Comrade Szakadáti had been squirming in his seat for a while now, wanting to make a contribution of his own. When Comrade Beider discreetly pressed his colleague’s knee under the table, Comrade Szakadáti unwittingly misinterpreted it as a gesture of encouragement, whereas Comrade Beider had meant to signal that this drawn-out meeting should come to a close. But Szakadáti, perhaps because he’d kept what he had to say bottled up for too long as his colleagues conversed with Mrs Pápai by turns jovially and then like grim professors giving a student a viva, now burst like a balloon. With the vehemence born of blind devotion to a cause, he reminded Mrs Pápai of the warm, intimate atmosphere that had characterized their first meetings.
Here it should be noted that, at those early meetings, this then forty-two-year-old divorced man, who lived a solitary existence (notwithstanding the occasional, rather wretched fling), had been decidedly pleased when Mrs Pápai had begged his pardon, explaining that when possible she addressed everyone with the informal ‘you’. True, Szakadáti had to prohibit this, whereupon the two of them returned to addressing each other in more formal terms, though that, too, had its own erotic edge; for back then, and for a while yet to come, Comrade Szakadáti, an aficionado of older women – notwithstanding that every regulation strictly prohibited such liaisons – playfully held out hope of a somewhat more intimate relationship.
Now, aware that their meetings would be rarer or else end completely – for Comrade Dóra was to assume the handling of Mrs Pápai from Comrade Beider, and the processing of her materials would be solely in the purview of Comrade Dóra – Szakadáti was forlorn. Not that he could complain that he didn’t have enough work: he was responsible for the whole of the Middle East, after all, even though he knew neither Arabic nor Hebrew, and his knowledge of English was pretty scant, too, even if he had passed the language test before an obviously good-natured committee. In short, his professional burdens were many, especially in these troubled times. And yet the same yearning trembled through his voice, even now, barely stifled, as he reminded Mrs Pápai of her ability to bewitch, of how adept she was at insinuating herself into the favour of others; and as he reminded her, moreover, of those perspectives which their common labour – the struggle against international Zionism – would open up before them in the not too distant future. What is more, and exaggerating somewhat, he added that Mrs Pápai’s work was of inestimable worth to the People’s Democracy, in light of her rare fluency in foreign languages and her adventurous spirit. Why, he even let slip that high-ranking Soviet comrades had praised the materials he and his colleagues had prepared from Mrs Pápai’s summaries – but by now Beider didn’t stop at a tactful bit of pressure on his comrade’s knee but (while smiling at Mrs Pápai) kicked Szakadáti square on the ankle.
‘Rabota calls!’ Miklós announced apologetically, glancing pointedly at his watch as he got up. But it wasn’t because of the rabota, the work, they had to do that he rose from the table so suddenly. In fact, he’d been struck with terror at that very moment on noticing that a notoriously opposition-oriented writer who’d achieved distinction even in the West had just stepped into the Angelika with a beautiful young woman. And, as he knew from the reports that regularly crossed his desk – reports that concerned Mrs Pápai’s trustworthiness, not exactly questioning it but, let’s say, keeping an eye on it – Mrs Pápai’s children were on very friendly terms with certain circles of Budapest’s intelligentsia. Miklós was terrified that Mrs Pápai, too, would recognize the writer in question. He had to keep them from greeting each other at any cost. He cursed himself for having chosen the Angelika, which, as he’d also read in no few reports, was among this writer’s favoured venues for romantic rendezvous, since his flat was close by. And so Miklós sprang up from the table like a soldier standing to attention, gazing fixedly at his watch. What an entertaining spectacle these three beaux made, rising from the table at precisely the same instant, like robots, glancing at their watches. It was ten past four.8
Mrs Pápai – having tied her silk scarf around her neck and buttoned her coat all the way up as she stepped out into the gently falling snow, her knitted cap pulled down tight over her forehead – went off on foot up the slight ascent of Batthyány Street towards Moscow Square, and from there towards the Ferenc Rózsa Veterans’ Home, where, in their tiny living room, her crazed husband, the one-time Pápai, awaited her, a crooked, trembling figure standing in the doorway, tormented by premonitions, frantic with worry.
