The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  “His mother died recently. So he might be a little strange.”

  “I see.”

  “Come on, then.”

  Leonek stood up stiffly when we came out, Ágnes folded on the sofa beside him. He kissed Magda’s hand with purpose. It reminded me, if I needed the reminder, that Magda was really quite beautiful; she could still stop a man in his tracks.

  20

  The silence hung over us as we dug into the bean soup, then the paprika chicken, forks and knives scraping plates, glasses pressing to lips, quiet gulps, water and red wine. I saw Ágnes place a sliver of chicken in her lap, glance to the side and toss it to Pavel, who silently gobbled it. When she looked up again I gave her a sharp shake of the head. Magda glanced at Leonek, who was focused on his food, then looked at me. I smiled, but she didn’t. I said the most benign thing that came to mind: “A Frenchman told me recently that plot is dead.”

  “What?” Magda asked, leaning forward as if she hadn’t heard.

  “Plot. He says that no one’s doing it anymore.”

  She grinned. “In the West maybe. Was that Georgi’s poet?”

  “It was.”

  Leonek looked up. “What are you talking about?”

  “Literature,” I said.

  “Oh.” He nodded at his plate.

  Magda tried. She told us about the hour-long line she’d stood in, waiting for beef, but when she reached the front, all that was left was chicken.

  While she spoke, Stefan’s pale flesh came to me again, and I couldn’t muster any comment. Neither could Leonek.

  But her stamina was high. She launched into a description of her factory. “Textiles, we even make the Militia uniforms. Well, the shirts at least. Lydia works opposite me on the line, and she makes jokes about undermining quotas every time she leaves for a cigarette. You should meet her sometime, she’s hilarious. I’ll set you up.”

  Leonek smiled politely but said nothing. I leaned down and scratched the mosquito bite on my ankle.

  Magda watched him return to his plate; it was almost empty. “Would you like some more?”

  “Thank you, no,” he said through a mouthful. “It’s very good.”

  “I told you it would be,” I said. At the end of the table, Ágnes was bent toward the floor, feeding Pavel, but I no longer felt like reprimanding her.

  Magda refilled our wineglasses, then turned to me with round eyes and tilted her head in Leonek’s direction.

  “Are you on a case now?” I asked.

  His tongue searched behind his lower lip. “The city’s pretty quiet. Except for those students, maybe.”

  I couldn’t see Ágnes at all; she had vanished behind the edge of the table.

  “Students?” asked Magda.

  I shrugged. “Demonstrators.”

  “Oh.”

  “Otherwise,” said Leonek, “not many homicides.”

  Magda spoke again, but slowly. “On the way home today, I saw two men in front of the cinema. I’ve never seen them before. They were pretty destitute. They had long coats, both of them, and through the flaps I could see their old prison shirts. Striped, you know?”

  Leonek seemed to wake a little.

  “They looked menacing to me, standing with their hands in their pockets, and when they watched me pass I was a little scared. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

  I said, “I can imagine what they were thinking.”

  “No—not that. I know that look. They were thinking something different.” She paused. “But you can’t really read faces, can you?”

  “Sometimes you can.”

  “They’ve been through a lot,” said Leonek.

  We both turned to him.

  “After the funeral, I talked to one of them in a bar.” He thought a second, eyes glazed, then returned. “Slavery. That’s what it was. And after years of being watched over by guards, after the malaria and executions—yes, that’s what he told me: They often executed men in a field near the barracks. After all that, what can you expect from someone?”

  Ágnes was in her chair now, paying attention. She stared at Leonek with something approaching wonder.

  “Remember in August?” he asked me. “Just before your vacation. There was that Ukrainian. He came back from the camps and beat his son to death because he’d become a clerk for the Central Committee.”

  “Lev Urlovsky,” I said. “He was at the Vátrina Work Camp.”

  “Yeah.” He leaned forward. “When we arrested him, he showed no remorse. None at all. It was strange to see.”

