The Confession Read online

  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 Ágnes 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.

  “It looks like shell shock,” he said.

  “Those shakes?”

  “Was he in the war?”

  “That would be a long time ago.”

  He shrugged. “Let’s check his file.”

  Files on public officials were kept in the basement of the Central Committee on Victory Square. We caught a bus from Woznica’s neighborhood, got out at the vast circle of roads around a huge statue of a man and woman holding up a torch, and made our way to the columned Central Committee building. Before it stood the Lenin of all capitals, a recent gift from Our Friend, arm elevated like the couple in the middle of the square, stepping into the future, the wind raising his jacket. A guard stood smoking at the small side door, beneath the emblem of the hawk at rest. The sight of our Militia certificates did nothing to excite him.

  The records room was down a dark, musty corridor, and Miloš, the old Slovak record keeper, wasn’t known for his helpfulness. Beneath a large, smiling Mihai, he scratched the gray stubble on his cheek. “I don’t imagine you have the proper forms, do you?”

  “What forms?” I asked.

  Miloš opened his hands. “Read your regulations, comrades. Article seventeen-fifty. Permissions for all Militia inquiries must be prefaced by signatures from your superiors. Isn’t that old Karl Moska?”

  Emil shook his head. “Subsection three,” he quoted: “‘This article pertains to investigations not previously authorized by Militia decrees G-34 or G-72.’ These are blanket decrees which cover Homicide Department work.”

  Now I was impressed.

  Miloš shoved a thumb over his shoulder at the wall of black drawers. “Don’t mess them up.”

  Comrade Malik Woznica, his brief file told us, was forty-eight years old and married to Svetla Levin (daughter of a Russian tailor who had moved here with the Red Army). He had been suffering from an unknown neurological disease for the last decade. The doctor’s report offered no answers, but speculated that the cause might be found in a mining town where Comrade Woznica had spent two years as Party boss before developing his condition. The water in that region, said the doctor, was known to have been contaminated by mercury, and the town was almost famous—in the medical community, at least—for its cancer rates. As for Comrade Woznica, only morphine seemed to help the condition. I wondered aloud if Woznica was hooked on his medication.

  Emil shut the file. “The way he was jerking around, I’d say he hasn’t touched it for a long time.”

  “Maybe she took his prescription with her. For herself.”

  “Or to sell. But she couldn’t move in the first place.”

  “Give me the name of that doctor, will you?”

  Back at the station, I called Dr. Sergius Brandt’s office at Unity Medical, but his secretary curtly informed me that the doctor was out of town. “When will he
be back?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’d like an appointment.”

  I listened to static while she, I assumed, examined his schedule. Emil was on his own telephone, checking in with Lena. He was smiling.

  “Two weeks.”

  “What?”

  “The doctor will be able to see you in two weeks. Wednesday the twenty-first.”

  “This is official business,” I told her. “I’m not a patient, I’m a Militia inspector.”

  “Comrade Doctor Brandt is a busy man.”

  “So am I. I’ll be there at noon. Tomorrow.”

  Before she could protest, I hung up.

  4

  Ágnes showed off her athletic uniform that evening. They’d just arrived at school for the Pioneers’ new fitness campaign. Like the students I’d seen in the street: white short-sleeved shirt and shorts that stopped just above the knee. “Aren’t those a little revealing?” I asked. She modeled in the living room to a Prague Symphony rendition of Mahler, her milky legs goose-stepping. “Where are your glasses?”

  No question could faze her. She demonstrated the new, scientific exercises—sharp bows from the waist, arms out, bent, forward, down. When she stopped finally, her face was as red as the Pioneer scarf.

  We went in to help Magda with dinner, but she was already plating it. While we ate, Ágnes went through the eleven-point Pioneer pledge she was supposed to memorize: “One: We the Red Pioneers honor our socialist motherland by wearing this red scarf. Two: We the Red Pioneers value learning as it advances the wisdom of our motherland. Three: We the Red Pioneers respect our parents—”

  “That’s a good one,” I said.

  “Shh,” Ágnes warned. “You’ll throw me off. Four: We the Red Pioneers love peace and the Soviet Union, and hate all warmongers. Five…”

  She stumbled over number seven, the one about loving and respecting work and all working people, but otherwise did a fine job. It was impressive enough to provoke a smile from Magda.

  “You coming tonight?” I asked her.

  “What tonight?”

  “Georgi’s party.”

  She gave an exaggerated expression of anguish, as if she’d forgotten, then shook her head. “I’ll stay here. I don’t want to leave Ágnes alone.”

  “I’m fine by myself,” she muttered through a mouthful.

  “She’s old enough. Come on, you’ll enjoy it.”

  She raised her eyebrows at me: no contradictions in front of the child. “Really. I’d rather spend some time with my daughter.” She turned to her daughter. “We’ll do something nice. Girls’ night.”

  Ágnes shrugged and went back to her plate.

  5

  In addition to the same ten from my last visit, there were twenty more crammed into that small apartment. Georgi had painted a red banner that hung over the kitchen door: ARTISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

  “You like?” he asked me, his drunkenness clear from the first glance.

  “It’s clever,” I lied.

  Georgi stumbled through to the kitchen. Someone had opened the window over the sink to cut through the smoke and humidity of so many sweating bodies, and a brandy was shoved into my hand. I noticed Vera—the hard stare and red lips playing on the edge of her glass made her unavoidable—then the others, squeezed tight: pairs and threesomes in heated conversations and lonely drinkers peering around in anticipation or nodding off.

  “Did your Frenchman make it out all right?”

