The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  Then, just as I had done the day before, I turned around and left.

  15

  Since we had brought separate cars, I drove back to the station to wait for him. On the way, I saw wives in windows brushing off their shutters and waving away pigeons, and in Victory Square there was a procession of university students. They had signs—small, hand-drawn boards—that demanded accountability within the universities. LET US GRADE PROFESSORS, SO WE CAN TRUST THEIR GRADES! Along their edge, a handful of bored, uniformed Militia looked on.

  I didn’t regret my outburst; I didn’t care what Stefan thought. I’d had enough of his worthless needling, because when I looked into Martin’s decomposing features I felt like I was one with him again, in those black bars just after the war. Like I had never crawled out of that subhuman existence.

  Leonek gave a smile for my benefit, but when I talked to him there was still that underlying misery. “You’re coming over tonight, then?”

  “New tie and everything.” He flipped it up for me to see. It was green silk with small brown dots forming diagonal lines.

  “I’m sure Magda will appreciate it.”

  Emil passed me on his way to Leonek’s desk and gave a wink. “When are you going to invite me and Lena over for dinner?”

  “When you get a decent tie.”

  Mikhail Kaminski had set up a chair across from Brano Sev, and they were hunched on either side of the desk, conferring over typewritten pages from the files of state security. Their voices were a distant rumble.

  I knocked on Moska’s door and waited for his voice: “Enter.” He was sitting at his desk, large hands prone atop piles of papers, and I was struck by the suspicion that he had been sitting like that all morning, immobile, while outside children played loudly on the sidewalk.

  I sat across from him. “What do you know about this guy?”

  “Who?”

  “Kaminski.”

  He glanced up to make sure I’d latched the door, then patted his shirt pockets and the coat hanging from his chair until he found a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one. We blew smoke simultaneously into the stuffy office. “Moscow sent him, but I only heard about it the day before he showed up. What can I tell you?”

  “You can tell me why he’s here.”

  “Does he need a reason?” He didn’t seem to like the taste of his cigarette, so he put it out. “You’ve heard about what’s been going on in Poland. It wasn’t so long ago they sent tanks into East Berlin and shot a lot of people. You think they want to do that here? They don’t like sending in tanks, any more than we like receiving tanks.” He readjusted himself in his groaning chair. “Kaminski apparently asked for this assignment. He was posted here after the war and claims he’s in love with our country. Says he wants to help shepherd our path to socialism. I checked his file, and it’s true—he was here after the war. I don’t think either of us knew him, but he worked with Sev. And you know what that means.”

  It meant that, just after the war, Mikhail Kaminski from the KGB and Brano Sev from our own Ministry for State Security were partners in the quick cleansing of the Capital. It meant sudden disappearances in post offices, government ministries, and even the Militia offices—old friends of questionable loyalty vanished, replaced by fresh-faced automatons. Only Moska’s deft juggling of paperwork kept our office relatively untouched. I said, “So this guy is an old hack.”

  “He’s an ambitious prick. Be careful around him. He puts on a good face, but take a look at his hand when he talks. He’s got a nervous trigger finger.”

  I smiled.

  “How was your vacation?”

  “Didn’t get much rest.”

  “I don’t think you mean that in a good way.”

  “I don’t.” I smoked his cigarette a while longer. “I think you’re going to hear from Stefan. About me, that is.”

  He frowned.

  “He’s obsessed with this case, he’s got us going all over the place for nothing.”

  “It is his case.”

  “Maybe.” I put the cigarette out. “But I don’t have to like it.”

  “Just bear with him, he’ll figure it out soon enough. He’s a good inspector.”

  “He can’t seem to believe that anyone could commit suicide in these times.”

  “But you can,” said Moska.

  “Yes. I can.”

  16

  Stefan was there when I came out. He didn’t have his bag, and he was standing at his desk, shifting some papers around. When he saw me leave Moska’s office he stopped trying to appear occupied. He gave me a firm look, then nodded at the door.

  I followed him through the busy corridor, past uniformed militiamen walking with secretaries, and out to the front steps. It wasn’t that hot, but Stefan was sweating.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” he began, then stopped. When he started again, it came out clearly and without hesitation: “I’ve put up with you for a long time now, and I thought that going off to the provinces would help things. But it’s only made them worse.”

  “Investigate the suicide. I don’t care, really.”

  He raised a hand. “That’s not what I’m talking about. This case is just another part of a four-year-long insult. Four years!” he said, shaking his head. “Ever since that shoddy book came out you’ve forgotten what we were to each other—we grew up together!”

  He waited, for some kind of recognition perhaps, and it says something about me that I was stuck on his description of my book as shoddy.

  “I’ve seen this coming for a long time. Those friends of yours, those writers, they fill you up, they make you think you’re infallible. But you certainly are not. You’ve ruined a marriage to a beautiful woman, you can’t do police work anymore, and now you can’t even write. What are you, Ferenc? What the hell do you have left to offer?”

