‘Pat would never lie to me,’ Mrs Pápai quickly replied as her stomach knotted up. She would have preferred to talk about something else, but she could not, for that was the lieutenant’s prerogative. Though they never broached the subject, Comrade Dóra was Mrs Pápai’s boss – the decisions were his to make. They had to tread carefully – this was, after all, a game in which they were supposed to be two equals brought together by mutual conviction.
Pápai had been hospitalized again, which is why Mrs Pápai and Comrade Dóra were able to meet at the flat in the veterans’ home. Mrs Pápai made a daily pilgrimage to visit Pápai at Lipótmező, the huge psychiatric facility in Buda, to make sure he did his exercises. She laid the whining Pápai on his back and got him to stretch, because the anti-depressants exacerbated the intestinal blockage that caused him to suffer from constant constipation. The medication he took for his eyes had negative side-effects for his heart, and the Parkinson’s and the mental illness were hardly a happy combination. Comrade Dóra couldn’t begin to imagine the work that went into keeping Pápai alive. Or what it was like to live with a madman. In the tiny second-floor flat the sick Pápai shared with his wife, the lights had to be kept on even in the morning, what with these dull December days. One of the walls was lined with the hideous, mass-produced furniture that had come with the flat.
‘Okay. But that Truday will marry her?’
‘Trudeau. Pierre Trudeau. Pat would not lie to me, no, she’s not capable of it. Her family is very well connected.’
‘This whole story seems a bit muddled to me,’ Comrade Dóra said, taking a big breath. But this wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. He and two colleagues at the office had racked their brains over the Canadian girl’s letters, passing them around, telling each other that this tip-off individual would be a big catch if it were true. They could send Mrs Pápai out to visit her, and then they’d see.
But this was the crux of the problem. And it wasn’t even because of this that he’d dropped by. Rather, he’d become ever more convinced that Mrs Pápai, in her utter despair, had produced the Canadian girl’s letters only to cook up an excuse to visit her daughter in New York. Not that that would have been such a big deal. Even back in Budapest the daughter had been under constant surveillance, in the agency’s crosshairs, and, now abroad, she was clearly capitalizing on her opposition contacts back home. Mrs Pápai could no doubt have provided useful information about all this, and yet this Pat Game . . . whom the Canadian prime minister supposedly wanted to marry . . . who went in and out of hospitals, living on sleeping pills and sobbing all day long about her lost love, Mrs Pápai’s brother . . . Comrade Dóra was all but certain that this was a dead-end. But he couldn’t say it.
He’d looked through the dossiers of the tip-off individuals Mrs Pápai had previously named. Nothing had come of any of them. And yet Mrs Pápai was not picky. She’d even offered up her niece in Milan. She invited her to Budapest along with her Persian husband. They’d come to the capital, they’d left. Nothing. She had named a cousin’s husband, an architect who seemed quite promising, for he had a murky past, he lied left and right, had money troubles, and no doubt conducted secret affairs with women. An ideal prospect for an intelligence agency worth its salt. But no amount of persuasion could convince him to come to Hungary, though Mrs Pápai had tried everything. Having served in the Interior Ministry at the time of his defection in 1956, he dreaded having to set foot again in Hungary, and no amount of reasoning proved enough to persuade him otherwise – no, he kept veering off topic, leading Mrs Pápai off course, and for her part, well, she naively took the bait. It was icing on the cake to discover that he didn’t even have a university degree, though in Budapest Mrs Pápai spared no effort to find it. Counter-intelligence would have produced a fake one, had the fellow been happy to accept it in person. But of course he wasn’t willing to do even that much. Of course he hoped that by some miracle a diploma would materialize out of thin air, whereupon he could legally go about designing bunker-style flats for the Israeli lower middle class in up-and-coming neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv. And what a splendid catch she too would have been, that Israeli border guard at the airport in Tel Aviv who, violating regulations, had