  Georgi leaned close, looking baffled. I repeated myself. “Ah! Louis sent word from Paris! Come, come!”

  I followed him back to the living room, pushing past faces that said Ferenc so good to and Where have you been hiding and I’ve been wanting to talk, until we had reached the bedroom. There was a young couple on his small bed, half-dressed. The girl tugged her bra strap up to her shoulder; the boy blushed. I didn’t know them, and neither, apparently, did Georgi. “Who did you come with?”

  There was some confusion as they buttoned their clothes and tried to manage an answer. “We just…well, everyone knew about…it was…no one, okay?” The boy, a Gypsyish southerner, finally stood straight. “Is there a problem with us being here?”

  Georgi gave me a sidelong glance. “I don’t like my bed being soiled by other people’s fluids.”

  They were edging along the wall toward the door. The girl’s lipstick was smeared to her chin. “No need to get all heated up,” said the boy.

  “I’m not heated,” said Georgi. “It’s just my friend here. He’s a little protective. He keeps breaking people into little pieces. I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Both of them looked up at me, and when I laid my hand over my rings and cracked my knuckles, they bolted.

  Louis had sent a picture postcard of Notre Dame, with a question mark and an exclamation point scratched beneath it.

  My dear Comrade! Here in the bourgeois capital looking for ways to take back my surplus value. Thoughts of my days with you warm me in this cold place. Please look into coming to Paris, where I can show you the hospitality you’ve shown me.

  The scribbled Louis at the bottom was illegible.

  “He’s got your sense of humor,” I said.

  Georgi put it back in his bureau. “You going to the Union meeting on Friday?”

  “The Writer’s Union?”

  “What else?”

  “Haven’t been to one of those in years.”

  He squeezed my knee. “That’s because you’re a sweetheart. You stopped going when they kicked me out.”

  I shrugged. “Coincidence.”

  He patted my cheek and gave a bleary smile, then raised his glass. “To our Magyar comrades-in-arms. Kick those bastards out!”

  I allowed myself a slow, quiet intoxication. It was a gift for writing again, for surviving Stefan’s stab at collapsing my marriage, and for not thinking too deeply about Magda’s late nights out, with Lydia. I swept through the rooms and back again, caught by half conversations about Budapest and Moscow and Washington, DC, and the Suez, and about writing. Stanislaus was working on a series of poems remembering the end of Stalinism, and Bojan was in the final edits of a surrealist memoir—a “dream book.” A couple artists were ridiculing Vlaicu, probably the most popular state painter at that time. A journalist I’d never met before provoked a few words on what I’d been writing and seemed genuinely interested in my vague answers, which helped my mood. There were more students, a few making out, and another young couple in a corner, telling Georgi loudly that there would be a strike very soon. “Citywide,” the girl said earnestly. “It will be unambiguous. They’ll know how the People feel.”

  Georgi was humoring their optimism, but an older painter whose name I didn’t remember asked how they expected to get word around. “How are we supposed to know when to strike?”

  “We won’t need to utter a word,” said her boyfriend. “The government will tell everyone when to strike. All they need to do is close down one demonstration. Just one. Then the People will react.”

  The painter laughed, and the ensuing argument lasted a long time, all shouts and condescending one-liners.

  Then, very late, as the party was clearing out and I thought I’d avoided it, Vera cornered me.

  She had made herself up very well: Her dark hair hung loose down her back, and she’d worked hard on blackening her eyes. Red sweater and one of those tight skirts I’d seen a lot of in the summer. Stockings and heels. I’d noticed all this when I first saw her in the kitchen, but now, drunk and a little aroused, I couldn’t ignore it.

  “Where’s your lovely wife?”

  “Home. Your husband?”

  “Writing, somewhere. Why don’t I ever see you anymore?”

  “We run in different circles.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  Vera had studied philosophy in Switzerland during the war, and returned to teach and marry her childhood love, Karel. But over the years their fights had been as public as her subsequent affa
irs. When she turned her attention to me the previous Christmas, no one knew about the problems in my marriage, but Vera’s philosopher eye had been able to divine our secret without much trouble.

  I tried to change the subject to the one still lingering around us—the fighting in the streets of Budapest—but she stood on her toes and leaned close to my ear.

  “Don’t bore me,” she breathed. “I expect better from you.” Then she rubbed a hand down my tingling arm. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  I lit it with a match because I’d never replaced the lighter Martin had taken. She stared at me through the smoke. I said, “Ágnes is doing some fitness program now. They gave out uniforms.”

  “She’s a pretty girl. Are the boys showing interest?”

  “I hope not.”

  She picked something off her lip with her long nails.

  I started rambling about wanting Ágnes to go to a foreign school in order to learn languages. “The French high school is exceptional, but they won’t take her unless she passes the exam. She’s not studying her French.”

  But Vera wasn’t listening. She gazed at the living room, which was empty except for the young couple we’d caught in Georgi’s bed. They were on the sofa, and the girl was determined to smear her lipstick again. Vera stroked my back. The drunkenness slid up to my scalp. When I turned back, she was back on her toes, our faces close, and her lips were on mine. I could taste smoke and bitter lipstick in her long kiss, then her tongue sliding against my teeth, probing deeper. Her hands held my head still.

  It was Christmas again, her body pressed on top of mine, her saliva filling my mouth, hips shifting over me.

  I held on to her waist and pulled her closer.

  Then I let go. I pushed her down by her shoulders. She looked up at me, licking her lips. “You want to go somewhere?”

  I shook my head. I even said no—either to make it clear to her, or to myself.

  I could tell by the sudden widening of her jaw that her teeth were clenched behind her lips. “Ferenc, I’m not going to wait forever.”