Pápai – and this was to be his first real job – had to furnish information about ‘Carrel’, and he had to somehow manipulate the niece’s movements in London. A perfect task for a new spy to prove he is up to the job. Alas, it fell to him in the moment of his effective dismissal from the Hungarian News Agency, where his days were cruelly numbered. What a mess! Still, he had to make an effort, or show that he was making an effort, and he hoped, perhaps not without reason, that if he succeeded somehow, he would be kept on as a correspondent as well. The comrades would talk to Barcs on his behalf. He could gain time. A glimmer of hope, and now this thunderbolt: the insolent little niece – the ideal bait for a big, big catch – had to be sent back to Budapest, back to her parents on the first plane. There was no way out of it. She couldn’t stay a day longer. How could he explain his fix to his wife when he could not tell her the plain truth? Madness.
She looked at him in disbelief. ‘You want her to stay?’ He tried to convince her, but she cut him short. ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Never!’
She was a wild one. She could disappear in an instant. She was not afraid of scandal. She was not a frightened little thing. She was a wild cat when she wanted to be. One Friday evening when she was sixteen, a young communist, she’d gone home, into her room, and turned on the radio. Her father appeared at once in her room, turned off the radio and reminded her that it was Sabbath, the time of silence and reflection, and the loud music would certainly disturb the religious feelings of their neighbours. He was once a believing Jew but not any more – a cautious atheist perhaps – and, like a schoolmaster, gave a pedantic lesson to his disobedient daughter about the respect they owed to other people’s feelings. They had a heated discussion. She, a revolutionary, shouted into his face, ‘All religion is a lie, a remnant of the old system, opium for the people!’ And she turned on the radio again. She wanted to listen to Beethoven. And then the unbelievable happened. Her father slapped her face. The classic Makarenko slap. He’d never done this before and he would never do it again. He regretted it instantly, this gentle man, this teacher who had never hit any of his pupils, had never lost his temper, or only once, and that one time just had to be with his beloved, wildcat daughter. And then she ran, a gazelle, through Tel Aviv. She jumped onto a military truck and vanished in the north of the country. She was a runner too, an athlete. The fastest in her school. She wasn’t very studious, but was a dreamy, book-devouring idealist. And she ran away to become a tutor in an orphanage-camp somewhere in the north, close to the Golan. And it didn’t take long for her to fall in love with a boy who was, in her eyes, as beautiful as Michelangelo’s David. A real prince. And he was a Christian. She had a thing for lovers who were out of the ordinary. A Christian Arab. Who came to fetch her one evening on a black horse. She jumped onto the back of the horse behind him and they vanished in the darkness. She was not to be blackmailed, no, she was not to be tamed by anyone.
* * *
Lieutenant Takács was not satisfied. The conversation in the secret flat in Budapest had not been pleasant. Lieutenant Takács didn’t give a damn about Pápai’s personal problems or his official problems. What he needed was his co-operation. Pápai didn’t even write anything down, as he’d promised. Takács had to question him slowly, methodically, and, what was more, he would have to write the report himself, and that didn’t make him happy. Sensing Pápai’s distractedness, he simply thought that Pápai was a lazy man, and he told him so. The business involving ‘Carrel’ was too important to be thwarted by a lazy, superficial agent like Pápai.
Little did he know that every little thing Pápai told him about his wife’s niece – and Takács practically had to use pliers to tear out each one – was spiritual torture for him.
Failure again. Again failure.
An old family feud bound Pápai’s tongue more strongly than any Sicilian code of silence. His wife’s family was, at least theoretically, also his family: ‘my phantom family’, as he put it. And yet this family was only the phantom pain of his own, for ever lost family. It was little more than the shadow of a family, a family in effigy, a prosthetic limb of a family, one which never gave him the respect and sympathy he so craved. No, instead he suffered their contempt, opposition, denigration: he was never, never accepted by them.
And here was an opportunity for revenge – but in a strange way Pápai felt utterly debilitated, unable to speak a word. Lieutenant Takács did not understand why this otherwise loquacious journalist, this communist with such a healthy sense of humour and broad knowledge of the world, was behaving like a child keeping mum, or, rather, a stuttering, muttering child who contradicted himself with every word painfully drawn out of him.
