The Confession (3 page)

Magda’s father
was still sturdy despite the weathering he’d taken over the years, and could probably even stand up to me, were it to ever come to that. He was nearly as big as I was, and I’d wondered often if this was part of Magda’s attraction to me, that I was a large man, like her father.

We’d eaten the apples, which were blander than they smelled, and the women had gone inside. Teodor uncorked a bottle of northern red for us, but did not pour. This was the obligation of entering his house and eating his food: the talk. For a while, we only looked out at the thousand hectares he shared with nearly a hundred other families. Pavel burrowed frantically into clumps of hot earth.

“So it didn’t work,” he said finally. “What now?”

“The same.”

“You wait for it to go to hell.”

“Something like that.”

Teodor gazed at the spindly bushes that separated their personal plot from the fields, then rocked his head from one side to the other.

This was the long silence in which Teodor worked. It made me—and he knew this—want to clarify that I wasn’t simply admitting defeat. For the last four years I’d known what was going on. I’d seen it in her, in myself, and I’d done what I could. Maybe I wasn’t bright enough to know what to do; maybe we were both stupid in such matters. So we listened to our friends and family, who told us we needed to get out of the city. We needed peace. Together in her parents’ small dacha in the woods near Sárospatak, over the space of three weeks, we would find what we’d lost along the way. But Magda’s patience had crumbled.
This is all too self-conscious,
she said before she left.
You can’t force this kind of thing
.

“I don’t think she wants to,” I told him. “She’s always the one to walk out.”

“And you didn’t chase her down, did you?”

I looked at my oversized hands, at the rings on each finger.

“You think you’ve got problems.” He poured our glasses and watched as I swallowed mine quickly. “I got a letter from a friend in Warsaw. You know what’s been going on there? It’s not in
The Spark,
I can tell you that.” He tapped his glass on the table. “Demonstrations in Poznan, that’s what. Back in June they had days of it. Workers out in the street because they were
hungry
. Then the troops came in, shooting. Seventy-four killed. Not by Russian troops, not like you’d think. But by their own boys. Polish soldiers killing Polish workers.”

I poured myself another. He was right; I hadn’t heard any of this.

“When that happens,” said Teodor, “you get your bearings again. It’s only in peacetime you have the luxury of divorce.”

She kept
Pavel on her lap as I drove, and the dog slept, blissful and mute. I asked her about tomorrow, her first day at school. She shrugged. “Did you study your French?”

“A little.”

I had been hoping to get her into the French high school at the beginning of Yalta Boulevard. Her state-run school, the “Rosa Luxembourg,” had never been much of an institution, even before the Liberation. But she’d failed the language test last May. “We can try again. There’s no shame in a second chance.”

She shrugged again, then after a moment asked the question, easily, trying to make it sound as if it hadn’t been the only thing on her mind ever since I had shown up. “Mama didn’t make it?”

I shook my head and watched the road, but could see her mouth moving as though she was chewing on something. Maybe she was.

“How did she get home?”

“What?”

“There’s only one car.”

I glanced into the rearview and noticed a hitchhiker with a small, hand-drawn sign:
RELEASED FROM POLITICAL PRISON
. I hadn’t seen him when we approached, and that troubled me. “I drove her to the station.”

“She took the train?”

“That’s what I said.”

I understood a fraction of what she was thinking. She could not fathom how anyone could calmly drive his wife to the train station and send her away. Not without some scene; some breakdown and reconciliation.

She nodded at the road. Her cheeks and forehead were very red from her three weeks under the provincial sun. I always insisted she wear a hat, but she thought she looked stupid in hats, which was untrue. And Magda’s parents seemed to think any amount of sun was a virtue, that even when my daughter’s pale skin turned red and crisp it was only a sign of health. She looked thin, too, and I rashly vowed never to leave her with them again.

“Did you have a good time?”

She grunted something incomprehensible.

“Well? What did you do?”

She pulled too hard on Pavel’s ear, and the dog made a squeaking noise in his sleep. “Picked apples, bought apples, talked
apples
.”

I laid a hand on her shoulder, then tugged her earlobe. “Miss me?”

She pulled her head away, but smiled. “Of
course
not.”

They had
been working on the Ninth District for as long as I could remember. Whenever I left town for an extended period, I fantasized that when I crossed back over the muddy Tisa and drove north, the roads would be smooth, the piles of broken concrete gone. But now, as then, there were still three unfinished shells, and the road that wrapped around each unit of eight blocks had still not been paved. Long ago it had been plowed, some gravel thrown halfheartedly on it, but with each hard rain, the road slid into the ditches. Now that it was dry, the Škoda whined, climbing out of potholes, and crunched when it hit them. Pavel sprang up in the backseat, barking at a couple strays running past. Ágnes was unconcerned, but I calculated damages in my head. The six-story blocks of Unit 15 to our left, set at an angle to the road, were lit yellow by the descending sun, and I wondered if she was up there, watching us navigate the holes and turn off the road into the well of shadow between the buildings, trying to get home. At least I hoped this with every muscle in my tight, sweating hands.

Children at the next corner climbed over a hill of concrete slabs, and just beyond them two slumped, babushkaed women fed chickens in the heat that in the provinces had been almost invigorating; here, it was only stifling. I parked by two other, older Škodas and a Russian make I didn’t know and grabbed our bags from the backseat. Ágnes took Pavel. As we stepped over dry rivulets, one of the women with the chickens called to me: “Come arrest my brother, Comrade Inspector! I’ve been waiting a month!”

I measured out my syllables, as if for a child: “We’ve been through this, Claudia. I can’t arrest your brother for drinking in his own home. Anyway, homicide inspectors don’t take care of this. You have the number to call.”

“See what I told you?” she said to her friend, who hadn’t looked up from the chickens until now. “Just does his hours and goes
home
.”

