But my father was intrigued above all to know why this reticent lame man who wore orthopaedic shoes – Pulai was his family name – invariably came home so late at the weekend with a different woman each time. In any case, on weekdays the man would get home in the evening and stumble his way, obviously drunk, up the stairs.
He passes his free time in the company of friends and women, in consequence of which he is home rarely, except that period when people were visiting him regularly.
He lives in stable material circumstances. He corresponds regularly with his parents and his relatives in the provinces, whom he visits on occasion. But these individuals often sleep at his place also.
His friends and various young old women have often spent the night there, in revelry. His health is poor, and he has often been treated at hospital on account of his lungs.
Ah, these ‘young old women’! My mother and father lowered their voices, but, well, ‘Pulai’ was ‘Pulai’ even in Hebrew. The Sandman was silent – more and more silent – and very much disinclined to be pally with suspicious elements, which the authorities were really sorry about, for he was therefore lost to them. As for me, I ran up the stairs at breakneck speed if I glimpsed him from afar. I would stand, waiting, in the dark stairwell, mesmerized as I spied on the lame devil through the dusty window as he came towards our stairwell, hobbling his way across the gravel path of the inner courtyard, between the flowerbeds. It can’t be chance that I have such a frightening neighbour, I brooded. This is Fate, I thought as I ran into our own flat before he got close, turning the key in the lock behind me twice.
The surprising twist at the end of the file:
In view of the limited prospect of exploiting his intelligence value and of his being a member of the MSZMP [Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party] leadership, under operative regulations he cannot be a member of our network, and so I recommend his exclusion from the network and from further exploitation as a social connection.
And the Sandman even has the courage to raise his middle finger:
I did not obtain a signed pledge of secrecy about the ending of the relationship, for the informant refused to write this, on the grounds that not even when first establishing the relationship with us was he asked to write such a pledge, and so he does not deem it necessary to undertake a counter-pledge either.
I can hear Father gabbling in a soft voice to Mother about the Sandman. I am five years old. When they notice me watching them, they go into the other room, closing the door behind them.
But this isn’t about Dad.
It was Bruria who had to pick up his heavy load.
MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR
TOP SECRET!
SUB-DEPARTMENT III/I-4
OFFICIAL REQUISITION
Budapest, 20 November 1975
I request release of the third volume of the M dossier, no. Z-281, of the SC code-named PÁPAI.
Károly Mercz, Police Captain
Authorized by:
József Stöckl
Oszkár Kiss, Police Lieutenant Colonel
Acting Deputy Assistant Department Head
To the Director of Records,
Directorate of the III/I Group, Ministry of the Interior
Intra-agency report
Why did they have to use Bruria to ‘substitute’ for Marcell?
Her activization was implemented only in the event of her husband’s serious illness, to substitute for him.
. . . as the report’s jargon puts it so subtly. If there was such a great need for her, why couldn’t she be recruited in her own right? Why did she have to take my father’s name, as it were, even in the underworld?
When Bruria was ‘provided’ with ‘smaller assignments’, as Police Captain Mercz put it so ornately in his report dated 4 February 1976, Pápai was officially still active – though his third and final breakdown had already occurred in 1973. It might be that he himself had recommended his wife as a translator in his place, though the spouses of network individuals working abroad were often recruited, too, on the presumption that husbands and wives couldn’t keep their identity as agents secret from each other anyway. Spycraft textbooks take this for granted. So I suspect that Bruria knew what her husband, the Hungarian News Agency correspondent, did on the side. But it could well be that when she submitted her first translations, back in Hungary, in the early 1970s, to the Párttörténeti Intézet (Party History Institute), she still didn’t have the faintest idea whom she was working for; or, if she did, she certainly didn’t know what name she was referred to by:
MRS PÁPAI has travelled to Israel twice in the past five years, given small assignments each time. While being debriefed she offered a few useful pieces of information. To cover her latest operative expenses we handed her one hundred dollars.
Her handlers had an easier time with her than with others, whom they intimidated, beat up or blackmailed, only later, in public places, whether cafés or in C or S flats, taking a different approach, gradually softening and training the network individual, step by step, as described so magnificently and unbearably by Péter Esterházy in his Javított kiadás (Corrected Edition), the subject of which was his own father. But even in the case of Bruria there was a grey area: the swimmer, in our case, the handler, at pool’s edge at first sticks only the tip of his big toe into the water, for a moment only, testing the temperature, and then gives the prospective recruit increasingly complex tasks until, finally – what the hell – he presses a hundred-dollar bill into her palm, as if into the hand of a Gypsy violinist to get him to play a favourite tune. By the time Bruria accepted the money – and accept it she did (it obviously came in handy) – the deal had already been done. From then on all went smoothly.
Frighteningly smoothly.
