But what to say at home? Where did this money come from? The antique watch? A gift can be given only if . . .
– The network individual receiving the gift is capable of adequately legalizing his possession of it among those around him.
But the shrewd Ottó Szélpál has a recipe for ‘legalization’, too:
The Legalization of Rewards
[. . .] The network individual must legalize the origin of the cash, the gift, or other benefit in a manner perceived as credible and acceptable by those belonging to both his closer and wider social environments. The legalization requires that he have an unequivocal story verifiable to others as well (especially to members of the enemy circle), one he can consistently represent in all directions. The operations officer must provide help and direction in developing the cover story. Overlooking the need for legalization can in some cases lead to serious instances of de-conspiring. In the case of a cash reward, a suitable explanation must be found for the origin of the money. For example, pools, lottery, other winnings, or extra work.
In certain instances the legalization of a gift may be more complicated. Methods of doing so include, for example: citing the receipt of an unexpected or expected source of money used to make the purchase; a gift received from an unverifiable source; the consequence of money put aside without the knowledge of family members; the cover story behind this.
And there is a practical rule worth noting, too:
A practical rule worth noting is that it is inadvisable to purchase gifts departing from the average in terms of function, form or value in the vicinity of the residence or the workplace of the network individual or of the residence of individuals under confidential investigation. This pertains especially to small cities and villages.
Also mentioned are ‘offering alternative benefits’, only – of course – ‘within the framework of legal options’ and ‘primarily as humane assistance’, and, to be sure, my dear mother readily took advantage of humane assistance, ‘e.g. passports’:
Those benefits hard for average people to attain or attainable to them only through much trouble will raise attention. This is particularly true of those legal procedures that fall under the purview of the Interior Ministry (e.g. passports, certificates of good-standing, various permits). A reward of this nature may be employed solely in a narrow framework indeed, and thoroughly, prudently, and with the approval of commanding officers, for it is dangerous and is hard to legalize, and besides, it can lead to corruption and can sink to the level of nepotism. For precisely this reason it should be employed only in the most necessary of cases, primarily as humane assistance (e.g. hospital admission, treatment by a physician, acquiring medication, convalescent retreats).
But these are just trifles. Not insignificant trifles, but trifles all the same. What began with that first trip, like an avalanche that could not be stopped, is something which, in that horrible jargon of the secret services, they called . . . To utter it is like vomiting, I’ve got to stand up from my desk – yes, I stand up, take a breath and go for a walk; I light a cigar, make myself a cup of coffee, walk about a bit more as my heart hammers away, look out over the railing of the outside corridor into the courtyard below, back to my computer, my hands still resting on the keyboard, my fingers prepared to type the letters, waiting for my brain to give the command, to write (no, don’t do it!): ‘tip-off-individual research activity’. If only I could now stop the pen in my mother’s hand, when, late at night – Father snoring away, comatose from sleeping pills strong enough to knock out a rhino – she gets up, as the mute moon shines from beyond the grave, she gets up, or perhaps she can’t get to sleep to begin with, she sits down, she sits down at the desk, which is too low and uncomfortable, and she is even glad that it’s uncomfortable, and, stooping over the desk, begins to write with that ballpoint pen of hers because she cannot type. Then again, she might not have waited for this moment. I’ve seen some reports – handwritten summaries – that suggest the singular style of my already supposedly deranged father. Yes. Mrs Pápai and Mr Pápai, if the latter’s condition allowed it, or if my mother pressured him into it, whether as therapy or in despair, because she herself was unable to link the end of one sentence with the start of another, and her words headed in all directions, like ants, refusing to co-operate, unruly, like naughty children. In a nutshell, Dad simply had to help, and so Mr Pápai and Mrs Pápai sometimes worked together. Yet another reason for my mother’s code name.
