The Secret Pilgrim (24 page)

So that from the first blinding explosion of pain, my response was recognition: Hullo, I thought, you've come at last—my name is Joost, what's yours?

There was no ceremony, you see. He didn't sit me at a desk in the tried tradition of the screen and say, “Either talk to me or you'll be beaten. Here is your confession. Sign it.” He didn't have them lock me in a cell and leave me to cook for a few days while I decided that confession was the better part of courage. They simply dragged me out of the car and through the gateway of what could have been a private house, then into a courtyard where the only footprints were our own, so that they had to topple me through the thick snow, slewing me on my heels, all three of them, punching me from one to the other, now in the face, now in the groin and stomach, now back to
the face again, this time with an elbow or a knee. Then, while I was still double, kicking me like a half-stunned pig across the slithery cobble as if they couldn't wait to get indoors before they had me.

Then, once indoors, they became more systematic, as if the elegance of the old bare room had instilled in them a sense of order. They took me in turns, like civilised men, two of them holding me and one hitting me, a proper democratic rota, except that when it was Colonel Jerzy's fifth or fiftieth turn, he hit me so regretfully and so hard that I actually did die for a while, and when I came round I was alone with him. He was seated at a folding desk, with his elbows on it, holding his unhappy head between his grazed hands as if he had a hangover, and reviewing with disappointment the answers I had given to the questions he had put to me between onslaughts, first lifting his head in order to study with disapproval my altered appearance, then shaking it painfully and sighing as if to say life really was unfair to him, he didn't know what more he could do to me to help me see the light. It dawned on me that more time had passed than I realised, perhaps several hours.

This was also the moment when the scene began to take on a resemblance to the one I had always imagined, with my tormentor sitting comfortably at a desk, brooding over me with a professional's concern, and myself spreadeagled against a scalding waterpipe, my arms handcuffed either side of a black concertina-style radiator; with corners that bit into the base of my spine like red-hot teeth. I had been bleeding from the mouth and nose and, I thought, from one ear as well, and my shirt front looked like a slaughterer's apron. But the blood had dried and I wasn't bleeding any more, which was another way of calculating the passage of time. How long does blood take to congeal in a big empty house in Gdansk when you are chained to a furnace and looking into the puppyish face of Colonel Jerzy?

It was terribly hard to hate him, and with the burning in my back it was becoming harder by the moment. He was my only saviour. His face stayed on me all the time now. Even when he
turned his head downward to the table in private prayer, or got up and lit himself a filthy Polish cigarette and took a stretch around the room, his lugubrious gaze seemed to stay on me without reference to where the rest of him had gone. He turned his squat back to me. He gave me a view of his thick bald head and the pitted nape of his neck. Yet his eyes—treating with me, reasoning with me and sometimes, as it seemed, imploring me to ease his anguish—never left me for a second. And there was a part of me that really wanted to help him and it was becoming more and more strident with the burning. Because the burning was not a burning any more, it was pure pain, a pain indivisible and absolute, mounting like a scale that had no upper limit. So that I would have given almost anything to make him feel better—except myself. Except the part of me that made me separate from him, and was therefore my survival.

What's your name?” he asked me, still in his Polish English.

“Joost.” He had to bend over me to hear me. “Franz Joost.”

“From Munich,” he suggested, using my shoulder as a prop while he put his ear closer to my mouth.

“Born Nijmegen. Working for farmers in the Taunus, by Frankfurt.”

“You've forgotten your Dutch accent.” He shook me a little to wake me.

“You just don't hear it. You're a Pole. I want to see the Dutch Consul.”

“You mean British Consul.”

“Dutch.” And then I think I repeated the same word “Dutch” several times, and went on repeating it till he threw cold water over me, then poured a little of it into my mouth to let me rinse and spit. I realised I was missing a tooth. Lower jaw front left. Two teeth perhaps. It was hard to tell.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked me.

When he stared down at me like this, his cheeks fell forward like a baby's and his lips formed themselves in a kiss, so that he looked like a puzzled cherub.

