Grabbing his son’s hand, he now headed towards the chemist’s on Finchley Road to get medication for his wife, and for the boy, who had had a minor accident the other day. And this was the moment when he began to sing. But, before that, he still had something to say, father to son.
‘These types don’t just pop up accidentally,’ he told his son in a serious tone. ‘I tell you, my son, and don’t forget this, that was an agent provocateur.’
Strange: he was talking to the little boy as an equal, and he didn’t care if the kid understood him or not. When they were by themselves he suddenly changed, treating his son as an alter ego, no matter that the boy didn’t understand half of what he said. He didn’t mince his words, he spoke from the heart, he confessed, he let on, he owned up, he avowed all the dirty little secrets of his life; he spoke freely, and he didn’t care a bit if his dear son understood it all or not. He treated him as an heir who will need to know where the family treasure is hidden – how many steps and in what direction from the old tree – when the time arrives.
But when they sat down as a family – he and his wife and all the children – he invariably switched back to normal, if it could be called normal: a funny, menacing, anxious figure who had no real authority over his children. His wife ran the business that was their household – keeping the flat in order and dealing with their landlord, talking to the milkman, chatting to the neighbours, arranging for an electrician to come, painting the rooms, buying the furniture, cooking the meals, deciding how to spend every penny. Pápai, despite his formidable intellect, his wit, his quick mind and his fluency in many tongues, was a strangely absent presence at home. There he became one of the children himself, the biggest of them all – sometimes the entertainer, sometimes the bully, sometimes the boss. His portly frame may have taken up a huge space in the flat, but this space was more or less empty. True, he used his scathing words and fast hands to discipline his children, and thought nothing of it, having himself been reared with the lightning-quick slaps that occasionally rained down on him from his loving but temperamental mother, Margit, a widow, whose only son he was. But he’d grown up without a father, and never truly learned what it was to be one.
‘The black girl in that dark room, you know . . .’ he said, continuing his tale of the Alexandria prostitute as his little boy stared longingly through the shop window at a painted, pug-nosed wooden Pinocchio with yellow hair and a little blue bonnet from which hung a tiny copper bell. How he yearned to get this puppet as a birthday present! ‘A woman from Nubia – know where Nubia is? Under Egypt, but they say it’s above Egypt, yes, over there everything is upside down, and the blackest people on earth live there, and they are so black you can’t see them at night. And did I tell you this?’ – Pápai suddenly cut short his own story, for he loved digressions – ‘The beautiful slender girl standing by our train in the desert, there was a bet about whether she was a he or a she, and someone threw a coin to her – or him? – and shouted that she should raise her rags to show us what was below them. Oh yes, we were betting on it, we were, and she saw the money flying her way through the air, and then she raised her rags as the train slowly moved on, and, wouldn’t you know it, that beautiful girl was indeed a boy, and how. He had quite an instrument, my son. But back to the Nubian girl in that dark room, that room which reeked of the unmistakable stench of Arab brothels in Egypt, so unpleasant at first, so enticing later. Well, she took that majestic gown of hers off her panther-like body and, wouldn’t you know it, she was shaved all over, not a single hair anywhere, know what I mean?’
It was at this moment that the Hungarian with the Clark Gable moustache had interrupted them. A little intermezzo that Pápai handled briskly and efficiently.
