A Grain of Truth (35 page)

To occupy his thoughts, he started mentally rewinding the conversation with Maciejewski, recalling the moments when he had felt the familiar tickling in his brain. Once when revenge for the death of a family came up, definitely. And a second time towards the end, when the rabbi had said it was impossible to acquire that sort of knowledge in a weekend. An idea had flashed through his mind at that moment, one that was valuable and not obvious. No, the point wasn’t to look among experts on Jewish culture, no. Maciejewski had
noticed a lot of details in Szacki’s account, small points that formed a complete picture.

“And what about me?” said Szacki aloud, his hoarse voice sounding strange inside the car.

Have I noticed all the details? In this nightmare, have I failed to focus on the most visible things? When there’s a corpse stuck in a barrel hanging from the ceiling, no one wonders why it has strange, deformed feet – but now it came back to his mind. When there’s a naked woman lying in the bushes, and a little further off there’s a butcher’s razor, no one thinks about how she came to have sand under her nails. But now he remembered it – the corpse had not soil, not dirt, but yellow, seaside sand under its fingernails. How many of these details had he overlooked, how many had he regarded as unimportant? The whole incident in the cathedral, the quotation on the painting, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” – he was following the obvious, intrusive trail of Jewish revenge. Just as the murderer wanted. Instead of acting contrary to his expectations by looking for mistakes in this whole performance, he was letting himself be led by the nose. Like the ideal spectator of an illusionist’s show, who isn’t looking to see what the other hand is doing, for fear of spoiling his evening’s entertainment.

He was just passing through Annopol, so he only had to cross the Vistula, turn south, and in half an hour he should be there. The town was empty and wreathed in fog, despite which he felt safer in the presence of street lamps. So much so that he drove onto the hard shoulder and took out his mobile to get on the Internet. He found an online Bible, and as he was waiting for the link to load, he opened the window to combat his rising drowsiness. Cold and damp poured into the car, filling it with a strong, earthy smell of melting snow, a harbinger of spring, which was just about to burst onto the scene, eager to make up for the weeks it had lost.

Remembering the references, he found the biblical quotations. Why were they so long? It would have been enough to give the one verse containing the phrase “an eye for an eye”, and the whole thing would have been clear. He wrote them all out in his notebook. The
one from Leviticus was the shortest and simplest; it spoke about punishment for disfigurement and for death. “Whoever kills a man shall be put to death.” Szacki was struck by the legalistic style of the phrase – paragraph 148 of the Polish Republic Penal Code started the same way: “Whoever kills a man shall be subject to a penalty of loss of liberty…”

The second quote talked about the penalty imposed for hurting a pregnant woman during a fight between men, which must have been a way of defining war or conflict. For causing a miscarriage the only punishment was a fine, but if the woman died, it was death.

Finally the third, from Deuteronomy, was the most tortuous – almost as bad as the modern Penal Code. And at the same time it was the strictest rule, aimed against bearing false witness, or – to put it in modern terms – against perjury. The Jewish legislator – which is really a strange definition of God, thought Szacki – gave orders for a perjurer to get the same punishment that would have been meted out if his lies were taken as the truth. In other words, if as the result of one man’s unfair accusations, another man could have been condemned to death, and the matter came to light, then the perjurer would get the noose or whatever was used in those days. It was also curious that the severity of the regulation was dictated by the principles of deterrence. It was plainly written that “those who remain shall hear and fear, and hereafter they shall not again commit such evil among you”. In a way, lying was treated as the worst crime of all.

Perhaps rightly, thought Szacki, and closed his notebook; he closed the window too, and did up his jacket – the night was damnably cold. What were the quotations about? About killing, harming a pregnant woman and perjury. Coincidence, or essential detail?

He switched off the light above the rear-view mirror, blinked a few times to accustom his tired eyes to the foggy darkness outside, and froze as he saw some dark figures crowding by the car. Feeling the panic rising in his throat, he started up the engine, and the headlights filled the milky mist with light. There were no shadows. Just a deserted town on the Vistula, a walkway made of paving bricks and an advert for Perła beer above a grocery shop.

