Then, drained of emotion, he rang Sebastian to suggest that he might like to catch a flight and give Roza Mojeska a pleasant surprise. The end was near. Praise came down the line, but Anselm just held the receiver away from his ear. He felt desperately sad. The cost of his trip to Warsaw had been immense.
‘I don’t know how Roza will react,’ he said, cutting short the tribute, ‘but afterwards you’ll be free to prosecute Otto Brack.’
Chapter Forty-One
The Old Mill had stood by the Lark for four hundred years. The original grinding mechanism, fragile and jammed, remained visible in the large room where Anselm had made the fire. The floor was flagged and uneven, worn down by the feet of peasant farmers who’d brought their threshed wheat to be ground into flour. In the centre stood a waxed round table, brought in by Anselm as a learned allusion to the groundbreaking Round Table talks of 1989 between Solidarity, the Communists and the Church; the negotiations that had launched a new order in social relations. There were four mock Chippendale chairs — a nod towards English fair play — occupied by the delegates invited by Anselm. A standing crowd of Suffolk ghosts seemed to watch expectantly cloth caps in hand.
‘This isn’t going to be easy’ said John, nudging his dark glasses. ‘I don’t want to make a speech. I can’t see you… it would help if you’d ask questions, reply anything, only don’t leave me floating in the darkness.’
Roza had come by train with Sebastian who was now in the guesthouse eating his nails. She sat upright, her back away from the chair. A face of shadows, thought Anselm. Shadows that were deep with the movements of dusk. She wore a silver brooch clipped to her white blouse. Her eyes seemed to speak a forgiving but frightened tenderness.
‘Why don’t you start with Klara?’ suggested Anselm, his voice dry and spare. ‘The road to this table begins with her, doesn’t it?’
Beside Roza sat Celina Hetman. She’d been held up by the snow drifts. Anselm had thought she might not come after all. He’d remembered a vibrant intellect and a kitsch, plastic belt. They’d only met two or three times. He’d once tried to imagine her in the Royal Courts of Justice speaking on John’s behalf, the judge intrigued, if not distracted, by the decorated headband. He needn’t have worried. She’d fled from John’s life. When the car had finally pulled up at Larkwood, Anselm hadn’t recognised her. On the understanding that the outlandish don’t always wear that well, he’d expected a middle-aged multicoloured prune but he’d met a timeless woman whose refinement made him stammer. She was dressed in black — cashmere wools and matt leather shoes — in contrast to the coral pink of her lips. On her little finger was a large ring: a daisy; a spot of yellow enamel with long white petals. Her hair was jet black and very short, like a distressed belle’s in a Chaplin film: boyish curls by the ears and incredibly feminine. Skilled with her courtesy, she’d been delighted to meet Roza and pleased to see John once more, but Anselm — a man familiar with troubled voices — sensed anxiety and old wounds. She looked at John as he ran a finger behind his roll neck collar, but then Roza suddenly spoke, a voice soft and musical, small and knowing: ‘Perhaps you should start with Otto Brack.’
The call came after John had been in Warsaw a couple of months. He said, ‘Call me the Dentist.’ He said he needed help. He said he wanted out. That’s how it all began: with a plea for help. He urged John to trust him, to understand how dangerous it was for him to speak to a British journalist. He didn’t trust his own organisation and he didn’t trust any in the West: ‘I need to find someone outside the system. Do you understand?’
Anselm shifted in his seat: this wasn’t the kind of call he’d expected Brack to make. Why would he want out? The point — Anselm had imagined — was to get John in.
‘The Dentist wanted me to vouch for him with a government minister, whom he’d later name, right over the head of MI6,’ John’s hand, flat on the table made a polishing motion. ‘He was flattering me; building up my self- importance. I was easy meat.’
John had two questions — and he asked them with all the aplomb of an experienced handler: first, what did the Dentist have to offer?
Second, why come to John? Warsaw was packed with foreign journalists.
