The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  “I don’t want to get into a wreck.”

  She smiled a little strangely.

  “I’m just terrified.”

  She reached over and held my free hand.

  After a while, Ágnes passed out, sprawled across the backseat, Pavel stuffed under her arm. Magda yawned. Teodor and Nora would watch them for however long was needed, but I couldn’t see any further than dropping them off.

  Teodor was in town sitting in on an informal collective meeting, and Nora was scrubbing the wood floors in the kitchen when we arrived. She smiled at the front door and gave us all kisses, but looked apprehensive when Ágnes ran across her clean, wet floor. “Let’s sit around back,” she suggested.

  The shrubs around the garden had thinned considerably, and now you could see directly through them to the orchards leading to the horizon. A cold wind blew, so we crossed our arms over our chests for warmth.

  “You’re looking good,” Nora said.

  “No we aren’t, Mama.” Magda grinned. “We both look worse than we have in a long time.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” She touched her fat fingers on her arm, as if playing a piano.

  “I’d like them to stay here a few days,” I said.

  She picked a white puff of something off her blouse and flicked it away. “Are we still a family?”

  “Of course,” said Magda.

  “No. The three of you. Are you still a family?”

  “We’ve never stopped being a family,” I said, and Magda, to my surprise, gave a smile.

  I helped Teodor unload half a lamb from the truck—a Czech Tatra the new local commissar let them use—and as we walked he asked what the hell was going on.

  “It’s a case,” I said. “They’ll be safer here.”

  “When are you going to get out of that work, Ferenc? Be a writer.”

  “Don’t you want me to support your daughter and granddaughter?”

  He huffed as he propped open the door. “I’d rather they were poor than shot dead by one of your suspects.”

  A little later we told them about Stefan, and after the required moment of reflection Teodor told me again to find another line of work.

  We ate a dinner of potatoes and lamb swimming in paprika and listened to Teodor mutter about the new directives to get rid of private plots for farmers. “They expect us to buy the food we grow back from them! That just makes no sense. I’ve got the land here, you can be damn sure I’m going to keep some of it for myself, so I can grow what I like.”

  Ágnes rolled the fork in her hand. “It’s been a record year for crops.”

  Teodor eyed her. “They say that?”

  “Best crops in twenty years.”

  “Well, don’t you believe a word of that, darling.”

  After dinner he pulled out the brandy, and though I tried to feign sleepiness, he stood and looked squarely at me. “Ferenc.”

  I got up.

  We could no longer see the apple trees in the blackness. He handed me a glass and stood beside the shrubs. “Nora tells me there’s been no progress. Is that true?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Is it worse?”

  I wanted to tell him that his daughter’s lover was finally out of the way, but could think of no way to express it without telling him. “Some of it’s gotten better.”

  “I suppose that’s something.”

  The brandy warmed me, then cooled me off, so I had to keep drinking.

  “How long are they staying?”

  “Maybe a week, I can’t be sure.”

  “And Ágnes’s school? Magda’s factory?”

  “Magda will call them both.”

  He seemed satisfied with that and turned to look over the orchards he couldn’t see. “Nora and I have been talking about leaving here.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Where else? The Capital.”

  “Ah.” I imagined them moving into our same building, one of the floors below us, always appearing with dishes of Nora’s dull meals. A part of me hated the idea, and another part wondered if it could help. They wanted us together, and they would fill Magda’s ears with reasons to love me, or at least reasons to stay with me. “Could you afford it?”

  “It’s almost time for my pension, Ferenc. Not much, it never is. But maybe it’s enough.”

  “Won’t you miss it out here? It’s a different life in the Capital.”

  “Of course it is,” he said, and came to sit beside me. He found the bottle and refilled us both. “A lot of our friends have moved away, and now when we go to the cooperative’s social club we know fewer and fewer people. They’re all leaving,” he said. “That, or dying off.”

  56

  Magda and I slept in the guest room. It was a large bed, and we didn’t touch, didn’t say anything. I put my hands behind my head and stared at the ceiling, just visible in the light from the porch. She rolled on her side, away from me. After a while, I heard her heavy breaths, but it wasn’t the sound of sleep. I touched her bare shoulder. “What is it?”

  She shook her head and didn’t look at me. “I was just thinking of Stefan.”

  I withdrew my hand. “It must be hard on you.”

  “Not so much. I was thinking about how his life was. He must have been so lonely.”

  “He had you.”

  She quieted, then rolled over so she faced me. I couldn’t quite see her face. “What does that mean?”

  “Come on, Magda. There’s no more need.”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  I took a breath. We were finally having this conversation, but in a bed that didn’t belong to us. “You were having an affair with Stefan. I’ve known it for a long time.”

  She didn’t say anything at first. I heard a couple sighs, as if she was going to speak, but nothing would come. Then she said, “You’re such a fool sometimes, Ferenc.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “I slept with him once, many years ago, and I’ve never stopped regretting it.”

  “And now?”

  “What now? I never touched him again.”

