The Confession

Fall
1

This confession is becoming longer than I would have expected, and has still hardly begun. But the details that precede and surround the story are necessary for understanding what follows, because crimes are not committed without precedent. Even the most banal details come together and gain power and lead murderers to their final, defining acts.

Through the weeks following that dinner, the writing began. I tried to ignore the news from Budapest and focus on words during the early-morning hours in the empty office. The typewriter rattled, and the sluggish T stuck. A few words came, interrupted by long periods when the blank sheets just hypnotized me. Then, gradually, thoughts began to coalesce. Magda’s parents’ farm before the war, the long journey home after the war, the discovery that my family was dead, then the move to the Capital, black bars and fevers of depression. By November, as the weather cooled, I was typing a regular, controlled flow. Marriage was the only subject for me now, and it was becoming the story of how time can erode a marriage from the center. I wrote about our early, flush months, the month-and-a-half wartime separation, then the strange, inexplicable disconnect when I returned. I was a different man even after such a short war, one who had to find his way back to the world of human feelings, to the joys and fears of a family man. That short war had changed Magda as well. I wrote of Agnes, and how her birth drew me back into the marriage, so that the marriage was the one thing that sustained me. I wrote nothing about Stefan because he was incidental, just a symptom of a real ailment. I showed my pages to no one.

Mikhail Kaminski continued to work with Brano Sev on the files of state security, his trigger finger always more active than the others. These security officers had the appearance of clerks, poring over sheets with numbers and paragraphs and photographs. When they left, we could only imagine what they did: converse with informers on park benches, drag victims into interview rooms, strong-arm troublesome students into the silence of utter submission. Leonek speculated that they were deciding which ones of us to get rid of, though Emil and I shrugged that off as paranoia. Once I overheard Kaminski laugh and say to Brano: Those bitches will wish they never heard of nonviolent resistance! I only understood this later.

There was one more incident with Stefan. I was out drinking with Emil and Leonek on a Friday night, and Stefan appeared, already a little drunk. He sat with us and joined the conversation, which slowed once he arrived, but he kept looking at me significantly. Sometimes he smiled, and he kept taking my cigarettes. The others didn’t seem to notice this, but I did, and when he got up to use the toilet I followed him into the bathroom and, without a word, hit him on the back of the head. His face fell into the mirror, leaving a long crack that as far as I know is still there. I returned to the table and finished my drink, and when Stefan appeared again he was padding a bloody spot on his forehead. The fact that Emil and Leonek said nothing only proved that they understood everything.

We changed partners. I was to work with Emil, and Stefan would work with Leonek. “A temporary measure,” Moska explained in his dim office. “Nothing to worry about.” He looked at the paperwork on his desk rather than at me.

“How long?”

“What was that?”

“How long is temporary?”

“Does it matter?”

He was right-it didn’t matter. No one in the Capital was committing murder. Leonek noticed this aloud. “When people are focused on something great outside their borders, they don’t have enough attention to kill each other.” Revisiting Sergei’s case was making him philosophical. Or something else was.

First he had gone through the station’s file cabinets, all of them, then barged in on Moska, demanding to know where Sergei’s files were. Expunged was the answer. Leonek sneered the word. “Cleaned out, that’s what he told me.”

“They were destroyed?”

Leonek flattened a hand on a stack of papers beside his typewriter. “Not quite. I had to go to the central depot. Do you know where that is?”

I’d never even heard of a central depot.

“Just outside the Seventh District. A warehouse, no less. Stefan came with me, and after two days, running back into town for unpredictable signatures, this greasy bureaucrat finally gives them to us. Reluctantly.” He sank into his chair and straightened the pages. A few inches thick-a couple hundred pages, I guessed. “A lot of this is useless,” he said. “Forms, certificates, the like. But there’s something here. I’m sure of it.”

He had the same surety as Stefan, when he had insisted that no one in the Capital could kill himself-a stubborn, peasant conviction.

Georgi called to invite me and Magda to a party. “More foreigners in town?” I asked.

“No foreigners, but it is for them. For the foreigners.”

“The Magyars, Georgi?”

“I’ll support our Hungarian comrades the only way I know how.”

“By drinking, you mean.”

“Such a cynic. Remember, Ferenc, you’re Magyar-blooded too. Bring Magda.”

“I don’t know. Haven’t seen her much.”

“Where’s she been?”

“Out with a friend from the factory. A Lydia.” This is what Magda would tell me when she returned home, often after Agnes went to bed, as she passed me on the couch: I was out with Lydia again.

But I had never asked where she had gone, or whom with.

“You know I’m still waiting for your literary contribution.”

“You’ll have to keep waiting. Nothing’s ready.”

“But you’re writing?”

“I seem to be. Finally.”

By the time we hung up, he sounded positively thrilled.