The confession tyb-2 Read online

  “Because he was Russian,” said Leonek. “It tore him up that everyone in the Capital thought of Russians this way, as rapists and murderers.”

  Magda refilled our glasses.

  Leonek took another drink. “He wanted to prove either that the killers weren’t Russian, or that if they were, a Russian could bring them to justice. You remember that night?”

  I did.

  “He called me,” said Leonek, “then I called you. He wanted us to meet him down by the water. There was that thick fog, and by the time we showed up he was dead. It was unreal. We could even hear the gunman running away, but couldn’t see more than a foot ahead of us.”

  “Is there anything left of it?” I asked. “In the files. After so long, it’ll be hard to follow the leads.”

  “I can at least try.”

  “What about his family?” Magda asked. “Wasn’t he married?”

  “His wife and son, Kliment, moved to Moscow.” Leonek smiled. “Kliment became a militiaman too.”

  Magda stared at Leonek, cheeks flushed, and I realized then that she had been doing most of the drinking. She was a little drunk, and maybe I was too.

  Leonek looked into his glass, then popped his head up. “This is really good wine!” I guess he was drunk as well.

  I heard the front door open, saw Magda’s face turn to me, flushed and radiant, and that was when it bubbled through me, and over me.

  I was in the present. I was not thinking of later that evening, when we would be alone again and the strained silence would keep us far from the one sad subject that was the only thing we could ever think about. I was in the present, where I was generous and could forget a single night almost two decades old, because marriage and all the years, and Agnes-they were so much bigger than one carnal act. I could see her cheeks redden; her smile warmed me. I saw my daughter watching from the doorway. Our guest smiled at all the riches I had in this house, his admiration all over him. And that’s when I thought, hopefully, that Magda and I still had a future together.

  “Leonek,” I said. “That really is a nice tie you’re wearing.”

  He looked down, flipped it with his fingers, and we all laughed, even Agnes.

  You can read it all; it’s no secret. The Magyars have grown loud. Because if they scream enough, they might get their Nagy with the mustache like two paintbrushes, just as the Poles have their Gomulka. And after a momentary face-off, the Empire bows its head and allows Imre Nagy to control their path to socialism. You read this, and you wait. And far a while you’re encouraged-who isn’t? Collectivization is halted in the Hungarian plains, and People’s committees are formed to air complaints. The Spark calls these moves bold, unprecedented. The sun shines on the Magyars, and even over here in the Carpathian basin the clouds are dispersing. Kozak the Engineer opens the Tenth Central Committee Meeting with a declaration of solidarity with the revered Comrade Nagy. Mihai does not condemn the phrasing, and his silence is greater than any words. Bobu the Professor asks for an investigation into the benefits of trade agreements with nations outside the socialist neighborhood.

  Yet just as quickly, the cooling begins. In their enthusiasm, Magyar workers seize government buildings and form revolutionary councils. Bobu says nothing, and even Kozak stares quietly at his podium. Nagy announces the end of the one-party system in the Hungarian People’s Republic. Breaths are being held; the oxygen grows thin. The Magyars decide to take their soldiers out of the year-old Warsaw Pact and ask to be united with the nations of the West. Exhale. The Empire mobilizes. Russian tanks reach the edge of Budapest. The lack of air makes everyone a little crazy-there are barricades in the streets along the Danube, then the tanks move in. The American radio gives instructions on guerrilla warfare. The radios of the Empire shout of imperialist-financed counterrevolutionaries. And in the Budapest streets busses are turned over and rifles disseminated and Magyar students and Magyar workers line up at the barricades. Nagy calls for quiet and calm, but he is whispering to a hurricane. On Radio Budapest he says, Today at daybreak, Soviet troops attacked our capital with the obvious intent of overthrowing the lawful democratic Hungarian government. Then Radio Budapest sends an SOS signal and drops quietly off the air.

