No Live Files Remain

by Andras Forgach

  I don’t know if I want to see those dossiers. But I do want to see them. That’s not even to mention that I’ve tellingly misread this totally innocent footnote – and perhaps I wanted to. I projected a Bond film onto this greyer-than-grey tale. The footnote makes no mention of any ‘honey trap’ – truth be told, this always sounded a bit rich. Since then the original reports have come into my possession – the wheels turn slowly indeed at the ÁBTL (Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security) – and they reveal that a certain police lieutenant named Imre Takács interrogated Papa (Pápai) in a C flat – a ‘conspiratorial’ flat, that is – and the only thing that bothered the lieutenant, as he mentioned in the ‘Assessment’ section of his report, was that Papa (Pápai) disclosed certain details only after prolonged prompting, like someone not inclined to remember too much, and that he gave several, often confusing replies to certain questions posed repeatedly.

  Assessment

  In September 1962 PÁPAI had already previously reported in person orally on the meeting between A. Zs. and R. H. Since then I have asked him several times for a written report, but he always came up with some excuse not to do so. In the course of this meeting I had him write it. Neither written nor oral report is complete.

  PÁPAI can be used in the matter of R. H., but in light of their being relatives and the work he has done to date, the degree to which his involvement is advisable is questionable.

  — Imre Takács, Police Lieutenant

  His occasional handler could not have known that in 1963 Papa was peering down into that dark abyss – after the utter failure of his London mission – into which for good measure he would soon plummet; which is to say, he ‘suffered’ a ‘nervous breakdown’ (as such episodes were then called), the second of those he had once a decade – 1953, 1963, 1973, as if I were mapping the latitude and longitude of Father’s descent into mental illness. How he just sat there on the bench in the park-like grounds of Korvin Military Hospital on Gorky Avenue after undergoing yet another round of electric shock therapy – I had just turned ten, and my mother had taken my hand and led me to see him – and Dad said not a word to me – no, he just stared blankly ahead as if he didn’t even recognize me.

  When in 2004 I first stepped from the street into the ÁBTL (whose cleverly forgettable name I couldn’t memorize for a long time) to request my records and those of my parents, and anything else having to do with my circumstances, they handed me only three or four completely insignificant and uninteresting scraps with the following stamped on them in big green letters: HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF HUNGARIAN STATE SECURITY. I received just as little as most applicants I’d heard about. Even these days, when I go in and out of the reading room of the archives, on Eötvös Street, in the centre of Budapest, I see the new applicants who arrive every day, and I see how vulnerable they are, and I see also how patiently the administrator speaks to them from inside a glass cubicle, exactly like a nurse in a psychiatric ward. Most people who receive so few documents are of course relieved. I was not relieved. And what is it that I got? An agent reported what I’d said once while I’d been a student in the faculty of arts and letters. Half a sentence. And not even an exact quote. Nonsense. Back in 2004, we were not allowed to find out the agents’ names. Today I know it. I don’t remember his face. I have no idea who he is. I don’t even bother to go over to the shelf and open up the envelope in which I brought home those few sheets of paper. It was an unimaginable disappointment.

  Today, as I hold in my hand the two thick dossiers in which my own name appears more than once, not just my parents’ names – in my virtual hand, that is, for they are both (my mother’s recruitment dossier and the work dossier) kept under lock and key in the research room on Eötvös Street – I can’t help but wonder why, in 2004, they gave me so little. It’s a real crime that in 1990 and since then every last such document hasn’t been made publicly available. A crime, a crime, an irredeemable crime.

  One of the documents released to me in 2004 was nonetheless of some interest, come to think of it, if only from a distance. In the course of the rehabilitation proceedings underway in the wake of Stalin’s death, in June 1954 my father was summoned to Gyorskocsi Street in Buda, the location of a huge prison and the military prosecutor’s headquarters. He would later recount how scared he was when the iron gate closed behind him, how the red-hot iron gate burned his back – it was important to him to mention this detail repeatedly. I suspect that he carried that fear with him for the rest of his life. Not that that was the first or the last time he was scared, of course. He was scared often in the years that followed. In 1973, for the last time and for all eternity. I did, then, receive these official records in 2004, with my thirty-four-year-old father’s signature at the bottom of each page.

  INTERIOR MINISTRY

  MAIN INVESTIGATIVE DEPARTMENT

  TOP SECRET!

  Affidavit

  I, the undersigned, understanding my liability under criminal law, hereby declare that under no circumstances will I mention my interrogation by the Main Investigative Department of the Interior Ministry to any unauthorized individuals.

  I understand that if I violate the terms of this affidavit, a criminal case may be opened against me.

  Budapest, 30 June 1954

  György Beofsics

  Marcell Forgács

  SUB-LIEUTENANT, ÁV

  Declarant

  That energetic signature! Those looped letters! The interrogating officer behaved like a proper gentleman, exactly as we might imagine he would in the course of a rehabilitation such as this: he was objective and dry. He was well aware how the interrogation of witnesses had unfolded a couple of years earlier. It could easily have been him who’d beaten a suspect to a pulp back then. And perhaps it was precisely this that rendered him so suitable for presiding over rehabilitation cases like a gentleman.

