The Confession (12 page)

Kaminski was
waiting for us. He’d already assembled Moska and Stefan, both of whom looked worried, and after we arrived Leonek sauntered in. The Russian waved us over to Brano Sev’s desk, but Sev himself was nowhere to be seen.

There was a demonstration, he told us, in one of the housing units near the Tisa. “Hooligans.” He shook his head. “Now, we’ve no plans to do anything to these people. Let them shout their heads off. We just need a show of support out there, to make sure they don’t set fire to themselves.” A smile, a half laugh, then he opened his hands, the right index finger jerking. “A lot of our regular Militia have called in sick. I don’t know. The flu or something. And we need more warm bodies out there. Can you spare an afternoon?”

Moska waited for the affirmation that didn’t come, then said, “They can spare an afternoon.”

Within the half hour, all of us—except Kaminski—were in the dim rear of a van, rattling through cobbled streets. There were no windows, so we looked at each other and at our hands.

“Where’s Sev?” asked Leonek.

Moska shrugged.

Stefan and I were preoccupied by our mutual vicinity. The cut on his forehead had healed and disappeared. His beard had grown out in a blond mess, and I wondered what Magda thought of it. I tried not to wonder about anything else. Emil, beside me, was quietly accepting this new aspect of his job. Leonek cracked open the rear door and nearly tumbled out. We pulled him back in. “We should have turned left back there,” he said in a high whisper. “I bet they’re just taking us to prison.”

“No one’s going to prison,” I said.

“Sit down,” Moska said as we clattered through a pothole. “You’ll hit your head.”

“I’ll get out of here is what I’ll do.” But after a moment he sat down again.

The demonstration wasn’t as large as Kaminski had us believing. There were maybe fifty students and workers milling around the entrance to an apartment block, a few with signs that said
SOLIDARITY
and
EYES TO BUDAPEST
and
FIRST HUNGARY, THEN US
! There were murmurs of anxious conversation, and groans whenever more militiamen arrived in white, unmarked vans like the one we’d taken. Some were in uniform, some not. Kaminski was on the edge of the crowd, speaking with a commander from another district. He smiled when he spoke, opening his hands and moving them around in explanation. The commander then walked to a van and spoke to three young militiamen—boys, really—who began gathering short black clubs from the van.

More groans from the crowd, some worried faces. One stared at me a long time, a stout man with oil stains up and down his work clothes. Farther back was a student who I thought I recognized from Georgi’s. I stood beside Moska. “What’s going on here?”

But he didn’t answer. His repulsed expression was clear enough.

“I’m not touching that,” said Leonek when a club was offered to him.

“Orders,” said the boy.

Moska touched Leonek’s shoulder. “Take it, Leon.”

Stefan stared at his own club, as if he’d never seen one before. “It’s like the Americans say.”

“What?” I asked.

“On the radio. They say that we club and shoot demonstrators. I was beginning to doubt them.”

I put my own club under my arm. It was stiff and awkward. Then I looked at all those faces looking back at me. I saw some fear, but primarily hatred. Particularly in the students. A few in the back were trying to start a chant.
Russia out of Bu-da-pest!

A couple others picked it up, but it was a weak effort; our presence was draining their resolve. But as it went on—
Russia out of Bu-da-pest!
—the repetition began to endow them with courage. I noticed a familiar face in the rear of the crowd, open mouth shouting, helping raise their excitement. Round cheeks, straight teeth, three moles: Brano Sev, only half-disguised in a blue worker’s cap. He and a few others raised fists above their heads, their voices turning to mist. But I could see only him.

Wives and mothers leaned out of windows and shouted for their men to come back in. From above they could see there was no escape through the ring of militiamen and white vans. But no one heard them. The chanting rose, the students shouting bravely, taken by a fever, by the knowledge that this was their moment of glory—they would not stop shouting until the last Russian tank had left Budapest. Then—a
thump
on the van beside me. The raised fists held rocks that began to rain on us. Brano Sev’s piece of ragged concrete cracked a windshield.

