19th of March, 1947
Bruria Darling!
There are three months since we married. It is time to make some observations although I do not dare to pretend to know more about the future of our relation than my own hopes for its perpetuity.
To begin with, it is something we both know: all marriages are, or better, have got their difficulties at the start, still our case being a special one, we made the mistake of underestimating the dangers. I have taken too lightly the fact that you were not in love with me; you have been too daring in expecting from yourself to be able to cope with all the demands and possible complications of marriage in case of marrying anybody (anybody from the point of view of the sentimental attachment).
We both were mistaken and we both did not give up. This is the ‘deus ex machina’, the surprise for me and for the sceptics as well.
We did not give up because this would have been a mechanistic attitude.
We did not give up because there is not guarantee that something better or at least as good as that and not worse, waits around the corner.
We did not give up because we BOTH need love, and both of us genuinely hope that there is a possibility for changes, for a development to put it better.
The trouble was and partly goes on to be, that we had such a different attitude towards love, owing to our diametrically opposed background and practical differences, that we were unable to compromise on the sentimental ground although logical decisions have been taken in this respect.
The question remains if only the form is divergent or the content of love is so altered in each case that no development, say no compromise will be able to patch it up?
I think this view is mistaken: love is a natural neccessity common to all normal and healthy people, those then, whose soul has not been crippled under the existing social conditions.
That much for what I think is common ground. Now for me alone:
I must confess to-night that I became too strongly involved in this affair. Too strongly because there is no solid ground under our feet and I already lost the touch with my previous life. It is true I loved you even in my being isolated from all hope of meeting you, but this love never obliged my thinking, planning and carrying out – my full self; it only affected my sentimental half or quarter.
To-day it is overwhelming and therefore confusing.
Please don’t take this for blackmailing you with my sentiments. It hurt me terribly when you asked in Ben Shemen last Thursday if I shall commit suicide in case you will leave me. The amount of love is not weighed by desperate deeds. I am sure that I am strong enough to stand any blow may this bring the greatest pain and the longest suffering.
In the past I experienced this in a very concentrated form, you know the fate of my beloved ones, this has shaken me out of my track for some time, but I got back and carried on.
Now this must be clear to you: I don’t want you Bruria because I cannot imagine life without you, I want you because life is nicer, better, fuller, nearer to perfection with you than without you.
More about this: you can make, and in some respects you already made a better man out of me, this of course only if you will find the right approach, and believe me dearest one, I can help you in bringing about the changes you wish to see in yourself, if you will open yourself to me not only with logical decisions, but with the tenderness of your feelings locked somewhere in the depth of your shell.
There is never too much love if we are ready to take it, not for its own sake but for the sake of our belief in an ever blooming, glorious march of the human race towards that to-morrow that sings in our hearts.
There is nothing more I can say that you don’t know already, I shall not use the word your name conveys me its content: My Bruria, Your Marcell
‘I have taken too lightly the fact that you were not in love with me,’ says the young and desperate husband almost casually, and in the turmoil of a brewing civil war and in the wake of the war of independence, during the birth pangs of the state of Israel, these young people are wondering if they have both made a mistake.
Her feelings were ‘locked somewhere in the depth of your shell’, he wrote, but otherwise the two of them were wonderfully happy together. The cornerstone of their shared faith was a certain person, still alive, one Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. As Bruria wrote in a letter dated 11 January 1946, not to her husband but to her comrades in Beirut:
I was discussing with a boy of nineteen about current problems. Whenever I mentioned the word ‘Democracy’ he made a wry face and murmured: ‘Again an empty, common-place word’ – He is a student in the university, took up mathematics. His world was shaken during the last few years and every expression which for us is full of meanings, because there is action behind it, for him is an empty phrase. So was it when I mentioned a book by Stalin. Here he retorted: ‘You too are contaminated with this blind adoration of a man?’ You see, he is an intelligent boy. Not a Zionist. Not narrow-minded. But altogether detached from the life of the simple people, the majority of humanity, from whose lap he himself grew. He is afraid to see meanings behind expressions. He is afraid to decide where to take a place. He is a typical petty-bourgeois intellectual.
Thus she writes in a letter to her comrades in Beirut, where she spent a number of years and where she took the first steps of her adult life – at the American University, studying to be a nurse. Alongside people of different nationalities, in the middle of an incredible, Levantine landscape she later simply called ‘Paradise’. People of many backgrounds – Armenians, Iraqis, Syrians, Americans and Jews – studied and socialized there, enjoying an amazing degree of freedom during the war, in the ‘Paris of the Middle East’, living life to the fullest. When she went back home to Jerusalem and started working as a nurse in a hospital, she felt as if she had been exiled in her own hometown, and this feeling of exile, like that of her suitor, never left her. She felt like an alien in her birthplace, where every day she witnessed both British colonial oppression and the terror wrought by right-wing Zionist extremists. She imagined a multinational country in place of a single, nationalist state. All her life. She knew it was a utopian vision, and yet it was a utopia she wanted to believe in:
To day it is a wonderful springday. Those who know Jerusalem, can imagine the clearness and freshness and charms of this city. When one looks at the city from the mountains, he forgets that it is reality which is in front, because it is so easy to fall into a dreamy state and see all like in a fairy-tale. I know what is wishful thinking, all of us do fight such thoughts but they come up nevertheless. To day my thoughts were concentrated on a truly dream – like subject: Palestine free and democratic. On the mountains hundreds of people picking flowers and dancing. Amphitheatres for thousands of people are surging with people who visit the best plays there. At night, to the full moon, the best music is played and the ballet dancers give the most fantastic and beautiful dance, which thousands of people enjoy and understand!
