A Grain of Truth (15 page)

There could be no doubt where the famous painting was. On the western wall, on either side of the entrance to the vestibule hung four large canvases. The first two portrayed, in a naturalistic manner, two massacres – judging by the appearance of the attackers, it was a Tatar or Mongol raid. In the first picture the infidels were pulverizing the citizens of Sandomierz, and in the second some Dominicans, easily recognized by their white habits. On the other side of the entrance there was another massacre and a burning castle; this time it didn’t look like the Tatars, so it must have been the Swedish invasion – no one was quite so keen on burning down and blowing up as the Swedes, who had a real passion for explosives, and a long time before Nobel’s day too. And the fourth canvas? Prosecutor Teodor Szacki stood in front of it and folded his arms across his chest. Could it possibly have something to do with Mrs Budnik’s murder? Should they really be looking for a religious madman? He turned round towards the altar, and mentally asked God for it not to be a religious madman. The worst cases are the ones involving madmen. A madman means miles of documents, whole processions of expert witnesses and arguments about whether or not he is aware of his own acts; sheer torment, and when it comes to the sentence, it’s a lottery, regardless of the hard evidence.

Szacki prayed and thought. From the left, the whoosh-swoosh of the church cleaning was coming steadily nearer to him. This time it was the woman. She put down her bucket, started to mop, and got as far as Szacki’s feet. She broke off her work and looked at him expectantly.
She was just as radiant and full of the joy of faith as her partner; a shop selling accessories for suicides would have employed her on the instant. The prosecutor stepped back a pace and started walking towards the exit along a narrow alley of dry floor; there wasn’t much sense in staring at the red shroud shielding the controversial painting. As a consolation prize, so there wouldn’t be nothing to look at, there was a portrait of John Paul II hanging on the fabric.

Szacki knew what the picture showed – he had looked at it on the Internet. Charles de Prévôt may not have been a good painter, but he had a predilection for the macabre and a comic-strip talent for pictorial narration which appealed to the archdeacon of the time, who had commissioned the painter to decorate the cathedral. As Archdeacon Żuchowski was a true Christian and a sworn Jew-baiter, de Prévôt had documented Jewish crimes against the children of Sandomierz. The painting showed Jews buying children from their mothers and checking their condition like cattle at the market, there were Jews in the act of murdering, there were experts at extracting blood with the use of a barrel studded with nails, and there was a dog eating up the leftover bits thrown to it. What had stuck most firmly in Szacki’s mind was the sight of the babies’ little corpses scattered on the ground.

He failed to reach the door; between him and the exit from the side nave there were three metres of wet, freshly mopped floor. He simply wanted to take three big steps, but something made him stop. The silence. There were no footsteps and no swishing noises. The man and the woman were both standing still, leaning on their mops in identical poses, staring at him from a distance. His first instinct was to just shrug his shoulders and leave the place, but there was such sorrow in their eyes that he sighed and started looking for a way out along the dry bits of floor. His route was a winding one; feeling like a rat in a labyrinth, he reached the opposite side of the church – a long way from the exit. But it looked as if he had an open path to the altar now, and from that side he could get to the door. Reassured by his behaviour, the man and woman went back to work.

Walking close to the wall, Szacki looked at the paintings he was passing, which were also the work of the baroque cartoonist de Prévôt.
As he looked, he started walking more and more slowly, until finally he stopped. His Catholic upbringing wouldn’t allow him to use the word “pornography” to describe what he was seeing, but no other word could have got the point across as well as that one. The large paintings had one single theme – death. The very realistic, gory deaths suffered by martyrs, in hundreds of different varieties. In the first instance Szacki couldn’t understand why each corpse had a number, but then he noticed that each picture was supplied with the Latin name of a month, and he realized that it was a sort of perverse calendar. One little horror for each day of the year. He was standing in front of March, and the tortures were so inventive that they seemed to be trying to reflect the entire hopelessness of the cold, muddy start of spring in Poland. The 10th of March featured the demise of Aphrodosius, nailed to a tree with spears, and two days later a spade was chopping through the neck of Micdonius; then his eyes were drawn to their fellow martyr, Benjamin, whose entrails were twisting in a gory ribbon around the serrated something that had transfixed him on the 31st of March. In April things were a tiny touch better – someone was being thrown off an embankment into a river, some heads were being cut off, somebody was being dragged by a horse and someone else was being torn apart by wild beasts. One chap seemed to be being boiled alive; the look on his face implied more than just a warm bath. On the 12th of May he came upon Theodore. In fact his namesake could boast of rather a mild punishment – being drowned with a weight around his neck. Szacki felt absurd relief that this was not his patron saint – he celebrated his name day on the feast of Saint Theodore of Tarsus, a seventh-century monk and intellectual.