  I took this in gradually. “But I saw you go to meet him. At that Turkish bar. It’s his favorite.”

  “You followed me?”

  “When you believe your wife’s having an affair, you’re allowed some improprieties.”

  “I can’t believe you followed me.”

  “Give it a rest, will you?”

  She rolled away again, and after a minute sat up on the edge of the bed. She looked at the floor while I waited for something to come. “It’s Leonek,” she said finally.

  “It’s—” I started to repeat, then didn’t.

  “We’ve been together, on and off, for a month and a half now. I don’t have any excuse. I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but I wanted to know what I really wanted first.” She was still looking at the floor, and her voice was clear and strong. “At the beginning it was just desperation. It looked like everything was over between us, and I wanted something for myself. Can you understand that?”

  I said, “Yes, I can,” but I was in a fog.

  “And I’ve broken it off with him I-don’t-know-how-many times. Remember that night when you came back from Georgi’s party, and I wasn’t there? Stefan called. He’d been drinking, and he wanted to apologize for telling you about what he and I had done during the war. That’s how I found out you knew. It was such a shock. I immediately went to Leonek and told him it couldn’t go on. I broke it off.” She shook her head. “But you remember how I was when you saw me later that night. You wanted to talk, and I couldn’t. I was confused. The next morning I called him, and we started it all over again. On the Sixth of November.”

  I remembered that day, and remembered her inexplicable panic when I asked her who had been listening to the Americans. It had been him—it was the only station he listened to. “So,” I said, “what is it he gives you? What does Leonek give you?”

  She finally stopped l
ooking at that goddamn floor. I could just make out some of her features. She looked old. “I’ve told you before, Ferenc. You’re different. You’re not the man I married. Leonek…I always know how he feels about me. With you I’m never sure.” She took a breath. “And he does love me.”

  “You love him?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. He’s good to me, but I don’t know if he’s good for me.”

  I finally moved. I sat up and leaned against the headboard. But I didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you going to leave me?” she asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Do you love me anymore?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not even a ‘maybe’?”

  She nodded. “Maybe.”

  I brought my hands to my face and breathed into my palms. The shock was starting to fade, but slowly. All my emotions were a shadow of themselves now, though I could pick them out and count them where they floated just out of reach.

  I got up and put on my clothes. Magda didn’t say a word as I walked out and found the brandy bottle in the kitchen and took it to the freezing garden. Teodor had left his cigarettes outside, and I began to smoke them, one by one.

  57

  In the morning I walked to the cooperative office at the top of the hill because Teodor and Nora’s phone only dialed out locally. I showed my Militia certificate and watched the lame man behind the desk stumble for the telephone and pass it to me. Then I called Moska and told him I was going to the Vátrina Work Camp in order to look up information on my suspect. He sighed and accepted this.

  Magda and Ágnes were in the kitchen with Nora, making breakfast. The smell was heavy with grease. Magda looked at me with an expression that said everything without saying a thing.

  After breakfast I threw my bag into the car. She followed me outside.

  “You’re going back home?”

  “Tonight, or tomorrow. I’ve got to check on some things first.”

  She squinted into the breeze.

  “What is it?”

  She said, “Don’t hurt him.”

  “What?”

  “Libarid.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. “Leonek, I mean. Libarid’s his birth name.”

  “Oh.”

  “His mother made him change it when they came here. She even called him Leonek in private. Damn.” She looked at the dirt. “I’m babbling, and that was a secret. But listen.” She looked at me again. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. This wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I was looking around and he was just there.”

  I took a step away from her. “I can’t promise anything.”

  She looked at the ground again and when she looked back, her eyes glimmered. She was crying so much these days. “Just don’t put all the blame on him. I want to be fair.”

  “Fair,” I repeated, then went in to say good-bye to the others.

  Vátrina was forty minutes to the north and, entering the small farming town with its tiny train station, it was difficult to believe there was a work camp there. Old men dotted the side of the road, walking past fences and puffing on barely visible cigarettes, and three fat women with babushkas huddled around a well. The central square was small, with a grocer’s, a post office, and a modern hotel that didn’t belong—a wide concrete bunker with a sign that proclaimed HOTEL ELEGANT in peeling red paint. I first tried the post office, but there was a long line of young, sunburned men with slips of paper leading up to the one open window, where a woman with dyed black hair smoked and stared at them. So I went into the Elegant. A worn red carpet stretched to the end of the faux-marble lobby, past the entrance to a dark bar, to where a younger black-haired woman sat behind the counter, smoking and reading a paperback. I leaned beside the guest book. “I’m looking for the Vátrina Work Camp, number four-eighty.”

  She held up an index finger, read for a second longer, and closed the book on her other finger. It was a novel by someone I’d met a few times at Georgi’s. “They don’t put work camps in main squares, idiot.”

  She had a nice, round face with an expression that didn’t match what she’d called me. “I don’t have a lot of practice with them.”

  She sighed and turned her book flat on the counter. “What business do you have there anyway?”

