on the lake where Jesus walked on water
she tried to tell me something
that can not be said
like Arachne whom the angry Pallas Athena
turned into a spider
because she wove the gods’ sins more beautifully
or like Philomela with her tongue cut out
she wove a tapestry for her sister
so without words in pictures she could tell
what Tereus did to her in the cabin
he digs his hands through the girl’s locks painfully
twisting them back
slices off her tongue with an iron only its stump twitches
in her throat
squirming like a snake’s severed tail jumps about
on the ground
but even after this Tereus fulfils his unstoppable lust
his desire
on the girl’s violated body again and again
and again
she spins weaves jabs night after night
she weaves she plots out the picture
weaving in the cancer
weaving the Monster in the
until she arrives with her needle at
the moonlit blockhouse
the concrete tower
on whose windows
the moonlight gleams
Bruria
On the contrary the truth is
On the contrary the situation is
On the contrary what happened is
On the contrary I want to say
On the contrary when I believed
On the contrary when it occurred to me
On the contrary when when when
Just don’t be overcome with emotions
The situation is simply
Totally in spite of everything
If I may say
Diametrically opposed to all
But on the contrary she even on the train was
Even then
Not even then
And even so not like that
And from that moment on especially
III
Something More
When I hear it contended that the least sensitive are, on the whole, the most happy, I recall the Indian proverb: ‘It’s better to sit than to stand, it is better to lie down than to sit, but death is best of all.’
Nicolas Chamfort
There are things in life we can fathom only if they happen to us. There is no other way to understand them. Now, we may have some sense of what has happened if our imagination is sufficiently daring and wild, but we will understand it only if it actually happens to us. This is true even if we are unable or unwilling to explain what occurred, or if it can’t be explained, for not only does the explanation come nowhere close to lived experience, but it kills it, obliterates it.
One such event is our mother’s death. The death of a mother is a cosmic event. ‘The last link in the chain has snapped,’ a great Hungarian writer once telegrammed a famous actress on the passing of his mother. What last link was the writer referring to? The one that tied him to humanity? The one that gave his life meaning? Or perhaps a doctor informs you that you have cancer or that someone you’re very close to, someone you adore – a friend or your lover, say – has cancer. The doctor tells you the facts. But the truth is something else. You just sit there and stare straight ahead. Or the aeroplane you’re on is about to crash. Then you’ll definitely understand what’s happening. Even if you won’t be able to tell anyone. A happier variation on this theme is when you’re sitting in a car that tumbles off the road at 1.00 a.m. and somersaults three times over a snowy field. Silence. Dead silence. Someone stirs. No one has even a scratch. From then on you see the world differently. You needn’t mention it, but you know something you didn’t know until then.
Or consider this: a kind, smart, wonderful person, your aunt, to whom you’ve always turned for advice, wakes up one day and doesn’t know who on earth she is. Only then do you understand what Alzheimer’s is. A whole life seems to be captured in her smile, her body still evokes the person she was, the same heart still beats in her chest – only she, of all people, doesn’t know who she is. On the surface it’s not apparent that she’s no longer there. She holds a book in her hand just the way she always has, except that all day for months on end she has been reading the same page over and over. She is just as lovely as ever reading in the lamplight. Just as beautiful. She laughs out loud but doesn’t know her own name. It’s her and yet it isn’t her. If you knew and loved her, suddenly you will understand. The knowledge leaves you speechless. If you don’t know her and don’t love her, then it’s just a sad case, a news report from far away, a curiosity.
Or, yes, try this on for size: one very fine day – okay, not such a very fine day – it turns out that your mother was recruited (by the intelligence services of the communist regime). An acquaintance who by chance uncovered this information gives you a call. He has happened across a file. This is how such scenarios typically begin. The phone rings, the news hits you hard. It is a tiny little detail that III/I is not quite the same as what is known as III/III. You can try to spin it, but nobody will give a damn. No, no, wait a minute: III/I was not simply the same as III/III, it was even more of the same. My mother was a spy, an informant. She wasn’t. But she was. No. Yes. All right, then, she wasn’t an informant, but a spy. Not a real spy, but something like that. In fact a titkos munkatárs (secret colleague, SC). A tiny screw – or, better put, the final cog – in the machinery of a petty apparatus. A component that could never be too small. And couldn’t be more insignificant. And how you feel about every moment you spent with this tiny screw or cog, about every moment you passed in the company of this SC CN (fedőnéυ = code name; FN = CN) is changed. As if the laws of perspective and gravity could alter from one minute to the next. Lo and behold, they can change.
