The Confession

17

I don’t know why I didn’t hit him. He would have respected me for it. But the anger wasn’t upon me yet-it was only shock. Maybe it was simply the residue of our decades of friendship, and that for a long time he had been so good to me-because of guilt or some other weakness. Or maybe I knew he was right: Ever since the book had come out I’d stopped calling him, stopped working to maintain our friendship.

I went back into the station, where Leonek and Emil and Brano were standing around Brano’s desk again. Kaminski was talking, and they were all smoking, a soft cloud hovering above their heads. My phone was ringing.

“Daddy?”

“Yes,” I said, for a moment unsure who it was. “Yes?”

“Mother wants to know-”

“What does she want to know?”

“When you’ll be over for dinner. With this friend of yours. That’s how she said it- that friend of his.”

My watch took a second to focus. “Tell her seven. We’ll be there at seven.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“This friend of yours, he’s a cute one?”

It was a joke, I knew, but I couldn’t rise to it. “I’ll see you at seven.”

“Here,” said Kaminski, as I approached. He held out a cigarette. I took it, noticing the small pin on his lapel. A red rippled flag. “I was telling the guys about the Komsomol.”

“The youth brigades?” I asked. I didn’t care what he was talking about. I just wanted some noise.

“You know them,” he said. Everyone knew about the Komsomol. Even The Spark carried articles of their industrious exploits in unclaimed regions on the other side of the Empire. “I went to the virgin lands in northern Kazakhstan after my years here, to help farm. Such good soil. Terrible climate, but what soil!” He held his gangly hands out, palms up. “You know what it’s like to work with your hands like that? It’s a dream. That’s what it is. I coordinated the work, and I ate with these fine young people in the fields, then we all went back to work, such hard work, and at night we ate around a campfire and sang revolutionary songs. You have to imagine it if you weren’t there. Fifty, a hundred passionate young people singing songs about their hopes and dreams for the future. No, I don’t think you can imagine it.” He shook his head. “Over here, maybe it’s different. But in the Motherland, we’re in this together. We build everything from nothing. That’s socialism. It’s the collective spirit that moves us on. Do you understand?”

I lit the cigarette finally, and visions of Stefan-stretched naked over my wife, grunting, his flesh sweating-only now began to fade.

“The peasants,” he said, “they brought us flowers. Can you believe it? Maybe you don’t know real peasants here, but you don’t get flowers from Kazhak peasants for no reason. They knew we were there to save them, that we were there to save the Union. Khrushchev had told us to make the plains arable. And for the sake of humanity, that’s what we did. Not me personally, of course, I was only there a couple years, mostly administrative; but we did it, all of us working together. Last year we worried that everything was ruined by the drought, but this year, I’m told, the wheat yield is going to be unprecedented.” He shook his head again, this time with admiration. “They’re still doing it now. They sing their songs at night and work all day and hope for better things. And better things are happening. Just wait.”

It was a peculiar thing to see. This man from Moscow had us surrounding him in a corner of the office we never visited, had us listening to him as if he were our kindergarten teacher. He had a sparkle in his eye, and a lively voice, and when you didn’t pay too much attention to what he was saying, you could feel his excitement yourself. Emil and Leonek were transfixed. Brano stared, his face revealing nothing. Kaminski was a real orator. A tremor ran through my body. It was a terrible, magical feeling.

Then I noticed the index finger of his right hand. Moska was right; it twitched. And I remembered that the word administrative meant a lot more than paperwork and long lunch breaks.