No Live Files Remain

by Andras Forgach

  The pathologist’s report is quite sophisticated. Bruria often fell to arguing with her handlers, and even if she did then grovel, she would soon start arguing again. she served the system with her work, whether interpreting or nursing, and she naturally received remuneration, which she accepted as what was rightfully due to her. Even so, she had to fight her handlers every centimetre, every millimetre of the way – yes, she had to fight the whole system and she didn’t enjoy exceptional privileges. Though, truth be told, in the late 1960s, in the middle of the decades-long Kádár regime, she and my father both received the For the Socialist Homeland Order of Merit, a sort of successor to the Order of Vitez. They received this for their supposed partisan past, and it did indeed come with benefits – and even if they weren’t that great, there were benefits nonetheless, and every penny or, rather, fillér, counted.

  And so, at the cost of a lot of scurrying about, or, as she liked to say, ‘crawling on my bloodied belly’, she even managed to procure a flat for the continually expanding Forgács family in a big tower block on Kerék Street, at the other end of town. And in moved the smaller half of the family, because, until then, at our previous address, we’d been living on top of each other, a real clutter, as if in a hovel. My father’s attempts as the family provider to buy a larger flat had met repeatedly with failure: occasional freelance translations and articles supplemented his regular pay as a news editor and shift manager at state radio, but they were barely enough to plug the larger holes in our financial affairs. No, my parents were incapable of managing money. They just didn’t understand its value, treating it as children might, which explains the refrain ‘I’m broke’, heard so often at the start of the month.

  The main point: Bruria, to ensure the regular visits to far away relatives that she could not do without, procured (by way of compensation for her work) not only a passport for herself but also for the rest of the family – that is, for me, my big brother, and my little sister. That’s not to mention inexpensive entry visas for her Israeli friends, relatives and comrades when there happened to be no diplomatic relations between Hungary and Israel, and for quite a while there weren’t, and that wasn’t Israel’s fault. Last but not least, as a heroic mother, as a sort of one-woman human shield, Bruria spread her wings over her brood, who made no effort to act as if they were unfalteringly loyal to the regime, who hung out with all sorts of dubious people, who were part of artistic movements modelled on those in the West, and who regularly popped up in various Interior Ministry reports.

  As in ancient Greek theatre, among the tragedy there is always a satyr play, and the case of György Petri and my bugged flat was not the only one. Indeed, Bruria was used cynically and sordidly, cynically and sordidly – yes, cynically and sordidly – by the operations officers of Department III/I, who, it seems, imagined themselves to be apocalyptic horsemen made of Herend porcelain who would bring peace to the world and could thus legitimately do anything they wanted. But I cannot understand why they felt themselves authorized to trick her, screw her over, and lie to her face when my mother was helping them out of inner conviction. The comical dilettantism of the following episode does not excuse the sordidness of their intentions – no, ineptitude does not excuse evil. My mother was instrumental, too, no doubt about that: her conviction that they could do anything they wanted was instrumental, yes, her misguided subservience was instrumental, too, her feeling that these people were fighting the ‘good fight’, though there is much to suggest that, finally, she didn’t believe this unreservedly. Only she didn’t yet have the words to express it.

  Nonetheless, it is clear that the information in the document I’m about to quote from did indeed originate with her, and that the operations officers blessed with the wisdom of the Buddha, the officers who’d cooked up the plan in their witches’ kitchen, were bent on playing with my mother as if this were a game of billiards, setting the ball rolling with their poorly crafted cues, watching it bounce off the cushions, experimenting a little with the human psyche, unconcerned that they were invading other people’s family lives, that they were assigning a role to a mother that a mother must not be allowed to play. It is nonetheless irresistibly comical; and it is comical even if this method, in other circumstances, might well have led to tragedy. Evil in miniature, worth crying and laughing about.

  MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR

  TOP SECRET!

  Sub-department III/III-4-a

  Szakadáti e. Sz J., B.

  To Comrade ISTVÁN BERÉNYI, police colonel

  Director, Ministry of the Interior Department III/I-II

  Budapest

  In his capacity as an author of texts of hostile content distributed in Hungary, and as the chief organizer of their distribution, we have kept H. Cs., a former director with Hungarian Radio, under surveillance.

  In the course of the surveillance we have determined that suspicions have been strengthening in the samizdat-producing group that Cs. is the ‘Interior Ministry’s stool pigeon’.

  An argument he had with [name redacted], a university student, heightened these suspicions. Citing his own experiences, [name redacted] recounted police excesses, which Cs. firmly cast doubt on.

  In the wake of this incident [name redacted] was left with practically no doubt concerning her suspicions, as she told her mother too.

  On the basis of our oral understanding, Comrade Miklós Beider, police lieutenant – employee of Department III/I-11 of the Interior Ministry – has the opportunity to play back information to the mother, Mrs Marcell Forgács.