The Attempt
By then the two boys had been sitting in the hallway for a good half an hour. They’d taken the elevator to the third floor. The sound of fingers diligently tapping away at typewriters could be heard beyond the padded doors. The office was clearly busy: secretaries in apparently obligatory stiletto heels, documents awaiting signatures in their hands, whisked past between the hallway’s veneer walls; now and then a pot-bellied gentleman in a cheap wrinkled suit and tie trotted past, a thick dossier under his arm; and from time to time a figure in a military uniform appeared, holster at his side. They came and went, going about their business as if not even noticing the two boys.
No one else besides them was waiting in this hallway with its veneer walls, which perhaps had not been designed for waiting at all – no one else, and that was pretty odd, though despite it all they had the sense, possibly unfounded, that they were being watched, that all the hubbub had been staged for their amusement, and that the prolonged waiting was nothing more than an opportunity to observe them, even if they sought to dispel the thought, to laugh it off, saying to themselves that, here, waiting was nothing unusual: an office is an office is an office.
And yet the hint of suspicion arose in them again when a balding young man walked past for a second time, and even as they made as if they were outside and above it all, that uncanny, unheimlich feeling took root in them all the same, that haunting feeling that the entire building was watching them. Or perhaps they weren’t being watched, but instead were being made to feel as if they were being watched? They’d arrived right on time, after all, even if they had come separately, and though an office worker saddled with lots of work can’t be expected to drop everything to receive just anyone who steps in off the street – if indeed this was an office, and it certainly looked like one, and if indeed this was where they’d been summoned for an appointment – why the long wait?
An unspeakable disquiet had taken hold of them earlier, even as they approached the greyish building on the corner – grey more from neglect than from being plastered grey – and as they arrived at the porter’s booth by the main entrance, where a uniformed man had asked for their IDs and made a record in a huge logbook, the porter’s book, and as that man called some number to signal their arrival. Just outside the entrance, gold letters on a black glass board told them they had arrived at the Interior Ministry’s passport department, 45 László Rudas Street, a bleak house whose proportions invariably inspired a momentary impression of beauty nonetheless. As for the boys, they hadn’t noticed the strange asymmetry – no, they had seen nothing much of the building while approaching on foot moments earlier from Lenin Boulevard, only its greyness or, more precisely, steel-greyness.
And perhaps that sums up just what happened as these two boys approached, and then arrived at, their destination one not particularly sweltering summer’s day in June 1978.
It was a pre-war building, that much was certain from its proportions, its windows and the two rosette inlays in the façade above the main entrance, which were partly obscured by a wrought-iron glass-encased structure extending above the door. Touched though it was with the same paltriness that characterized all the neighbourhood’s buildings, if the two boys could have seen it in its entirety, perhaps they would have noticed that it looked as if a church had been turned into an office: to the left of the entrance, columns and arched windows composed a surprising ornamentation on the bay of the façade; a tympanum up above hinted at the multi-faceted nature of the spaces inside; and, rendering the ba
y even more mysterious, a smaller tympanum was visible under the larger one. As for the stone-faced sphinx lounging on the roof, there was no seeing that – for who would have thought to approach the building from the other side of László Rudas Street? Just to peruse the Interior Ministry’s façade?
