The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  The commander bellowed something that must have been an order, because we were all moving forward, clubs held tightly, to round them up. The chant dropped off, and when we reached the demonstrators their open hands tried to push us back. Palms pressed into my chest, faces flashed by. Someone was behind me, stopping my retreat, and we were in the midst of them, in faces and hands and shouts and sweat. Someone hit me in the jaw, and I instinctively struck out with my club. The snap of bone. A student dropped at my feet. I looked around for Emil or Leonek, or anyone, but saw only angry workers and students climbing over each other to get away. Above, women covered and uncovered their faces, screaming. This was too much. I pushed backward through the crowd, outward, elbowing anything that tried to stop me. Something hit the back of my head and I swung the club again, turning, and saw a militiaman floundering on the ground, his ear bleeding. I pushed through them, but the crowd seemed to go on forever, hysterical demonstrators and militiamen, who swung their clubs as if such a small tool could bring silence. Then I was out, and Kaminski stood shouting at me. I couldn’t hear his words, only saw his large mouth, spit-damp, his own club pointing me back into the riot. He reached for me. I grabbed his shoulders and flung him against a van and kept going.

  I crossed the street and stood in front of an apartment door, then sat down. Windows slammed shut above me, then I heard gunshots. I thought I would be sick, but wasn’t. From where I sat, I saw a row of white vans, bloody men being thrown into them, and a block where women cried from their windows. Two unconscious bodies were carried into a van. I stared at my rings.

  After a long time, the vans started to pull out, beginning their journeys to the prison infirmaries. Stefan and Emil appeared, beaten and numb. They noticed me and turned away. Then they parted without words. Leonek was shouting at Moska, some incomprehensible stream of abuse. Moska said nothing, then started across the street toward me, leaving Leonek to his anger.

  “You got out,” he said. He looked back. There was a smear of blood from his ear to his collar; it wasn’t his blood. “Kaminski is after you. Says you attacked him. Says you refused to fight.” He brushed his shoulder with a hand. “Sounds like you just fought the wrong person.”

  “Did I?” My hands were between my knees. I didn’t know what had happened to my club. “Did you see Brano?”

  He turned to me.

  “Sev was dressed up like a worker. This was all a setup.”

  Moska grimaced, but didn’t say anything for a while. As the last van left, we saw what remained: a bloodstained sidewalk with spare pieces of clothing—a torn shirt, a shoe, some hats. A crying woman knelt over a hat, and a few dazed militiamen stood perfectly still.

  “To dirty us,” said Moska.

  My hands were dirty. My clothes were dirty.

  Moska sat down next to me. “A trial run, to implicate ourselves. So that if they want to use us later, we won’t hesitate. You, though,” he said, but didn’t finish his sentence. He stood up and said something that, at that moment, struck me as utterly strange: “I wonder where my wife is right now.”

  10

  It took an hour and a half to walk back to the station. I wasn’t thinking of Malik Woznica anymore. He and his morphine-addicted wife were nothing to me. A few busses passed, but I didn’t flag them down. Brano Sev had helped organize a demonstration in order to close it down. The absurd logic of state security was difficult to grasp.

  If I were sent to prison—this is what I remembered telling Leonek—Ágnes and Magda would be alone, maybe even harassed. I would not be able to protect them. But I couldn’t take a club to those people. And Kaminski—I’d attacked him. That, perhaps, was my one regret. But it wasn’t a deep regret.

  I didn’t go inside the station. I found my car, waited for the ignition to catch, then drove fast.

  Magda was putting away groceries in the kitchen. “Ágnes is with a friend,” she said absently. Her hands shook as she closed the cabinets.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Of course I’m all right.” I was glad she didn’t look at me, because I was not all right.

  Pavel followed me as I turned on the radio and went back to the kitchen. But instead of the usual Russian composers, or even staticky American crooners, I heard a Hungarian voice speaking slowly and clearly, giving news of the continued fighting in Budapest. Then another voice asked Soviet soldiers why they were killing their Hungarian brothers and sisters; why, after suffering Stalin for two decades, they were now serving worse Stalins. Magda looked up, surprised and, it seemed to me, terrified.