  I didn’t know where all this was coming from—or maybe I did know, but I didn’t know why now, of all times, he had to say it. We’d been drifting apart for a long time. “This is a load of crap,” I said.

  He started nodding very quickly, his second chin quivering. “Crap is right, Ferenc. You’ve crapped on our friendship for a long time. You’ve crapped on me. And now I’m going to crap on your future. Are you ready?”

  I didn’t know how to get ready.

  “When you were at the Front,” he said, “I slept with Magda. I had sex with your wife, and I wouldn’t trade that single night for anything in this world.” He tapped his head. “I keep it up here always. Why do you think I was so eager to get you this job? Misplaced goddamned guilt. I still valued our friendship. But I had your wife in your own bed, and I hope that knowing this ruins what little joy you still feel when you look at her.”

  He stood rigidly on the steps, his chin up, waiting. He was expecting what I would have expected: a fist. His resolution fluctuated as I watched him, his eyes blinked, his nostrils flared as he breathed loudly, the sweat now coursing past his ears, but I did not move. I wanted to. I wanted to throw myself on him and break his bones. I wanted my fist, with each of its five rings and a story for each, to crush him. It would have been an easy thing. But I just looked at him, then past him, to where the city kept moving along the narrow street, pedestrians and automobiles and a few horses pulling emptied, dirty carts.

  “Well then,” I heard him say. He took a step farther down, nodded briefly, and joined the traffic down below.

  17

  I don’t know why I didn’t hit him. He would have respected me for it. But the anger wasn’t upon me yet—it was only shock. Maybe it was simply the residue of our decades of friendship, and that for a long time he had been so good to me—because of guilt or some other weakness. Or maybe I knew he was right: Ever since the book had come out I’d stopped calling him, stopped working to maintain our friendship.

  I went back into the station, where Leonek and Emil and Brano were standing around Brano’s desk again. Kaminski was talking, and they were all smoking
, a soft cloud hovering above their heads. My phone was ringing.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes,” I said, for a moment unsure who it was. “Yes?”

  “Mother wants to know—”

  “What does she want to know?”

  “When you’ll be over for dinner. With this friend of yours. That’s how she said it—that friend of his.”

  My watch took a second to focus. “Tell her seven. We’ll be there at seven.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “This friend of yours, he’s a cute one?”

  It was a joke, I knew, but I couldn’t rise to it. “I’ll see you at seven.”

  “Here,” said Kaminski, as I approached. He held out a cigarette. I took it, noticing the small pin on his lapel. A red rippled flag. “I was telling the guys about the Komsomol.”

  “The youth brigades?” I asked. I didn’t care what he was talking about. I just wanted some noise.

  “You know them,” he said. Everyone knew about the Komsomol. Even The Spark carried articles of their industrious exploits in unclaimed regions on the other side of the Empire. “I went to the virgin lands in northern Kazakhstan after my years here, to help farm. Such good soil. Terrible climate, but what soil!” He held his gangly hands out, palms up. “You know what it’s like to work with your hands like that? It’s a dream. That’s what it is. I coordinated the work, and I ate with these fine young people in the fields, then we all went back to work, such hard work, and at night we ate around a campfire and sang revolutionary songs. You have to imagine it if you weren’t there. Fifty, a hundred passionate young people singing songs about their hopes and dreams for the future. No, I don’t think you can imagine it.” He shook his head. “Over here, maybe it’s different. But in the Motherland, we’re in this together. We build everything from nothing. That’s socialism. It’s the collective spirit that moves us on. Do you understand?”

  I lit the cigarette finally, and visions of Stefan—stretched naked over my wife, grunting, his flesh sweating—only now began to fade.

  “The peasants,” he said, “they brought us flowers. Can you believe it? Maybe you don’t know real peasants here, but you don’t get flowers from Kazhak peasants for no reason. They knew we were there to save them, that we were there to save the Union. Khrushchev had told us to make the plains arable. And for the sake of humanity, that’s what we did. Not me personally, of course, I was only there a couple years, mostly administrative; but we did it, all of us working together. Last year we worried that everything was ruined by the drought, but this year, I’m told, the wheat yield is going to be unprecedented.” He shook his head again, this time with admiration. “They’re still doing it now. They sing their songs at night and work all day and hope for better things. And better things are happening. Just wait.”

  It was a peculiar thing to see. This man from Moscow had us surrounding him in a corner of the office we never visited, had us listening to him as if he were our kindergarten teacher. He had a sparkle in his eye, and a lively voice, and when you didn’t pay too much attention to what he was saying, you could feel his excitement yourself. Emil and Leonek were transfixed. Brano stared, his face revealing nothing. Kaminski was a real orator. A tremor ran through my body. It was a terrible, magical feeling.

  Then I noticed the index finger of his right hand. Moska was right; it twitched. And I remembered that the word administrative meant a lot more than paperwork and long lunch breaks.

  18

  At a nearby bar filled with workers sipping vodkas and beer, I ordered a couple brandies for us. Leonek reached for his wallet, but I put a hand on his elbow to stop him. A warm shower had fallen on our way there, and the place was humid with wet bodies and drooping hats. We squeezed into an empty table in the center.