  Dad, in his own version of events, was just another Stendhal hero who had got lost on the battlefield. Aside from his repeated and dramatic attempts to convey just how terrifying it had been, he told me nothing at all about why he was there in the first place. And I didn’t press him. It didn’t even occur to me to do so. We simply didn’t have the words for a proper conversation about these things. And to think that dad was quite a storyteller. He even wrote poems. ‘The sound of thick raindrops knocking / gave way to the footsteps of the evening’s human seas / and still I awaited you / under the trees buzzing from the breeze.’ He wrote this for Kati not long before she was burned at Auschwitz – Kati, with whom he was caught in the act because her parents came home too soon from a cancelled movie. There is a photo, too – Kati at the ice rink in the town of Szatmárnémeti – but I can’t find it just now.

  A couple of years before Dad was summoned, a certain Endre Rosta was sentenced to many years in prison, by way of a small side-show to the show trials of the time. Dad had been his subordinate in the prime minister’s press office between June 1948 and September 1949, when the whole crew was quickly cast to the winds. Until then, Endre Rosta worked under the prime minister (and dictator) Mátyás Rákosi, as did my father. Here’s a good anecdote: one fine day Dad had just finished translating one of Comrade Ràkosi’s speeches, when Mátyás himself phoned Dad and, in a rasping voice, congratulated him on his excellent French. At first dad was scared, but then, puffing out his chest, he went about telling everyone the news.

  In June 1954, then, Father was summoned to Gyorskocsi Street. He performed relatively well, but it is still painful and embarrassing to imagine. I can hear him hemming and hawing and coming up with excuses, with self-justifications.

  How did your interrogation in 1949 concerning Endre Rosta unfold?

  I think it was a certain Lieutenant Horváth who interrogated me in 1949 about Rosta. In the course of the interrogation Horváth asked me why it was that I hadn’t noticed that Rosta was engaged in hostile activity. How could I have failed to notice that Rosta was an enemy who, among other things, had been terrorizing the Hungarian pres
s? In the course of the interrogation Horváth encouraged me to make connections between Rosta’s activities and the fact, as Horváth put it, that Rosta was an enemy. Among other things he asked me if I knew that Rosta was a spy. After I replied no, Horváth asked me, now that I knew that Rosta was a spy for foreign powers, what hostile actions I can attribute to Rosta, or activity that is consistent with Rosta having been a spy. These were the circumstances under which I gave my testimony in 1949 against Endre Rosta.

  The record also reveals how the prime minister’s press office, with Dad’s vigorous participation, worked to destroy Hungary’s free press in 1949.

  Was there a tendency in the Hungarian media rooted in the conviction that the sensationalistic form and content of the bourgeois papers must be redirected to the propagation of the policies of the Party and the government?

  [. . .] It was a duty to re-educate the reporters at bourgeois papers to change the form and content of their papers, to shift from the sensationalism they had practised up to that point, to representing the position of the government and the Party.

  What aspect of Rosta’s work contributed to the execution of the above duty?

  As regards the above, Rosta’s method was to summon the editors of the bourgeois papers or to speak to them by telephone. In the course of these conversations Rosta communicated the direction said editors were to follow, which is to say, what subjects the papers were to cover. Rosta’s work had results, too, for the papers did in fact publish those articles concerning agriculture or industry that Rosta handed to them in completed form, or else that he had told them they should write.

  In consequence of Rosta’s above-mentioned activity, did these papers become more uniform and their readership decline?

  A certain trend towards uniformity was indeed detectable among the bourgeois papers, and this was in part because the prime minister’s press office could not deal sufficiently with all the editors of the bourgeois papers, but rather mostly provide only the general direction. However, nor were the editors of the bourgeois papers pleased to publish and edit articles addressing the Party and government’s position, and did not process such news in a form that would have been understandable to their readerships. One consequence, then, was that the bourgeois papers’ readership declined. But I cannot claim that this was the result of deliberately bad work on the part of Rosta, for – according to him – he was in constant communication with the Party’s top leadership. In his individual decisions and instructions Rosta always cited the comrades working at Party headquarters.

  This deposition certainly wasn’t a pleasant read.

  There was also another strange incident. Four years later, on 26 May 1958, two investigators in civilian clothes rang the buzzer to our flat at 8 Attila Street in Buda so that – as Deputy Sub-Department Head Hugó Németh wrote in his field report – they could grill Father, in his capacity as a member of the Workers’ Militia, about our nearest neighbour. In the assessment of the deputy sub-department head, our neighbour’s housekeeper wasn’t reliable enough, which is why they turned to my father and another resident, Kornélia Polacsek. I remember Dad’s steel-grey Workers’ Militia uniform well. One time I even saw him wearing it in a parade, perhaps on May Day of the same year, 1958. I have to say, he didn’t look very dapper in it. This was the fourth and last uniform of his life: the first, his Mihai Eminescu High School uniform in Szatmárnémeti; the second, his Romanian army uniform, which lacked any insignia; and the third, that of the British army in Palestine. Much more exciting, though, was the fact that he kept his service revolver and ammunition in his desk drawer, which was, I suppose, in violation of regulations. I was quite impressed by the sight of those brass bullets scattered among his papers. Though we were under strict orders not to open that drawer, I often looked at the bullets and played with them when he wasn’t at home. They really were beautiful, those bullets. And so heavy.

