The Confession Read Free Page B

showed up and walked me through the case, so I rolled a fresh sheet into my typewriter, gave the ring on my left pinkie a half turn, and stared at the page. I’d written the book on this, adapting my touch to the stiff T , the rusting carriage return, and its fragile, gray body.
    A half hour later, the paper was still blank. I scratched a mosquito bite on my ankle, then typed a few words to get it going. But it went nowhere. I tapped my fingers on the edge of my desk and gazed at the ubiquitous portrait of Prime Minister Mihai—young, a wave of healthy hair, a smile that begged to be trusted.
    Finally, Stefan stormed into the room, his satchel banging against the doors and clattering to the floor as he arrived at his desk. He was looking fatter than usual, and his shrapnel limp was stronger today, but he had a pink, lively glow above his sparse beard. “There you are,” he said, out of breath.
    We shook hands, a little formally.
    “You get my message?”
    “Magda wrote it down.”
    “Good, good.” He rubbed a hand through his whiskers. He seemed to be deciding something. “What are we waiting for?” He got his satchel again, and I followed him out of the office.

7
     

     
    I’d known Stefan since childhood. When you know someone that long, the actual circumstances of your introduction disappears. We went to school together, got into trouble together, and lusted after the same girls together. It was a joke, around the time of my marriage, that he’d never forgiven me for seducing Magda, because we’d both stared at her from across the schoolhouse, gauging our prospects. But by the wedding we weren’t boys anymore. It was 1939 and we were preparing to meet the Germans, who had crossed over from Czechoslovakia and were ready to make quick work of us. Stefan was wounded that first week by a mine and sent back home. I survived the whole month and a half of useless fighting, all the way to the defeat in May. But by the time I returned home to Magda, and to the news that my parents had died when an errant bomb fell on their house, I was sick and mentally worthless. I had to begin anew.
    I wrote about my condition in the novel, a few sentences about how the act of killing Fascists seemed to take away my humanity, and when the war was over I thought it would never return—I was surprised that those lines made it past the Culture Ministry editors. But the humanity did return, months after the war, with Stefan’s help. He had become a police officer in the occupied Capital, and he continually came out to visit us at Teodor’s house, trying to save me from my self-pity with the offer of a job. It took a lot of prodding, but by 1940 I accepted it, and two years later Ágnes was born. Two years after that, I was best man at Stefan’s marriage to Daria Vídra, the first girl who’d ever slept with him. But by the end of the decade they had split up. He’d been alone ever since.
    In the car, he adjusted the mirror and went over the details. On Friday morning, a neighbor had smelled gas around the victim’s apartment door and informed the building supervisor, who, when he unlocked the door, was almost knocked unconscious by the fumes. But he made it inside and turned off the stove by reaching over the body of the deceased. “His name’s Josef Maneck.”
    “So it’s a suicide?”
    Stefan leaned into a sharp swerve around a trio of broom-sellers. “That’s the easy answer, but I’m not sure. He’d been beaten up pretty badly.”
    “Any word on that?”
    He stopped behind a cart overflowing with yellow squash. The farmer tapped his stick on the tired mare’s rump. “The supervisor could only say that the victim was a drunk. I got the name of his bar.”
    “Nothing in the apartment?”
    “I went through it once, but didn’t find anything.”
    “And the neighbors?”
    “Heard nothing, saw nothing. The usual.”
    We were in the last hot days of September, and everyone seemed to know this. Women wore uncovered