Again Anselm couldn’t speak. He was looking at Klara’s inscription, her life reduced to two dates. No wonder Mr Fielding had been lost for words.
‘We think he came clean to Roza because it gave him the best kind of cover, continued Bernard, in a changed voice; less compassionate, more logical. ‘The remorse of a child salvaging the mistake of his mother — it’s a good story and credible. The mapped failings of communism from East Berlin to Bucharest? Part of a long and detailed preparation. I think it’s called a legend. When your friend came to Warsaw, it was a homecoming. He’d arrived to finish off what his mother had started:
Sebastian didn’t argue as much as Anselm had expected. Perhaps it was Anselm’s crisp retorts, the impatient authority of a judge in control of his court. Holding the phone some distance from his ear and mouth, he spoke to the Warsaw skyline. No, it wasn’t Father Kaminsky who’d led Brack to Roza and it wasn’t Bernard Kolba. Their innocence had sparkled. Anselm cut short the remonstrations, asking him to check the SB archive for material on Klara Fielding and her son, John. Perhaps they might discuss the outcome the following evening. It had been a long day he’d said, and tomorrow he fancied a spot of aimless sight-seeing.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cooking when you’re blind isn’t as difficult as one might think, but it takes years of practice — at least when it comes to the more demanding recipes, and those heartbreakers, like Yorkshire pudding, which rise, or don’t rise according to a caprice of their own. John had been down the roast dinner road many times and, after almost thirty years, it held no terrors for him. Except for that pudding. It wouldn’t fall into line.
John’s hands were shaking, too, and that didn’t help. The risk of accident hovered in his darkness. Roza had said she’d come round. You’re a fool, thought John. You should have left well alone. Only all was not well.
John felt his way across the kitchen, tapping the edge of the worktop. His hands wandered towards the knife stand and he picked out the second from the left. Mechanically he chopped some garlic, moving fast towards his thumb and finger.
Roza wanted justice.
He’d nearly fallen over when he’d answered the phone and heard that voice. He’d gripped the door frame, leaning his head against the wall. He’d listened, trying to hear the traces of accusation in her rushed explanation — the blind are good at that; they can hear things above the frequency of ordinary sighted folk; but Roza was too good; she was too smart; she was wasn’t giving anything away She just stayed within the conventional waveband, leaving him to pick up the signal. She wanted to know who’d betrayed her. She’d said whoever betrayed her in eighty-two could help her bring Otto Brack to court by facing their past. All they had to do was agree to meet her.
Dear God, what had the Dentist said to her? How much did she know?
John had listened with his eyes squeezed shut, trying to locate the slightest crackle of accusation. He couldn’t hear it. She just sounded resolved, her need for help almost tearing at his clothes. It was as though Roza were on her knees, forehead touching his shoes, her hands knotted into the hem of his trousers. It had been awful.
And — out of genuine affection, but a colossal lack of prudence, in the face of everything the Dentist had ever taught him — he’d said, ‘Roza, come round, will you? I’ll give you the taste of an English heaven.’
When he’d finished off the clove, he trussed up the meat with string.
For the first time since the bandages were taken off his eyes, John wished, with a suppressed screaming desperation, that he could see. Roza was there, four steps in front of him, seated at the end of the dining table. She smelled of 4711 cologne. Her hand had been cool and soft, the wrinkles like the striations in some living stone. Her cheek had been warm, those fine hairs touching his skin when he kissed her.
‘Do you remember the grave of Prus?’ she said, her knife clinking. She’d put it down. Which meant she was watching.
‘How could I forget?’ John kept his hand against the table to control the shake. For the moment, he’d have to leave the wine. He didn’t want any spilling. ‘I never asked, why did you pick that spot?’
‘The caretaker at Saint Justyn’s once brought us… he was a wonderful man, always dressed in patched overalls. Mr Lasky His eyebrows were huge, like woollen hats for his eyes. He played the banjo.’
He’d told them stories when she was a child. His job was fixing doors and windows and pipes but he found an excuse whenever he could to drop his tools and be with the children. He’d loved children. That’s why he’d taken the job in the first place. They’d shot him in the ruins of the Ghetto while the stones were still hot.
‘Hot?’ John’s breathing scraped out the word; his chest was tightening.
‘There was an Uprising before ours. After they’d crushed the remaining Jewish community, they blew the Ghetto to pieces. I’m told the Shoemaker was in there.’
Her knife clinked. She’d picked it up… but she wasn’t eating… she was looking away John snatched at his glass and gulped some wine.
‘The grave of Prus,’ he said, playing dangerous, going back to the place of Roza’s arrest. ‘I loved the carving of that child.’
‘Me, too.’ Her knife clinked; so did the fork. ‘Do you remember that article you did on me for that series on lives lived in secret for the truth?’
‘I do-o-o-o.’ John drew out the last word as if he’d just been brought to something fondly packed away in the attic.
‘The title embarrassed me hugely:
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes. It made me sound like a hero.’ Her gruff voice showed smiling and affection. ‘That was the beginning, wasn’t it?’
‘Of what?’
‘Our friendship.’
‘God, of course, sorry, yes.
‘Don’t worry.
‘No really I’m half out of it. Getting the old Yorkshire to rise did me in.
‘It meant a lot, what you told me, John… about your mother:
‘It was just… natural.’
‘I could tell.’ She picked up her cutlery. ‘I followed you, you know’
‘What?’ John coughed and dabbed his mouth. ‘Sorry, it’s the string on the beef, ha. Don’t know why we do that. The thing’s dead. Why tie it up?’
‘I said I followed you.
‘That’s right. Sorry again. Where to? The ends of the BBC?’
‘No.’ Her tone was smiling and warm again. ‘To her grave. If you hadn’t gone there, you know, I might never have met you. I, might have changed my mind at the last minute:
‘Really’
‘Oh yes, agreeing to see you was the breaking of a golden rule.’
‘Rule?’
‘Mmmmm. Never meet a stranger. But having seen her stone, I thought you had roots. Deep roots in my soil.’
‘I’m glad, because I have; because…’John coughed again. ‘Blasted stuff. It’s part of an Englishman’s understanding of paradise. You can’t get in without a ball of string and penknife. Dear God — ’ he banged his chest, thinking what to say — ‘roots. You never leave them behind.’
‘No, you don’t.’
They ate in silence, John composing himself, trying to classify the signals from the other end of the table. There was no doubting the use of code — the lives lived in secret, that tilt towards the Shoemaker, and the tailing to a grave and the beginning of it all — the problem was cracking it; being sure. What had the Dentist said to her? If only John knew, he could play out this meal and make it to the shore. And with that thought, he hated himself deeply and angrily Roza wanted justice. She’d waited the length of the Cold War and more. The Big Game was over,
