The Confession (20 page)

In the
morning, I sent Emil out to see if he could find any files on Nestor Velcea, Antonín and Zoia’s old roommate, then looked up as Leonek rushed in, ecstatic, his grin larger than any I’d seen in a long time. “He’s dead! I can’t believe it—what luck!”

“Who?” I asked.

“The old man! The girl’s grandfather!”

Tevel Grubin, grandfather of Chasya Grubin, one of Sergei’s dead girls. One of two family members still in the Capital. “I don’t see how that’s great news, Leonek.”

He tapped his head with an index finger. “Think, man, think! There’s only one family member around to go to the funeral—the one I need to interview. Zindel, Chasya’s brother. He’ll be let out of prison—there’s no reason they would refuse him!”

“They don’t need a reason, Leon.”

“They’ve got to let him. I’ll lodge a complaint if they don’t.”

“That always does the trick.”

“Don’t be ironic, Ferenc. Can you come with me?”

“To the funeral?”

He tilted his head. “I need you there. Just your presence. I’d ask Emil or Stefan, but they couldn’t intimidate a fly.”

As I agreed to it, my phone rang.

“It’s been signed out,” said Emil.

“What do you mean it’s been signed out?”

“Day before yesterday someone signed out Nestor’s file. Guess who.”

“Tell me.”

“Brano Sev.”

I waited for Emil to return, and in the meantime told Stefan about the file. I went out of my way to be brusque with him, but he didn’t seem to notice. So we watched Brano Sev at his own desk, his back to us as he went through more files. This was how we always saw Brano Sev: a man at a desk with files. The times when he left his desk to do the more heinous acts that state security required, for us he was simply gone. He did not share his cases with us, though we knew that he was aware of everything we worked on.

Emil arrived flush from the cold. “Did you get it?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“For me? Why?”

I looked at the floor. “I don’t know.”

Like every other time anyone approached his desk, Sev instinctively closed the file in front of him. “Ferenc.”

I started to lean on his desk, but changed my mind. “I need to look at a file you’ve got. Nestor Velcea.”

For the first time in my life I saw Brano Sev’s face form an expression of surprise. “Why are you interested in Nestor Velcea?”

“His name came up in an interview, I just want to see if there’s anything to learn.”

Sev turned to his wide file drawer, hesitated, then opened it. It was stuffed tight with files and papers, and when he found the Velcea file he had to use both hands to keep from pulling out the ones around it. He kept hold of it as I held the other side. “Do me a favor, will you?”

“Sure, Brano.”

He licked his thin lips. “Tell me if there’s anything useful to your case.”

When I nodded he let it go.

I opened the file on Stefan’s desk, and he took over, passing us things he thought were of interest. A photograph from before his incarceration—a blond young man with curls around his ears, good-looking. His data sheet said little. He had been born in the Capital in 1919, which made him thirty-seven now—my age. His profession was marked by the word
various. Painting
was listed under “
PASTIMES
,” along with
reactionary political interests.

There wasn’t much else. His family had been transferred south after the war, which perhaps explained why Nestor never had regular work. He didn’t have the residence papers to allow him a job assignment in the Capital. But he had stayed nonetheless, to work on his painting and eke out a living.

His decade in the Vátrina Work Camp, number 480, from 1946 to 1956 was just a line on his résumé—the details would be in a file at the camp itself. Behind the work camp fingerprint card with its ten swirls of black ink, Stefan noticed a sheet, just a brief description added after the Amnesty, in September. A physical description gathered from an informer named “Napoleon”:
Limping due to damage to right leg, loping walk. Damage to left hand—small finger missing.
I looked at them looking back at me, then grabbed the fingerprint card from my desk, the prints taken from Antonín’s apartment. They matched Nestor’s.

We had the name of our murderer.

When I took Nestor’s file back to Sev, he closed another file on his desk. “Tell me,” I said. “Why is state security interested in the file of an artist?”

Brano Sev slid Nestor’s file between the others in the drawer. “Just a routine check on amnestied prisoners. We do this sometimes.” But he didn’t look at me when he said that. He only looked at me when he said, “And you? Anything of interest in his file?”

Knowledge was not something Brano Sev deserved from anyone—if he could lie, so could I. “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

Thursday morning
in the empty office, while waiting for the others to arrive, an idea came to me. I had the Militia operator patch me through to Ozaliko Prison, named after a sixteenth-century nationalist whose name was dredged out of history soon after the Versailles borders were drawn. A man sounding sick of his job answered the phone. “This is Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar from the Militia Homicide Department.”