‘He said he’d bring the entire SB battle order. He had lists of informers within Solidarity and the Church. Copies of correspondence between Moscow and Warsaw He knew the colour of Brezhnev’s underpants
… you name it, the Dentist had pulled it from some top drawer marked “Secret”, and it was mine to hand over. Part of the dowry that would secure my place in the annals of Cold War history — unread by all, save the major players on either side of the Wall.’
Anselm was cut loose. A dowry? How could a mock defection by Brack lead to John betraying Roza? Once more — and this time with complete finality — Anselm abandoned a convincing interpretation of the evidence. John might have been CONRAD but CONRAD was no willing spy… and Roza’s eyes were resting upon him; she hadn’t strayed once; she held on to his voice as if it were a handle. I’ve got everything wrong, except for this meeting; and even now, I don’t know why it’s right.
‘He was typical of many people I knew back then,’ said John — he’d become swift and fluid; his memory set in motion by the relief of letting go — ‘he was convinced that but for martial law the Russians would have invaded. They’d marched into Budapest in fifty-six, Prague in sixty-eight and Kabul in eighty. He thought they still might come to Warsaw, which was why he wanted out now, and fast.’
‘But why you?’ Celina’s tone was frail, like tearing paper. ‘Why did he pick you?’
Anselm involuntarily abridged Bogart’s gin-joint line — of all the food queues in Warsaw, why did you have to walk into mine? And he understood that she grieved, even now, at ever having met him.
‘Because I was a stranger,’ replied John, hearing — Anselm was sure — the same tone of regret. ‘Because he’d done some research. He knew a great deal about my family Far more than me; he’d guessed why I’d come to Warsaw.’
He knew John was the son of a diplomat; the son of a woman who’d committed suicide; the son of a tragedy He’d read his mother’s file. He’d calculated that John’s embarrassment went deep into his identity; that he carried a kind of transferred guilt.
‘Suicide?’ repeated Celina, softly.
The subject was too large for the moment — like Anselm with Irina on the unswerving ardour of monks — but Celina was simply reaching out to him from a new understanding. She knew there was more to be said… that might once have been said, if things had been simpler between them.
‘Yes,’ replied John. ‘I’ve come to see it very differently over the years. Once it was a betrayal. Now? I think she wanted to eternalise her regret. To say sorry for ever — to me, to my father. Brack smelled that, too.’
He’d been deeply sympathetic. The pressures of the time had been awful (Brack said) — ‘I was there, I know what it was like; I felt the heat’ — with friend pitted against friend to demonstrate their innocence. He’d only raised the matter because he felt that John, of all people, would understand why the Dentist wanted out; that John, of all people, might want to rectify the past — by helping him; by purging the mistake of his mother.
‘He didn’t use those words, but that’s what he meant.’ John’s hand had stopped moving. ‘And that was the trick. Within minutes of listening to him, the table had slowly turned. He was offering to help me. And you might find this difficult to believe, but I was grateful. Really grateful. Without the assistance of an insider, I’d never know what my mother had actually done. I thought a great chance had come my way.
The Dentist asked John to think about it because there were dangers on both sides. A week later the phone rang again. To prove his bona fides, he offered John copies of telegrams sent to the KGB dealing with Solidarity’s- ‘I didn’t want them. I told him I was prepared to take the risk.’ But the Dentist said that’s not how things worked. That trust was a kind of deal, a bargain, an exchange of services. And, if he was to help the Dentist, there were rules.
‘First, we were never to meet. I could only call him on a secure number, five-five-eight-seven-six. Second, names were dangerous, that’s why he was the Dentist, so I had to pick one. I went for Conrad. It was a joke. The Secret Agent… Heart of Darkness. But he didn’t get it. Third, I was to keep a journal recording all the leads he’d send my way each of which would focus on the fight for freedom of speech, accountability, democratic blah, blah — ’ John smoothed the table once more, moving quickly — ‘Fourth, I was to take this journal with me to the minister he’d later name as evidence of the Dentist’s values and commitment to political reform. This was the deal: if I prepared his passage to the West, he’d help me understand my mother’s story. He’d bring her file.’
