The Confession (18 page)

Stefan was
at the drinks table with Magda, while Lena entertained three officials in a corner, one hand fluttering over her head in an imitation of something mysterious. Emil went to save her. Stefan and Magda didn’t seem to be talking when I approached them, and I turned this over in my head throughout the rest of the night, trying to ascertain any meaning, but finding nothing. Stefan told me he had been watching Antonín’s apartment, but without luck—no one had approached it. “What about you?”

“I’ve got Antonín’s ex-wife’s name. She changed it to Sofia, and married a clerk named Mathew Eiers.”

“You got that from the records?”

I nodded at Vlaicu at the end of the table, filling up a glass with wine. He noticed me looking and wandered off.

Magda whispered in my ear: “Can we go?”

“In a little while.”

“We should talk.”

“Later,” I said.

I tried to give each painting a good look. I took my time, cradling my drink, and examined the brushstrokes. I knew Moska did a little painting, but I’d never tried it, and I was always impressed by that much attention to detail. In writing, it was simple to change a word here and there. With painting, each little mistake seemed unfixable. I told this to Vlaicu, and he shrugged. “You paint over it. It’s the same thing.” He’d regained his easy drunkenness. “Painting’s a breeze. Writing is too literal. Everyone knows exactly what you’re saying, so if you make a mistake, everyone sees it.”

Stefan and Magda kept their distance from one another. Magda chained herself to the drinks and smiled and nodded at the old men who ogled her. Stefan lingered around Emil and Lena, getting more drunk himself, pointing with his cigarette hand at the paintings and laughing. Vlaicu asked him what he thought.

“Of this?” He pointed at a picture of workmen pouring tar for a highway.

Vlaicu shrugged.

“It’s the most useless thing I’ve ever seen. How can you live with yourself?”

Vlaicu smiled thinly. “Lay into it, Comrade.”

So Stefan did. He called it empty and redundant. “Why not use a camera? Save you time. But don’t make other people look at it; they look at this dirt every day.”

“Maybe that’s my point,” said Vlaicu.

“Your point? Paint a pile of dog crap next. We see it daily on the sidewalk, you know.”

“Don’t you think labor has meaning?”

“It’s to get a job done—that’s its meaning.” Then he leaned forward and, in a whisper high enough for a few of us to hear, said, “You’ve sold your soul, Comrade Vlaicu.”

No one expected the artist to swing. His fist caught Stefan’s jaw, then they were on the ground, tangled, throwing punches as best they could. I pulled Stefan off, and some officials took Vlaicu into their protection.

Outside, I noticed how drunk Magda was. She was laughing about the fight, leaning on Lena’s elbow, then she started to cry. Lena patted her head like a mother. Stefan said nothing as he stumbled back into the darkness, and the rest of us piled into Emil’s car.

Surprisingly, Ágnes was on the sofa, snoring. Pavel, dozing beside her, woke up and trotted over. “He needs to pee,” I said. Magda wandered off to the bedroom. I carried Ágnes to her bed, then took Pavel downstairs. He crapped on the front steps, and I wondered what a painting of that would really look like.

Magda lay in bed staring at the ceiling.

“You said you wanted to talk.”

She shook her head. “Stefan,” she said, but could hardly get the word out.

“What about him?”

“He told me days ago. When you were at Georgi’s. That he told you.”

I sat on the edge of the mattress. “He hasn’t told me everything. Are you going to tell me?”

She tried to look at me, but her eyes crossed and uncrossed, so she returned to the ceiling, then shut them. “It was a long time ago, Ferenc. You were gone. I couldn’t—”

But I was standing up again and leaving. If she wasn’t going to be honest about the present, about everything, then I didn’t want to hear.

Her hangover
lasted all Sunday, and she stayed in bed, the lights out and the blinds drawn. I brought water and lunch, but whatever she took in she immediately threw up.

“Don’t tell me she drank last night,” said Ágnes over breakfast.