  “After killing his own son?” said Magda. “That’s horrible.”

  “Ágnes,” I said, and it took a second for her to hear me. “Ágnes, take Pavel for a walk.”

  She sighed loudly, but got up and left the room. Pavel followed, nails clicking on the floor.

  “You don’t know,” said Leonek. “You just don’t know what they’ve been through. The Turks were going to take my father to prison, but they shot him instead.” His hands settled on the table, on either side of his plate. “Maybe he was lucky.”

  I heard the front door open and slam shut.

  21

  The two wine bottles were empty, so I went to get another from the kitchen, and when I returned, Leonek was leaning back in his chair, legs stretched out beneath the table, frowning again. Magda shrugged. When I filled his glass, he took it absently and pressed it to his lips, but did not drink. Then he set the glass back on the table and looked at Magda. “I’m going to do it,” he said.

  I was almost afraid to ask. “Do what?”

  He turned to me. “I’m going back into the files. I’m going to investigate Sergei’s murder.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Why not?” He drank some wine. “I told you before, there are no more responsibilities for me. This is the only responsibility I have left.”

  “Who’s Sergei?” Magda asked.

  “You met him a couple times during the Occupation.”

  “My partner, Sergei Malevich.” Leonek put his elbows on the table. “He was killed just after the war. Shot in the back of the head.”

  “I think I remember. The Russian, right?”

  We nodded.

  “He was nice.” She looked at Leonek. “And it wasn’t investigated?”

  I spoke up. “He was looking into the rape and murder of a couple girls in a synagogue. We knew who had done it, everyone knew: Russian soldiers. But we couldn’t do a thing. Sergei was insistent, though.”

  “Because he was Russian,” said Leonek. “It tore him up that everyone in the Capital thought of Russians this way, as rapists and murderers.”

  Magda refilled our glasses.

  Leonek took another drink. “He wanted to prove either that the killers weren’t Russian, or that if they were, a Russian could bring them to justice. You remember that night?”

  I did.

  “He called me,” said Leonek, “then I called you. He wanted us to meet him down by the water. There was that thick fog, and by the time we showed up he was dead. It was unreal. We could even hear the gunman running away, but couldn’t see more than a foot ahead of us.”

  “Is there anything left of it?” I asked. “In the files. After so long, it’ll be hard to follow the leads.”

  “I can at least try.”

  “What about his family?” Magda asked. “Wasn’t he married?”

  “His wife and son, Kliment, moved to Moscow.” Leonek smiled. “Kliment became a militiaman too.”

  Magda stared at Leonek, cheeks flushed, and I realized then that she had been doing most of the drinking. She was a little drunk, and maybe I was too.

  Leonek looked into his glass, then popped his head up. “This is really good wine!” I guess he was drunk as well.

  I heard the front door open, saw Magda’s face turn to me, flushed and radiant, and that was when it bubbled through me, and over me.

  I was in the present. I was not thinking of later that evening, when we would be alone
again and the strained silence would keep us far from the one sad subject that was the only thing we could ever think about. I was in the present, where I was generous and could forget a single night almost two decades old, because marriage and all the years, and Ágnes—they were so much bigger than one carnal act. I could see her cheeks redden; her smile warmed me. I saw my daughter watching from the doorway. Our guest smiled at all the riches I had in this house, his admiration all over him. And that’s when I thought, hopefully, that Magda and I still had a future together.

  “Leonek,” I said. “That really is a nice tie you’re wearing.”

  He looked down, flipped it with his fingers, and we all laughed, even Ágnes.

