The Confession (43 page)

Authors: Olen Steinhauer

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #Historical, #General

“
Jesus, Ferenc.
What did they do to you?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t even smile. Because I knew this must all be a dream. And I would wake soon to the bugle call and rotting mattresses and truncheons.

The female desk clerk at the Hotel Elegant—not Tania—was reluctant to give us a room when she saw me, and Emil had to use his Militia certificate to persuade her. “Don’t destroy the place,” she said as she handed over the key.

I took a long bath. Emil had been speaking ever since he picked me up, pausing only to puzzle over my silence and try to think of something else to say, but I hadn’t heard a word. The water blackened very quickly, so I emptied and refilled the tub. My sores hurt when I squeezed them dry, then scoured them. My hair had been shaved again the previous week, but the lice had returned to infest the little hair that had grown, so I used a razor to shave it off again. As I dried I caught myself in the mirror and understood Emil’s horror.

He was talking again when I came out, something about how he’d had to drop the Malik Woznica case because there were no clues, but I only said, “Did you know prisoners built this hotel?”

They were the first words I had spoken, and by the look on his face I knew they were the wrong words. “No. I didn’t know that, Ferenc.” He spoke the way one speaks to an injured child.

“I’ve got to admit,” I said, trying to sound human again, “I haven’t heard a thing you’ve said all this time. I’m sorry.”

He dropped onto a bed. The sun was beginning to shine through the cheap curtains. “I didn’t say anything important. Anyway, I bet you’d like to sleep on a real mattress.”

“Oh God,” I said, and fell into the other bed.

When I woke up, groggy and aching but rested, it was nighttime. Emil was out, but by the time I had gotten up and washed another time, he appeared with a small suitcase. “What’s that?”

“You’re not going to live in those striped rags, are you?”

Inside were clothes I could hardly remember after these months of prison garb. They were clean and pressed—perfectly. “Where did you get them?”

“Magda packed it all.”

“Did she try to come with you?”

He looked at the bed. “No. I suppose she didn’t think she could take it.”

“Leonek?”

“What?”

“Is she with him?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t know, Ferenc. No one tells me a thing.”

“But you’ve seen them together.”

He looked away, nodded.

I didn’t ask anything more, because a part of me knew this all along.

In my clothes again, I almost felt like a man. My face was still battered, but my suit covered the sores, and when I walked the chafing reminded me that I was back with the living.

In the hotel restaurant I ate too much and had to vomit in the bathroom. When I returned I passed Tania at a table with a camp guard. She noticed my face and muttered something to the guard, who looked at me and nodded. But as I sat down I realized that she had no idea who I was.

The next morning we drove south, to Pócspetri. Emil didn’t tell me until we were halfway there that Lena had lost the child. “Emil. I’m sorry.”

He tugged down the sun visor. “I suppose we should just stop trying.”

“Has she been checked out by a doctor?”

“A dozen times. She’s physically fine. It could be her nerves, or the drinking. Probably the drinking.”

“Then try it again after she stops drinking. That’s all you can do.”

“Pick yourself up and try again? We’ll see.”

We reached the farm by eleven, the sun bright over the rolling orchards, lighting the dirt road winding past the cooperative offices and down to Teodor and Nora’s house. I could just make out Nora standing on the front steps, hand shielding her eyes, watching us approach.

“You’re going to stay here?” Emil asked as he looked ahead along the road.

He was smiling as if the question were funny. I wasn’t sure why, until I looked ahead to where Nora was waving beside the Škoda I hadn’t noticed before. I reached to twist a ring that wasn’t there. From a distance it looked like Nora, but it wasn’t.

