The Confession

18

At a nearby bar filled with workers sipping vodkas and beer, I ordered a couple brandies for us. Leonek reached for his wallet, but I put a hand on his elbow to stop him. A warm shower had fallen on our way there, and the place was humid with wet bodies and drooping hats. We squeezed into an empty table in the center.

I wanted to say something, to get this started, but nothing came to me. We drank in silence, him looking over the crowd, blinking, his dark face reminding me of what little I knew of his background-childhood in an Armenian village, until the Young Turks started butchering his people, then the life of a refugee until he landed here with his mother.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

“You already told me.”

“I would have liked to make the funeral. Were there a lot of people?”

He shrugged. “The guys came, and her friends from the neighborhood. There were enough.”

“That’s good.” I sounded a little stupid. “How old was she?”

He looked at his glass on the table. In the voices and sweat of all the men around us I remembered the clean, sweet-smelling Italian, then, inevitably, Stefan’s disgusted face.

“She pushed her way through so much.” Leonek looked at me. “Even when the Turks killed my father, she kept a level head. Through Yugoslavia, to Bulgaria and Italy, then here, she kept everything together. I wanted to stay back home and fight. But they would have killed me too. She knew this. She made me come with her.”

I thought I should say something, but what do you say to that? I noticed then that he’d shaved, he looked clean, and this was something I appreciated.

“I even considered moving to the Armenian Republic a few years ago. Can you imagine that?” A smile finally split his face. “But this is my world now, not Central Asia. I wouldn’t know what to do in Yelevan.”

I agreed.

“You remember when Sergei was killed?”

I nodded.

“It was her again. She was the one who made me let it go, to stop looking into his murder. I was angry at her a long time about that. He and I were close-we were the two foreigners in the station house. Sergei was a brother to me. You know that.”

I did.

“At first I didn’t understand. But she understood.” His thin hands were on his glass, his fingers tapping. “Then people in the other offices were sent away-suddenly, with no warning, their desks were empty. Remember that?”

We all remembered that.

“Only then did I start to understand. She always knew. She saved me.”

She had saved herself as well. An old woman who knows how to survive knows that her son had better stay employed. Back then it was truer than ever. We all learned a degree of blindness-first during the Occupation, and then after the Liberation.

The door banged open, and five laughing students barged in. They had pink faces and shoddy clothes. “Five brandies!” shouted the first one, with an attempted mustache shadowing his lip. They gathered around the bar, talking animatedly. The workers looked at them a moment, then went back to their drinks.

“School must be going well,” said Leonek.

“Demonstrators,” I told him. “They were in Victory Square today.”

“How about that.” He turned in his seat to face them. “This is something, isn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“Remember how it used to be? No one would think to demonstrate. And look at them now!” His face pulsed as he considered it. “God, I wish I was young.”

“You are young.”

“We’re both young,” he said. “We should be out there too, standing next to them.”

It was good to see him pleased by this thought. “You going to make up a sign?”

“Why not?”

“What would it say?”

He put his chin in his palms, elbows on the table-he really did look young. “I don’t know. Isn’t that amazing? I’ve got no idea. What about you?”

“I’m not the demonstrating kind.”

“What does that mean?”

He was waiting, eyes big. “I have a wife and a daughter,” I said. “If I get thrown into jail, how would they fare? I don’t want my girl to grow up fatherless.”

He opened his mouth-something was ready to pop out-but then he shut it. He said, “Maybe that’s why I should do something. No one depends on me anymore.”

“Maybe.” But then I remembered what men like Mikhail Kaminski and Brano Sev would use to keep demonstrators from forcing Russian tanks to roll down our streets: interrogations, informers, secret police, and prison camps.