“Hello, Comrade Inspector.”

“Do you still have a man named Lev Urlovsky in custody? He was brought in last summer.”

“Urlovsky?”

“Exactly.”

He went through his files. “I see, killed his own son?”

“That’s the one.”

“That particular bastard will be here for another week or so, then he’s off to the provinces.”

“Labor camp?”

“Labor?” The functionary grunted. “Sure. Labor.”

It was a long shot, but he and Nestor were at the same camp during the same period, and it wasn’t unreasonable that they might have known each other. Or that they still knew each other. I told him I’d arrive in the next few hours to fill out the request for an interview.

“As you like.”

Footsteps exploded in the station. I knew, even without looking, who it was.

“
You!”
He was at my desk, leveling a cool, stable finger at me.

“I see you’re back on your medication.”

Malik Woznica swung down a fist that made my typewriter jump. “Where is my Svetla?”

I tried to seem concerned. “You haven’t heard from her yet? And no ransom notes?”

“Don’t talk to me like that! What did you do with my wife?”

“I think my chief told you, Comrade Woznica. I haven’t found her. A prostitute was mistaken for her, but really, your wife’s no prostitute.”

He breathed heavily, not used to so much exertion, and when he spoke his teeth were clenched. “Comrade Inspector Kolyeszar. You signed the papers authorizing her leave. We have your name on a paper that says you took Svetla Woznica into your custody.”

“I was mistaken.” I said this smoothly, but it was just the coolness of immediate shock. I had forgotten about that form.

“No, you weren’t mistaken, Comrade Kolyeszar. But you did make a mistake. You thought you could go against Malik Woznica of the Health Ministry. You thought you were above the rules.” He put another unshaking hand on the desk. “I’m going to finish you off.”

Then he walked out. There was no sign of his illness at all.

I didn’t
wait for the others. I got into one of the Militia’s Mercedes and sped north to Ozaliko. Woznica’s hands did not shake, but mine did, and they threw the car off a little when I took wide turns. The Militia radio buzzed through tinny speakers, and a few times I heard voices. Leonek informed the station that he was heading over to the Fourth District Militia station, and Regina Haliniak thanked him for his update. I lifted the mouthpiece and even pressed the button before changing my mind. Sev would learn where I was going, and wonder why. He would want to know why I was speaking with a prisoner at Ozaliko, and for the moment I didn’t want him knowing anything. He’d had the file of my killer, and that meant Kaminski did as well. They were just two heads of the same Hydra.

The face of the man who sounded sick of his job matched the voice. His features sagged depressingly, in direct contrast to the smiling Mihai on the wall. When I told him I had called a half hour ago, he made no move to suggest that this rang a bell. He handed me the forms on a clipboard and asked if I needed a pen. But I already had one.

It was a three-page form requesting all of my personal details, with open spaces to fill in my reasons for seeing the prisoner. I labored over that, wanting to explain it without bringing up Nestor Velcea’s name, though I knew that, were Sev interested, he could figure it out easily enough. But there was no reason to make it easy for him.

The clerk took back the clipboard and ignored me as I stood waiting. “What now?” I asked.

He looked up again. “You’ll be contacted.”

I drove all the way to the station before changing my mind. I was afraid that Woznica would be there again, waving forms at Sev or Kaminski, awaiting my arrival. I was afraid that Kaminski was finally done playing with me, that all this time he had only been waiting for a free cell in Yalta Boulevard, where I could think about what I’d done on the Sixth of November. So I instead parked by October Square and asked Corina if I could use their telephone. She looked over to Max, cleaning glasses behind the bar, and he shrugged.

“Hello?”

“Vera. It’s me. Ferenc.”

“Well, this is a surprise.”

“Are you busy?”

“Just looking over some lectures for a class. Want to drop by?”

“Can I buy you a coffee? I’m over at October. Max and Corina’s place.”

At that point I had no intention of sleeping with her, or I believed I didn’t. I just wanted someone to talk to, and she was the one person I knew would be at home. But she was also the one person who would want more from me than a talk.

She looked as though the cold had taken a decade off her age, and when she sat I waved to Corina for another coffee.

“Shouldn’t you be hunting criminals or something?”

“Just don’t feel like it right now. What lectures were you working on?”

Corina set down the coffee. Vera thanked her, pulled some long black strands behind an ear, then leaned close to me. “You don’t really care about that, do you?”

I could feel her warm breath on my face. “I do, actually. I’m interested.” And that was true.