fallen into conversation with the jabbering Mrs Pápai, whom everyone trusted, even if they were inspecting her luggage! An elderly relative of that border guard had survived Auschwitz and lived in Miskolc, and the border guard supposedly wanted to make contact with her secretly through Mrs Pápai. She even gave Mrs Pápai the address. By the time they found this relative in Miskolc, she had died. And then there was Mrs Pápai’s son, whom Mrs Pápai herself had recommended for the work – at least she didn’t seem to be against the idea – but they had never seen him again. They should have gone after him, but Comrade Beider had ruled it out. And there was that hapless peacenik who loathed his chosen homeland, where he’d been humiliated again and again for refusing military service and who’d forbidden even his daughters from joining the army, but not even in Hungary would they have known what to do with a diehard pacifist. He would only have spelled trouble. With his rigid worldview he was a pariah the whole world over, and yet he was incorruptible and mistrustful. And, yes, there was the catch that seemed the most promising, the Israeli army colonel, Mrs Pápai’s former suitor. The ever-exhausted Mrs Pápai had prepared herself carefully, putting on makeup, which she almost never did, and her sister, who accompanied her to the colonel’s villa, was pleased but at the same time wondered what was going on, for she remembered the days when the colonel, as a young man – now he was an important and rich man – had run after her sister. Besides, when visiting Israel Mrs Pápai usually only met her comrades. In any event, the colonel had warmly received these two beauties of a bygone world. While watching TV after a dinner of many courses he’d even expressed critical opinions of Israeli politicians, but when the sharp-nosed colonel began grilling Mrs Pápai about 1956 and Solzhenitsyn, their conversation faltered and finally ran aground. Mrs Pápai just couldn’t lie. In other circumstances this would have been rewarded, but in this case it had been worse than a sin – it had been a mistake.
In fact, Mrs Pápai’s sole significant catch had arguably been that notoriously anti-Soviet Russian employee at the Weizmann Institute, Zaretsky, who helped Jews emigrate to Israel. It was a wonder he’d even given Mrs Pápai the time of day. And yet the Russians took over his case. Yes, this was a gold star for Mrs Pápai.
As for the Canadian girl, she was well on her way to going mad. Yes, her interminably long letters were made up of succinct sentences, as far as Lieutenant Dóra could gather from the rough translations, and yet they focused obsessively on only a few themes: the girl with the scintillating intellect had been reduced to a wailing, whining madwoman huddled at the edge of her bed and living on painkillers. Every one of her grand plans – writing a novel, writing a play, writing a dissertation – had gone up in smoke one after the other. And now she wanted to be the wife of the Canadian prime minister?
Does everyone around Mrs Pápai go mad? Lieutenant Dóra asked himself. He cleared his throat.
‘Thank you for the delicious tea,’ he said softly as if preparing to leave. He stood, ceremoniously shook hands with Mrs Pápai, buttoned up his winter coat, and was just about to step out into the hallway. Standing there was an old man with a walking frame, budging neither forward nor backward, but looking as if someone had forgotten him there. Comrade Dóra turned back from the door as if something had just come to mind. He was quite pleased with himself for this gambit.
‘Where was it again that you and your husband lived before moving here?’ he asked Mrs Pápai, as if he didn’t know the answer.
‘On Kerék Street,’ she replied carefully, ready for the next move in their chess match. Her nerves were on edge. No matter how innocently Comrade Dóra had phrased his question, Mrs Pápai was certain that it was connected to some matter she was unaware of, but she had learned to maintain an unflinching expression. ‘Next to the school.’
‘What number?’
‘Twenty-two.’
The lieutenant rose on his tiptoes. He took a step back into the flat and closed the door behind him.
‘May I sit down?’
‘I’ll make another tea.’
‘No, no, I’m in a hurry.’
They looked at each other.
‘I’m embarrassed,’ said Comrade Dóra.
‘You have no reason to be,’ replied Mrs Pápai reassuringly.
‘This concerns a dilemma of a friend of mine. More precisely, a technical problem of ours. Can the grocery store on Szentendrei Street be seen from the flat’s windows?’
‘It can.’