“Not at the moment,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Get me the Dutch Consul. You've got the wrong man.”

I saw that he didn't like being told this. He wasn't used to being given orders or contradicted. He passed the back of his right hand across his lips, a thing he sometimes did before he hit me, and I waited for the blow. He began patting his pockets, I assumed for some instrument.

“No,” he remarked, with a sigh. “You are mistaken. I have got the right man.”

He knelt to me and I thought he was preparing to kill me because I had noticed that he was at his most murderous when he appeared most unhappy. But he was unlocking my handcuffs. When he had done so, he shoved his clenched fists under my armpits and hauled me—I almost thought helped me—to a spacious bathroom with an old, freestanding bath filled with warm water.

“Strip,” he said, and watched me dejectedly while I dragged off what remained of my clothes, too exhausted to care about what he would do to me once I was in the water: drown me, or cook me or freeze me, or drop in an electric wire.

He had my suitcase from the hotel. While I lay in the bath, he picked out clean clothes and tossed them on to a chair.

“You leave on tomorrow's plane for Frankfurt via Warsaw. There has been a mistake,” he said. “We apologise. We shall cancel your business appointments and say you were the victim of a hit-andrun car.”

“I'll need more than an apology,” I said.

The bath was doing me no good. I was afraid that if I lay flat any longer, I would die again. I hauled myself into a crouch. Jerzy held out his forearm. I clutched it and stood upright, swaying dangerously. Jerzy helped me out of the bath, then handed me a towel and watched me gloomily while I dried myself and pulled on the clean clothes he had laid out for me.

He led me from the house and across the courtyard, carrying my case in one hand and bearing my weight with the other, because the bath had weakened me as well as easing the pain. I peered round for the henchmen but saw none.

“The cold air will be good for you,” he said, with the confidence of an expert.

He led me to a parked car, and it did not resemble either of the cars that had taken part in my arrest. A toy steering wheel lay on the back seat. We drove down empty streets. Sometimes I dozed. We reached a pair of white iron gates guarded by militia.

“Don't look at them,” he ordered me, and showed them his papers, while I dozed again.

We got out of the car and stood on a grass clifftop. An inshore wind froze our faces. Mine felt big as two footballs. My mouth had moved into my left cheek. One eye had closed. There was no moon and the sea was a growl behind the salt mist. The only light came from the city, behind us. Occasionally phosphorous sparks slipped past us, or puffs of white spume spun away into the blackness. This is where I'm supposed to die, I thought as I stood beside him; first he beat me, then he gives me a warm bath, now he shoots me and shoves me over the cliff. But his hands were hanging glumly at his sides and there was no gun in them, and his eyes—what I could make out of them—were fixed on the starless darkness, not on me; so perhaps someone else was going to shoot me, someone already waiting in the dark. If I had had the energy, I could have killed Jerzy first. But I hadn't, and didn't feel the need. I thought of Mabel, but without any sense of loss or gain. I wondered how she'd manage living on a pension, whom she'd find.
Fräulein Stefanie is not at home,
I remembered . . .
Then perhaps it was Stefanie who answered,
Smiley was saying . . . So many unanswered prayers, I was thinking. But so many never offered, either. I was feeling very drowsy.

At last Jerzy spoke, his voice no less despondent than before. “I have brought you here because there isn't a microphone on
earth can hear us. I wish to spy for your country. I need a good professional to act as intermediary. I have decided to choose you.”

Once more I lost my sense of time and place. But perhaps he had lost his too, for he had turned his back on the sea and with his hand clutched to his leather hat to hold it against the wind, he had undertaken a mournful study of the inland lights, scowling at things that needed no scowling at, sometimes punching the windtears from his cheeks with his big fists.

“Why should anyone spy for Holland?” I asked him.

“Very well, I propose to spy for Holland,” he replied wearily, indulging a pedant. “Therefore I need a good professional
Dutchman
who can keep his mouth shut. Knowing what fools you
Dutchmen
have employed against us in the past, I am understandably selective. However, you have passed the test. Congratulations. I select you.”

