The confession tyb-2 Page 16

  I tugged my lip. “So why are you teaching this? If you don’t believe it.”

  “Because they let me,” she said as she took out a cigarette. I lit it. “I used to teach six classes, now they’ve whittled me down to two, and seem to have forgotten I’m teaching under quota. Plato’s forms are safe. Because, as I said, behind every socialist state lies utopia-that’s the similarity I was talking about. And that utopia is what we’re all aspiring to. Right?”

  We drank our coffee in silence for a while. She had me thinking of that, too: Was there an ideal Ferenc that I should be trying to become? An ideal husband and father, an ideal militiaman? A great writer?

  She said, “When I was studying in Zurich, a professor of mine had a theory about women in wartime. He said that, in times of war and revolution, when their men cannot protect them, women see their lives stripped bare. They understand, with utter clarity, that they are alone, as we all are. Most women also see that this life, with this man, is not what they wanted. It’s just something they stumbled upon. And only in the clarity of this vision do they find the strength to change their lives. So they leave.”

  I watched her thinking about this. “Is that true? Do women leave their men in wartime?”

  She raised her shoulders. “It happens.”

  “A professor told you this?”

  “A professor, yes. He was also my lover.”

  “Oh.”

  “So why did you call me, Ferenc?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Of course you are. That I don’t know is the oldest, and worst, excuse.”

  “I guess I wanted this. To talk to you. We never do.”

  She placed the sugar spoon into her empty cup. “Talk isn’t what I want from you. Don’t try to make me into something I’m not. Okay?”

  “But you’re not anything,” I said. “You told me that.”

  She touched a red nail to the back of my hand. “You’re a fast learner. Did you know Karel’s going to Yugoslavia on Saturday?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “A Writers’ Union trip. A representative of our men of letters. He’s very proud.”

  “He should be.”

  “And I’ll be alone for a whole week.”

  The conversation didn’t go much further because she was not very interested in it, and maybe I wasn’t either, so I went home and waited for my family. Agnes showed up first, but she didn’t feel like talking either. She’d had a bad day, and all I could get out of her was that she would prefer to remain in her room for the rest of her life. Magda’s mood was no better, and when after dinner I tried to talk to her it was no use. None of the women in my life wanted to talk that day. I told Magda that I’d had coffee with Vera, but it didn’t faze her. She didn’t know about the Christmas kiss or the more recent one, and I didn’t know if knowing about them would have made any difference.

  35

  Emil was in the office, waiting with a slip of paper. “Results,” he said, smiling.

  The previous night a militiaman in the Second District had spotted Nestor Velcea near Antonin’s apartment, but had been unable to catch him.

  “How did he know about Velcea?”

  “I filed a bulletin on him,” said Emil.

  “Oh.” My secret was no longer a secret.

  We drove over to the Second District station, and the switchboard operator used the new radios to call for Laszlo, the militiaman who had seen Nestor. Emil and I waited on the stiff corridor benches, listening to the heels of secretaries rattle the floor.

  “It’s no longer who,” said Emil. “It’s why. ”

  I nodded at my rings, twisting them. “That’s right. Any ideas?”

  “Art and art. How much further can you take it?”

  “A particularly grisly murder and two less grisly ones. An evil painter and two people who knew him. And the artist Nestor Velcea, a work camp prisoner who’s killing them.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He was staring at his own hands, too.

  Laszlo was gray on the sides and seemed too old to be walking the streets with the young men. And he was. He had recognized Nestor right away from Emil’s description, but had been foolish enough to shout before he was close. “That guy didn’t even think about it,” he said, grunting. “He was gone before I finished saying his name. Even with that limp he can move.”

  It was a wasted trip for us, and so was the subsequent visit to Antonin’s apartment. There was nothing to suggest Nestor had returned to it-perhaps Laszlo had scared him on his way there. We spent the afternoon canvassing the neighborhood, but no one remembered the limping man short one finger. Back at the station I was relieved to find neither Sev nor Kaminski nor Woznica. But I did find Leonek in another of his ecstatic moods.

  “They’re letting him go! Didn’t I tell you they would?”

  I settled behind my desk. “Who?”

  “Aren’t you listening? Zindel Grubin, that’s who!” He rapped his knuckles on my desk. “They’ll lock you up and kill you, but they don’t want your funeral unattended. You’re still coming, right?”

  “Sunday, is it?”

  “You can pick me up.”

  After the others had left, Stefan arrived. I told him about our misadventures, and he nodded thoughtfully. Then he sat down to finish some paperwork.

  I could have walked over and hit him again-it was a thought that still ran around in my head-but when you learn something over time the anger dissolves into the days, so that in the end you’re too tired; the anxiety has dulled you. He also seemed tired, and I wondered if the guilt was keeping him from sleep. We’d had such affection for each other for so many years that there had to have been guilt. Or if there was no guilt, just a low burning hatred of me that he sublimated through the exertion of sleeping with my wife.