But this doesn’t simply change how you feel about the time you spent together. It renders all the other moments defenceless, too – there’s no longer any before and after – stripping them bare, annihilating the little intimacies in a family’s life – the first questions, the first steps, the first words, flavours savoured together, holidays spent together, Christmas Day, sprinkling women and girls at their front doors with eau de cologne on Easter Monday, the first day of school, getting your school report, playing pranks, telling tales, childish fibs, little miracles, Chinese paper pagodas and dragons that unfurl in boiling water, joy, sorrow, card games, falling in love, slurping tea with milk together, tunafish with sour cream, fried dough at food kiosks on the shores of Lake Balaton, a dab of marzipan on the tip of a knife, Kellogg’s Crispy Cornflakes, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, big fights, long bouts of sobbing, hayfever, Thomas Mann, noisy vindications of the only truth, visits to family and friends, the sniffles, toothaches, outings, her pouring hot oil in your ear at night, her massaging your temples, her singing lullabies in Hebrew and Hungarian, discovering the world, looking at family albums, idyllic summer evenings as insects buzz around you, Schubert, Toscanini, every single sound of every single piece of music we ever listened to together, every little sound in between, even the sound of silence. Everything is now suspect, especially beauty. Everything is now ordinary: broad-mindedness, generosity, self-sacrifice. There is a shadow over all of it, and it can’t be spoken about.
Nor can it not be spoken about.
A motley crew had gathered in the living room: from film and theatre directors and actors to manual labourers – everyone was there. The guests represented a cross-section of society at the time, all of this suggesting a considerable degree of ethnic and cultural tolerance. Who was it who made possible this brotherly, quasi-‘free university’ atmosphere? Their mum, that’s who – bringing order now and then by serving up more food, as well as cleaning the dishes and the rugs. Otherwise she didn’t interfere. Remarkably energetic and yet not authoritarian, that’s the sort of woman she was. Gentility and industry fused seamlessly in her. To this day I don’t k
now how she had time for everything and everyone.
One time she embroidered something for me, too. A minor miracle – she must have worked on it for months: gold, silver, blue, green, and red. It depicted a bird, a bird of paradise, which, according to legend, flies its whole life, alighting on the ground only at the moment of its death. Was this how she saw me? Or is this how she immortalized herself? All of this will remain a mystery, for she was a reticent woman. Although in this account I abide by the principle of discretion and refer to people by their first names or else anonymously, I can’t resist here giving her musical name, which seemed to come straight from the Old Testament: Avi Shaul Bruria. It was through her, perhaps, that I first came to appreciate gentility. She was a leftist in a unique and yet also characteristic way, though she spoke of her political convictions only rarely. For the most part, she drew her vocabulary from both everyday life and poetry.
This is how my mother was described by a long-dead friend of mine, ‘Dönci’, who had come from a very different background to me and went on to become the lead guitarist of the underground band Európa Kiadó.
* * *
Bruria had many admirers, so what I’m writing here will be, for them, a huge slap in the face; it will be disillusioning, immeasurably sad. So it is our mother who was this ‘secret colleague’ or ‘network individual’. Of course, there will be some for whom this will play quite nicely indeed. We said it from the start, they’ll say. Yes, we knew it without a doubt. So let’s howl it out. Let’s weep. Let’s sit down together and talk it over. Let’s talk it over one more time. Let’s talk it over ten more times, a hundred times, a thousand times. Let’s read through the dossiers. Why should I read through these dossiers? One is about her recruitment; the other, the work she did for them. Let’s learn a new language, a new vocabulary; let’s get to know more intimately a world that revolts us and makes us tremble, which makes the hair stand up on our necks and the blood freeze in our veins, which sees us wake in terror in the middle of the night; a world that discomfits us; a world that, until now, we’ve observed from such a comfortable distance. Those were always others. Other people it was always so easy to judge. It’s always others who get cancer. Always others who die in car crashes. And, now, here it is, under our skin, worse than a tattoo, because it is invisible.
And one more bad thing. Suddenly, despite everything, you think – is it the suffering that does it? Or maybe the pain? Or the shame? Because even now I often find myself at unexpected moments beset by a deep shame, turning red – you think that this is something exceptional, something extraordinary. But part of the tragedy is that it’s not exceptional. It’s depressing just how much the individual cases resemble each other. They’re all so banal. Nearly all of them start the same way and end the same way. Every single story is saturated with the monotony of the files, with the idiotic jargon of the secret services, of the state. The whole thing is like some freak of nature floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Cod liver oil. Which she gave us kids a tablespoonful of every night – swallowing it was mandatory.
These days at my place the musty odour of old paper permeates my room. I went in there not long ago and nearly suffocated. I must uncover every last snippet of every last letter, envelope, dossier, photo album and memory and look them over one by one. Here I sit in the middle of this stale odour, the same stale odour of the ancient dresser that used to be in our home. A childhood smell. I recognize it. The old papers, air-mail envelopes, yellowed newspapers, cut-out newspaper articles, brochures, postcards, photographs, IDs and certifications. Until now they were all over the place, in glorious disarray. I go about the flat, gathering them up, carrying them into my room. This is my second stab at understanding what happened. The first time was ten years after my mother’s death. The result was a novel, Zehuze. That’s when I began to bring order to the awful chaos. But there could be no order.
At the same time, in a perverse sort of way, this turn of events has an advantage, too. It casts a sharp light on your own story. The fact that everything is – must be – re-evaluated compels you to weigh everything once again, to scrutinize your life from a distance. You’ve been too close to your life, anyway, while living it, and so you haven’t had a chance to consider the broader connections. You might even call this an opportunity. Whether final or first, it doesn’t matter.
