The Confession (24 page)

The poet
Kaspar Tepylo shared a room with a minimalist painter. There were canvases of large blue squares on red backgrounds stacked in a corner and a bowl of cigarette butts beside a jar of dirty brushes. “Never live with a painter,” he advised me. “The messes are incredible.”

We walked through to his sparse bedroom, a mattress and desk covered with neat stacks of paper. A few books were lined up beside a radiator that didn’t seem to be working. He offered me the desk chair as he settled his tall, thin frame on the corner of the bed. He scratched a concave cheek. “So what is it, Ferenc?”

Like everyone, he was a friend of a friend, an unsuccessful poet who was assigned to work on construction sites and scribbled lines at night. “I need to talk to Nestor Velcea.”

“What’s Nes been up to? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“I just need to ask him some questions. It’s about a case.”

“What kind of case?”

“A murder.”

“Oh.” He stood up and found some cigarettes on the desk. “I haven’t seen him since, I don’t know, early September. He stayed here for a while after he came back from the camps. Here in this room.”

“Then he left?”

Kaspar nodded. “Told me he’d found a place. But he never gave me the address.”

“Any ideas?”

“I’ve asked around, but he’s not staying with anyone I know.”

“Tell me,” I said. “What’s he like?”

He ashed on the floor and sat back down. “He’s different now than he was. More withdrawn—which for him is saying a lot. He never told me what happened in the camps, but he’s got a terrible limp. And he’s missing this little finger here.” He held up his left hand and pointed at it, then took another drag. “I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. He just smiled. To tell the truth, he made me nervous.”

“But you let him stay here?”

“I couldn’t turn him away, could I? I remember how he was before he was sent away. He was supposed to have been a good painter. A lot of promise.”

“You didn’t see his paintings?”

He shook his head. “Never let me. He always said they weren’t finished, but I think he was just scared of criticism. I suppose that’s why he didn’t spend time with other painters, just writers. He said he found painters boring.”

“But he used to live with Antonín Kullmann.”

Kaspar shrugged. “When you’re broke you have to make concessions.”

“Why was he sent to the camps?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Nestor was never political. He couldn’t stand the idea of painting for political reasons. It was all propaganda, he said, no matter who was making it. I think he was a little too insistent on this, but to each his own, right?”

“I suppose.”

“And he told me he never signed his paintings. This was strange, too. How did he put it? Yes: He didn’t want his identity to overshadow the integrity of the work. I think I know what he meant—but again, it’s a little extreme.”

“So when he was picked up, it was a surprise?”

“To everyone. A few of us filed a protest at Victory Square, but that did no good.” He looked at his long ash. “Until the Amnesty, we heard nothing.” He tapped the cigarette, and the ash dropped to the floor. “You know, he has family in the provinces. The south, somewhere, I’m not sure. Maybe he went back to his village.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Why not?”

I got up and took my hat from the desk. “Get in touch with me if you hear from him, will you?”

I could
only hold off thinking of him for moments, and in between those moments I imagined him in a cold concrete cell, suffering the light of a bare, dusty bulb hanging from the ceiling, then facing interrogators with complicated electrical equipment that attached to the tenderest parts of Georgi’s body. Clubs striking his legs; heat and cold on his flesh.

At the station, Leonek stopped me on his way out to say that Kliment was “a mensch, a real mensch.” He had agreed to track down Boris Olonov. But I couldn’t share his excitement. On my desk was a message from Ozaliko informing me that I had an appointment with Lev Urlovsky at ten the next morning. I folded the message into my pocket and sat down. I tried to focus on this artist who had returned from the camps to kill his old roommates and an art curator. But it didn’t work, and when Kaminski and Sev strolled in and began talking by Sev’s desk my distraction gained material form. Kaminski wandered over. “Hello, Ferenc. Did you give my wishes to Magda and Ágnes?”

“Sure.”

“Are you working hard?”

I looked at him.

“I believe we had a deal, Comrade Kolyeszar.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m working hard.”

“Good to hear.” He returned to Sev and bent over the desk and read something Sev was pointing at, but I couldn’t quite see them anymore. I could hear him laughing, saying
Good good,
but could no longer make out his features.

I took the tram home. It seemed unbelievable that the other riders could chat and smile or simply doze in their seats. I wanted to shake them out of their ignorance—didn’t they know what was going on, at that very moment, on Yalta Boulevard? But they knew. They knew that they could be next. I could be next.

I took a bath, sinking into the murky, cooling water, thinking still of electricity. Ágnes knocked on the door. “You going to be in there forever?”

“Just until I’m clean.”

She knocked again. “I don’t know if I can wait that long.”

So I toweled off and went to the bedroom to lie down. She bolted past me and slammed the bathroom door shut.

Magda came once and settled on the edge of the bed. “Was it awful?”

“Of course it was.”

“Did he seem…I don’t know. In good spirits?”

I turned my head, the pillow crackling in my ears, and looked at her. “What do you mean,
good spirits?
”

“You know what I mean. It’s Georgi we’re talking about.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “No good spirits today.”

She got up to finish dinner.

We didn’t tell Ágnes, because there was no need yet. She talked about the rope-climbing exercise that she and Daniela had apparently excelled at. The Pioneer chief—a man with the unlikely name of Hals Haling—brought them to the head of the class as examples of the female ideal of fitness, then awarded them with lengths of knotted rope.

“I suppose you were proud,” said Magda, trying to smile.

“You’d suppose, wouldn’t you?” Ágnes said into her plate. “I mean, it’s all kind of stupid in the end, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Climbing ropes. All we did was climb up so we could come back down. What’s the point in that?”