He moved off abruptly, driving away towards the river. The fog swirled behind the Citroën’s broad rear end.

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki didn’t know it, because he couldn’t have done, but he was just leaving one of the typical pre-war shtetls, a town occupied mostly by an indigent Jewish population, which in Annopol, just before the war, had accounted for more than seventy per cent of the inhabitants. There was a Hebrew school here, run by the Tarbut movement, cheders, a Talmud Torah Association and secular schools for girls and boys, and there was even a modest yeshiva, after which the boys continued their rabbinical studies in Lublin. There was a small commemorative stone left on the site of the old Jewish graveyard on the edge of the town, surrounded by a decorative path made of pink paving bricks.

VII

Disbelief had appeared on the girl’s face, but she was still letting him keep his hand on her thigh – a good sign. For this reason, Roman Myszyński allowed himself to move it a little higher, onto the bit of skin above her lacy stocking top, except that there wasn’t any lace there, or any skin. Oh no, don’t say girls go out clubbing in tights these days. What is this, some sort of vintage party, or what? Was he just about to find out she’d got a spandex bra and hairy armpits? Couldn’t he just for once in his life get a normal girl? Not once a month, not once every six months or even once a year. Just once, once ever.

“So you’re something like a detective?” she asked, leaning towards him.

“Not something like, I just am a detective,” he exclaimed, making a mental note never, ever again to offer anyone squid in garlic sauce on a date. “I know how it sounds, but it’s true. I sit in an office, someone comes along, first he spins me a yarn – he’s checking to see if he can trust me. And then,” – here he paused – “and then he reveals his deepest secrets to me and I get a commission from him. You have no idea how complicated people’s fates can be.”

“I’d like to see your office. Reveal my secrets to you.”

“Your deepest ones?” he asked, feeling the tackiness of that riposte dampening his desire for a thrill-filled evening.

“You have no idea!” she shouted back over the music.

Soon after, they were sitting in a taxi, which was taking them from the centre of Warsaw to his “office”, in other words his small bachelor pad in Grochów. The place may not have been luxurious, but it was atmospheric, in a pre-war villa covered in creepers, squatting beneath the flat blocks of the Ostrobramska estate, known locally as Mordor. They were kissing passionately when his phone rang. A private number. He answered, mentally imploring all the gods in heaven for it not to be his mother.

For a while he listened.

“Of course I know, Prosecutor,” he said in a businesslike tone, lower than usual, casting the girl a meaningful look. “Things like that aren’t quickly forgotten… Yes, right now I’m in Warsaw… Right… Aha, aha… I see… Of course… I’ve got to grab a few hours’ sleep, it’ll take me three to get there, so I can be with you at eight… Yes, sure, goodbye.”

With the gesture of a gunslinger he snapped the phone shut and put it away in his jacket pocket. The girl was gazing at him in admiration.

“What a thing,” said the taxi driver, looking at him in the rear-view mirror, “for a prosecutor to be calling people at midnight. Normal, my arse. They’re turning us into a proper Soviet Union. And they say they’re liberals. Fuck the lot of them, sir.”

8

Wednesday, 22nd April 2009

The Earth is celebrating Earth Day, Jack Nicholson his seventy-second birthday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk his fifty-second, and car enthusiasts are commemorating the seventh anniversary of the demise of the Polonez. In Poland almost half a million high-school students are doing their final school exam; apart from that, the government announces that there will be a total ban on smoking in public places, a twenty-five-year-old mountaineer climbs up a wall to the top of the Marriott Hotel in Warsaw without any safety gear, and top prize for stand-up comic of the year is won by the Minister of Infrastructure when he declares that the A1, A2 and A4 motorways will be finished before Euro 2012. Poland’s western neighbour opens a major trial of Islamic terrorists, while to the east the ice-hockey trainer who was fired because his players dared to beat President Lukashenko’s team is reinstated. In Sandomierz the police arrest a man who accused a group of fourteen-year-olds of stealing seventy-four bottles of beer and some bottles of vodka at the bazaar and forced money out of them as compensation. Meanwhile, some real thieves purloin a handbag with 180 zlotys in it from an open flat. The owners were sitting on the balcony. And no wonder, because although the temperature does not rise above eighteen degrees, and at night it falls to two, it is a beautiful sunny day.

