Bernard pointed to a large distinctive monument. A small girl, carved in relief, was reaching up against the stone. Her arms were spread out and her head was thrown back. At her feet were yellow and red flowers. A candle burned in a green glass jar. The surrounding trees seemed to reach out to the atmosphere of sadness.
‘Roza chose this place for a specific reason,’ said Bernard. His hands were in his pockets as if he were extemporising in a lecture hall. ‘She picked it because of the girl. She saw herself in those shoes.’
Like Prus, Roza had been a child soldier. They’d both joined an uprising; they’d both been imprisoned and never quite recovered. Prus
… he’d fought in eighteen sixty-three against imperial Russia. The succeeding experience of prison gave him lifelong problems with panic attacks and agoraphobia. He’d turned to writing, but couldn’t decide if resistance was best through ideas or guns.
‘Roza was scarred by Mokotow,’ said Bernard. ‘But she was always sure of the ground where the fight would eventually be won; in the mind and heart. Which is all the more significant now that I know of her husband’s execution:
He began walking away with that steady purpose, so Anselm followed, his intuition tingling with anticipation, undecided as to whether it was agreeable or not.
‘We’d all seen the two rings, we’d all wondered what they meant,’ said Bernard. ‘We’d all been stunned when she turned out to be linked to the Shoemaker. We’d all been baffled when she went silent in eighty-two — realising, with retrospect, that she’d done the same thing in fifty-three… and that the wedding rings were part of her silence.’ He slowed down and took a narrow pebbled lane to the left. ‘Roza is the most mysterious person I’ve ever known. Without speaking she was always crying out for help and I couldn’t do anything… I didn’t know how to reach her. So I’m glad you called. I’m glad, at last, for the chance to do something significant. I’ve waited thirty years for this.’
Bernard took off his brown felt hat and scratched the back of his head. He turned his face sideways to find Anselm.
‘You’ve heard of Mateusz Robak?’
‘Yes.’
‘He got close to Roza, too. He’s another man with a doubtful profile.’
There was a sliver of irony or sarcasm in those strong, hazel eyes, but the surrounding light carried a heavier regret.
‘We fell out, once, over a play by Mickiewicz,’ resumed Bernard. ‘And we nearly fell out again over Roza’s arrest. But he was a very careful man. And he had to be careful for Roza. So he followed her sometimes, even when she thought she was alone, just in case of trouble. So when I accused him of collaboration, like you accused me — though I failed to choose my words as finely as you did — he had a reply He brought me here:
Once more Bernard pointed towards a grave. The headstone was a fraction too tall, making Anselm think the incumbent had been given a straitjacket for eternity. He stepped closer to read the inscription. There was only a name and some dates: the barest elements of identification. No loving words had come to the husband’s mind. It read:
Klara Fielding
8th March 1925 — 1st July 1953
Anselm read the inscription several times as if more information might suddenly appear on the stone. This was John’s secret. He’d only told Roza. It was why he’d come to Warsaw.
‘A BBC journalist wanted to interview the Shoemaker,’ said Bernard. ‘Roza told Mateusz to arrange a meeting. When the guy arrived, Roza tailed him… and Mateusz tailed Roza. In turn, they came here, before convening at the agreed location as if nothing had happened. Mateusz thought nothing of it until much later, when Roza walked into a trap.’
Bernard had tracked down Klara’s family Not the English one, by marriage — they’d left the country — but the Communist Party members who’d come to Warsaw from Poznan after the war: her parents.
‘They were still fiercely proud of her memory,’ said Bernard, stepping to one side, moving his shadow off the grave. ‘Even though they knew nothing of her work for the state, they clung on to the fact that it was significant. That’s what the man in the dark suit had said at the funeral. He’d come round a week later with her medals, recognition from Warsaw and Moscow of her service to the people… difficult service.’
Anselm did the maths. ‘She was only twenty-eight.’
‘Yes:
‘What happened? She had a husband; she was a young mother.’
John, the child, had only just been born.
‘Suicide.’
Anselm breathed back the word.
‘She hung herself. But not in the garage or her bedroom. She chose an unguarded section of railings around the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Her parents didn’t know that, of course — it would have shattered the myth. And myths, even false ones, can heal if you believe in them.’
Mateusz had also tracked down her friends. She’d been carefree and funny Talented, too, a musician who’d won prizes at home and abroad. She’d been naive, thinking she could marry an English diplomat without attracting the attention of the security service.
‘Not one of these old friends knew she’d been recruited,’ said Bernard, buffing the felt with the back of his hand. ‘All they noticed was that she’d lost her sense of fun. They’d thought it was because of the Englishman, you know, that stiff upper lip and the stiff embassy parties. But then she made a confession of what she’d done, to these people that mattered. She planned to tell her husband, too. A couple of days later she vanished.’
One of those shattered friends, a former love — kindly rejected — hadn’t accepted the police explanation of a road accident. So he’d gone to the undertaker’s with a bottle of vodka and a Molotov cocktail and given him a choice. They’d got smashed making vows of secrecy about the tell-tale bruising to Klara’s neck and the laugh of the ubek who’d unhooked the body from outside his place of work.
‘But how does all this relate to John?’ asked Anselm, moved and sad, his mind drained of curiosity. ‘Did Mateusz ask himself that question? Did you?’
‘Yes, we did.’ Bernard scratched the back of his head again, not especially enjoying the moment he’d waited for since 1982. ‘Your friend told Roza that he’d come to Warsaw to make up for a mistake… that’s what Roza told Mateusz. She’d been overwhelmed by his honesty; she’d wanted to help him; she’d brought him into the struggle. But things looked very different once Roza was back in Mokotow and Mateusz had unearthed the nature of Klara’s mistake. There were only four people who’d known about that planned meeting with the Shoemaker: Father Kaminsky Mateusz, me and…’
Bernard left a sort of gap for Anselm to fill but, not wanting to name his friend, he made a kind of last-ditch loyal defence. He thought of his father sighting the Indians at Little Big Horn. He sensed an impending death and grief.
‘But John has no motive. He’d mapped the failings of communism from East Berlin to Bucharest and everywhere in between. He told me once of a betrayal — he meant her abandonment of him. He’d never forgiven her…’
Bernard listened, nodding with agreement, following the steps in Anselm’s thinking, not accepting — with immense regret — where they were leading. He stepped back, as if to get some distance from Klara, not wanting her to hear what he was going to say.
‘I’d imagine that for a child, the suicide of a parent could be a sort of betrayal. They weren’t important enough. Something was bigger. But that doesn’t mean they cease to love them, deeply and all they stood for.’
Anselm didn’t respond because he knew it was true.
‘You know, a child can grow to spend their life trying to find what they’ve lost. To reach the person taken away. They can seek out the streets on which that vanished parent walked… to see what they saw, to smell the air they breathed, to feel the same breeze on their skin. And they can do something even more desperate, a gruesome act of necrophilia: they can dig deep into the grave to salvage what their mother or father cared about. To bring those ideas and feelings back to life. To live them out, in the flesh, in mystical union with the person who turned their back upon them. Everything’s forgiven. They’re together again. It’s another kind of suicide. This time the child is dead. Everything they might have thought and felt has been buried in an unmarked grave. They’ve made the ultimate sacrifice, dying so that someone else might live.’