* * *
During the coffee-shop conversation – when I was supposed to find out who this certain family member of mine was who had been mentioned, anonymously, in the phone call – I was already sure, even before hearing her name, even if this was entirely, utterly impossible (and indeed it was out of the question, precisely because it was, well, absolutely out of the question), that it obviously was my mother all the same. But why was I so sure? Perhaps it was my memory of her quivering lips when I sensed that she wanted to say something? Something that was on the tip of her tongue, but in the end she didn’t say? A mute mother’s word.
If there’s going to be a tragedy, let it be a major tragedy. Now, I’d heard such rumours before – about my father, that is – but I’d swept them off me like breadcrumbs or cigar ash. I laughed them off. Why on earth would they have recruited a loyal communist like him, a stalwart believer in the system, a man of blind faith? He was, after all, someone who happily spouted those views which so many of his colleagues spouted only to fit in and all the while harbouring secret thoughts of a different sort – his journalist colleagues who fancied themselves real heroes solely because they dared to think something else, because they thought something other than what they said. This too is why Dad became a pariah among his colleagues. For this reason, at least, he had my respect: he wrote what he thought, even if I wasn’t crazy about it. The problem lay not only in the quality of his thinking, but in how wounded and simplistic his boneheaded dogmatism had rendered his otherwise witty style. He wasn’t the first smart person to be made stupid by his beliefs. ‘What Is Behind the News’ was the name of Dad’s column in the daily Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation). As a child I really liked the telephone logo above each article. When I happen upon one of his pieces nowadays I can’t bring myself to read even a single paragraph – how empty it all seems, every word and every phrase!
What use would the state have had for such a person?
Boy, was I mistaken. Owing to his rather dishonourable role in the wake of the 1956 Revolution, in 1960 my dad was named the London correspondent for MTI, the Hungarian News Agency. This phase of his career didn’t last long: in the space of two years he – the parachutist dropped there by the Party – was broken by the sly machinations of MTI’s veteran staff. His having signed his recruitment papers, off to London he went with four children. What fine cover! Four children.
CONTENTS OF THE FORGÁCS FAMILY’S SUITCASES AND BOXES
4 men’s suits
1 men’s jumpsuit
1 men’s coat
10 pairs men’s underwear
1 men’s bathrobe
5 pairs men’s pyjamas
10 men’s shirts
5 little aprons
3 pairs men’s shoes
8 pairs children’s pyjamas
6 pairs socks
20 pairs children’s socks
3 women’s coats
5 clothes hangers
2 women’s costumes
2 bed sheets
7 women’s dresses
5 pillowcases
20 pairs women’s underwear
7 tablecloths
5 skirts
10 women’s cardigans & jumpers
2 dictionaries
40 schoolbooks, school supplies
5 pairs women’s shoes
5 nightgowns
10 children’s novels
6 teddy bears
2 English-language instruction books
20 girls’ dresses
6 children’s light coats
1 Hungarian spelling handbook
6 children’s heavy coats
10 used plas
tic bags
1 drawing board with rulers
15 towels
20 children’s shirts
1 paint set
40 pairs children’s underwear
1 big doll
Bartók’s Mikrokosmos (2 scores)
12 pairs children’s shoes
10 pairs long children’s trousers
Béla Balázs: Bluebeard’s Castle
6 pairs children’s shorts
1 Erika typewriter
6 skirts
1 espresso-maker
1 sewing kit
B. FOREIGN EXCHANGE
1 clothes-brush with holder
DIRECTORATE
1 toiletry kit
22 September 1960
1 shoe-shining kit
CERTIFICATE ISSUED
1 wool blanket
LICENCE NO. 5
1 flannel blanket
Marcell Forgács
1 bed cover
Departed
1 set cutlery (6 knives, tablespoons, teaspoons) (pewter not silver!)
26 September 1960
HUNGARIAN NEWS AGENCY
BUDAPEST
But now we also know not only that his reports comprised news articles but that he himself was Pápai, a ‘secret colleague’, a member of the so-called ‘London station’. So Papa was Pápai. It’s not enough that he’d gone from Friedmann to Forgács at the drop of a hat: that he’d gone out into the hallway as Comrade Friedmann and returned to introduce himself as Comrade Forgács. Do I really care that much why he got this of all code names? Now I’ll never know. A certain Pápai pops up in a footnote to an entertaining essay the historian Krisztián Ungváry wrote describing the London station and its collapse and dismantlement. This Pápai proposes a rather outlandish scheme of a sort known in the trade as a ‘honey trap’: he promised that one of our relatives, a young woman, would seduce a young professor in England – an English historian. And up till now this footnote is the sole indication that Pápai really was active; for all three dossiers concerning the secret colleague code-named Pápai have disappeared without a trace. Or, at least, to date they haven’t turned up. I write this with a journalist’s blood coursing through my veins, although I’m not one – he was the journalist. Strike while the iron is hot.
No Live Files Remain Page 17