‘Well, that’s wonderful. You see, our friend, of whom it can’t be known exactly which side he is on, happens to live in the building opposite. To get to know him a bit better, we’d like to spend a bit of time observing him to determine just what he is up to in his flat.’
Mrs Pápai pricked up her ears. She understood precisely what ‘our friend’ meant, or at least she thought she did, and this feeling was enough.
The lieutenant hesitated. What he had to say was, he felt, obvious enough, but with so little time he and his colleagues had not been able to cook up a better cover story, and only an idiot would not have seen through it at once. But because of the individuals concerned, a great deal of caution was advisable. Mrs Pápai pretended she didn’t understand, or perhaps indeed she didn’t understand. The chess games flowed into each other. There were games within games. If she played so well that she seemed not to understand, that would mean that in fact she understood only too well; and if she pretended that she understood, it was by no means certain that she did. The goal was to leave both possibilities open. To help without quite understanding. But it was enough, too, if she pretended she didn’t understand. It would be catastrophic were she to let on.
Comrade Dóra assumed an anxious expression.
‘There is a flat there—’
‘At number twenty-two?’ Mrs Pápai cut in.
‘No, no, not at all. That’s just it. Like I said, exactly opposite, on the other side of the street. A flat in which certain things have been going on for a while now that are a bit of a problem for us, and we want to find out exactly what those things are.’
‘On the third floor?’
Without a second thought, the lieutenant replied:
‘Yes, on the third. Why?’
‘I knew it! My husband was the first to notice, but I didn’t bother with such things, because he has this, how do you say it, obsession, this compulsive fantasy, that he is being watched, and I told him right away that no one is watching him, but he said there’s a camera there, opposite us, and it has been directed right at our windows, and I told him that’s so stupid, why would anyone be watching us, they’d have no reason, and that this was his illness, his persecution complex, and he vowed he’d never say such a thing again, but that very night, when I couldn’t sleep, I took a closer look at that window, which always had its thick curtains drawn, and often the occupants weren’t home, but when they were, well, the lights were on all night long, and who is able to afford that much electricity? But I trashed, I mean I brushed the thought aside. One night, though, at four in the morning, I noticed a car stop in front of the building, and the same thing happened several times, and a man looked out of the window and shouted down in some unknown language.’
The lieutenant was now in a remarkable position. It was like a card game in which the opponent gives away their trumps without knowing. This was what was so strange about Mrs Pápai. One minute she was sitting silently in the throes of depression, her mouth shut tight, and the next, eyes gleaming, voice strident, she came up with one good idea after another, or at least she took the initiative, like a zealous student almost falling off her bench, stretching out her hand to answer the teacher’s question.
‘Exactly that flat.’
‘It’s strange that the curtains are always drawn.’
‘And since we recalled that your younger son lives in the Kerék Street flat. . . Do you still have the key?’
Mrs Pápai froze. This could not be. This was her sole point of vulnerability. She couldn’t just walk into that sanctum. She knit her brows.
Strike while the iron is hot, thought the lieutenant.
‘We are talking about something like twenty minutes.’
The silence was thick enough to cut with a knife.
‘I don’t think my son would be happy about it. But that’s not the main problem: he sits around at home a lot. He comes and goes in the most unexpected fashion, he doesn’t work like other people do. He sleeps late, and in the evening when he is on duty at the theatre, he sticks around only for the start of the performance before hurrying home.’
‘Indeed,’ said Comrade Dóra softly, ‘your son mustn’t know about this. The matter is sensitive. But this would allow us to solve our little technical matter in one fell swoop. It would be a really big help. I don’t even know why this didn’t occur to us before.10 But if it’s not practical, then we’ll figure something else out. Could you draw a plan of the flat?’
Mrs Pápai might even have heard this as a command. For his part, Lieutenant Dóra pretended not to notice her increasing unease. He unbuttoned his coat, removed it, and flung it brazenly on one of the beds. Mrs Pápai needed to feel that the matter was serious, that there was no turning back.
