The confession tyb-2 Read online

  By the second week I was terrorized into submission.

  I talked with the other prisoners during the rare instances when exhaustion did not make me mute. There were all kinds: students, Gypsies, factory workers, and even some who had been in the Party-the old worried man had been the head of his metalworking collective until he was turned in. “I know who it was, though,” he whispered to me one night, the worry suddenly fleeing his face. “Wlodja Stanislavsky. He’s one of the machinists, and for the last five years he’s been in love with my wife. But she would never touch that dirty Pole. So he decided to get rid of me.” He shook his head. “That bastard will only have her if he rapes her.”

  His name was Tibor Petrescu. He had been in the camp for a month when I arrived, and each Sunday when we were allowed to rest he wrote his wife long, convoluted letters. At first I wrote letters, too. I wrote to Emil, asking him to find a way to get me out, and I wrote to Magda, in order to reassure her of my health and love. I had been a fool to let her and Agnes go-given the chance again, I would have sent Leonek to The Crocodile that night. How could I have hesitated when she asked to be taken back? In the camp I found the limits of my maturity. But after a while, I stopped writing altogether. I had asked Tibor if he ever received answers from his wife, and his no reminded me that mail did not leave this camp. Everything remained stacked in that steel cabinet in the commander’s office to be read over brandies and cigarettes, for a laugh.

  I gave up, and gave in to the regime of work. I watched the other prisoners fall, and once brought back a burlap sack filled with Gyula, the student, thinking only that his fear had reached its end.

  Despite all the sand we dug, the canal seemed to make no progress. Gogu arrived with a uniformed officer, shouting at us from above, and the next day the quota was raised to twelve cubic yards. I was just able to keep up, but Tibor fell short often, and at night I’d hear him grunting in the yard as I tried to sleep, then the thud as his ax hit wood.

  6

  Two and a half months into my stay, I was at the work site, collapsing beneath the weight of a wheelbarrow filled with snow-damp sand, when the mustached barracks guard-the Cosmin I’d heard of in another life-appeared at the edge of the canal. He put his hands on his hips. That morning he had pulled a boy from the roll call, ordered him to strip naked, then made him sit in the snow and cover himself with it, like a blanket. When we marched off to work, the boy was still there, rasping through congested pipes, turning blue. “Kolyeszar!” I looked up, my empty stomach tightening. “Get up here, Kolyeszar!”

  I left the wheelbarrow and climbed up the embankment. Cosmin grabbed my ear and started walking forward-I had to bend so it wouldn’t tear off. He walked me to another guard, who kept his machine gun pointed at me.

  “Take care of him,” said Cosmin.

  I could hardly walk back across the wheatfields. I didn’t know why they hadn’t killed me there, in front of the others. Shooting me in secret just didn’t make sense-it was the one thing I felt must make sense-and only when we were in sight of the camp did I begin to suspect that I wasn’t going to die.

  We went in through the back gate and stopped at the commander’s shack. The guard knocked and waited. By the fence was a burlap sack. I knew, by glancing over to the empty yard, that the frozen boy was in it. “Enter.” The guard opened the door and pushed me inside before closing it again. The warmth enveloped me as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Gogu sat at his desk, fanning himself with a file, while beside him, impassive, stood Brano Sev.

  He said, “Hello, Ferenc.”

  “Hello.”

  “Can you excuse us, Comrade Commander?”

  Gogu stopped fanning himself and looked at Sev. He seemed about to protest, but then lumbered out, muttering to himself. Sev took the commander’s seat and motioned to a chair. I collapsed into it.

  “You don’t look good, Ferenc. Camp life doesn’t suit you.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And that smell.”

  “It’s the pus.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can get you out.”

  I didn’t answer, afraid that anything I said might ruin this one tenuous possibility.

  “I should tell you,” he said after a moment. “You should know that I never knew about this. About Kaminski. He was sent to help me with my work, and for a while he did just that. I was grateful for his help. But when he started showing interest in Nestor Velcea I became suspicious.”

