The Confession

Winter
1

I look back over weeks and months in an attempt to give them order, but time can only be given shape by time. Fall had been my season of irresponsibility, and I had moved steadily through it, accumulating mistakes and fears and tragedies, and in the winter I was paid back for it.

The beginning was a white, four-door Mercedes. Brano Sev sat in front with the driver, and the second man remained in the back with me. Brano had not talked in the stairwell and maintained his silence all the way to Yalta Boulevard, where the shops were closed, their metal blinds like mouth braces holding the buildings straight.

Sev walked ahead of us as the guard opened the heavy door of Number 36 without a word. I couldn’t remember if he was the guard from Georgi’s visit. The inner doors parted, and we were in a cavernous, institutional green room, where two uniformed women sat behind a wide desk. Sev talked to the heavier one, and the other, her thin face revealing the shape of her narrow jawbone, watched me. The hawk on her shoulder patch matched the one on the wall above them: a copper sculpture five feet tall, the hawk at rest.

Two doors on either side of the desk led from this room. We took the left one through a low corridor, not unlike the Militia station’s corridors, but what I noticed was this: There were no names on the doors’ translucent windows, and no numbers. And that is when I became afraid. The unmarked doors of Yalta 36 were part of a world that was beyond my understanding.

We descended a concrete stairwell at the end of the corridor, and I wondered if Georgi had followed this same path. I tried to remember the details of what he’d recounted; but the growing panic was making me forgetful. Three levels down, Sev knocked on a steel door and waited for the tiny barred window to open and close. A series of locks were worked on from the other side, and then the door opened.

The guardroom was just big enough for a desk holding a telephone and a copy of The Spark. Hooks on the wall held keys. The guard was a meaty man with round glasses. He smiled and asked me to empty my pockets. All I had was some loose change, my wallet, and my Militia certificate. “Laces?” he said, and waited as I knelt and unthreaded my shoelaces. He spoke to Sev while looking at me. “Which one?”

“Seventeen.” Sev’s voice was flat.

The guard handed over a key and used another one on the next door. It opened onto a narrow, concrete corridor lined by more steel doors.

“Is this really necessary?”

Sev acted as if I’d said nothing as I followed him to the ninth door on the left. Here, at least, were numbers, but they were drawn with chalk-at any moment they could be wiped clean and changed. Sev worked with some effort on the lock, but got it open, then glanced at the guards who waited back with the jailer. In the dim light his face had lost all its color. “We both know it’s necessary. At least for now.”

I followed the direction of his hand, and the door closing behind me filled the cell with darkness.