  “You’ve been listening to the Americans?”

  “No,” she said abruptly. Pavel let out a sharp cry; she’d stepped on him.

  “Christ, Mag, I’m not going to arrest you for it.” I forced a smile to show that this was true.

  Pavel scurried, whimpering, into the other room.

  Magda turned back to the counter so I wouldn’t see her face. “Maybe it was Ágnes,” she said, then: “No, it was me.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Just turn it back to something mundane when you’re finished.”

  She nodded at the wall. “Of course. Yes.”

  I wanted to talk it all out with her, to tell her what had happened. I wanted her to touch me and say that I’d done right. But she wasn’t listening today. She was somewhere else. She was distracted by her own decisions.

  When the telephone rang, I turned down the Americans, who were calmly asking Russian soldiers to lay down their arms and disobey their officers in the interests of justice.

  “Ferenc.”

  “Emil?”

  “Look, Ferenc, we’ve been talking.”

  “Who?”

  “Us. The guys. We’re not going in tomorrow. We’re calling in sick.”

  He sounded like he’d been drinking, which was what I should have been doing. “All of you?”

  “Stefan, Leonek, and I. And you, Ferenc.”

  I paused before answering. “I guess it should be all of us.”

  “Good.”

  Magda was throwing something away; I could hear paper crunching. “Just tomorrow? There’s the rest of the week, Thursday and Friday.”

  “No decisions yet. But we can discuss it tomorrow.”

  I still wasn’t completely sure, but the thought of that office was more abhorrent than the fears for my own family. After I hung up, I raised the volume again and said to Magda, “I’m staying home tomorrow.”

  “You’re—” she began, and looked closely at me for the first time since I’d gotten home.

  “I’m calling in sick.”

  Then a high squeal filled the apartment as the radio-jamming went into effect.

  11

  I called the Militia switchboard in the morning and coughed through my lie. The operator took it as easily as she’d taken all the other calls that morning, finishing with a knowing Take care of yourself that meant more than a warning about illness.

  Ágnes and Magda left together, and I sat with Pavel and the newspaper. My coffee became cold. Although the fighting in Budapest would go on for a few more days, it was evident to The Spark that the battle was over. The Hungarian agitators of reaction are shrinking back into their bullet-riddled holes. They were defending from broken windows. And the Americans, despite their proud radio talk, were staying out of it.

  There were only a few lines about the demonstration:

  Yesterday, an unwelcome scene appeared on our streets. Hungarian and other foreign elements staged a counterrevolutionary riot that quickly exposed their violent intentions. Four brave members of the People’s Militia were injured restoring order.

  I was preparing to take Pavel for a walk when the telephone rang. It was Moska. “How are you feeling?”

  I hesitated. “Sick. I feel sick.”

  “So do I, Ferenc, but I can’t do anything about it. Other than Brano and Kaminski, this place is deserted.”

  “Oh.”

  “Listen. Your disappeared woman has b
een found.”

  “Svetla Woznica?”

  “Third District. Central train station. Ferenc, they picked her up for prostitution.”

  “For what?”

  “When they brought her in, someone noticed the missing person’s report, so they called over here. Are you too sick to pick her up? I can’t leave the station.”

  “Can’t they drive her over?”

  “Too short-staffed. Seems half their men are out with the flu.”

  The Third District Militia station had been moved when its previous home—the old royal police station on Bishop Albert Street, later Engels Street—caught fire in 1952. The cause of the fire was never fully proven, but five Party officials who had, before the Liberation, been high in the Peasant Party were blamed. The charge was subversion, and they were executed. The new station was a concrete slab built on the ruins of a bomb-damaged apartment building. Flat-faced, four floors. It stood out on a street of Habsburg homes. Above double doors, a blue sign told visitors in flat, unadorned letters: MILITIA, DISTRICT III.