‘Where was I? Did I tell you about the soldier in the training camp who did nothing all day but pick up dry leaves in the courtyard? While picking them up he muttered to himself, “This is not it. This is not it” – and he threw the dry leaves away. He was sent to a doctor, and after three weeks he came out with a slip of paper in his hand, beaming, “This is it!” It was his discharge paper, and he left us for ever. And then there was a chap in the habit of helping himself to other people’s beer and then leaving the bottles lying about. He’d begin by asking, “Can I?” But, not waiting for a reply, he’d take a good long guzzle. Until one day another soldier, fed up with this brazen behaviour, prepared a special treat for him: after drinking a bottle of beer he pissed in it. He then sat down on top of a hill and set his bottle down. Well, the other chap came by and asked “Can I?”, and as usual he took a good long guzzle without waiting for an answer. But never again. Oh, that face!’ Pápai laughed, still amused by this scene he’d either heard of or had really seen. ‘I myself never drank beer and never smoked a single cigarette, no, I always gave my ration to others – for money, you know. So I was rich then, I could travel to see your mother. And, by the way, did I tell you about that girl I took in my lap, a very sweet girl? We were kissing, and suddenly she farted, and that fart rolled all the way down my trousers, like a marble, all the way to my shoes. I could never kiss that girl again. Why? I don’t know. Anyhow, this black Nubian girl, what breasts she had, full breasts, and rosy lips, and the blackest of eyes. Well, when I saw that she was shaved, you know, I couldn’t do a thing – yes, that was it for me. What a shame! She was the queen of the brothel, but I could do nothing, you understand? We used to go to the brothel after school back in Hungary. I had a special price, you know: the madam loved my rosy cheeks, pinching me whenever she saw me. She was an old lady with huge gold earrings, painted like an old doll. One day she led me into a room that had a hole in the wall behind a painting. Yes, she took me in there at half price just to take a peep and see what the others were doing. And a sister of a classmate worked there, too, and we all tried her, we did, just for fun.’
Pinocchio in his short blue trousers and red shirt was still smiling at the little boy.
But then Pápai grabbed his son’s hand, pulling the boy away from the shop window as he headed off and began to sing to himself – of all songs, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. He didn’t have time to think about a puppet – he had other worries. Chaotic plans filled his head, irresolvable decisions to be made, moments of clarity and confusion furiously following one another.
And then his son, his favourite, told him that he was an idiot.
* * *
That morning Pápai had arrived at 6.30, after only three hours’ sleep – sweating and out of breath, having taken a taxi to get there on time – at MTI’s Fleet Street office. There, to his great astonishment, he found his colleague, the old guy, ‘the old reactionary’, as Pápai not very affectionately used to call him during confidential conversations with his wife in the marital bed after midnight. Well, the old reactionary was already sitting by the telex machine, busily typing away, not even looking up at Pápai but only murmuring something that could be taken as a greeting. But of course it wasn’t a greeting. It was a curse. Things had unmistakably deteriorated in the past month.
A few months earlier Pápai’s boss himself, the president of the Hungarian News Agency, Comrade Barcs – originally Bartsch, but Hungarianizing the German was not a bad idea after the Second World War – had come to London to set Pápai straight on what the problem was with the news Pápai was sending home from London, and why it mostly landed in the wastepaper basket after emerging from the telex machine in Budapest, in MTI’s grey building on Naphegy, a leafy residential hill beside the block of flats within which was the permanent residence of Pápai’s family. Yes, Pápai had seen MTI headquarters every day, under the Buda Castle, even after being chased out of the Agency.
The explanation was in fact more like an execution. Pápai felt as if he were standing before a firing squad.
From that day on, the old reactionary – that seventy-six-year-old man with perfect English manners who’d lived in London since the Twenties and had done all he could to make it his home– used a different tone with P�
�pai. Dr Rácz was performing a careful balancing act: the Hungarian embassy had recruited him once again during the post-1956 years of consolidation to demonstrate to the world that Hungary was ‘opening up’, and his neutral and ‘progressive’ attitude was highly valued. Ever since the boss had visited, Dr Rácz knew exactly the fate of this ‘fat guy’, this ‘obstinate, obtuse and obsolete figure’ as he used to call him, with a fine sense of irony, adding, rolling his eyes, ‘And that is an understatement.’ Yes, Rácz knew that the days of this colleague, whom he never considered a real colleague, were numbered. He was rude to him, and could not forgive Pápai for forcing him to be rude.