  My inaction haunted me more than the infidelity. I knew how I was supposed to react: I was supposed to rage into a violent destruction until everyone around me was stunned. I’d seen enough husbands who had done that, men I’d put behind bars. I’d sympathized with them, and always thought I might do the same. But like Mathew Eiers, I did nothing.

  Was this a reflection of my love for Magda? If I couldn’t become irrational and brutal about this, then where did I draw the line? Because of my size, I’d seldom had to use my strength. The threat was always enough. But this was something that could not be assuaged by a threat.

  No: I couldn’t become violent because in the end it didn’t matter. Magda and I had been growing apart for a long time, and this was just the uglier side of what already existed. The only thing that truly angered me was her nonchalance. She was sleeping with my oldest friend, and when Agnes became aware of it-as she no doubt would-what would it do to her?

  Stefan lounged at his desk sleepily, and I finally began to gather some strength to brutalize him. He was helping to chip away at my family, and for that there was no forgiving him.

  But before I could turn the feeling into action, he stood up, stretched, and told me he was beat-he was going home.

  I bet you’re beat.

  36

  In the empty office I typed. It was in the form of a letter, and the only way I could write it was to think of it as fiction. It was addressed to “My dear wife” and listed, in detail, the reasons why the letter writer was leaving her. Why he was taking their child with him, why there was a reality to be faced up to and this lie could no longer be lived. He did not wish to hurt anyone, he said, but had no choice. He was sick of her evasions and the way she risked the family they had carefully tended for the past decade and a half. He didn’t understand why everything had failed in the end (he was gracious enough to take some of the blame), but he had stuck it out with the faith of a monk. He knew there was something higher than simple happiness, and he wished she understood this as well. But she understood nothing. So he would leave her, and take their daughter with him.

  I tugged the sheet out of the typewriter and folded it into my jacket pocket without rereading it.


  “More egocentric writing?”

  Kaminski was in the doorway, arms crossed, smiling at me.

  “You put in the hours, don’t you?”

  I reached for my overcoat. “Sometimes.”

  “You know what’s been on my mind lately, Ferenc?” He came over and leaned on my desk. “Kazakhstan. Remember me telling you about it a while ago? Well, the numbers are starting to come in, and it turns out I was right. We succeeded.” He smiled, his thin mustache rising. “From that area alone we’re harvesting twenty million tons of wheat. Twenty million! Sixty million from all the new regions, one hundred twenty- five million tons from the entirety of the Soviet Union! What do you think about that?”

  He waited for an answer, so I nodded.

  “It’s better than that, my boy. It’s a goddamn miracle. The largest yield in the history of the USSR.” His smile was expansive, and I made a halfhearted attempt to match it, but just as quickly it went away. “These kinds of things don’t impress you, do they, Ferenc?”

  “It’s impressive,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No it’s not. You’re only interested in the individual. Something you proved on November the sixth. Put you in a group, and you’ll always be the oddball, won’t you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  He pursed his lips and nodded at me. “How’s your case coming?”

  “Slowly.”

  “I thought so. It’s because you don’t work well in a team. It’s all over you. Maybe you should find a different line of work, Ferenc. Maybe I can help you out with that.”

  I swallowed, too visibly. “What kind of work.”

  “Does it matter?” He shrugged. “You’re a man who likes art. A fan of Vlaicu’s work?”

  “Not really.”

  “But all you boys went to his show. Now, that’s a surprise. You don’t see a lot of militiaman going in for art shows. It’s a little eccentric. But Stefan sure made an ass of himself, didn’t he?”

  Although when he spoke his tone was light and conversational, his face, with its hard cheekbones and lips, did not match it. I didn’t know if he just wanted to scare me, or if there was a point to this. State security has always worked by diversion, and to imagine you know what any officer is thinking is pure fantasy.

  “You do know, don’t you?”

  I swallowed. “What?”

  “That you and I will be face-to-face someday soon. I’m not the kind of man who forgets insults. Who ignores it when a man under my supervision embarrasses me in public.”

  “I…I know.”

  He drummed his long fingers on my desk, but kept staring at me. “There’s a reason you’re not eating your own waste in a prison cell right now.”

  I wanted to ask for the reason, but my tongue was too heavy to move.

  “This is the only reason you’re allowed to return to your family tonight. What do you want to ask me?”

  My tongue was lead.

  “Come on. You can do it.”

  “What,” I managed. “What is the reason?”

  He held up a finger. “No, Ferenc! No!” He shook the finger. “ That is the wrong question. The correct question is: How do I stay out of a prison cell even after having humiliated you in public, Comrade Kaminski?”

  My dislodged tongue shifted. “How?”

  He opened his hands. Smiled. “Simple, Comrade Kolyeszar. You work. You do your job to the best of your limited abilities. Bring in your killer, and perhaps, through the virtue of your good labor, I’ll find a way to rise above the insults of the past.”

  I nodded, and right then all I wanted in this world was his forgiveness.

  But he’d had enough. He waved me away. “Go on, Ferenc. Say hello to Magda and Agnes for me.” He winked. “Send them my love.”

  37

  “Your dinner’s in the icebox,” said Magda. “In the future, let me know if you’re going to be late.”

