The Confession

by Steinhauer, Olen

  “One shot,” said Emil, as we walked to a bar.

  “When there were at least three bullets fired. Two for Stefan and a third into Nestor, who ran down the stairs.”

  “Nestor was using a silencer. It’s the only answer.”

  “So who shot Nestor?”

  Over our silent drink no ideas came to us, and afterward I returned alone to Stefan’s spattered apartment to stare at the terrible walls. After a while, I lay down in Stefan’s bed and tried to sleep. The exhaustion was too much. The ceiling went in and out of darkness as I blinked, but when it went black I saw everything, in pieces. Broken shins and femurs, porridge, beaten faces, and bowls of fish soup. And I saw Stefan’s bleeding forehead and the cracked mirror I shoved him into.

  Stefan never really recovered after Daria left him. The reason for the break was a mystery—he’d only said that a man can only get so fat before his woman searches for a thinner man. But what else could he have said? If someone asked why my marriage was crumbling, my answers would have been just as ludicrous. Such things cannot be paraphrased.

  I rolled over and forced my face into his pillow. It smelled like him, or I imagined it did. Dirty. The smell of the east, as the Frenchman had said. We stink, and we mutilate one another. The clothes we wear and the words we speak are just masks. We take our revenge because we can’t let the past go. Because in the past we were no better—we ate each other like wild, starving dogs.

  Maybe it was then. Maybe later, after I drifted off and woke from uncomfortable dreams about a genius painter who becomes, by way of betrayal, a mad killer. Sometime in that restless night the storyteller in me put it together. Antonín’s rise to fame with the help of Josef Maneck, nearly simultaneous with Nestor’s demise. Nestor, the eccentric who wouldn’t even sign his work. And the things Stefan had fretted over: Josef’s sudden conversion to alcoholism because, as Martin had said, he couldn’t live with himself, and Antonín’s shift into the banality of state art. Then I knew it. I knew, with utter clarity, why Nestor Velcea had killed Josef, Antonín, and Zoia. I knew it in a flash, like a vision from God. It was art. It was all about art.

  52

  I washed in Stefan’s grime-laden tub, dried off with his mildewed towel, used his toothbrush on my teeth, and drank coffee from his cup. I looked out his window at the gray blocks he saw every morning and paused at the same door he opened each day.

  At home I pulled out my dress uniform. All inspectors had one, but only brought it out for celebrations or funerals. I was mildly astonished that mine still fit. Magda and Ágnes wore identical black dresses, bought from the same sale. Magda had told Ágnes about Stefan, and she seemed to be taking it well. On the drive she asked if dying hurt.

  “Depends on how you die,” I said.

  She shifted in the backseat, looking out the window. “I think when I die, I want it to hurt a lot.”

  Magda looked at me. I said, “Why on earth would you want that?”

  “Because. That way I know I’m dying. I don’t want it to be a surprise.”

  I looked at her in the rearview and wondered if I should be worried.

  With the pleasant exception of Kaminski, everyone was there, in uniform, both Moska and Sev with little rows of medals on their chests. It was as if our office had lost its walls and desks, then grown crabgrass and tombstones. A ring of trees separated us from the city, and Lena, in an impressive black gown, toyed with a leaf. Beside Moska stood his wife Angela, a tall, thin woman with a round face that seemed unable to smile.

  She was a good woman, everyone agreed, but she seldom spoke to any of us. Ágnes and Magda shook hands with everyone, Magda a little shamefully—she hadn’t seen most of them in a long time—and Ágnes boldly. Ágnes gave Leonek a big hug, which surprised Magda. She pulled Ágnes back, blushing, and said, “Hello again, Leonek.”

  Leonek left a hand on Ágnes’s shoulder and smiled back.

  Emil’s uniform looked too big for him, but it was better pressed than anyone’s. I assumed Lena had taken care of that. “Can I take your husband away a moment?” I asked her.

  She smiled and let go of his arm.