  In the interest of discrediting H. Cs., to reinforce the suspicions over him, we ask Comrade Beider to notify Mrs Marcell Forgács of the following – clarifying that his information comes from a confidential source:

  • It is our understanding that [name redacted] is apt to discredit the police, and at the same time is spreading false rumours about H. Cs.

  • Mrs Forgács should seek to persuade [name redacted] to change her behaviour, for she has already raised the attention of the Interior Ministry through other, but similarly destructive activities.

  From Comrade Beider’s above notification we expect that in this manner more information will filter into the group about Cs.’s ‘contacts with the Interior Ministry, his protectors’, that his isolation will intensify and that more people may slacken their remaining ties with him. Moreover, it can be expected that [name redacted]’s activity will diminish.

  Budapest, 12 December 1978

  Dr József Horváth,

  Miklós Esvégh,

  Police Colonel

  Police Captain

  Team Deputy Director

  Sub-department Head

  How was she still capable of co-operating with her ‘comrades’, one handler after another, allowing them to enter her most intimate domain, parading her embroideries, sharing her fears with them?

  Of course they are taught how to achieve this, too:

  It may be stated that it is generally the initial stage of the working relationship that is most amenable to the development and nurturing of honest, human ties between the operations officer and the network individual.

  It is advisable to steer this stage of the conversation in such a way that the network individual may raise his or her personal problems, including any professional, family or other difficulties, and find the opportunity to share with the operations officer all his or her sorrows and joys.

  But things don’t always go so smoothly, and, like an eagle-eyed psychologist, the operations officer – Lieutenant Dóra in the following passage – perceives this and records it in his report:

  MRS PÁPAI requests our assistance in inquiring, on behalf of her daughter who is studying in Moscow, how much Waldmann PUVA 180 and PUVA 1200 phototherapy lamps used in dermatology cost in Vienna.

  We agreed to arrange the time of our next meeting by phone at the beginning of March 1983. We concluded this meeting, which cost 75 forints, at 12:35.

  Assessment:

 
Mrs Pápai looked very tired at today’s meeting, and yet she was ardent in her oral observations concerning her written report.

  It seems she will be willing to undertake active tip-off research work in her environment.

  She was very awkward in presenting her request for assistance concerning the therapeutic devices.

  Mum presented her request awkwardly, and with that she gave herself away. Not as a jaunty, confident agent but rather as an uncertain, anxious mother. Well, we’ll take care of this too. As Ottó Szélpál says in his textbook of the ideal operation officer’s ‘honesty’ (an oxymoron if there ever was one):

  The initiation of such a conversation is not a customary courtesy on the part of the operations officer, but a key aspect, a fundamental element of forging a deeper, sincere human bond. The operations officer’s expression of sincere interest in the network individual’s problems, expression of empathy, and far-reaching helpfulness invariably yields a positive result. Such a relationship forms the basis of mutual trust and respect. Steering the conversation in this direction is expedient also in the interest of creating the tension-free atmosphere requisite to the taking of reports.

  Notwithstanding the above, though, to feel trust towards these gentlemen, these strangers, required not only the chaotic circumstances and emotional disorder of home but also something else: the primitive ideology she’d absorbed since her childhood, and which still resonated in her profoundly. It isn’t by chance that Blanche Dubois says to the doctor in A Streetcar Named Desire, ‘Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ It required her oversimplistic explanation for social injustices, her sense of solidarity with those grey Interior Ministry figures, those bureaucrat-warriors of Department III/III she met in offices and sundry meeting places, those characters who, one way or another, were in her eyes knights on some sort of holy crusade. What about Thomas Mann, Goethe, Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad? What of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Tchaikovsky? All of them proved too little, too feeble a counterbalance to that thinking which simplified the world so dangerously, which an irredeemable and yet beautiful human being equipped to help others in this world had a burning need for.

  Even if it is alluring to so many, this thinking – which equates the Holocaust, which will disgrace the world for ever, with the tragic injustice that was the fate of Palestinians – surely doesn’t hold up logically, it doesn’t stand the test; the mirror distorts. But for Bruria, it had by then crystallized into an obsession. She’d locked herself away in ideology just as she could lock herself away in music, even as she continued a family tradition of helping a great many people – she adopted some girls whom she almost loved even more than her own children, with utter selflessness. Yes, even when her own kids didn’t have enough, she gave unquestioningly to others all the time, and she didn’t notice that sometimes she deprived her own of the attention they needed; for even this sort of self-sacrifice – this nurse and midwife who’d graduated summa cum laude from the American University of Beirut often considered taking off to Africa – helped to perpetuate the disarray her handlers saw as fundamental to her character, a disarray that regularly intensified to the point at which it became intolerable. Not that this bothered them, far from it: they exploited it, deceiving her shamelessly again and again, using her like a tool, a piece of furniture, a mindless thing. And yet there was a method to her untidiness, a hidden order to the personal chaos, which she herself needed: she put away every last piece of paper and silk, every official document and postcard – often she didn’t even know where, but she threw nothing away, and I’m like this, too, by the way. So then, she really needed this constant or, rather, constantly renewing chaos to avoid coming face to face with her own fundamental problem – namely, that she was nowhere. Nowhere. The word for it in Hungarian echoes the word for hell in Hebrew. Sehol and Sheol. She was nowhere, she was in hell.