It was a rather complex and sophisticated manoeuvre on the part of Comrade Barcs, who wasn’t a Party member, but was naturally on intimate terms with the regime’s intelligence service. A puppet-member of the Hungarian parliament, he had sat on the jury of the most infamous show trial in Eastern Europe, the Rajk trial. He must have known perfectly well that Forgács was Pápai. He had to tread carefully. Before acting, he had to prove to the Intelligence Bureau – because even a matter such as the appointment of a common-or-garden foreign correspondent was approved at the highest levels of the Party – that parachuting Pápai into the serpent’s nest of the Hungarian News Agency had been a big mistake. He also had to defend his staff. Having been successful in his previous role, as president of the Hungarian Football Association, Comrade Barcs was acutely aware of the importance of gaining the confidence of his staff, and at MTI it was of course made up mainly of Party members, along with some non-members who were all affiliated with, and tested and trusted by, the regime. To appease them, Comrade Barcs had to undo Pápai, but to do so he had to prove to the intelligence service why he was unsuited for the job. The painstakingly precise letters he’d written preceding the boss’s visit, which we shall not quote in detail, contain a shrewd observation deserving of our attention. This was apart from Barcs’s efforts to provide cover for MTI’s grumbling staff, who from the beginning had sought to hinder Pápai’s efforts to become a foreign correspondent, and who, failing in this, had sought to annihilate him altogether once he had been nominated as chief of the London bureau. Pápai was an intruder, a virus, an alien body put there by the Party and the intelligence service; he was the hated ‘parachutist’. He had to be undermined. Destroyed. But it was not as simple as that. Barcs had to have connections to do so. And here he found Pápai’s weak point.
Barcs had detected in Pápai’s reports a paranoid tendency to see conspiracy even where there was none: a cabal, a plot of international news organizations, of seemingly opposed parties. Pápai was constantly trying to make news out of news-making itself; that is, of nothing, or rather, of something that had no real substance. As Barcs saw it, Pápai was neglecting a genuine correspondent’s real investigative work. And so Barcs accused him of filling some of his reports with suppositions, guesses and obscure references to unnamed sources. As for Pápai, he honestly admitted some of his mistakes – he wasn’t stupid, after all. He knew what he was doing: he had remained a fighter, a revolutionary, all his life. Some stuff even seemed to have been made up, invented on the spur of the moment within a narrow ideological framework. As a result, Pápai’s stories were, on more than one occasion, about the world-wide conspiracy of Manichean powers to destroy the forces of good – better known as the Soviet Union, the Socialist Camp, the Sacred Aim of Global Communism. This attitude of Pápai’s, who was otherwise a professional, was doubtless reinforced by the new, secret role he had to play, even if it was theoretical in the beginning.
Leading the double life of an intelligence agent – the paranoia a secret agent had to cultivate! – had become a sort of spiritual burden on Pápai, exacerbating the constant tension within him. Not that every Hungarian journalist who became a secret collaborator of the notorious II/3 – Department II/3 of the Interior Ministry, that is, which from 1963 was re-dubbed III/1 – was destined to wind up in a lunatic asylum. And yet it is not wholly unreasonable to assume that this double life of his heightened his tendency for paranoid thinking. He arrived at his Fleet Street office like some animal being chased by a predator – sweating, breathing heavily – and here was Dr Dezső Károly Rácz, sitting at the telex machine, busily typing up his report. Pápai was exasperated.
‘When can I use the telex?’
‘How should I know? Come back later.’
There stood Pápai, in the middle of an awakening London, on busy Fleet Street early one morning, thrown out of his own office, not knowing where to go, where to turn. In a few hours he had to be in Parliament, where an important session would be underway; he had to do his job, he had to go on, as a man with an amputated leg forgets what has happened to him, continues as if everything were normal, feeling the intolerable phantom pain in the missing limb. Pápai was losing touch again with the world, losing the solid ground under his feet.
Call my wife and ask her? This thought flashed through his mind, but, shivering in the early-morning breeze, he refrained from acting on it. He had to eat something quickly, anything, just to calm his nerves.