  We’d made it to a fresh grave not yet covered with grass before he said, “What is it?”

  “Nestor Velcea. I know what he’s doing.”

  “Then please, for Christ’s sake, tell me.”

  I took a breath, then spoke it aloud for the first time. “Antonín Kullmann turned in Nestor so that he could steal his work. All of it. Antonín signed his name on the paintings, and Josef Maneck, the curator, showed them. The guilt turned Maneck into a drunk, and when Zoia learned of it she left Antonín.”

  He patted his schoolboy hair. “It’s a stretch.”

  “Not entirely. Take a look at the early Kullmann paintings and compare them with the newer ones. Even Stefan saw the difference. Kullmann ran out of Nestor’s paintings and had to make his own finally. I’d been trying to figure out why Nestor had mutilated Antonín, had put him through such pain. It’s because he took his whole life away. He took everything. And I’ll bet that if we look into it, we’ll find that Antonín had been supporting Josef’s lifestyle, in order to keep him quiet about it all.”

  “It’s too simple,” said Emil. “How could this kind of thing remain secret?”

  “Nestor never showed his work. No one knew it.”

  “Somebody must have known.”

  “Zoia did. Because they all lived together. Maybe someone else did, too, but this at least gets us moving.”

  “But why did he kill Stefan?”

  “That, I don’t know,”

  He shook his head. “Good job, Ferenc. Really. I wish I’d come up with it.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll teach you a thing or two before this is over.”

  Georgi brought Vera. I shook Georgi’s hand and gave Vera a hug as my family loitered with the others. “What are you doing here?”

  The corners of her lips twitched into a sneer. “You don’t think I remember Stefan? I knew him.”

  “Years ago, and you only met a couple times.”

  “I didn’t want Georgi to be all alone. He needs a shoulder. By the way, the uniform suits you.”

  Vera and Georgi greeted my family. Occasionally during the ceremony I shot glances back at both women standing beside one another, Magda erect beside Vera’s slouch. Beneath my fear I noticed how different they were—their looks, their characters, the way they made love. I was their only shared attribute.

  We stood stiffly during the reading, and now and then I caught Sev’s gaze wandering over to evaluate my grief. The casket was open, and Stefan’s uniform was too tight on him, pulling around the belly. Magda was surprisingly dry-eyed, while Ágnes clutched her hand and gaped. We were all surprisingly dry-eyed. All except Leonek, who wept quietly.

  53

  The guys invited me out for drinks, but I looked back at Magda and Ágnes and declined. We drove in silence, and silence reigned at home. Ágnes turned on the radio, then sat with Pavel on the floor, while Magda prepared dinner. I watched Ágnes for a long time, but thought only of Stefan.

  Ágnes bored of Pavel and found a newspaper crossword puzzle to work on. Pavel climbed into my lap. There was a documentary on the radio—not American, but ours—on the history of the nation and the ethnic diversity that made it an ideal home for socialism.

  I scratched Pavel’s ear absently.

  Stefan could no longer ease his pain by confessing to me, and I could not sit him down and forgive him. I pressed my eyelids, remembering moments of our childhood in Pócspetri, and later, after Daria left him. I’d distanced myself from him, and with his mother’s death Stefan’s life was empty of almost everything, except regret.

  Magda wanted to know if I preferred potatoes or fried cornmeal. I looked at her a while before answering.

  “It’s a simple question, Ferenc.”

  “Cornmeal. Yes, cornmeal.”

  She returned to the kitchen. No wonder he had jumped at the chance to b
e with her again. He had nothing else.

  The radio told me that Comrade General Secretary Mihai wanted us to revel in our history, to learn from it the possibilities for our future.

  Ágnes scribbled letters into boxes.

