The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  On a family vacation we once drove to Baia Mare to see Mihai’s childhood home. It was a letdown—a two-room shack outside the city, with portraits of him everywhere, looking down on the ratty BED WHERE HE SLEPT and the clay oven in the KITCHEN WHERE HE ATE. I didn’t understand until Magda sighed, and said, He really is one of us, isn’t he?

  Magda’s fist covered her quivering lips, and her red eyes tried to see past shoulders and heads. Then she buried her nose in my chest. I turned to my other side. “Where’s Ágnes?”

  Magda’s face was twisted. “What?”

  …Seed of the Land; Thunderstorm in Times of Drought…

  “Ágnes!” I shouted. “She’s not here!”

  Magda unlatched herself and pushed people aside to see for herself. “Ágnes?”

  We split up and threaded through the crowd. I shoved women and men aside and kneed children who stood in my way as the worry became frantic. “Ágnes!”

  …Academician of Worldwide Acclaim; Friend to the Animals of the Planet…

  As I pushed I imagined her trampled beneath feet, dragged away by molesters, knifed by Nestor Velcea or tortured in a wet Canal District mansion, her corpse carried to the mountains for disposal. Not once did I imagine the most evident scenario, which was proven as the Politburo cars slid slowly by and Magda caught up with me, dragging our daughter along: She had squeezed her way to the street in order to cry and wail where she could better see the object of her adoration.

  93

  We were eating dinner when they came. The buzzer went off, and Magda got up from the table to open the door. I followed her when I heard his voice, monotone: “I’d like to speak with Ferenc, if you don’t mind.”

  He was already inside the apartment when I got to them, and through the door I saw the other two men. Leather coats, hats. They did not come in.

  “Ferenc,” he said, and squinted as if faced with too bright a light. He stuck out a hand and I took it. “Comrade Kolyeszar,” he said to Magda. “Would you mind if Ferenc and I talked alone?”

  Ágnes stood in the kitchen doorway, frowning. Sev noticed her and tried a friendly smile, but no one was convinced of it, him least of all. Magda took her back into the kitchen.

  We sat—him in a chair, back straight, me on the sofa. He touched the mole on his cheek. “Listen, Ferenc. I’m going to have to take you over to Yalta Boulevard. Some questions.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “The case. The Nestor Velcea case.”

  “You have my report.”

  “And other things.”

  “I’ll come by Monday.”

  “Ferenc,” he said. “Let’s not make this ugly. There’s no reason.”

  “I suppose there isn’t.”

  Somewhere inside me, in a small soft place, I was terrified.

  “My wife and daughter know nothing about any of this. You realize that, right?”

  He glanced back toward the kitchen. “I know that.”

  “Then let’s go. I’ll tell them good-bye.”

  “Listen,” he said. I looked at him chewing the inside of his mouth. “This,” he began. “This is not my doing, what’s going on right now. Comrade Kaminski talked to other people, and they want to know more from you. I’m following orders.”

  I wasn’t sure if I believed that or not.

  Ágnes was sitting at the table, and Magda stood by the sink, chewing the nail on her little finger. “What is this?”

  “It’s nothing. Just some questions. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Questions? Questions?” She shook her head, and her kiss was salty. She held my lower lip in her teeth. “Don’t go,” she whispered. “Tell them you’ll go in tomorrow. Or Monday.”

  “I tried. If you need…”

  “What?”

  “If you need anything, call him.”

  “Who?”

  “Libarid.”

  “Oh God, don’t say that.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Ágnes.

  I pulled away from Magda, but she clutched my hand as I leaned over the table and kissed Ágnes’s head. “Just to talk with these men. It’s nothing. I’ll be back soon, but if I’m not back tonight, you go on to bed, okay?”

  She smiled a moment, then her smile disappeared. Perhaps she saw it in her mother’s face, because she started to cry quietly. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine, honey.”

  Magda squeezed my hand until the rings pinched my fingers, then walked with me into the living room and helped me into my coat. Then she said to Sev, “Bring him back soon. Do you understand?”

  He pressed his lips together. “Of course, Comrade Kolyeszar. I will do my very best.”

  You hear this later.

  You hear that the Magyars have it worse than anyone this year. Nagy is lured out of hiding from the Yugoslav embassy and over a year later is executed deep inside the Empire. Thirty-five thousand Hungarians are arrested and three hundred executed.

  You hear that after the death of Mihai, after the convulsions of grief and homages to his immortality, the nation goes on. It is announced that a joint leadership is now in power, because how can such a man be replaced with just one? There are three: Bobu the Professor, Kozak the Engineer, and a name you’ve not heard before this, a name no one has heard: Tomiak Pankov, a Party apparatchik from before the war. Less than a week later, Bobu is arrested by state security at his mistress’s apartment in the Fifth District. The next morning The Spark explains all: He is guilty of financial improprieties. Kozak and Pankov shake hands on the balcony of the Central Committee chambers before a crowd that fills the entirety of Victory Square. They wear identical greatcoats to symbolize their accord, and then the arrests begin to riddle the Capital with holes where men once stood—you’re only one of many. The empty prisons swell as they did a decade before, after the war, and the trains lumber under the weight of the dispossessed on their way to the provinces and the camps. This is what you learn much later.