  “Sure.”

  “And there was a call. Someone named Vozka?”

  “Woznica.”

  “That’s it. I asked him to leave a message, but he just wanted me to tell you he’d call back. He was insistent that you know.”

  “Where’s Agnes?”

  “In her room.”

  I paused outside her door, again trying to shove Kaminski’s threats down into the darkness. To my surprise, she was on her bed studying French, wearing her glasses, Pavel lying beside her. She pointed at the book so I would see.

  “Very nice.”

  She sat up and crossed her legs beneath herself. “I think maybe you’re right, Daddy. The French school may be a good idea.” While she was trying to sound enthusiastic, it wasn’t working very well.

  I sat beside her and put my arm over her shoulder. “So it didn’t work out with him?”

  “With who?”

  “This boyfriend you won’t tell me about.”

  Her eyes grew large, and her face colored. “There is no boyfriend.”

  I stroked her hair, then gave her ear a tug. “Okay, then. Let’s talk about the French school.”

  The next set of tests was scheduled for mid-December. She had a month to work on her language, which didn’t seem like much time to me, but she was optimistic. “Then I can start in January.”

  “If you pass.”

  “I’ll pass, all right.”

  Her optimism was infectious.

  The dinner was cold, but good. Pork schnitzel and fried potatoes. Magda’s cooking seemed to have improved recently, and I wondered if this was how she worked her guilt into something manageable. She lit a cigarette and sat across from me. “Did you take some money out of the account a couple weeks ago?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  I looked at my fork. “Georgi needed to borrow it.”

  “You could have told me, you know.”

  “Sorry. We’ll get it back by the beginning of the month.”

  She exhaled a cloud. “I believe that.”

  I tried to smile at her, but could only dream of a world where money was my only concern.

  38

  Sunday was bright as Leonek and I waited in one of the new cemeteries. The ones in the center had been filled to overflowing by the war, and the overflow had been directed to these modern expanses in the outer districts. There was no fence around this one, and the graves were flat stones in the grass. Name, dates, and sometimes a rank. Nothing more. The graveyard’s flatness was made more noticeable by the narrow shed on the edge of the grounds, and the block towers in the distance. There were two trees, though they were no more than twigs rising hopefully out of the grass toward a white sun that warmed nothing. A man with a shovel stood beside a pile of dirt.

  “No one here yet?” Leonek asked him.

  The groundskeeper’s weathered face buckled when he shut his mouth tightly. “No one ever comes early to a funeral.”

  “Well, we do.”

  Between us was a rectangular hole, well dug, and a slip of stone that read.

  Grubin Tevel

  1856–1956

  “Tevel was a century old,” said Leonek. “Good for him.”

  “One lousy century to live through,” I said.

  We retreated to the closest of the two saplings, which made us feel less exposed.

  “You know what you’re going to say to him? You only get one chance.”

  “I never prepare an interview. I’ll know what to ask when I’m asking it.”

  A cold wind buffeted us, then died down. In the distance a hearse drove toward the cemetery. It moved slowly along a gravel path through the graves and stopped near the groundskeeper. He and the driver heaved a cheap casket out of the back and placed it beside the hole.

  “Where’s your mother buried? Not here.”

  “Other side of town. It’s a small graveyard, out of the way. Lots of trees. Not like this.”

  After a while, five mourners appeared on foot. They were all in black and, I saw as they neared, stooped and old. Two
men in Hassidic garb, three women with ceremonial scarves covering their heads. Neighbors or friends from the Jewish quarter. They waited beside the casket, muttering and occasionally shooting us mistrustful glances. One of the men-he seemed to have the serenity of a holy man-approached the casket and opened it; inside, the body was covered by a shroud. He said some Hebrew words over it.

  At first we were afraid that Zindel Grubin would not arrive. Then Leonek spotted the reflection of sun off a white car coming toward us. We left the tree and waited with the others, and all of us watched the car stop behind the hearse. Three men were in the front seat, Zindel Grubin between two beefy men who walked him over silently. The old ones moved forward to greet him.

  Zindel had a thin face and big ears on either side of his shaved head. His thick-lipped smile seemed a little unsure of itself as he bent to receive hugs.

  The hearse driver opened a leather-bound book and said a few words. This was the official eulogy, the one that would go into the record books. He awkwardly inserted Grubin, Tevel where blanks appeared in the text. The guards retreated to the tree we’d left and started smoking. They had no worries-there was nowhere for Zindel to hide.

  Afterward, the old man who had opened the casket stood over the enshrouded body and began to read outlines of Hebrew. Leonek and I glanced at one another. Everything was a mystery. One of the women cried, but briefly, and Zindel stared at the shroud as if trying to see through it.

  After the words were said, we helped Zindel and the groundskeeper lower the casket into the earth. It was surprisingly light.

  The mourners talked briefly with Zindel, and we waited behind them. Leonek stuck out his hand and introduced himself. “My condolences,” he said, as Zindel hesitantly took the hand. “Look, can we talk?”