As he walked on, the pictorial horrors repulsed and attracted him all at once, like the victim of an accident lying by the roadside. He admired de Prévôt’s inventiveness, as for 365 days surprisingly few tortures were repeated, though crucifixion and throat-slashing were definitely top of the bill.

He finally managed to reach the vicinity of the door and increased his pace, because the sexton in black was clearly trying his best to cover
the last patch of dry floor by the exit. He stopped at November, as his birthday was on the eleventh. Wow, this particular martyr really did deserve canonization. Not only was he strung up on a hook in a very nasty way, just to make sure his legs were burdened with a weight and his body was stuck through with a spear. Szacki thought grimly what a dreadful prophecy it was, as if someone were trying to tell him there’s always room for a little extra martyrdom.

The sexton cleared his throat in a meaningful way. Szacki tore his gaze from the vision of baroque pornography.

“I’ve found my birthday,” he said pointlessly.

“That’s not a birthday,” replied the cleaner in a surprisingly jolly tone, “that’s a prediction of how you’ll end.”

Outside it was like November – damp, cold and dark. Szacki buttoned up his coat and went out of the gate into Kościelna Street, then started walking towards the market square. He glanced into a camera – the very one that had captured Ela Budnik for the last time as she straightened her boot top, and then caught up with her husband in three skips. The idea of calling on Budnik flashed through his mind, but he dropped it.

VI

Outside it keeps on raining, as if the winter is bidding farewell to this land in weak, weary weeping. In here it’s warm and dry, and if it weren’t for the burning eyes of the man sitting in the corner, it would even be cosy. Not very tall, skinny, with his hands and feet bound, he resembles a child; only the ginger beard protruding from under his gag betrays the fact that the victim is a grown man. He stirs pity, but that doesn’t change anything. In the distance the clock on the town-hall tower chimes four times to mark the full hour, and then strikes two. One more day. Just one more day. Unfortunately it can’t be waited out here; there are still the dogs to look in on before going back up. Luckily, the second act is coming to its end now.

4

Saturday, 18th April 2009

The seventh, penultimate day of Easter for Catholics, and Easter Saturday for Orthodox Christians; the Sabbath in the entire Jewish world. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, independent Poland’s first prime minister, is celebrating his eighty-second birthday. More recent former prime minister Jarosław Kaczy
ń
ski claims that only his party, the right-wing Law and Justice, can save democracy in Poland. In the outside world the Somali parliament introduces shariah law throughout the country, and Bulgaria is in a panic because a well-known astrologer predicts an earthquake. In the Czech city of Ústí nad Labem hundreds of neo-fascists from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Germany celebrate Hitler’s approaching birthday by attacking a Roma settlement. Łukasz “Flappyhandski” Fabiański defends his net poorly on his twenty-fourth birthday, so Arsenal lose against Chelsea and go out of the FA Cup at the semi-final stage. In Sandomierz thieves cut down six apple trees and a plum tree. The sixty-year-old trees were worth a thousand zlotys. In the evening there is a noisy party at the club located in the town-hall cellar, Soundomierz Rock Zone. This is the first fairly springlike day – it is warm and sunny, and it isn’t raining.

I

“Listen to this. A rabbi and a priest are travelling in the same train compartment, reading in silence, all very civilized. A while goes by, and then the priest puts down his book and says: ‘Just out of curiosity – I know you people aren’t allowed to eat pork. But… have you ever tried it?’ The rabbi closes his newspaper, smiles and says: ‘You really want to know? Well actually, I did once try it.’ After a pause he adds: ‘And just out of curiosity – I know you people are obliged to be celibate…’ The priest interrupts him, saying: ‘I know what you’re driving at, and I’ll tell you straight away, that yes, I did once give in to the temptation.’ They smile indulgently at each other’s little peccadilloes, then the priest goes back to his book, the rabbi to his newspaper, and they read in silence again. Suddenly the rabbi says: ‘Better than pork, isn’t it?’”

