The Confession (13 page)

I signed
the forms and took her and her small bag of clothes into my custody. We drove along the Tisa as I tried to make up my mind. It was his word against a morphine addict’s. He’d gotten rid of the lock on the bedroom door, and she had taken the rest of the morphine and the other drugs he’d used to keep her incapacitated. There were no witnesses. Malik knew all of this, and that was why he had felt secure enough to face the People’s Militia when regulations required our entry—and, ultimately, to use us to retrieve her.

“How did you get away?”

She lifted her forehead from the door window. “Svetla’s not stupid. I told you this, now listen. I even have control, a little.” She smiled crookedly. “I just didn’t take it—the pills, no pills. Simple. Very hard,
da,
but simple. The medicine under the bed and Svetla playacted. After a week, just a week, I was stronger. Maybe Svetla shouldn’t have brought the medicine with her, but I did. Now here I am, back on the medicine.”

“But the lock. You were locked in.”

She considered it, then spoke slowly, “God unlocked the door for me.” She looked at a passing bus. “It was a miracle, you know? But not so strange. God wanted Svetla to get away, so she did. But first I looked for a knife, you know, to kill him. Malik is a clever prole. So clever. He took away all the knives. The whole kitchen, no knives! Such a clever prole.”

Malik forgets to lock her door, or maybe he’s decided there’s no longer any need, then she tears the kitchen apart in her desire to kill him.

I stopped at the central bank, and while she waited in the car, humming to herself, I stood in line and withdrew a quarter of the money from my account, more than half of it in rubles. Then, at the train station, I bought a sleeper cabin to Moscow, both beds so she would be alone.

I found the conductor and pulled him aside. Using both my Militia certificate and a stack of koronas, I commanded him to keep a close watch on her. “She’s not to leave the cabin, you follow? You bring her meals. She’s to stay on the train until Moscow, where someone from the Soviet Militia will pick her up. You are also to hold this,” I said, handing over an envelope heavy with rubles. “You will give it to the Moscow militiaman. He knows how much to expect. This one,” I added, handing over another, “is for the border guards. She does not have papers. You’re still with me?”

He started to protest, but I leaned over him to make it clear that we both knew what was and was not possible at the frontier.

I gave Svetla a third envelope of rubles, in case something went wrong once she was on the other side. That was when she finally understood what was happening. She started to cry, fell on her knees, and pressed her bruised, wet face to my hand. Some old women in the ticket line looked at me with scorn, and a few men smiled.

It took
a while, and the operator had to call me back, but finally I was speaking, in very poor Russian, to the switchboard operator of the Moscow Militia. She was stern-sounding, but when she heard the name she brightened.
Immediately.
There was no one in the office around me, and Moska’s door was shut.

“Da?”

“Comrade Inspector Kliment Malevich?”

“Moment.”

I was trying to not think about Svetla’s story, the details she never quite spelled out, and to ignore the knots in my stomach when I didn’t succeed.

“What is it?”

I hadn’t spoken to him since he and his mother had left almost two decades ago. He had been a fat child then. “Comrade Kliment Malevich?”

“Da.”

“I was a friend of your father’s. In the royal police.”

He hummed into the phone, unsure of what to say.

“My name is Ferenc Kolyeszar.”

“I think I remember.” He sounded young. “Didn’t you…”

“Yes. Leonek Terzian and I discovered your father’s body.”

That seemed to reassure him. “Okay, Ferenc. How are you?”

“As good as can be expected in difficult times.”

“Truly.”

“And yourself? Your mother?”

“I’m excellent, but my mother’s been dead five years.”

“Was it easy for her? I hope.”

It was obvious to us both that I was no good at small talk. “Tell me, Ferenc. Tell me why you’ve called.”

I described the situation in as much detail as I could, so he would understand the necessity of what I was asking of him.

“Who’s this husband of hers?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“So he’s political.” He paused. “And I do what, exactly?”

“You give her a ride, that’s all. Find out where her father lives and drive her there.” I told him the exact number of rubles he would receive.

“You don’t need to pay me, Ferenc. I’ll do it.”

“Consider it expenses—what’s left over is a tip. And if the conductor gives you one ruble less, break his knees.”

Kliment laughed.

As I hung up, Moska came out of his office with a half-eaten sandwich, wiping a spot off his tie. “Where’s the Woznica woman?”

I swiveled in my chair. “Who?”

“Jesus, Ferenc.” He brought the sandwich down to his side. “Tell me.”

“Wasn’t her. Some hooker I’d known from before. I took her back to the Canal District and told her to stay away from trains.”

He didn’t know whether or not to believe me. But he had other things on his mind. “I’m sending you back there. To the canals. I’ve got a real murder for you.”

“I think I feel my illness coming back.”

Moska didn’t smile. “Come on.”

He settled in his chair and watched me sit across from him. “Do you know what you’re doing, Ferenc?”

I shrugged a forced unconcern.

“I was as disturbed as anyone by yesterday. You know that.”

I did know.

He picked up a typed sheet. “If you need to talk it over, okay? Just come to me. I’ll do what I can from my side, and if you need anything, let me know. Don’t ruin your career.”

“Thanks.”

He looked at me a moment more, then read from the sheet, his tone back to its usual efficiency. “Augustus II Square, number three. A burned body.” He handed it over, and there wasn’t a lot more. No identifying traits, just a body in the center of the Canal District. It had been called in anonymously and not yet verified. “You’re the only one around to take the case.”

