The Confession

6

Two and a half months into my stay, I was at the work site, collapsing beneath the weight of a wheelbarrow filled with snow-damp sand, when the mustached barracks guard-the Cosmin I’d heard of in another life-appeared at the edge of the canal. He put his hands on his hips. That morning he had pulled a boy from the roll call, ordered him to strip naked, then made him sit in the snow and cover himself with it, like a blanket. When we marched off to work, the boy was still there, rasping through congested pipes, turning blue. “Kolyeszar!” I looked up, my empty stomach tightening. “Get up here, Kolyeszar!”

I left the wheelbarrow and climbed up the embankment. Cosmin grabbed my ear and started walking forward-I had to bend so it wouldn’t tear off. He walked me to another guard, who kept his machine gun pointed at me.

“Take care of him,” said Cosmin.

I could hardly walk back across the wheatfields. I didn’t know why they hadn’t killed me there, in front of the others. Shooting me in secret just didn’t make sense-it was the one thing I felt must make sense-and only when we were in sight of the camp did I begin to suspect that I wasn’t going to die.

We went in through the back gate and stopped at the commander’s shack. The guard knocked and waited. By the fence was a burlap sack. I knew, by glancing over to the empty yard, that the frozen boy was in it. “Enter.” The guard opened the door and pushed me inside before closing it again. The warmth enveloped me as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Gogu sat at his desk, fanning himself with a file, while beside him, impassive, stood Brano Sev.

He said, “Hello, Ferenc.”

“Hello.”

“Can you excuse us, Comrade Commander?”

Gogu stopped fanning himself and looked at Sev. He seemed about to protest, but then lumbered out, muttering to himself. Sev took the commander’s seat and motioned to a chair. I collapsed into it.

“You don’t look good, Ferenc. Camp life doesn’t suit you.”

“You’re right.”

“And that smell.”

“It’s the pus.”

“Well, let’s see if we can get you out.”

I didn’t answer, afraid that anything I said might ruin this one tenuous possibility.

“I should tell you,” he said after a moment. “You should know that I never knew about this. About Kaminski. He was sent to help me with my work, and for a while he did just that. I was grateful for his help. But when he started showing interest in Nestor Velcea I became suspicious.”

He paused, so I ventured an observation: “But it was you looking at his file.”

“Yes,” he said. “After Kaminski had already been through it. I wanted to know why he was so interested in an ex-camp prisoner, and so interested in your case. The only connection seemed to be that he was running the Office of Internal Corrections at the same time Nestor was put away. But I didn’t know enough to understand everything. Maybe if you had been more honest with me in the first place, I could have helped.”

I looked at my blackened fingernails. “But you did know about Sergei.”

“Of course,” he said without inflection. “I knew about the execution in ’forty-six. You have to understand: Back then we were still fighting a war. It wasn’t as relaxed as it is now.”

“Relaxed?”

As he talked, he arranged his hands on the desk, as if plotting out moves. “People forget. I learned of Sergei’s execution just after Kaminski performed it. It was a necessary thing. Sergei’s investigation threatened to undermine the entire Soviet presence in the country. We still had Fascists in the hills, and foreign instigators were spread throughout the city. They could have used the investigation to devastating effect.”

I didn’t want to argue. “What about Nestor?”

“That was what I didn’t know. I didn’t know there had been a witness to the synagogue murders-no record was kept of it in our files. And I certainly didn’t know how Kaminski was connected to those girls. One expects more of state security.” He shook his head. “But Kaminski finally admitted it all. In the interview room.”

“Oh.”

“I might have turned a blind eye to some of this, but I could not allow that Kaminski had killed Stefan. That was entirely beyond imagining.”

“Where is he now?”

Sev looked at his own fingernails, which were very clean. “He’s dead, Ferenc. His body was found in the Tisa. He’d been shot in the back of the head.”

I leaned forward, not quite understanding. “He-”

“Don’t ask, Ferenc.”

I took a deep, wavering breath as I leaned back again.

“Nestor Velcea is in a work camp in the east. He’s a miner. And now to you.” He straightened in his chair. “I’ve spent the last months arranging an amnesty. It was not easy. I couldn’t defend your actions on November the sixth, but I did talk with them in more depth about the situation with the Woznica woman. Emil was useful in this, as he knew the whole story. I was hoping that Malik Woznica himself could verify some facts, but he has not yet been found.”

I noticed my cold hands were beginning to shake.

“The best I could arrange was internal exile. You won’t be allowed in the Capital again, not without proper authorization.”

I remembered to say, “Thank you.”

“One condition.”

“What?”

“A confession. It’s bureaucratic, a simple thing. But they want an in-depth confession of your crime, as well as a full report on the case. You will deliver this to me.”

“And what will you do with it?”

“I’ll put it in your file. Type it up in the proper format, numbered, and wire me when you’re finished. That’s all they want.”

Later, I would think about how he used the word “they” instead of the more appropriate “we,” but at the time I just looked at my hands, at the red and black sores that covered them.

He said he would be back in a week with the release papers, and that in the meantime I should stay alive. I asked him how I should go about doing that. He shrugged. “Work hard.”