The Confession

66

The Canal District was colder than the rest of the city. The water seemed to suck any heat from the air, and wind funneled through the empty passageways. In Augustus II Square, where long before I had found a black shoe, the water level had dropped, and I arrived relatively dry at number three. The chalk x had faded away. The inner room was still a pool, the small well still dry, but the blemish from Antonin’s body was completely gray now, with spots of black corroded by the wet air.

I could not find Nestor, and Louis was in another country. I was no longer sure who had killed Stefan, but I was convinced I would never figure it out. And it didn’t matter how valiantly I protected my family-my marriage was slipping away. Now, my only virtuous act in recent memory-the only one that I had followed through on-had been erased. No action I took seemed to stick. I wanted to sleep.

In the mosaic beneath the water were chalices, wine, debauchery-a satyr leaned, grinning, over a white-robed young woman with a breast exposed. In the corner, a platter of wild berries and the head of a pig gazed up at me.

The Romans had themselves a time in their day, putting everything into their mouths like children. They slaughtered whole civilizations and sowed lands with salt. These were a people of extremes, but somehow over time all the extremes had been bred out of humanity, so that we wore ties and took busses and trams and clocked in and out of the jobs that fed our family. We spoke with calm, responsible detachment and made words that seemed to show what logical beasts we were. But the only important words are those that result in action-Vera knew this. And so did I. In the war I learned who I was-not by the words I spoke, but by the things I did.

We were captured near Humenne on a bleak, dry hill that had become our home for a week. We ran out of ammunition, and our commander, a young man from Hust, announced that the fight was over. Then he went behind the hill and shot himself in the mouth with his last bullet. The Germans came over the hill in a cloud of dust and their bold helmets, well fed and scornful. They arranged us into lines and walked us westward.

Before shooting himself, our commander had told us about the camps set up by the Germans. They were for Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. The Germans, he pointed out, were a people of extremes. His stories were difficult to believe, and some of us laughed at him, though since then his descriptions have seemed mundane. But on that dusty walk, as we starved on blistered feet, we began to suspect the truth.

Each day we stopped so the Germans could rest, and during one of these breaks I escaped with a couple other soldiers. I’ve written about this. I’ve written about the calculations we made, the old trenches we dropped into in order to escape snipers, the grass we ate to hold off starvation, the peasants’ homes where we rested and received nourishment. What I never wrote down was the bitterness between us when we stopped over a clump of grass and tried to divide it up. I used my size to force the largest portion, and once when another escapee-Yakov Teddi, a skinny boy with long hair-tried to take his fair share I kicked him in the face. This is something I never wrote about. My boot broke his nose, and I didn’t care. But he stayed with us until the end.