She leaned back. “Well, Marx, if you must know. His critique of Plato’s
Republic
—Marx considers it largely a defense of the Egyptian caste system. Which, you can imagine, Karl wasn’t too happy about.”

“I can imagine.”

“Some of my students are relatively critical of Plato, but I like to point out how similar, in a way, social Marxism is to Plato’s theory of forms. In essence at least—because society is moving toward a predefined goal, a pure idea.”

I looked at her, eyes wide, until she understood.

“You don’t know anything about Plato, do you?”

“About as much as I know about Marx.”

“Which is nothing.”

I nodded. “So teach, professor.”

She looked at me a moment, trying to decide, then slid the ashtray to her left. “Plato or Marx?”

“The first one.”

“Well, it’s really very simple. Kindergarten level.”

“That’s just right for me.”

She looked at me another moment. “Plato felt that for everything there is an essential form that is more real than this reality.”

“Like souls?”

“No,” she said. “That’s a common mistake. He uses the story of the people in a cave, with a fire blazing. On the walls are the shadows—these shadows are us. Our world is on the walls. And the people sitting around the fire are the ideal.”

I nodded.

“You’re sure you haven’t heard this before?”

I had, but I wanted her to do the talking. “Just tell me, will you?”

“Okay. An example: For all apple trees, there is a single, perfect apple tree on which they are all based, but never equal to.”

“Like God making us in his image.”

“Something like that.”

“All apple trees aspire to this perfect version?”

“Maybe. But it makes more sense for people.” She pointed at me. “Behind Ferenc Kolyeszar there is an ideal Ferenc Kolyeszar. Do you aspire to it?”

I sank back into my chair. “Of course I do. Don’t you?”

“Of course I aspire to the perfect Ferenc Kolyeszar,” she said, smiling, then shook her head. “No, I don’t aspire anymore. I used to believe all that. I used to think there was an ideal Vera Pecsok who was the perfect wife. I worked on it a long time. But the closer I got in action—because it’s only through your actions that you can become anything—the less happy I was. The less like myself I felt. So either the perfect Vera was not the perfect wife, or there was no perfect Vera.” She shrugged. “I prefer believing there’s no perfect Vera, and that with each new action I become someone slightly different.”

I tugged my lip. “So why are you teaching this? If you don’t believe it.”

“Because they let me,” she said as she took out a cigarette. I lit it. “I used to teach six classes, now they’ve whittled me down to two, and seem to have forgotten I’m teaching under quota. Plato’s forms are safe. Because, as I said, behind every socialist state lies utopia—that’s the similarity I was talking about. And that utopia is what we’re all aspiring to. Right?”

We drank our coffee in silence for a while. She had me thinking of that, too: Was there an ideal Ferenc that I should be trying to become? An ideal husband and father, an ideal militiaman? A great writer?

She said, “When I was studying in Zurich, a professor of mine had a theory about women in wartime. He said that, in times of war and revolution, when their men cannot protect them, women see their lives stripped bare. They understand, with utter clarity, that they are alone, as we all are. Most women also see that this life, with this man, is not what they wanted. It’s just something they stumbled upon. And only in the clarity of this vision do they find the strength to change their lives. So they leave.”

I watched her thinking about this. “Is that true? Do women leave their men in wartime?”

She raised her shoulders. “It happens.”

“A professor told you this?”

“A professor, yes. He was also my lover.”

“Oh.”

“So why did you call me, Ferenc?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Of course you are. That
I don’t know
is the oldest, and worst, excuse.”

“I guess I wanted this. To talk to you. We never do.”

She placed the sugar spoon into her empty cup. “Talk isn’t what I want from you. Don’t try to make me into something I’m not. Okay?”

“But you’re not anything,” I said. “You told me that.”

She touched a red nail to the back of my hand. “You’re a fast learner. Did you know Karel’s going to Yugoslavia on Saturday?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“A Writers’ Union trip. A representative of our men of letters. He’s very proud.”

“He should be.”

“And I’ll be alone for a whole week.”

The conversation didn’t go much further because she was not very interested in it, and maybe I wasn’t either, so I went home and waited for my family. Ágnes showed up first, but she didn’t feel like talking either. She’d had a bad day, and all I could get out of her was that she would prefer to remain in her room for the rest of her life. Magda’s mood was no better, and when after dinner I tried to talk to her it was no use. None of the women in my life wanted to talk that day. I told Magda that I’d had coffee with Vera, but it didn’t faze her. She didn’t know about the Christmas kiss or the more recent one, and I didn’t know if knowing about them would have made any difference.