It seems curious, given the circumstances, that Krystian Bala should feel the need to be polite. When a man is serving 25 years for murder, you do not expect him to apologize for smoking a cigarette.
"Do you mind?" he asks, fishing out a pristine packet of Red & White from his shirt pocket. "I gave up a year and four months ago but then I started again since all of this."
He gestures vaguely with his hand, taking in his surroundings with a brief, unconcerned glance: the grubby prison visiting room, the gray-suited warders, the small metal cage he must be locked inside before being allowed to speak to anyone from the outside world.
"It is ridiculous what's going on here," he says, shaking his head. "That I should be in jail just because someone drew the wrong conclusion from an innocent work of fiction."
Balanced on the narrow ledge in front of him is a slim, black book, its pages carefully annotated in blue Biro, corners folded over to mark relevant passages. Its Polish title is typed on the cover in yellow print: Amok, by Krystian Bala.
As he talks, Bala bends back its spine and thumbs through the volume urgently, his eyes, framed by square wireless spectacles, skimming rapidly across the page. When he finds the phrase he is searching for, he slides it through a letterbox-sized slot cut into the metal bars.
"I can defend every single sentence," he says, jabbing at the typed pages with stubby fingers.
As he gets more animated, his stilted conversational English breaks into the hiss and spit of quickfire Polish. This is the first time Bala has agreed to speak to a journalist since his incarceration - and he has plenty to say. "Of course, the book is brutal, vulgar, the dirtiest I could write, but that's how art must be provocative. Just because I write a murder, doesn't mean I did it in real life."
The Polish courts drew a different conclusion. On Sept. 5 in a court in the Lower Silesian city of Wroclaw, Bala, 34, was found guilty of co-coordinating the torture, semi-starvation and eventual murder of his ex-wife's former lover. It was the most sensational trial in recent Polish history, its every detail pored over by the local press and recounted breathlessly to a stunned public. One of the main pieces of circumstantial evidence against Bala was his own book, in which an eerily similar murder was committed by the protagonist. According to the prosecution, Bala's narrative contained a level of detail about the actual killing of Darius Janiszewski that only the investigating police officers or the murderer could possibly have known.
It was a peculiarly specific crime. The bloated, semi-naked body of Janiszewski, a 35-year-old advertising company director, was discovered by anglers on the banks of Wroclaw's River Odra on a washed-out, gray December morning in 2000. He had been missing for more than a month. The corpse bore livid bruises from repeated beatings and a series of knife wounds. Over the subsequent days, the police pathologist would find that Janiszewski had been denied food and water for three days before his death.
The first police officers on the scene were struck by the strange way the victim had been tied up: his feet had been bound together, bent backwards and attached to a noose around his neck with a single piece of rope. Trussed up like a human cat's cradle, Dariusz Janiszewski would have strangled himself had he flexed his legs too suddenly. No one knows whether he suffocated in this way before being thrown in the Odra or whether he drowned there.
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