The Confession (4 page)

I’d known
Stefan since childhood. When you know someone that long, the actual circumstances of your introduction disappears. We went to school together, got into trouble together, and lusted after the same girls together. It was a joke, around the time of my marriage, that he’d never forgiven me for seducing Magda, because we’d both stared at her from across the schoolhouse, gauging our prospects. But by the wedding we weren’t boys anymore. It was 1939 and we were preparing to meet the Germans, who had crossed over from Czechoslovakia and were ready to make quick work of us. Stefan was wounded that first week by a mine and sent back home. I survived the whole month and a half of useless fighting, all the way to the defeat in May. But by the time I returned home to Magda, and to the news that my parents had died when an errant bomb fell on their house, I was sick and mentally worthless. I had to begin anew.

I wrote about my condition in the novel, a few sentences about how the act of killing Fascists seemed to take away my humanity, and when the war was over I thought it would never return—I was surprised that those lines made it past the Culture Ministry editors. But the humanity did return, months after the war, with Stefan’s help. He had become a police officer in the occupied Capital, and he continually came out to visit us at Teodor’s house, trying to save me from my self-pity with the offer of a job. It took a lot of prodding, but by 1940 I accepted it, and two years later Ágnes was born. Two years after that, I was best man at Stefan’s marriage to Daria Vídra, the first girl who’d ever slept with him. But by the end of the decade they had split up. He’d been alone ever since.

In the car, he adjusted the mirror and went over the details. On Friday morning, a neighbor had smelled gas around the victim’s apartment door and informed the building supervisor, who, when he unlocked the door, was almost knocked unconscious by the fumes. But he made it inside and turned off the stove by reaching over the body of the deceased. “His name’s Josef Maneck.”

“So it’s a suicide?”

Stefan leaned into a sharp swerve around a trio of broom-sellers. “That’s the easy answer, but I’m not sure. He’d been beaten up pretty badly.”

“Any word on that?”

He stopped behind a cart overflowing with yellow squash. The farmer tapped his stick on the tired mare’s rump. “The supervisor could only say that the victim was a drunk. I got the name of his bar.”

“Nothing in the apartment?”

“I went through it once, but didn’t find anything.”

“And the neighbors?”

“Heard nothing, saw nothing. The usual.”

We were in the last hot days of September, and everyone seemed to know this. Women wore uncovered heads and those tight, unignorable skirts that had become fashionable that summer; the men went without jackets. It was as if they were taking this final chance to soak up the sun. I saw a few familiar faces in the bookstore displays, then wondered how Ágnes was doing at school. “What now?”

“Let’s hear from the coroner,” he said, “then visit his watering hole.”

He took a few more turns, scratched at his beard, and asked how the writing was coming. I told him the writing wasn’t coming along at all. He didn’t seem fazed. “So did the countryside do its magic for you and Magda?”

I shook my head. “I heard about Leonek’s mother.”

“Heart attack.” He turned into the Unity Medical Complex parking lot. “Happens every day, and she was old enough.” His eyes roamed the cars for a spot. “Leonek’s fallen apart, though. Remember when Sergei was killed?”

1946: Leonek’s longtime partner, with a bullet in the back of his head down by the Tisa.

“Same as he was then,” Stefan said. “He looks like hell, he doesn’t come into work half the time, and he can’t even do the job when he does.” He put on the parking brake, turned off the engine, and looked at me. “That man wears his grief on his sleeve. It’s not pretty.”

He said this with more scorn than I would have expected. In the last years—since his divorce and the more recent death of his own mother—he’d been losing his ability to empathize with misery. I’d noticed this often and once made the mistake of mentioning it to Magda. Her answer:
And you can?

In the basement morgue, the new coroner set aside his newspaper. “Markus Feder,” he announced as he shook our hands with his rubber-gloved one. Yuldashev, the previous coroner, had moved back home to Tashkent in July. He’d done it in a hurry, without any announcement, and they replaced him with this redheaded child who delicately pulled back a white sheet covering the body of Josef Maneck.

Fifty-one, very thin, flesh loose over his limbs. There were black welts on his face, around his cheeks and jaw, and his skin was white except where the sun had browned his head and hands. His ears, lips, and the fingernails on his clenched hands were blue. Markus Feder repositioned the head for us to see clearly. “I cleaned the froth and blood off the lips, and we had to change his drawers because of the defecation. I also pushed the tongue back in to get a look inside the mouth. See here,” he said, and pulled open an eyelid. Around the cornea was a field of burst capillaries. “It was the gas, all right. Suicide.”

“And what about these bruises?” I waved a hand at the face.

Markus Feder grimaced. “Somebody hit him, sure, but that was hours before he died.”

“I wonder who,” said Stefan.

“That, Comrade Inspectors, is your job.” He covered the dead man with the sheet.

