No Live Files Remain

by Andras Forgach

  4

  There he was, standing in the bathtub, little more than a skeleton. His movements were the desperate writhings of a spider that has fallen onto its back. They hadn’t had the heating on: it was chilly and damp, and a suffocating odour pervaded the large bathroom. A little light oozed through the high windows but could not dispel the gloom. At the start of the procedure, Pápai sometimes grabbed his son and banged his forehead in a rage against the boy’s. His son would give him a hard stare, and it worked, for his father somehow calmed down. I am like an animal trainer, thought the son. Plastic catheter bags hung on the drying rack beside them, porcelain bedpans were lined up along the wall and there were glass bedpans in the corner, stained with the foam of dried piss, the scent of the lower bodies of diabetics, paralytics and the freshly amputated emanating from them.

  The father stood before his son in the tub like a zombie, wet strands of hair wriggling worm-like all over his belly and back. In a deep wooden crate a heap of dirty bedsheets; beyond the crate, a torn, piss-soaked, bloodstained mattress. Leaning up against the wall was a mass of tangled crutches, their pads covered in filthy gauze, their dirty pink rubber tips worn unevenly away. Beside the tub was a curved steel chair, its white paint flaking away, handles soldered on in case someone wanted a sitz bath. Like some medieval torture device.

  The son diligently soaped the old man’s back, thighs, arms, underarms, fingers and ears – his two little rubbery ears. This whimpering, trembling thing, this man broken in two, this was his father. He’d come from his loins. It was hard to imagine that he was the seed of this something. Hearing a rustling sound, Pápai looked around in alarm while hiding his circumcised willy with trembling hands. It had shrunk to almost nothing in the cold.

  A door opened with a loud creak as someone peered into the passage that led to the bathroom, which had a row of stalls with half-doors that afforded a view of the toilets inside. They could hear the new arrival whistling as he now proceeded to urinate, and then, amid loud burping, slammed the stall doors shut one after another. Cringing in fear as if being beaten, Pápai lost his balance, his son catching him just in time. This skeleton was heavy. Ten minutes earlier, the son had been stuffing slices of cheap, over-salted ham into his father’s mouth straight from the butcher’s paper, as the father jabbed at his son’s shoulders with a weak fist. He seemed to be raving deliriously, and yet he was careful not to go too far, doing just enough to ensure that his son would not leave him.

  There he stood now, in the tub, for once without the glasses that were always set on his nose, gazing blankly around him with a dopey, confused stare, his livid brown eyes speaking of a whimpering dread. There are no words to describe a body whose flesh has been gnawed away by fear. For weeks he’d been dragging about his excrement inside him, and his belly had grown taut, like a drum, and round, like a rubber ball. Below his belly, like a sewn-up pocket of skin, was the scar of an old hernia operation, and then his purple-brown loins with their coating of bluish-grey pubic hair. I might have to administer an enema to him today. These words ran through the head of the son, who shuddered. His father’s delicate, parchment-like skin had all but separated from the flesh below; and his knees were shiny and white, like majolica.

  The nurses had no time to bathe Pápai, who gave off the sickly-sweet scent of decaying flesh. The deep, enamelled steel bathtub stood rather incidentally in the centre of the room, like a bed unmade for days in a cheap motel. As much as he disliked the thought of someone entering unannounced, the boy had been unable to lock the door between the bathroom and the toilets, and when he heard a noise from outside he, too, turned and the water spraying out of the shower head soaked him, making him furious, whereupon he took to rubbing his father’s hunched back with his soapy hands even harder. As if he were punishing him for something his father couldn’t help. Public defecation, like in a concentration camp, the son had thought earlier while shoving Pápai into the bathroom and seeing those stalls with their half-doors. He finally squeezed into his palm a shiny gob of greasy yellow shampoo, the famous WU2, the shampoo of his childhood, and spread it over the top of his father’s dented skull, which had only a few grey strands of sometimes fluttering hair left on it. The boy’s hair was thick and curly; he didn’t want to go bald like his father.