  So our concierge, a certain Mr Lénárt, presumably wasn’t an informant. His sons were wild, I recall. They weren’t too good at football, either, shoving everyone around on the field like animals, but because they were the concierge’s sons we overlooked this. They had power. The Lénárts lived in Flat 1, in the basement, and when huddling over battle plans when an attack seemed imminent, we boys often squatted in front of that window of theirs which looked out onto the building’s inner courtyard. For ammunition we collected conkers, spiny shells and all. Now, this ongoing war between the boys on the grund – the vacant lot just outside, that is – and those of us defending our building wasn’t too dangerous, even if a piece of brick that was hurled over the high stone wall into the upper yard did once nearly knock out my left eye.

  In that basement flat, Mr Lénárt himself sometimes popped out from behind his boys, a mocking smile on his face, and took relish in catching one of us and twisting his ear. If he happened to be away, his sons would let us into the concierge’s booth, where we leafed through the huge concierge-book, reading Mr Lénárt’s funny notes on the building’s residents.

  On 26 May 1958, then, the investigators pressed the buzzer of our flat at 8 Attila street – Floor II, stairwell D. Dad must have been scared then, too, I reckon. Or, if not, he must at least have known what sort of visitors he was about to deal with. They questioned him about our nearest neighbour – the lame man whose arrival invariably alarmed me. I was afraid of him. The heavy thud of his steps on the stairs. He was the Sandman. Who comes to punish boys who don’t go to sleep. A black-haired, dark-eyed fellow who rarely uttered a word. He had a limp. Yes, there was a file on him, too. As it turned out much later, even the sandman had been recruited before 1956. According to a particularly exciting find in Deputy Sub-Department Head Hugó Németh’s field report:

  He generally leaves home in the morning and returns to his flat in the evening.

  Indeed, the Sandman always got back around 6.00 p.m., the thick-soled orthopaedic shoe on his right foot stomping loudly as he ascended the spiral staircase – it took for ever for him to get to Floor II. I shuddered at the thought of him seeing me. The report determines that the Sandman

  has not shared his political views with even his nearest neighbours at his address. During the period of the counter-revolution he stayed at home, rarely going out and getting home soon after.

  Hugó Németh adds:

  It was through his connections that he joined the party via the district’s party committee in 1957, for the main party had not accepted his membership, for after the [counter-revolutionary] events the police had had him under surveillance on suspicion of organizing.

  Often, my heart racing, I peeked through our letterbox to see him fumbling with the key to his door as the stairwell light went out. The smell of alcohol and nicotine wafted off him, and this fascinated me as much as it repulsed me. It’s worth noting here that my parents never drank or smoked. ‘A real man drinks and smokes,’ a housewife who lived in another stairwell once told my father, when rejecting or perhaps – my father was never clear about this – yielding to his extravagantly suave advances.

  This archive is such that if you remove one file, countless others are liable to come spilling out after it, and finally a veritable tower of paperwork piles up on your desk. As I learned from a dossier I happened across just a couple of days ago (at the time of writing, in September 2015), the Sandman had been recruited once before, in the late 1940s, when he was a leftist member of the National Peasant Party and, moreover, secretly joined the Magyar Dolgozók Pártja (Hungarian Working People’s Party, MDP):

  The informant code-named ZOLTÁN PÁL was recruited in 1949 on the grounds of his solid belief in the cause. We perceived no double-dealing, no de-conspiring in the course of his secret work. Even after the counter-revolution he was ready to make himself available. His work was instrumental in the re-mapping of the right-wing elements of the NPP.

  This was reported by Police Lieutenant János Engelhardt. But the agent’s files went missing in the chaos of 1956. Aside from his wretched r
ole in the politics of the day the sandman wasn’t, as it turned out, so terrible or evil; his father had been a simple night watchman.

  He lives in a one-bedroom, nicely furnished flat with all the modern conveniences. A cleaning woman performs the tidying of the flat. With the exception of one or two individuals he is not on close terms with any of the building’s residents, exchanging only greetings. He has a wide circle of friends who used to stop by to see him before the events and especially during the events. During and after the time of the counter-revolution, individuals of various sorts looked him up, including local officials and newspaper reporters from the provinces. These people came by at all hours of the day, and were sometimes there even at midnight.

  Although he joined the Party after the ‘events’, the Interior Ministry wanted to know if it was worth recruiting him again. And, because his housekeeper wasn’t one to toe the line, my daddy – that is, ‘the individual providing the information’ – didn’t hold back about what he knew.

  [. . .] according to him, in the present day similar sorts stop by his place at similar times of day as did during the events, but not yet as frequently.