Chapter Thirty-Five
Anselm’s street map led him to a parish church ten minutes walk to the west of the city centre. It stood on the edge of a residential complex by a railway line that climbed towards a bridge. Anselm could almost smell the presence of the river. Flanked by major thoroughfares, the neighbourhood was somewhere and nowhere, a triangular patch of land left behind when the road and rail people had done their bit for Warsaw’s post-war infrastructure.
Father Kaminsky spoke English quite well. His French was good, though his German was better. To get at Dante and Cervantes he’d learned Italian and Spanish, which left him comprehensively unprepared for small talk. His Russian was faultless. He liked Czech. Latin was another option, though the vocab might not cover the nuances of life under Stalin. So said the visiting curate from the United States when taxed on the phone by Sebastian. He viewed his host with unadulterated awe.
‘He’s seen everything, you know,’ said the curate to Anselm. ‘From the Nazis to the Reds. They say he smuggled Jewish kids out of the Ghetto, made Molotovs in the Uprising, and then, after Yalta, went out into the Cold. But he won’t tell me anything. Sweet whatever. He only talks about his childhood.’
They entered a parlour facing a garden running to outbuildings and a wall. On the far side lay an embankment sloping to the tracks. A train thundered by out of sight, tearing towards the bridge.
Father Kaminsky was lodged in a wheelchair, his legs painfully thin in flimsy black trousers. Bony feet in large slippers had been lodged on the footrests like pedals on a bike. A grey woollen cardigan with buttons missing hung upon his shrunken chest. Around his neck was a bright yellow scarf, The room had the feel of a passenger’s waiting room. Newspapers were heaped on a table. Anselm’s eye picked out El Pais, La Repubblica, the Sun.
‘Ah, my youth has come to scold me,’ Father Kaminsky said in English, fondly noting Anselm’s habit. ‘I’ll come back, one day’ He pointed towards a wicker chair, his voice throaty and soft. ‘You want to speak about Roza Mojeska.’
‘In the first instance, no,’ replied Anselm, picking up the Sun. ‘I thought we might start with Pavel, her husband. Or Stefan. Or maybe Otto Brack. Or perhaps we could just cut to the chase and talk about retribution, human and divine.’
The old man started, gently ‘You surprise me, Father.’
‘Really?’ Anselm turned the pages, not seeing. ‘Do you know this paper’s most famous headline? It’s “Gotcha!”‘
The curate knocked open the door with his knee and brought in a tray laden with tea, sliced panettone, nougat, Lady Finger biscuits and poppyseed cakes. After pouring and stirring he loitered, hoping to join in the chat, but Father Kaminsky made a firm nod towards the door. He was frail, like Sylvester back home. His bones were clear beneath the soft skin on his face. White hair, in wisps, had managed to get tangled, making him look more of a boy than a man. It was hard to believe that collaboration could leave no identifying marks. His eyes were wide, the blue running out of colour.
‘Tell me about SABINA,’ said Anselm, closing the paper. ‘The rest will come out in the wash:
I’m old school, he said, taking no nonsense. I’m telling you all you need to know and not a breadcrumb more, do you understand. You’ll be getting nothing about the Shoemaker, the Friends, Freedom and Independence. Don’t ask how I met Pavel Mojeska because I won’t tell you. Same for Stefan Binkowski. They were both shot because someone said something they should’ve kept to themselves. Trust is all well and good, but it has a boundary. It’s not an open field. And don’t ask about me. I won’t tell you. Understood? Check the door will you?
He was Sylvester in reverse. Anselm, unsteady on his feet, had a quick look: the curate had gone. The old man was rolling on with his story even before Anselm had sat down. A premonition told Anselm that playing smart with a headline had been a spectacular mistake. And the old man was talking… talking fast, as if he’d been primed to explode.
‘I approached them in nineteen forty-eight. We needed the money ‘We?’
‘I’ve already told you: don’t ask for breadcrumbs. Where was I?’