  Now someone else entered the bathroom, tinkering with one of the stall doors before finally plopping down on the toilet seat. His farts and heaving sighs echoed off the tiled walls as the son, now using a bath glove, washed Pápai’s scraggy bottom. His father was ashamed of his disfigured body, but he had to resign himself to his fate. ‘I would prefer not to,’ he’d said with a faint smile just before being stripped of his clothes, quoting from his favourite short story, ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. But what could he do? He’d given in. And, yet, as a last act of resistance, he now refused to straighten his back, and even if he’d wanted to, he would have been unable to stop the ceaseless trembling of his hands. Finally, with a large, hospital-issue towel, the boy dried this giant baby.

  Later they sat on a bench in the garden, bundled up to their necks. The December sun emerged, and they sat there, shivering a little, before returning to the ward.

  5

  The next morning Lieutenant Dóra knocked once more on the door of Mrs Pápai’s flat in the veterans’ home.12 As he entered, after a loud ‘come in!’, he was almost overcome by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, which filled the room. Mrs Pápai was sitting by the record player at the far end of the room, silhouetted in front of the picture window as she moved her head gently in time with the music. She seemed to be sewing something or other: glasses set low on her nose, she kept pricking a dark blue piece of velvet with a needle.

  Comrade Dóra expected that Mrs Pápai would turn off the record player the moment she saw him, but this is not what happened. Not this time. Instead she only smiled, and said that he should take a seat, and that the concerto was almost finished. The two violinists were Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh. Not that the lieutenant had the slightest idea. He had a strange relationship with music. He had nothing against it in theory, but he was one of those people in whom classical music provokes a boundless impatience. He regarded it as a waste of time, an irritating reminder of a bygone age. It was of no interest to him, and he found no beauty in it – no, it was just a noise, as if someone, somewhere, was sawing. That was it. But, now, he kept his opinions to himself. Sitting down in the armchair, he cast a hard stare at Mrs Pápai, who seemed simply to ignore him. That, too, irritated him. And yet this time the lieutenant had not arrived empty-handed.13 The volume he’d finally chosen in the bookshop the day before, after much hesitation, was still in his bag. This will do just fine, he’d thought.

  ‘Was your son home?’ Lieutenant Dóra asked as a matter of routine the moment the arm lifted from the record with a little click and the player stopped. A momentary silence preceded Mrs Pápai’s emphatic ‘No!’, a silence the lieutenant turned this way and that in his head before collecting himself. Was she still under the influence of the music? He shook his head.

  ‘Haven’t you spoken to him since?’

  ‘Of course I have. I speak to him every day. He’s such a blessing, my son. He went to visit his father in hospital. And that’s when I went up to the flat. Beautiful, no?’

  She was referring to the music. But she spoke as if it were something she’d learned by rote.

  ‘How is your husband?’

  ‘The same. He is always the same. I’m only happy if he’s not worse.’

  No, she isn’t lying, thought Lieutenant Dóra. Besides, even if she is lying, it’s all the same – the men got into the flat, and we’ll see what comes of it.

  ‘My children and I argue about a lot,’ Mrs Pápai said suddenly.

  The lieutenant had been preparing to leave. After showering Mrs Pápai with praise for her conscientious work over the past year (which comprised chiefly her reports on the students at the International Journalism School, reports
that, after all, were not entirely uninteresting)14 – true, Mrs Pápai had also organized special cultural events for them (the Interior Ministry had paid for the theatre tickets) – he finally handed over to her an art book, a collection of woodcuts by Gyula Derkovits inspired by György Dózsá’s peasant uprising.

  ‘I like to do the work despite all problems,’ said Mrs Pápai as her gaze wandered over the pages. She was wondering whom she could give it to as a gift. ‘I like Africans a lot. They are better than us. I have a much easier time getting them to understand me than with Hungarians. But now I have no work. For a while now I haven’t even been called on for interpreting jobs, though I used to be asked all the time.’ While this sounded like a sort of rebuke or even a proposal, Lieutenant Dóra only nodded without saying a word.