  When I came back from the war, I was nothing to look at, nothing to consider, nothing to be. Magda thought she recognized me at first—I looked the same and spoke the same—but soon she knew better. All I would do was sit on the sofa and ask for water. She always brought it, but there wasn’t anything else I wanted. There had been a week in the trenches when we did not have fresh water, and in the middle of a dry field, pinned in by mortar fire and explosions puncturing the sky, we thought we’d die the way sailors once died—scurvy, salt water on the brain. What was she to think? She offered what she thought I wanted. Hot meals, a warm woman. But all I wanted was fresh water. Finally, she talked me into sex. It was a revelation. Beyond water there really was something. There was flesh and warmth and that tremor of the glands that I hadn’t thought of since I’d seen glands and flesh exploded by German mines, and the glands and flesh of my parents when I imagined their small house obliterated by that German bomb. My emotions were suddenly in reach after so long; I felt human again.

  We had dinner with brief moments of conversation. Ágnes wanted a bicycle, which I at first said we could not afford; then, as she pressed, I told her I’d see what I could find. Magda was melancholic, but not the way I’d expect from someone who had just seen her lover buried in the earth. How well did I know her? Perhaps I had lost track of her in the provinces, just before we moved to the Capital, when she cared for me like a nurse. Perhaps she began hiding hard facts from me then, beginning with her night with Stefan, and had steadily built her own, secret world.

  The idea of Magda’s leaving had come to me on and off over the years. Married people do this. In a small part of their minds hides a secret world of independence, and in that parallel world there are other companions. Some beautiful, some less so, and for a while it seems these others are more or less the same as the one that you have, in the real world, devoted your life to. How different are the breakfasts and dinners, the weekends in the country, the lovemaking, the conversations? Not so different, in the end.

  But when troubles begin, this secret world grows. It is visible on the horizon. It takes roots in reality. I thought about the other women I knew. Vera, sure. Seductive and strong. There was something there. Roberta, a stenographer who visited the office now and then, had been single for the last five years—I imagined how her famished and ample body would be in bed. She would have the virtue of gratefulness. I even wondered about the bodiless voice from the Militia radio: Regina Haliniak. There were others whose names I didn’t know, women on the street who held my gaze for a few seconds longer than polite—and within the brackets of these flirtations a new future presented itself.

  This is the first stage, the hopeful stage. Promiscuous fantasies without the burden of responsibility. When I thought of Ágnes, I ignored the unavoidable custody worries. Although she seldom appeared in my fantasy life, it was granted that Ágnes was with me, waiting at home.

  In this first stage, divorce seemed survivable, maybe even a little invigorating—the building of a new life always is. But then it approached from the horizon, moved close enough that I could make out its barren details. The second stage is knowledge. While sleeping with other women had its virtues, I couldn’t imagine what would follow.

  What had we to say to each other? I couldn’t eat breakfast with these women, and the thought of taking a weekend trip with any of them was unbearable.

  I realized then what I’d always known: Magda was in every action I took and shadowed every thought. A life without her was no life at all.

  When Ágnes asked me to pass the salt, I had been staring blindly at her for a while. “You all right, Daddy?”

  “Fine, honey.”

  “You don’t look so good.”

  “It’s been a hard day.”

  Magda looked questioningly at me, and I smiled and shook my head. “I’m going to have to take off after dinner. I’ve got something to do.”

  “Will we see you again tonight?”

  “Yes,” I said, then repeated it. “Yes.”

  54

  I parked on the dark, empty street outside her block and went over the words in my head. I took a breath, wiped my face, and got out.

  She wore slacks and a white blouse that hung loose and transparent over her breast. She wore a smile as well. “Ferenc, I didn’t think you’d come. Give me that coat.”

  I gave it to her and watched her take it through the kitchen to the bedroom to toss it on the bed. She noticed my hesitation when we kissed.

  “I was going to whip up something to eat. You hungry?”

  “I just ate.”

  “Then I’ll wait.”

  I sat on the sofa. She stood in front of me a moment, then straddled my knees. “Tell me, Ferenc.”

  “Yes, we should talk.” I moved her off of my knees—she was light, easy to lift—and onto the cushion beside me.