The commander bellowed something that must have been an order, because we were all moving forward, clubs held tightly, to round them up. The chant dropped off, and when we reached the demonstrators their open hands tried to push us back. Palms pressed into my chest, faces flashed by. Someone was behind me, stopping my retreat, and we were in the midst of them, in faces and hands and shouts and sweat. Someone hit me in the jaw, and I instinctively struck out with my club. The snap of bone. A student dropped at my feet. I looked around for Emil or Leonek, or anyone, but saw only angry workers and students climbing over each other to get away. Above, women covered and uncovered their faces, screaming. This was too much. I pushed backward through the crowd, outward, elbowing anything that tried to stop me. Something hit the back of my head and I swung the club again, turning, and saw a militiaman floundering on the ground, his ear bleeding. I pushed through them, but the crowd seemed to go on forever, hysterical demonstrators and militiamen, who swung their clubs as if such a small tool could bring silence. Then I was out, and Kaminski stood shouting at me. I couldn’t hear his words, only saw his large mouth, spit-damp, his own club pointing me back into the riot. He reached for me. I grabbed his shoulders and flung him against a van and kept going.

I crossed the street and stood in front of an apartment door, then sat down. Windows slammed shut above me, then I heard gunshots. I thought I would be sick, but wasn’t. From where I sat, I saw a row of white vans, bloody men being thrown into them, and a block where women cried from their windows. Two unconscious bodies were carried into a van. I stared at my rings.

After a long time, the vans started to pull out, beginning their journeys to the prison infirmaries. Stefan and Emil appeared, beaten and numb. They noticed me and turned away. Then they parted without words. Leonek was shouting at Moska, some incomprehensible stream of abuse. Moska said nothing, then started across the street toward me, leaving Leonek to his anger.

“You got out,” he said. He looked back. There was a smear of blood from his ear to his collar; it wasn’t his blood. “Kaminski is after you. Says you attacked him. Says you refused to fight.” He brushed his shoulder with a hand. “Sounds like you just fought the wrong person.”

“Did I?” My hands were between my knees. I didn’t know what had happened to my club. “Did you see Brano?”

He turned to me.

“Sev was dressed up like a worker. This was all a setup.”

Moska grimaced, but didn’t say anything for a while. As the last van left, we saw what remained: a bloodstained sidewalk with spare pieces of clothing—a torn shirt, a shoe, some hats. A crying woman knelt over a hat, and a few dazed militiamen stood perfectly still.

“To dirty us,” said Moska.

My hands were dirty. My clothes were dirty.

Moska sat down next to me. “A trial run, to implicate ourselves. So that if they want to use us later, we won’t hesitate. You, though,” he said, but didn’t finish his sentence. He stood up and said something that, at that moment, struck me as utterly strange: “I wonder where my wife is right now.”

It took
an hour and a half to walk back to the station. I wasn’t thinking of Malik Woznica anymore. He and his morphine-addicted wife were nothing to me. A few busses passed, but I didn’t flag them down. Brano Sev had helped organize a demonstration in order to close it down. The absurd logic of state security was difficult to grasp.

If I were sent to prison—this is what I remembered telling Leonek—Ágnes and Magda would be alone, maybe even harassed. I would not be able to protect them. But I couldn’t take a club to those people. And Kaminski—I’d attacked him. That, perhaps, was my one regret. But it wasn’t a deep regret.

I didn’t go inside the station. I found my car, waited for the ignition to catch, then drove fast.

Magda was putting away groceries in the kitchen. “Ágnes is with a friend,” she said absently. Her hands shook as she closed the cabinets.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Of course I’m all right.” I was glad she didn’t look at me, because I was not all right.