Well, I think it is more than enough to bother you with my dreams.
Although they shared a worldview, young Pápai knew he was walking a fine line. In the letter written three months after they married, he had talked of blackmail:
Please don’t take this for blackmailing you with my sentiments. It hurt me terribly when you asked in Ben Shemen last Thursday if I shall commit suicide in case you will leave me. The amount of love is not weighed by desperate deeds.
What a prophecy! Two years before their London adventure, in 1958, in Budapest, he was standing on a chair in the bathroom with a rope around his neck when she stormed into their home, which only a few weeks before she had been ready to leave for ever. She was tortured by premonitions. And there she found him, a farewell note on the floor. That morning she’d phoned him every ten minutes, and when he didn’t answer, she ran to him, faster than she’d ever run. She would never again try to escape.
Shall we dance or shall you accompany me home? was the question asked by Bruria, a beaut
iful, wild creature from whom the young Romeo could not tear his gaze – yes, the glowing fire of love at first sight had been lit. She was standing there, outside the room, in the candlelight, Jerusalem’s cool evening breeze moving her dark hair around her face – Bruria, her jasmine eyes beaming from her suntanned face, in a simple white dress embroidered with colourful flowers, like a fairy in a folktale, a fruit ripe for plucking.
She stood, momentarily alone, among the happily dancing, red-faced communist youth of Palestine – at this ball where the band, between foxtrots and tangos and sambas, played the ‘Marseillaise’, the ‘Internationale’, and a Russian folk song. The dance floor was packed with young men in the uniform of the British army, most of them immigrant Jews who wanted to fight the Nazis in Europe but were instead stranded in North Africa or Egypt or Palestine because the Brits didn’t trust them. And there were young men dressed very casually, or in their work clothes, in simple sandals or even barefoot, who represented the new type of Jew, and all were ready to build the brave new world of which they had a clear vision. The girls, often dressed too in men’s clothes, were among the most beautiful daughters of Poland, Germany and Hungary – the children of those who’d escaped fascism and the war. A brand-new breed of Jewish youth who were already tasting both the hardships of cultivating a new land and the pleasures of a life in a free world to come, a world they partly owned even now and would own fully before long. The war was over, the sun was sinking behind a hill against a crystal-clear sky, and the music was loud and joyful.
Shall we dance or shall you accompany me home? was the question, the bait thrown to the fish still blithely swimming in clear waters, and the fish bit. The young man loved rash decisions, mistaking them for courage; and she too was swift and sometimes rash – yes, she could act decisively at difficult times, and he was already in a trap. He accompanied her home: far, far away from the lights of this great communist ball, through dark alleys where anything could happen, where someone might rob them, where the military police might arrest them or simply intimidate them, where they might be killed. Stabbings, as in the days of Flavius, happened all the time in Jerusalem in those feverish days of 1946. And after a long, seemingly endless walk through the streets – during which they agreed on many points, giving false hope to the boy in British uniform – on arriving at her room, where they had to whisper, because the whole house was sleeping, she, instead of kissing him, asked for a favour. Could he deliver a letter to an English soldier, a certain Thomas Rogers, who coincidentally served in the same town in Egypt as him? She didn’t trust the post office in those turbulent, dangerous times. Yes, he was ready to be the postman. And it would change nothing if the letter he had to deliver was a letter of farewell. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.
* * *
Folding the signed sheet of paper and putting it away, Lieutenant Takács beamed a satisfied smile at Pápai. They seemed to have reached an understanding, and Pápai had a good sense of humour, seemed very well informed, and, not least, the Party was behind him.
‘Don’t worry, we shan’t bother you for a long time, Comrade Pápai.’
‘I am not worried,’ said Pápai. ‘I can’t wait to serve my country as best I can.’
‘That may not be enough,’ said Takács sombrely. A cloud passed over Pápai’s face. But Lieutenant Takács, whose change of tone was calculated, went on: ‘I’m only joking, of course.’
The familiar game of cat and mouse began. The invisible thread of dependence had to be stretched between them, the distance measured, the connection assured, the subordination clarified, the discipline practised. All this in a casual way, so the subject wouldn’t feel constrained in the least, all this being quite voluntary, a service to the homeland and the Party, and to the great common cause of humanity.
‘To whom can I turn at the embassy in times of emergency?’