Afterword to the 1978 edition by Georgi Radevych

Ferenc Kolyeszar
began writing his confession on 12 March 1957 and finished it on 5 November, three days after Khrushchev launched Sputnik II—a relatively short time compared to the years it had taken him to write his first book,
A Soldier’s Tale
. It was composed at both Teodor and Nora’s Pócspetri farm and their dacha near Sárospatak. When he returned from the dacha on its completion he called me, but made no mention of the book. He only wanted to know what I knew about this satellite orbiting the earth, and about the dog inside it. “What’s going to happen when it runs out of air?” he asked, in a panic. When I told him the dog, Laika, was going to die, he fell silent.

It took another month for him to put together the “official” version that he turned in to Brano Sev. By that point Laika was dead. In his official confession, Ferenc cut out all references to the crimes of others. For example, there is no mention of anyone other than himself listening to Radio Free Europe, and the station-house strike that followed the Sixth of November demonstration is put down as his idea. But what no one, least of all Brano Sev, suspected was that Ferenc would confess to killing Malik Woznica. There was no evidence against him, and Woznica’s body had not been found. When he told me what he’d done, I asked him why on earth he’d confessed. He said, “Sometimes, Georgi, you’ve just got to be an adult.” He gave this version to Brano Sev on 11 December 1957.

It surprised Ferenc that he was not arrested after turning it in. He expected that within the week a white Mercedes would pull up to the farm and take him back to Vátrina. But he finally understood, and wrote me in a letter, “They will hold it over my head, Georgi. All I have to do is open my mouth and say something they don’t like, and I will be back with my friends in that camp.”

Ferenc only told me about this uncensored version of his
Confession
eight years later. He had waited long enough so that no one besides himself would be punished for its contents. He changed the names of the characters and used a pseudonym, like most underground writers at that time. In June 1965 I put out the first edition as a simple typed manuscript, five copies that we passed around to our friends and read in groups. The Russian word
samizdat
had just come into vogue, and this was the lowest form of
samizdat
you could find: a stack of pages stuffed into a folder.

It wasn’t until 1971 that we found the means and will to bind
The Confession
into a box of nine serialized pamphlets—known as “the Box” to those who looked for it. I asked Ferenc if he could compose some words to remind people of the political situation in those days, because some younger readers, I worried, would not remember exactly how it was. Ferenc answered with the second-person interchapters found in the present edition.

The Confession
gained a life of its own. It was discussed in living rooms and kitchens all over the Capital, and a few copies were smuggled to Poland and Hungary. The Hungarians, with their own rich
samizdat
history, translated it into their difficult language and began printing it madly. From there his book spread like a beautiful malady.

But this popularity was the very thing that Yalta Boulevard was waiting for. On 1 February 1972, the white Mercedes did arrive at the Pócspetri farm, where Ferenc had lived with his wife and her parents for the last decade and a half, and took him to another work camp, on the eastern side of the country. The charge was murder, and Ferenc seemed, according to Magda, to have been waiting for that moment all his life.

He was released in 1975, during another wave of amnesties, in part because voices outside the country were demanding to know his whereabouts. He was returned to Pócspetri. His lungs were weak from working in the mine shafts of the Carpathian range, but Ferenc went immediately back to farming. “It is,” he confided to me once, “the only thing that gives me satisfaction.”

—March 1978

Also by Olen Steinhauer

The Bridge of Sighs

Acknowledgments

For their wise and informed criticisms, I thank my steadfast agent, Matt Williams, my friend, the author Robin Hunt, and my editor, Kelley Ragland. In fact, they are all friends.

For a clean, friendly place to scribble in a corner, then abandon all hope of work in favor of a drink, I thank the staff of Pótkulcs, who always made me feel welcome.

In my more studious moments, the Central European University kindly allowed me the use of its extensive research facilities, as did the Artpool Art Research Center, and for that I am grateful.

Some details of the labor camps are taken from a fascinating and disturbing collection of eyewitness accounts called
Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria,
edited by Tzvetan Todorov and Robert Zaretsky.

They are not to be blamed for the mistakes of my own imagination.

THE CONFESSION
. Copyright © 2004 by Olen Steinhauer. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steinhauer, Olen.