The Confession

60

It was after seven when I returned to the Elegant with my small bag of clothes. There was a different clerk at the desk, a young man who took my papers and wrote the information in a ruled notebook. In the middle of writing, he squinted up at me. “You came in here before?”

“For information.”

He tossed his head in the direction of the bar. “Tania’s waiting for you.”

I had forgotten about her. My mind was stuck in the realm of barbed wire and mud and beatings, and spending the evening with a woman just didn’t fit in. So I took back my documents and key and walked directly to the stairs, not looking up as I passed the doorway to the bar.

The stairs and the doors and the corridor and the tiny room-all of them had been built by cracked and bloody fingers, slumped backs and sore stomachs. I lay on the bed, my feet hanging off, and stared at the beige ceiling.

There was a knock at the door, but I didn’t get up. I was wondering what was said in Gogu’s office last spring.

The knocking started again, so I got up, grunting, and opened the door. Tania smiled at me. “Think you can get rid of me that easily?”

“Look. I’m tired.”

She put her hand on my chest and pushed me back. I noticed an open bottle of wine in her other hand as she closed the door. “You don’t look so tired to me.”

There was a certain prettiness to her, but I couldn’t see it then. She got two glasses from the bathroom and filled them up. There was no other place to sit than the bed. She tapped my glass against hers and winked.

“You kept me waiting so long I almost found myself another victim. But then I remembered this,” she said, touching the rings on my right hand. “And this.” She touched my chest. Then she set her glass on the floor and moved her round face up to mine. “And this,” she whispered, before kissing me.

The kissing was enough for a while, and we rolled on the bed, a mess of tongues and saliva. Sometimes she got up suddenly, leaned over the edge of the bed as I rubbed the back of her thigh, and took a sip, then returned with wine-reddened lips. But when she started to take off her clothes I stopped her. “No,” I said, and she frowned, took another sip, and began kissing me again.

This was all I wanted, something simple and almost childlike, and that’s all we did until we were lying together on the bed, both very tired.

Tania was twenty-five, had grown up in this town, and the only outsiders she met were connected to the work camp. “I like this, meeting people from all over. Most of them are pretty nice, and sometimes we can have ourselves some fun.”

“So you do this a lot?”

She stretched an arm over her head. “Now and then. There are a couple guards I see regularly, but we all know I’m not the kind of girl to settle down.” She looked at me. “It’s too fun, isn’t it?”

“Fun, yes.” I poured the last of the wine into her glass and asked if she wanted to stay over.

“Think there’s enough room?”

There wasn’t, but I wanted to sleep with a warm body tonight. “We can make it work.”

The room was getting cold, so I checked the radiator, which didn’t seem to do a thing. Tania banged on the knob a few times. “This hotel is a joke.”

As she undressed, I noticed the black, shiny spot on her stockings, where she’d used nail polish to repair a hole. I turned out the lights.

It was difficult, but she curled up with her back to my chest, and I wrapped my arms around her. She talked steadily through the next hour, mumbling about how she’d had offers from men to take her out of this town, but she would never go. “Here I’m somebody. What would I be in the Capital? Just another peasant. Just another slut.” She said she’d even had offers from state security men. One of them sent her packages of Swiss chocolates on a regular basis. “He’s in love with me. That job must have screwed up his brain. You can see it in them, those security types are all a little off.”

“You should watch out for them.”

“Me? No, they should watch out for me.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

Her hair shifted against my nose. “I’m serious. One told me that he was frightened of me.”

“A little girl like you?”

“I didn’t believe it either, but,” she said, then paused, trying to remember exactly. “He said he was afraid of my inability to commit to one man. Not that it scared him, not personally, but he said that more and more people were like me, and if you couldn’t commit to a single person, how could you commit to a state?”

“That sounds like state security.”

“I even get the occasional foreigner.”

“Foreigners?”

“Well, not many. So you remember them. The last one was French. Nice enough guy. Big and fat, but not so jolly as he looked. He was trying to get a friend out of the work camp. I could’ve told him it wouldn’t work.”

My arms around her twitched, but she didn’t notice. “Remember his name?”

“Louis. Yes-Louis something. Nice guy.” I felt her fingers grip my elbow beneath the covers, as if for support. “But he wasn’t such a gentleman as you.”