I thought it best to say nothing. Probably I didn't believe him. “In the false compartment of your suitcase you will find a wad of Polish secret documents,” he continued, in a tone of dejection. “At Gdansk airport you will have no Customs problems, naturally. I have given orders for them not to examine your luggage. For all they know, you are by now my agent. In Frankfurt, you are on home ground. I shall work for you and nobody else. Our next meeting will be in Berlin on May 5th. I shall be attending the May Day celebrations to mark the glorious victory of the proletariat.”

He was trying to light a fresh cigarette, but the wind kept putting out his matches. So he took his hat off and lit the cigarette inside the crown, lowering his fat face to it as if he were drinking water from a stream.

“Your people will wish to know my motive,” he continued when he had taken a deep draught of cigarette smoke. “Tell them—” Suddenly at a loss, he sank his head into his shoulders and peered round at me as if pleading for advice on how to deal with idiots. “Tell them I'm bored. Tell them I'm sick of the work. Tell them the Party's a bunch of crooks. They know that anyway, but tell them.
I'm a Catholic. I'm a Jew. I'm a Tartar. Tell them whatever the hell they want to hear.”

“They may want to know why you have chosen to come to the
Dutch
,” I said. “Rather than to the Americans, or the French or whoever.”

He thought about that too, puffing at his cigarette in the darkness. You Dutch had some good joes,” he said ruminatively. “I got to know some of them pretty well. They did a good job till that bastard Haydon came along.” An idea occurred to him. “Tell them my father was a Battle of Britain pilot,” he suggested. “Got himself shot down over Kent. That should please them. You know Kent?”

“Why should a Dutchman know Kent?” I said.

If I had weakened, I could have told him that, before our so called “friendly” separation, Mabel and I had bought a house in Tunbridge Wells. But I didn't, which was as well, because when Head Office came to check the story out, there was no record of Jerzy's father having flown anything larger than a paper kite. And when I put this to Jerzy several years later—long after his loyalty to the perfidious British had been demonstrated beyond all doubt—he just laughed, and said his father was an old fool who cared for nothing but vodka and potatoes.

So why?

For five years Jerzy was my secret university of espionage, but his contempt for motive—his own particularly—never relaxed. First we idiots do what we want to do, he said; then we look round for justifications for having done it. All men were idiots to him, he told me, and we spies were the biggest idiots of all.

At first I suspected that he was spying for vengeance, and drew him out on the people above him in the hierarchy who might have slighted him. He hated them all, himself the most.

Then I decided he was spying for ideological reasons, and that his cynicism was a disguise for the finer yearnings he had discovered in his middle age. But when I attempted to use my wiles to
break his cynicism down—“Your family, Jerzy, your mother, Jerzy. Admit you're proud to have become a grandfather”— I found only more cynicism beneath. He felt nothing for any of them, he retorted, but so icily that I concluded that he did indeed, as he maintained, hate the entire human race, and that his savagery, and perhaps his betrayal too, were the simple expression of this hatred.

As to the West, it was run by the same idiots who ran everything in the world, so what's the difference? And when I told him this simply was not so, he became as defensive of his nihilist creed as any other zealot, and I had to rein myself in for fear of angering him seriously.

So why? Why risk his neck, his life, his livelihood and the family he hated, to do something for a world he despised?

The Church? I asked him that too, and significantly, as I think now, he bridled. Christ was a manic depressive, he retorted. Christ needed to commit suicide in public, so he provoked the authorities until they did him the favour. “Those God-thumper guys are all the same,” he said with contempt. “I've tortured them. I know.”

Like most cynics, he was a Puritan, and this paradox repeated itself in him in several ways. When we offered to drop money for him, open a Swiss bank account, the usual, he flew into a rage and declared he was not some “cheap informant.” When I picked a moment—on the instruction if Head Office—to assure him that if ever things went wrong, we would spare no effort to get him out and provide him with a new identity in the West, his contempt was absolute: “I'm a Polish creep, but I would rather face a firing squad of my fellow creeps than die a traitor in some capitalist pigsty.”