  I wanted to say something, to get this started, but nothing came to me. We drank in silence, him looking over the crowd, blinking, his dark face reminding me of what little I knew of his background—childhood in an Armenian village, until the Young Turks started butchering his people, then the life of a refugee until he landed here with his mother.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

  “You already told me.”

  “I would have liked to make the funeral. Were there a lot of people?”

  He shrugged. “The guys came, and her friends from the neighborhood. There were enough.”

  “That’s good.” I sounded a little stupid. “How old was she?”

  He looked at his glass on the table. In the voices and sweat of all the men around us I remembered the clean, sweet-smelling Italian, then, inevitably, Stefan’s disgusted face.

  “She pushed her way through so much.” Leonek looked at me. “Even when the Turks killed my father, she kept a level head. Through Yugoslavia, to Bulgaria and Italy, then here, she kept everything together. I wanted to stay back home and fight. But they would have killed me too. She knew this. She made me come with her.”

  I thought I should say something, but what do you say to that? I noticed then that he’d shaved, he looked clean, and this was something I appreciated.

  “I even considered moving to the Armenian Republic a few years ago. Can you imagine that?” A smile finally split his face. “But this is my world now, not Central Asia. I wouldn’t know what to do in Yelevan.”

  I agreed.

  “You remember when Sergei was killed?”

  I nodded.

  “It was her again. She was the one who made me let it go, to stop looking into his murder. I was angry at her a long time about that. He and I were close—we were the two foreigners in the station house. Sergei was a brother to me. You know that.”

  I did.

  “At first I didn’t understand. But she understood.” His thin hands were on his glass, his fingers tapping. “Then people in the other offices were sent away—suddenly, with no warning, their desks were empty. Remember that?”

  We all remembered that.

  “Only then did I start to understand. She always knew. She saved me.”

  She had saved herself as well. An old woman who knows how to survive knows that her son had better stay employed. Back then it was truer than ever. We all learned a degree of blindness—first during the Occupation, and then after the Liberation.

  The door banged open, and five laughing students barged in. They had pink faces and shoddy clothes. “Five brandies!” shouted the first one, with an attempted mustache shadowing his lip. They gathered around the bar, talking animatedly. The workers looked at them a moment, then went back to their drinks.

  “School must be going well,” said Leonek.

  “Demonstrators,” I told him. “They were in Victory Square today.”

  “How about that.” He turned in his seat to face them. “This is something, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Remember how it used to be? No one would think to demonstrate. And look at them now!” His face pulsed as he considered it. “God, I wish I was young.”

  “You are young.”

  “We’re both young,” he said. “We should be out there too, standing next to them.”

  It was good to see him pleased by this thought. “You going to make up a sign?”

  “Why not?”

  “What would it say?”

  He put his chin in his palms, elbows on the table—he really did look young. “I don’t know. Isn’t that amazing? I’ve got no idea. What about you?”

  “I’m not the demonstrating kind.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He was waiting, eyes big. “I have a wife and a daughter,” I said. “If I get thrown into jail, how would they fare? I don’t want my girl to grow up fatherless.”

  He opened his mouth—something was ready to pop out—but then he shut it. He said, “Maybe that’s why I should do something. No one depends on me anymore.”

  “Maybe.” But then I remembered what men like Mikhail Kaminski and Brano Sev would use to keep demonstrators from forcing
Russian tanks to roll down our streets: interrogations, informers, secret police, and prison camps.

  19

  I drove us through the busy evening streets, stopping for busses and trams and bicycles, until we were back among the unfinished towers of the Ninth District. We parked half in a ditch, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to make it out later on. Claudia was outside with her chickens again—she stopped to give me a severe nod. She was still waiting for me to pick up her drunkard brother, and no doubt Magda had been filling her head with advice to pester me. But this time she chose silence.

  Ágnes opened the door. She wore a knee-length dress I had never seen before, with a pattern of purple-and-yellow flowers. She stood on her toes to kiss my lowered cheek. “Do you remember Leonek?” I said. “Leonek, Ágnes.”

  Leonek kissed her hand, and, over his head, she winked at me.

  “Where’s your mother?” I asked.

  She nodded toward the kitchen, then Pavel trotted in from the bedroom and gave Leonek two high barks.

  Magda’s hair hung over her face as she brushed a plate of chicken bones into the trash can. When she looked up at me, I could hardly see her through the strands. She brushed them away with her wrist and smiled. It was the first time we’d really seen each other for a while, and momentarily it was as if nothing bad had ever passed between us in the provinces.

  Then it came back to me: Stefan, his choking breaths beating out of him as he writhed over her breasts, her clean smooth belly, her face.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “How was the train?”

  “Well, it got me here.”

  I went to a cabinet for the wine as she washed the plate off in the sink and set it with other dishes on a towel. “You know Leonek, right?”

  “Sure, yeah. I don’t remember the last time I saw him. A year ago?”