It had
no name. Before the war, it had been named after the owner, but he had been shipped off somewhere when his bar was nationalized. Now, it was only
CAFÉ-BAR
and, below the sign, on a small white placard, #103. It was the kind of dingy place I would lurk in when I came back from the Front. In these places maimed veterans grumbled into their shot glasses and made menacing noises at anyone who looked whole. For the price of a drink you could learn their stories or see their scars. I had no scars to show but my gaunt body, though I grumbled too.

Stefan wrinkled his nose. There were a couple men in the back corner, hunched in the darkness over their tables, and we could smell them from the door. The bartender looked at us through round glasses, and said, “What, then?”

“Not much of place you’re running here,” said Stefan.

“If you’ve come to complain—”

“We’ve come to ask questions.” Stefan unfolded his green certificate to display the Militia hawk.

I stepped up to the bar. “One of your customers.”

The man flinched, just slightly. My size does that to people sometimes.

“Josef Maneck,” said Stefan. He climbed up on a stool and settled in for a long talk.

Café-bar #103’s portrait of Mihai, suspiciously sandwiched between vodka bottles, was blackened by years of smoke. The bartender squeezed a dirty rag, and a few drops fell on the counter. Then he set it down and soaked them up. He looked at me. “Don’t know any Josef Maneck.”

“Sure you do,” said Stefan. “About my height. But thin, very thin. A drunk.”

“Oh,” said the bartender, smiling, still looking only at me. “A
drunk
.
That
guy.”

“This drunk’s dead,” I told him.

His smile went away, and he stepped back, holding the rag in both hands. “What did you say his name was?”

“Josef Maneck,” said Stefan.

The bartender took off his glasses. He put them back on. “Maybe.” When I leaned against the bar, he finally looked at Stefan. “Maybe I know him. Did he have a way of blinking? You know.” He blinked a few times to demonstrate.

“When we saw him his eyes were shut,” said Stefan.

He looked at me again, as if I’d confirm it. Then he peered past us at the dark corner. “Hey, Martin! Martin!”

One of the two figures shifted a little, the head rose, then swung slowly toward us.

“Martin, is your friend dead? The one with the blink.”

I could just make out his features in the darkness—pink eyelids, wide mouth, high cheekbones. His face sat still a moment, then his lips parted. “Josef?” His voice was like gravel in a ditch.

“That’s the one, Martin,” said Stefan. He walked over. The second drunk, deeper in the blackness, didn’t budge. “Did you know he’s dead?”

“Josef?” Martin repeated.

I kept an eye on the bartender.

“Come on, Martin.” Stefan stood over him now, his wide gut level with the man’s face. “Why don’t you tell us about your friend.”

“He was crazy,” the bartender whispered.

I turned to him. “How’s that?”

“That man was trouble.” He picked up his rag again. “Started fights all the time. Isn’t that right, Martin?”

Martin, by Stefan’s belly, closed his pink eyes and considered it.

“Did he start fights, Martin?” asked Stefan. “Is that what your friend did?”

There were pumpkinseeds in a dish on the counter, and I collected some in my hand. “Was he a good fighter?” I asked the bartender. “Did he win his fights?”

“That nut?” He shook his head. “Never. He was crazy. He’d start a fight, then get brutalized. Every time.”

Stefan’s voice: “What do you say, Martin? Could you have beaten him up?”

“He was a nut, all right.” The bartender adjusted his glasses and looked at me. “So how’d he die?”

“Come on, Martin. It’s your friend we’re talking about! Give us some help.”

I chewed on a pumpkinseed, but it was soggy, so I spit it out in my hand and dumped it back into the dish. I had heard enough, and the familiarity of this place disturbed me. It was all so obvious; there was no reason to be here. Josef Maneck was a drunk who had reached the end of his tether. He got into a fight and lost, like every other time. He stumbled back to his apartment and, faced with the reality of where his life had brought him, decided to finally end it. He turned on the gas and sat on the kitchen floor. I had seen enough of his kind to know it was the inevitable end.

Stefan was squatting beside the drunk, a hand on his frayed jacket, shaking to keep him awake. “Come on, Martin. You can do it. Tell me about your friend.”

I scratched a mosquito bite on the back of my hand.

“Martin, tell me, did you kill your friend? Is that what happened? You can tell old Stefan.”

“I’ll be in the car,” I said, but didn’t know if he heard me. As I left, the bartender washed out the dish where I’d dumped my chewed seed.

He was
in there a while longer, but on the drive back only said that there wasn’t anything to be learned from an alcoholic like that. We were in agreement.

Leonek had finally arrived at the station. He and Emil and Chief Moska were over by Brano’s desk. That in itself was strange; no one spent time with Brano Sev. But through them we saw a tall man with a thin mustache leaning back against the desk, his long legs crossed at the ankle. His top half was animated, arms moving around in his well-tailored jacket, smiling, speaking in heavy, grinding syllables. He had a horrendous Russian accent.

Chief Moska, though, looked as weary as ever. I’d watched him aging since I joined the police force during the German Occupation, back when his particular bureaucratic genius found a way to hide Stefan’s and my war records; he saved us. And then, when the Russians marched in and we were renamed the People’s Militia, his hair went gray overnight. He waved us over. “Meet Mikhail, guys.”

