The confession tyb-2

by Olen Steinhauer

  Chief Moska, though, looked as weary as ever. I’d watched him aging since I joined the police force during the German Occupation, back when his particular bureaucratic genius found a way to hide Stefan’s and my war records; he saved us. And then, when the Russians marched in and we were renamed the People’s Militia, his hair went gray overnight. He waved us over. “Meet Mikhail, guys.”

  The Russian stood up to shake our hands. He did it somewhat stiffly, but winked at me as he gripped my fingers. He didn’t wink at Stefan, and I’m still not sure why.

  “Mikhail Kaminski,” he told us both.

  “From Moscow,” said Moska, and I think we all noticed then, if we hadn’t before, the similarity between our chief’s name and that capital. He seemed almost apologetic about it, his self-conscious smile revealing his two missing teeth on the left side. “Mikhail’s here for consultations.”

  Brano Sev sat at his desk as passively as usual. Mikhail Kaminski was here to consult with Sev, no one else, but from that blank expression you couldn’t guess it.

  “All consultation means is a lot of dull paper-pushing,” said Kaminski, smiling broadly to show us he wasn’t about to start doing any of that foolishness. “Where’s the closest bar?”

  We all stared at his attempted joke.

  “Seriously, though, I want everyone to feel free to approach me at any time. I’m from Moscow, you know, not the Moon.”

  This Muscovite wasn’t from the Moon, but he was from Lubyanka. Even without his uniform, his KGB stripes were visible to all of us.

  “Come on, guys,” Moska said, knowing when to step in and clear things up, “we’ve all got a lot of work to do.”

  At his desk, Stefan and I looked over the coroner’s report. A simple suicide was, in the end, only that, and I tried to explain this to him. “But why now?” he asked. “Why does a man commit suicide now of all times?”

  “Because it builds up. You don’t know how it can build up in a man. None of us does.”

  He laid his chubby hands on the desk, spread wide. “But look around. Things haven’t been this good for a long time. The market’s fuller than ever before, political prisoners are coming back home, and you can read damn near anything you want. Why now? ”

  I slouched deeper into my chair. “Tell me about him, then. What was he before he became a drunk?”

  Stefan moved some pages until he came to a typewritten sheet. “Josef Maneck, born 1905 in Miskolc. His family ended up in the Capital in ’twenty-five, when his father opened a frame maker’s shop. The father died in ’forty-three, during the Occupation, and Josef took over his shop. He ran it for four years until, presumably because of connections, he became acting curator of the Museum of National Contemporary Art. In 1953 he was transferred to the Stryy Mineral Springs bottling plant outside town.”

  “A bottling plant?”

  “I suppose he wasn’t so good with the Culture Ministry. But he was no better on the assembly line. He was fired last year, for not showing up enough.”

  “That takes a lot of work.”

  “Arrested twice since for public drunkenness and fistfighting. Overnight stays.”

  “And you need a reason for him to kill himself?”

  Stefan stared through the page. “I guess I do.”

  I noticed Leonek in the corner, at the coatrack, putting on his jacket to leave. He was a way out of this pointless conversation, so I did it, beginning something that would unravel so much. I asked Stefan to wait a moment, then went over to Leonek and told him I was sorry about his mother.

  He looked surprised. “Thanks, Ferenc.”

  “Come over for dinner. Okay? Tomorrow night.”

  “Thanks, but no.”

  “Really.” I put a hand on his arm to make my sincerity clear. “Magda’s a good cook, you’ll thank yourself for it.”

  He shook his head again, his leathery Armenian face looser and more lost than I’d seen it before, his dark eyes drifting. But he was considering it, I could tell.

  “Six o’clock, okay? We’ll leave from here, go get a drink, and be there in time to eat. It’s settled.”

  “Why’d you do that?” Stefan asked when I returned.

  “He just looks terrible.”

  “He’ll work through it.” Stefan spoke with that same cold edge I’d heard earlier. Then he went back into the details of Josef Maneck’s miserable life, but by then I wasn’t listening to a word.