  Mrs Pápai added, ‘Though the two pensions are worth nothing if you have a big family.’

  Unbeknown to Lieutenant Dóra, Mrs Pápai could not manage money. ‘Money: khara!’ she would say with utter scorn. When angry, she sometimes turned to the guttural sounds of Hebrew, which resembled the harsh clearing of a throat, as if praying to a god she didn’t know. ‘Khara?’ asked her son. ‘Shit. Money is shit!’ She was fond of mixing the two languages like some strange cocktail. ‘I don’t have a mother tongue,’ she said sometimes with a masochistic smile. ‘I don’t know Hebrew properly any more, and I never really learned Hungarian.’

  Certainly, Mrs Pápai’s strange relationship with money was founded not so much on the biblical legend of the golden calf but more – much more – on those receipts that attested to the varying sums of dollars or forints paid her, without which she could hardly have visited her beloved father so often in that distant land.

  Between two homelands into quicksand, one could say, and yet I won’t. Between two reasons, between two treasons. And life is suddenly over.

  Lieutenant Dóra understood perfectly what Mrs Pápai was hinting at with her talk of a lack of work, of their pensions not being sufficient. But he gave no sign of this. He would add it to his report. They couldn’t give Mrs Pápai a fixed monthly sum, no – for that she would need to try a little harder. Besides, not everyone at the Firm took such a benevolent view of the way Mrs Pápai’s children carried on. As a colleague of the lieutenant’s had remarked, ‘The Pápai kids are slowly but surely sinking into the swamp of the opposition.’ Or, as it was expressed behind closed doors after a few shots of cognac, ‘Like that whole tribe of commie Jews in general.’ Among themselves they drew perverse pleasure from commie-bashing. No one would have put it in writing, of course: Not so long ago these spoiled brats were Maoists. A deviant bunch. These kids have too much time on their hands. So now they want Flying Universities? Is that why we paid through the nose for them to get educated at our universities? So that they can travel free as birds? Stay abroad? If Mrs Pápai wants to cover up their lack of loyalty . . . Still, she should be discreetly warned. But she mustn’t take it personally. That could undermine what little operative value this network individual has.

  As if she’d read Comrade Dóra’s thoughts, the words came to Mrs Pápai. The moment of silence that still hovered in the air between them had to be dispelled.

  ‘My children and I argue about a lot,’ Mrs Pápai repeated.

  Comrade Dóra was indulgent and generous:

  ‘This sort of thing happens in every family. The young criticize the old. That’s what they do. I could tell stories, too, about my daughter.’ No sooner had he said this than he regretted it. Steering the conversation onto his own private affairs was strictly prohibited: the operative officer could not become a private individual in the eyes of the secret colleague – no, he had to maintain his strict neutrality even while striving for a tone of familiarity. It was a golden rule. It was inviolable. But he couldn’t swallow his words now.

  ‘And to think that they devoured the works of Marx and Lenin, and that that must have been the mistake.’ Mrs Pápai didn’t even notice the irony of what she’d just said. She continued in the same pamphleteering style that often shaped her sentences. ‘Because their theoretical knowledge clashes with everyday political practice, which means they can’t identify with all these political measures.’

  Same old tune, thought Comrade Dóra, who of course heard the recurring complaint in Mrs Pápai’s tirade. Isn’t it enough for her that we don’t have diplomatic relations with the Jews? What else does she want, for heaven’s sake? Does she want us to throw all of Hungary’s Zionists in jail? And then we could lock up all the journalists! It was early. His alarm had woken him, and he’d hurried over to the office to hear first-hand about yesterday’s operation. He’d hardly slept, and he was consequently somewhat resentful of Mrs Pápai. The works of Marx and Lenin? Why, of course! And Mao’s Little Red Book? Or was that a mere trifle? He only thought all this without, for now, uttering a word.

  ‘I haven’t argued with them for a quite a while, because I can’t convince them of a thing, anyway. So as far as I’m concerned, the arguments are less fruit.’

  ‘Fruitless.’