  * * *

  In 1688 the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term ‘nostalgia’, so the story goes – from the Greek nostos (‘homecoming’) and algos (‘pain’), words that occur in the Iliad – when a mysterious disease swept the ranks of Swiss soldiers, mostly mercenaries, who were serving not even so far from home. Their symptoms included neurosis, despair, fits of sobbing, anorexia and suicide attempts. ‘Nostalgia’ went on to enjoy a brilliant career, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for homesickness. Hofer noticed the symptoms even in a young man who had moved from Bern to Basel – just forty kilometres from his hometown. In his dissertation Hofer characterizes it as ‘a cerebral disease of essentially demonic cause’ which was produced by ‘the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibres of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling’. In 1732 a compatriot of Hofer’s, the scholar Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, wrote that nostalgia was due to a ‘sharp differentiation in atmospheric pressure causing excessive body pressurization, which in turn drove blood from the heart to the brain, thereby producing the observed affliction of sentiment’. Back then it was widely accepted that nostalgia was a uniquely Swiss disease, for trusted and well-trained Swiss soldiers served as mercenaries in numerous armies throughout Europe, and certain military physicians speculated that the cause of the disease lay in the serious damage done to the eardrums and brain cells by the constant clanging of cowbells in the Alps. It is also said that in the early nineteenth century, a Russian general happened upon a surprisingly successful treatment for the nostalgia sweeping the ranks of his troops – burying alive those complaining of it.

  In Bruria’s case, the only treatment would have been for her to move back home, but that was impossible, and so her feelings of nostalgia grew ever stronger every time she returned from Israel to Hungary. But perhaps not even that would have solved matters, her move home, for the obscure object of her desire was a long-lost country, an underwater world called Palestine in which the two peoples had lived side by side – true, they were under the control of a foreign power. The symptoms would abate for a little while only to possess her all the more powerfully. This must have intensified the hayfever that tormented Bruria from spring to autumn to the point at which she gave herself over to suffering, hoping perhaps it would take the edge off the nostalgia that threatened to drive her mad.

  At a certain moment in her life, without her having noticed it, she’d been imprisoned in a country she didn’t want to live in, though for a while she believed she would want to; a country whose smells were foreign, whose colours were foreign, whose language was foreign; a political system that, she was told, was the world’s best, and turned out to be one of its worst. But she made the best of it, acting for a good many years as if this really was what she wanted, living in a country in which she was for ever a foreigner; for if she spoke English or Hebrew on the tram, she was reported to the authorities. This first happened in the Fifties by way of a warning sign, and counting such signs was in vain, because they didn’t subside, no, they only multiplied, and how. But there was no turning back.

  In 1983 I gave her a postcard I’d purchased in Dahlem, a district in West Berlin, at the Gemäldegalerie, a museum that was home to the city’s pre-eminent art collection before German reunification. The famous painting on the card, Two Monkeys, was by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Bruegel without an ‘h’. In the foreground are two monkeys, sitting in a large, arched window that opens to a view of the port of Antwerp in the background. Both of the monkeys are chained to the same iron ring, one of them gazing at the viewer, the other, face turned away, apparently sulking. Broken peanut shells or walnut shells are scattered on the windowsill beside them. When I handed Bruria that card, she just stared at it as if hypnotized, as if the painter in 1562 had summed up the whole of her life. No less than twice she then embroidered those monkeys, and without ever having seen the actual painting; remarkably enough, in doing so she enlarged the image on the postcard to precisely the dimensions of the original. By then the sky was Bruria’s limit when
it came to embroidering, and, at the time, she told every visitor who asked her what she was working on that those two monkeys were her and my father.

  The two of them were the inhabitants of nowhere – neither Hungarians nor Jews, nor foreigners, nor comrades, nor compatriots. Among comrades they were Jews, among Jews they were communists, among communists they were Hungarians, among Hungarians they were foreigners. Patriots of nowhere land. They were the inhabitants of Sheol – the place of darkness to which the dead go; or, rather, of their own personal hell. It is not obligatory, of course, for a wandering Jew to be recruited as an agent of the state; no, it’s quite enough of a burden that he or she must wander until the Day of Judgement.

  And then came – the icing on the cake – the ‘Rapcsány’ case. Bruria and her handler consistently misspell the name of the writer in question – László Rapcsányi – which leads me to conclude that his book never found its way into the hands of Lieutenant Dóra, who didn’t even know what he was talking about – no, he was focused solely on ensuring that my mother’s letter was never made public. Rapcsányi’s book, Jerusalem, was, for my mother, the straw that broke the camel’s back. And yet what is also clear from the lieutenant’s report of 13 April 1984 is how the give-and-take works: they don’t support my mother’s desire to have her letter be made public, but her Israeli nephew in Canada can get a Hungarian visa, no problem.