  Mikhail Kaminski left with Brano, loudly describing the glories of Moscow nightlife, and Emil and Moska left together. Stefan asked if I wanted a drink. I said no. “You want to get right back to her, do you?” He smiled. “Come on, spend some time with your oldest friend for once.” But it wasn’t going to work. I was stuck in thoughts of Leonek’s dead mother, and of those days, long ago, in dark bars like the one we’d visited. After Stefan sighed and left, I called home.

  “Hello, Daddy.”

  “How was your day?”

  “What day?”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  Agnes sighed. “It was satisfactory, Daddy. Very satisfactory.”

  “Your teachers? How are they?”

  “Too soon to tell.”

  “And your friends? Are all of them still around?”

  “You don’t even know my friends.”

  I knew a few, but it didn’t matter. “Your mother there?”

  “She’s downstairs, talking to that old woman again. Claudia. Want me to get her?”

  “Just give her a message, okay?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Tell her we’re having a guest for dinner tomorrow. Can you do that?”

  “When should I tell her you’re coming home? She always asks.”

  “I’ll be,” I began, then realized I didn’t know. “Tell her I’ll probably be late. There’s a lot of work backed up here.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  From her tone it was clear that Agnes saw right through me.

  I sat straight in front of the typewriter. I’d rolled in a white sheet, twisted my ring, and now I waited for something to come. After a while, though, it was too dark to see.

  10

  I knocked on Georgi’s door after having walked down to the Tisa, trying to summon inspiration from the black water. The summer heat had brought out the smell of decay, and when the clamoring noise of a dogcatcher’s van filled with its barking victims flew by, the stink became too much.

  Georgi let out a rude exclamation, kissed my cheeks with his wine-stained lips, and pulled me inside. His face was red, and the smile lines that sprouted from his eyes were white. “Have you met Louis? He’s leaving tomorrow! Come on, come on.” There were a lot of voices coming from the kitchen.

  “Louis?”

  “The Frenchman.” He reached up to my shoulder and urged me along.

  They were up at this hour because they were always up-this is something they prided themselves on-ten or twelve men and women squeezed around a tiny kitchen table, drinking. Louis, the Frenchman, was in town, and everyone had made the pilgrimage to Georgi’s to see this emissary from the West. I’d forgotten.

  “Louis!” Georgi called, and a fat man with oily, tasseled hair rolled his head back.

  “Oui?”

  “Mon ami” said Georgi. “Meet another of our writers!”

  “This is a nation of writers!” Louis shouted, then rose wearily to his feet and stuck out a hand. “ You’re a big writer.”

  He gave the kind of firm, rough shake men give when they consider my size, then turned my hand so he could see my rings, my sentimental reminders of the war.

  “Each finger, huh?” Louis grinned as he settled back down. “I bet those rings have got some stories to them. Writers! ”

  It was a kitchen of writers-Karel and Vera, Daniel, even Miroslav, and more-and I wanted none of them. All I’d wanted was Georgi, a quiet talk, and then some sleep. But Georgi couldn’t do anything quietly tonight. His Frenchman was in town. His French communist poet-an existen
tialist, no less.

  The Frenchman sat up and said a few words of a love poem by Paul Eluard that I did not understand, something about wasps flowering and a necklace of windows. When he paused long enough we knew he was done, so we clapped. He beamed. Karel got up, and I took his chair. Louis said, “Now that you’re sitting I can face you!”

  Vera and Ludmila laughed, and when they quieted, I saw Vera’s big, drunken eyes holding on to me. Her black hair hung loosely down her back.

  “They told me about it,” he said. “This book of yours.”

  “Oh great.”

  “I hear it’s autobiographical. That so?” He spoke our language surprisingly well.

  “Everything’s autobiographical, isn’t it?”

  Louis laughed expressively, as though he were on a stage and had to project to the back rows. “Very good, very good!”

  I hadn’t said it to be funny, but they were all laughing with him, even Georgi, and I didn’t know if this was because it actually was funny, or if they were trying to stay in France’s good favors.