“Sometimes it happens.”

“Maybe I should start drinking.”

“Maybe you should take Pavel out for a walk.”

Magda was able to get a small dinner to stay down, and as she ate in the dark room she asked what she had said last night. “I don’t remember at all. But we spoke.”

“You didn’t say anything, really.”

“I said something.”

“Do you want to say something now?”

She considered it, frowning through the pain. “We should talk, yes, but I can’t. Not in this state.”

“Have you figured out what you want?”

She looked at me, her expression still painful. “I wish I knew, Ferenc. God, you don’t know how much I wish that.”

I pulled the blanket to her chin.

Ágnes was rolling a ball across the living room floor for Pavel to bring back, but the dog was uninterested. She stood up, retrieved it from the corner, and came back to try again. “I think we need a new dog. Pavel just isn’t working out.”

I sat on the sofa. “What kind of dog would work out?”

“Something larger, that’s for sure. Pavel can’t keep up when I run.”

“Maybe we could make some wheels for him.”

“Wheels and an engine.”

“Tell me about school. Is it going better this year?”

She nodded into her chest. “Better than last year, yeah. I learned about cosmonauts.”

“Cosmo
what?
”

“Cosmonauts,” she repeated just as incomprehensibly. “People who go into space. The USSR has big plans for putting us in space. Communes on the Moon.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” I said. “I’m still looking into the French school. But you’ve got to pass that exam.”

“Maybe I should stay where I am.”

Her hair needed a trim. “I thought we’d decided to give it another try.”

“I’ve made friends this year. I don’t want to just leave them.”

Then she pulled her foot toward herself and started playing with her toes. You learn a child’s behaviors so they become simple clues to the inner life. I wanted this school for her, but knew that nothing would come of it if she didn’t want to go. “What’s his name?”

“What?”

“The name of the boy you’re in love with.”

“Daddy.”
She glared at me, but her mouth was smiling.

I arrived
at the office early and found Mikhail Kaminski hunched over my desk, hand on his forehead, absorbed in a slim stack of typed pages. He’d had a haircut since I’d seen him last, his mustache was trimmed to a razor’s width, and his coat had large shoulders that rose as his elbows spread on the desk. Then I realized what he had before him.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He looked up, blinking, and smiled as if suddenly recognizing me. “Ferenc!” He tapped the sheets with that trigger finger. “You’re really very talented. I had no idea.” He pushed himself back in my chair, scratching the floor, and crossed his hands in his lap. “Why don’t you sit down?”

There was something in his voice. So I took Emil’s chair. “You’ve been going through my things.”

He nodded at the papers. “How do you do this? I mean, all I write are reports. They’re so dry. But you, Ferenc, you’ve got a way with words. How do you do that?”

“I work at it. Now please put them back where you found them.”

He lifted the top sheet and read aloud: “
She moved through the world as if nothing was worth her effort, but she nonetheless influenced the outcome of situations. The proper word, or a subtle gesture, and someone was filling her empty glass with wine
. You see what I mean? I feel like I’ve known this woman before. You’ve nailed it just right. I’m impressed.” He tapped the pages again. “Impressed, and a little disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

“I’m not an artist, not like you. But like anyone, I enjoy a good read. I know what I like. It’s a shame to see your great talent wasted like this.”

I waited.

“This,” he said, laying his hand on my words, “It’s so…so
unreliable
. All this—how should I put it?—this
me me me
. You understand?”

“I don’t think I do.”

He crossed a leg over his knee. “Who do you think would be interested in this, Ferenc?”

I shrugged.

