Olen Steinhauer - The confession

Magda unlatched herself and pushed people aside to see for herself. “Agnes?”

We split up and threaded through the crowd. I shoved women and men aside and kneed children who stood in my way as the worry became frantic. “Agnes!”

…Academician of Worldwide Acclaim; Friend to the Animals of the Planet…

As I pushed I imagined her trampled beneath feet, dragged away by molesters, knifed by Nestor Velcea or tortured in a wet Canal District mansion, her corpse carried to the mountains for disposal. Not once did I imagine the most evident scenario, which was proven as the Politburo cars slid slowly by and Magda caught up with me, dragging our daughter along: She had squeezed her way to the street in order to cry and wail where she could better see the object of her adoration.

We were eating dinner when they came. The buzzer went off, and Magda got up from the table to open the door. I followed her when I heard his voice, monotone: “I’d like to speak with Ferenc, if you don’t mind.”

He was already inside the apartment when I got to them, and through the door I saw the other two men. Leather coats, hats. They did not come in.

“Ferenc,” he said, and squinted as if faced with too bright a light. He stuck out a hand and I took it. “Comrade Kolyeszar,” he said to Magda. “Would you mind if Ferenc and I talked alone?”

Agnes stood in the kitchen doorway, frowning. Sev noticed her and tried a friendly smile, but no one was convinced of it, him least of all. Magda took her back into the kitchen.

We sat-him in a chair, back straight, me on the sofa. He touched the mole on his cheek. “Listen, Ferenc. I’m going to have to take you over to Yalta Boulevard. Some questions.”

“Questions about what?”

“The case. The Nestor Velcea case.”

“You have my report.”

“And other things.”

“I’ll come by Monday.”

“Ferenc,” he said. “Let’s not make this ugly. There’s no reason.”

“I suppose there isn’t.”

Somewhere inside me, in a small soft place, I was terrified.

“My wife and daughter know nothing about any of this. You realize that, right?”

He glanced back toward the kitchen. “I know that.”

“Then let’s go. I’ll tell them good-bye.”

“Listen,” he said. I looked at him chewing the inside of his mouth. “This,” he began. “This is not my doing, what’s going on right now. Comrade Kaminski talked to other people, and they want to know more from you. I’m following orders.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed that or not.

Agnes was sitting at the table, and Magda stood by the sink, chewing the nail on her little finger. “What is this?”

“It’s nothing. Just some questions. I’ll be back soon.”

“Questions? Questions?” She shook her head, and her kiss was salty. She held my lower lip in her teeth. “Don’t go,” she whispered. “Tell them you’ll go in tomorrow. Or Monday.”

“I tried. If you need…”

“What?”

“If you need anything, call him.”

“Who?”

“Libarid.”

“Oh God, don’t say that.”

“Where are you going?” asked Agnes.

I pulled away from Magda, but she clutched my hand as I leaned over the table and kissed Agnes’s head. “Just to talk with these men. It’s nothing. I’ll be back soon, but if I’m not back tonight, you go on to bed, okay?”

She smiled a moment, then her smile disappeared. Perhaps she saw it in her mother’s face, because she started to cry quietly. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine, honey.”

Magda squeezed my hand until the rings pinched my fingers, then walked with me into the living room and helped me into my coat. Then she said to Sev, “Bring him back soon. Do you understand?”

He pressed his lips together. “Of course, Comrade Kolyeszar. I will do my very best.”

You hear this later.

You hear that the Magyars have it worse than anyone this year. Nagy is lured out of hiding from the Yugoslav embassy and over a year later is executed deep inside the Empire. Thirty-five thousand Hungarians are arrested and three hundred executed.

You hear that after the death of Mihai, after the convulsions of grief and homages to his immortality, the nation goes on. It is announced that a joint leadership is now in power, because how can such a man be replaced with just one? There are three: Bobu the Professor, Kozak the Engineer, and a name you’ve not heard before this, a name no one has heard: Tomiak Pankov, a Party apparatchik from before the war. Less than a week later, Bobu is arrested by state security at his mistress’s apartment in the Fifth District. The next morning The Spark explains all: He is guilty of financial improprieties. Kozak and Pankov shake hands on the balcony of the Central Committee chambers before a crowd that fills the entirety of Victory Square. They wear identical greatcoats to symbolize their accord, and then the arrests begin to riddle the Capital with holes where men once stood-you’re only one of many. The empty prisons swell as they did a decade before, after the war, and the trains lumber under the weight of the dispossessed on their way to the provinces and the camps. This is what you learn much later.

You learn that once the Capital is cleansed it is time to fumigate the Central Committee. Chairs in the great hall go empty, two, three at a time. Emergency elections bring in new, quieter men, younger men with a lifetime of service before them. Then, in February, Kozak delivers a speech to these new young men, says that he will resign his position for a quiet life in the provinces. He holds his hand up and tells them, tears in his eye, that it is the hardest decision of his career, as well as the wisest. Tomiak Pankov shakes his hand and smiles, then opens his arm to the Committee members. This movement lets them know what to do next: to give the poor old engineer a rousing farewell. Which they do, all standing and hollering. You never see the newsreels of this meeting-no one sees them. But you can imagine the fear in Kozak’s eyes and the desperate sound of all those shouting voices, wanting nothing but to live and to go on.

I look back over weeks and months in an attempt to give them order, but time can only be given shape by time. Fall had been my season of irresponsibility, and I had moved steadily through it, accumulating mistakes and fears and tragedies, and in the winter I was paid back for it.

The beginning was a white, four-door Mercedes. Brano Sev sat in front with the driver, and the second man remained in the back with me. Brano had not talked in the stairwell and maintained his silence all the way to Yalta Boulevard, where the shops were closed, their metal blinds like mouth braces holding the buildings straight.

Sev walked ahead of us as the guard opened the heavy door of Number 36 without a word. I couldn’t remember if he was the guard from Georgi’s visit. The inner doors parted, and we were in a cavernous, institutional green room, where two uniformed women sat behind a wide desk. Sev talked to the heavier one, and the other, her thin face revealing the shape of her narrow jawbone, watched me. The hawk on her shoulder patch matched the one on the wall above them: a copper sculpture five feet tall, the hawk at rest.

Two doors on either side of the desk led from this room. We took the left one through a low corridor, not unlike the Militia station’s corridors, but what I noticed was this: There were no names on the doors’ translucent windows, and no numbers. And that is when I became afraid. The unmarked doors of Yalta 36 were part of a world that was beyond my understanding.

We descended a concrete stairwell at the end of the corridor, and I wondered if Georgi had followed this same path. I tried to remember the details of what he’d recounted; but the growing panic was making me forgetful. Three levels down, Sev knocked on a steel door and waited for the tiny barred window to open and close. A series of locks were worked on from the other side, and then the door opened.