  The old desk veteran who took me to the basement cells muttered about all the young men who had called in sick. “Forty-three years, and not a day missed. What’s this? They don’t fool me. Not one minute. Lazy.”

  I wondered if he really believed that. “What about this girl?”

  “She wasn’t even hooking for money,” he said as he turned on the corridor light.

  “What?”

  “Ticket. She was selling her goods for a train ticket. Can you believe it?”

  “Where to?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Svetla Woznica was behind a steel door with a barred view-window. She was curled up on the cot in the back corner, and though I didn’t look close, her bedpan smelled of fresh vomit. From the ceiling, a fluorescent light buzzed.

  When she rolled over to look at us, at first I didn’t recognize her. Her upturned nose was ringed by a purple bruise where someone had hit her, and above her thin cheeks her eyes bulged out.

  “Svetla Woznica?”

  She used an arm to help sit up. Her hair was chopped strangely, as if with gardening shears. “You’ve come.” Her voice cracked.

  “You going to take the whore?” asked the veteran.

  I squatted beside the cot. Her skin, where it wasn’t bruised, was as white as a corpse’s. “Can you leave us alone?”

  The veteran hesitated. “You’re not—” he began, then shrugged and walked out, closing the door behind him.

  Svetla’s smile exposed a few missing teeth. “Want a good time, mister?” The Russian accent was more apparent now. “You’re very big, aren’t you?”

  “How long has it been?” I pointed at her bruised forearm.

  She looked at it too, and shrugged. “Yesterday morning. You got some?”

  I tried to lay out the questions in my head, but the stink was distracting me. “Svetla, tell me why you left your husband.”

  Her mouth opened behind her closed lips, as if she was going to be sick again. But she found her voice. “That prole bastard.” She rubbed her face. “Do you know? Did you get it out of him? Of course you didn’t.” She trembled in a way that reminded me of him. “He had the drug. It was for him. Then when Papa went back to Moscow Malik said, Svetla, you want a try? It’s very nice.” She closed her eyes. “It was nice, just like he said. But he didn’t say how you need it. Because that,” she said, tapping her temple, “that was his plan. First a little, it’s for both of us. Svetla, we share. Then all of it, all the medicine for my little Svetla.” She was remembering with her expressions, half-crying, half-laughing. “You know how it is? At first it’s very good. And then it’s better.”

  I watched her bruised nose, her squinting eyes, understanding slowly. “The morphine?”

  “First morphine, yes. Then pills and needles with no names—names I don’t know. I’m a whore, not a doctor. Not like Malik.”

  I swallowed.

  “At first, you know, it was not bad. Then he said, You need rest, my Svetla. I know a spa in Southern Bohemia.”

  “Trebon.”

  She shook her head. “But we didn’t go to Trebon. I knew, I could tell he was driving to the mountains. To that dacha.” She covered her mouth with a hand, eyes big. “That was,” she said. “That was when it was very bad. He wanted to know what he could do to his little Svetla when no one could hear. He found a lot of things. He’s imaginative.” She uncovered her mouth. “And when he wasn’t doing his things, he moved me around. That prole’s so smart. He said Svetla, we exercise you so you don’t have bedsores, we make sure you don’t die. Like a very smart doctor.”

  I started to say Why? but I didn’t know what that meant, or what the answer could be.

  Her smile was wide and thin, and flattened out her emaciated face as she read my mind. “I wanted to go home. I want to go home.” She glanced at the steel door. “Malik, he wanted a quiet wife. He said, a good wife. He made me a good wife. You stay here, Svetla, with me. In that room with the lock. And no windows. He showed his love with a needle and his prick. You know what I mean? He dressed me up, put all that makeup on my face, and gave me this lovely hairstyle.” She touched her chopped bangs. “Needle and the prick.” She looked very tired. “And now. Now you take me back, I know. I know this. I’m a crazy whore, but I’m not stupid.”

