knowing he could only repeat himself; that away from the microphone he’d said strange things off the record. He couldn’t retract them; he’d let slip things he didn’t fully grasp himself.
‘Well?’ challenged Brack.
Anselm didn’t reply He let Brack squirm in the made-to-measure suit of a killer, sensing the cloth had always chafed his skin. Anselm stared across the divide, intrigued at that lingering scrap of decency.
It was Celina who’d fanned a heap of dust into flame, bringing sensation back to his life. With her colour and craziness and cheek. After she’d walked out on him, he’d tracked her troubled steps, protecting her from the many dangers of the brave new world, torn between the two, though not acknowledging the tear into his own universe. He’d almost been rescued from moral extinction… by garish nail varnish worn by a girl who wouldn’t stay between the lines. The chance of salvation had risen out of his crimes, but he hadn’t seen it. Then, and now, he had to keep face. He’d once been the man of a moment, the responsibility handed to him by his father. He couldn’t surrender that, not even for the sake of Celina.
‘Well? Speak. Now it’s your turn,’ he barked, ill-tempered and defensive, no longer quite so convincing. ‘I’ve told you about the crimes, now tell me about the mercy.’
Chapter Fifty-One
Anselm had made no deal. But he couldn’t walk away from the table. There’d been a partial exchange of information. Anselm had listened. It was his duty to complete the picture: to complete the trial. However, he had a few preliminary matters that required a brisk adjudication.
‘What happened to JULITA’s file?’
‘It was destroyed.’
‘By whom?’
‘I don’t know’
That was a lie, concluded Anselm, but it didn’t matter, for now; at least the point had been dealt with.
‘Did you let it be known to interested parties that John Fielding had been involved in intelligence gathering — an allegation which, by the way could only damage his reputation?’
‘No.’
‘Who did?’
‘Frenzel. I found out shortly afterwards:
And that was true. Anselm nodded, intrigued again by the hint of another double image. For if Brack had known — he’d implied — he’d have stopped his subordinate from having fun. But why? John was an enemy.
‘I’m not making an exchange,’ said Anselm, moving on to the trial proper. ‘I’ll explain why Roza chose mercy if you insist, but this is your chance to escape. You can walk out of this hall, just like Roza and Celina could have left Warsaw, sheltered by ignorance. Or, like them, you can try and shape how you understand your life by taking account of things you never knew about. Things that were kept from you. As you kept them from Celina. It’s a big choice. Think about it. The protection you offered them is still available to you. I’m offering you a passport.’
Anselm found it almost impossible to make contact with Brack now Behind his glasses Brack was almost absent, in a chosen darkness. Anselm was talking into an abyss. Brack said, ‘In eighty-nine I tried to find my file. It had gone. I wanted to see what others made of me. You see, I’m not scared of what others think. I’m more troubled by what they do. I don’t understand Roza’s mercy and I don’t want Roza’s mercy But if I have to live with it, I need to know why’
Anselm wondered if irony would ever leave this man alone. The one thing he needed to fear was that file. And chance had taken it from him. But he wanted it back.
‘Your parents were deported to Mauthausen,’ said Anselm. He’d decided to lay out the facts, simply and without padding, as he’d done with Celina in the Old Mill. ‘Your mother died there but, against what you have always believed, your father did not.’
Brack made all the physical motions preparatory to speech — that sudden, light rising with the body — but then said nothing. The cracks in the linoleum round his mouth became hard again. Anselm continued.
‘After the liberation of the camp he was hospitalised in a part of Austria that fell under Soviet post-war administration. Agents of Stalin’s security service found him. They found him because they had a list of names, names of Communist Party members of the wrong kind. The kind Stalin no longer trusted because he was mad with suspicion and fear and dread.’
Brack’s mouth moved. A lip twitched.
‘I’ve guessed that your father never told you,’ said Anselm, ‘but he’d lost faith in Stalin as early as nineteen thirty-eight, when the Party was dissolved by the Comintern, before the Terror got underway I imagine he didn’t want to disillusion you with grown-up talk about in-politics, divisions and back-stabbing. Maybe he just wanted to keep the story about the field nice and simple, because it was worth believing in; because he, himself; believed in it so much that he didn’t want the grass, for you, to be polluted with stories of blood spilled over… what? How not to build a fence? Your father saw further than Stalin, Mr Brack. He understood that the death of innocent people kills off a good idea.’
Brack’s top teeth nipped his lip.
‘The Terror reached your father,’ said Anselm. ‘He was deported to a work camp in the Arctic Circle.’
‘When?’
‘Nineteen forty-six.’
‘Where?’
‘Vorkuta.’
The interrogator’s voice came and went like air from a slow puncture. Brack’s face became eerily mobile, the lines appearing at once as contortions rather than marks on a damaged floor. The loose collar somehow constricted his windpipe.
‘He was still alive in nineteen forty-eight when you applied to join the secret police in Warsaw’ Anselm’s flesh began to prickle, his back aggravated by sweat. He didn’t like this bargain, this bringing together of crime with mercy. But he was a part of unfolding circumstances. The Prior had said that you have to go along with them, sometimes, as an act of obedience; you had to let the head of the axe do all the work. ‘Your prospective employers were concerned about your background. They’d received a memo from the NKVD disclosing your father’s whereabouts and his resistance to current Party ideology. Major Strenk, however, spoke up in your favour.’
‘How?’
Anselm swallowed hard. ‘He thought you were ideologically uncomplicated, hungry to subordinate yourself to an institution and, if offered the paternity of the service, were likely to offer back the devotion of a son. His demand that you abandon Roza was a test of loyalty… proof to his superiors that he’d been right to support your application.’
There was a long pause. Both Anselm and Brack seemed to hear Strenk’s speech about men chosen by history for the difficult tasks of the moment: the voice that had replaced that of his father. Strenk had spoken for the institution that was dedicated to the nitty-gritty of protecting what his father had believed in. This had been the moment in Brack’s life when, in discarding Roza and everything she meant to him, he’d sacrificed his own inner life: for he’d loved her, hadn’t he? Isn’t that why he’d taken Celina? Something had stirred when he saw the child and he’d tried to grasp what he’d thrown away for the sake of tomorrow Wasn’t that the other image behind the failed indoctrination of the girl who wouldn’t listen?
‘Tymon Strenk knew that my father was in Vorkuta?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even as I sat in the interview room?’
‘Yes.’
Anselm drew a line in his mind. He wasn’t going to say any more about Strenk’s relationship with Brack. Sebastian was right: the file contained copious evidence that Strenk effectively adopted Brack, moulding him and directing him in the ways of the service, its ideals and its goals. That didn’t need saying: B rack already knew; his mind was probably burning at the recollection. Brack was grimacing again, though he’d said nothing, the discs on his eyes moving with each brief spasm. Suddenly he spoke, his voice, like a soft gust of air.
