No Live Files Remain

by Andras Forgach

  But it was all in vain. Everything seemed to crumble again, exactly at the moment when he’d started to understand the tricks of the trade, his mission; when he’d made the necessary connections, built up his network, and was ready to apply the ‘dark art’ of information-gathering, getting closer to people who trusted him sufficiently and had valuable information to unwittingly share. The dream job he’d begun two years ago was a kind of reward for his exemplary behaviour after ’56. He was a communist. He had known right away whose side he was on in those heated, happy, exasperated, dangerous, treacherous, murderous days of October six years earlier, and he was proud of it. Indeed, he boasted of it right to the face of a society that learned – after a few days of exuberant freedom – fear and silence again. And now the grand prize: four years in London. Why, he’d even bowed before the Queen! The envy and disbelief in all those eyes he met on the street gave him a sort of bitter satisfaction amid the whispering behind his back at work, where, when his colleagues did talk to him directly, they did so as if he were a piece of shit. Yes, once again he felt that he could turn his life around, revive all his hopes, and at long last take up his true vocation; he could correct his mistakes, eradicate the failures of his past, which had happened only because he was an alien, blown to Budapest by the wind, someone not born there, not born anywhere. He had never again set foot in his birthplace, never crossed the border to see what had become of the world of his youth, where everyone he’d loved had been murdered.

  He had never been an insider – no, he’d only impersonated one with his mellifluous words, the raw logic of the new ideology he’d made his own, Bolshevism. He’d jumped blindly into the unknown, having no intimate knowledge of the finely woven web of friendships built up over generations. He had no family in the true sense of the word – it had vanished in the Nazi extermination camps – and he had no human network to sustain him. All he had was his unshakeable faith in an ideology, a religion in the true sense of the word, that could explain the world in a second. And those diligently scribbled notes he’d addressed to Party comrades certainly hadn’t helped – sometimes he’d bombarded them with endlessly complaining letters begging their attention, letters filled with malicious remarks about his colleagues, letters that had given him the unenviable reputation of a denouncer even before he’d become one. A denouncer. The worst thing that could be said of anyone. Even those who helped him were mistrustful and cautious around him. A living Jew who hated Zionism. What an oxymoron. He was the perfect stranger.

  But in the face of these vicissitudes he constructed his life from nothing with a rigorous rationality. After the war, in which he lost everything, he was given a second chance, the greatest gift life would offer him: the most beautiful woman on earth, who, moreover, had faith in the same things as him; who believed, as he did, in the bright future of mankind. Before the eyes of his incredulous rivals, he had won her as a wife and companion. ‘You are a second Ingrid Bergman,’ he used to say in his arduous, rational way, as if wooing her with convincing arguments. Yes, he’d hunted her down, he’d clutched her to him, knowing that his incurable love was not reciprocated, and she kept her feelings for someone else. It was a price he was ready to pay. His marriage was built on the same beliefs as his life. He was a twenty-six-year-old who’d survived the darkest night to roar at the world, his passionate words all the more convincing and disciplined because they came from a dithering and disorderly young man. They were almost hypnotic, his faith in them absolute despite their own absurdity.

  This is how the letter read, exactly, word for word, in English, because the girl of his dreams – born of Hungarian parents but already in the promised land, her mother tongue the ever-changing new Hebrew – did not yet speak Hungarian:

  12th of February, Jerusalem, 1946

  My dear Bruria!

  Your letter, dated the 24/10, is still my latest source of information about you. I could not guess what are (or I hope were) the reasons of your silence. I don’t want to make any precipitated conclusions, I am only stressing the necessity of a more frequent exchange of views, considering my very complicated position.

  You know, Bruria, I have decided in a certain way. This was the easiest part of the job, you will agree with me I am sure. What comes now is to rid myself of all the unnecessary burdens barring the road leading towards the realization. It is difficult like hell to drop the great majority of my tasks in the movement, when I don’t see who will do the job, at least as well as I was trying to do. But I must drop them or otherwise my plans with chemistry will remain empty promises.

  I have seen Helmut to-day. He told me that you received my letters and that you have been glad about the news. On my questions why Bruria is so silent lately, meaning the letters, he told me that you are too busy for that. I have swallowed this quietly since there is nothing Helmut can do about it. However I must confess that this can be only a secondary reason.

  Is it too much to ask somebody, who is as close to me as I believe it to be, to tell me frankly if anything has changed?

  ‘Bruria will not change her heart’ – you wrote to me – ‘I shall not give a spark of hope if I would not be sure’ – you wrote. Still, it can happen, what then? Will you keep quiet for a while and ponder about the smoothest way of conveying me the news?

  You did not write to me and you must have had a reason. Suppose I would have chosen the way I proposed in my previous letters: Humanities and all that. What was to be your attitude towards our relation in a case like that? Can it be true that you would have dropped the whole affair, including writing?