  Here in the Capital the silence reigns. But it is a tense silence, like the one that hangs over a failing marriage. No one in the street can smile cleanly, and even you hear whispers about the tremblings beneath the surface. Here, the only shouts are unheard: the epidemic of workers calling in sick. One day someone is at the factory, the next day he is not. Then there are five gone, then twenty. This is not the news that reaches The Spark, but is passed along on the street and in bedrooms and over drinks. You hear it once or twice-you’re not sure anymore who from, or when-but then it is common knowledge, the whole country is part of the secret society that has only one weapon at its disposal.

  The radios whine like sick animals when the electronic jamming functions, and whisper orders for street-battle tactics when it doesn’t. While that other capital is aflame, this capital is silent. There is a secret society of discontent with its hand on its only pistol, waiting to fire.

  Fall

  1

  This confession is becoming longer than I would have expected, and has still hardly begun. But the details that precede and surround the story are necessary for understanding what follows, because crimes are not committed without precedent. Even the most banal details come together and gain power and lead murderers to their final, defining acts.

  Through the weeks following that dinner, the writing began. I tried to ignore the news from Budapest and focus on words during the early-morning hours in the empty office. The typewriter rattled, and the sluggish T stuck. A few words came, interrupted by long periods when the blank sheets just hypnotized me. Then, gradually, thoughts began to coalesce. Magda’s parents’ farm before the war, the long journey home after the war, the discovery that my family was dead, then the move to the Capital, black bars and fevers of depression. By November, as the weather cooled, I was typing a regular, controlled flow. Marriage was the only subject for me now, and it was becoming the story of how time can erode a marriage from the center. I wrote about our early, flush months, the month-and-a-half wartime separation, then the strange, inexplicable disconnect when I returned. I was a different man even after such a short war, one who had to find his way back to the world of human feelings, to the joys and fears of a family man. That short war had changed Magda as well. I wrote of Agnes, and how her birth drew me back into the marriage, so that the marriage was the one thing that sustained me. I wrote nothing about Stefan because he was incidental, just a symptom of a real ailment. I showed my pages to no one.

  Mikhail Kaminski continued to work with Brano Sev on the files of state security, his trigger finger always more active than the others. These security officers had the appearance of clerks, poring over sheets with numbers and paragraphs and photographs. When they left, we could only imagine what they did: converse with informers on park benches, drag victims into interview rooms, strong-arm troublesome students into the silence of utter submission. Leonek speculated that they were deciding which ones of us to get rid of, though Emil and I shrugged that off as paranoia. Once I overheard Kaminski laugh and say to Brano: Those bitches will wish they never heard of nonviolent resistance! I only understood this later.

  There was one more incident with Stefan. I was out drinking with Emil and Leonek on a Friday night, and Stefan appeared, already a little drunk. He sat with us and joined the conversation, which slowed once he arrived, but he kept looking at me significantly. Sometimes he smiled, and he kept taking my cigarettes. The others didn’t seem to notice this, but I did, and when he got up to use the toilet I followed him into the bathroom and, without a word, hit him on the back of the head. His face fell into the mirror, leaving a long crack that as far as I know is still there. I returned to the table and finished my drink, and when Stefan appeared again he was padding a bloody spot on his forehead. The fact that Em
il and Leonek said nothing only proved that they understood everything.

  We changed partners. I was to work with Emil, and Stefan would work with Leonek. “A temporary measure,” Moska explained in his dim office. “Nothing to worry about.” He looked at the paperwork on his desk rather than at me.

  “How long?”

  “What was that?”

  “How long is temporary?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He was right-it didn’t matter. No one in the Capital was committing murder. Leonek noticed this aloud. “When people are focused on something great outside their borders, they don’t have enough attention to kill each other.” Revisiting Sergei’s case was making him philosophical. Or something else was.

  First he had gone through the station’s file cabinets, all of them, then barged in on Moska, demanding to know where Sergei’s files were. Expunged was the answer. Leonek sneered the word. “Cleaned out, that’s what he told me.”

  “They were destroyed?”

  Leonek flattened a hand on a stack of papers beside his typewriter. “Not quite. I had to go to the central depot. Do you know where that is?”