The Russian stood up to shake our hands. He did it somewhat stiffly, but winked at me as he gripped my fingers. He didn’t wink at Stefan, and I’m still not sure why.

“Mikhail Kaminski,” he told us both.

“From Moscow,” said Moska, and I think we all noticed then, if we hadn’t before, the similarity between our chief’s name and that capital. He seemed almost apologetic about it, his self-conscious smile revealing his two missing teeth on the left side. “Mikhail’s here for consultations.”

Brano Sev sat at his desk as passively as usual. Mikhail Kaminski was here to consult with Sev, no one else, but from that blank expression you couldn’t guess it.

“All
consultation
means is a lot of dull paper-pushing,” said Kaminski, smiling broadly to show us he wasn’t about to start doing any of that foolishness. “Where’s the closest bar?”

We all stared at his attempted joke.

“Seriously, though, I want everyone to feel free to approach me at any time. I’m from Moscow, you know, not the Moon.”

This Muscovite wasn’t from the Moon, but he was from Lubyanka. Even without his uniform, his KGB stripes were visible to all of us.

“Come on, guys,” Moska said, knowing when to step in and clear things up, “we’ve all got a lot of work to do.”

At his desk, Stefan and I looked over the coroner’s report. A simple suicide was, in the end, only that, and I tried to explain this to him. “But why now?” he asked. “Why does a man commit suicide now of all times?”

“Because it builds up. You don’t know how it can build up in a man. None of us does.”

He laid his chubby hands on the desk, spread wide. “But look around. Things haven’t been this good for a long time. The market’s fuller than ever before, political prisoners are coming back home, and you can read damn near anything you want. Why
now?
”

I slouched deeper into my chair. “Tell me about him, then. What was he before he became a drunk?”

Stefan moved some pages until he came to a typewritten sheet. “Josef Maneck, born 1905 in Miskolc. His family ended up in the Capital in ’twenty-five, when his father opened a frame maker’s shop. The father died in ’forty-three, during the Occupation, and Josef took over his shop. He ran it for four years until, presumably because of connections, he became acting curator of the Museum of National Contemporary Art. In 1953 he was transferred to the Stryy Mineral Springs bottling plant outside town.”

“A bottling plant?”

“I suppose he wasn’t so good with the Culture Ministry. But he was no better on the assembly line. He was fired last year, for not showing up enough.”

“That takes a lot of work.”

“Arrested twice since for public drunkenness and fistfighting. Overnight stays.”

“And you need a reason for him to kill himself?”

Stefan stared through the page. “I guess I do.”

I noticed Leonek in the corner, at the coatrack, putting on his jacket to leave. He was a way out of this pointless conversation, so I did it, beginning something that would unravel so much. I asked Stefan to wait a moment, then went over to Leonek and told him I was sorry about his mother.

He looked surprised. “Thanks, Ferenc.”

“Come over for dinner. Okay? Tomorrow night.”

“Thanks, but no.”

“Really.” I put a hand on his arm to make my sincerity clear. “Magda’s a good cook, you’ll thank yourself for it.”

He shook his head again, his leathery Armenian face looser and more lost than I’d seen it before, his dark eyes drifting. But he was considering it, I could tell.

“Six o’clock, okay? We’ll leave from here, go get a drink, and be there in time to eat. It’s settled.”

“Why’d you do that?” Stefan asked when I returned.

“He just looks terrible.”

“He’ll work through it.” Stefan spoke with that same cold edge I’d heard earlier. Then he went back into the details of Josef Maneck’s miserable life, but by then I wasn’t listening to a word.

Mikhail Kaminski left with Brano, loudly describing the glories of Moscow nightlife, and Emil and Moska left together. Stefan asked if I wanted a drink. I said no. “You want to get right back to her, do you?” He smiled. “Come on, spend some time with your oldest friend for once.” But it wasn’t going to work. I was stuck in thoughts of Leonek’s dead mother, and of those days, long ago, in dark bars like the one we’d visited. After Stefan sighed and left, I called home.

“Hello, Daddy.”

“How was your day?”

“What day?”

“Don’t give me that.”

Ágnes sighed. “It was satisfactory, Daddy. Very satisfactory.”

“Your teachers? How are they?”

“Too soon to tell.”

“And your friends? Are all of them still around?”

“You don’t even know my friends.”

I knew a few, but it didn’t matter. “Your mother there?”

“She’s downstairs, talking to that old woman again. Claudia. Want me to get her?”

“Just give her a message, okay?”

“I suppose.”

“Tell her we’re having a guest for dinner tomorrow. Can you do that?”

“When should I tell her you’re coming home? She
always
asks.”

“I’ll be,” I began, then realized I didn’t know. “Tell her I’ll probably be late. There’s a lot of work backed up here.”

“I’ll tell her.”

From her tone it was clear that Ágnes saw right through me.

I sat straight in front of the typewriter. I’d rolled in a white sheet, twisted my ring, and now I waited for something to come. After a while, though, it was too dark to see.