The Confession (7 page)

Stefan was
there when I came out. He didn’t have his bag, and he was standing at his desk, shifting some papers around. When he saw me leave Moska’s office he stopped trying to appear occupied. He gave me a firm look, then nodded at the door.

I followed him through the busy corridor, past uniformed militiamen walking with secretaries, and out to the front steps. It wasn’t that hot, but Stefan was sweating.

“Yes?”

“I’ve had enough of this,” he began, then stopped. When he started again, it came out clearly and without hesitation: “I’ve put up with you for a long time now, and I thought that going off to the provinces would help things. But it’s only made them worse.”

“Investigate the suicide. I don’t care, really.”

He raised a hand. “That’s not what I’m talking about. This case is just another part of a four-year-long insult. Four years!” he said, shaking his head. “Ever since that shoddy book came out you’ve forgotten what we were to each other—we grew up together!”

He waited, for some kind of recognition perhaps, and it says something about me that I was stuck on his description of my book as shoddy.

“I’ve seen this coming for a long time. Those friends of yours, those
writers,
they fill you up, they make you think you’re infallible. But you certainly are not. You’ve ruined a marriage to a beautiful woman, you can’t do police work anymore, and now you can’t even write. What are you, Ferenc? What the hell do you have left to offer?”

I didn’t know where all this was coming from—or maybe I did know, but I didn’t know why now, of all times, he had to say it. We’d been drifting apart for a long time. “This is a load of crap,” I said.

He started nodding very quickly, his second chin quivering. “Crap is right, Ferenc. You’ve crapped on our friendship for a long time. You’ve crapped on me. And now I’m going to crap on your future. Are you ready?”

I didn’t know how to get ready.

“When you were at the Front,” he said, “I slept with Magda. I had sex with your wife, and I wouldn’t trade that single night for anything in this world.” He tapped his head. “I keep it up here always. Why do you think I was so eager to get you this job? Misplaced goddamned guilt. I still valued our friendship. But I had your wife in your own bed, and I hope that knowing this ruins what little joy you still feel when you look at her.”

He stood rigidly on the steps, his chin up, waiting. He was expecting what I would have expected: a fist. His resolution fluctuated as I watched him, his eyes blinked, his nostrils flared as he breathed loudly, the sweat now coursing past his ears, but I did not move. I wanted to. I wanted to throw myself on him and break his bones. I wanted my fist, with each of its five rings and a story for each, to crush him. It would have been an easy thing. But I just looked at him, then past him, to where the city kept moving along the narrow street, pedestrians and automobiles and a few horses pulling emptied, dirty carts.

“Well then,” I heard him say. He took a step farther down, nodded briefly, and joined the traffic down below.

I don’t
know why I didn’t hit him. He would have respected me for it. But the anger wasn’t upon me yet—it was only shock. Maybe it was simply the residue of our decades of friendship, and that for a long time he had been so good to me—because of guilt or some other weakness. Or maybe I knew he was right: Ever since the book had come out I’d stopped calling him, stopped working to maintain our friendship.

I went back into the station, where Leonek and Emil and Brano were standing around Brano’s desk again. Kaminski was talking, and they were all smoking, a soft cloud hovering above their heads. My phone was ringing.

“Daddy?”

“Yes,” I said, for a moment unsure who it was. “Yes?”

“Mother wants to know—”

“What does she want to know?”

“When you’ll be over for dinner. With this friend of yours. That’s how she said it—
that friend of his
.”

My watch took a second to focus. “Tell her seven. We’ll be there at seven.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“This friend of yours, he’s a cute one?”

It was a joke, I knew, but I couldn’t rise to it. “I’ll see you at seven.”

“Here,” said Kaminski, as I approached. He held out a cigarette. I took it, noticing the small pin on his lapel. A red rippled flag. “I was telling the guys about the Komsomol.”

“The youth brigades?” I asked. I didn’t care what he was talking about. I just wanted some noise.

“You know them,” he said. Everyone knew about the Komsomol. Even
The Spark
carried articles of their industrious exploits in unclaimed regions on the other side of the Empire. “I went to the virgin lands in northern Kazakhstan after my years here, to help farm. Such good soil. Terrible climate, but what soil!” He held his gangly hands out, palms up. “You know what it’s like to work with your hands like that? It’s a dream. That’s what it is. I coordinated the work, and I ate with these fine young people in the fields, then we all went back to work, such hard work, and at night we ate around a campfire and sang revolutionary songs. You have to imagine it if you weren’t there. Fifty, a hundred passionate young people singing songs about their hopes and dreams for the future. No, I don’t think you can imagine it.” He shook his head. “Over here, maybe it’s different. But in the Motherland, we’re in this together. We build everything from nothing. That’s socialism. It’s the collective spirit that moves us on. Do you understand?”

I lit the cigarette finally, and visions of Stefan—stretched naked over my wife, grunting, his flesh sweating—only now began to fade.

