The Confession

53

The guys invited me out for drinks, but I looked back at Magda and Agnes and declined. We drove in silence, and silence reigned at home. Agnes turned on the radio, then sat with Pavel on the floor, while Magda prepared dinner. I watched Agnes for a long time, but thought only of Stefan.

Agnes bored of Pavel and found a newspaper crossword puzzle to work on. Pavel climbed into my lap. There was a documentary on the radio-not American, but ours-on the history of the nation and the ethnic diversity that made it an ideal home for socialism.

I scratched Pavel’s ear absently.

Stefan could no longer ease his pain by confessing to me, and I could not sit him down and forgive him. I pressed my eyelids, remembering moments of our childhood in Pocspetri, and later, after Daria left him. I’d distanced myself from him, and with his mother’s death Stefan’s life was empty of almost everything, except regret.

Magda wanted to know if I preferred potatoes or fried cornmeal. I looked at her a while before answering.

“It’s a simple question, Ferenc.”

“Cornmeal. Yes, cornmeal.”

She returned to the kitchen. No wonder he had jumped at the chance to be with her again. He had nothing else.

The radio told me that Comrade General Secretary Mihai wanted us to revel in our history, to learn from it the possibilities for our future.

Agnes scribbled letters into boxes.

When I came back from the war, I was nothing to look at, nothing to consider, nothing to be. Magda thought she recognized me at first-I looked the same and spoke the same-but soon she knew better. All I would do was sit on the sofa and ask for water. She always brought it, but there wasn’t anything else I wanted. There had been a week in the trenches when we did not have fresh water, and in the middle of a dry field, pinned in by mortar fire and explosions puncturing the sky, we thought we’d die the way sailors once died-scurvy, salt water on the brain. What was she to think? She offered what she thought I wanted. Hot meals, a warm woman. But all I wanted was fresh water. Finally, she talked me into sex. It was a revelation. Beyond water there really was something. There was flesh and warmth and that tremor of the glands that I hadn’t thought of since I’d seen glands and flesh exploded by German mines, and the glands and flesh of my parents when I imagined their small house obliterated by that German bomb. My emotions were suddenly in reach after so long; I felt human again.

We had dinner with brief moments of conversation. Agnes wanted a bicycle, which I at first said we could not afford; then, as she pressed, I told her I’d see what I could find. Magda was melancholic, but not the way I’d expect from someone who had just seen her lover buried in the earth. How well did I know her? Perhaps I had lost track of her in the provinces, just before we moved to the Capital, when she cared for me like a nurse. Perhaps she began hiding hard facts from me then, beginning with her night with Stefan, and had steadily built her own, secret world.

The idea of Magda’s leaving had come to me on and off over the years. Married people do this. In a small part of their minds hides a secret world of independence, and in that parallel world there are other companions. Some beautiful, some less so, and for a while it seems these others are more or less the same as the one that you have, in the real world, devoted your life to. How different are the breakfasts and dinners, the weekends in the country, the lovemaking, the conversations? Not so different, in the end.

But when troubles begin, this secret world grows. It is visible on the horizon. It takes roots in reality. I thought about the other women I knew. Vera, sure. Seductive and strong. There was something there. Roberta, a stenographer who visited the office now and then, had been single for the last five years-I imagined how her famished and ample body would be in bed. She would have the virtue of gratefulness. I even wondered about the bodiless voice from the Militia radio: Regina Haliniak. There were others whose names I didn’t know, women on the street who held my gaze for a few seconds longer than polite-and within the brackets of these flirtations a new future presented itself.

This is the first stage, the hopeful stage. Promiscuous fantasies without the burden of responsibility. When I thought of Agnes, I ignored the unavoidable custody worries. Although she seldom appeared in my fantasy life, it was granted that Agnes was with me, waiting at home.

In this first stage, divorce seemed survivable, maybe even a little invigorating-the building of a new life always is. But then it approached from the horizon, moved close enough that I could make out its barren details. The second stage is knowledge. While sleeping with other women had its virtues, I couldn’t imagine what would follow.

What had we to say to each other? I couldn’t eat breakfast with these women, and the thought of taking a weekend trip with any of them was unbearable.

I realized then what I’d always known: Magda was in every action I took and shadowed every thought. A life without her was no life at all.

When Agnes asked me to pass the salt, I had been staring blindly at her for a while. “You all right, Daddy?”

“Fine, honey.”

“You don’t look so good.”

“It’s been a hard day.”

Magda looked questioningly at me, and I smiled and shook my head. “I’m going to have to take off after dinner. I’ve got something to do.”

“Will we see you again tonight?”

“Yes,” I said, then repeated it. “Yes.”