– MRS PÀPAI’s situation, circumstances24
On arriving I handed a bouquet of flowers to MRS PÁPAI.25 At the start of the conversation MRS PÁPAI said she is suffering from lung cancer, that it is because of the serious illness that her hair has fallen out and her face and body are swollen.26
She has regular treatment, and according to the doctors they’ve managed to halt the spread of the cancer.27
MRS PÁPAI complained of being in great pain and said her condition is increasingly hard to bear, and because of this her husband is still in a sanatorium, for she herself is unable to take care of him.28 Another big problem for her alongside her illness is that her daughter who has worked in Moscow is coming home at year’s end and she has to find a flat for her.29
She plans to trade the flat on Kerék Street for two smaller ones, thereby solving the housing problem.30
Turning attention to our specific request, I asked MRS PÁPAI to prepare a review of the contents of the articles on two pages of a newspaper.31
MRS PÁPAI accepted the assignment, agreeing to prepare the translations as her condition allows.32
We agreed to telephone each other in the middle of October.
The meeting, which cost 100 forints, ended at 5:20 pm.
Assessment:
MRS PÁPAI is aware that she suffers from an incurable disease, and so she has, practically speaking, settled her account with her life and wishes to pass what time she has left living with as few problems as possible.33
she knows that her condition could turn definitively critical at any moment, which is why she aims to leave behind stable circumstances.34
Recommendation:
I recommend that for MRS PÁPAI’s translation/review work, we pay her 1,000 forints on receipt of the translation, to be charged to the account of Interior Ministry Department III/I-7.35
Dr József Dóra, Pol. Lt.
INTERIOR MINISTRY
TOP SECRET
Department III/I-3
RE: The case of MRS PÁPAI (CN)
MEMORANDUM:
Budapest, 28 December 1985
On 27 November 1985 MRS PÁPAI was hospitalized in serious condition,36 and on 30 November 1985 she died.37 From an operative standpoint we request to keep it in the archive. MRS PÁPAI had been in contact with our services since 1975, and in 1979 Comrade BEIDER classified her as a secret colleague.
Recommendation:
I recommend that we place her materials in the archive. Dr József Dóra, Pol. Lt.
INTERIOR MINISTRY TOP SECRET
Department III/I-3
Re: The matter of MRS PÁPAI (CN)
Authorized by me:
Dr Kálmán Kocsis, Pol. Capt.
head of department
Re: Archiving of CN MRS PÁPAI’s dossiers
RECOMMENDATION
Budapest, 28 December 1985
I recommend the archiving of vols. I of Recruitment and Work dossiers no. Z 2959 of CN MRS PÁPAI. (No live files remain.)
The dossiers contain no data on hostile individuals.38
II
Bruria and Marcell
Hangman
They handed me a rope,
I sought out the tree.
They didn’t say it was a joke,
And so a hangman I came to be.
I prepared to execute myself: I was
A humane hangman, and how,
Strung up on a verdant bough.
Aphrodite
Already in the crowded market in Athens
And then near Paphos too
He traipsed off
Strayed wandered fell away
The boy lagged behind vanished
stepped from the stage turned the corner
went under the ground
Perhaps in Paphos – or not in Paphos
after all – but already in Piraeus –
in Piraeus too
Like someone wanting to shake her off
get rid of that beautiful figure
Brutally
As if there would be nothing
to talk to her about
On the tar- and oil-splotched quay
Where grey waters rocked all the ships gently
In Limassol they caught a cab
Twelve hours they had before departure
And the only worthy sight in Piraeus after all
was the Parthenon far far away not the
horrible port city of Piraeus with that lovely name
When from deep within the noisy lazy grimy
sluggish city he caught sight of the Parthenon
up on the peak his heart pounded –
That it exists in reality and not just in pictures! –
He was struck by lightning as they say
in novels
His heart skipped a beat as they say
in novels
Though the Temple of Pallas Athena did not yet flutter
with snow-white columns up there on the Acropolis
But was black from soot from grime
neglected
Beyond the Yugoslav border beyond passport control
beyond customs
The beautiful figure
When they remained alone in the compartment
Whose walls had colour photos behind framed glass the Elisabeth
Bridge the Parliament Building the beach in Füred on
Lake Balaton
So they were still home in a sense even if
beyond the border too
The beautiful figure
took the dollars from her stockings
Thick brown proletariat stockings he remembers
as if it had happened today
His mother kicked off her shoe and pulled the stocking
off her right leg
It was a strange moment
Both of them blushing
His mother from the lie he from the stockings