‘I think I’ll ask for a little tea, after all,’ he said. ‘It really is cold out there.’
‘Three rooms, one beside the other. Very simple, nothing fancy: the bathroom, toilet and kitchen opposite the rooms. The first room is bigger; the middle one, the living room, is smaller; and the third room is bigger again. My son sleeps in the first room. From the kitchen window you can see the school.’
Mrs Pápai had become laconic and withdrawn. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry to make tea, which didn’t bother the lieutenant too much.
‘And when can you let us in there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We need to figure something out, anything.’
The lieutenant cast Mrs Pápai a somewhat ill-tempered stare. Doesn’t she get it? Doesn’t she understand that there is no time for fudging? Doesn’t she understand her duty?
‘The other thing is, sometimes friends stay in the flat. My son is very generous when friends of his don’t have a place to stay. He doesn’t tell me and doesn’t need to tell me.’
‘Is anyone else living there now?’
‘I have no idea, but it can’t be ruled out.’
She either knows or she doesn’t, thought the lieutenant, fixing his jaundiced eyes on Mrs Pápai. And as she looked back at him, she suddenly noticed something she couldn’t give a name to. She was gripped by terror. What did Comrade Dóra know about her son? She had no idea. At their last meeting she’d opened up too much. About how happy she’d be if her son had a significant other. About how much she yearned for a grandchild. She already had two grandchildren, true, but how happy she’d be if this son were to bless her with one! She shouldn’t have said even that much. She sensed that the lieutenant could hear the bottomless woe pervading her words. She couldn’t expose her utter shame. These people would tear her son to shreds, walk all over him, wring him out like a wet rag, make his life impossible. Mrs Pápai could feel the oxygen being sucked out of the room, her asthma starting up as her breathing became laboured. Her large chest rose and fell. In her hands she held her little boy, who’d seemed bent on dying the moment he was born, and pressed her cheek to his tender face. She looked into Pápai’s camera on a sunny spring day under the Buda Castle and smiled. And then, her head tilted just so, she looked at the lieutenant. After a short pause she began talking in a thin, little-girl voice – a voice the lieutenant had never heard before.
‘I might be able to come up with an excuse to get my son to leave the flat for a bit.’
‘Let’s have it,’ said the lieutenant somewhat glumly and curtly, while a
lso sneaking a note of commiseration into his voice.
‘My daughter is coming home from Moscow for Christmas.’
The notorious New York–Moscow axis, thought Lieutenant Dóra with some bitterness. Yes, the notorious Tel Aviv–New York–Moscow axis. These Jews always find the sunnier side of things. Wherever they land, it’s always on their feet. He would gladly have travelled to New York. He did at least manage to prevent a malicious smirk coming over his face, though when he was tipsy it would sometimes happen, for when it came down to it he was a rather envious sort, and though he liked the adventurous, secretive, conspiratorial aspects of the work, which allowed him to feel almost like a god when looking at the pedestrians he passed on the street, in fact he sometimes hated himself for this soul-wrenching profession of his, although he wasn’t conscious of it. Only the ennui that increasingly bore down on him reminded him that something was amiss with his life.
‘Which means I’ll have to clean the flat. When I do that my son makes a run for it.’
‘Splendid!’ said Lieutenant Dóra. ‘Congratulations – it’s a wonderful plan. And then you’ll let our men into the flat for a couple of minutes.’
‘But they must be there right on time.’
‘They’ll be as punctual as death, comrade.’
He rose from his seat.
‘You don’t want tea, then, after all?’ Mrs Pápai asked timidly.
‘But before we carry out the mission, we will go over everything thoroughly one more time,’ replied Lieutenant Dóra. ‘In three days, right here.’ He didn’t even bother to acknowledge Mrs Pápai’s question. ‘They’re waiting for me. This conversation has gone on a bit too long.’
It was impossible not to sense the reproach in his voice.
2
The heartbeat.
She didn’t know whether to keep pressing the buzzer or open the door with her own key.
She’d arrived without notice, since her son had not picked up the phone. But maybe it was better this way.
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