‘It’s not snowing and this is not your home, George. It’s not even the real world.’
‘This morning I found the tracks of wolves at the back. They come down to raid the rubbish-bins outside the kitchen door.’
‘Foxes; or perhaps wild dogs.’
‘No: wolves. They wake me at night howling. You hear explosions too sometimes. These forests are riddled with minefields left here from the war. Only the big wolves trigger them; the other animals are not heavy enough to detonate the pressure pads.’
‘Okay, wolves. And maybe it is snowing. But you are not Polish, George. That’s one thing I’m certain about. You are very very English.’
‘I speak the language,’ said George.
‘No, George, you don’t speak the language. You speak some old-fashioned heavily accented Polish gobbledegook that leaves a trail behind you that a child could follow.’
‘Do I?’ He seemed dismayed.
‘The crazy man, speaking funny old Polish? That’s what they said in the village when I asked about you. Everyone you ever speak with goes telling everyone he meets about a man from England speaking comical old Polish.’
George dismissed this with a wave of the hand. ‘How can you understand? It’s not just a matter of the local accent; it’s in the heart. I discovered how Polish I was back in 1978, when Pope John Paul was elected.’
I knew what was coming. Just as popular legend says that everyone in the West remembers what they were doing when they first heard of the shooting of President Kennedy, so Poles can all remember where they were when Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow, was elected: the first non-Italian Pope for 456 years.
‘Warsaw,’ said George. ‘I was walking down Nowy Swiat after a long service in the Jesuit church. My legs were stiff. There were little groups of people, standing on the street corners, singing. Then down the street there came a tramcar – and all the passengers were singing and shouting. You know Warsaw, Bernard. You know the people. Can you imagine that? A street-car with passengers leaning out shouting and singing? Not easily, eh?’
‘Not easily.’
‘I waved back at them, and I found myself crying with happiness and a feeling of being present at the most wonderful family celebration. It was then that I knew I was Polish. I watched the TV news that night, and the news announcer – a long-faced fellow who never smiled – was laughing and bouncing around the studio in a performance no one would have thought possible. Yes, I was truly Polish, but at first I didn’t fully admit it to myself. And I knew it wasn’t something I could safely go around confiding to people in England, even Tessa. The English don’t hate foreigners, but they draw the line at foreigners who boast of being foreign.’
I smiled to acknowledge his quip, but he scarcely knew I was there. It was a monologue, and it was little more than displacement activity, while his mind tried to deal with the prospect of life without Tessa.
‘So in the summer of 1981 I came back to Warsaw to try and sort my feelings out. I chose the date so I could attend the funeral of Cardinal Wyszynski. I was expecting a crowded church, a solemn eulogy and a respectful burial. You should have been here, Bernard! The first sign of what was going to happen was the way that all the theatres and movie houses closed their doors. Only religious music was transmitted on the radio. People flocked in from all over the country. Crowds gathered in the streets. The funeral became the biggest demonstration of religious faith I’ve ever seen. When Victory Square was used for communist demonstrations it was only half filled; but on that day I couldn’t get within half a mile of the platform. They say a quarter of a million people were packed into that Square for the funeral. At one end of it they’d erected a gigantic cross; well over forty feet tall. And if there was any last doubt that this was some miraculous kind of revolution, that doubt was dispelled when the President arrived. The President of a communist government had come to pay homage at the funeral of Cardinal Wyszynski, his most outspoken critic.’
‘Yes, well, before we both fall down and drown in a sea of tears, let me tell you one of my vivid memories of big-city life. If you’d stayed in Warsaw until the December of that same year, you would have seen your jolly Polish family getting their skulls cracked open by grey-uniformed anti-riot squads, as they eliminated “trouble-makers” and dragged them off to their cosy detention camps. You could have switched on your TV and seen General Jaruzelski on the early-morning programme proclaiming not martial law but “a state of war”. Solidarity was banned and even its minor rank and file were tossed into prison without trial. Strikes and demonstrations were prohibited, the night curfew was enforced, and the courts were told not to be too fussy about the nicer points of law. Telephone calls and all mail were subject to the censor. Even while the General was telling us all this, the radio and TV stations, and just about every other vital institution, were being taken over by teams of armed soldiers, and his tame “military council” took over the government.’