Pavel followed me as I turned on the radio and went back to the kitchen. But instead of the usual Russian composers, or even staticky American crooners, I heard a Hungarian voice speaking slowly and clearly, giving news of the continued fighting in Budapest. Then another voice asked Soviet soldiers why they were killing their Hungarian brothers and sisters; why, after suffering Stalin for two decades, they were now serving worse Stalins. Magda looked up, surprised and, it seemed to me, terrified.

“You’ve been listening to the Americans?”

“No,” she said abruptly. Pavel let out a sharp cry; she’d stepped on him.

“Christ, Mag, I’m not going to arrest you for it.” I forced a smile to show that this was true.

Pavel scurried, whimpering, into the other room.

Magda turned back to the counter so I wouldn’t see her face. “Maybe it was Ágnes,” she said, then: “No, it was me.”

“Doesn’t matter. Just turn it back to something mundane when you’re finished.”

She nodded at the wall. “Of course. Yes.”

I wanted to talk it all out with her, to tell her what had happened. I wanted her to touch me and say that I’d done right. But she wasn’t listening today. She was somewhere else. She was distracted by her own decisions.

When the telephone rang, I turned down the Americans, who were calmly asking Russian soldiers to lay down their arms and disobey their officers in the interests of justice.

“Ferenc.”

“Emil?”

“Look, Ferenc, we’ve been talking.”

“Who?”

“Us. The guys. We’re not going in tomorrow. We’re calling in sick.”

He sounded like he’d been drinking, which was what I should have been doing. “All of you?”

“Stefan, Leonek, and I. And you, Ferenc.”

I paused before answering. “I guess it should be all of us.”

“Good.”

Magda was throwing something away; I could hear paper crunching. “Just tomorrow? There’s the rest of the week, Thursday and Friday.”

“No decisions yet. But we can discuss it tomorrow.”

I still wasn’t completely sure, but the thought of that office was more abhorrent than the fears for my own family. After I hung up, I raised the volume again and said to Magda, “I’m staying home tomorrow.”

“You’re—” she began, and looked closely at me for the first time since I’d gotten home.

“I’m calling in sick.”

Then a high squeal filled the apartment as the radio-jamming went into effect.

I called
the Militia switchboard in the morning and coughed through my lie. The operator took it as easily as she’d taken all the other calls that morning, finishing with a knowing
Take care of yourself
that meant more than a warning about illness.

Ágnes and Magda left together, and I sat with Pavel and the newspaper. My coffee became cold. Although the fighting in Budapest would go on for a few more days, it was evident to
The Spark
that the battle was over.
The Hungarian agitators of reaction are shrinking back into their bullet-riddled holes.
They were defending from broken windows. And the Americans, despite their proud radio talk, were staying out of it.

There were only a few lines about the demonstration:

I was preparing to take Pavel for a walk when the telephone rang. It was Moska. “How are you feeling?”

I hesitated. “Sick. I feel sick.”

“So do I, Ferenc, but I can’t do anything about it. Other than Brano and Kaminski, this place is deserted.”

“Oh.”

“Listen. Your disappeared woman has been found.”

“Svetla Woznica?”

“Third District. Central train station. Ferenc, they picked her up for prostitution.”

“For what?”

“When they brought her in, someone noticed the missing person’s report, so they called over here. Are you too sick to pick her up? I can’t leave the station.”

“Can’t they drive her over?”

“Too short-staffed. Seems half their men are out with the flu.”

The Third District Militia station had been moved when its previous home—the old royal police station on Bishop Albert Street, later Engels Street—caught fire in 1952. The cause of the fire was never fully proven, but five Party officials who had, before the Liberation, been high in the Peasant Party were blamed. The charge was subversion, and they were executed. The new station was a concrete slab built on the ruins of a bomb-damaged apartment building. Flat-faced, four floors. It stood out on a street of Habsburg homes. Above double doors, a blue sign told visitors in flat, unadorned letters:
MILITIA, DISTRICT III
.