  12

  I signed the forms and took her and her small bag of clothes into my custody. We drove along the Tisa as I tried to make up my mind. It was his word against a morphine addict’s. He’d gotten rid of the lock on the bedroom door, and she had taken the rest of the morphine and the other drugs he’d used to keep her incapacitated. There were no witnesses. Malik knew all of this, and that was why he had felt secure enough to face the People’s Militia when regulations required our entry—and, ultimately, to use us to retrieve her.

  “How did you get away?”

  She lifted her forehead from the door window. “Svetla’s not stupid. I told you this, now listen. I even have control, a little.” She smiled crookedly. “I just didn’t take it—the pills, no pills. Simple. Very hard, da, but simple. The medicine under the bed and Svetla playacted. After a week, just a week, I was stronger. Maybe Svetla shouldn’t have brought the medicine with her, but I did. Now here I am, back on the medicine.”

  “But the lock. You were locked in.”

  She considered it, then spoke slowly, “God unlocked the door for me.” She looked at a passing bus. “It was a miracle, you know? But not so strange. God wanted Svetla to get away, so she did. But first I looked for a knife, you know, to kill him. Malik is a clever prole. So clever. He took away all the knives. The whole kitchen, no knives! Such a clever prole.”

  Malik forgets to lock her door, or maybe he’s decided there’s no longer any need, then she tears the kitchen apart in her desire to kill him.

  I stopped at the central bank, and while she waited in the car, humming to herself, I stood in line and withdrew a quarter of the money from my account, more than half of it in rubles. Then, at the train station, I bought a sleeper cabin to Moscow, both beds so she would be alone.

  I found the conductor and pulled him aside. Using both my Militia certificate and a stack of koronas, I commanded him to keep a close watch on her. “She’s not to leave the cabin, you follow? You bring her meals. She’s to stay on the train until Moscow, where someone from the Soviet Militia will pick her up. You are also to hold this,” I said, handing over an envelope heavy with rubles. “You will give it to the Moscow militiaman. He knows how much to expect. This one,” I added, handing over another, “is for the border guards. She does not have papers. You’re still with me?”

  He started to protest, but I leaned over him to make it clear that we both knew what was and was not possible at the frontier.

  I gave Svetla a third envelope of rubles, in case something went wrong once she was on the other side. That was when she finally understood what was happening. She started to cry, fell on her knees, and
pressed her bruised, wet face to my hand. Some old women in the ticket line looked at me with scorn, and a few men smiled.

  13

  It took a while, and the operator had to call me back, but finally I was speaking, in very poor Russian, to the switchboard operator of the Moscow Militia. She was stern-sounding, but when she heard the name she brightened. Immediately. There was no one in the office around me, and Moska’s door was shut.

  “Da?”

  “Comrade Inspector Kliment Malevich?”

  “Moment.”

  I was trying to not think about Svetla’s story, the details she never quite spelled out, and to ignore the knots in my stomach when I didn’t succeed.

  “What is it?”

  I hadn’t spoken to him since he and his mother had left almost two decades ago. He had been a fat child then. “Comrade Kliment Malevich?”

  “Da.”

  “I was a friend of your father’s. In the royal police.”

  He hummed into the phone, unsure of what to say.

  “My name is Ferenc Kolyeszar.”

  “I think I remember.” He sounded young. “Didn’t you…”

  “Yes. Leonek Terzian and I discovered your father’s body.”

  That seemed to reassure him. “Okay, Ferenc. How are you?”

  “As good as can be expected in difficult times.”

  “Truly.”

  “And yourself? Your mother?”

  “I’m excellent, but my mother’s been dead five years.”

  “Was it easy for her? I hope.”

  It was obvious to us both that I was no good at small talk. “Tell me, Ferenc. Tell me why you’ve called.”

  I described the situation in as much detail as I could, so he would understand the necessity of what I was asking of him.

  “Who’s this husband of hers?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “So he’s political.” He paused. “And I do what, exactly?”