Olen Steinhauer - The confession

Leonek swiped the paper from her, and as he moved it back and forth, trying to focus, he looked baffled. “It’s Mihai,” he muttered, maybe to us, maybe to himself. “He’s dead.”

It rained most of the drive. I had not had the patience to clean up the house; all I wanted was Agnes and Magda. I wanted them with me immediately; there could be no delay. I splashed through craters of rainwater and flew past hitchhikers stumbling through the mud, the sputtering radio teaching me more about the life of Mihai than I would ever have wanted to know. All I learned of his death was that lung cancer had taken him.

I ducked beneath my coat to stay dry and banged on the loose front door. Nora looked surprised.

“Where are they?”

“Inside, dear. Eating lunch.”

Agnes threw herself into my arms, weeping. It was strange to hold my daughter again, and I had to adjust my arms to accommodate her. Maybe she’d grown in the past week. But her tears weren’t for me. “He’s dead, Daddy! W-what can we…” She broke down again.

Magda was easier to hold. I sank my face into her shoulder and held her for a few seconds longer than she expected. Then she pulled back. “Are you okay?” She wiped my cheek.

“Me? Oh, sure. I’m fine.”

“Your hand is scratched.”

“It’s nothing. I’m okay.”

It took a while to relax, a meal that tasted better than any Nora had ever made before, and a long smoke with Teodor. We discussed Mihai’s passing and speculated without knowledge on what would follow. No one that week had any idea what would happen. “Agnes is a wreck,” he said. “Does that surprise you?”

“Maybe those Pioneer meetings had their effect.”

He asked about the case.

“It’s over.”

“And it went well? You got your man?”

“I got him.”

“And what about you two?”

“What about us two?”

“Mag told me she asked you to take her back.” He put out his smoke. “Are you going to do that?”

I didn’t know how to answer.

All five of us took a walk across the wet communal plots and greeted farmers who stood smoking in empty, long-harvested fields. We made it to the social club, a low wooden building where a couple men played guitars in a corner while drunk farmhands danced with young girls. I didn’t like it when one of them covered us with his atrocious breath and asked to dance with Agnes, but I was pleased when she declined.

At the farmhouse Magda and I took the room where she had once told me about Leonek. But this time she examined my hand with concern, then told me again how sorry she was. I kissed her to keep her quiet, and we made love in a way I’d not done for a very long time: simply, and without any motives other than love. Afterward she told me she could never leave me, because a man as pure and true as me was a once-in-a-lifetime find. “Pure?” I asked her. I was standing naked by the opened window, smoking.

She put herself up on an elbow, and in the darkness she might have been any woman. “I know you, Ferenc. Your impulses are pure. You’ve proven it to me all these years.”

“I’m not pure, Magda. I’m so far from that.”

“But you are.”

“No,” I repeated, then told her about Vera. I told as little as possible.

She was quiet for a moment, then whispered, “I knew something was going on. All those nights out.” I noticed her breaths were uneven. “But what else should I expect?” she said. “I’m surprised you didn’t do it earlier.”

I flicked the cigarette out the window and latched it tightly.

Magda was disheartened by the apartment-I hadn’t cleaned a thing while they were gone-and peered closely at the bullet hole in the wall. Standing with her and seeing it through her eyes, shame overcame me. Agnes ran with Pavel to her room, and Magda leaned against the radio and sighed.

“Look,” I said. “I’ll help.”

“You’re damn right you’ll help.”

So we spent that afternoon cleaning. She dusted and mopped; I swept and washed dishes. Both of us went through the apartment with rags, wiping down all surfaces, and by the afternoon it was done. We bathed together, washing each other’s backs, and when we were done I suggested we go to a puppet show. “That’s a nice idea,” she said.

But the theater was closed in deference to Mihai, and on the front door was a twenty-line poem extolling the virtues of that great patron of the arts. We ended up at a restaurant where I told them to get whatever they wanted. Agnes chose fried potatoes. I tried to get her to add some meat to her order, or vegetables, or even ice cream, but she shook her head firmly. “You said whatever I want.”

“Fair enough.”

We put Agnes to bed and undressed in our bedroom. I watched Magda slide out of her clothes as if I’d never seen her do it before in my life. Her face and shoulders were brown from a week in the country, and I touched an old scar on her shoulder, white against her tan. We shut off the lights and kissed for a while and made love without speaking. Then, as we lay beside each other in the dark, she finally began to tell me.

“Remember how it was when you came back from the war?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“You were a different person. Really, you were. The Ferenc I married was bright and happy. God, you could make me laugh. You did it without effort. You saw the humor in everything around you, and you always pointed it out to me.” She shifted, and her hand slid up to my chest. “I was never like that. Then when you came back it was different. Of course, at first you couldn’t do anything. You’d been through something I couldn’t imagine, and I was willing to work with you through it.”

“I remember that. You were so good to me.”

Her fingers weaved through the hair on my chest. “Why wouldn’t I be? Your family was dead, and you’d been through a war. I loved you. So we moved to the Capital when Stefan got you the job. I knew why he wanted to help you-we both felt guilty. But I swear it only happened once.”

“I believe you.”

“Once you were working again, you started to come out of your shell. I can’t tell you how excited that made me. I was looking forward to greeting the boy I’d fallen in love with.” She paused then, her fingers continuing to stroke.

“But he didn’t appear, did he?”

Her hand flattened just over my heart. “Not really. I saw moments of it now and then, particularly after Agnes was born. But you were a different man. I had to realize that. And when you started writing, it seemed to take you away even more. The only time you were like your old self was with Agnes. I was jealous of her for a long time.”

“Of Agnes?”

“She was the only one who got the old Ferenc. I wanted that Ferenc for myself.”

I considered that decade and a half with a man she hadn’t married. “Was it so bad?”

“What?”

“Being with me.”

She stroked the stubble on my cheek. “Of course not. There were moments, I have to admit, when I was scared of you. You’d get into one of those moods, you’d go silent, and I didn’t know if I could trust you. With me. With my body.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, then paused again, “you don’t realize what your size does to people. You could snap someone in half. You could snap me.”

“But I’d never do that. Not to you.”

“I know you wouldn’t. But sometimes I’d look at you, mulling over your brandy, distant, and wonder if you could. I wondered what would happen if I did something to really provoke your wrath.” She removed her hand. “And then I did. I did the most provocative thing imaginable. And you…you didn’t touch me. Not once. Not many men are that way, Ferenc.” Her hand returned, this time to my scalp. “Maybe this is what I realized at my parents’. I was throwing away my family because I didn’t have enough faith. God,” she said, placing her hand on mine again and squeezing.