  You learn that once the Capital is cleansed it is time to fumigate the Central Committee. Chairs in the great hall go empty, two, three at a time. Emergency elections bring in new, quieter men, younger men with a lifetime of service before them. Then, in February, Kozak delivers a speech to these new young men, says that he will resign his position for a quiet life in the provinces. He holds his hand up and tells them, tears in his eye, that it is the hardest decision of his career, as well as the wisest. Tomiak Pankov shakes his hand and smiles, then opens his arm to the Committee members. This movement lets them know what to do next: to give the poor old engineer a rousing farewell. Which they do, all standing and hollering. You never see the newsreels of this meeting—no one sees them. But you can imagine the fear in Kozak’s eyes and the desperate sound of all those shouting voices, wanting nothing but to live and to go on.

  Winter

  1

  I look back over weeks and months in an attempt to give them order, but time can only be given shape by time. Fall had been my season of irresponsibility, and I had moved steadily through it, accumulating mistakes and fears and tragedies, and in the winter I was paid back for it.

  The beginning was a white, four-door Mercedes. Brano Sev sat in front with the driver, and the second man remained in the back with me. Brano had not talked in the stairwell and maintained his silence all the way to Yalta Boulevard, where the shops were closed, their metal blinds like mouth braces holding the buildings straight.

  Sev walked ahead of us as the guard opened the heavy door of Number 36 without a word. I couldn’t remember if he was the guard from Georgi’s visit. The inner doors parted, and we were in a cavernous, institutional green room, where two uniformed women sat behind a wide desk. Sev talked to the heavier one, and the other, her thin face revealing the shape of her narrow jawbone, watched me. The hawk on her shoulder patch matched the one on the wall above them: a copper sculpture five feet tall, the hawk at rest.

  Two doors on either side of the desk led
from this room. We took the left one through a low corridor, not unlike the Militia station’s corridors, but what I noticed was this: There were no names on the doors’ translucent windows, and no numbers. And that is when I became afraid. The unmarked doors of Yalta 36 were part of a world that was beyond my understanding.

  We descended a concrete stairwell at the end of the corridor, and I wondered if Georgi had followed this same path. I tried to remember the details of what he’d recounted; but the growing panic was making me forgetful. Three levels down, Sev knocked on a steel door and waited for the tiny barred window to open and close. A series of locks were worked on from the other side, and then the door opened.

  The guardroom was just big enough for a desk holding a telephone and a copy of The Spark. Hooks on the wall held keys. The guard was a meaty man with round glasses. He smiled and asked me to empty my pockets. All I had was some loose change, my wallet, and my Militia certificate. “Laces?” he said, and waited as I knelt and unthreaded my shoelaces. He spoke to Sev while looking at me. “Which one?”

  “Seventeen.” Sev’s voice was flat.

  The guard handed over a key and used another one on the next door. It opened onto a narrow, concrete corridor lined by more steel doors.

  “Is this really necessary?”

  Sev acted as if I’d said nothing as I followed him to the ninth door on the left. Here, at least, were numbers, but they were drawn with chalk—at any moment they could be wiped clean and changed. Sev worked with some effort on the lock, but got it open, then glanced at the guards who waited back with the jailer. In the dim light his face had lost all its color. “We both know it’s necessary. At least for now.”

  I followed the direction of his hand, and the door closing behind me filled the cell with darkness.

  2

  When we were captured in the trenches near Humenne and marched westward, I had wondered what the prisoner-of-war camp would be like. My imagination had come up with details of a hypothetical cell: dirt floor, bunk, a slot in the door for food, maybe a hole in the corner for a toilet, and certainly a barred window one had to stand on one’s toes to look through to see the sun. None of these details matched the cell on Yalta Boulevard. It was extremely small, like—as Georgi had said—a soundproof water closet; unlike Georgi’s cell, this one was unlit. The ground was rough concrete, and there was no hole in it, only a small pot in the middle of the floor. No bunk and no window, no matter how high I reached my fingers up the wall. Then I remembered: I was under the earth.

  The darkness settled on me with real weight. It became thicker with time, and after a while I could only sit in the corner, lacking the strength to climb up through it. I touched the dead German soldiers on my fingers and repeated their names. I think it helped, because it reminded me that in the war people died indiscriminately, and I was back in that world. That was at least familiar. I would live or I would die based on the whims of people I could not see, could not argue my case with. Fatalism settled into me with the fog.

  But with time either the darkness sheds its weight, or you shed yours, because I began, without realizing it, to pace. Three steps took me to the back of the cell; two crossed its breadth. But I was able to make a kind of lap by using infant steps. Sometimes I ran into the wall—the concrete left a scrape on the tip of my nose—but I learned to sense the wall by the movement of air along it, and turned, quickly, to continue my lap.