  “I just finished an epic poem on the most glorious of all human desires: revenge. I swear, there is nothing more sincere. What about your book?”

  “It’s about my time during the war.”

  The Frenchman stopped laughing and put on a very serious face. “And what did you do during the war?”

  “Killed people, of course.”

  Louis winked. “Me, I hid under my mother’s skirt!”

  Everyone laughed again, and even I cracked a smile.

  11

  The conversation was literary before it became political. It started with some French poets I hadn’t read, then some Italians I’d read in translation, and finally came back home. Karel, Vera’s husband, brought up August Menish, who had been released from internal exile two months before and was busy editing his prison memoir. “It’s going to be incredible,” he told us.

  “That’s what you told us about Brest’s camp book,” Vera said as she put out her cigarette. “And that ended up worthless.” The smile on her gaunt philosopher’s face was directed at me.

  “Menish has the books behind him-he’s got the evidence,” said Karel. But no one was listening to him anymore.

  Louis talked about the bus strike going on in Montgomery, Alabama, in the United States. A couple people waved his comments away, because we’d heard enough of the story from The Spark — further evidence of capitalism’s racist underbelly-but Louis insisted that we listen. “You should hear this reverend they’ve got leading them. His name’s King — a doctor, in fact. He’s one hell of a speaker. He’s putting nonviolent resistance on the map.”

  “That was Gandhi,” said Ludmila. “The Americans would have you think they invented water next.”

  “Didn’t they?” said someone I didn’t know.

  Miroslav pulled out a pack of cards to start the games, so I moved to the deflated sofa in the living room and half listened to Vera provoke Louis into a debate on existentialism-she questioned his credentials, which was something Vera loved to do. I stopped listening. On the far wall was Georgi’s old poster for the Fifth Soviet Five-Year Plan, of kerchiefed women working in fields, below the enormous face of Stalin filling the sky, a chalk-scribbled beard over his wide chin. Georgi had been drunk when he defaced it, and everyone over that night-myself included-had applauded.

  Georgi Radevych was known as a drunk and, briefly, as the author of a small volume of state-published poetry that made his name. He had used that momentary fame to secure his position as an arbitrator of all things literary. He gathered writers in his home and made them perform for him, and sometimes from these evenings self-published manuscripts emerged that bore his name on the front page. After my own little book came out, he showed up at the Militia station and introduced himself. I couldn’t help but admire that. He had a card with the profession poet inscribed in cursive beneath his name. He invited me to his evenings, and over the last four years I had met almost everyone who did any worthwhile writing in the Capital, before forgetting their names. They came through his apartment, drank his wine, and performed impromptu readings under the gaze of his bearded Stalin. Even I got into the mood now and then and said some spontaneous lines, but those were rare intoxicated moments, and seldom worth a listen.

  Georgi flopped into a chair and asked how the criminal classes were coming along. I told him about the dead man in the kitchen. He waved his red hands. “This is what passes for criminality these days?”

  “Suicide’s illegal.”

  “A sin, you mean. Just a sin. And a coward’s way of breaking the law. You’ve got to stay alive in order to face the punishment. Tell me, Ferenc,” he said, dropping to almost a whisper, “what have you got for my new collection?”

  He had been asking for months. They were going to put out another volume of writings, dissident writings perhaps, on the theme of responsibility. He wanted a piece from everyone. Another basement-printed book-maybe just some stapled pages to pass around to friends and talk over in smoky living rooms like this one. “I don’t have anything.”

  “Weren’t you writing in the provinces?”

  “I was trying to restart my marriage.”

  “And?”

  I drank the wine, but it had a spoiled edge. I set it on an end table. Somebody in the kitchen turned on the radio, and we heard static until voices rose through it. It was the American station that you could sometimes hear from Germany, broadcasting eastward. In certain weather it drifted through. News and music and more news. Georgi’s eyes closed as he meditated on the commentary on developments in Poland: negotiations between Moscow and Warsaw to end the unrest. “The Frenchman, he’s staying here?”

  He nodded, eyes still shut. “Been here two weeks. But tomorrow it’s off to Prague, and then back home to Paris. A glorious tour of the People’s Republics.”

