The Confession

34

I didn’t wait for the others. I got into one of the Militia’s Mercedes and sped north to Ozaliko. Woznica’s hands did not shake, but mine did, and they threw the car off a little when I took wide turns. The Militia radio buzzed through tinny speakers, and a few times I heard voices. Leonek informed the station that he was heading over to the Fourth District Militia station, and Regina Haliniak thanked him for his update. I lifted the mouthpiece and even pressed the button before changing my mind. Sev would learn where I was going, and wonder why. He would want to know why I was speaking with a prisoner at Ozaliko, and for the moment I didn’t want him knowing anything. He’d had the file of my killer, and that meant Kaminski did as well. They were just two heads of the same Hydra.

The face of the man who sounded sick of his job matched the voice. His features sagged depressingly, in direct contrast to the smiling Mihai on the wall. When I told him I had called a half hour ago, he made no move to suggest that this rang a bell. He handed me the forms on a clipboard and asked if I needed a pen. But I already had one.

It was a three-page form requesting all of my personal details, with open spaces to fill in my reasons for seeing the prisoner. I labored over that, wanting to explain it without bringing up Nestor Velcea’s name, though I knew that, were Sev interested, he could figure it out easily enough. But there was no reason to make it easy for him.

The clerk took back the clipboard and ignored me as I stood waiting. “What now?” I asked.

He looked up again. “You’ll be contacted.”

I drove all the way to the station before changing my mind. I was afraid that Woznica would be there again, waving forms at Sev or Kaminski, awaiting my arrival. I was afraid that Kaminski was finally done playing with me, that all this time he had only been waiting for a free cell in Yalta Boulevard, where I could think about what I’d done on the Sixth of November. So I instead parked by October Square and asked Corina if I could use their telephone. She looked over to Max, cleaning glasses behind the bar, and he shrugged.

“Hello?”

“Vera. It’s me. Ferenc.”

“Well, this is a surprise.”

“Are you busy?”

“Just looking over some lectures for a class. Want to drop by?”

“Can I buy you a coffee? I’m over at October. Max and Corina’s place.”

At that point I had no intention of sleeping with her, or I believed I didn’t. I just wanted someone to talk to, and she was the one person I knew would be at home. But she was also the one person who would want more from me than a talk.

She looked as though the cold had taken a decade off her age, and when she sat I waved to Corina for another coffee.

“Shouldn’t you be hunting criminals or something?”

“Just don’t feel like it right now. What lectures were you working on?”

Corina set down the coffee. Vera thanked her, pulled some long black strands behind an ear, then leaned close to me. “You don’t really care about that, do you?”

I could feel her warm breath on my face. “I do, actually. I’m interested.” And that was true.

She leaned back. “Well, Marx, if you must know. His critique of Plato’s Republic — Marx considers it largely a defense of the Egyptian caste system. Which, you can imagine, Karl wasn’t too happy about.”

“I can imagine.”

“Some of my students are relatively critical of Plato, but I like to point out how similar, in a way, social Marxism is to Plato’s theory of forms. In essence at least-because society is moving toward a predefined goal, a pure idea.”

I looked at her, eyes wide, until she understood.

“You don’t know anything about Plato, do you?”

“About as much as I know about Marx.”

“Which is nothing.”

I nodded. “So teach, professor.”

She looked at me a moment, trying to decide, then slid the ashtray to her left. “Plato or Marx?”

“The first one.”

“Well, it’s really very simple. Kindergarten level.”

“That’s just right for me.”

She looked at me another moment. “Plato felt that for everything there is an essential form that is more real than this reality.”

“Like souls?”

“No,” she said. “That’s a common mistake. He uses the story of the people in a cave, with a fire blazing. On the walls are the shadows-these shadows are us. Our world is on the walls. And the people sitting around the fire are the ideal.”

I nodded.

“You’re sure you haven’t heard this before?”

I had, but I wanted her to do the talking. “Just tell me, will you?”

“Okay. An example: For all apple trees, there is a single, perfect apple tree on which they are all based, but never equal to.”

“Like God making us in his image.”

“Something like that.”

“All apple trees aspire to this perfect version?”

“Maybe. But it makes more sense for people.” She pointed at me. “Behind Ferenc Kolyeszar there is an ideal Ferenc Kolyeszar. Do you aspire to it?”

I sank back into my chair. “Of course I do. Don’t you?”

“Of course I aspire to the perfect Ferenc Kolyeszar,” she said, smiling, then shook her head. “No, I don’t aspire anymore. I used to believe all that. I used to think there was an ideal Vera Pecsok who was the perfect wife. I worked on it a long time. But the closer I got in action-because it’s only through your actions that you can become anything-the less happy I was. The less like myself I felt. So either the perfect Vera was not the perfect wife, or there was no perfect Vera.” She shrugged. “I prefer believing there’s no perfect Vera, and that with each new action I become someone slightly different.”

I tugged my lip. “So why are you teaching this? If you don’t believe it.”

“Because they let me,” she said as she took out a cigarette. I lit it. “I used to teach six classes, now they’ve whittled me down to two, and seem to have forgotten I’m teaching under quota. Plato’s forms are safe. Because, as I said, behind every socialist state lies utopia-that’s the similarity I was talking about. And that utopia is what we’re all aspiring to. Right?”

We drank our coffee in silence for a while. She had me thinking of that, too: Was there an ideal Ferenc that I should be trying to become? An ideal husband and father, an ideal militiaman? A great writer?

She said, “When I was studying in Zurich, a professor of mine had a theory about women in wartime. He said that, in times of war and revolution, when their men cannot protect them, women see their lives stripped bare. They understand, with utter clarity, that they are alone, as we all are. Most women also see that this life, with this man, is not what they wanted. It’s just something they stumbled upon. And only in the clarity of this vision do they find the strength to change their lives. So they leave.”

I watched her thinking about this. “Is that true? Do women leave their men in wartime?”

She raised her shoulders. “It happens.”

“A professor told you this?”

“A professor, yes. He was also my lover.”

“Oh.”

“So why did you call me, Ferenc?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Of course you are. That I don’t know is the oldest, and worst, excuse.”

“I guess I wanted this. To talk to you. We never do.”

She placed the sugar spoon into her empty cup. “Talk isn’t what I want from you. Don’t try to make me into something I’m not. Okay?”

“But you’re not anything,” I said. “You told me that.”

She touched a red nail to the back of my hand. “You’re a fast learner. Did you know Karel’s going to Yugoslavia on Saturday?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“A Writers’ Union trip. A representative of our men of letters. He’s very proud.”

“He should be.”

“And I’ll be alone for a whole week.”

The conversation didn’t go much further because she was not very interested in it, and maybe I wasn’t either, so I went home and waited for my family. Agnes showed up first, but she didn’t feel like talking either. She’d had a bad day, and all I could get out of her was that she would prefer to remain in her room for the rest of her life. Magda’s mood was no better, and when after dinner I tried to talk to her it was no use. None of the women in my life wanted to talk that day. I told Magda that I’d had coffee with Vera, but it didn’t faze her. She didn’t know about the Christmas kiss or the more recent one, and I didn’t know if knowing about them would have made any difference.