  Frowning, she left a hand on my thigh.

  “It’s over. From this moment. It’s over.”

  “Us?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Look: I have to make things work with Magda. It’s what I have to do.”

  Vera looked at her hand on my leg, then began to stroke. “You don’t have fun with me?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “You don’t like what we do?”

  “You know I like it.”

  “Well then,” she said. “You keep working on Magda, and at the same time keep working on me.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Sure it is. I do it all the time, and I can tell you how easy it is.”

  I took her hand from my leg and put it on her own, but her other hand fell upon mine and pressed it to her thigh.

  “Listen, Ferenc.”

  “I can’t listen.”

  She drew my hand up into her groin, and though I could have resisted, I didn’t.

  “I should go now.”

  “Don’t be a bastard,” she said, but her voice was soft. She put her free hand on my crotch. “She won’t do the things I’ll do, you know this.”

  As she massaged me, she leaned up to my ear and whispered what she would do. I looked at her, momentarily shocked, then easing into it. But the fears of a life of regret flashed back, and I took her hand off me. “I really should go.”

  “You know what your problem is?”

  I should have stood up and left. But I said, “Let’s pretend I don’t know.”

  “Simplicity.”

  “Thanks for the insight.”

  She shook her head. “It’s true. You’re desperate for simplicity. It’s why you’ve held on so long to a dead marriage. You want to think you understand everything, but you’ll never understand yourself until you accept your contradictions.”

  I stood up, but didn’t walk away.

  She said, “You need to learn that specific actions do not yield specific results. Just because you’re good to your marriage doesn’t mean it’ll be good to you.” She grabbed my arm, but I pulled it away.

  “You don’t get it,” I said. “It’s…it has to do with Stefan. With my daughter, with everything.”

  She pulled her lips back and showed me her teeth.

  “Where’s my coat?”

  “You know where.”

  I didn’t want it like this, but my explanations had turned to smoke. I went back to the bedroom and took my coat from the bed. It was the right decision, I knew this, and I had to see it through. When I turned, she was standing in the bedroom doorway, blocking my exit.

  “Let me see something,” she said.

  She took the coat from my hand, tossed it back on the bed, and sank to her knees. When she started to take off my belt, I reached down to stop her, but she slapped my hand.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  She
unbuttoned me quickly. I was excited despite myself. She looked at it, almost curiously, then put it into her mouth.

  The telephone woke us. Vera turned on the bedside light and looked at the clock—a little after five in the morning. She walked naked to the living room. “Yes?…No, he’s not…okay, all right. I’ll get him.” Then: “Ferenc!”

  “I won’t say a thing, okay, buddy?”

  “I’m not worried about that, Georgi. What do you need?”

  “Not me. Magda. She called over here looking for you. She was worried.”

  “About me?”

  “No, not you. At least she didn’t say that. Someone was banging on your door.”

  “Who?”

  “She doesn’t know. A man. She thinks he’s gone now.”

  “When was this?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago. Something like that.”

  It was cold, and the car took a while to start. My breath steamed the windshield. I bounced through the holes and crevices of our parking lot. The block looked empty. I climbed the flights, pausing to listen and check the color of the steps. Then I listened at the door and used the key. “It’s me,” I whispered as I pushed it open.

  55

  I put the car through more than I should have, cutting across the parking lot and flying up Tashkent Boulevard, out of town. I’d rushed them through the packing, answering all Ágnes’s questions with a hysterical It’s a trip! We’re going on a trip! Magda had thought I was overreacting.

  “What are you saying?”

  “That man might have killed you both, like he did Stefan. Get your bag.”

  She stood by the bathroom door with a towel in one hand, and nodded.

  As dawn grew, we passed the outskirts, the final unfinished blocks falling away, and the earth leveled into fields. Magda pointed out that I was going the wrong way. “We need to go south.”

  “I don’t want to drive through the city.”

  “Why not?”