  I started to reach for my Militia certificate, but instead patted my coat for cigarettes. I pulled one out and lit it. “My own business. That’s what business I’ve got.”

  She rolled her eyes as if she’d heard this a million times, and that’s when I realized this was how she flirted. Stuck behind a desk in a dead-end town, you learn strange ways of getting a man’s attention. “And you think your own business is important?”

  “I expect it’s more important than chain-smoking in a flea-infested hotel all day.”

  Her face brightened, and she tapped the counter with a fingernail. “Tell me, come on. I know how to keep a secret.”

  I leaned closer to her face. “How can I trust that?”

  “You’ll just have to,” she whispered.

  “But keep it quiet, you understand?”

  She nodded again, seriously.

  I told her I was a novelist researching a book on the history of the Vátrina Work Camp, number 480.

  She leaned back again. “You’re giving me a line. That probably works on a lot of girls. But not this one.”

  I shrugged. “What can I do if you don’t believe me?”

  “You write any other books?”

  “A Soldier’s Tale. It was a few years ago.”

  She hesitated, then smiled broadly. “Really? I read that! No.”

  I showed her my transit identification papers to prove who I was, and she leaned close again, her voice back down to a whisper.

  “I thought it was extremely good. You know that? You’re a very good writer.”

  I suspected she had never read it, but didn’t press. She told me to drive down the eastbound road six, seven miles. “It’s as plain as day. You staying the night?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I’ll be chain-smoking here until six.”

  58

  It lay on the left-hand side of the dusty road, in a flat expanse of harvested wheatfield. The watchtowers were visible first—five wooden columns connected at their bases by barbed wire—and inside lay five long, low buildings. It was as basic as you could imagine, no signs, no indication of purpose. The towers were empty, but when I turned off the road and took a gravel path to the front gate, a guard in a heavy coat wandered out to meet me, patting his arms. He opened the gate and stuck his head in my window. “What can I do for you?”

  His rancid breath quickly filled the car. His teeth were like over-thickened fingernails. “I’m here to talk with the commander.”

  He looked around the inside of the car. “Are you from Yalta Boulevard?”

  “I’m from Militia headquarters. This is part of an investigation.”

  He licked his discolored teeth and inhaled deeply. I braced myself for the exhale. “Mind if I see some evidence?”

  After I showed him my Militia certificate he waved me inside, closed the gate, and pointed to a space between two buildings. He walked me down to the back of the camp, where a muddy field opened up. In the far corner, beside another gate leading out of the camp, was a small building with a smoking chimney and a telephone cable connecting its roof to a tower. That, the guard pointed out, was the commander’s office.

  I walked the rest of the way alone. The guard was the only person I’d seen, and the long buildings, which I assumed were used to house prisoners, were silent and, I also assumed, empty.

  There was a muddy window on each side of the front door, and before I knocked I tried unsuccessfully to see inside.

  “Enter,” came an unpleasant voice. For a moment I was confused.

  Like Moska, the commander sat in a dim room at a disorganized
desk surrounded by stacks of files. Some open steel cabinets revealed piles of letters that had been read and stored there. Against the back wall and beside a sooty Mihai, a small iron stove burned, its open grille revealing a few half-consumed papers on the coals. The commander was bald and surprisingly short—his jacket and slacks were too large on him. When he introduced himself as Comrade Captain Gregor Kaganovich, it was with a voice dirtied from a lifetime of cigarettes and shouting. A coal drawing of the captain hung on the wall—well-done, but severely romanticized.

  “I’ve come to ask some questions relating to a case I’m working on.” I handed over my certificate.

  He slipped on a pair of round glasses, turned the certificate in the weak light from the window, then handed it back. “What kind of case are we talking about?”

  “A homicide.”

  “One of my pets get killed?”

  “One of them is doing some killing.”

  He clucked his tongue, as though we were talking about one of his own children. “I’ve heard of this happening before. Some wolves just can’t help but follow their instincts. You can beat them as much as you like, but they can’t be domesticated. Some coffee?”

  “I’m interested in a particular one. Nestor Velcea.”

  He looked at me as he poured a cup, but I couldn’t catch his expression. “No, I’m afraid I can’t remember all my pets. But look around,” he said, waving at the files. “There’s bound to be something.” He handed me the cup and squatted among some stacks. “I tell you, the Comrade Prime Minister could have given us a little warning over this Amnesty, if you know what I mean.” His fingers flipped through the files at an alarming speed.

  “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, he announces it, and the next day—not in a week, not a month, but the next day—all my boys are out of a job. A lot of them are from the other side of the country, and were transferred here when we needed them. And we did need them. Then one day they weren’t needed.”

  “Then they get transferred somewhere else.”

  “That’s what you’d think, wouldn’t you?” He lifted a file to the light, opened it, then shook his head and closed it. “It wasn’t until the end of the summer they realized they hadn’t followed through on that small point. That’s a lot of men to suddenly transfer. My guess, though, is that they just didn’t know if they’d change their minds and need the boys all over again.”