  “There was no trouble, then? Him staying here? No knocks on the door?”

  Georgi opened his eyes, then his hands, and spoke with the simplicity of spirit that reminded me that I actually liked him. “We’re living in the most wonderful of times, my friend. And if we’re not, then please, don’t let me know.”

  12

  “I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do,” said the Frenchman. He had come in after Georgi left and leaned forward on the edge of the chair. “I’m trying to grasp this situation we’re in right now. It’s unprecedented, you know, in human history. The entire planet is split between two camps, and the rest of us are intermediaries. We’re the ones fighting it out. I want to find a way to express this puppetry. Because that’s what we are. We’re puppets of history, and we’re playing out a tragedy. Those hydrogen bombs are ready to be dropped. There are enough idiots in the White House and the Central Committee to ensure one of those buttons is going to be pressed. And the longer the wait, the bigger the explosions-they’ll put bombs into space before long. I’m not kidding, all our leaders are mad. In the West we vote them in, but the vanity only makes them more crazy. Don’t you see? All our efforts are toward our own annihilation.”

  He was drunk, but this was something he’d thought about for a long time and needed no sobriety to express-just a listener.

  “Now, I’m not trying to deride this situation. I’ll leave that to the pacifists. It simply is, and I want to see it as clearly as I can. Without prejudice.”

  “So what’s this?” I asked. “Your visit here. Research?”

  He crossed a leg over his knee with some effort, then gripped his raised ankle. “Yes, maybe, in part. But I’ve spent a lot of time here over the years, and I always have friends to see. A very special one recently got out of the camps, thank God. This soil is in my heart,” he said, touching his nose. “You should see the miles of paperwork I had to fill out in order to come here. Then the checks at the border, the soldiers who went through my luggage. They kept half the gifts I brought! I’ll never see them again.” He frowned. “You probably don’t see it in the newspaper, but the E
ast Berliners are running through the border like mad. Nobody can stop them. There’s not enough room in the refugee camps.”

  “They just pick up and leave their homes?”

  “They’re desperate, Ferenc.” He leaned closer. “You know what happens when I walk down the streets here? People follow me.”

  “State security?”

  “No- investors. They want to buy French francs. They can smell it on me.” He paused. “And do you know, Comrade, what Western money smells like?”

  I shook my head.

  “Soap,” he said. “It’s the smell of a clean body washed with Western deodorant soap.”

  I settled back, remembering the excuse for a bath I’d put myself through that morning, in the sink, and all those weeks in the dacha. “You’re not a communist after all.”

  He smiled. “I’m a communist all right. I just haven’t seen an ounce of real communism since crossing the Iron Curtain.”

  There was commotion in the kitchen; someone had won a hand. But it was a weak enthusiasm. They were getting tired.

  “Georgi tells me you’re having trouble writing,” he said.

  I was surprised Georgi considered it important enough to mention. “It’s just not coming.”

  “But no ideas? Nothing at all?”

  “A couple things, maybe.”

  He gave a fatigued smile. “You’ve heard, though, haven’t you, that plot is dead?

  “Is it?”

  “I read it in l’Humanite, some editorial. Plot is a capitalist construct made to give lives a false sense of totality, so they can be valued like a wheel of Brie, then bought and sold.” He grinned. “Luckily, I’m a poet. It doesn’t affect me.”

  Vera and Karel appeared, and when she kissed my cheeks, I thought I heard her whisper, Call me, but wasn’t sure. When she pulled away she smiled conspiratorially. Karel shook my hand. The others gave quiet greetings on their ways out, and I knew then that Georgi had told them all about Magda and me. I was too tired to be bothered by it. They filed by the sofa, asking why they never saw me these days, telling me to give them calls. Their requests for a call were entirely different from Vera’s. They told Louis they would see him again, and, with an elegant bow, he said that this was undoubtedly true. And then, after what seemed like forever, they were gone. Georgi settled on the other corner of the sofa, and the three of us were silent for a while. Georgi laughed once, but when we looked at him he shook his head.