On her first official assignment, after she had been trained in all sorts of practical secret-service matters, we travelled together, Bruria and I. We went by train to Athens, and from there – from the port of Piraeus – via Cyprus – to Jaffa. I remember how surreal it was, at the age of twenty-three, to see oranges hanging from trees, when one cold and foggy morning I took a glimpse into the back garden of our surly hosts in Athens. That is when I understood that oranges grow on trees just the same as apples and pears do.
Mum’s first report is a frightening read. True, our family paid for the trip, but that doesn’t change how terribly depressing it is to read the later acknowledgements of receipt endorsed by the signature of Mrs Marcell Forgács. During the trip I often didn’t understand why she was so tense. Dad wasn’t there – she could breathe freely. Well, of course: she had to record, record, record ceaselessly. The following list is somewhat boring, true, but with it we will at least have covered this part sufficiently, for the subsequent reports were dead ringers for this one. In sum, Bruria got plenty of homework.
On the basis of the above, under Order 0024/1966 I recommend that MRS PÁPAI receive somewhat more specific and wide-ranging briefings as regards the following:
– Israel’s present-day domestic political situation
– Situation of immigrants, reasons for emigration from Israel
– Domestic economic tensions, development of living standards
– Preparations for the 29th World Zionist Congress
– Israeli reactions to the ‘For Soviet Jews’ congress held in Brussels
As for the Israeli agent-operative situation:
– Controls in practice on entering and exiting the country (passport, customs inspection, frisking, etc.)
– Registration obligations on entry, forms that must be filled out, questions posed, the general procedure
– Signs of surveillance – whether direct surveillance or surveillance-like practices, perhaps measures to limit activity, with special attention to provocation
– Opportunities for travel within Israel, restrictions on travel either nationally or regionally
Now, this was no easy task for a passionate, slapdash spirit, for she had to combine professional pol
itical analysis with a sociologist’s objectivity grounded in precise data and also with, yes, a spy’s snake-like stealth. And then the report mentions a nice bit of nonsense: Mother spoon-fed her comrades a dubious excuse for my travelling with her, which is that I was going along to put my grandfather’s literary estate into order. My non-existent fluency in Hebrew would have rendered me wonderfully unsuitable for this. Even today it wouldn’t pass muster. True, I later learned some Hebrew by my own efforts – at first from an absurd East German textbook – while I worked in a screw factory in Holon, an industrial city on the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv, alongside Arab co-workers, that is. During my lunch breaks I’d invariably open up that textbook as I sat on the steps in the factory yard – I couldn’t converse with anyone. My fellow workers, who were from the West Bank, knew only a few odd words of English. My studies were a joke – as if someone were trying to learn Hungarian today from a 1958 reading workbook. I’d bought the Hebrew textbook in East Berlin back in 1972, when I was touring there as a self-taught drummer with the band Orfeo – but that’s another story. The book’s Hebrew texts were about working men and women, production and that model family which Walter Ulbricht – in his capacity as that country’s foremost communist leader for a number of decades – envisioned for East Germans. So it was in part a non-existent, socialist Hebrew that I acquired and whose words I would later use to the endless amusement of the youth of Israel.
But the one and only reason I studied the language to begin with was in order to penetrate the secrets of my mother’s mysterious mother tongue; whereas the Hebrew I had learned, on the streets of Israel at least, sounded not so mysterious at all, but, rather, ordinary. And, yes, I had the feeling that with every word I learned by rote, and, later, with every word that came back to me at unexpected moments, I was seeing the world anew, like a young child. Water was mayim? How could mayim be water? It was as if I were looking into a crystal ball that showed the past and future simultaneously, as if at the same time I were penetrating my mother’s body like an X-ray. That something is motek (sweet) or melach (salt), ratoov (wet) or yavesh (dry), khoref (winter) or kayits (summer), or that someone is atsuv (sad) or aliz (cheerful). It was as if, through these new words, I were learning something radically different about these things: for example, that wetness always has a strange, dry sensation, and even the driest dryness is saturated with a wet sh sound. From all these words that were so strange to me, so contradictory to the laws of nature, I reconstructed my mother’s sense of sight, hearing and smell. I recreated her childhood. I understood her inside-out, upside-down world. I turned her from standing on her head to her feet. I now reconstruct my mother from Hebrew words, as if from the pieces of a puzzle. My mother, the mosaic woman. Every one of these word-sensations is tangible, and I heard every one from my mother’s mouth, as I have since then, too. The language worked like a hidden tape recorder or camera. I spied out my mother.
My parents often spoke Hebrew to each other at home so we wouldn’t understand, and my head was like a storage chest, long full of countless Hebrew words I didn’t know the meaning of, words I would perhaps never understand. And when the Hebrew expressions filed away in my mind were suddenly illuminated, as if by magic, they were mostly those that my parents had for years hurled back and forth at each other – Hebrew was to them above all the language of fights and not love – the language with which blows were struck, of rebukes, not of harmony and understanding. It was as if I’d learned something about the universe, about every language that had ever existed. Indeed, the ritual repetition of the fights ensured that the meaning of the words wasn’t so mysterious to us after all, the words that flew around our home so thickly, piercing and striking so poisonously, like arrows or a shower of stones: Ze lo beseder! Ein li kesef! (It’s not all right! I don’t have money!)