which he could indeed have seen every day
Also his mother’s thighs strewn with freckles
For his mother wasn’t a bashful sort
Sometimes showing herself undressed
in front of her kids – ashamed neither of
her enormous breasts nor her white skin
nor her beauteous hips
Ashamed before her family
neither of her beauty nor its ruins
What made them both blush nonetheless
was the comedy in which his mother
being a loyal subject
was compelled to play
The money stashed away – for the exotic trip
could not even have happened
had it not been for his parents both being
professed communists the system’s building blocks
The journalist and the nurse
Commies who spoke up at party meetings
But dollars had to be tucked away
The two of them had to cheat like everyone else
Indeed it was this that later drove his dad mad
He smuggled a white Mercedes over the border
for a colonel
From then on he was on watch for them to come
and take him away
She blushed – the beautiful figure – while removing
the wad of dollars from her stockings
Blushed and broke out laughing –
Her laughter – that of a Cossack on a horseback
trotting up the marble staircase of the Czar’s Winter Palace –
It was closer to neighing
She got the better of them she had the money
for the boat that took them to Haifa via Cyprus
from Piraeus
To the land of the ancestors
From where she’d exiled herself
Someone looked in from the corridor
The cabbie got twenty dollars at the port of Limassol
That garrulous scruffy thickly mustachioed man
Who got by with twenty-five words of English
So that’s what those bills hidden in her stockings were for
For a tour of the island that the Green Line had already
split in two
Turks became Greeks and Greeks became Turks
five times in the madness
Twenty dollars for Mother and son
to look at Aphrodite’s birthplace
Even Richard the Lionheart aka Cœur de Lion
had also passed there much later to be felled
by an arrow through the shoulder
And which a careless surgeon the “Butcher”
tore from his flesh
The wound turning gangrenous
All this had happened at the castle of Châlus-Chabrol
But he forgave the crossbow-wielding boy
who took revenge for his father and two brothers
And in the arms of his mother
Richard gave up his ghost
To brush her off unmercifully –
so did the boy with his mother
At the market where the smiling young
waiter in a green outfit and unbuttoned white shirt
delivered cups of coffee on a bronze tray
with dancing steps among the cars
and with a toothy grin
Mother and son listening to the driver
pointing all the time and flailing his arms
explaining to them in Paphos that it was here
that Aphrodite had been rising from the foam
On the desolate rocky seacoast
Crawling now with tourists
In the February lights wafted by Zephyrus, the West Wind
And then the mother was tense, her skin grew taut because
Her boy was stubbornly silent vanishing
into an underground chapel
Woven through with the roots of a huge terebinth tree
An old lady Solomoni the Jewish woman
as she was called
They say she later became Christian
So she built this church around this tree
after some mercenaries of Cœur de Lion
slaughtered her seven sons
And now the superstitious locals
knotted handkerchiefs on the tree
Alone already down into the cellar
went the boy
The beautiful figure wasn’t interested in
icons of saints or sanctuary lamps
I’m an atheist she pouted after a full day of silence
Her son’s silence an arrow boring into her heart
And down there in the dusky light
to which steep steps led
And where the boy remained alone with the icons
and a stray altar in the musty darkness
Between saltpetre-splotched walls
Where he could hear a gurgling brook
He stood there for ever before the picture of an unknown
Saint who’d died a martyr’s death
A picture a clumsy hand had evidently cut
from some newspaper and which had
curled up from the dampness
On the table the scissors still lay with
A loaf of bread broken in two
A cat was running past his legs
God
Silence darkness and murky light
He has stood there ever since
In that stubborn silence
That followed their mutual solitude
The moist breath of Zephyrus wafted her
over the waves of the loud-moaning sea
in soft foam
to the island of Cyprus
Marcell
Don’t sing Dad they’ll think you are a fool
I said to him on Finchley Road
And then he got so mad he left me
On the street and I wasn’t even eight
Though until then he’d held my hand
In an intimate moment just before amid
The heady scent of fish and chips we broke through
Like an Il-18 Soviet turboprop through the clouds
He told me a tale about an Alexandria whore
More than once in front of his son
MTI’s London correspondent
Anatomized his dealings with women
An ebony woman
