“Labor camp?”
“Labor?” The functionary grunted. “Sure. Labor.”
It was a long shot, but he and Nestor were at the same camp during the same period, and it wasn’t unreasonable that they might have known each other. Or that they still knew each other. I told him I’d arrive in the next few hours to fill out the request for an interview.
“As you like.”
Footsteps exploded in the station. I knew, even without looking, who it was.
“You!” He was at my desk, leveling a cool, stable finger at me.
“I see you’re back on your medication.”
Malik Woznica swung down a fist that made my typewriter jump. “Where is my Svetla?”
I tried to seem concerned. “You haven’t heard from her yet? And no ransom notes?”
“Don’t talk to me like that! What did you do with my wife?”
“I think my chief told you, Comrade Woznica. I haven’t found her. A prostitute was mistaken for her, but really, your wife’s no prostitute.”
He breathed heavily, not used to so much exertion, and when he spoke his teeth were clenched. “Comrade Inspector Kolyeszar. You signed the papers authorizing her leave. We have your name on a paper that says you took Svetla Woznica into your custody.”
“I was mistaken.” I said this smoothly, but it was just the coolness of immediate shock. I had forgotten about that form.
“No, you weren’t mistaken, Comrade Kolyeszar. But you did make a mistake. You thought you could go against Malik Woznica of the Health Ministry. You thought you were above the rules.” He put another unshaking hand on the desk. “I’m going to finish you off.”
Then he walked out. There was no sign of his illness at all.
34
I didn’t wait for the others. I got into one of the Militia’s Mercedes and sped north to Ozaliko. Woznica’s hands did not shake, but mine did, and they threw the car off a little when I took wide turns. The Militia radio buzzed through tinny speakers, and a few times I heard voices. Leonek informed the station that he was heading over to the Fourth District Militia station, and Regina Haliniak thanked him for his update. I lifted the mouthpiece and even pressed the button before changing my mind. Sev would learn where I was going, and wonder why. He would want to know why I was speaking with a prisoner at Ozaliko, and for the moment I didn’t want him knowing anything. He’d had the file of my killer, and that meant Kaminski did as well. They were just two heads of the same Hydra.
The face of the man who sounded sick of his job matched the voice. His features sagged depressingly, in direct contrast to the smiling Mihai on the wall. When I told him I had called a half hour ago, he made no move to suggest that this rang a bell. He handed me the forms on a clipboard and asked if I needed a pen. But I already had one.
It was a three-page form requesting all of my personal details, with open spaces to fill in my reasons for seeing the prisoner. I labored over that, wanting to explain it without bringing up Nestor Velcea’s name, though I knew that, were Sev interested, he could figure it out easily enough. But there was no reason to make it easy for him.
The clerk took back the clipboard and ignored me as I stood waiting. “What now?” I asked.
He looked up again. “You’ll be contacted.”
I drove all the way to the station before changing my mind. I was afraid that Woznica would be there again, waving forms at Sev or Kaminski, awaiting my arrival. I was afraid that Kaminski was finally done playing with me, that all this time he had only been waiting for a free cell in Yalta Boulevard, where I could think about what I’d done on the Sixth of November. So I instead parked by October Square and asked Corina if I could use their telephone. She looked over to Max, cleaning glasses behind the bar, and he shrugged.
“Hello?”
“Vera. It’s me. Ferenc.”
“Well, this is a surprise.”
“Are you busy?”
“Just looking over some lectures for a class. Want to drop by?”
“Can I buy you a coffee? I’m over at October. Max and Corina’s place.”
At that point I had no intention of sleeping with her, or I believed I didn’t. I just wanted someone to talk to, and she was the one person I knew would be at home. But she was also the one person who would want more from me than a talk.
She looked as though the cold had taken a decade off her age, and when she sat I waved to Corina for another coffee.
“Shouldn’t you be hunting criminals or something?”
“Just don’t feel like it right now. What lectures were you working on?”
Corina set down the coffee. Vera thanked her, pulled some long black strands behind an ear, then leaned close to me. “You don’t really care about that, do you?”
I could feel her warm breath on my face. “I do, actually. I’m interested.” And that was true.
She leaned back. “Well, Marx, if you must know. His critique of Plato’s Republic—Marx considers it largely a defense of the Egyptian caste system. Which, you can imagine, Karl wasn’t too happy about.”
“I can imagine.”
“Some of my students are relatively critical of Plato, but I like to point out how similar, in a way, social Marxism is to Plato’s theory of forms. In essence at least—because society is moving toward a predefined goal, a pure idea.”
I looked at her, eyes wide, until she understood.
“You don’t know anything about Plato, do you?”
“About as much as I know about Marx.”
“Which is nothing.”
I nodded. “So teach, professor.”
She looked at me a moment, trying to decide, then slid the ashtray to her left. “Plato or Marx?”
“The first one.”
“Well, it’s really very simple. Kindergarten level.”
“That’s just right for me.”
She looked at me another moment. “Plato felt that for everything there is an essential form that is more real than this reality.”
“Like souls?”