From a distance, from the fifth floor of some building beyond the tracks of the nearby train station, perhaps the ministry building could have been seen in all its beauty. Most significant, though, and beyond the notice of those not approaching from László Rudas Street, was the year MDCCCLXXXXVI inscribed in the tympanum, proudly announcing that the building had been built not one war earlier, but two, in the glorious year of 1896, that annus mirabilis that had marked the thousandth anniversary of the Hungarian state. The hermae of half-naked women that had projected from the rustic keystones of the ground floor had been dismantled by careful hands – or by bombs or a well-aimed round of machine-gun fire – to make way for austere rhombuses. Other omissions were attributable to the crafty architect himself: that corner of the building where László Rudas Street met Vörösmarty Street seemed to have been lopped off with a cake knife, leaving the building without a corner at all, as if with this small surface the building sought to address all the city’s residents; its second storey held a statueless niche, above which, as if above an orator’s lectern, was some unexpected decoration in the form of a lace-like baldachin; and above that a coat of arms perhaps intentionally left empty; for all of this had been stripped away in the whirl of the Second World War. Yes, it had vanished, with nothing left to reveal that on this Friday morning in June the boys had stepped – timidly, from the sun’s blinding glare – into the former Symbolic Grand Lodge of Hungary, the one-time palace of the Freemasons.
It was a classic communist office building, though perhaps more elegant than most, with its veneer walls and a few surviving pieces of the original, custom-made furniture in its offices. The building’s architect had been asked to include three sanctuaries and two workshops. This was in accordance with the Masonic custom of the time, because, in contrast to earlier practice whereby individual lodges had their own premises, here several lodges operated in one building, at set times and in their own reserved spaces. The building also had a refectory in which jovial conversations unfolded after the work was done, a restaurant available for lease, a library, a reception room, a recreation room, and, yes, offices.
The key symbols of Freemasonry could be found in less conspicuous spots, in keeping with the Freemasons’ tendency to shy away from revealing too much of themselves to the world. Bouquets were set in the small tympanum below the larger one above the main entrance; and rocailles ornamented the aedicules of the second-floor windows. But the stucco decorations spotting the wall had no symbolic import. Only the most observant pedestrian would have noticed the ornaments on the roof, behind the parapets decorated with urns and balustrades. Along with the sphinx leaning against a globe, the building’s other crowning ornament comprised four owls holding up a celestial sphere marked with the signs of the zodiac. Its pedestal bore the most important Masonic symbol, a square and a set of compasses joined together, the crowning triangle symbolizing God.
It was an irregularly shaped office with a rather low ceiling into which the younger of the two boys, his stomach softly churning, now entered. An enormous desk stood in the centre of the room, and the short, double-chinned man in a lieutenant colonel’s uniform and gold-framed glasses who stood and genially offered him a seat seemed to vanish momentarily behind the desk as he, too, sat down. Owing to its irregular shape, the office, which seemed to have been spliced together from several spaces, at once seemed unusually spacious and, in its narrowness, also rather cramped. A small recess could be seen on the left, by the rear wall, whose depth could not be determined – it may have been a passageway to another space. If someone wanted to eavesdrop on the conversation in the office, he could hide away quite happily in that recess, for anyone entering from the hall, even if he took several steps into the room, still could not see him.
Both because of the low suspended ceiling and especially because of the clumsily half-covered arched windows – which had evidently been made to serve a much larger space – the office lamp had to be kept on during the day, and so at certain moments the room, in harmony with the emotional state of those inside, seemed minuscule and dark. Yet another oddity: owing to some technical constraint or less fathomable consideration, a one-and-a-half-metre span of floor in front of the arched windows was a few inches lower than the rest, so that anyone walking back and forth there would have to constantly take one step down, and one step up, as if limping. For this reason, the room’s current occupant probably stayed put on the near side of the room, while the colossal desk – in fact two pieces of furniture of different sizes pushed together – stood in the middle and swallowed up nearly all the space. The room resembled a jail cell. Was this that ‘dark room’ where a Freemason candidate, before being led into a sanctuary to be subjected to various rites of passage, could undertake solitary reflection and write his spiritual will? Whatever the case, anyone passing his days in here would feel simultaneously diminutive and gigantic: a weary, enervated bureaucrat on the one hand, an omnipotent éminence grise wielding power over the fates of his fellow man on the other. To the right stood two large safes painted a revolting brown, keys hanging out of their shiny locks; and beside them was a piece of rococo period furniture with a glass door – a sort of document cabinet, conspicuously empty. To the left was a round marble table with two bentwood chairs that would have better suited a café; on the table was a doily, on top of which was a lead crystal ashtray and a sparkling mocha pot resting on a hotplate, from which a black cord led to a plug hanging clumsily from a socket on the wall. The air held the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans.