  He paused, so I ventured an observation: “But it was you looking at his file.”

  “Yes,” he said. “After Kaminski had already been through it. I wanted to know why he was so interested in an ex-camp prisoner, and so interested in your case. The only connection seemed to be that he was running the Office of Internal Corrections at the same time Nestor was put away. But I didn’t know enough to understand everything. Maybe if you had been more honest with me in the first place, I could have helped.”

  I looked at my blackened fingernails. “But you did know about Sergei.”

  “Of course,” he said without inflection. “I knew about the execution in ’forty-six. You have to understand: Back then we were still fighting a war. It wasn’t as relaxed as it is now.”

  “Relaxed?”

  As he talked, he arranged his hands on the desk, as if plotting out moves. “People forget. I learned of Sergei’s execution just after Kaminski performed it. It was a necessary thing. Sergei’s investigation threatened to undermine the entire Soviet presence in the country. We still had Fascists in the hills, and foreign instigators were spread throughout the city. They could have used the investigation to devastating effect.”

  I didn’t want to argue. “What about Nestor?”

  “That was what I didn’t know. I didn’t know there had been a witness to the synagogue murders-no record was kept of it in our files. And I certainly didn’t know how Kaminski was connected to those girls. One expects more of state security.” He shook his head. “But Kaminski finally admitted it all. In the interview room.”

  “Oh.”

  “I might have turned a blind eye to some of this, but I could not allow that Kaminski had killed Stefan. That was entirely beyond imagining.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Sev looked at his own fingernails, which were very clean. “He’s dead, Ferenc. His body was found in the Tisa. He’d been shot in the back of the head.”

  I leaned forward, not quite understanding. “He-”

  “Don’t ask, Ferenc.”

  I took a deep, wavering breath as I leaned back again.

  “Nestor Velcea is in a work camp in the east. He’s a miner. And now to you.” He straightened in his chair. “I’ve spent the last months arranging an amnesty. It was not easy. I couldn’t defend your actions on November the sixth, but I did talk with them in more depth about the situation with the Woznica woman. Emil was useful in this, as he knew the whole story. I was hoping that Malik Woznica himself could verify some facts, but he has not yet been found.”

  I noticed my cold hands were beginning to shake.

  “The best I could arrange was internal exile. You won’t be allowed in the Capital again, not without proper authorization.”

  I remembered to say, “Thank you.”

  “One condition.”

  “What?”

  “A confession. It’s bureaucratic, a simple thing. But they want an in-depth confession of your crime, as well as a full report on the case. You will deliver this to me.”

  “And what will you do with it?”

  “I’ll put it in your file. Type it up in the proper format, numbered, and wire me when you’re finished. That’s all they want.”

  Later, I would think about how he used the word “they” instead of the more appropriate “we,” but at the time I just looked at my hands, at the red and black sores that covered them.

  He said he would be back in a week with the release papers, and that in the meantime I should stay alive. I asked him how I
should go about doing that. He shrugged. “Work hard.”

  7

  Over the next week I saw two more inmates shot, one of them Tibor Petrescu. He was killed in the wheatfields at twilight, on our way back to the camp. That day Tibor’s wheelbarrow had slid back on top of him, crushing his leg, and he spent the rest of the day up by the truck, helping collect sand that spilled out. In the fields he fell three times, and Cosmin, without hesitation, walked over and put a bullet in his head. He knew that Tibor and I had been friends, so he tossed me the burlap sack, and said, “He’s all yours, Kolyeszar.”

  I collected Tibor as well as I could, at first trying not to look at the hole in his forehead. But then, as I folded his legs to make him fit into the bag, I paused to look directly into his face. He’d made it through a lot, but in the end a wheelbarrow signified his death. I hadn’t told him or anyone else about my impending release, because I didn’t want to face their agonizing, jealous stares, but I wished I had told him.

