The Confession Read Online Free PDF Page A

over to Leonek and told him I was sorry about his mother.
    He looked surprised. “Thanks, Ferenc.”
    “Come over for dinner. Okay? Tomorrow night.”
    “Thanks, but no.”
    “Really.” I put a hand on his arm to make my sincerity clear. “Magda’s a good cook, you’ll thank yourself for it.”
    He shook his head again, his leathery Armenian face looser and more lost than I’d seen it before, his dark eyes drifting. But he was considering it, I could tell.
    “Six o’clock, okay? We’ll leave from here, go get a drink, and be there in time to eat. It’s settled.”
    “Why’d you do that?” Stefan asked when I returned.
    “He just looks terrible.”
    “He’ll work through it.” Stefan spoke with that same cold edge I’d heard earlier. Then he went back into the details of Josef Maneck’s miserable life, but by then I wasn’t listening to a word.
    Mikhail Kaminski left with Brano, loudly describing the glories of Moscow nightlife, and Emil and Moska left together. Stefan asked if I wanted a drink. I said no. “You want to get right back to her, do you?” He smiled. “Come on, spend some time with your oldest friend for once.” But it wasn’t going to work. I was stuck in thoughts of Leonek’s dead mother, and of those days, long ago, in dark bars like the one we’d visited. After Stefan sighed and left, I called home.
    “Hello, Daddy.”
    “How was your day?”
    “What day?”
    “Don’t give me that.”
    Ágnes sighed. “It was satisfactory, Daddy. Very satisfactory.”
    “Your teachers? How are they?”
    “Too soon to tell.”
    “And your friends? Are all of them still around?”
    “You don’t even know my friends.”
    I knew a few, but it didn’t matter. “Your mother there?”
    “She’s downstairs, talking to that old woman again. Claudia. Want me to get her?”
    “Just give her a message, okay?”
    “I suppose.”
    “Tell her we’re having a guest for dinner tomorrow. Can you do that?”
    “When should I tell her you’re coming home? She always asks.”
    “I’ll be,” I began, then realized I didn’t know. “Tell her I’ll probably be late. There’s a lot of work backed up here.”
    “I’ll tell her.”
    From her tone it was clear that Ágnes saw right through me.
    I sat straight in front of the typewriter. I’d rolled in a white sheet, twisted my ring, and now I waited for something to come. After a while, though, it was too dark to see.

10
     

     
    I knocked on Georgi’s door after having walked down to the Tisa, trying to summon inspiration from the black water. The summer heat had brought out the smell of decay, and when the clamoring noise of a dogcatcher’s van filled with its barking victims flew by, the stink became too much.
    Georgi let out a rude exclamation, kissed my cheeks with his wine-stained lips, and pulled me inside. His face was red, and the smile lines that sprouted from his eyes were white. “Have you met Louis? He’s leaving tomorrow! Come on, come on.” There were a lot of voices coming from the kitchen.
    “Louis?”
    “The Frenchman .” He reached up to my shoulder and urged me along.
    They were up at this hour because they were always up—this is something they prided themselves on—ten or twelve men and women squeezed around a tiny kitchen table, drinking. Louis, the Frenchman, was in town, and everyone had made the pilgrimage to Georgi’s to see this emissary from the West. I’d forgotten.
    “Louis!” Georgi called, and a fat man with oily, tasseled hair rolled his head back.
    “Oui?”
    “Mon ami” said Georgi. “Meet another of our writers!”
    “This is a nation of writers!” Louis shouted, then rose wearily to his feet and stuck out a hand. “ You’re a big writer.”
    He gave the kind of firm, rough shake men give when they consider my size, then turned my hand so he could see my rings, my sentimental reminders of the war.
    “Each finger, huh?” Louis grinned as he settled back down. “I bet those rings have