The Confession

89

It rained most of the drive. I had not had the patience to clean up the house; all I wanted was Agnes and Magda. I wanted them with me immediately; there could be no delay. I splashed through craters of rainwater and flew past hitchhikers stumbling through the mud, the sputtering radio teaching me more about the life of Mihai than I would ever have wanted to know. All I learned of his death was that lung cancer had taken him.

I ducked beneath my coat to stay dry and banged on the loose front door. Nora looked surprised.

“Where are they?”

“Inside, dear. Eating lunch.”

Agnes threw herself into my arms, weeping. It was strange to hold my daughter again, and I had to adjust my arms to accommodate her. Maybe she’d grown in the past week. But her tears weren’t for me. “He’s dead, Daddy! W-what can we…” She broke down again.

Magda was easier to hold. I sank my face into her shoulder and held her for a few seconds longer than she expected. Then she pulled back. “Are you okay?” She wiped my cheek.

“Me? Oh, sure. I’m fine.”

“Your hand is scratched.”

“It’s nothing. I’m okay.”

It took a while to relax, a meal that tasted better than any Nora had ever made before, and a long smoke with Teodor. We discussed Mihai’s passing and speculated without knowledge on what would follow. No one that week had any idea what would happen. “Agnes is a wreck,” he said. “Does that surprise you?”

“Maybe those Pioneer meetings had their effect.”

He asked about the case.

“It’s over.”

“And it went well? You got your man?”

“I got him.”

“And what about you two?”

“What about us two?”

“Mag told me she asked you to take her back.” He put out his smoke. “Are you going to do that?”

I didn’t know how to answer.

All five of us took a walk across the wet communal plots and greeted farmers who stood smoking in empty, long-harvested fields. We made it to the social club, a low wooden building where a couple men played guitars in a corner while drunk farmhands danced with young girls. I didn’t like it when one of them covered us with his atrocious breath and asked to dance with Agnes, but I was pleased when she declined.

At the farmhouse Magda and I took the room where she had once told me about Leonek. But this time she examined my hand with concern, then told me again how sorry she was. I kissed her to keep her quiet, and we made love in a way I’d not done for a very long time: simply, and without any motives other than love. Afterward she told me she could never leave me, because a man as pure and true as me was a once-in-a-lifetime find. “Pure?” I asked her. I was standing naked by the opened window, smoking.

She put herself up on an elbow, and in the darkness she might have been any woman. “I know you, Ferenc. Your impulses are pure. You’ve proven it to me all these years.”

“I’m not pure, Magda. I’m so far from that.”

“But you are.”

“No,” I repeated, then told her about Vera. I told as little as possible.

She was quiet for a moment, then whispered, “I knew something was going on. All those nights out.” I noticed her breaths were uneven. “But what else should I expect?” she said. “I’m surprised you didn’t do it earlier.”

I flicked the cigarette out the window and latched it tightly.