that her brother was shot and that her husband was an informer. To say nothing of Bernard, his wife, their son…
Such were the implications of disturbing the past. Was it really a good idea? Wasn’t there a lot to be said for drawing a thick long line and living as best as possible on the other side? Even if people like Brack were the winners? Isn’t it part of their crime that the suffering they’ve caused others, collectively outweighs the impact of any punishment? He blurted out his thoughts, surprised to hear his own quarrel with conventional justice.
‘That’s why Roza’s trial is so important,’ replied Sebastian, clicking his pen. ‘It’s not just hers. She represents all the people who never got a chance to tell their story, all the cases that can never be brought. She’s the epoch: its victim: its accuser.
At the conclusion of that phrase, Anselm seemed to glimpse some of the scrawl upon Brack’s mind, for he, too, was the epoch, though his role was so utterly different. And he would defend it.
‘I know how he intends to stop Roza,’ said Anselm, in a hushed voice. The door to the cloister had been left open. He looked at the Garth, just visible between two pillars — a rich, moist and violent green, bathed in spring sunshine. ‘Everything returns to the same principle of destruction. He uses families. He sets father against son, mother against daughter.’
Sebastian followed Anselm’s lead. ‘He’s got something on Aniela. I never thought of her. She cracked in fifty-one, she…’
Anselm didn’t listen. He was thinking the matter through.
… so if Roza pursues Brack — ’ concluded Sebastian — ‘there’ll be no more warnings. This time it’s mutual, public destruction. If he goes down, Aniela-’
‘It’s not her,’ said Anselm evenly cold and certain. ‘Brack saved his best trick till last.’
Spring is a special interlude for a beekeeper. New colonies begin and the old ones come back to life. There’s a lot to do. And Anselm normally found himself oddly fulfilled pottering about the hives with his list of jobs. But not this time. He was still haunted by the reunion of Roza with Celina, haunted by Brack’s intentions, haunted by the long shadow of Klara’s handlers. The Terror wasn’t over.
By late September the harvest was over and then, as if there was some kind of connection between the bitter and the sweet, a letter came, written in a wavering hand he did not recognise. It was from Roza. A trial date had been fixed for the spring. Father Nicodem was too old and, frankly not altogether well. Would Anselm take his place, even if he understood nothing? The Prior didn’t hesitate to grant his permission. He, like Anselm, understood only too clearly that Roza’s suffering was by no means over; that it was about to reach its conclusion.
Part Seven
Chapter Forty-Five
On a cold morning at the beginning of March, the Warsaw District Court was ready to hear the case against Otto Brack, a former colonel in the communist Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa. The sun had risen to poke holes in a grey blanket of cloud. Faint rain spat upon the streets and the crowd of onlookers and restive journalists. On the other side of the road stood an elderly couple, a man and woman. They seemed to be making a separate, private protest. Between them they held a banner made from a torn bed sheet.
‘Czekamy na sprwiedliwosca,’ murmured Roza, reading the black lettering, as the limousine swung to a halt at the main entrance. She turned to Anselm with a quiet translation: ‘We are waiting for justice.’
Guided by hulking policemen in baseball caps and black body armour, Anselm followed Roza, John and Celina out of the car towards the court, mouthing the phrase as if it were sacred, ducking past the nest of microphones, the flash of cameras and the volley of questions.
‘We are waiting for justice,’ he mumbled, in reply.
Roza’s expectation that Anselm would understand nothing had been defeated by the simple expedient of simultaneous translation delivered through a discreet earpiece. Upon arrival he was brought by a court usher to a tiny room with a window and an elevated view on to the court. The cabin was sufficiently high that no one would notice it unless they raised their heads to examine the plaster mouldings or the flamboyant capitals crowning the sequence of pillars that stood like guards around the auditorium. Anselm had a bird’s eye view, with the implied detachment that comes with distance. Once he was seated at a narrow table, the translator’s voice sounded in his ear, greeting him with flawless English.
‘Let me introduce the lawyers down below’
The courtroom was wood-panelled from floor to ceiling. Three robed judges sat beneath the emblem of a white eagle. Documents lay in bundles between the computer screens. The IPN prosecutors were crouched to one side, their black gowns trimmed with red:
Sebastian a kind of map-reader to the driver, Madam Czerny a woman with bleached straggling hair and a pair of gold bifocals held permanently in one hand. Fastened just below their left shoulders was a plume of crimson cloth the size of a handkerchief. Anselm couldn’t help but think of blood. Facing them sat Mr Fischer, counsel appointed for Brack, the sober green border to his gown completely displaced by the pink and blue striped cuffs of his shirt. One could almost pass over the client at his side. He’d been upstaged by the few centimetres of peeping colour.
Anselm examined Brack. First with a lawyer’s eye: aged eightyfour, he faced what the indictment called Communist crimes — a misnomer because murder and torture had a prevalence and character without boundary of any kind — and then, briefly with a monk’s:
Do you realise what you’re doing?
He wore a light brown jacket and a dark brown shirt. His tie was another brown. Against those combinations, even his skin seemed brown. Dark pigmentations like the spots on a Dalmatian covered his head. Large glasses with brownish lenses hid his face. He was thin, like a wooden clothes stand. All the emotion centred on the mouth. It worked as if he were chewing a piece of old leather, the top teeth occasionally pulling at the bottom lip. He ignored every whispered remark from his counsel. In front of him was a smart-looking black leather document case.
Is this truly your choice?
The witness stand was directly in front of the judicial bench. It resembled a lectern, inherently serious. Roza would stand there and tell her story. Then Brack would do the same thing. A year earlier, at the other end of the phone, Sebastian had listened to Anselm, clicking his biro open and shut.
‘He’ll tell the court how Pavel Mojeska betrayed his wife, his friends and his country. If he wants, he can make it up as he goes along, because no one else was there. He’s going to spring a defence out of the files. He’ll produce evidence that Pavel collaborated with the Nazis — a crime the IPN would prosecute now, if he was living. He’ll make those executions into rough justice — unpleasant, brutal, and lacking ceremony… but legitimate actions of the State nonetheless. Brack’s not going down, Sebastian, he doesn’t play to lose; he never has done.’
Sebastian’s pen had clattered against a wall.
‘What have I done?’ he’d said, faintly ‘I’ve brought her to this.’
‘What have we all done?’ Anselm had replied.
Drawing that thick long line between ‘then’ and ‘now’ had never seemed more prudent. Shortly after that telephone conversation Sebastian had carefully explained to Roza what was likely to happen when Brack opened his mouth, and she’d listened with that disconcerting quietness that absorbed any and all disappointment. When he’d finished, she’d simply said, ‘At least I didn’t remain quiet.’
She was now sitting with John and Celina in a room set aside for prosecution witnesses. She was wearing a sober dress from Jaeger with a silvery Paisley design. The lime cardigan — an old friend, worn at the elbows — appeared, by association, both refined and expensive. Sebastian was right, though: she’d aged. She’d taken in too much. Her movements were slow and heavy, her spine rounded. But she had a most haunting allure, a curious