There is, then – let’s call a spade a spade – the so-called target individual and tip-off individual. Such terms are already common knowledge, so I don’t know why I’m so averse to writing them down. Oh, but I do know. The amalgam of fervour, communicativeness and directness in my mother made her perfectly suitable for striking up a conversation with anyone, in any situation, and she – living as she did under the illusion that she was simply carrying out the task the Party had assigned her, that she was just doing her job – didn’t and couldn’t notice the muck she was sinking into every step of the way. Even on that first trip to Israel, in fact, I couldn’t help but notice how effortlessly strangers fell into conversation with each other on the street, as I’d seen back home in Hungary, too, in times of crisis, but of course in Israel there was – and is – always crisis, a constant buzz, a sort of collective hysteria, and there is always something to talk about at bus stops, in shops, concert halls, on the street: people greet each other as if they’ve been friends for a thousand years, not even introducing themselves, offering each other oranges or any kind of food if the wait at the bus stop is long or if they happen to have some in their bags. The flip side of this is the unpleasant jostling that almost invariably occurs while boarding a bus in Israel, though even this discourtesy is, there, an intense social experience.
When the name of a family member popped up in the dossier for the first time – that of my cousin who lived in Milan, who adored my mother, her aunt, and whom my mother adored – my heart stopped. And from here on, there really is no holding back:
H. H. is getting divorced. She doesn’t want to return to Israel; she will continue to live in Italy. As an architect, making a living is hard, so she decided to change professions. She will probably open a store of some sort. She also said she would be happiest to settle in Hungary, but that if she does reach such a decision, it will be realized only in 10–15 years.
MRS PÁPAI offered to visit her relative in Milan if we see the need and to invite her to Hungary at a later date.
At my request, MRS PÁPAI will prepare a more detailed report on the above individual.
I suspect something else in the background, but it is only a suspicion, or, rather, a yearning to see as more beautiful what can’t be beautified; namely, that Bruria knew full well that nothing would come of this, but wanted to offer proof of her efforts. She was, after all, being constantly bombarded with demands. Give us a name already, you know so many people, it won’t hurt! And she, like a good little girl, spat out a name in despair, or perhaps not in despair. (Oh, but you shouldn’t have! I imagine telling her. Shush, kid, I tell myself, this is no place for pathos. But, oh my, you shouldn’t have!) Yes, she did it just to stuff their traps, and she knew that whatever happened wouldn’t be her doing after all, but if it were her doing, then nothing would come of it anyway, that she’d somehow explain it away. The naivety that delivers us to evil! For by now it’s all the same whether something comes of it or not. Nothing did come of it, but it’s all the same. No, it’s not all the same. It’s a fact that she was capable of this, and since she’d already done it once, the second time would be easier, and it would keep getting easier and easier to give up a name, some detail, or any sort of confidential information about someone to the nameless machinery we might even call the Party, which, it’s true, was akin to the church in Bruria’s religious world; that is, to give up the name of someone she’d exchange cheerful glances with, someone she’d visit, someone who looked upon her with unfailing adoration and who didn’t s
o much as suspect what muck her name had been rolled in; and if he or she is lucky, and his or her dossier never turns up, because it was destroyed, as perhaps my father’s dossiers were, he or she will never find out. Neither he nor she nor anyone else.
But still it happened, it happened for ever.
But it wasn’t even sweet H. who marked Bruria’s fall into sin, no, she wasn’t the first tip-off individual with whom Bruria had crossed the Rubicon, but another someone I maybe didn’t like as much as I did my mother’s niece, my cousin, and so – though the revelation would shock me all the same – my heart didn’t quite stop even if the mere fact did feel like a blow to my stomach. By chance, in this instance, too, it was an architect who was caught in the net of our secret colleague, but not a relative as close as H., no, but the companion of Bruria’s cousin in Israel, a man this cousin lived with, who happened to be the same age as Bruria. Yes, it seems my mother was inclined to try out her remarkable talent at tip-off-individual research on relatives, which she assiduously practised later, too.