  I wish this would not be true. I am asking myself and that’s why I am asking you about it. The weeks have passed ‘somewhat nervously’, to quote you again. I have been Friday evening in Tel Aviv and slept at your home. I met your brother but until now we could not find a way for a closer understanding, although I was trying hard. He was somewhat reserved. His wife is a wonderful person, I started to like her from the first moment and she was very communicative. I had a chat with your father, he could not attend the celebration of ‘7 November’ because of a cold. He is getting nearer to me every time I meet him. I must make a headway towards his personality – to grasp more of him. It is quite difficult because our conversation is limited to questions from his side and answers from my side, and all this concerning me alone.

  I must stop now it is very late in the night and I am so tired that my eyes are aching. So good night to you Bruria and don’t forget to write to me whatever you may deem necessary. I am taking my chances.

  Your Marcell, who is incurably in love with you and only you.

  * * *

  Some dozen years later he had to sign a little sheet of paper in a windowless room before taking up the most lucrative of missions. No, lucrative not in material terms – he had four children, and so his salary was just enough to make ends meet – but in a spiritual sense. In the Sixties, in the middle of the Cold War, his was a job in which people like him, with a rigid ideological creed and a supple mind, could thrive. Signing that sheet of paper and learning some essentials about secret codes and espionage – the tricks of a spy at the lowest grade of the hierarchy – seemed to be a small price to pay to be transported to the dream city called London, the centre of the world. He signed it without blinking – all journalists who worked abroad had to do the same – out of ‘patriotic conviction’, which they ascribed to those collaborators who weren’t blackmailed or badly beaten or otherwise physically coerced into signing, because in those days being a Party member was identical to being patriotic – yes, it was a synonym for patriotism. At a stroke he became not only MTI’s first post-war correspondent in London but also a secret agent with the code name Pápai at the II/3 Intelligence Bureau of the Political Investigation Department at the Interior Ministry.

  Why did he choose the name Pápai? Meaning ‘from Pápa’, it was the sort of name one might expect of someone whose ancestry reached back to the sleepy baroque town of Pápa (i.e. Pope) in the
Bakony Hills some way west of Budapest. But Pápai had never been to Pápa or had any connection with the head of the Catholic Church. There was nothing ‘papal’ about him; he was simply a faithless Jew. It was a strange decision, but he seemed to be ready for such whimsical changes of identity. Nomen est omen? Was this name an omen, as the Latin proverb had it? The thought did not cross his mind. The willingness with which he, only a few years before, had thrown away the name he’d grown up with, Friedmann (‘man of peace’), and put on a grey and characterless costume, keeping only the initial ‘F’ for Forgács (which meant ‘woodchip’, but which no few blue-blooded families had been proud to bear), testified to this. At the request of his boss in 1948, Marcell Friedmann had gone out into the corridor at the press department of the prime minister’s office, where he had a prestigious job, and come back a minute later, introducing himself as ‘Comrade Forgács’. Comrade Woodchip: the name was an invitation to become fragmentary, to a forlorn existence, as a piece torn off from a living thing.

  Sir Woodchip. A character from a Shakespeare play? That’s what it sounded like. He couldn’t have cared less. The point was not to sound Jewish when the Party was so full of Jews that even the bureaucrats in Moscow shook their heads in disbelief and wagged their fingers menacingly. One had to be cautious. One had to hide one’s true identity. An old identity. Someone more or less already left behind, anyway, in the chaos of the Second World War – at least this is what he must have said to himself. And what’s more: a Jewish name didn’t have such a good ring to it at a time when a group of doctors, mostly Jews, were accused of conspiring to poison the Big Brother himself in the Kremlin.

  It was an officer of the Interior Ministry who had helped him out.

  Pen in hand, Lieutenant Takács looked bemusedly at Not-Yet-Pápai’s childishly round face, at the almost comical, thick black horn-rimmed spectacles Not-Yet-Pápai had bought for himself through the SZTK, the Social Security Centre of the Trade Unions – at those unutterably cheap, clumsy, rigid black rectangles which, apart from his very bald head and double chin, defined his face as they sat ponderously on his nose. At first the lieutenant wanted to call him Pápaszem (‘Pope-eye’, meaning ‘spectacles’, a word of a bygone age, harking back to when the gold-rimmed spectacles of Pope Leo X, who had lousy eyesight, had amazed the Hungarian delegates to the Vatican – and Raphael, too, who painstakingly painted him). But Takács found Pápaszem too funny – it sounded like Hawkeye, the name of an Indian – so he cut it in half. Let it be Pápai. Papal.

  Another method of hiding a Jew: paint him in Catholic colours! A masterstroke! The officer was extremely pleased with himself. Pápai nodded. Yes, Pápai he would be, and he signed his new name in his usual, energetic hand on the document put before him.

  Shedding one’s identity step by step.

  Even Friedmann was not his original name, thanks to the otherwise liberal Kaiser Joseph’s strict decree of 1787, when all Jews had had to change their names to the German equivalent. But that original name was lost. Almost two hundred years later Comrade Woodchip stepped onto the stage briskly, with a firm handshake, leaving Comrade Friedmann behind, and now here was Pápai, the secret collaborator, scribbled furtively on a piece of paper.