I managed a smile of my own. “That’s pretty perceptive, Ági.”

She nodded formally at me. “Thank you, Daddy.”

“You can take it further, though, can’t you?”

She shrugged.

“Why get out of bed each day when you’re just going to get back in at night?”

“Well, that’s certainly a reason not to make the bed in the morning,” she said, making a face at Magda.

“Or why,” I continued, “should you eat a meal when you’re just going to crap it out later?”

“
Ferenc,
” warned Magda.

Ágnes was grinning. “That’s a good question, Daddy. And why should I study French when I’m just going to forget it anyway?”

“
That,
” I said, “is a different issue altogether. You really need a course in logic, sweetheart.”

But the levity only lasted until we’d cleaned up the plates and headed into the living room. Ágnes insisted on listening to the Americans, and we heard a report on Bulgarian work camps. An emigrant described slave labor and casual killings in hushed tones that made us lean close to hear. The commentator apologized for his guest’s too-quiet voice, but explained that, while in a camp, a guard had crushed his windpipe with a boot. Then the radio whined like a sick animal, and I turned it off.

There were
only a few white hairs left on his head, but a plume of them rose out of his blue prison collar. He had big eyes, one smaller than the other, and long fingers with darker hairs covering them. He looked exactly as I remembered him from last summer. He placed his hands on the table and waited.

“Lev Urlovsky?”

He nodded. No smile, no sound.

“Do you remember me?”

He nodded again. “Ferenc Kolyeszar. You and your friend Leonek Terzian found me out.”

“Not me. I only came on the case when they went to get you.”

“You’re modest.”

“Still no regrets?”

“Nothing that keeps me awake.”

“Vassily was your son.”

He moved his hands together until the thumbs touched, then dragged them apart. “
Was,
yes. Until he decided to join the regime that took away my life.”

“Part of your life. You were at the camps for—how many? Five years?”

“Seven.”

“Seven, okay. But you were free again—it was over.”

He chewed the inside of his mouth, looking at his hands. “Inspector, if you think my life was given back just because they let me walk around this beautiful city, then you’re more stupid than even you look. Just because it’s another day doesn’t mean that yesterday never happened.”

It was an elegant way to put it, but he’d had a long time to think over his reasons for bludgeoning his son to death, and maybe only elegance could justify it. “I’m here to ask about someone else. Someone you were in Vátrina with.”

He leaned forward, just a little.

“Nestor Velcea. Does the name ring a bell?”

He leaned back again. “The Romanian.”

“Romanian?”

“He sat in with the other Romanians when there was time—there wasn’t much time. Very tight, those Romanians.”

“But you knew him?”

“Sure I did. He had nothing against Slavs. I had nothing against Romanians. We all had the same enemy.”

“The state.”

He closed his eyes as he nodded.

I opened my notepad on the table. “You were friends?”

“Not hard to be friends when you’re treated as we were.”

“You talked.”

“When we weren’t too exhausted and beaten.”

“So tell me about him.”

Urlovsky opened his nostrils and took a deep breath. I wondered how old he was—sixty? Sixty-five? Or was he one of those who returned from the camps looking twenty years older than they were? “He used to draw on the wall. With a piece of coal. Anything you asked for. He had fantastic hands, at least until they took off that finger.” He touched the pinkie on his left hand.

“Who took it off?”

“The guards, of course. First time he did a sketch on the wall. They took him in the yard and cut the thing off. But that didn’t stop him.” He smiled. “That Romanian was something.”

“I’ve heard he was a great artist.”

“Talent, yes. So much talent. But he was worse than me.”

“Worse than you?”

He tilted his head. “
Worse
is the wrong word. He was stronger, that’s what he was. He could sustain his hatred in a way most of us couldn’t.”

“His anger against the state.”

“The state, sure. But not really.”

“Then who, really?”

“The bastards who put him there.”

“State security.”

“Them, too.”

I looked down at my empty page and sighed. “Tell me, then, who Nestor Velcea was angry with.”

“Who shouldn’t he be angry with?”

The guards would allow me to beat him if I wanted, but I didn’t think it would work. He had been through a lot worse than I could give him, and had held on to all his rage. “Josef Maneck? Was that someone?”

“Might have been.”

“How about Antonín Kullmann?”

He looked me in the face, as if judging me. Then he nodded, big eyes holding onto me. “These names, they do ring a bell.”

“Why did he hate them?”

He frowned, as if reassessing his judgment. “Why do you think? They put him in there.”

“He was sure about this?”

Urlovsky leaned back. “Not at first, no. A lot of us only figure it out later. For me, it took almost a year before I realized who did it. My ex-wife. You know why? Do you know why?”

I said I didn’t.

“She wanted the dacha—that’s why. I told her it was in my family before we were married, and it would stay in my family. I spent my summers in that dacha as a child. But she wanted to vacation in the countryside, so she made a phone call to Yalta Boulevard.” He shook his head and smiled. “A crafty bitch, that one.”

“Why didn’t you kill her instead?”

“She was already a bitch; I couldn’t do anything about it. But my son, I could stop him from becoming one. I’m his father.”

“Let’s get back to Nestor. Why was he turned in?”

He pursed his lips. “That boy was talented, and he knew it. It made him vain. He thought they’d done it out of jealousy.” Urlovsky turned his palms to the ceiling. “I don’t know, maybe he’s right. But it takes a bold man to suggest that.”

“Your wife did it for a house.”

“You can live in a house. A house is security. What’s art? Each time Nestor made his pictures on the wall, one of us used a wet rag to clean it so the guards wouldn’t see.” He patted the table. “It’s pretty stuff, art, but it just wipes away.”