‘Money’
‘Ah, yes, and we needed to keep them at a distance.’
So he’d drawn them in to keep them out, and drawn a decent wage while he was at it. A group of prominent figures, well known to him and of interest to the authorities, had agreed that he should inform on them. Patriots with ideas. Nationalists who didn’t accept Soviet domination. They’d met regularly to decide in advance what Father Nicodem was to say They’d hoped to influence minds.
‘Whose?’
‘Theirs.’
It was a word that seemed to point. He’d identified the opposition en masse. Back then, at the beginning, the ideological conflict had been acute, cleaner, and simpler. Some people’s minds were for the taking. The country had been devastated. Something new had to be built, both psychologically and materially It was a terrible, tragic fresh start. And it was important to get the thinking right for this new purpose and the new future. It was, in fact, an opportunity for everyone to start again. But it was persuasion against imposition; words against violence. The intellectuals known to Father Kaminsky had hoped to infiltrate the system itself and lure away its agents with ideas, with arguments… to poison the entire edifice of oppression by injecting free-flowing words into its bloodstream.
‘You see, we all believed passionately that ideas matter,’ said Father Kaminsky with an old undying fervour. ‘That ideas, properly worked out, bring peace, prosperity, equality of opportunity, justice
… that if we could only get them into the minds of the jailors, then they’d find it harder to turn the key that eventually — maybe not in our lifetimes, but in generations hence — the words would do their work.’
‘And the money?’ asked Anselm, weakly.
‘Paper and ink. A good education doesn’t come cheap. We thought they ought at least to pay the running costs.’
The scale of Anselm’s misconstruction was colossal. Father Kaminsky’s innocence completely demolished his understanding of Brack’s scheme and a good half of Roza’s presumed motivation. All that remained was the vindication of her child. He listened with a kind of humility, embarrassed that he’d condemned a man who’d risked so much for so long.
‘In those days, my handler was a man called Strenk,’ said Father Kaminsky ‘A hardliner with a mind dead to any feeling. Like so many of his kind, he’d separated thought and emotion. All torturers do that. It’s how they make sense of wading in blood, doing what ordinary folk could never stomach; it’s how they step back into ordinary life thinking they’re heroes.’
A few years later Brack took over. Strenk and Brack were like father and son, pupil and master and Brack was being given a chance to show he could drive the car on his own, that he could work the gears.
‘I was in my forties then, and Brack, well, I’d say his mid-twenties.’ A white hand with knotted veins rose to his mouth, touching his pale bottom lip. ‘I remember when I saw him first… this young man, this… apprentice. He was being schooled. They were forming him into their own kind. For a long time I just looked at him… at his eyes, his mouth… wondering what else he might have done with his life, other than this with them.’ The old priest’s gaping eyes burned with compassion. He spoke slowly nodding out the words. ‘He was obsessed with the Shoemaker. He wasn’t trying to please. There was something personal to his drive.’
Father Kaminsky’s meetings were, of course, limited to the report of conversations with suspected persons, but Brack never failed to remind him that he was to keep his ear to the ground, that if he heard one word about the Shoemaker he was to let him know.
‘He was sullen and angry,’ said the old priest, abstractedly ‘My old friend Jozef Lasky used to say “Harm the boy you harm the man and Otto Brack was a man with deep wounds. Whoever was responsible carries a heavy burden… for who Brack became and for what he did.’ His face became eerily still; even his eyes ceased their slow blinking. ‘Have some panettone,’ he resumed, quietly ‘It’s the real thing. From Milan.’
A train rushed along the line, shaking the window in its frame. Anselm found his arms were folded tight as if he were cold. He’d been spellbound by the confused tussle between judgement and mercy.
‘In fifty-one Pavel told me he’d broken a rule.’ Father Kaminsky had stepped away from the first meeting with Brack. His hands became lively on his lap. ‘He’d met a stranger and brought them into the running of the operation.