The friend shook her head, muttering something I couldn’t hear. I started to tell Ágnes to hurry up, but she was already ahead of me, looking down on Pavel, his leg raised, pissing absently on the corner of our block, Unit 15:6.

The mailbox was empty, which was a good sign. The stairs had been recently cleaned, though nothing could get rid of the smell of boiled cabbage, and on each landing someone had set out leafy green plants. On the top floor, there were none. Our door was locked. The apartment felt stuffy, unlived-in, and I began speculating wildly. We opened the windows, the fresh air bringing in voices and the hack of a car coughing to life.

“She’s not here,” said Ágnes as she set Pavel on the rug. He did not run away, only peered around at the sofa and table and the wide German radio against the wall.

The bed didn’t look slept in. But Magda made it up every morning; it told me nothing. The icebox, though, had fresh milk. Ágnes took out some water. She drank from the bottle and leaned against the counter, looking at me.

I hoped she wouldn’t repeat the obvious, because if she did I was afraid I might shout at her. She didn’t. She instead drank her water and left the kitchen, making
tsk tsk
sounds, calling for Pavel.

When she came across the note on the radio, I was still in the kitchen. The curtain was pulled, so it was very dark. Ágnes, from the doorway, said, “Daddy?”

I didn’t answer right away, but noticed that she’d turned on the radio. Shostakovich murmured through the house. “What is it?”

“She left a note for you.”

Something seemed to crack inside me. She had a small sheet of paper in her hand. It was almost weightless, and when I brought it into the light of the living room it shook in my hand. I unfolded it by the window and got a clear view of the angular script. I read it twice to be sure. Then I almost laughed. It was a telephone message. Stefan, my old friend and Militia partner, had called. While I was on vacation—if that’s what it could be called—there’d been a case.

“Daddy?” said Ágnes. She sounded afraid, so I smiled and turned up the Shostakovich.

“It’s nothing,” I said, my smile now authentic. “Someone’s been killed.”

I slept
on the couch, because this was where I’d been sleeping for months. The mosquitoes woke me, but I survived by pulling the sheet over my head and sweating. I heard her come in, saw the dim light from the stairwell as she opened the door, then smelled the cigarettes on her clothes when she passed. Pavel whimpered in recognition. She didn’t look at me, and I didn’t say a thing.

A thump to the head woke me. Ágnes’s stern face was in mine—she was dressed. “We’re going to be late,” she said.

“Have you walked your dog?”

Her expression relaxed.

“Well then,” I said.

I waited for the hot water to reach our floor, then shaved and gave myself a quick wash from the sink. I toweled off and went into the bedroom for clothes. Magda was still sleeping under a mess of sheets, her walnut hair curled against the pillow, and a bare, dirty foot stuck out below. I considered waking her, then realized she was probably already awake, playing dead until I left the apartment.

I drove Ágnes to a café in the center before sending her off to school. I always did this on first days—the drive and the breakfast were to mark something important. There was the usual mess of blue work clothes and old, quiet men in berets who perked up at the sight of a young girl. We sat by the window. “Are you nervous?” She shrugged and pushed her glasses closer to her eyes. “First days are exciting.” But she didn’t answer; she was becoming quieter as she got older. She was becoming more like her mother.

Emil Brod and Brano Sev were the only ones in the office this early, and Brano, behind his files, turned his round face with its three moles and gave the usual, polite half nod. The last time I’d seen him, the state security inspector had a mouth full of metal braces, but now they were off, and his teeth, when he flashed a brief, self-conscious smile, were straight and true. It was a clever lie. We’d worked with him over a decade now, but like all the world’s secret policemen, his world was run by a dark logic none of us was privy to.

Emil’s blond hair was combed to a perfect part, like a schoolboy’s. “You’re back,” he said, smiling.

“I’m back.”

He sat on the corner of my desk. The smile wouldn’t leave him. “So?”

He was one of the few I’d told. I shook my head.

Emil was the youngest in Homicide, only thirty. We’d given him a hard time when he was first transferred here—there were misunderstandings on all sides—but after a while he became part of the wood-work. “No decisions, I guess?”

“We wait.”

“You know, Lena’s still willing to talk with her. It might help.”

I didn’t want his crazy wife talking to mine. “I still don’t think so.”

“You hear about Leon?”

“What?”

“His mother died.”

I looked up at him.

“Two weeks ago. We all went to the funeral, even the Comrade himself,” he said, tilting his head toward Brano’s desk. “Leon’s taking it badly.”

“I imagine.”

“He adored Seyrana. I liked her a lot too.”

“I never met her.”

He shrugged in a way that suggested these kinds of events were beyond us all, then got off my desk.

There was nothing to do until Stefan showed up and walked me through the case, so I rolled a fresh sheet into my typewriter, gave the ring on my left pinkie a half turn, and stared at the page. I’d written the book on this, adapting my touch to the stiff
T
, the rusting carriage return, and its fragile, gray body.

A half hour later, the paper was still blank. I scratched a mosquito bite on my ankle, then typed a few words to get it going. But it went nowhere. I tapped my fingers on the edge of my desk and gazed at the ubiquitous portrait of Prime Minister Mihai—young, a wave of healthy hair, a smile that begged to be trusted.

Finally, Stefan stormed into the room, his satchel banging against the doors and clattering to the floor as he arrived at his desk. He was looking fatter than usual, and his shrapnel limp was stronger today, but he had a pink, lively glow above his sparse beard. “There you are,” he said, out of breath.

We shook hands, a little formally.

“You get my message?”

“Magda wrote it down.”

“Good, good.” He rubbed a hand through his whiskers. He seemed to be deciding something. “What are we waiting for?” He got his satchel again, and I followed him out of the office.