But Takács, the able lieutenant of Department II/3, didn’t know that he was talking to a heap of ash, a shadow of a man who’d lost all faith in the world and in himself. He was not a Jew, and he was not not a Jew either. He was both. And nothing.
All his wife’s aunts and uncles had followed her father and mother to Palestine in the Twenties, but some of them, like the parents of the insolent niece, had gone back to Hungary or thereabouts at the worst possible moment, between the two wars, not having found life attractive enough in the Palestinian Mandate of the British Empire, or simply having been thrown out by the colonial powers for subversive activities. The Brits were in a precarious position, caught between the Arab and Jewish populations, and when they encountered illegal immigrants who happened to be communists, they were unmerciful.
The family’s strangely contrary travels, the opposing directions they took, crossed and mirrored each other. When Pápai, as a young man, first escaped the approaching apocalypse in 1939, stepping onto the train in Gara de Nord, Bucharest, his mother, who had furnished him with a passport and money and all the goods she could heap on her beloved son for his daring journey to the Middle East, told him, to explain why she was staying behind, ‘They won’t hurt women.’ No, she had no idea of the horrors that would engulf her. Even as Pápai went one way, half of his future wife’s family had done the opposite, returning only to suffer the horrors of the fascist regime. But, in a strange twist of events, they all miraculously survived. During which time, as they said later, he was living a happy life in sunlit Palestine. This, then, became a reproach and an accusation: how could he oppose Zionism if he had never himself experienced on his body and in his soul the atrocities of the war? To him, this was the cruellest argument. Why would he come back with his young wife after the war? Why would he demand the support of a family if he was being so irrational? Why did they come back? Why didn’t they stay there?
But, when they were still in Palestine, his newlywed wife had written in English to a friend, describing it as hell, nothing but hell:
Tonight I write to you with a fresh feeling of resistance, with a stronger will to struggle and with a clear knowledge of our difficult task here! You know that Palestine today is a hell. With all its smallness it contains all the ingredients necessary to make it a great camp of suffering. This is what the English wanted and this is how they succeeded in their aims. There is no use to write more about the present situation, what you know, with some exaggeration, from other papers is enough. You have only to interpret it, to read in between the lines. So we live here and sometimes a flash of thought demands from us to run away from here. It is easy to hide in a mountaineous village, where no paper ever reach, or to go to Ethiopia and work there in a small village. It is all too easy. But we must face it. Without facing it we shall agree to the foreign rule, to the ruthless crazy imperialism. And you know: we don’t want to run away, because it is against our class-consciousness. Not because it is easier to fight but because we want to live with a clear conscience.
I am sorry for the long sentences, but you understand me, dear friend.
I work in the hospital for a long day . . . It is so far from the town. But it is good, I have work and earn my living. My husband studies, but unfortunately much of his time is exhausted in other things than chemistry .
. . You know the constant need for people . . . and it is too sad that it is not realized that he must finish his studies well. Science is not a joke! It cannot be done superficially.
Strange words. But this is how they felt, two young communists with ideals in their obstinate heads. She was a good girl, Bruria, a young woman of conviction who could write a clear political analysis of the situation, who did in fact write a letter about the ‘burning problems of Palestine’ – on 26 December 1946, exactly one week after her marriage – that is striking for matching the tone of some of the reports Mrs Pápai would submit to Department III/1 thirty years later:
Now I am in Jerusalem, living in a curious suspension. I can start to work next week in a job that will give me many opportunities to develop and teach. It is in a Child-Welfare-Centre, in the old city of Jerusalem. It is the poorest and dirtiest section of Jerusalem and may be of Palestine. The only objection to start the work is the extremely low salary. It is 9 pounds monthly, with the additional pay for high cost of living it will be about 17–19 Palestinian pounds. It is less than minimum for us. My husband is a student of chemistry and he does not earn except occasionally by working after his studies. It is truly a problem. It seems that I’ll have to continue a hospital job, where I’ll earn more, but where I shall not get any satisfaction. Anyhow all is quite pale in comparison with the burning problems of Palestine. The X. congress of the P.C.P. [Palestine Communist Party] has formulated its decisions in a small pamphlet. I’ll send it to my sister. Please ask her to translate especially those parts which concern the Jewish and Arab relationship. I hope that soon the Party will send an English translation. It will be good to translate it to French.