  ‘That’s right. Futile.’ After slurping the last drop of milky tea from her cup, she added, provocatively, ‘By the way, a couple of days ago I met one of my son’s friends, György Petri. You know of him, Comrade Dóra?’

  Comrade Dóra heard alarm bells ringing. He racked his brain for the right reply, but it wasn’t easy. Mrs Pápai continued.

  ‘A very good poet. In my opinion.’

  She fetched György Petri’s collection Circumscribed Fall from a table. In the middle was an embroidered bookmark. Comrade Dóra gave the cover a glassy stare, but did not reach for the book or say a thing.

  ‘He said that recently his application for a passport was denied.’

  What is she getting at? Is she trying to provoke me?

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Pápai added, ‘if a regime can’t take criticism, then talented people can easily become radicalized.’

  The conversation was starting to resemble a bad dream.

  ‘Look, Comrade,’ said Comrade Dóra in an officious tone of voice, ‘we are no longer living in Stalinism. Nor the Middle Ages. The leadership listens to sensible criticism. If it’s not destructive. This is not the era of the Rajk trials.’

  ‘I had another of his books, too, Eternal Monday,’ Mrs Pápai declared with a disarming smile. ‘I didn’t like that one. It was full of foul language. But Petri’s poetry in general, I like very much. And even that book has some beautiful lines.’

  ‘Wasn’t that some opposition publication?’ the lieutenant asked in distress. He was wondering how he’d weave this conversation into his report. Has this woman gone mad? He even wondered whether perhaps there was a listening device in the room, and Mrs Pápai – though he could hardly imagine her in this role – was setting a trap for him. Or that she wanted him to know that she understood precisely what yesterday’s action had really been about. But then the whole thing was doomed.

  ‘I don’t know the opposition, don’t know anything specific about them, but I think they are not necessarily dishonourable people, that they are pointing out the still existing negative aspects of our society. Maybe their words should be listened to in the interest of reforms.’

  ‘In my opinion,’ Comrade Dóra began, though he felt he wasn’t taking the right approach, that he sounded mechanical, as if delivering a lecture, ‘the work of the opposition is a very nuanced activity, in the course of which they regularly unearth and bring to the fore real errors not with the aim of building socialism but rather with the aim of discrediting and undermining it, and usually under the influence of a foreign agency.’

  Mrs Pápai was silent. Comrade Dóra was almost certain he beheld a playful, almost imperceptible, mocking smile on Mrs Pápai’s face. Her eyes glistened, as if she’d just been up to mischief. Of course the lieutenant could not know that in her youth Mrs Pápai had eaten herring with chocolate, which had shocked her whole family. It is hard to say whether she’d eaten herring with chocolate
because she really liked it or, rather, simply to laugh at all those it appalled.

  ‘I think of it differently,’ Mrs Pápai said after a short pause, though her lips did not seem to move. Comrade Dóra suddenly felt as though he must be hallucinating. But even if Mrs Pápai had not uttered these words, her face seemed to have said them, for she kept silently staring at Comrade Dóra, who had turned beet-red.15

  She Ends Her Activities

  INTERIOR MINISTRY

  TOP SECRET

  Department III/I-3

  Attn: Comrade Dóra

  Attn: Comrade Stöckl I agree. Determine the method and form in which we can assist. But only discreetly!17

  Attn: Comrade Kocsis It seems that MRS PÁPAI will end her activities.16 We can draw the 1,000 forints from our own Kocsis 10/3 account. This is the minimum for the help she honourably18 performed for us19 over decades.20 We could evengive her 2,000 forints!21

  József Stöckl

  X.2.

  Recommendation:

  - I recommend that at the next meeting with MRS PÁPAI, we devote special attention to her relationship with the opposition.

  Dr József Dóra, Pol. Lt.

  REPORT

  Budapest, 1 October 198522

  I report that on 26 September 1985 at 2 pm I held a meeting with our secret colleague CN MRS PÁPAI in the FERENC RÓZSA home.

  We aimed for the following subjects to be discussed at the meeting:

  – A translation assignment at the request of Interior Ministry Department III/I-723