Authors: Zygmunt Miloszewski
A Grain of Truth
Zygmunt Miłoszewski, born in Warsaw in 1976, is a star of Polish fiction. His first novel,
The Intercom
, was published in 2005 to high acclaim. In 2006 he published a novel for young readers,
The Adder Mountains
, and in 2007 the crime novel
Entanglement
. The latter received the High Calibre Award for best Polish crime novel of the year and was made into a feature film.
A Grain of Truth
, the sequel to
Entanglement
, also featuring State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, was published in 2011 in Poland.
Also available from Bitter Lemon Press
by Zygmunt Miłoszewski:
Entanglement
A GRAIN OF TRUTH
Zygmunt Miłoszewski
Translated from the Polish
by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
First published in Polish as
Ziarno prawdy
by Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2011
This edition has been published with the financial support of
The Book Institute – the © POLAND Translation Programme
Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial
assistance of the Arts Council of England
Copyright © Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2011
English translation © Antonia Lloyd-Jones, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any form or by any means without written
permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of the author and the translator have
been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and
Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-908524-03-4
Typeset by Tetragon
For Marta
“In every legend there lies a grain of truth.”
–
FOLK SAYING
“Half the truth is a whole lie.”
–
JEWISH PROVERB
“It is the prosecutor’s duty to strive to establish the truth.”
–
ETHICAL PRINCIPLES
FOR THE PROSECUTOR
Contents
Jews are celebrating the seventh day of Passover and are commemorating the crossing of the Red Sea. For Christians it is the fourth day of Easter week. For Poles it is the second day of a three-day period of national mourning declared after a hotel fire in Kamie
ń
Pomorski in which twenty-three people were killed. In the world of European Champions League football Chelsea and Manchester United go forward to the semi-finals, and in the world of Polish football some fans of ŁKS, the Łód
ź
team whose main rivals are a team called Widzew, are charged with inciting racial hatred by wearing T-shirts inscribed “Death to Fucking Widzew-Yidzew”. Police Headquarters issues a report on crime figures for March – compared with March 2008, crime has risen by eleven per cent. The police comment: “The economic crisis is forcing people to commit crimes.” In Sandomierz it has already forced a saleswoman at a butcher’s shop to sell cigarettes free of excise duty under the counter, and she has been detained. In the city it is fairly cold, as throughout Poland, and the temperature does not exceed fourteen degrees Celsius, but even so it is the first sunny day after an ice-cold Easter.
I
Ghosts certainly don’t appear at midnight. At midnight there are still late films running on TV, teenage boys are having intense thoughts about their lady teachers, lovers are gathering strength before the next go, long-married couples are having serious conversations about “what’s happening to our money”, good wives are taking cakes out of the oven and bad husbands are waking up the children in their drunken attempts to open the front door. There’s too much life going on at midnight for the spirits of the dead to be able to make a proper impression. It’s quite another matter shortly before dawn, when even the staff at petrol stations are nodding off, and the dull light is starting to pick beings and objects out of the gloom whose existence we had never suspected.
It was approaching four in the morning – the sun would be up in an hour – and Roman Myszyński was fighting off sleep in the reading room at the State Archive in Sandomierz, surrounded by the dead. Around him towered stacks of nineteenth-century parish registers, and even though most of the entries concerned life’s happy moments, even though there were more baptisms and weddings than death certificates, even so, he could smell the odour of death, and couldn’t shake off the thought that all these newborns and all these newly-weds had been pushing up the daisies for several decades at least, and that the rarely dusted or consulted tomes surrounding him were the only testimony to their existence. Though actually, even so they were lucky, considering what the war had done to most of the Polish archives.
It was bloody cold, there was no coffee left in his thermos, and the only thought he could formulate was to berate himself for the idiotic idea of founding a firm that specialized in genealogical research, instead of taking on a junior lectureship. The salary at the college was low but regular, and came with free health insurance – nothing but pluses. Especially compared with the jobs at schools which his friends from the same year at university had ended up in – just as badly paid, but enhanced with non-stop frustration and criminal threats from the pupils.
He glanced at the huge book lying open in front of him, and at the sentence finely inscribed by the parish priest at Dwikozy in April 1834: “The applicant and witnesses are unable to read.” That really would have said it all, as far as Włodzimierz Niewolin’s noble ancestry was concerned. But if anyone still had doubts that perhaps the father of Niewolin’s great-great-grandfather who presented his child for baptism was just having a rough day after wetting the baby’s head, his profession was enough to dispel them – peasant. Myszyński was sure that as soon as he rooted out the marriage certificate, the Marjanna Niewolin mentioned in the birth certificate – fifteen years younger than her husband – would turn out to be a serving wench. Or maybe she was still living with her parents.
He stood up and stretched vigorously, accidentally jogging an old, pre-war photo of the Sandomierz market square that was hanging on the wall. He set it straight, thinking that somehow the square in the postcard looked different from today. More modest. He peered out of the window, but the market-square frontage visible at the end of the street was shrouded in the dark mist of daybreak. What nonsense – why should the old market square look any different? Why on earth was he thinking about it? He should get down to work if he wanted to reconstruct Niewolin’s past and get back to Warsaw by one o’clock.
What else might he find? He shouldn’t have any trouble with the marriage certificate, and Jakub and Marjanna’s birth certificates must be somewhere too – luckily the Congress Kingdom of Poland was fairly kind to the archive researcher. From the start of the nineteenth century, thanks to the Napoleonic Code, in the Duchy of Warsaw all the registry documents had to be drawn up by the parishes in two copies and delivered to the state archive; later on the rules had been changed, but even so it wasn’t bad. It was worse in Galicia, and the eastern Borderlands were a real genealogical black hole – there was nothing in the Warsaw archive relating to territory east of the River Bug but the remains of some documents. In other words, Marjanna, born
circa
1814, shouldn’t present a problem. As for Jakub, the tail end of the eighteenth century was still not too bad; the priests were becoming better educated, and apart from in the exceptionally lazy parishes,
the books were generally complete. In Sandomierz it was a help that during the last war neither the Germans nor the Soviets had sent them up in smoke. The oldest documents dated from the 1580s. Earlier than that, the trail broke off – it wasn’t until the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century that the Church had come up with the idea of registering its flock.
He rubbed his eyes and leant over the outspread records. What he needed were the marriage certificates from Dwikozy dating from the previous two years, and maybe he’d look for the mother at once. Née Kwietniewska. Hmm. A small alarm bell rang in the researcher’s head.
Two years had passed since the time when, against everybody’s advice, he had founded his company, Golden Genes. He had had the idea for it while gathering material for his thesis at the Central Archive of Historical Records in Warsaw, where he kept coming across people with a mad look in their eyes, ineptly seeking information about their ancestors and trying to draw up their family tree. He helped one lad out of pity, one girl because of her stunningly beautiful bust, and finally Magda, because she was so sweet, with her great big genealogical chart, something like the Tree of Jesse. It ended in Magda and her chart coming to live with him for half a year. Five months too long – she moved out with tears in her eyes and the knowledge that her great-great-grandmother Cecylia was a bastard, because in 1813 it was the midwife who had had her baptized.