‘Nobody,’ said Takács. ‘Wait until you get instructions from us. I see no reason for any emergencies. What counts is this: we are trying to change the image of our country on an international level. To show that we are independent actors, not what they call a satellite state. The counter-revolutionaries who escaped in ’56 are all over Europe. They denigrate, smear, blacken and slander their own motherland, our socialist system, unashamedly. All you have to do for now, until you get new instructions, is to befriend as many people as you can. And it wouldn’t hurt if they are high-level state functionaries, secretaries in a ministry, MPs of any – I repeat any – party, right or left, or the editors of influential newspapers – no matter how reactionary. The more reactionary, the better. As far as I’m concerned, they can be capitalist pigs. Just befriend them. Win their confidence.’
‘I am not worried about that,’ said Pápai, and Takács took note of the reappearance of the little word Pápai had introduced into the conversation five minutes earlier. He knew that denials are affirmations of sorts.
‘But you should be,’ said Takács theatrically. ‘I warn you to be alert all the time. Do your job as best you can. We will not interfere, but please be alert. And here are the instructions.’
He handed Pápai an envelope.
‘Read them carefully, learn them by heart and burn them. Today.’
A stupid little ritual, he thought, to make the agent feel more important.
‘We shall have a little conversation in order to go over the details in a week or so. But this is not a spy novel, comrade, and you are not a dog on a leash.’
He wondered why he had said that. What had made him think of a dog? He stood up quickly, his hand in the air between them. Pápai wasn’t sure if it was an invitation for a handshake. It wasn’t.
‘Good luck, comrade!’
Apart from the dull code name, they did leave him alone. As promised, they allowed him a little breathing room in the first days, weeks, months and even year. No one bothered him for any favours, either in London or in Budapest; he received no burdensome tasks, was ordered to no secret meetings. Instead he was on his own for a while, for the learning period, and he was a quick learner. He was handled by the Hungarian embassy as a kind of sleeper agent, a resident spy. He had no idea who the others were. Perhaps everybody at the embassy – every worker and every secretary, from the chauffeur to the gardener up to the ambassador himself. Perhaps even the wives. In critical situations it was of inestimable value if the wives were in the know, as all the manuals emphasized. But he had to watch his words, and that wasn’t easy, because his tongue was quick and his convictions strong.
* * *
Moments before Pápai left his son alone on Finchley Road that early spring afternoon, the two of them had stepped out of a nearby bakery. Pápai loved sweets. He ate all the time, this and that, here and there, spending most of his money on food. He was a gourmand. Maybe this partly explained why he was so overweight: the huge belly, the childish round face, the double chin. True, his wife also loved sweets, not only the figs and dates and halva of her native land, Palestine, but also (lots of) marzipan – made from her cabalistic fruit, the almond – as well as Cadbury chocolates filled with nuts and raisins, which she bought and consumed in formidable quantities after her long years of poverty and deprivation in Hungary.
But who doesn’t love sweets?
Popping into that little bakery in Canfield Gardens, near the Underground, had been one of the day’s more pleasant errands. Pápai had cooked up the plan knowing it would be an opportunity for a bit of chit-chat with the ladies who worked there, a chance to reinforce his son’s admiration for his father’s capacity to befriend strangers – especially women, women of any age. How he made them laugh! How he made them blush! he was a master of the dashing compliment. Now, back on the street, passing a single muffin between them as they munched away, Pápai was in the middle of regaling his son with the story of a prostitute in a brothel in Alexandria, where he’d been as a soldier. The two of them, the big man and the little boy, had paused in front of a branch of Marks and Spencer – loitering here, looking at
the displays in the windows, was one of the boy’s favourite pastimes – when a stranger, an elderly gentleman, approached. Well, not quite a true gentleman, but more the caricature of one, as if clipped from a 1930s magazine, a Clark Gable moustache above his colourless lips and comically formal manners.
‘I heard you speaking Hungarian,’ he said, raising his little green hunting hat. ‘Excuse me for interrupting.’ He was talking Hungarian, but his Hungarian sounded funny in the young boy’s ears: he recognized the words, but the man’s cheerful tone, forced mirth and manners were odd, an echo of some ancient tune on a crackling vinyl record. ‘And how do you like life here in London, in the free world?’ he asked Pápai, adding, ‘Will you stay?’ But this ersatz gentleman had chosen the wrong man, because instead of an affirmation, he received a mighty slap in the face, metaphorically at least. But before his angry tirade could begin, Pápai had to crack a joke: ‘In a country where they can’t make decent Coffee? Never!’ And then came the lesson he had to deliver to this grotesque old man who’d appeared from out of nowhere. Pápai lectured him in ready-made journalistic lingo about the exploitation of the English working class, the imminent fall of the British Empire, the inevitable decline of capitalism, the West German army training on English soil, the atomic bomb, the Common Market, and, yes, the United States of America and the military-industrial complex. Pápai knew how to deal with such people, how to hold them at bay. At least he was convinced he knew how to, and in this instance it seemed to work, for the man with the funny moustache withdrew abruptly. Tipping his green feathered hat, he very nearly ran away. When the man had vanished, Pápai, looking after him, muttered under his breath: ‘I know who sent you.’
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