“The peasants,” he said, “they brought us
flowers.
Can you believe it? Maybe you don’t know real peasants here, but you don’t get flowers from Kazhak peasants for no reason. They knew we were there to save them, that we were there to save the Union. Khrushchev had told us to make the plains arable. And for the sake of humanity, that’s what we did. Not me personally, of course, I was only there a couple years, mostly administrative; but we did it, all of us working together. Last year we worried that everything was ruined by the drought, but this year, I’m told, the wheat yield is going to be unprecedented.” He shook his head again, this time with admiration. “They’re still doing it now. They sing their songs at night and work all day and hope for better things. And better things are happening. Just wait.”

It was a peculiar thing to see. This man from Moscow had us surrounding him in a corner of the office we never visited, had us listening to him as if he were our kindergarten teacher. He had a sparkle in his eye, and a lively voice, and when you didn’t pay too much attention to what he was saying, you could feel his excitement yourself. Emil and Leonek were transfixed. Brano stared, his face revealing nothing. Kaminski was a real orator. A tremor ran through my body. It was a terrible, magical feeling.

Then I noticed the index finger of his right hand. Moska was right; it twitched. And I remembered that the word
administrative
meant a lot more than paperwork and long lunch breaks.

At a
nearby bar filled with workers sipping vodkas and beer, I ordered a couple brandies for us. Leonek reached for his wallet, but I put a hand on his elbow to stop him. A warm shower had fallen on our way there, and the place was humid with wet bodies and drooping hats. We squeezed into an empty table in the center.

I wanted to say something, to get this started, but nothing came to me. We drank in silence, him looking over the crowd, blinking, his dark face reminding me of what little I knew of his background—childhood in an Armenian village, until the Young Turks started butchering his people, then the life of a refugee until he landed here with his mother.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

“You already told me.”

“I would have liked to make the funeral. Were there a lot of people?”

He shrugged. “The guys came, and her friends from the neighborhood. There were enough.”

“That’s good.” I sounded a little stupid. “How old was she?”

He looked at his glass on the table. In the voices and sweat of all the men around us I remembered the clean, sweet-smelling Italian, then, inevitably, Stefan’s disgusted face.

“She pushed her way through so much.” Leonek looked at me. “Even when the Turks killed my father, she kept a level head. Through Yugoslavia, to Bulgaria and Italy, then here, she kept everything together. I wanted to stay back home and fight. But they would have killed me too. She knew this. She made me come with her.”

I thought I should say something, but what do you say to that? I noticed then that he’d shaved, he looked clean, and this was something I appreciated.

“I even considered moving to the Armenian Republic a few years ago. Can you imagine that?” A smile finally split his face. “But this is my world now, not Central Asia. I wouldn’t know what to do in Yelevan.”

I agreed.

“You remember when Sergei was killed?”

I nodded.

“It was her again. She was the one who made me let it go, to stop looking into his murder. I was angry at her a long time about that. He and I were close—we were the two foreigners in the station house. Sergei was a brother to me. You know that.”

I did.

“At first I didn’t understand. But she understood.” His thin hands were on his glass, his fingers tapping. “Then people in the other offices were sent away—suddenly, with no warning, their desks were empty. Remember that?”

We all remembered that.

“Only then did I start to understand. She always knew. She saved me.”

She had saved herself as well. An old woman who knows how to survive knows that her son had better stay employed. Back then it was truer than ever. We all learned a degree of blindness—first during the Occupation, and then after the Liberation.

The door banged open, and five laughing students barged in. They had pink faces and shoddy clothes. “Five brandies!” shouted the first one, with an attempted mustache shadowing his lip. They gathered around the bar, talking animatedly. The workers looked at them a moment, then went back to their drinks.

“School must be going well,” said Leonek.

“Demonstrators,” I told him. “They were in Victory Square today.”

“How about that.” He turned in his seat to face them. “This is something, isn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“Remember how it used to be? No one would think to demonstrate. And look at them now!” His face pulsed as he considered it. “God, I wish I was young.”

“You are young.”

“We’re both young,” he said. “We should be out there too, standing next to them.”

It was good to see him pleased by this thought. “You going to make up a sign?”

“Why not?”

“What would it say?”

He put his chin in his palms, elbows on the table—he really did look young. “I don’t know. Isn’t that amazing? I’ve got no idea. What about you?”

“I’m not the demonstrating kind.”

“What does that mean?”

He was waiting, eyes big. “I have a wife and a daughter,” I said. “If I get thrown into jail, how would they fare? I don’t want my girl to grow up fatherless.”

He opened his mouth—something was ready to pop out—but then he shut it. He said, “Maybe that’s why I should do something. No one depends on me anymore.”

“Maybe.” But then I remembered what men like Mikhail Kaminski and Brano Sev would use to keep demonstrators from forcing Russian tanks to roll down our streets: interrogations, informers, secret police, and prison camps.