A Babylonian harlot with teeth like corals
The jewel of the brothel its Koh-i-Noor was
For whom all the men stood in line
And when at last his turn came
So Dad regaled me
He already lay sprawled on the sagging iron bed
And watched her undress
He regaled me more
While the din of the street filtered in
Just like Gustave Flaubert in Egypt
Who for weeks concerned himself only
With what the woman felt – the woman he fucked
In a boudoir on the banks of the Nile
And the goddess pausing as she stood by the bed
This so supple panther of Nubia
Pulling her gauzy robe over her head
Two bronze loops alone danced on her ears
And taking everything off she was so totally naked
That she couldn’t have been more totally naked
Because after all what’s more said Dad
In that goosebumped voice of his
Still abuzz with that perverse ecstasy
She was shaved all over
Not a strand of hair on that black body
Blacker than the blackest night
Skin on skin a sparkling land
Without even a tiny blade of grass
For one’s eyes to rest upon
Only the little black slit
From which the pink
Labia shone like an orchid
At twilight
There was a man in Liverpool
Who had a red ring on his tool
He went to the clinic
But the doctor a cynic
Said
Wash it it’s lipstick
You fool
He didn’t do
What a man’s honour demands
Of a British private who’s seen a lot
Even on being shaken out of sleep
Dad told me on Finchley Road
Wading through the scents of a foreign land
Midway through life’s journey
In London one autumn afternoon
Twenty-one years after his silly swoon
Past eight I was
The jester of the Young Pioneers’ Paul Robeson den
Formed by children of the Embassy
Named after the famous black singer
Who lived in exile in London at the time
My dad began his tale two blocks earlier
In front of Marks and Spencer
Where we’d taken in the toy display
But then he left me there grinding his teeth
Because I dared say to him see above
Don’t sing Dad they’ll think you are a fool
How was I to know that daddy was a spy
An atrocious spy but still a spy my dad
And Pápai was the name that Poppa had1
And perhaps this was precisely why he sang
So loudly in the middle of Finchley Road
Afternoon among the pedestrians
Perhaps he was humming an English march or else
Forgetting simply that I too was there
But his desire deflated all at once
In that whorehouse of Alexandria
Terror not ecstasy filled him
When he saw
This extremity of bareness
Surprising both him and that woman too
Who licked the edge of her mouth
With the ready-to-pounce calm of
A wild Nubian panther
Then pulling the clasp on his lovely uniform
Nice and tight and putting his cap on his head lopsided
That cap bear
ing the British Empire’s coat of arms
The English crown on top
Montgomery’s army2
And whistling he headed down the street
My dad the good soldier
After paying without a blink
In mysterious snow-white Alexandria
When he spoke everyone listened
A merry pyknic fellow that he was
When he spoke people laughed
He collected jokes in a notebook3
And other information
Let’s say about the Iraqi industrialization
Or say about Colonel Gaddafi
Who received him in a tent
He wrote fast and read fast
With two fingers he typed
Touch typing at that
I didn’t know my dad was a spy
Nor why
Never did he reveal to me what else
He’d been up to in Alexandria4
Other than fighting the Germans that is
Who as well known were not there
And other than how as a postman in love
He delivered my mother’s letters to
The hand of his main-main-main rival
On a sun-scorched Alexandria street
Cavafy’s city
Foamy waves in the port
The two men exchange a couple of words
He tells some ribald jokes and waves goodbye
Here even a Stalin quote wouldn’t be misplaced who knows
Cavafy is dead
They take a hard look at each other
Sometimes I imagine the scene
A girl leans out of a careening jeep screaming with joy
And is greatly surprised that she will be raped a bit later
Tom was a communist and a soldier and English and blond
and kind of barmy
And the love of my mother’s life
to her death.
Sisyphus began rolling the boulder even on
The migrant ship
The handsome boy with thinning hair
Who enrolled in the law school
In Bucharest in nineteen thirty-eight
If I’m not wrong he didn’t even complete half a semester
No diploma no nothing
He couldn’t complete a thing
I didn’t know he was a spy my dad
And he wasn’t very good at that
Not even later did he finish it in Jerusalem
When in a slapdash manner instead of chemistry studies
He fabricated phosphorescent paint
And with that wrote off chemistry
Turning night into day he worked in great secrecy
Mixing phosphorus in I-don’t-know-what
At the not-yet so world famous university
He was concocting not for the Party but
From sheer diligence so that
No Live Files Remain Page 15