“I can’t pass it on to someone else tomorrow?”

“Stefan’s still wasting time on that suicide, and Leonek’s working on a dead case—not to mention he thinks I hid Sergei’s files.” He shook his head. “That kid doesn’t have the slightest idea how a bureaucracy is run. Anyway, when Emil gets over his flu, he can help you.”

On my way out I passed Kaminski and Brano Sev in the corridor. Brano looked again like himself—he’d gone back to the long leather coat, and his somber mouth was too small to ever form a shout.

“So you’re feeling better,” said Kaminski. There was no more levity in his manner. He’d run out of it.

“Yes.”

“A lot of sick guys today. Me, I’ve got a sore back. Stumbled carelessly into a van. You, though,” he said, his trigger finger tapping his thigh, “You were quite sick yesterday. Very ill. It was obvious in everything you did.”

“I’m okay.”

Brano nodded at my hand, which held the folded sheet. “But you’re shaking. You’re not quite recovered.”

“Looks like we should keep an eye on him,” said Kaminski.

I pressed my lips together until they formed something meant to look like a smile.

The anxiety
collapsed upon me on the front steps, the bright sun spotting my vision. I had bribed state employees of the railroads, frontier guards, and even a Moscow militiaman. I’d aided the wife of a Party official in leaving the country illegally. Yesterday, I had walked away from the scene of battle, and in the process attacked a member of the KGB.

I reached the empty sidewalk and found my car. I had trouble getting the key into the door, then into the ignition. My joints were heavy, gummed up. I leaned my head on the wheel and took deep breaths.

A burned body would not walk away. I could wait for tomorrow. Or the next day. Or forever.

There were only a few farmers in the markets I passed, looking bored and alone. No children, and all the window shutters were closed. A general, unspoken strike had descended on the Capital. Just as the students had predicted.

I turned on the radio and settled into the sofa. There was a show of song and recitation for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party.
There is nothing secret about the Party—we all know what it is.
I wished the day would end. I lit a cigarette, and in the smoke saw Svetla Woznica sick in her cabin, racing toward the Soviet border.
It’s all of us. It’s me; it’s you.
I saw an empty city, shutters closed, then another one filled with tanks and gunfire and shattered windows.
The Party is a tree in the desert; it’s a star at midnight.
Magda beneath Stefan’s sweating white body, half-listening to the Americans’ radio broadcasts, then stumbling home and muttering some guilty words about Lydia, but feeling only the ache in her groin.

Be happy. A great Party means you are never alone.

Ágnes showed up with Pavel, and I realized I hadn’t noticed his absence. He sprang onto the sofa and climbed on me. His breath stank as he licked my chin. Ágnes brought a cup of water from the kitchen.

“Why are you home so early?” I asked.

She sat on the floor and squinted—her glasses were nowhere to be seen. “Not enough teachers,” she said. “Sick. They tried to teach us anyway, but by lunchtime they saw it was no use.”

“You took the bus back?”

“Had to wait forever. But Daniela came along. Wasn’t so bad. Where were you? I thought you were sick too.”

“I had to work.” My cigarette was burned down, so I carried it to the kitchen, dropping ash along the way. Ágnes changed the radio station.

“Daniela told me about this,” she said by way of explanation.

So we sat together on the sofa and listened to the Americans. It was a day of injustice, they said. Although sporadic fighting continued in some areas of the city, Budapest was now clearly lost. Imre Nagy was hiding in the Yugoslav embassy. I put my arm around Ágnes, and she leaned into me. Pavel was quiet in her lap. When the news began to repeat itself, I turned it off.

Around six, as I was cooking eggs for dinner, Magda showed up. She seemed disheveled somehow, as if she’d put her clothes on backward. But they looked fine. She sat at the kitchen table and watched me with surprise. I didn’t think it was because I was cooking.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked finally.

“What?”

“Yesterday. The demonstration. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

I stared back at her. “How did you know?”

“Word gets around.”

I wondered if Stefan had shed tears when he’d told her the story. I set a plate in front of her. “You weren’t in a listening mood.”

After dinner, we put on the Americans again, sitting together like a proper family, until the screech of jamming overcame it. As I turned it back to music, I told Ágnes that, whether or not everyone else listened to this station, it was still against the law. It should not be discussed outside the family. “The volume should remain low,” I said. “And afterward, always change the station. You understand?”

“I knew all this before, Daddy.”

“Now it’s more important than before.”

She nodded, and so did Magda.

We put Ágnes to bed, then drank wine in the living room. We didn’t talk, but for the first time in weeks the silence wasn’t strained. I didn’t know why. I was too exhausted to dwell on her and Stefan or even the mistakes I’d made these last two days. I was blank. I was disconnected from everything around me, even all that we had learned from the radio. It was disturbingly like the blankness I acquired on the battlefield, where all tender emotions are kept at arm’s length, so they will not harm you.

But then she smiled and nodded at the bedroom door. “You want to sleep in a real bed tonight?”

I did.

We undressed and got beneath the sheets in the dark. At first we did not touch, then she slid against me, and I could feel that she had not worn her nightdress. She buried her face in my chest in a way that made the blood rush into my head. It had been so long since she’d held me like that, and I stroked her bare, warm ribs with the tips of my fingers. But it was no use. After the initial flush of excitement, my body wouldn’t stay up for it. Everything receded to arm’s length. I kissed her ear and let her go. She rolled away from me, her cold heels just touching my shins, and began to cry.