“No,” she said. “That’s a common mistake. He uses the story of the people in a cave, with a fire blazing. On the walls are the shadows—these shadows are us. Our world is on the walls. And the people sitting around the fire are the ideal.”
I nodded.
“You’re sure you haven’t heard this before?”
I had, but I wanted her to do the talking. “Just tell me, will you?”
“Okay. An example: For all apple trees, there is a single, perfect apple tree on which they are all based, but never equal to.”
“Like God making us in his image.”
“Something like that.”
“All apple trees aspire to this perfect version?”
“Maybe. But it makes more sense for people.” She pointed at me. “Behind Ferenc Kolyeszar there is an ideal Ferenc Kolyeszar. Do you aspire to it?”
I sank back into my chair. “Of course I do. Don’t you?”
“Of course I aspire to the perfect Ferenc Kolyeszar,” she said, smiling, then shook her head. “No, I don’t aspire anymore. I used to believe all that. I used to think there was an ideal Vera Pecsok who was the perfect wife. I worked on it a long time. But the closer I got in action—because it’s only through your actions that you can become anything—the less happy I was. The less like myself I felt. So either the perfect Vera was not the perfect wife, or there was no perfect Vera.” She shrugged. “I prefer believing there’s no perfect Vera, and that with each new action I become someone slightly different.”
I tugged my lip. “So why are you teaching this? If you don’t believe it.”
“Because they let me,” she said as she took out a cigarette. I lit it. “I used to teach six classes, now they’ve whittled me down to two, and seem to have forgotten I’m teaching under quota. Plato’s forms are safe. Because, as I said, behind every socialist state lies utopia—that’s the similarity I was talking about. And that utopia is what we’re all aspiring to. Right?”<
br />
We drank our coffee in silence for a while. She had me thinking of that, too: Was there an ideal Ferenc that I should be trying to become? An ideal husband and father, an ideal militiaman? A great writer?
She said, “When I was studying in Zurich, a professor of mine had a theory about women in wartime. He said that, in times of war and revolution, when their men cannot protect them, women see their lives stripped bare. They understand, with utter clarity, that they are alone, as we all are. Most women also see that this life, with this man, is not what they wanted. It’s just something they stumbled upon. And only in the clarity of this vision do they find the strength to change their lives. So they leave.”
I watched her thinking about this. “Is that true? Do women leave their men in wartime?”
She raised her shoulders. “It happens.”
“A professor told you this?”
“A professor, yes. He was also my lover.”
“Oh.”
“So why did you call me, Ferenc?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Of course you are. That I don’t know is the oldest, and worst, excuse.”
“I guess I wanted this. To talk to you. We never do.”
She placed the sugar spoon into her empty cup. “Talk isn’t what I want from you. Don’t try to make me into something I’m not. Okay?”
“But you’re not anything,” I said. “You told me that.”
She touched a red nail to the back of my hand. “You’re a fast learner. Did you know Karel’s going to Yugoslavia on Saturday?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“A Writers’ Union trip. A representative of our men of letters. He’s very proud.”
“He should be.”
“And I’ll be alone for a whole week.”
The conversation didn’t go much further because she was not very interested in it, and maybe I wasn’t either, so I went home and waited for my family. Ágnes showed up first, but she didn’t feel like talking either. She’d had a bad day, and all I could get out of her was that she would prefer to remain in her room for the rest of her life. Magda’s mood was no better, and when after dinner I tried to talk to her it was no use. None of the women in my life wanted to talk that day. I told Magda that I’d had coffee with Vera, but it didn’t faze her. She didn’t know about the Christmas kiss or the more recent one, and I didn’t know if knowing about them would have made any difference.
35
Emil was in the office, waiting with a slip of paper. “Results,” he said, smiling.
The previous night a militiaman in the Second District had spotted Nestor Velcea near Antonín’s apartment, but had been unable to catch him.
“How did he know about Velcea?”
“I filed a bulletin on him,” said Emil.
“Oh.” My secret was no longer a secret.
We drove over to the Second District station, and the switchboard operator used the new radios to call for Laszlo, the militiaman who had seen Nestor. Emil and I waited on the stiff corridor benches, listening to the heels of secretaries rattle the floor.
“It’s no longer who,” said Emil. “It’s why.”
I nodded at my rings, twisting them. “That’s right. Any ideas?”
“Art and art. How much further can you take it?”
“A particularly grisly murder and two less grisly ones. An evil painter and two people who knew him. And the artist Nestor Velcea, a work camp prisoner who’s killing them.”
“Yeah,” he said. He was staring at his own hands, too.
Laszlo was gray on the sides and seemed too old to be walking the streets with the young men. And he was. He had recognized Nestor right away from Emil’s description, but had been foolish enough to shout before he was close. “That guy didn’t even think about it,” he said, grunting. “He was gone before I finished saying his name. Even with that limp he can move.”
It was a wasted trip for us, and so was the subsequent visit to Antonín’s apartment. There was nothing to suggest Nestor had returned to it—perhaps Laszlo had scared him on his way there. We spent the afternoon canvassing the neighborhood, but no one remembered the limping man short one finger. Back at the station I was relieved to find neither Sev nor Kaminski nor Woznica. But I did find Leonek in another of his ecstatic moods.
