‘I can’t take it any more, John,’ she repeated. The black had reached her lips. The pink silk scarf had come loose and lay along one cheek.
She suspects nothing, thought John, coldly.
‘I’ve had enough,’ she said, with a brutal, hopeless finality.
The phrase turned in John’s mind like a light switch. Instantly he saw something odd. Anselm had used the very same words only recently just before John had come to Warsaw For some inexplicable reason — ostensibly for a jaunt — he’d brought John to a monastery in Suffolk. They’d gone up the bell tower. He’d looked down and said, ‘I’ve had enough.’
‘What of?’
‘Trying to find reasons.
‘For what?’
Anselm had just leaned on the stone ledge, four whopping bells behind his head, looking down at the dots of people on the ground — like Harry Lime in The Third Man, high up on the Ferris wheel in Prater Park. Only Anselm hadn’t got the eyes of a man cynical about the boundaries of pity… he’d been melancholy outreaching, vaguely desperate…
‘You’re not in love, are you?’
There’d be no reply.
‘Who is it? That ballet dancer? Your clerk? No… the jazz singer with the veils? Veil after veil will lift, but there must be veil upon veil behind?’
Anselm had just kept his gaze on the dots and the pink tiled roofs below Obliquely he’d muttered, ‘It’s like a stone in the shoe. Asking why it’s there doesn’t get rid of it. Chasing reasons is like…’
What had Anselm said? John couldn’t remember, damn it, but the message was clear enough: there’s no point in trying to find out why you love something… or someone… you’ve just got to get on with it, regardless of the implications.
‘Come with me,’ John blurted out.
Celina stared back, like Anselm had stared down.
‘Bring your film to London,’ mumbled John. ‘I’ve got friends. We’ll get it out in a diplomatic bag.’ She didn’t react. She just looked at him as if she were grieving. John made it across the floor and took the dangling hand. It was warm, the nails a dark purple, like mussel shells. He kissed each one, feeling the bangles against his forehead. ‘Please come with me.’ His eyes closed and he made a leap into the dark. He let himself fall, no longer resisting, knowing this moment had been coming ever since they’d first met to discuss art and resistance.
‘I love you,’ he said, for the first time.
John dialled 55876. Celina’s passport was organised for the same day Later in the afternoon, he tried to call back. He had to know if the Dentist had spoken to Roza about CONRAD; and he wanted to ask about the file… the file at the heart of their relationship. But it was too late. The line had gone dead.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Anselm walked away from Father Kaminsky’s church like Roza had once left Mokotow prison: wondering where to go when he reached the junction. The collapse of his theorising had an immediate and profound effect: a loss of confidence in his judgement and the utility of Roza’s statement which finally showed itself for what it was — altogether useless. There were too many names on the quarterdeck. There was no way to allocate a stronger suspicion to one above another. Standing at the intersection a flood of irritation filled the void left by Father Kaminsky’s innocence: all he could do now was accuse someone. If they were guilty he might reach their conscience; if they were innocent, then they might be enraged enough to point the finger at someone else.
Half an hour later Anselm passed beneath an eagle on the elaborate entrance to Warsaw University. Neoclassical grandeur — rebuilt of course — was home to the one suspect likely to speak a language known to Anselm. Roza had watched him grow from boy to man; she’d never want him exposed for what he was. Having found a reception desk, Anselm passed over a name written on a scrap of paper. Moments later, the telephonist handed him the receiver. Anselm skipped any introduction and went straight to the point, opting for French, the idiom of intellectuals across nineteenth century Europe.
‘I’m in Warsaw to find out who betrayed Roza Mojeska in nineteen eighty-two.’
There was a very long pause, followed by ‘You are?’
‘I am. You could say I’m Roza’s representative. I thought we might talk through the circumstances of your sudden release from internment.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes, because the word convenient springs to mind.’
Anselm placed Bernard Kolba at sixty or so. He wore loose jeans, a black roll-neck sweater and scuffed suede shoes. His hair, chestnut brown and rimed with age, was short and smart. The felt hat in his hand evoked an artist rather than an academic philosopher. Without speaking he led Anselm to a car park and a yellow Fiat with a dinted passenger door. He seemed neither insulted nor troubled. In fact, he had the air of a man ready to talk.
‘I thought we’d go the Powazki Cemetery,’ he said, struggling with the ignition. ‘Lots of national heroes are buried in quiet out-of-the-way corners — heroes, of course, according to your convictions. It’s a good place to talk about the past.’
In that spirit of openness, he invited Anselm to say a little more of his mission. Anticipating reciprocity Anselm hid nothing of substance, recounting all that had taken place between John’s coming to Larkwood and Anselm’s departure from the church by the railway line, leaving out, of course, the distraction of the blue paper whose private character commanded Anselm’s continued confidence. He’d just about finished when Bernard parked and yanked the handbrake. Walking in step, they passed through another ornate gate to enter the graveyard where Roza had been arrested by Otto Brack.
‘I’m here to make an appeal to conscience,’ said Anselm, in conclusion. ‘Roza seeks an admission, freely made, without any preliminary accusation. Your thoughts on the matter would, I imagine, be instructive.’
Bernard nodded with appreciation, as if a professor in the law department had come up with a novel scheme to deal with plagiarism. He turned right, his hand guiding Anselm down a long lane flanked by carved angels, bare trees and a scattering of lit candles.
‘I used to think that it was my teachers who’d shaped my mind,’ he said, as if taking up the proposal raised by his learned colleague. ‘But it was Roza. As a child she told me the story of the Shoemaker and how he’d destroyed the red dragon with a homemade bomb.
Later she told me that words were more powerful than any explosion and that set me reading.’
The fairytale had led him to academic philosophy non-violent resistance, factory work, Union activism and, finally a return to the formal pursuit of wisdom. After the collapse of communism in 1989 he’d gone back to university and finished the studies which the government of another day had suppressed. Six years later he’d begun his career as a junior lecturer.
‘By and large my doctoral thesis set out the ideas I’d have published already if Roza hadn’t been arrested by the SB. They’d have appeared in Freedom and Independence. That’s why I wanted to meet the Shoemaker. To talk things out and get his guidance. In those days ideas weren’t kept in the academy they were running wild on the street. He was the giant on the block and I was the pygmy wanting to climb on his back and see that little bit further.’
Anselm had a rather depressing sense of deja-vu. The tenor of these winsome disclosures carried no hint of an impending declaration of guilt. Bernard’s conscience was evidently clear; but he was talking and moving with purpose.
‘I’ve always wondered why Roza just threw her hand in,’ he said, turning left. ‘She’s never spoken of that day to me or, as far as I’m aware, to anyone else. We’ve all been wondering why We’ve all been trying to figure out who tipped off the SB. Obviously it had to be someone close to her, someone she wouldn’t suspect: His hand directed Anselm to the right. ‘Someone like me, you might think.’
Shortly Bernard came to a halt. He looked around, gathering in a memory. ‘This is where it happened; this is where Roza was betrayed… at the grave of Prus.’
