The Confession

57

In the morning I walked to the cooperative office at the top of the hill because Teodor and Nora’s phone only dialed out locally. I showed my Militia certificate and watched the lame man behind the desk stumble for the telephone and pass it to me. Then I called Moska and told him I was going to the Vatrina Work Camp in order to look up information on my suspect. He sighed and accepted this.

Magda and Agnes were in the kitchen with Nora, making breakfast. The smell was heavy with grease. Magda looked at me with an expression that said everything without saying a thing.

After breakfast I threw my bag into the car. She followed me outside.

“You’re going back home?”

“Tonight, or tomorrow. I’ve got to check on some things first.”

She squinted into the breeze.

“What is it?”

She said, “Don’t hurt him.”

“What?”

“Libarid.”

“Who?”

She shook her head. “Leonek, I mean. Libarid’s his birth name.”

“Oh.”

“His mother made him change it when they came here. She even called him Leonek in private. Damn.” She looked at the dirt. “I’m babbling, and that was a secret. But listen.” She looked at me again. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. This wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I was looking around and he was just there.”

I took a step away from her. “I can’t promise anything.”

She looked at the ground again and when she looked back, her eyes glimmered. She was crying so much these days. “Just don’t put all the blame on him. I want to be fair.”

“Fair,” I repeated, then went in to say good-bye to the others.

Vatrina was forty minutes to the north and, entering the small farming town with its tiny train station, it was difficult to believe there was a work camp there. Old men dotted the side of the road, walking past fences and puffing on barely visible cigarettes, and three fat women with babushkas huddled around a well. The central square was small, with a grocer’s, a post office, and a modern hotel that didn’t belong-a wide concrete bunker with a sign that proclaimed HOTEL ELEGANT in peeling red paint. I first tried the post office, but there was a long line of young, sunburned men with slips of paper leading up to the one open window, where a woman with dyed black hair smoked and stared at them. So I went into the Elegant. A worn red carpet stretched to the end of the faux-marble lobby, past the entrance to a dark bar, to where a younger black-haired woman sat behind the counter, smoking and reading a paperback. I leaned beside the guest book. “I’m looking for the Vatrina Work Camp, number four-eighty.”

She held up an index finger, read for a second longer, and closed the book on her other finger. It was a novel by someone I’d met a few times at Georgi’s. “They don’t put work camps in main squares, idiot.”

She had a nice, round face with an expression that didn’t match what she’d called me. “I don’t have a lot of practice with them.”

She sighed and turned her book flat on the counter. “What business do you have there anyway?”

I started to reach for my Militia certificate, but instead patted my coat for cigarettes. I pulled one out and lit it. “My own business. That’s what business I’ve got.”

She rolled her eyes as if she’d heard this a million times, and that’s when I realized this was how she flirted. Stuck behind a desk in a dead-end town, you learn strange ways of getting a man’s attention. “And you think your own business is important?”

“I expect it’s more important than chain-smoking in a flea-infested hotel all day.”

Her face brightened, and she tapped the counter with a fingernail. “Tell me, come on. I know how to keep a secret.”

I leaned closer to her face. “How can I trust that?”

“You’ll just have to,” she whispered.

“But keep it quiet, you understand?”

She nodded again, seriously.

I told her I was a novelist researching a book on the history of the Vatrina Work Camp, number 480.

She leaned back again. “You’re giving me a line. That probably works on a lot of girls. But not this one.”

I shrugged. “What can I do if you don’t believe me?”

“You write any other books?”

“ A Soldier’s Tale. It was a few years ago.”

She hesitated, then smiled broadly. “Really? I read that! No.”

I showed her my transit identification papers to prove who I was, and she leaned close again, her voice back down to a whisper.

“I thought it was ex treme ly good. You know that? You’re a very good writer.”

I suspected she had never read it, but didn’t press. She told me to drive down the eastbound road six, seven miles. “It’s as plain as day. You staying the night?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I’ll be chain-smoking here until six.”