“They’re letting him go! Didn’t I tell you they would?”
I settled behind my desk. “Who?”
“Aren’t you listening? Zindel Grubin, that’s who!” He rapped his knuckles on my desk. “They’ll lock you up and kill you, but they don’t want your funeral unattended. You’re still coming, right?”
“Sunday, is it?”
“You can pick me up.”
After the others had left, Stefan arrived. I told him about our misadventures, and he nodded thoughtfully. Then he sat down to finish some paperwork.
I could have walked over and hit him again—it was a thought that still ran around in my head—but when you learn something over time the anger dissolves into the days, so that in the end you’re too tired; the anxiety has dulled you. He also seemed tired, and I wondered if the guilt was keeping him from sleep. We’d had such affection for each other for so many years that there had to have been guilt. Or if there was no guilt, just a low burning hatred of me that he sublimated through the exertion of sleeping with my wife.
My inaction haunted me more than the infidelity. I knew how I was supposed to react: I was supposed to rage into a violent destruction until everyone around me was stunned. I’d seen enough husbands who had done that, men I’d put behind bars. I’d sympathized with them, and always thought I might do the same. But like Mathew Eiers, I did nothing.
Was this a reflection of my love for Magda? If I couldn’t become irrational and brutal about this, then where did I draw the line? Because of my size, I’d seldom had to use my strength. The threat was always enough. But this was something that could not be assuaged by a threat.
No: I couldn’t become violent because in the end it didn’t matter. Magda and I had been growing apart for a long time, and this was just the uglier side of what already existed. The only thing that truly angered me was her nonchalance. She was sleeping with my oldest friend, and when Ágnes became aware of it—as she no doubt would—what would it do to her?
Stefan lounged at his desk sleepily, and I finally began to gather some strength to brutalize him. He was helping to chip away at my family, and for that there was no forgiving him.
But before I could turn the feeling into action, he stood up, stretched, and told me he was beat—he was going home.
I bet you’re beat.
36
In the empty office I typed. It was in the form of a letter, and the only way I could write it was to think of it as fiction. It was addressed to “My dear wife” and listed, in detail, the reasons why the letter writer was leaving her. Why he was taking their child with him, why there was a reality to be faced up to and this lie could no longer be lived. He did not wish to hurt anyone, he said, but had no choice. He was sick of her evasions and the way she risked the family they had carefully tended for the past decade and a half. He didn’t understand why everything had failed in the end (he was gracious enough to take some of the blame), but he had stuck it out with the faith of a monk. He knew there was something higher than simple happiness, and he wished she understood this as well. But she understood nothing. So he would leave her, and take their daughter with him.
I tugged the sheet out of the typewriter and folded it into my jacket pocket without rereading it.
“More egocentric writing?”
Kaminski was in the doorway, arms crossed, smiling at me.
“You put in the hours, don’t you?”
I reached for my overcoat. “Sometimes.”
“You know what’s been on my mind lately, Ferenc?” He came over and leaned on my desk. “Kazakhstan. Remember me telling you about it a while ago? Well, the numbers are starting to come in, and it turns out I was right.
We succeeded.” He smiled, his thin mustache rising. “From that area alone we’re harvesting twenty million tons of wheat. Twenty million! Sixty million from all the new regions, one hundred twenty-five million tons from the entirety of the Soviet Union! What do you think about that?”
He waited for an answer, so I nodded.
“It’s better than that, my boy. It’s a goddamn miracle. The largest yield in the history of the USSR.” His smile was expansive, and I made a halfhearted attempt to match it, but just as quickly it went away. “These kinds of things don’t impress you, do they, Ferenc?”
“It’s impressive,” I said.
He shook his head. “No it’s not. You’re only interested in the individual. Something you proved on November the sixth. Put you in a group, and you’ll always be the oddball, won’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
He pursed his lips and nodded at me. “How’s your case coming?”
“Slowly.”
“I thought so. It’s because you don’t work well in a team. It’s all over you. Maybe you should find a different line of work, Ferenc. Maybe I can help you out with that.”
I swallowed, too visibly. “What kind of work.”
“Does it matter?” He shrugged. “You’re a man who likes art. A fan of Vlaicu’s work?”
“Not really.”
“But all you boys went to his show. Now, that’s a surprise. You don’t see a lot of militiaman going in for art shows. It’s a little eccentric. But Stefan sure made an ass of himself, didn’t he?”
Although when he spoke his tone was light and conversational, his face, with its hard cheekbones and lips, did not match it. I didn’t know if he just wanted to scare me, or if there was a point to this. State security has always worked by diversion, and to imagine you know what any officer is thinking is pure fantasy.
“You do know, don’t you?”
I swallowed. “What?”
“That you and I will be face-to-face someday soon. I’m not the kind of man who forgets insults. Who ignores it when a man under my supervision embarrasses me in public.”
The Confession Page 16