  I’d never even heard of a central depot.

  “Just outside the Seventh District. A warehouse, no less. Stefan came with me, and after two days, running back into town for unpredictable signatures, this greasy bureaucrat finally gives them to us. Reluctantly.” He sank into his chair and straightened the pages. A few inches thick-a couple hundred pages, I guessed. “A lot of this is useless,” he said. “Forms, certificates, the like. But there’s something here. I’m sure of it.”

  He had the same surety as Stefan, when he had insisted that no one in the Capital could kill himself-a stubborn, peasant conviction.

  Georgi called to invite me and Magda to a party. “More foreigners in town?” I asked.

  “No foreigners, but it is for them. For the foreigners.”

  “The Magyars, Georgi?”

  “I’ll support our Hungarian comrades the only way I know how.”

  “By drinking, you mean.”

  “Such a cynic. Remember, Ferenc, you’re Magyar-blooded too. Bring Magda.”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t seen her much.”

  “Where’s she been?”

  “Out with a friend from the factory. A Lydia.” This is what Magda would tell me when she returned home, often after Agnes went to bed, as she passed me on the couch: I was out with Lydia again.

  But I had never asked where she had gone, or whom with.

  “You know I’m still waiting for your literary contribution.”

  “You’ll have to keep waiting. Nothing’s ready.”

  “But you’re writing?”

  “I seem to be. Finally.”

  By the time we hung up, he sounded positively thrilled.

  2

  On November the fifth, a Monday, Emil and I were sent to look into a disappearance. A Party official, attached to the Health Ministry, had come home to find his wife missing. “So she left him,” I said.

  “I’m likely to agree,” said Moska. “But what I think isn’t important.”

  It didn’t sound particularly interesting, or perhaps I was just feeling lazy. I pointed out that homicide inspectors shouldn’t be wasting time with missing person’s cases. But Emil knew his regulations: “She’s connected to the Party, and it’s been three days. After three days it goes to us.”

  Moska seemed impressed. He explained that she had left no note, but did leave a mess in the kitchen. “Silverware all over the floor.”

  “What about her clothes?” I asked.

  “A few dresses taken.” Moska paused, as if unsure. “I told him you two would be over to see him today.”

  Because it was close, we walked to Comrade Malik Woznica’s apartment down by the Tisa, where the colder winds blew. Built on old bomb-damaged buildings, these were the new riverview homes filled with apparatchiks and officers. There was a noticeable lack of cabbage smell in the stairwell, and the doorbell, instead of buzzing, emitted a soothing sequence of three tones. Emil smiled when he heard them.

  A white-haired man shorter than Brano, but three times heavier, opened the door and started speaking immediately: “Comrade Inspectors, so very good. Please please, yes, come in, yes, right this way. A drink? Come on, a drink between friends. Yes?” His smooth face was pink beneath his sleep-deprived eyes, and as he spoke his chubby hands flew around. It wasn’t nervousness, I didn’t think; it was simply too much energy. “Come, come, sit, no, yes-take a look. Isn’t it a lovely view?”

  He left us standing at two large, double-paned windows, gazing out at the Tisa. The river changed colors depending on the sky, and today it was gray. The Georgian Bridge, off to the right, crossed into the dilapidated Canal District and continued to the southern bank.

  “All Mag and I see are more blocks. What’s your view like?”

  “Come by and see for yourself,” said Emil. “It’s breathtaking.”

  On a wall, beside the old portrait of Mihai, was an austere photograph of Comrade Woznica and his wife. She was much younger. Her nose turned up, and her eyes were spread a little wide, but even through the formal pose you could tell what had attracted him to her. What had attracted her to him-besides the comforts of Party lodging-was less apparent.

  Woznica returned with a tray of glasses that tapped together as his overexcited hands shook. We joined him around the coffee table. Vodkas, with fresh limes squeezed into them. Despite all the improvements, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a lime.

  “So,” I said, after we’d touched glasses to health, “can you tell us about your wife?”

