The Confession

Afterword to the 1978 edition by Georgi Radevych

Ferenc Kolyeszar began writing his confession on 12 March 1957 and finished it on 5 November, three days after Khrushchev launched Sputnik II-a relatively short time compared to the years it had taken him to write his first book, A Soldier’s Tale. It was composed at both Teodor and Nora’s Pocspetri farm and their dacha near Sarospatak. When he returned from the dacha on its completion he called me, but made no mention of the book. He only wanted to know what I knew about this satellite orbiting the earth, and about the dog inside it. “What’s going to happen when it runs out of air?” he asked, in a panic. When I told him the dog, Laika, was going to die, he fell silent.

It took another month for him to put together the “official” version that he turned in to Brano Sev. By that point Laika was dead. In his official confession, Ferenc cut out all references to the crimes of others. For example, there is no mention of anyone other than himself listening to Radio Free Europe, and the station-house strike that followed the Sixth of November demonstration is put down as his idea. But what no one, least of all Brano Sev, suspected was that Ferenc would confess to killing Malik Woznica. There was no evidence against him, and Woznica’s body had not been found. When he told me what he’d done, I asked him why on earth he’d confessed. He said, “Sometimes, Georgi, you’ve just got to be an adult.” He gave this version to Brano Sev on 11 December 1957.

It surprised Ferenc that he was not arrested after turning it in. He expected that within the week a white Mercedes would pull up to the farm and take him back to Vatrina. But he finally understood, and wrote me in a letter, “They will hold it over my head, Georgi. All I have to do is open my mouth and say something they don’t like, and I will be back with my friends in that camp.”

Ferenc only told me about this uncensored version of his Confession eight years later. He had waited long enough so that no one besides himself would be punished for its contents. He changed the names of the characters and used a pseudonym, like most underground writers at that time. In June 1965 I put out the first edition as a simple typed manuscript, five copies that we passed around to our friends and read in groups. The Russian word samizdat had just come into vogue, and this was the lowest form of samizdat you could find: a stack of pages stuffed into a folder.

It wasn’t until 1971 that we found the means and will to bind The Confession into a box of nine serialized pamphlets-known as “the Box” to those who looked for it. I asked Ferenc if he could compose some words to remind people of the political situation in those days, because some younger readers, I worried, would not remember exactly how it was. Ferenc answered with the second-person interchapters found in the present edition.

The Confession gained a life of its own. It was discussed in living rooms and kitchens all over the Capital, and a few copies were smuggled to Poland and Hungary. The Hungarians, with their own rich samizdat history, translated it into their difficult language and began printing it madly. From there his book spread like a beautiful malady.

But this popularity was the very thing that Yalta Boulevard was waiting for. On 1 February 1972, the white Mercedes did arrive at the Pocspetri farm, where Ferenc had lived with his wife and her parents for the last decade and a half, and took him to another work camp, on the eastern side of the country. The charge was murder, and Ferenc seemed, according to Magda, to have been waiting for that moment all his life.

He was released in 1975, during another wave of amnesties, in part because voices outside the country were demanding to know his whereabouts. He was returned to Pocspetri. His lungs were weak from working in the mine shafts of the Carpathian range, but Ferenc went immediately back to farming. “It is,” he confided to me once, “the only thing that gives me satisfaction.”

— March 1978