And what happens when – right in the middle of a heap of stupid official files – one discovers a familiar name, that of someone one had long forgotten? Moreover, when one discovers it in a dossier in which one is also remotely implicated? What happens is this: the figure leaps off the page, as this architect did that day, appearing before my eyes in sharp relief as he went about explaining something to us on a sun-drenched Tel Aviv street before we stepped into his office, like some hero conjured up by Tolstoy in one of his novels with a couple of strokes of the pen. I can see the pores on his skin as he turns his eyes away from mine. The twists and turns of these dry and porous files are sometimes like the mouth-watering taste of the madeleine Proust soaked in tea in Remembrance of Things Past. As this uncle of sorts led us about his Tel Aviv office, explaining things in a blaring voice, with the long-windedness of those people who jabber on ceaselessly because they really couldn’t care less whom they are talking to – bear in mind what Dostoevsky says of Raskolnikov as he enters, guffawing, the prosecutor’s office: that these kinds of people want to cover something up – there was also something of the endlessly sputtering Eastern merchant in this distant quasi-uncle, who had it in him to haggle with a person even before he knew what that person wanted to buy. Last but not least, with his fleshy nostrils he also reminded me of my own garrulous, jocular, stocky father, whose striking light-heartedness concealed impenetrable, unspeakable depths. I am reminded of Gyula Kabos, the greatest of all Hungarian comedians, who suffered from serious depression. People with outsized senses of humour are mostly out of their minds. Dark, impenetrable, unspeakable. Mommy dear, Mommy dear. Alas, the architect, whose non-existent diploma had gone missing, fitted to a tee the description my mother must have received from her handler, in that he appeared to be exquisitely vulnerable to blackmail; and that, moreover, he spoke both Hungarian and Hebrew perfectly, and so on:
MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR TOP SECRET!
Department III/I-4
Comrade Mercz!
Proceed according to the given considerations.
28 March 1977
REPORT
Budapest, 28 March 1977
MRS PÁPAI reports:
Last December she travelled to Israel for her mother’s funeral, returning from there on 19 March. During her stay abroad she met several times with a relative’s acquaintance.
R. B. (Place of birth: Miskolc. Date of birth: 17 April 1927. Previous flat in Miskolc: 80 Gy. Street) architect, Israeli citizen, resident of Tel Aviv.
In the course of their conversations he said the following about himself:
He earned a degree as an architectural engineer from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He was among the first to complete the Red Academy. He lived in Miskolc and had a job there. He claims to have worked for the Interior Ministry, too, and during this time he travelled to China as well. Two of his sisters married Soviet officers stationed near Miskolc. Since 1956 he hasn’t heard of them at all, and he assumes that they no longer live in Hungary.
R. B. defected in 1956, justifying his act by saying that because of his past association with the Interior Ministry he could have faced difficulties in the event of a change of regime.
In Israel he is the co-owner of an architectural firm. He accepted the position as an architectural engineer, but he lives in constant fear, since he does not have a copy of his university diploma. He is afraid of requesting one from Hungary, for he would have to ask the Red Academy, where they would not respond kindly to this. He is also worried about his Interior Ministry past coming to light and him then being held responsible, because back then he had denied this aspect of his past. Two technical illustrators and a secretary work in his office. His co-owner doesn’t bother much with the business, and R. B. has to do everything.
R. B.’s companion – who lives with him and who is likewise of Hungarian descent – told MRS PÁPAI that her husband’s behaviour is making her increasingly anxious. He is concerned that their telephone is bugged, that their letters are intercepted, and that they are under surveillance. He sometimes gets money from a mysterious source and then disappears for a day or two, after which he is always nervous but never tells her why. In her assessment he is working for some socialist country and is constantly scared of being caught.
Assessment:
With MRS PÁPAI’s help we could begin a study of the above individual. An attempt should be made to procure a copy of his engineering diploma. MRS PÁPAI would undertake this, would stay in touch with him through letters, and at a later date, once the diploma is in our possession, he could be invited to a third country.