  Woznica took a deep breath that seemed to drain his energy. “Well. This happened three nights ago-”

  “Friday night,” offered Emil.

  “Yes, yes.” He leaned back into the sofa. “I had returned from a special meeting of the Pharmaceutical Section-distribution problems, very troublesome-it was late for me. Eight at night? Yes. Eight, eight-thirty. I came in and called for her. Svetla, I called. That’s my wife. Svetla. There was no answer. Very surprising. But I went into the kitchen, and that was what worried me. The cabinets, yes, they were open- all open. And the pots and dishes and forks and spoons-they were all over the floor!” As he talked, his hands were on his knees, the sofa, his glass, his chin, his ear. “I called her name loudly- Svetla! Svetla! But still no answer! I ran through the apartment, checking everywhere, but no, she was nowhere. And now, three days later, still no Svetla.”

  Emil set down his empty glass. “Her clothes? We were told-”

  “Yes yes,” he answered, nodding and flushing. “I should have said before. Some dresses were missing. Whoever took her is prepared to hold her a long time.”

  I shot Emil a glance; he caught it.

  “What about the neighbors?” Emil asked. “Have you talked to them?”

  “I have, Comrade Inspectors, I have.” He seemed proud of his foresight. “But the downstairs neighbor, Comrade Ioana Lipescu, is so terribly deaf she never heard a thing. She’s very old-her husband, who I knew from the Ministry, died a year ago. We live on the top floor, and these walls keep out noises. I was going to talk to the family on the ground floor, but to be terribly honest, I don’t want word getting out. At least, not until we’ve found her. For a man like me…” He finally ran out of words.

  “Of course,” said Emil.

  “And relatives? Are there any we can speak to?”

  Woznica opened his hands. “Feel free to speak with her father, but he returned to Russia a year ago, after we married.”

  I took out my notepad to make this seem like a bureaucratic question. “You and your wife-how well have you been getting along recently? Any arguments? Disagreements?”

  He took it very well. A sad smile came over him, and he shook his head more slowly than I would have thought him capable. “Comrade Inspectors, my Svetla is an angel. Truly. I don’t say this as a husband; I say it because it is
true. She is very agreeable. We are always of a like mind on all issues.” The smile was gradually disappearing. “My Svetla, you have to understand, she has a weak constitution. This has been a hard year for her, the last months-yes, six months-spent in bed. In June I took her to the baths at Trebon, I thought it would help. And for a little while, yes, it seemed to. But then she suffered more, the poor thing. She’s too weak to get up on her own, you understand? I have to help her exercise in her room so her muscles-so they don’t degenerate. In the Health Ministry we know how to take care of people. I know you ask the question because you are good investigators, you have to ask. But my Svetla, were she to decide to do so, is too weak to pack her clothes and leave me.” The smile was returning, though his eyes were wet. “And why should she want to leave me? I give her everything I have. I nurse her. She is my little angel.”

  3

  We took a quick survey of her windowless bedroom-a vast, too-soft bed, half-full wardrobe, wide-mirrored vanity filled with all kinds of blush and mascara and lipsticks. If she had left on her own, she wasn’t interested in doing her face. On the outside of the bedroom door was a pale square with four screw holes where a lock had once been. Woznica explained: “The previous tenants had, yes, a child. Sometimes, you know, they had to lock him in.”

  I could never imagine locking Agnes in her room.

  “What do you think?” Emil asked as we walked back to the station.

  I stopped for a crowd of teenagers in exercise shorts to jog by. “How can he be fat with so much energy?”

  “If you can afford it, anything’s possible.”

  Emil was the one militiaman who knew this firsthand. Lena had brought an unnationalized fortune to their marriage, and though they lived among the rabble, one look at Lena gave them away. She visited the station in current Western fashions, new hairstyles, and though she wore little jewelry, the long neck beneath her black, bobbed hair was hereditarily built to support a string of pearls. Her drinking problem, and the fact that he had saved her life, were the only reasons any of us could figure for her choosing a clumsy peasant like Emil for a life mate.