  In the Sixties, still in search of an identity, one that was to be found nowhere, he invented an alter ego, a grotesque figure he called Ugo Kac (pronounced Katz). Someone with whom he could, at long last, identify. Ugo hated music. That was his peculiarity. His trademark. Music made him nervous. Music. Just a silly noise. Music. The only thing that made his wife, the mother of his four children, happy. Schubert, Mozart, Bach. It was all crap.

  This was the last dark hole into which – before everything got darker – Ugo Kac crawled. His last stand.

  But back to the courtship, to their love affair. After a period during which Pápai suppressed his instinct to sleep with any other girl, and on realizing that even this would not help, and still having had no response from the beautiful would-be bride, the young and desperate lover returned to the fray with another long letter.

  This letter concerns those existential decisions that are the preconditions of a good marriage. After proving that he has become a serious man – one who has begun his studies at the prestigious Hebrew University of Jerusalem – he confesses that his little knowledge is not nearly enough for the demands of his chosen profession (he never did finish his studies), and has also got a decent – well, half-decent – job. True, his job description hardly inspires confidence, but to take on such a menial job could itself appear to be a courageous step. Like a hunter, he is getting closer and closer to his prey. He promises – and it is hard for him to resist the temptation to be a glorious revolutionary – to withdraw from all Party activities, where he is a leading light, a future star, someone absolutely indispensable and so very important. He is ready to delay such a career for her sake. And, yes, he has found a place where they can stay together as a young married couple, a students’ home. In the same breath, however, he admits that there will be no real privacy there, so it is in fact inadequate and inconvenient for a honeymoon. Every plan that seems at first sight to be built on solid ground is undermined the next moment by harsh reality. But such is Youth. Run into the wind. Follow your dreams. Such is Fate. The idea itself is important. The ideal. Does it have to be realistic? Not at all. The less realistic it is, in fact, the more it deserves to become reality. And already he has another brilliant idea. A rabbit pulled from a hat. A race against time. How to make the unreal real: let’s marry during Hanukkah! Hanukkah exists, Hanukkah is important, Hanukkah is the thing! Hanukkah and marriage fit together like two halves of a riddle. An irresistible offer, because he ‘can’t see when next there will be such an occasion’. Isn’t this in itself an irrefutable argument? All built on drifting sand. But, a miracle!

  Yes, she would be his partner, jumping with him blindly into the abyss.

  21st of February, Jerusalem, 1946

  Bruria my Darling.

  So I have started both things: the laboratory and the job in the morning. I can’t tell which of them is the worst. In the lab I am sometimes wondering how can somebody with so little knowledge, as I have got, start chemistry. It is like an adventure. Still I will have to complete all my deficiencies, if you will be here, the study will go easier. I am taking off the rust from my brains, so my heart can send some fresh blood into it.

  The job is not so bad only I have to sleep somewhere in town otherwise I won’t be able to be there in time. There are about 14–16 machines to be washed. When the night is dry the job is easy, but when wetness covers the machines, I am having a hell of a time. Not only it takes double time, but it is never nice enough for the customers who don’t spare their voices and vocabulary to tell me what they think.

  The party takes the heaviest toll. There is no excuse for me. We are approaching the X Congress. I shall try NOT to be a delegate so I can quietly study at least during those three days without being chased from one ‘extraordinarily important session’ to some other action where I am ‘indispensable’. Slowly I am convincing the Secretary about me being a student also for studies and not only for political activities in the University.

  I was looking for a room in the neighbourhood of my working place but I couldn’t find anything good for us. Still I hope that in the worst case we can stay in the students home. I demanded permission for this from the Students organization and in principle there is no opposition. The trouble is that there is not much privacy in such students homes and I don’t see why should I share those very few moments I can have with you with two dozen strangers.

  Say Bruri, what’s your opinion about getting married in the course of Hanuka! There is a whole week, when the University is closed and outside study I can have a spell of time to be with you more than five minutes a day. We can have a couple of days in Tel Aviv or Haifa too. If not in Hanuka I can’t see when next there will be such an occasion.

  Don’t forget to convey my greetings to
Naama, and don’t forget that I love you more than ever. If your eyes are getting tired, go to an eye specialist at once, the glasses won’t spoil your beauty. I shall be in Tel Aviv on the 6th in the afternoon.

  Marcell

  How flattering to read these words, like red-hot embers that scorched the paper they were written on; to feel the torrent of unconditional love, the exaggerations of one who loved blindly. But, alas, for him, in the end this was too easy a victory. Only three months into their marriage he observes, ‘It is overwhelming and therefore confusing.’ The young husband, the poetic yet at first sight so rational thinker, was compelled to note – arming himself with the arguments at he had learned from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, those thinker-giants who wielded the sword of an irrefutable logic and conquered the world – that facts are sometimes stronger than words. He is not afraid of bitter truths. ‘Because there is no solid ground under our feet and I already lost the touch with my previous life.’ Not giving up in his case meant that he had to run headfirst into a thick wall of silence. ‘It is true I loved you even in my being isolated from all hope of meeting you.’ And as he himself so perfectly put it at the end of his letter, he wanted to reach ‘the tenderness of your feelings locked somewhere in the depth of your shell’.