The Confession Read online

  “Not much of place you’re running here,” said Stefan.

  “If you’ve come to complain—”

  “We’ve come to ask questions.” Stefan unfolded his green certificate to display the Militia hawk.

  I stepped up to the bar. “One of your customers.”

  The man flinched, just slightly. My size does that to people sometimes.

  “Josef Maneck,” said Stefan. He climbed up on a stool and settled in for a long talk.

  Café-bar #103’s portrait of Mihai, suspiciously sandwiched between vodka bottles, was blackened by years of smoke. The bartender squeezed a dirty rag, and a few drops fell on the counter. Then he set it down and soaked them up. He looked at me. “Don’t know any Josef Maneck.”

  “Sure you do,” said Stefan. “About my height. But thin, very thin. A drunk.”

  “Oh,” said the bartender, smiling, still looking only at me. “A drunk. That guy.”

  “This drunk’s dead,” I told him.

  His smile went away, and he stepped back, holding the rag in both hands. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Josef Maneck,” said Stefan.

  The bartender took off his glasses. He put them back on. “Maybe.” When I leaned against the bar, he finally looked at Stefan. “Maybe I know him. Did he have a way of blinking? You know.” He blinked a few times to demonstrate.

  “When we saw him his eyes were shut,” said Stefan.

  He looked at me again, as if I’d confirm it. Then he peered past us at the dark corner. “Hey, Martin! Martin!”

  One of the two figures shifted a little, the head rose, then swung slowly toward us.

  “Martin, is your friend dead? The one with the blink.”

  I could just make out his features in the darkness—pink eyelids, wide mouth, high cheekbones. His face sat still a moment, then his lips parted. “Josef?” His voice was like gravel in a ditch.

  “That’s the one, Martin,” said Stefan. He walked over. The second drunk, deeper in the blackness, didn’t budge. “Did you know he’s dead?”

  “Josef?” Martin repeated.

  I kept an eye on the bartender.

  “Come on, Martin.” Stefan stood over him now, his wide gut level with the man’s face. “Why don’t you tell us about your friend.”

  “He was crazy,” the bartender whispered.

  I turned to him. “How’s that?”

  “That man was trouble.” He picked up his rag again. “Started fights all the time. Isn’t that right, Martin?”

  Martin, by Stefan’s belly, closed his pink eyes and considered it.

  “Did he start fights, Martin?” asked Stefan. “Is that what your friend did?”

  There were pumpkinseeds in a dish on the counter, and I collected some in my hand. “Was he a good fighter?” I asked the bartender. “Did he win his fights?”

  “That nut?” He shook his head. “Never. He was crazy. He’d start a fight, then get brutalized. Every time.”

  Stefan’s voice: “What do you say, Martin? Could you have beaten him up?”

  “He was a nut, all right.” The bartender adjusted his glasses and looked at me. “So how’d he die?”

  “Come on, Martin. It’s your friend we’re talking about! Give us some help.”

  I chewed on a pumpkinseed, but it was soggy, so I spit it out in my hand and dumped it back into the dish. I had heard enough, and the familiarity of this place disturbed me. It was all so obvious; there was no reason to be here. Josef Maneck was a drunk who had reached the end of his tether. He got into a fight and lost, like every other time. He stumbled back to his apartment and, faced with the reality of where his life had brought him, decided to finally end it. He turned on the gas and sat on the kitchen floor. I had seen enough of his kind to know it was the inevitable end.

  Stefan was squatting beside the drunk, a hand on his frayed jacket, shaking to keep him awake. “Come on, Martin. You can do it. Tell me about your friend.”

  I scratched a mosquito bite on the back of my hand.

  “Martin, tell me, did you kill your friend? Is that what happened? You can tell old Stefan.”

  “I’ll be in the car,” I said, but didn’t know if he heard me. As I left, the bartender washed out the dish where I’d dumped my chewed seed.

  9

  He was in there a while longer, but on the drive back only said that there wasn’t anything to be learned from an alcoholic like that. We were in agreement.

  Leonek had finally arrived at the station. He and Emil and Chief Moska were over by Brano’s desk. That in itself was strange; no one spent time with Brano Sev. But through them we saw a tall man with a thin mustache leaning back against the desk, his long legs crossed at the ankle. His top half was animated, arms moving around in his well-tailored jacket, smiling, speaking in heavy, grinding syllables. He had a horrendous Russian accent.

  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.”

  Ágnes 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 Ágnes 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 existentialist, 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 o
ld 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?”