Then again, when I was little, even the lullabies that put me to sleep were sung in Hebrew: those words that melt in the mouth like Eastern sweets, bound up in dense, honey-coated melodies; and so too the delicious aromas, the dates, the halva, the chocolate, and even the smell of the Marlboros bought by the carton at airports that came to us from afar, intermittently – when guests arrived from Israel, as they often arrived, invariably bringing with them something exotic. And, finally, when on this first trip together I loafed about – as if on the rather skilfully rendered set of a film studio – on Sderot Rothschild, Sderot Ben-Gurion, Kikar Dizengoff, in Jaffa, or by the sea, I breathed in the local fragrances, too, and from day to day and word to word I was increasingly under the illusion that I better understood my mother. As if these strange, backward-pronounced words and shouted sentences, these ordinary and yet at the same time mysterious linguistic configurations, contained her DNA. (My older brother aptly dubbed this language – so beyond our comprehension, so chaotic, it seemed to us – a ‘porridge language’, invoking the oats Bruria made for us every single morning ever since our London sojourn.) After a while I learned to read even those Hebrew letters lacking vowel points – from street signs, which I painstakingly spelled out like a little schoolboy as I rode a bus about the city. But that didn’t mean I knew Hebrew yet. No, that was only an excuse for my trip: my mother had chosen to take with her not my older brother, but me, because she wanted to travel with me, even though it would have been his turn after our older sister; but with me, I suppose, she felt secure (and now I even know what she was hiding).
The invitation of her son took place because they find him suitable – he has a degree in the humanities – for professionally sorting out and arranging his grandfather’s literary and political estate.
On this occasion Bruria doesn’t get any money from her taskmasters, but that really doesn’t make a difference. It does make a difference, and yet it doesn’t make a difference. It does make a difference. I’m getting my heart used to silence.
For her present trip abroad we shall cover neither travel nor other expenses, since our interests in the Israeli visit are but conditional on whether, among the documents in the aforementioned estate, any turn up that we can use to pursue active measures against Zionist organizations or leading individuals.
In short, they want to rummage about in my grandfather’s desk. A recommendation dated 30 January 1977 reveals that, having noted the co-operative fervour displayed by my mother (Mum, Mommy, imah sheli), they wish to promptly make up for the financial omission during her next trip, which occurs a year after the first.
Financial matters
In view of the fact that until now we have provided nothing to MRS PÁPAI to cover her expenses ensuing from her trips to Israel, for the present trip we recommend that her travel costs be covered, as follows:
Airline ticket
8,000 forints
Ship ticket
400 US dollars
Miscellaneous expenses
100 Us dollars
We request permission, on an official requisition, for the export of foreign currency. We will write up the cover story for its legalization.
Oh, these blood-money cover stories and manoeuvres! The step-by-step seduction! As Police Lieutenant Colonel Ottó szélpál puts it, in his immortal work The Principles and General Methods of Managing, Training, Educating and Monitoring Network Individuals, which he penned not long before the events discussed here, in his Dadaist poem therein, ‘The degrees of Praise’:
The Degrees of Praise
(a) The operations officer praises the network individual he is responsible for.
(b) The operations officer’s superior expresses his recognition of the network individual in the form of praise.
(c) In the case of outstanding achievement, the network individual can be recommended for decoration.
Beyond all of this, rewards may be given, too – of course, you may well say, but the form they take is important, because ‘certain individuals react sensitively to cash rewards’, even finding ‘this form of recognition offensive’:
Types of Rewards
Cash Rewards
. The simplest form of reward to employ, in the event that objective and subjective conditions are met. When employing, it is imperative to consider:
– On account of their temperament, certain individuals react sensitively to cash rewards, regarding this form of recognition as offensive.
– If possible we should not employ this method in the initial period in the case of an agent recruited on the basis of inculpatory facts.
In other words, best to keep a blackmailed criminal on a short leash for a while, in case he or she gets too confident.
– Rewards must not take on the form of regular disbursements (e.g. monthly, quarterly).
– In the case of an agent recruited from among enemy circles, as long as he is still working against his former associates, it is advisable to employ rewards only in exceptional circumstances.
But if cash rewards trouble such sensitive souls, gifts can be given instead. Even then, however, it is important to note whether the recipient is ‘at all pleased’. One must proceed with absolute discretion, examining whether:
[. . .] the gift well serves our goals in educating the agent, whether it represents some sort of value for the network individual in terms of practical use, pleasure or cultural significance, for example – whether he is at all pleased. A poorly chosen gift will not yield the emotional effects that serve to reinforce co-operation. Precisely for this reason it is advisable to give the network individual gifts that suit his interests, his positive passions, his ‘hobbies’. For example, an engineer or a researcher can be given a valuable technical book, and a collector – of paintings, stamps, medals or antiques, for example – can receive something to expand his collection.
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