The Confession

10

It took an hour and a half to walk back to the station. I wasn’t thinking of Malik Woznica anymore. He and his morphine-addicted wife were nothing to me. A few busses passed, but I didn’t flag them down. Brano Sev had helped organize a demonstration in order to close it down. The absurd logic of state security was difficult to grasp.

If I were sent to prison-this is what I remembered telling Leonek-Agnes and Magda would be alone, maybe even harassed. I would not be able to protect them. But I couldn’t take a club to those people. And Kaminski-I’d attacked him. That, perhaps, was my one regret. But it wasn’t a deep regret.

I didn’t go inside the station. I found my car, waited for the ignition to catch, then drove fast.

Magda was putting away groceries in the kitchen. “Agnes is with a friend,” she said absently. Her hands shook as she closed the cabinets.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Of course I’m all right.” I was glad she didn’t look at me, because I was not all right.

Pavel followed me as I turned on the radio and went back to the kitchen. But instead of the usual Russian composers, or even staticky American crooners, I heard a Hungarian voice speaking slowly and clearly, giving news of the continued fighting in Budapest. Then another voice asked Soviet soldiers why they were killing their Hungarian brothers and sisters; why, after suffering Stalin for two decades, they were now serving worse Stalins. Magda looked up, surprised and, it seemed to me, terrified.

“You’ve been listening to the Americans?”

“No,” she said abruptly. Pavel let out a sharp cry; she’d stepped on him.

“Christ, Mag, I’m not going to arrest you for it.” I forced a smile to show that this was true.

Pavel scurried, whimpering, into the other room.

Magda turned back to the counter so I wouldn’t see her face. “Maybe it was Agnes,” she said, then: “No, it was me.”

“Doesn’t matter. Just turn it back to something mundane when you’re finished.”

She nodded at the wall. “Of course. Yes.”

I wanted to talk it all out with her, to tell her what had happened. I wanted her to touch me and say that I’d done right. But she wasn’t listening today. She was somewhere else. She was distracted by her own decisions.

When the telephone rang, I turned down the Americans, who were calmly asking Russian soldiers to lay down their arms and disobey their officers in the interests of justice.

“Ferenc.”

“Emil?”

“Look, Ferenc, we’ve been talking.”

“Who?”

“Us. The guys. We’re not going in tomorrow. We’re calling in sick.”

He sounded like he’d been drinking, which was what I should have been doing. “All of you?”

“Stefan, Leonek, and I. And you, Ferenc.”

I paused before answering. “I guess it should be all of us.”

“Good.”

Magda was throwing something away; I could hear paper crunching. “Just tomorrow? There’s the rest of the week, Thursday and Friday.”

“No decisions yet. But we can discuss it tomorrow.”

I still wasn’t completely sure, but the thought of that office was more abhorrent than the fears for my own family. After I hung up, I raised the volume again and said to Magda, “I’m staying home tomorrow.”

“You’re-” she began, and looked closely at me for the first time since I’d gotten home.

“I’m calling in sick.”

Then a high squeal filled the apartment as the radio-jamming went into effect.