And he had one more very good reason to be nervous.
A scandal had erupted in his own household a few days earlier, and it was approaching its climax. It had started when his perhaps over-inquisitive wife had opened an envelope and read a letter her niece – a guest in their home, living with them for a few weeks as an au pair in London to perfect her English – had written, but not yet sent, to her parents back in Hungary. She was a lucky girl. After an almost year-long fight among the relatives about who would send their daughter to stay with them, she was the chosen one. She had won, and now her presence made the Pápais’ almost comfortable, idyllic home in Hampstead just as crowded and disorderly as their flat in Budapest had been, where one could not move about without bumping into someone. It was not easy to keep four children in a three-room London flat. Conflicts invariably erupted: the bigger kids needed space of their own, and nobody could have any privacy without some sacrifice or other. Neither Pápai nor his wife had a room of their own. Yes, they were used to it. But the kids were everywhere, and hysterical arguments flared up every day. And of course the children brought friends home, and there were always guests from different parts of the world. In short, the London flat was full to the brim, and the food in the fridge invariably ran out sooner than expected, along with the money. Now, with the niece living there, things were even more of a squeeze, and the parents’ nerves were fraying.
And then the scandal. Pápai’s wife happened upon the letter, which her niece had left lying around, and which she – perhaps not so inadvertently – had then read. The contents scandalized her. Yes, the childish complaining about the circumstances of her home was like salt rubbed into her wounds. The fact that there was at least a grain of truth in the vicious caricature the niece had written to satisfy her parents – who already had a bad opinion of Pápai and company – made it hurt all the more. Now, the niece’s parents had always made a good show at family gatherings back in Hungary of being diplomatic: they had never been the ones, for example, to start a shouting match about what and how a decent Jew should do and think about Israel. But Pápai’s wife felt, not without cause, that this letter was an act of treason. After all, feeling obliged to swallow the bitter pill and take in the noisy girl, who in any case wasn’t her favourite relative, she had sacrificed much. Pápai’s wife was aware that she might have been overreacting, but she was on edge, knowing perfectly well her husband’s precarious situation at the Hungarian News Agency, and trying to soothe him every night at home. No, there was no other solution: the girl had to go, she must be sent home. It wasn’t an easy decision, but Pápai’s wife was adamant.
Well, it could happen in any family. But the story had a twist. And this was Pápai’s secret – a secret he didn’t even dare share with his wife. Checkmate.
Where am I again? thought Pápai, on Finchley Road, before singing a song:
It’s a long way to Tippe
rary,
It’s a long way to go.
It’s a long way to Tipperary
To the sweetest girl I know!
Goodbye, Piccadilly,
Farewell, Leicester Square!
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,
But my heart’s right there.
I am at the starting point again. Nowhere. I am a nobody once more.
Now, the niece – the one who’d written that malevolent letter describing in rather rude terms the Pápais’ family life in London – had not quite accidentally befriended the future wife of an up-and-coming young English historian. It so happened. And it so happened, too, that the latter had just published a rather successful book, The Appeasers. And this historian, since visiting Budapest a year earlier, had been, it so happened, in the crosshairs of Hungarian intelligence. He was, after all, something of a leftist –a communist almost. In this respect he was not unlike many young scholars at Cambridge and Oxford. But, belonging as he did to an upper-class family, it so happened that he also had good connections with the British Conservative government. Hence he had access to government archives. He was, then, ideal material for a spy. During his Budapest visit, therefore, Hungarian intelligence had ‘befriended’ him, by way of agents masquerading as historians or historians who were in fact agents. These contacts had subsequent rendezvous with the young man in Vienna and Paris and had sent him friendly postcards which he’d answered warmly. Indeed, he seemed to understand exactly what was at stake, and all seemed to be working out quite well. He was candid in his critiquing of the British political system. He enjoyed his stay in Budapest a great deal. He had many friends there, at least he thought so. And he already had a code name in the dossiers: ‘Carrel’.
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