  The tiny cell stank of mildew and my sweat and urine. I held off defecating as long as I could—how long, I don’t know—then gave in. I used my undershirt to cover the small pot, but that didn’t help the stink.

  My fatalism wavered over the hours. It wasn’t as strong as it had first appeared. I was still healthy—physically, at least—and could stand up straight. That in itself seemed enough to assure my survival. I was strong, and it didn’t make sense that a man as large and strong as I was could simply be erased.

  This is the irrationality of darkness. You begin to grasp at little things. Just the sound of your footsteps on concrete give hope: They are so loud in the absence of all other sounds, they are godlike.

  The hunger that came on and off and twisted my stomach into knots seemed like the only way to track time. I could go without eating for a couple days, which perhaps meant I’d been there two days. I considered banging on the steel door and calling for food, but I doubted my voice would make it through. And this was what I knew they wanted, for me to panic.

  At some point a slot at the base of the door opened, filling the cell with a dim, painful light. This, at least, was something I had imagined while walking under German guard: an opening in the door for food. A tray slipped through, spilling soup from a tin bowl. Bread, and a brackish, chunky liquid I could not identify. By the time the slot closed again, I had almost finished it.

  3

  They came four meals later, while I was sleeping. I had slept so much in that cell, though sleep never rejuvenated me. There was the shock of light, the aching eyes, and two sets of hands pushing my shoulders as I stumbled through the steel door and up three flights of stairs, which, I remembered vaguely, placed us on the ground floor, where there were two doors. The one on the right led to the long corridor without numbers and out the front; the left one led, as I learned, directly outside, into a wide courtyard, where vans and cars sat in rigid lines. It was night, and a light blanket of snow covered the ground. They threw me into the back of an empty white van, locked the door, then climbed into the front. I pressed my face against the metal screen. “Where?”

  The driver, the one with the mustache, looked at me in the rearview. “Don’t worry so much. You’ll give yourself a hernia.”

  The other stuffed my shoelaces through the screen. “Put these back on.”

  I tried to remain standing in order to see out the back windows. I thought we were driving south, but when we passed Unity Medical and entered the Second District, I realized we were headed west. The van jostled, and I hit my head on the ribbed ceiling, then squatted. I hadn’t noticed the cold until then; it burrowed into me.

  When I checked again, we were in the Fifth District, stately Habsburg homes sliding past. Then a right-hand turn took us to our destination: the Fifth District train station. Unlike the central station, this one closed at ten every night and reopened at six. We drove through the empty lot and into a corner, where a ramshackle building stood hidden in the shadows, smoke trickling out of a smokestack.

  We left prints in the fresh snow up to the door. Inside, it was too warm, and a fat man with bristle on his cheeks dealt cards to another fat man at a desk. The dealer smiled at us. “Guests?”

  My clean-shaven guard took some folded papers from his pocket and handed them over. The dealer set down the deck and read thoughtfully. Then he leaned on his knees, grunted, and stood up. The keys on his waistband made a racket when he walked to another door and unlocked it.

  “Get in,” said my clean-shaven guard.

  The one with the mustache said, “Good luck, Inspector.”

  This cell was huge—a paradise. There was a bench attached to a wall, and when I stood on it I could just see through the barred window to the overcast night sky. The cold didn’t bother me, and for the moment I didn’t worry about what would happen next. For the moment I could take long strides and even jump, which I did, many times.

  4

  I woke to the first sunlight I had seen for a long time. But the elation drained away as I looked down on my blackened hands and soiled clothes and tasted the decaying teeth in my mouth. My own grime and smell were intolerable.

  The fat card dealer brought some soup that I ate while standing and staring at the sky. When he came to take the bowl, I asked where I was going. He waved the bowl as if it were a little flag, “You’re going to put yourself to use for once, Comrade. You’re going to work.”

  “Which camp?”

  He shrugged.

  Three hours passed, then five, and I watched the sun set through the bars. My time didn�
��t come until after I’d fallen asleep on the bench, and I woke to the dealer standing in the doorway with three soldiers holding rifles. “It’s your big moment!”

  The train was already sitting on the tracks. I was led to its rear, to a cattle car that held three young men—no older than seventeen—with bruised faces. Dirty straw covered the floor, and when the door was pulled shut the darkness and smell of decay covered us. One voice said something about concentration camps. Another told him to shut up.

  The train whistled and started to move.

  They introduced themselves, and in passing lights through the high barred windows I could connect names with faces. Gyula, his ear crusted with dried blood, was the one who was afraid of concentration camps. Florian, with a purple, swollen right eye that remained shut, had no patience for such talk. He asked what I’d done to end up here. When I told them it was connected to a case, and that I was a militiaman, they fell silent again. But I enjoyed the sound of their voices. “What did they get you on?”

  “Nothing!” said Johann, the third, who blushed beneath his bruises. “They didn’t tell us anything. They took us from our homes, beat us, and brought us here. It’s unbelievable!”

  They were students who had helped draw up a little manifesto during the height of the Sixth of November fervor, then quietly returned to their studies. But their names had appeared alongside their classmates’, and these signatures became part of the long lists of the condemned.