The Confession Read Online Free PDF Page B

made them perform for him, and sometimes from these evenings self-published manuscripts emerged that bore his name on the front page. After my own little book came out, he showed up at the Militia station and introduced himself. I couldn’t help but admire that. He had a card with the profession poet inscribed in cursive beneath his name. He invited me to his evenings, and over the last four years I had met almost everyone who did any worthwhile writing in the Capital, before forgetting their names. They came through his apartment, drank his wine, and performed impromptu readings under the gaze of his bearded Stalin. Even I got into the mood now and then and said some spontaneous lines, but those were rare intoxicated moments, and seldom worth a listen.
    Georgi flopped into a chair and asked how the criminal classes were coming along. I told him about the dead man in the kitchen. He waved his red hands. “This is what passes for criminality these days?”
    “Suicide’s illegal.”
    “A sin, you mean. Just a sin. And a coward’s way of breaking the law. You’ve got to stay alive in order to face the punishment. Tell me, Ferenc,” he said, dropping to almost a whisper, “what have you got for my new collection?”
    He had been asking for months. They were going to put out another volume of writings, dissident writings perhaps, on the theme of responsibility. He wanted a piece from everyone. Another basement-printed book—maybe just some stapled pages to pass around to friends and talk over in smoky living rooms like this one. “I don’t have anything.”
    “Weren’t you writing in the provinces?”
    “I was trying to restart my marriage.”
    “And?”
    I drank the wine, but it had a spoiled edge. I set it on an end table. Somebody in the kitchen turned on the radio, and we heard static until voices rose through it. It was the American station that you could sometimes hear from Germany, broadcasting eastward. In certain weather it drifted through. News and music and more news. Georgi’s eyes closed as he meditated on the commentary on developments in Poland: negotiations between Moscow and Warsaw to end the unrest. “The Frenchman, he’s staying here?”
    He nodded, eyes still shut. “Been here two weeks. But tomorrow it’s off to Prague, and then back home to Paris. A glorious tour of the People’s Republics.”
    “There was no trouble, then? Him staying here? No knocks on the door?”
    Georgi opened his eyes, then his hands, and spoke with the simplicity of spirit that reminded me that I actually liked him. “We’re living in the most wonderful of times, my friend. And if we’re not, then please, don’t let me know.”

12
     

     
    “I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do,” said the Frenchman. He had come in after Georgi left and leaned forward on the edge of the chair. “I’m trying to grasp this situation we’re in right now. It’s unprecedented, you know, in human history. The entire planet is split between two camps, and the rest of us are intermediaries. We’re the ones fighting it out. I want to find a way to express this puppetry. Because that’s what we are. We’re puppets of history, and we’re playing out a tragedy. Those hydrogen bombs are ready to be dropped. There are enough idiots in the White House and the Central Committee to ensure one of those buttons is going to be pressed. And the longer the wait, the bigger the explosions—they’ll put bombs into space before long. I’m not kidding, all our leaders are mad. In the West we vote them in, but the vanity only makes them more crazy. Don’t you see? All our efforts are toward our own annihilation.”
    He was drunk, but this was something he’d thought about for a long time and needed no sobriety to express—just a listener.
    “Now, I’m not trying to deride this situation. I’ll leave that to the pacifists. It simply is, and I want to see it as clearly as I can. Without prejudice.”
    “So what’s this?” I