After politely introducing himself, the lieutenant colonel stared in silence for some time at his well-manicured hands. Before him was a brand-new passport, the smell of which seemed to linger in the air. Scrutinizing the nails of his left hand, the lieutenant colonel placed his right hand gently on the passport as his eyes fell upon the boy with a distant stare, like a predator deciding what to do with its victim: kill it immediately or first play with it?
Both boys had been surprised when the secretary – a fiftyish matron with dyed hair, a long grey dress and a white blouse with baggy sleeves – called the younger of them in first. Jacob and Esau, that immortal story of the privileges of the firstborn.1
The lieutenant colonel had two approaches to choose from. He’d honed his skills for long years now, so he could effortlessly put either one into practice – the words were right there at his disposal, in his desk drawer so to speak, and all he had to do was pull them out: one version was foreboding, the other enticing; one was strewn with storm clouds and, more to the point, indirect threats, such as the blocking of a career, the other promised undreamed-of opportunities, security and pink sunrises. Like a virtuoso, the lieutenant colonel had the script at his fingertips, and it was this moment of recruitment that he considered one of the most exciting and inspiring of all his duties. This is what he savoured the most, that most resembled that which he’d dreamed of as a boy – the theatre. It was a role he gladly played even if he knew – he was no fool, after all – how ludicrously petty it was, the prospect he was now preparing to unveil before the kid sitting across from him, who could not guess what awaited him.
As with all suspects, including those accused of crimes they surely hadn’t committed, the boy’s entire being was delicately vibrating. Perhaps he was scared, too, without being entirely conscious of it. All this was evident in the way his lips parted, ready for a breath; on his faintly flushed skin; in his sparkling eyes; and in other signs an amateur would not notice – signs the individual himself wasn’t even aware of. And while he wasn’t actually a suspect – why would he have been? – this moment of opportunity had to be exploited. Yes, he, the lieutenant colonel, had to suggest, delicately of course, that the
balance of power here was unequal. But he had to do so without scaring off or even alarming his prey, but, rather, luring it into his trap. It was often enough – even in the case of those with intellects sharper than this kid’s – to subtly allude to the twists and turns, and the accidents, that can befall one’s chosen career.
During a professional development course in Moscow, the lieutenant colonel, by some miracle, had got hold of a dogeared volume of Talleyrand during political history class. Noticing his lingering stare, Lieutenant Colonel Volkov, a brilliant mind, had pressed the book into his hand with a manly slap on the shoulder, and after the young man managed with no little difficulty to acquire a French–Hungarian dictionary, he was finally able to read the book. Of course he’d lied when he said that he knew French. Lying was – what else? – a professional affliction, or so his supervisor had once declared as he filled him in on his affair with some woman. ‘But let us not call this lying,’ his supervisor had observed. ‘It is diplomacy!’
Without a doubt the future lieutenant colonel had, in Moscow, fallen in love for life with that French bishop-turned-revolutionary, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. He was in the habit of repeating his finest aphorisms by heart. Was it not Talleyrand who’d said, ‘A married man with a family will do anything for money’? Of course, at the firm, money did not grow on trees – though it wasn’t all about money – but sometimes it was necessary to pay blood money or a reward or drop-in-the-bucket disbursements – trivial sums, but enough to further ensnare delinquents, with a guilty conscience if nothing else. This came with the territory. And was it not Talleyrand who’d also said, ‘Speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts’? Brilliant! thought the lieutenant colonel as he began to rack his brain for an apt little saying with which to impress this young man who worked in the theatre, who was said to be – which it took only a look to confirm – highly cultivated and clever.2 But nothing came to mind. Perhaps during the conversation it would.
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