A Grain of Truth by Zygmunt Miloszewski Read Free Book Online Page B

for labels, he would have been a Red because of his past on the National Council, and she a Black – a conservative, traditionalist – because of her involvement in church initiatives and mildly professed Catholic faith.
    “In a way that is a symbol of this town,” Sobieraj had said. “People of very different views, with different past histories, in theory from opposite sides of the barricade, but always able to see eye to eye when it came to the good of Sandomierz.”
    “In a way, that is a symbol of this dump,” said Wilczur. “First the Reds and the Blacks each had something to prove by turns, and finally they realized they could see eye to eye for the good of business. Not for nothing is the city council in an old Dominican monastery with a view of the synagogue and the Jewish district. So they’d never forget what’s good for gesheft ,” he said, dropping in a Yiddish word. “I’m not going to give you a history lecture, but to put it briefly, under the Reds the town was yuk. Tarnobrzeg was fine and dandy with its sulphur deposits, and eventually there was the glassworks across the river, but here it was educated types up to their tricks, dubious intellectuals, and priests, to make matters worse. In Warsaw, Sandomierz wasn’t even mentioned on the road signs, only Tarnobrzeg. This place was nothing but misery, indigence and a bloody open-air museum. The new era came along, people rejoiced, but not for long, because suddenly it turned out this wasn’t a town, just a secular growth on the healthy tissue of the Church. They changed the cinema into a Catholic Centre. They started holding masses in the market square. They set up a statue of John Paul the size of a lighthouse on the common to have an excuse from then on why no event should ever be held there, and now it’s just a place where the dogs shit. And so it became a bloody open-air museum again, more churches than pubs. And then the Reds came back to power, and after a moment’s consternation it turned out that if there’s good gesheft , then oy vey, oy vey, everyone can benefit.If a shop or a petrol station can be put up on recovered church land, everyone gets a cut, everyone will be happy.”
    “Did Budnik take part in that?”
    Wilczur hesitated, and ordered another bottle of mineral water with a gesture worthy of single-malt whisky.
    “In those days I was working in Tarnobrzeg, but people used to talk.”
    “This is Poland, they always talk. I have heard that he was never mixed up in anything.”
    “Not officially. But the Church doesn’t have to be public about these things – it can sell whatever it wants for as much as it wants and to whomever it wants. It was quite strange that first of all the town was happy to hand over plots of land to the Church, as part of the recompense for Communist injustices, and then the Church immediately sold them as sites for a petrol station or a supermarket. No one knows who bought them or for what price. And Budnik was a great advocate of the idea of rendering unto God the things that are God’s, and rendering unto the Jew the things that are the Jew’s.”
    Szacki shrugged. He was bored, he was tired of the fact that all Wilczur’s statements had a negative tone, permeated with Polish poison, as sticky as the tables at the Modena.
    “There are deals like that the length and breadth of the country – what’s the significance of that? Did it earn Budnik enemies? Was there someone he didn’t take care of? Or didn’t take care of the right way? Did he do deals with the Mafia? So far it sounds to me like village scams, a scoop for the local school magazine. But nothing you slash someone’s wife’s throat for.”
    Wilczur raised a skinny, wrinkled finger.
    “Maybe land isn’t worth as much here as in central Warsaw, but no one gives it away for nothing.”
    He stopped talking and became pensive. Szacki waited, watching the policeman. He was trying to think of him as an experienced local cop, but