With the help of the Borsod County sub-department III/I we will initiate an investigation in Miskolc aimed at procuring data and finding his relatives.
Finally I recommend that we contact the state security organs of socialist countries and request their assistance in processing.
Károly Mercz, Police Captain
Comr. BEIDER!
What does MRS PÁPAI know about the work the above
individual did for the Interior Ministry?
IV/28 – János Szakadáti
In her first handwritten report, my mother, as a good agent, did not forget to note – after trying as best she could within the bounds of her modest abilities to draw a portrait of the Hungarian émigré community – how scared R. B. was. Indeed, in her report she speaks of many sorts of fear – she emerges as a bona fide fear specialist – and she doesn’t seem to worry at all that someone might abuse those feelings of fear. I felt the same shock when, years earlier, an acquaintance of mine gave me a copy of the reports made by the writer Sándor Tar, who was denounced by a fellow writer in the press in 1999 for having been an informant. In one of these reports I happened upon this: when on one occasion friends of Tar’s stayed at his home in the western city of Debrecen before travelling across the Romanian border into Transylvania, Tar went so far as to wake up after his guests had gone to sleep and painstakingly note the names of the medications they had left on the table. (Perhaps he thought: This just might be good for something.)
‘This man could be interesting,’ writes our agent in Tel Aviv:
Meetings
Most Hungarian immigrants in Israel are Zionists. They are so even if they are homesick and would love (as many do) to inhale again the smell of Budapest’s streets and coffeehouses. Új Kelet does its part, and while many love Hungary, between the two homelands they choose Israel. Progressive-minded Hungarian immigrants find a place in the Israeli Communist Party or among the party’s sympathizers. A few immigrants hate the atmosphere in Israel and are completely pessimistic; they are afraid and so are not politically active. One such person is R. B., born in Miskolc, who in his words was among the first in Hungary to finish the Red Academy and is an engineering graduate. He hates Israel and really regrets having defected on account of the counter-revolution. He is afraid that in Israel they will realize that he worked with
the Interior Ministry as an architect, and he is constantly suspicious that his telephone is bugged. At present he works as an architectural engineer, and he is said to be talented. To his regret, he doesn’t have a diploma. Maybe he did have one, but he is afraid of mentioning his Red Academy diploma. Hence his professional certification is unresolved (for 20 years now).
When I asked him why he doesn’t travel home to resolve his diploma-problem, he replied, ‘I’m afraid, because I worked for the Ministry of the Interior as an engineer in rather sensitive times.’ If it can be believed, then he travelled in China, too, when with the Interior Ministry. This man could be interesting. He has numerous contacts there. There are three workers in his office – technical illustrators and a secretary. His older sister is married to a high-ranking Soviet officer, at least he says so. He has had no contact with his family since the counter-revolution.
Even more frightening to me is the episode when my mother, again during the trip we took together in 1976, describes her meeting with a young man at the Italian embassy in Tel Aviv. Here she steps onto the stage as Mata Hari, deploying her generosity – that angelic generosity of hers so many people mentioned. Poor Mata Hari! Historians have tried in vain to prove that she wasn’t even a spy, and her name has become synonymous with that of the femme fatale all the same. Since the young man does not introduce himself, my mother furtively reads his name on a form handed her because of his lack of linguistic fluency, and she paints a not terribly flattering portrait of him; and as a sharp observer she notes, too, that this young man whom she has engaged in conversation is suspicious of her – but she is able to twist even this: or he is just acting suspiciously. So obviously he is also a spy – yes, Israeli intelligence, Mum mentions by the by, in a gossipy manner, and so the smoke-and-mirrors game – which all spies worth their salt dream of, which gives such chance meetings their zest – begins. The tortuous wording with which she conveys this suspicion displays exquisite dramatic flair, and surely her handler, on reading it, immediately began drooling:
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