The Confession

55

I put the car through more than I should have, cutting across the parking lot and flying up Tashkent Boulevard, out of town. I’d rushed them through the packing, answering all Agnes’s questions with a hysterical It’s a trip! We’re going on a trip! Magda had thought I was overreacting.

“What are you saying?”

“That man might have killed you both, like he did Stefan. Get your bag.”

She stood by the bathroom door with a towel in one hand, and nodded.

As dawn grew, we passed the outskirts, the final unfinished blocks falling away, and the earth leveled into fields. Magda pointed out that I was going the wrong way. “We need to go south.”

“I don’t want to drive through the city.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to get into a wreck.”

She smiled a little strangely.

“I’m just terrified.”

She reached over and held my free hand.

After a while, Agnes passed out, sprawled across the backseat, Pavel stuffed under her arm. Magda yawned. Teodor and Nora would watch them for however long was needed, but I couldn’t see any further than dropping them off.

Teodor was in town sitting in on an informal collective meeting, and Nora was scrubbing the wood floors in the kitchen when we arrived. She smiled at the front door and gave us all kisses, but looked apprehensive when Agnes ran across her clean, wet floor. “Let’s sit around back,” she suggested.

The shrubs around the garden had thinned considerably, and now you could see directly through them to the orchards leading to the horizon. A cold wind blew, so we crossed our arms over our chests for warmth.

“You’re looking good,” Nora said.

“No we aren’t, Mama.” Magda grinned. “We both look worse than we have in a long time.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” She touched her fat fingers on her arm, as if playing a piano.

“I’d like them to stay here a few days,” I said.

She picked a white puff of something off her blouse and flicked it away. “Are we still a family?”

“Of course,” said Magda.

“No. The three of you. Are you still a family?”

“We’ve never stopped being a family,” I said, and Magda, to my surprise, gave a smile.

I helped Teodor unload half a lamb from the truck-a Czech Tatra the new local commissar let them use-and as we walked he asked what the hell was going on.

“It’s a case,” I said. “They’ll be safer here.”

“When are you going to get out of that work, Ferenc? Be a writer.”

“Don’t you want me to support your daughter and granddaughter?”

He huffed as he propped open the door. “I’d rather they were poor than shot dead by one of your suspects.”

A little later we told them about Stefan, and after the required moment of reflection Teodor told me again to find another line of work.

We ate a dinner of potatoes and lamb swimming in paprika and listened to Teodor mutter about the new directives to get rid of private plots for farmers. “They expect us to buy the food we grow back from them! That just makes no sense. I’ve got the land here, you can be damn sure I’m going to keep some of it for myself, so I can grow what I like.”

Agnes rolled the fork in her hand. “It’s been a record year for crops.”

Teodor eyed her. “They say that?”

“Best crops in twenty years.”

“Well, don’t you believe a word of that, darling.”

After dinner he pulled out the brandy, and though I tried to feign sleepiness, he stood and looked squarely at me. “Ferenc.”

I got up.

We could no longer see the apple trees in the blackness. He handed me a glass and stood beside the shrubs. “Nora tells me there’s been no progress. Is that true?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Is it worse?”

I wanted to tell him that his daughter’s lover was finally out of the way, but could think of no way to express it without telling him. “Some of it’s gotten better.”

“I suppose that’s something.”

The brandy warmed me, then cooled me off, so I had to keep drinking.

“How long are they staying?”

“Maybe a week, I can’t be sure.”

“And Agnes’s school? Magda’s factory?”

“Magda will call them both.”

He seemed satisfied with that and turned to look over the orchards he couldn’t see. “Nora and I have been talking about leaving here.”

“Where would you go?”

“Where else? The Capital.”

“Ah.” I imagined them moving into our same building, one of the floors below us, always appearing with dishes of Nora’s dull meals. A part of me hated the idea, and another part wondered if it could help. They wanted us together, and they would fill Magda’s ears with reasons to love me, or at least reasons to stay with me. “Could you afford it?”

“It’s almost time for my pension, Ferenc. Not much, it never is. But maybe it’s enough.”

“Won’t you miss it out here? It’s a different life in the Capital.”

“Of course it is,” he said, and came to sit beside me. He found the bottle and refilled us both. “A lot of our friends have moved away, and now when we go to the cooperative’s social club we know fewer and fewer people. They’re all leaving,” he said. “That, or dying off.”