  The next morning, which I later learned was the twentieth of February 1957, Cosmin came into the barracks before wake-up and called my name. Everyone moaned, half-awake, and I climbed down. “Now!” Cosmin shouted, and I hurried over to him. He quickly swung his truncheon against my arm, sending a bright, wakening pain through me. “Let’s get going.”

  I followed him to the front gates, where a guard handed me a clipboard with a form on it. I couldn’t read it in the darkness, but signed where he pointed a finger. He lifted the sheet and had me sign another. Then a third. Cosmin grabbed my shoulder and pushed me forward as the guard opened the gate. “I better not see you again,” he whispered in my ear.

  The gate closed behind me.

  What I hadn’t seen in the darkness was a white Mercedes moving slowly up the long dirt path from the main road. Its lights leapt as it bumped along. Then it stopped about ten yards from me, and the driver’s door opened. A figure stood up and waved.

  My legs no longer supported me. It was Emil.

  8

  “ Jesus, Ferenc. What did they do to you?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t even smile. Because I knew this must all be a dream. And I would wake soon to the bugle call and rotting mattresses and truncheons.

  The female desk clerk at the Hotel Elegant-not Tania-was reluctant to give us a room when she saw me, and Emil had to use his Militia certificate to persuade her. “Don’t destroy the place,” she said as she handed over the key.

  I took a long bath. Emil had been speaking ever since he picked me up, pausing only to puzzle over my silence and try to think of something else to say, but I hadn’t heard a word. The water blackened very quickly, so I emptied and refilled the tub. My sores hurt when I squeezed them dry, then scoured them. My hair had been shaved again the previous week, but the lice had returned to infest the little hair that had grown, so I used a razor to shave it off again. As I dried I caught myself in the mirror and understood Emil’s horror.

  He was talking again when I came out, something about how he’d had to drop the Malik Woznica case because there were no clues, but I only said, “Did you know prisoners built this hotel?”

  They were the first words I had spoken, and by the look on his face I knew they were the wrong words. “No. I didn’t know that, Ferenc.” He spoke the way one speaks to an injured child.

  “I’ve got to admit,” I said, trying to sound human again, “I haven’t heard a thing you’ve said all this time. I’m sorry.”

  He dropped onto a bed. The sun was beginning to shine through the cheap curtains. “I didn’t say anything important. Anyway, I bet you’d like to sleep on a real mattress.”

  “Oh God,” I said, and fell into the other bed.

  When I woke up, groggy and aching but rested, it was nighttime. Emil was out, but by the time I had gotten up and washed another time, he appeared with a small suitcase. “What’s that?”

  “You’re not going to live in those striped rags, are you?”

  Inside were clothes I could hardly remember after these months of prison garb. They were clean and pressed-perfectly. “Where did you get them?”

  “Magda packed it all.”

  “Did she try to come with you?”

  He looked at the bed. “No. I suppose she didn’t think she could take it.”

  “Leonek?”

  “What?”

  “Is she with him?”

  He scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t know, Ferenc. No one tells me a thing.”

  “But you’ve seen them together.”

  He looked away, nodded.

  I didn’t ask anything more, because a part of me knew this all along.

  In my clothes again, I almost felt like a man. My face was still battered, but my suit covered the sores, and when I walked the chafing reminded me that I was back with the living.

  In the hotel restaurant I ate too much and had to vomit in the bathroom. When I returned I passed Tania at a table with a camp guard. She noticed my face and muttered something to the guard, who looked at me and nodded. But as I sat down I realized that she had no idea who I was.

  The next morning we drove south, to Pocspetri. Emil didn’t tell me until we were halfway there that Lena had lost the child. “Emil. I’m sorry.”

  He tugged down the sun visor. “I suppose we should just stop trying.”

  “Has she been checked out by a doctor?”

  “A dozen times. She’s physically fine. It could be her nerves, or the drinking. Probably the drinking.”

  “Then try it again after she stops drinking. That’s all you can do.”