‘That was during the time of military law,’ said George.
‘Are you blind, George? Ending martial law – and this phoney amnesty – were just deceptions to persuade the foreign bankers not to call in their loans. Martial law hasn’t ended. Your precious “family” is in the tight grip of the generals.’
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’
‘Can’t you, George? I’ll write that down and try and remember it. Is that your personal political philosophy, or simply a cookery hint to save for a time when eggs are not rationed?’ He gave me a sour smile. ‘What I need to know is exactly when you decided to work for the Bezpieca. Was that before the omelette-making began, or afterwards?’
His head snapped back as if I’d slapped his face, but then he looked at me and smiled wearily to let me know he wasn’t stumbling into my trap: he was marching into it. He was prepared. ‘Before, Bernard. I wanted to help Poland.’
‘But you didn’t stop when the General took command, did you? You reported whatever you could find out about the work that Fiona and I did?’
‘I told them nothing important. I never took money from them; I never gave them anything more than gossip.’
‘How can you have been so stupid, George? You were moved by the way the Church confronted the communist State; but you went to work for the communist State?’
‘I felt those two elements were no longer divided,’ said George. ‘And they got nothing important out of me.’
‘Maybe they put you on hold,’ I said. ‘You move in influential circles, George. What you call your gossip is useful to them.’
‘Perhaps. But I’m not a spy, Bernard. I couldn’t take the stress of it. That’s why I got out and went to Zurich. I told them I had to leave England. I thought they’d stop pestering me after that.’
‘But these folk don’t take no for an answer, do they? Is that why you hired Tiny Timmermann?’
‘I wanted him to find out about Tessa.’
‘Tiny was murdered. I found him in Magdeburg; they’d blown the top of his head off.’
‘I asked him to talk to them. To act as an intermediary… persuade them to let me off the hook. He said he knew everyone. He said he could do it.’
‘I bet he did. When Tiny was strapped for money he sold short on promises.’
‘I was desperate to know about her.’
‘And when you came to Poland, what did they say about Timmermann?’
‘I didn’t know he’d been killed. They said that Timmermann had talked with them and that they would let me off the hook. But that first they’d show me their good faith. They would start an inquiry into Tessa’s disappearance.’
‘So Tessa’s death became her disappearance, with all the promise that evokes. So you didn’t run back here because the stock-market took a dive?’
‘No, no, no. That was a coincidence. I wanted to escape, Bernard. I thought I’d managed it at one time.’
‘There was a severed hand with your family crest on a signet ring.’
r /> ‘I thought I was being clever. Stefan helped. He showed it to someone in the British embassy in Warsaw, to convince everyone that I was dead. We never intended that it should go to London.’
‘Well, it went to London and one of their people was shot.’
‘I know. Everyone here was angry. It was my fault. The local Bezpieca people did everything to retrieve it and then went to London after it. I was deeply indebted to them after that. They said I must come here, to my brother’s house, and wait.’
‘Wait?’ I said. ‘Wait for what? They sent you here to wait for Tessa? Alive? How could you have swallowed that fairy story?’
‘She’s alive and she’s pregnant,’ said George, as if this disclosure would catch me off-guard.
‘She’s dead,’ I told him.
‘No. Next week they said.’
‘Because they will invent an emergency. And they will tell you she died in childbirth. Then they will foist off a look-alike body for the burial. And they’ll bring you a smiling baby they will persuade you is yours. The baby will be Polish and they will have locked you up really tight. That’s their plan, George.’
‘You can’t leave anything alone, can you, Bernard?’
‘Don’t tell me you never had the thought of such a deception cross your mind?’
