Anselm to his clouded mind. ‘John was arrested at the same time as Roza. Brack’s creeping around as the Dentist had nothing to do with Polana. They were separate operations. Remember? Brack’s interest in teeth fell outside the joint SB/Stasi mandate. His dealings with John had nothing to do with his plan to catch Roza and the Shoemaker.’
Anselm came to a junction he didn’t recognise. He must have taken a wrong turn. Not caring he pressed on as if Frenzel’s pals were on to him, wanting blood because he’d bought those flowers for a piece of the boss’s property. Ahead was the bright, modern skyline west of the river; he’d easily find a bridge. Like one of the Magi from the east, he’d found an unexpected truth, and the only way home was by a different route, because truth changes where you’re going and how you get there.
‘The Dentist was Brack.’ Anselm wouldn’t let the matter go. It was as though he’d turned round to check where he’d got lost. ‘Now there’s a truth I didn’t expect.’
John’s hand had reached into the darkness of a sewer to touch Brack’s outstretched fingers. The touching had troubled John (he’d said), and it troubled Anselm now, because unexpected truths, lined up, often make greater sense of each other. And Anselm had stumbled across another one in Roza’s statement.
John had told her a family secret: his mother had died during his infancy Mr Fielding, an indecisive man, had remarried swiftly. He’d ended up exiled to a Washington basement, his career in the slow lane. Roza called it a personal story tied up with the greater struggle. It had been the reason for John’s coming to Warsaw… where, by chance (unknown to Roza) he’d shaken hands in the dark with Otto Brack.
‘What’s the link?’
What connection lay between the death of John’s mother and Brack’s emergence as the Dentist in the life of her son? There had to be one. Proximity of two mysteries in time and place was unlikely to be a coincidence — that was Anselm’s rule of thumb: it served him in theology and it had served him at the Bar (he’d never been at ease with chance as an explanation: it was harder to justify than a miracle). The connection, if there was one, remained obscure. But this much was clear: Brack had been manoeuvring John as much as he’d been manipulating Roza.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, John?’ asked Anselm. ‘Why not tell me about her death and the greater struggle? For God’s sake, we drank stolen altar wine together. We played Misery You came to Larkwood and learned how to pick fruit that was ripe.’
Darkness entered his mind like a cold, paralysing wind. All at once he came to a halt.
There ahead, on a small piazza, in the blue night shadow of trees and shrubs, were a group of musicians… five of them… all in various attitudes of performance: a violin, an accordion, a drum, a guitar and a banjo.
But there was no sound and no movement.
On approaching the band Anselm saw that they were statues… life-sized figures waiting for the dance to begin, for the people in all the sealed tenements to come out and stamp their feet and clap their hands. They were waiting for Roza, and Irina, and so many others
…
The imported meaning bounced back, smashing straight through Anselm’s disquiet. This gathering of folk playing in unison was like a prophecy whose fulfilment no servant of Brack or Frenzel could hinder, even if they were
