The Confession

10

I knocked on Georgi’s door after having walked down to the Tisa, trying to summon inspiration from the black water. The summer heat had brought out the smell of decay, and when the clamoring noise of a dogcatcher’s van filled with its barking victims flew by, the stink became too much.

Georgi let out a rude exclamation, kissed my cheeks with his wine-stained lips, and pulled me inside. His face was red, and the smile lines that sprouted from his eyes were white. “Have you met Louis? He’s leaving tomorrow! Come on, come on.” There were a lot of voices coming from the kitchen.

“Louis?”

“The Frenchman.” He reached up to my shoulder and urged me along.

They were up at this hour because they were always up-this is something they prided themselves on-ten or twelve men and women squeezed around a tiny kitchen table, drinking. Louis, the Frenchman, was in town, and everyone had made the pilgrimage to Georgi’s to see this emissary from the West. I’d forgotten.

“Louis!” Georgi called, and a fat man with oily, tasseled hair rolled his head back.

“Oui?”

“Mon ami” said Georgi. “Meet another of our writers!”

“This is a nation of writers!” Louis shouted, then rose wearily to his feet and stuck out a hand. “ You’re a big writer.”

He gave the kind of firm, rough shake men give when they consider my size, then turned my hand so he could see my rings, my sentimental reminders of the war.

“Each finger, huh?” Louis grinned as he settled back down. “I bet those rings have got some stories to them. Writers! ”

It was a kitchen of writers-Karel and Vera, Daniel, even Miroslav, and more-and I wanted none of them. All I’d wanted was Georgi, a quiet talk, and then some sleep. But Georgi couldn’t do anything quietly tonight. His Frenchman was in town. His French communist poet-an existentialist, no less.

The Frenchman sat up and said a few words of a love poem by Paul Eluard that I did not understand, something about wasps flowering and a necklace of windows. When he paused long enough we knew he was done, so we clapped. He beamed. Karel got up, and I took his chair. Louis said, “Now that you’re sitting I can face you!”

Vera and Ludmila laughed, and when they quieted, I saw Vera’s big, drunken eyes holding on to me. Her black hair hung loosely down her back.

“They told me about it,” he said. “This book of yours.”

“Oh great.”

“I hear it’s autobiographical. That so?” He spoke our language surprisingly well.

“Everything’s autobiographical, isn’t it?”

Louis laughed expressively, as though he were on a stage and had to project to the back rows. “Very good, very good!”

I hadn’t said it to be funny, but they were all laughing with him, even Georgi, and I didn’t know if this was because it actually was funny, or if they were trying to stay in France’s good favors.

“I just finished an epic poem on the most glorious of all human desires: revenge. I swear, there is nothing more sincere. What about your book?”

“It’s about my time during the war.”

The Frenchman stopped laughing and put on a very serious face. “And what did you do during the war?”

“Killed people, of course.”

Louis winked. “Me, I hid under my mother’s skirt!”

Everyone laughed again, and even I cracked a smile.