The old desk veteran who took me to the basement cells muttered about all the young men who had called in sick. “Forty-three years, and not a day missed. What’s this? They don’t fool me. Not one minute.
Lazy.
”

I wondered if he really believed that. “What about this girl?”

“She wasn’t even hooking for money,” he said as he turned on the corridor light.

“What?”

“Ticket. She was selling her goods for a train ticket. Can you believe it?”

“Where to?”

“Does it matter?”

Svetla Woznica was behind a steel door with a barred view-window. She was curled up on the cot in the back corner, and though I didn’t look close, her bedpan smelled of fresh vomit. From the ceiling, a fluorescent light buzzed.

When she rolled over to look at us, at first I didn’t recognize her. Her upturned nose was ringed by a purple bruise where someone had hit her, and above her thin cheeks her eyes bulged out.

“Svetla Woznica?”

She used an arm to help sit up. Her hair was chopped strangely, as if with gardening shears. “You’ve come.” Her voice cracked.

“You going to take the whore?” asked the veteran.

I squatted beside the cot. Her skin, where it wasn’t bruised, was as white as a corpse’s. “Can you leave us alone?”

The veteran hesitated. “You’re not—” he began, then shrugged and walked out, closing the door behind him.

Svetla’s smile exposed a few missing teeth. “Want a good time, mister?” The Russian accent was more apparent now. “You’re very big, aren’t you?”

“How long has it been?” I pointed at her bruised forearm.

She looked at it too, and shrugged. “Yesterday morning. You got some?”

I tried to lay out the questions in my head, but the stink was distracting me. “Svetla, tell me why you left your husband.”

Her mouth opened behind her closed lips, as if she was going to be sick again. But she found her voice. “That prole bastard.” She rubbed her face. “Do you know? Did you get it out of him? Of course you didn’t.” She trembled in a way that reminded me of him. “He had the drug. It was for him. Then when Papa went back to Moscow Malik said,
Svetla, you want a try? It’s very nice
.” She closed her eyes. “It was nice, just like he said. But he didn’t say how you need it. Because that,” she said, tapping her temple, “
that
was his plan. First a little, it’s for both of us.
Svetla, we share.
Then all of it, all the medicine for my little Svetla.” She was remembering with her expressions, half-crying, half-laughing. “You know how it is? At first it’s very good. And then it’s better.”

I watched her bruised nose, her squinting eyes, understanding slowly. “The morphine?”

“First morphine, yes. Then pills and needles with no names—names I don’t know. I’m a whore, not a doctor. Not like Malik.”

I swallowed.

“At first, you know, it was not bad. Then he said,
You need rest, my Svetla. I know a spa in Southern Bohemia
.”

“Trebon.”

She shook her head. “But we didn’t go to Trebon. I knew, I could tell he was driving to the mountains. To that dacha.” She covered her mouth with a hand, eyes big. “That was,” she said. “That was when it was very bad. He wanted to know what he could do to his little Svetla when no one could hear. He found a lot of things. He’s imaginative.” She uncovered her mouth. “And when he wasn’t doing his things, he moved me around. That prole’s so smart. He said
Svetla, we exercise you so you don’t have bedsores, we make sure you don’t die.
Like a very smart doctor.”

I started to say
Why?
but I didn’t know what that meant, or what the answer could be.

Her smile was wide and thin, and flattened out her emaciated face as she read my mind. “I wanted to go home. I
want
to go home.” She glanced at the steel door. “Malik, he wanted a quiet wife. He said, a
good
wife. He made me a good wife.
You stay here, Svetla, with me.
In that room with the lock. And no windows. He showed his love with a needle and his prick. You know what I mean? He dressed me up, put all that makeup on my face, and gave me this lovely hairstyle.” She touched her chopped bangs. “Needle and the prick.” She looked very tired. “And now. Now you take me back, I know. I know this. I’m a crazy whore, but I’m not stupid.”