You will notice that the question of Immigration is formulated in a very tactical manner. The party under the present circumstance cannot find a way to bring the question in a more direct and open manner. I cannot agree, but at the same time my only place is with the C.P. I’ll work in the Y.C.L. [Young Communist League]
As you know probably from the newspapers, the Zionist congress in Basel completed its session without reaching any final decisions. The main discussions were around the question: ‘What imperialism should the Zionist movement choose for its protector? The British or American?’ The American sector in the congress is the most reactionary section of this jingoistic movement, and they had a majority. Now the Zionist activity will be operated on ‘American Orientation’. The ‘progressive’ parties, those who call themselves Marxists–Zionists, decided to move for Weizmann, who is for ‘British Orientation’. The end results are: Weizmann’s proposals to go to London’s sponsored ‘round-table’ for Palestine was defeated. The new ‘higher Zionist committee’ prepares new proposals for Zionist activities in the future. Most of the delegates in the congress are for continuation of the ‘illegal’ immigration into Palestine, and for new ‘settlement-movement’ which actually means new Zionist strongholds in different places in Palestine.
In all this political games the C.P. stands as the only anti-imperialistic factor, and is confronted by very difficult tasks. We are very weak in Jerusalem. We have not entered at all into the working-class circle. Our comrades have not developed yet the spirit of public, social worker. I think that Jerusalem is particularly difficult for our party work. It is a town with ‘comportments’, with a strange individualistic stamp on its people.
Nevertheless I’ll work hard and do my best.
It was the summer of 1947 when Pápai and his beautiful wife – his prey, who made men turn their heads in disbelief – got off the train that arrived from Prague at Keleti railway station. Leaving everything behind, they had escaped from war-torn Palestine, where they felt it was impossible for them to stay. For Pápai, this meant burning his bridges for the second time in his life. And so they arrived in Budapest, the land of hope, the ‘furnace of the future’, not knowing how they would thrive. They had jumped into the void. Her family had to take care of them, finding money for them and handing down furniture, but they were treated by some of her relatives as traitors. Traitors of Israel. It was a strange family, his wife’s. Pápai was an alien in their midst and remained so, a double traitor to the cause of world Jewry in their eyes. He struggled hard to prove that he was a man, a capable man, but all he had to show for himself after long years of struggle were his four children and a beautiful wife. Everything else was a sham, a fake. That is how he felt.
* * *
When, holding the hand of his son, he stepped out of 13 Netherhall Gardens, the famous Elm Tree House, and started down the hill in the pleasant breeze of a late spring afternoon, Pápai started to talk, and his son, although he’d heard some of these stories before, was happy to hear them again.
‘You know your grandma kicked me in the arse once? Did you know that, and why she did it?’
‘She kicked you in the arse?’
‘She did. She also broke an umbrella over my head when I brought shame on her on account of how I did in a school exam before all the other parents. As we stepped out the front door she began hitting my head with it. And it broke. And then she cried. And then we laughed. And then we returned home to find two ladies sitting in the living room, two boring old ladies who were collecting money for the Keren Kayemeth.’
The boy didn’t understand what Keren Kayemeth meant, but he adored words he didn’t understand. He played with them when he was alone, throwing them up into the air and watching them fall.
‘They were collecting money to buy land in the Promised Land. “A land without people for people without land,” as Mr Balfour so famously put it.’
The boy didn’t ask who this Mr Balfour was, but all was still well. It was good not to understand things.