“There’s my point! No one, except for yourself. You should be writing about subjects that unite people, subjects we can all relate to! For example, there’s a wonderful Soviet writer, whose name I can’t remember now, but he wrote about the building of a dam in Siberia. Now
that’s
a story! You see the human drama of people working together for a great aim, and when you read it, you feel a part of that endeavor. And when, in spite of foreign saboteurs and some nasty hooliganism, the dam succeeds, you can’t help but clap and feel the same pride those workers feel. But this,” he said, abruptly changing tone. “This is about you, and only you. And this relationship—this marriage—what depressing people! The story about the dam,
that’s
what people want to read. I ask you again, who would want to read your story?”

I wanted to reply, but there was no satisfactory answer.

“I’ll tell you who,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning closer. “People who revel in their pain. You see what I’m saying? Healthy people want to read about camaraderie, about healthy love, about how to be valuable to their society. They want lessons on life. What does this teach them? How to fail in life. Do you plan on publishing this?”

I was wordless. Then, finally, I managed: “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Well. I wonder. This stuff is bourgeois, cosmopolitan. It’s
rootless
. This sort of thing could be dangerous.”

“For me?”

“For the city, for the country, and yes, I suppose, even for you. Keep it to yourself, Ferenc. That’s my little bit of literary criticism. Keep these kinds of thoughts to yourself, and for the rest of us explore the things that people really care about. We want healthy writers. Healthy writers are concerned with progress, enthusiasm for life, human industry. Unhealthy writers…well, they’re the kind of people who walk away from battle when their country needs them. They attack their superiors. Am I making myself clear?”

I nodded, my fingers fiddling with my rings.

“Good,” he said, still smiling. He patted my shoulder. “Keep at it, you’re very good. And I look forward to reading your great proletarian novel one of these days.”

I watched him walk away, his casual stride, and all the organs in my exhausted body hardened into heavy rocks.

Kaminski wasn’t there just to critique my fiction. He greeted each inspector as he arrived, as if they were all old friends who had been unfortunately separated from him for a while. Then Moska came out of his office and asked us to gather around. “New regulations,” he said. “We’ve fitted all the Militia cars with two-way radios. We’re later than a lot of cities getting this done, but the funding came through, I think for obvious reasons. From now on, whenever you go out on a case, you’re supposed to use one of our cars rather than your own. So we can keep track of you.”

Kaminski shook his head. “It’s so you can call for help whenever you need it. The streets aren’t as safe as they once were, we all know this.” He must have taken our silence for agreement, because he clapped his hands together, grinning hugely. “You may have wondered where I’ve been the last week and a half. Out west in Budapest, as they say. You’d be surprised how good things are now. They’ve cleared up the barricades, it was a mess. Busses turned over, set on fire. It took some real pigs to do that. But you’ll be happy to know that now it’s peaceful, and they’re busy rebuilding. It’s becoming almost normal.”

Brano Sev gave a lesson in the garage, all of us bent over the open doors of a new Mercedes. “You pick it up like so. Press here and speak. The reply comes from here.” He pointed at a small speaker grille. “When a message comes in, you do the same thing. Pick it up, press, and talk. But remember that when you press the speaking button you cannot hear what the central office is saying.” He turned it on by flicking a switch. A red light glowed and we heard static. He pressed the button, silencing the static. “Central, this is a test. Can you hear me?”

When he released the button, a garbled woman’s voice said,
This is Central, Sev. We hear you fine
.

“Who’s that?” asked Stefan.

“Regina Haliniak. She’s new.”

“A new girl,” he said, smiling at the rest of us. “Cute?”

Brano looked at him, expressionless, and switched off the radio. And I stared at Stefan, disturbed that, with Magda, he could even joke about a voice on a radio.

When we got back to the office, there were two notes on my desk: one from the lab, saying that they had clear prints from five different people in Antonín’s apartment—I could pick them up whenever I wanted; the second was from Moska, asking to see me in his office.

“Ferenc, you were looking for the Kullmann woman?”

“I’m going over today. But her name is different now.”

“Yes, yes. I know. Sofia Eiers.”

“How did you know?”

“Because she’s just been reported dead, Ferenc, and the only names I learn are those that don’t matter anymore.”