I

Ever since the first high-school outing, when Marcin had ended up on the coach next to Sasha – the only spare seat had been next to the overgrown beanpole with the look of a murderer – the boys had been linked by a friendship – perhaps not very close, but quite specific. They didn’t know much about each other, they didn’t go round to each other’s houses, they didn’t invite each other to parties and they weren’t even in the same class. They were both fairly independent, and they both valued their own independence. Marcin was more of a weakling, small with straw-blond hair and glasses, famous as well as ridiculed for being a violinist who sometimes played, to his despair, at school events. He did a bit of composing, and was turned on by the idea that he might one day write the music for films, but the only people who had heard his compositions were Ola and Sasha.

The rumours about Sasha were that he dealt in drugs and was involved with the Russian Mafia. The gossip was so widespread that even the teachers treated him with astonishing leniency, probably fearing that if they gave him too low a term grade some Mafioso in a rustling shell suit would kneecap them in the school changing room. Reticent by nature, Sasha kept quiet about this matter in particular, which of course only compounded the gossip, and when someone dared to go up to him and ask for some gear, Sasha first of all said nothing for a long time, then finally leant down and said with a deliberate Russian accent: “Not for you”.

In reality Sasha didn’t deal in anything – his greatest passion, unknown to anyone, was documentary cinema, whole terabytes of which he kept in his computer. Now and then he passed on the better and more controversial bits of his collection to Marcin. Lately, thanks to Sasha, Marcin had seen an unusual film about an American Jew who
went to Poland with his kids to look for the people who had saved his father’s life. What struck him most was the sick old Jewish man, attached to various tubes, who had been living in Israel for sixty years, could no longer communicate, and just kept repeating that he wanted to go home. They told him he was at home, but he kept on saying he wanted to go home. “So Dad, where is your home?” someone finally asked. “What do you mean, where? Seven, Zawichojska Street,” he replied. Marcin couldn’t explain why, but he had found this scene very moving.

Sasha was standing leaning against the window sill with his arms folded across his chest, staring into space; in loose clothes including a light top he looked even tougher than usual. Marcin came up, nodded to say hello and leant against the window sill next to him.

“Pawn to e4,” he said.

Sasha frowned and nodded approvingly.

“Knight to c4,” he muttered.

They had actually been playing games of chess non-stop ever since they had met on the bus, when Sasha had been playing chess on his mobile. Now they had it set up so each of them had his own chessboard at home, and each day at school they swapped a single move. Except that Marcin had all day to think over and prepare his move, while Sasha’s responses to moves Marcin had often spent hours working out took no more than a quarter of an hour. Once he had asked for time to think until the next break, and Marcin went about feeling proud for a week. But he never won – thanks to some Russian gene, Sasha was unbeatable.

“Listen, if I remember rightly, your old man’s a crooked bully and all-round bastard on the take?”

“That’s right, he is indeed a police officer,” replied Sasha.

“On Monday I was on a school trip to Sandomierz.”

“Bad luck.”

“We went on a tour of these vaults underneath the Old Town – apparently they used to be on several levels, but now there’s just a pathetic corridor left, or maybe that’s all they show people.”

“And?”

“And I heard this howling.”

“In other words Marysia’s finally found her clit. That’s the end, no one’s safe now.”

“It was like sort of… sort of horrendous howling, from deep underground. As if someone was being tormented in there or tortured.”

Sasha looked down at his friend. He raised one eyebrow.

“Yes, I know how it sounds,” Marcin went on. “I know perfectly well. But I can’t get it out of my head. You know what’s been going on there lately – they’ve got a serial murderer on the prowl, they’ve already found two dead bodies and today I read that apparently people have stopped sending their children to school, it’s hysteria. And you see, it’s probably nothing, I mean, it’s sure to be nothing, but what if? It’d be stupid, wouldn’t it?”