The Confession

59

It was only four, but I needed a drink. I’d heard enough about the work camps to know I had walked across soil with a heavy blood content and had talked to one of the most brutal sons of bitches that state security could find-because that’s who you put in charge of work camps, the ones who could stomach it.

Along the road to the center there were more bars than anything else, so I parked and entered one at random. Young men leaned against high tables and cupped their shot glasses with thick fingers. The bartender smiled thinly at me. “You need a coffee?”

“Palinka.”

He poured it and looked me up and down. “You one of the new ones?”

“The new what?”

“You know. The new guards.”

I sipped my drink. “New guards? I heard there were plenty already.”

He leaned close so he could whisper. “That’s the word. New guards are being shipped in any day now. What are these boys going to do?” He nodded at the drinkers. “They’ve waited long enough as it is.”

“Well, I’m not one of them.”

“That’s good for you,” he said with a wink.

I leaned on a free table and gazed at the photographs that covered the wall. Shots of “old Vatrina.” The only difference between old and new Vatrina, the photos told me, was the Hotel Elegant, and the camp.

A thick man with a close-shaved head set his drink next to mine and looked up at the photos, as if unaware of my presence. The back of his neck was swollen with wrinkles where his excess flesh had collected, and his puffy cheeks were riddled with gray pockmarks and stubble. “You come in from the Capital?” he asked the wall.

“Yeah.”

“Horia says you’re not a guard.”

Horia watched us from behind the bar. “That’s true.”

“It’s all right if you are,” he said to a photograph of a woman and a horse in front of the feed store. “We’re not vindictive here. Everyone’s in the same boat.”

“I’m still not one.”

“Then what are you?” He turned to look at me. His eyes were light blue, and below one of them was a scar.

I said it before I could think it over: “I’m a writer.”

“What do you write?”

“Novels.”

“You mean, stories you make up?”

“That’s it.”

He considered this as he finished his shot, walked back to the bar, and returned with two more. He put one in front of me.

We raised our glasses to each other.

“So why aren’t you in some cafe in the Capital right now? Why are you on the stinking edge of the world?”

“Research.”

“Working on a story about this town?”

“About the camp.”

His mouth opened, but then he closed it. He noticed someone at another table. “Hey, Krany!” A little dark-haired guy with a cigarette in his mouth looked up. “Krany, come over here.”

Krany sauntered over with his glass and leaned on our table without looking at me.

“This guy wants to know about the camp. He’s a writer.”

Krany put out his cigarette and frowned at the lingering smoke. “Why’re you writing about that, Comrade?”

“Because somebody’s got to.”

The thick one nodded his agreement, but Krany still wasn’t convinced. “What are you going to say about the camp?”

“I’ll know when I learn more.”

“You some scaremonger who’s going to say we’re a bunch of thugs who like beating up on people?”

“Are you?”

He smiled then, and I pulled out my cigarettes. I offered them to the guards and left the pack on the table.

Krany, it turned out, was primarily a tower man. He had spent his days, summer and winter, up in one of the boxes overlooking the camp and the farmland surrounding it. He was one of the best shots in the camp, and once killed an escapee from a distance of five hundred yards (though his friend disputed that figure). “And he went down. I wanted to get his leg, just stop him, but it ended up going through his head.” He took another of my cigarettes.

The first guard’s name was Filip. He worked down in the mud with the prisoners. Each morning he would herd them out of their cots and march them to the quarry. “It was all about following orders,” he told me. “They were ordered to walk, and if they didn’t, we would hit them. Usually in the stomach and chest, because we didn’t want to break their legs.”

“Come on, Filip,” said Krany. “You broke some legs. I could see you just fine.”

“So you get carried away.”

“It was easier up in the tower. You didn’t have to smell them, you didn’t have to do that kind of work.”

I bought another round and asked if they knew Nestor Velcea. Krany shook his head, but Filip thought it over. “A small guy? What was he…an artist?”

“That’s the one.”

“Sure, I knew him. An okay kid. He thought we didn’t know about all those charcoal drawings he did. But when prisoners clean up a wall, you notice. The wall’s dirty already, and then you’ve got this big clean spot.” He smiled grimly. “Some of them were real idiots.”

Krany nodded. “Yeah, the artist. The one who did Gogu’s portrait.”

“Who’s Gogu?”

“The commander,” said Filip, and I remembered the portrait on the captain’s wall.

I passed out cigarettes, emptying the pack. “But Gogu said he didn’t remember Nestor. Does that make any sense?”

“Of course he remembers Nestor,” said Filip.

“He was pulling your leg,” said Krany. “He damn well knows who Nestor is.”

“But there were a lot of prisoners. Why would he remember Nestor?”

Krany looked at Filip, as if asking something. Filip shrugged. “What does it matter?”

Krany turned back to me. “Last spring, this gray Citroen comes up to the gate. Cosmin checks it, but the driver doesn’t have the right paperwork to come inside.”

“Who’s Cosmin?”

“No one. Another guard. Pay attention, okay?”

I nodded.

“So Cosmin won’t let him inside. And this guy gets out-a big guy, kind of oily hair-and starts shouting for Nestor through the fence. Only it’s daytime, and all the prisoners are off at Work Site Number One. He was a foreigner, maybe he didn’t know any better. So he’s shouting to an empty prison.”

“What kind of foreigner?”

“Don’t know,” said Krany. “But you could tell there was an accent. What a hothead he was. Finally, Gogu had to come out and deal with him.”

“I heard about it that evening,” said Filip.

“We all heard about it,” said Krany. “And this is why Gogu will swear he doesn’t know Nestor. Because the foreigner bribed him with a stack of koronas the size of my fist. Gogu tried to cover it up, he told him to put it away, and they went back to the office to take care of it. But we all saw it. Bribing’s no big deal, just as long as you keep it quiet.”

“So what happened?”

Filip said, “I brought Nestor back from the work site and into Gogu’s office. Gogu stepped outside for a few minutes to leave them alone. Then Nestor went back to work, and the foreigner left.”

“But-what was it about? What did he want?”

Filip finally lit the cigarette I’d given him. “No one knows. We asked Gogu, and he told us to keep out of his business unless we wanted to end up as one of his pets.”

“And Nestor, too,” said Krany. “He wouldn’t say a word, would he, Filip?”

“Not a word. I punched him a few times because I was so curious, but the lump just wouldn’t speak.”