The Confession

3

Magda’s father was still sturdy despite the weathering he’d taken over the years, and could probably even stand up to me, were it to ever come to that. He was nearly as big as I was, and I’d wondered often if this was part of Magda’s attraction to me, that I was a large man, like her father.

We’d eaten the apples, which were blander than they smelled, and the women had gone inside. Teodor uncorked a bottle of northern red for us, but did not pour. This was the obligation of entering his house and eating his food: the talk. For a while, we only looked out at the thousand hectares he shared with nearly a hundred other families. Pavel burrowed frantically into clumps of hot earth.

“So it didn’t work,” he said finally. “What now?”

“The same.”

“You wait for it to go to hell.”

“Something like that.”

Teodor gazed at the spindly bushes that separated their personal plot from the fields, then rocked his head from one side to the other.

This was the long silence in which Teodor worked. It made me-and he knew this-want to clarify that I wasn’t simply admitting defeat. For the last four years I’d known what was going on. I’d seen it in her, in myself, and I’d done what I could. Maybe I wasn’t bright enough to know what to do; maybe we were both stupid in such matters. So we listened to our friends and family, who told us we needed to get out of the city. We needed peace. Together in her parents’ small dacha in the woods near Sarospatak, over the space of three weeks, we would find what we’d lost along the way. But Magda’s patience had crumbled. This is all too self-conscious, she said before she left. You can’t force this kind of thing.

“I don’t think she wants to,” I told him. “She’s always the one to walk out.”

“And you didn’t chase her down, did you?”

I looked at my oversized hands, at the rings on each finger.

“You think you’ve got problems.” He poured our glasses and watched as I swallowed mine quickly. “I got a letter from a friend in Warsaw. You know what’s been going on there? It’s not in The Spark, I can tell you that.” He tapped his glass on the table. “Demonstrations in Poznan, that’s what. Back in June they had days of it. Workers out in the street because they were hungry. Then the troops came in, shooting. Seventy-four killed. Not by Russian troops, not like you’d think. But by their own boys. Polish soldiers killing Polish workers.”

I poured myself another. He was right; I hadn’t heard any of this.

“When that happens,” said Teodor, “you get your bearings again. It’s only in peacetime you have the luxury of divorce.”