‘Next week we’ll see.’
‘You think you’re a big-shot, George, but for the people you deal with here you are a nothing. The first stage of grief is denial. But now it’s time to move on.’
He sank down into a chair. ‘Our delightful father-in-law said more or less the same thing. He doesn’t believe Tessa is still alive. I’m the only one who believes it. I persuaded the old pig to come out here to Warsaw. One of the Polish security men went all through the post-mortem and photos of the dissected body with him. I couldn’t bear to look at any of it but they say it’s clearly not Tessa; it was a Stasi lieutenant – a woman – who was there on the Autobahn that night.’
‘But father-in-law still thinks his daughter is dead?’
‘He’s stubborn,’ said George. ‘He said I’d ruined his holiday in the Caribbean, and that I should refund his air fare out here. It was a joke of course; but you know his jokes, don’t you?’
‘He’s realistic,’ I said. ‘I saw the same post-mortem material; they brought it to London and then killed the man who delivered it so we couldn’t interrogate him. I have the same junk in a file at the office. It’s phoney, George. I’m sorry to say it but it’s an example of the trouble they take faking their disinformation evidence, and getting rid of anyone who knows the truth. Tessa is dead.’
George picked up my map, got up and went to the window to study it by daylight. ‘So this region was part of Hitler’s wartime headquarters? Where did you get this map?’ He took off his glasses and peered at it closely. ‘Look at the size of the place…’ The map was a photocopy of a wartime German one. It showed all the wooden buildings, bunkers, roads, checkpoints, and the railway line and the sidings and the train stations and the airstrips, that comprised the Wolfschanze. ‘They tried to put a bomb under him, didn’t they? Somewhere out there in the forest there’s a rotting splinter of that wooden hut… Have you seen all that broken concrete and the half-buried steps and ventilation shafts…? Dig out the earth from those collapsed tunnels and we’d find the maps and operations rooms and maybe the dead generals too.’
‘I don’t think so, George. Generals are smart: they pack up and go away long before the enemy arrives.’
‘And that’s what I should do? Is that what you mean?’
‘There’s still enough time to get you out of here. But if you stay, you’ll lose British nationality and my people will do nothing for fear of creating a diplomatic brawl.’
‘In London they’ll put me on trial for spying.’
‘Not if you come clean with them.’
‘But you said they knew… Weren’t you sent after me because I’d been an agent for the Bezpieca?’
‘That was just one of my hunches, George.’
‘Not really an agent. I could explain to your people… I wouldn’t have endangered any of you, Bernard.’
‘That’s good to know, George.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I understand, George. They’ve made a fool of you. These people – Bezpieca, Stasi, KGB – they all work hand in glove. Their latest gimmick is to tell you Tessa is still alive. Have they threatened to betray you to the British? Well they like stick and carrot; it’s the way their minds work. But you have nothing to be afraid of, have you?’
‘It’s all my own fault.’
‘Come home, George. Come and tell us all you know. You’re a Londoner; you’re not Polish. Forget all this crap they’ve been feeding you.’
‘Stefan says…’
‘Stefan made his own pact with the devil. His wife is a part of the regime. But you are still free to choose.’
There was a long silence while he refolded the map with exaggerated care. ‘They arrested Uncle Nico. Stefan did nothing to stop them. Nico is in a camp in the south. He took that damned biography of Bishop Stanislaus to a publisher. It was read by an army censor, and they said it was treason.’
‘I thought it was about a bishop who lived in the eleventh century,’ I said. Poor Uncle Nico. Even the best of the army’s detention camps provided rigorous conditions for young fit men. He was unlikely to survive a harsh winter there.
‘That’s right; Stanislaus the Bishop of Cracow, our patron saint. He excommunicated the tyrant Boleslaw II and the brutal knights that were at his court… Boleslaw had him executed, or did it personally if you want Uncle Nico’s version. The execution of the Bishop brought a curse upon the royal line. Church versus State. You see how dangerous that could be?’