‘Or maybe it wasn’t him who said it, maybe everyone was saying it back then, 1936, I remember the day, yes, they were having tea and talking about building a homeland for the Jews, and they said to my mum: “But there is nobody there. It is empty, it is a desert” – and when I heard this and I saw my mother opening her purse and giving them quite a lot of money, I simply asked, “But aren’t there any Arabs there?” And my mum had a fit of anger – she jumped up and kicked me right in the arse so hard that I flew out of the room like a ball. I was sixteen. Bang, right in the arse, she could have played for any football team with a kick like that, I can tell you. I was laughing, I enjoyed having a mum like her. Anyway, when the two old ladies left she was still a bit angry, though I wasn’t. She was baffled by what she’d done and already regretted it. She just couldn’t control herself, you know. So then she kissed me and gave me some money and said, “You idiot. They were my best clients, silly boy” – because the ladies came regularly to buy carpets from us, and my mum was the best businesswoman in the world, you know, after my dad died, and we were robbed of the little shop, Friedmann and Company, we were robbed by the Company, and my father always dreamed of renaming it Friedmann and Son, he told me, like in the Dickens novel Dombey and Son. And now my mother was left there, without a penny, and with me, and she started this business with a little peasant girl sent by her family to help her, yes, they started weaving carpets, carpets so beautiful that in the end she sold them even to the royal family in Bucharest, and we were quite rich, I was really spoiled, and the two ladies with their collection tin for the Keren Kayemeth bought from her regularly. And I remember that we had to visit my father’s tomb every year, on Rosh Hashanah.’
As Pápai and his son arrived at the foot of the hill where Netherhall Gardens meets Finchley Road, the boy started to muse over the words ‘Rosh Hashanah’. He didn’t ask what they meant. Distracted, he had meanwhile missed a few words his father had spoken.
‘Aren’t you listening?’
‘I am.’
‘So what is Rosh Hashanah?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You are right not to let it trouble you – it could be any day in the calendar. But all the same, it was at Rosh Hashanah, every year . . . in autumn, and it was usually quite cold already . .
. it was at Rosh Hashanah, in the kitchen, which was huge, because we had two big flats on the first floor, one being the workshop, where the girls wove the carpets, beautiful girls I liked to chat to and who were always singing. Anyway, it was at Rosh Hashanah every year, in the huge kitchen, that my mum told the maid . . . we had three maids, actually, one specially for me, who took me to school every morning . . . it was in that kitchen that she told the maid to bake ten crescent rolls. Know why it had to be ten?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, you know, the ten righteous men of the Bible, the Tzadikim. And we also went to the cemetery.’
They were already standing in front of the bakery in Canfield Gardens, but Pápai wanted to finish his story before going in. They should have gone to see the doctor first, because the son had had a little accident two days earlier: he’d fainted at the embassy after sipping from his mother’s cognac, and his father had carried him through the crowd on his shoulders. How good the boy had felt riding on the huge shoulders of his father among those lit-up faces all turned towards them, all the ladies looking at him. How proud he’d been of his father! And how proud of himself for fainting – yes, it was so nice to faint, everybody asking, ‘What happened with the little boy?’
‘And there were always beggars standing there in the cold, waiting for the rich folks to give them money, and my mum gave them the warm rolls, and they followed us to my father’s grave to pray with us, to that black marble grave which was so cold, you know, and I had to kiss it, every year I had to, and I hated kissing it – I was scared that my lips would freeze – but my mother insisted. Perhaps the only ritual she insisted on. Yes, in fact, the only ritual she ever insisted on.’
Silence fell upon them, Pápai and the boy. Pápai took a deep breath and started for the bakery’s entrance, almost forgetting that he was not alone. He looked back at his son for a moment.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I shall never forget it. The silence of all those tall, black men in the room. My father’s yellow face in the bed. Chrome yellow. A path opened up for me, a path made by the people standing on each side. I was only four, you know, and it was such a long way to his bed. And he was yellow, chrome yellow. I remember thinking, why is he so yellow? You know, when the big war broke out, he was already twenty-eight, and he didn’t want to go to the war. It was the First World War, you know, so he smoked two hundred cigarettes and swam through the icy Szamos River and almost died of fever, and ten years later he – you know, his family didn’t want him to marry my mother, because her family was so poor, it was a mésalliance in their eyes, a mésalliance. You know what that means?’
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