  You can read it all; it’s no secret. The Magyars have grown loud. Because if they scream enough, they might get their Nagy with the mustache like two paintbrushes, just as the Poles have their Gomulka. And after a momentary face-off, the Empire bows its head and allows Imre Nagy to control their path to socialism. You read this, and you wait. And far a while you’re encouraged—who isn’t? Collectivization is halted in the Hungarian plains, and People’s committees are formed to air complaints. The Spark calls these moves bold, unprecedented. The sun shines on the Magyars, and even over here in the Carpathian basin the clouds are dispersing. Kozak the Engineer opens the Tenth Central Committee Meeting with a declaration of solidarity with the revered Comrade Nagy. Mihai does not condemn the phrasing, and his silence is greater than any words. Bobu the Professor asks for an investigation into the benefits of trade agreements with nations outside the socialist neighborhood.

  Yet just as quickly, the cooling begins. In their enthusiasm, Magyar workers seize government buildings and form revolutionary councils. Bobu says nothing, and even Kozak stares quietly at his podium. Nagy announces the end of the one-party system in the Hungarian People’s Republic. Breaths are being held; the oxygen grows thin. The Magyars decide to take their soldiers out of the year-old Warsaw Pact and ask to be united with the nations of the West. Exhale. The Empire mobilizes. Russian tanks reach the edge of Budapest. The lack of air makes everyone a little crazy—there are barricades in the streets along the Danube, then the tanks move in. The American radio gives instructions on guerrilla warfare. The radios of the Empire shout of imperialist-financed counterrevolutionaries. And in the Budapest streets busses are turned over and rifles disseminated and Magyar students and Magyar workers line up at the barricades. Nagy calls for quiet and calm, but he is whispering to a hurricane. On Radio Budapest he says, Today at daybreak, Soviet troops attacked our capital with the obvious intent of overthrowing the lawful democratic Hungarian government. Then Radio Budapest sends an SOS signal and drops quietly off the air.

  Here in the Capital the silence reigns. But it is a tense silence, like the one that hangs over a failing marriage. No one in the street can smile cleanly, and even you hear whispers about the tremblings beneath the surface. Here, the only shouts are unheard: the epidemic of workers calling in sick. One day someone is at the factory, the next day he is not. Then there are five gone, then twenty. This is not the news that reaches The Spark, but is passed along on the street and in bedrooms and over drinks. You hear it once or twice—you’re not sure anymore who from, or when—but then it is common knowledge, the whole country is part of the secret society that has only one weapon at its disposal.

  The radios whine like sick animals when the electronic jamming functions, and whisper orders for street-battle tactics when it doesn’t. While that other capital is aflame, this capital is silent. There is a secret society of discontent with its hand on its only pistol, waiting to fire.

  Fall

  1

  This confession is becoming longer than I would have expected, and has still hardly begun. But the details that precede and surround the story are necessary for understanding what follows, because crimes are not committed without precedent. Even the most banal details come together and gain power and lead murderers to their final, defining acts.

  Through the weeks following that dinner, the writing began. I tried to ignore the news from Budapest and focus on words during the early-morning hours in the empty office. The typewriter rattled, and the sluggish T stuck. A few words came, interrupted by long periods when the blank sheets just hypnotized me. Then, gradually, thoughts began to coalesce. Magda’s parents’ farm before the war, the long journey home after the war, the discovery that my family was dead, then the move to the Capital, black bars and fevers of depression. By November, as the weather cooled, I was typing a regular, controlled flow. Marriage was the only subject for me now, and it was becoming the story of how time can erode a marriage from the center. I wrote about our early, flush months, the month-and-a-half wartime separation, then the strange, inexplicable disconnect when I returned. I was a different man even after such a short war, one who had to find his way back to the world of human feelings, to the joys and fears of a family man. That short war had changed Magda as well. I wrote of Ágnes, and how her birth drew me back into the marriage, so that the marriage was the one thing that sustained me. I wrote nothing about Stefan because he was incidental, just a symptom of a real ailment. I showed my pages to no one.