  “Pick yourself up and try again? We’ll see.”

  We reached the farm by eleven, the sun bright over the rolling orchards, lighting the dirt road winding past the cooperative offices and down to Teodor and Nora’s house. I could just make out Nora standing on the front steps, hand shielding her eyes, watching us approach.

  “You’re going to stay here?” Emil asked as he looked ahead along the road.

  He was smiling as if the question were funny. I wasn’t sure why, until I looked ahead to where Nora was waving beside the Skoda I hadn’t noticed before. I reached to twist a ring that wasn’t there. From a distance it looked like Nora, but it wasn’t.

  Afterword to the 1978 edition by Georgi Radevych

  Ferenc Kolyeszar began writing his confession on 12 March 1957 and finished it on 5 November, three days after Khrushchev launched Sputnik II-a relatively short time compared to the years it had taken him to write his first book, A Soldier’s Tale. It was composed at both Teodor and Nora’s Pocspetri farm and their dacha near Sarospatak. When he returned from the dacha on its completion he called me, but made no mention of the book. He only wanted to know what I knew about this satellite orbiting the earth, and about the dog inside it. “What’s going to happen when it runs out of air?” he asked, in a panic. When I told him the dog, Laika, was going to die, he fell silent.

  It took another month for him to put together the “official” version that he turned in to Brano Sev. By that point Laika was dead. In his official confession, Ferenc cut out all references to the crimes of others. For example, there is no mention of anyone other than himself listening to Radio Free Europe, and the station-house strike that followed the Sixth of November demonstration is put down as his idea. But what no one, least of all Brano Sev, suspected was that Ferenc would confess to killing Malik Woznica. There was no evidence against him, and Woznica’s body had not been found. When he told me what he’d done, I asked him why on earth he’d confessed. He said, “Sometimes, Georgi, you’ve just got to be an adult.” He gave this version to Brano Sev on 11 December 1957.

  It surprised Ferenc that he was not arrested after turning it in. He expected that within the week a white Mercedes would pull up to the farm and take him back to Vatrina. But he finally understood, and wrote me in a letter, “They will hold it over my head, Georgi. All I have to do is open my mouth and say something they don’t like, and I will be back
with my friends in that camp.”

  Ferenc only told me about this uncensored version of his Confession eight years later. He had waited long enough so that no one besides himself would be punished for its contents. He changed the names of the characters and used a pseudonym, like most underground writers at that time. In June 1965 I put out the first edition as a simple typed manuscript, five copies that we passed around to our friends and read in groups. The Russian word samizdat had just come into vogue, and this was the lowest form of samizdat you could find: a stack of pages stuffed into a folder.

  It wasn’t until 1971 that we found the means and will to bind The Confession into a box of nine serialized pamphlets-known as “the Box” to those who looked for it. I asked Ferenc if he could compose some words to remind people of the political situation in those days, because some younger readers, I worried, would not remember exactly how it was. Ferenc answered with the second-person interchapters found in the present edition.

  The Confession gained a life of its own. It was discussed in living rooms and kitchens all over the Capital, and a few copies were smuggled to Poland and Hungary. The Hungarians, with their own rich samizdat history, translated it into their difficult language and began printing it madly. From there his book spread like a beautiful malady.

  But this popularity was the very thing that Yalta Boulevard was waiting for. On 1 February 1972, the white Mercedes did arrive at the Pocspetri farm, where Ferenc had lived with his wife and her parents for the last decade and a half, and took him to another work camp, on the eastern side of the country. The charge was murder, and Ferenc seemed, according to Magda, to have been waiting for that moment all his life.

  He was released in 1975, during another wave of amnesties, in part because voices outside the country were demanding to know his whereabouts. He was returned to Pocspetri. His lungs were weak from working in the mine shafts of the Carpathian range, but Ferenc went immediately back to farming. “It is,” he confided to me once, “the only thing that gives me satisfaction.”