The Confession

4

She kept Pavel on her lap as I drove, and the dog slept, blissful and mute. I asked her about tomorrow, her first day at school. She shrugged. “Did you study your French?”

“A little.”

I had been hoping to get her into the French high school at the beginning of Yalta Boulevard. Her state-run school, the “Rosa Luxembourg,” had never been much of an institution, even before the Liberation. But she’d failed the language test last May. “We can try again. There’s no shame in a second chance.”

She shrugged again, then after a moment asked the question, easily, trying to make it sound as if it hadn’t been the only thing on her mind ever since I had shown up. “Mama didn’t make it?”

I shook my head and watched the road, but could see her mouth moving as though she was chewing on something. Maybe she was.

“How did she get home?”

“What?”

“There’s only one car.”

I glanced into the rearview and noticed a hitchhiker with a small, hand-drawn sign: RELEASED FROM POLITICAL PRISON. I hadn’t seen him when we approached, and that troubled me. “I drove her to the station.”

“She took the train?”

“That’s what I said.”

I understood a fraction of what she was thinking. She could not fathom how anyone could calmly drive his wife to the train station and send her away. Not without some scene; some breakdown and reconciliation.

She nodded at the road. Her cheeks and forehead were very red from her three weeks under the provincial sun. I always insisted she wear a hat, but she thought she looked stupid in hats, which was untrue. And Magda’s parents seemed to think any amount of sun was a virtue, that even when my daughter’s pale skin turned red and crisp it was only a sign of health. She looked thin, too, and I rashly vowed never to leave her with them again.

“Did you have a good time?”

She grunted something incomprehensible.

“Well? What did you do?”

She pulled too hard on Pavel’s ear, and the dog made a squeaking noise in his sleep. “Picked apples, bought apples, talked apples.”

I laid a hand on her shoulder, then tugged her earlobe. “Miss me?”

She pulled her head away, but smiled. “Of course not.”