‘I can see the regime wouldn’t take to it as a story-line.’
‘Uncle Nico let me read the typescript. It was a thinly veiled attack on the present regime. Cleverly done but too long, and too boring, I would have thought. There were sly little touches, and contemporary parallels. And the death of Father Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984, which has been blamed on the Bezpieca, was artfully worked into it. But the book needed editing and a lot of work.’
‘What are you, a literary critic?’ I scoffed. ‘Why didn’t you warn the old man what he was getting into?’
‘How could I guess he’d have the nerve to take that bundle of scribble to a publisher? He’d been rewriting it for years and years. It was nowhere near fit to publish.’ Again George paused, thinking about the old man, and perhaps remembering everything the old man had risked for the two boys. I didn’t break into his thoughts. ‘If you think you can get me out of this, Bernard, get me out of it without trouble coming to me, and I’ll do whatever you say.’
I plunged right in. ‘There’s an airstrip, part of the old Wolfschanze complex. It’s just over five miles from here. There’s a small plane coming from Sweden tonight. It’s a tight fit but the pilot is a mercenary; and he only gets paid if he gets us out. I know him; he’s been into worse landing places.’
‘It sounds risky.’
‘I went there yesterday. At one end the trees have all grown taller, but the other end is a lake. There will be space enough. It is sheltered from the snow and most of the vegetation is dead.’
‘An airstrip? In the forest?’
‘The Wolfschanze had several strips; this one is the best-preserved. If the Luftwaffe could land a big Junkers there, it’s big enough for my man. And in this sort of cold weather he doesn’t have to worry about nosing over in the mud.’
‘What if the weather closes in?’
‘He’ll try again tomorrow, and again the next night. He’ll want his money: I know these bush pilots. Cloud and mist doesn’t stop them. He’ll come in using braille.’
He turned away. ‘And you are sure she’s…’
‘Dead? Yes. I was there, George. I saw it.’
‘What are you looking at?’ he asked, noticing me glance at
the snowy scene through the window.
‘Tonight when we leave they will follow us,’ I told him.
‘Is there someone out there now?’ said George.
‘Yes, they’re out there somewhere, and when we leave they’ll be close behind us.’
‘They’ll stop us.’
‘No, George, they won’t stop us, but they might try. You must understand that when they do try, I might have to deal roughly with them. It will be too late then for you to change your mind, because we’ll be leaving behind some very hostile natives.’
‘I said I’m coming with you.’
‘Well, don’t change your mind, George. This is a costly way to travel, and when Elizabeth Windsor is picking up the tab she doesn’t like no-shows.’
We left in a Fiat as soon as it became dark, and made a detour so that I could see who was interested in us. It was a big black Volvo estate. There were four of them inside it; big men bundled up in overcoats as if they were expecting a breakdown and ready to push. They made little effort to hide the fact that they were following us.
The wild forest, preserved from forestry experts, was a magnificent jungle of beech, firs and birch. The ground was hard and frosty and the narrow forest tracks, sheltered from the snowstorms, meandered away and disappeared into the night. I was pleased to have spent a few hours of the previous day doing a tourist’s run around the neighbourhood. Now, as we approached it from the northern side, I knew the airstrip was coming up, and at the very edge of the strip there was a place where the track was too narrow for them to overtake us. When I stopped the car they would have to stop behind us.
I looked at George. He was girding himself for a big effort. ‘This is what I want you to do after I stop the car, George. Get out and make a fuss. Get well away from both cars and get their attention. Scream and shout. Tell them you are being kidnapped. Tell them you are hurt. Tell them anything. But get their full attention. Can you do that for me?’ I was driving very slowly by that time. In the mirror I saw the Volvo with the main beam headlights flashing to tell me that the game was up. One of the men was leaning out of the window waving his hand. He was wearing gloves, I noticed. That was encouraging. Men wearing gloves are not quick on the trigger. ‘Where the track widens out to the lake I will stop.’