The Confession

5

In addition to the same ten from my last visit, there were twenty more crammed into that small apartment. Georgi had painted a red banner that hung over the kitchen door: ARTISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

“You like?” he asked me, his drunkenness clear from the first glance.

“It’s clever,” I lied.

Georgi stumbled through to the kitchen. Someone had opened the window over the sink to cut through the smoke and humidity of so many sweating bodies, and a brandy was shoved into my hand. I noticed Vera-the hard stare and red lips playing on the edge of her glass made her unavoidable-then the others, squeezed tight: pairs and threesomes in heated conversations and lonely drinkers peering around in anticipation or nodding off.

“Did your Frenchman make it out all right?”

Georgi leaned close, looking baffled. I repeated myself. “Ah! Louis sent word from Paris! Come, come!”

I followed him back to the living room, pushing past faces that said Ferenc so good to and Where have you been hiding and I’ve been wanting to talk, until we had reached the bedroom. There was a young couple on his small bed, half-dressed. The girl tugged her bra strap up to her shoulder; the boy blushed. I didn’t know them, and neither, apparently, did Georgi. “Who did you come with?”

There was some confusion as they buttoned their clothes and tried to manage an answer. “We just…well, everyone knew about…it was… no one, okay?” The boy, a Gypsyish southerner, finally stood straight. “Is there a problem with us being here?”

Georgi gave me a sidelong glance. “I don’t like my bed being soiled by other people’s fluids.”

They were edging along the wall toward the door. The girl’s lipstick was smeared to her chin. “No need to get all heated up,” said the boy.

“I’m not heated,” said Georgi. “It’s just my friend here. He’s a little protective. He keeps breaking people into little pieces. I don’t know what to do about it.”

Both of them looked up at me, and when I laid my hand over my rings and cracked my knuckles, they bolted.

Louis had sent a picture postcard of Notre Dame, with a question mark and an exclamation point scratched beneath it. My dear Comrade! Here in the bourgeois capital looking for ways to take back my surplus value. Thoughts of my days with you warm me in this cold place. Please look into coming to Paris, where I can show you the hospitality you’ve shown me.

The scribbled Louis at the bottom was illegible.

“He’s got your sense of humor,” I said.

Georgi put it back in his bureau. “You going to the Union meeting on Friday?”

“The Writer’s Union?”

“What else?”

“Haven’t been to one of those in years.”

He squeezed my knee. “That’s because you’re a sweetheart. You stopped going when they kicked me out.”

I shrugged. “Coincidence.”

He patted my cheek and gave a bleary smile, then raised his glass. “To our Magyar comrades-in-arms. Kick those bastards out!”

I allowed myself a slow, quiet intoxication. It was a gift for writing again, for surviving Stefan’s stab at collapsing my marriage, and for not thinking too deeply about Magda’s late nights out, with Lydia. I swept through the rooms and back again, caught by half conversations about Budapest and Moscow and Washington, DC, and the Suez, and about writing. Stanislaus was working on a series of poems remembering the end of Stalinism, and Bojan was in the final edits of a surrealist memoir-a “dream book.” A couple artists were ridiculing Vlaicu, probably the most popular state painter at that time. A journalist I’d never met before provoked a few words on what I’d been writing and seemed genuinely interested in my vague answers, which helped my mood. There were more students, a few making out, and another young couple in a corner, telling Georgi loudly that there would be a strike very soon. “Citywide,” the girl said earnestly. “It will be unambiguous. They’ll know how the People feel.”

Georgi was humoring their optimism, but an older painter whose name I didn’t remember asked how they expected to get word around. “How are we supposed to know when to strike?”

“We won’t need to utter a word,” said her boyfriend. “The government will tell everyone when to strike. All they need to do is close down one demonstration. Just one. Then the People will react.”

The painter laughed, and the ensuing argument lasted a long time, all shouts and condescending one-liners.

Then, very late, as the party was clearing out and I thought I’d avoided it, Vera cornered me.

She had made herself up very well: Her dark hair hung loose down her back, and she’d worked hard on blackening her eyes. Red sweater and one of those tight skirts I’d seen a lot of in the summer. Stockings and heels. I’d noticed all this when I first saw her in the kitchen, but now, drunk and a little aroused, I couldn’t ignore it.

“Where’s your lovely wife?”

“Home. Your husband?”

“Writing, somewhere. Why don’t I ever see you anymore?”

“We run in different circles.”

“That’s a shame.”

Vera had studied philosophy in Switzerland during the war, and returned to teach and marry her childhood love, Karel. But over the years their fights had been as public as her subsequent affairs. When she turned her attention to me the previous Christmas, no one knew about the problems in my marriage, but Vera’s philosopher eye had been able to divine our secret without much trouble.

I tried to change the subject to the one still lingering around us-the fighting in the streets of Budapest-but she stood on her toes and leaned close to my ear.

“Don’t bore me,” she breathed. “I expect better from you.” Then she rubbed a hand down my tingling arm. “Do you have a cigarette?”

I lit it with a match because I’d never replaced the lighter Martin had taken. She stared at me through the smoke. I said, “Agnes is doing some fitness program now. They gave out uniforms.”

“She’s a pretty girl. Are the boys showing interest?”

“I hope not.”

She picked something off her lip with her long nails.

I started rambling about wanting Agnes to go to a foreign school in order to learn languages. “The French high school is exceptional, but they won’t take her unless she passes the exam. She’s not studying her French.”

But Vera wasn’t listening. She gazed at the living room, which was empty except for the young couple we’d caught in Georgi’s bed. They were on the sofa, and the girl was determined to smear her lipstick again. Vera stroked my back. The drunkenness slid up to my scalp. When I turned back, she was back on her toes, our faces close, and her lips were on mine. I could taste smoke and bitter lipstick in her long kiss, then her tongue sliding against my teeth, probing deeper. Her hands held my head still.

It was Christmas again, her body pressed on top of mine, her saliva filling my mouth, hips shifting over me.

I held on to her waist and pulled her closer.

Then I let go. I pushed her down by her shoulders. She looked up at me, licking her lips. “You want to go somewhere?”

I shook my head. I even said no-either to make it clear to her, or to myself.

I could tell by the sudden widening of her jaw that her teeth were clenched behind her lips. “Ferenc, I’m not going to wait forever.”

“I know.”

“Once a year, that’s not enough for any woman.”

I looked at her a moment more, at her hard, determined expression, then gave her shoulder a squeeze.