  Mikhail Kaminski continued to work with Brano Sev on the files of state security, his trigger finger always more active than the others. These security officers had the appearance of clerks, poring over sheets with numbers and paragraphs and photographs. When they left, we could only imagine what they did: converse with informers on park benches, drag victims into interview rooms, strong-arm troublesome students into the silence of utter submission. Leonek speculated that they were deciding which ones of us to get rid of, though Emil and I shrugged that off as paranoia. Once I overheard Kaminski laugh and say to Brano: Those bitches will wish they never heard of nonviolent resistance! I only understood this later.

  There was one more incident with Stefan. I was out drinking with Emil and Leonek on a Friday night, and Stefan appeared, already a little drunk. He sat with us and joined the conversation, which slowed once he arrived, but he kept looking at me significantly. Sometimes he smiled, and he kept taking my cigarettes. The others didn’t seem to notice this, but I did, and when he got up to use the toilet I followed him into the bathroom and, without a word, hit him on the back of the head. His face fell into the mirror, leaving a long crack that as far as I know is still there. I returned to the table and finished my drink, and when Stefan appeared again he was padding a bloody spot on his forehead. The fact that Emil and Leonek said nothing only proved that they understood everything.

  We changed partners. I was to work with Emil, and Stefan would work with Leonek. “A temporary measure,” Moska explained in his dim office. “Nothing to worry about.” He looked at the paperwork on his desk rather than at me.

  “How long?”

  “What was that?”

  “How long is temporary?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He was right—it didn’t matter. No one in the Capital was committing murder. Leonek noticed this aloud. “When people are focused on something great outside their borders, they don’t have enough attention to kill each other.” Revisiting Sergei’s case was making him philosophical. Or something else was.

  First he had gone through the station’s file cabinets, all of them, then barged in on Moska, demanding to know where Sergei’s files were. Expunged was the answer. Leonek sneered the word. “Cleaned out, that’s what he told me.”

  “They were destroyed?”

  Leonek flattened a hand on a stack of papers beside his typewriter. “Not quite. I had to go to the central depot. Do you know where that is?”

  I’d never even heard of a central depot.

  “Just outside the Seventh District. A warehouse, no less. Stefan came with me, and after two days, running back into town for unpredictable signatures, this greasy bureaucrat finally gives them to us. Reluctantly.” He sank into his chair and straightened the pages. A few inches thick—a couple hundred pages, I
guessed. “A lot of this is useless,” he said. “Forms, certificates, the like. But there’s something here. I’m sure of it.”

  He had the same surety as Stefan, when he had insisted that no one in the Capital could kill himself—a stubborn, peasant conviction.

  Georgi called to invite me and Magda to a party. “More foreigners in town?” I asked.

  “No foreigners, but it is for them. For the foreigners.”

  “The Magyars, Georgi?”

  “I’ll support our Hungarian comrades the only way I know how.”

  “By drinking, you mean.”

  “Such a cynic. Remember, Ferenc, you’re Magyar-blooded too. Bring Magda.”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t seen her much.”

  “Where’s she been?”

  “Out with a friend from the factory. A Lydia.” This is what Magda would tell me when she returned home, often after Ágnes went to bed, as she passed me on the couch: I was out with Lydia again.

  But I had never asked where she had gone, or whom with.

  “You know I’m still waiting for your literary contribution.”

  “You’ll have to keep waiting. Nothing’s ready.”

  “But you’re writing?”

  “I seem to be. Finally.”

  By the time we hung up, he sounded positively thrilled.

  2

  On November the fifth, a Monday, Emil and I were sent to look into a disappearance. A Party official, attached to the Health Ministry, had come home to find his wife missing. “So she left him,” I said.

  “I’m likely to agree,” said Moska. “But what I think isn’t important.”

  It didn’t sound particularly interesting, or perhaps I was just feeling lazy. I pointed out that homicide inspectors shouldn’t be wasting time with missing person’s cases. But Emil knew his regulations: “She’s connected to the Party, and it’s been three days. After three days it goes to us.”