Szacki knew this joke, but he laughed sincerely – he liked Jewish jokes.

“OK, here’s another one…”

“Andrzej…”

“Last one, I promise. It’s Passover, a beautiful day, so Moshe takes his lunch to the park, sits down on a bench and tucks in. A blind guy comes and sits next to him, and as it’s the festive season, Moshe is feeling warm and loving towards all mankind, so he offers him a piece of matzo bread. The blind man takes the matzo, turns it in his hand, his face falls and finally he says: ‘Who wrote this shit?’”

This time Szacki burst out laughing without any buts – the joke was excellent, and brilliantly told too.

“Andrzej, please! Teodor will think we’re some sort of anti-Semites.”

“This is a good Kielce region family. Have you told him how we met at the National Radical Camp rally? What a night it was, in the light of the flaming torches you looked like an Aryan queen… Aargh!”

Andrzej Sobieraj ducked as his wife threw a piece of bread at him, but he did it so clumsily that he banged his elbow on the edge of the table. He glared at her reproachfully. Szacki always felt awkward when he witnessed intimacy between people, so he just
smiled weakly and smeared a generous helping of mustard on his piece of barbecued sausage. He was feeling odd, jostled by emotions he couldn’t identify.

The husband of Basia Sobieraj – the principled pussy, as Szacki couldn’t stop thinking of her, despite his growing fondness for her – was a fairly typical teddy bear. The kind of man that had never, not even in his best years, been a heart-throb women sighed over and dreamt about, but one they all liked, because they could have a chat and a laugh with him, and feel safe. But then of course they went for the enigmatic hunks, alcoholics and skirt-chasers, convinced that love would change them, and the reliable teddy bear usually ended up with a bitch who needed someone to kick around and do all the work. In spite of all, Basia Sobieraj did not look like one of those, and this teddy bear had made a pretty good match. And he looked like a nice, happy guy. He had a nice checked shirt, tucked into old, cheap jeans. He had a nice, stocky, slightly pot-bellied, beer-and-barbecue figure. He had nice, gentle eyes, a moustache that curled towards his mouth and slightly balding temples, two thinner patches in a forest of wavy, salt-and-pepper hair.

“Stop stirring it up,” said Nice Andrzej to his wife, as he turned the pieces of sausage on the barbecue. “Of all people the prosecutor isn’t likely to be offended by anti-Semitism. From what they write in the papers…”

Basia snorted with laughter, and Szacki smiled politely. Unfortunately, yesterday’s press conference had gone running through the media, and unfortunately almost all of them had written about a “mysterious murder”, about “anti-Semitic undercurrents” and a “Nazi undertone”; one paper had recited the history of the city in detail, and suggested in an editorial that “it is not entirely certain whether the investigator is aware of the delicacy of the matter he is having to deal with”. And that was just the start of it – if they didn’t solve the case quickly, or if some new facts didn’t turn up soon to give the vultures something to feed on, it would just get worse.

“Why on earth are we talking about anti-Semitism anyway?” asked Andrzej Sobieraj. “Ela wasn’t a Jew, and as far as I know she had nothing
to do with them, she didn’t even organize klezmer concerts – the closest she got to Judaism was a concert a few years back featuring songs from
Fiddler on the Roof
. So how can her murder be a fascist act? And why should the word ‘Jewish’ appearing in any given context immediately have to mean it’s an anti-Semitic context?”

“Sweetheart, don’t try to be clever,” said Basia Sobieraj, brushing aside his reasoning. “Ela was killed with a Jewish knife for the ritual slaughter of cattle.”

“I know that, but if we reject the hysteria, in that case wouldn’t it be more logical to interrogate some Jewish butchers rather than those who hate Jewish butchers? Or are we so politically correct that we can’t even hypothetically consider that the culprit is a Jew or has close connections with that culture? And as a result, has access to that tool, for instance?”