Klára Tóth

It's Going to Hurt!

 

I know this will affect you deeply; maybe it's going to hurt. You can even say that you don't want to see it," a male voice says on the telephone. It is decidedly awkward, almost apologetic. But not as awkward as my reaction.
"Let's meet," I reply finally, but arrange an appointment a good time later, not really sure what to expect. The reason this journalist I do not know called me was that he came across secret police reports on me while gathering material for a book on the 1970s rock-and-roll scene.
Each passing day is a struggle. I had long thought that I was not moved by the national pastime of "I wasn't a secret agent - you were one - maybe he was one". Many things have happened here since the change of regime. For example, it transpired that Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy was formerly an officer of the secret police. He was not forced to resign, and his whitewashing was even helped by some of the country's most respected writers. The debates rage, parliamentary bills proliferate, and I, a television viewer always glued to the best soaps, watch instead the talk shows and news programmes to see anxious politicians and newly-outed former secret agents accept or, cynically, reject blame.
There is the former minister of the interior of the country's first democratically elected government, sitting in the television studio and saying that he has no recollection of the list, drawn up in secret in 1990, of politicians in the new system who, before the change of regime, had collaborated with the secret police. "Maybe the whole thing should be thrown into the Danube," he suggests.
He reminds me of an amiable doctor who does not have the courage to tell the family that the patient is about to die, even though they have long known that the patient will. A few days later, former Prime Minister Gyula Horn is more resolute. He thinks we should burn the files. In any case, why are we bothering about agents when we should be dealing with the difficulties faced by lowincome pensioners? I am reminded of the painter and novelist Gábor Karácsony. After Gyula Horn, a member of the militia in the reprisals following the 1956 uprising, was elected prime minister in 1994, Gábor Karácsony said he was incapable of continuing his novel about 1956. At any rate, there is no doubt that Horn's proposal makes sense. Maybe in the near future an expert committee will be formed to make careful calculations, concluding that it would be much cheaper to destroy the files than for a legion of investigators to process them. Perhaps they might place an advertisement explaining that the money should be spent on increasing pensions, with the masses accepting with wise resignation that oblivion is in the financial interest of us all - both betrayers and betrayed. Maybe, but I still contend that however dark and deep the well of the past might be, it is better to peer into it. Even if it will hurt.

I do not have a clear memory of the girl who I was back then, but I do remember that I did not look like someone about to topple the powers that be.
Was my thinking non-conformist? I certainly thought about things. By the early eighties, I was only too pleased to quote a poem: "What did she do to us?" In Orwell's words, "'thoughtcrime'." But now we are in autumn 1975. In the Kassák Club, where Ferenc Sebő and Béla Halmos run the folk music and dance evenings which I have been attending from the start. I like authentic folk music and the singing of poetry. I like the way hundreds of young people spend their leisure in a worthwile way. After all, I am studying to be an adult educator, and I live in the homeland of Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók.
One evening I meet a boy. He hasn't been coming to the club for long, but he is kind, intelligent and interested in everything: the summer heritage protection camp, trips to Transylvania, the beautiful untouched villages, meetings with that wonderful collector of Transylvanian ballads, Zoltán Kallós. The boy apologises for being "only" a chemist, but says he is no narrow-minded specialist. I am impressed how, even though he is a few years older and has a "serious" profession, I can say things that are new and interesting to him, and how he pays attention to what I say. Enthusiastically he comes folk dancing with me and to the film club, to the young folk artists' studio. He doesn't miss a single event.
Well, how could he not have paid attention to me, since that was his job? On a weekly basis, for six months, he submitted written reports to the infamous Directorate III/III of the Budapest police headquarters on how we got to know each other, our meetings, our activities - reports on a relationship which I thought to be the most natural thing in the world to develop between a girl and a boy - a relationship which now, thirty years later, I learn was planned, step by step, by two men in a safe flat codenamed Hobby. I read the reports of the Hungarian State Security Archive in dismay. I have held similar material in my hands before, when writing a book on the brilliant film critic of those years, László B. Nagy. I am even familiar with the awkward specialist jargon, but seeing my own name in such a context is quite a different matter. Unnerving. I am looking at my life of three decades ago as if it were a reality show. The first feelings of defencelessness, humiliation, being stripped bare for all to see - these feelings are slowly replaced with a certain wonder. Why was all this necessary? Including the typist, four people spent months dealing with things such as how I lent someone the 1943 edition of László Németh's The Quality Revolution and how I talked for a few moments in private with the poet Sándor Csoóri during the break in a lecture on folk architecture. The report notes that, unlike the previous year, the programme at the Kassák Club this particular Christmas no longer included the carol "An Angel from Heaven Has Come Down to You." No major sins that I was guilty of, but the reports were "valuable from an operative point of view". But what on earth can be interesting about a report on a New Year's Eve party in 1975 if "nothing significant to state security occurred"? "The secret agent was invited to the New Year's Eve party by Klára Tóth.
According to our instructions, he took part in the gathering. The operative value of the report is provided by the fact that the secret agent became acquainted with individuals active in our area of counterintelligence. By his presence he increased the trust Klára Tóth has in him."

I am calm and collected by nature. In general, I can control myself. Even now, despite a slight pain in my stomach and the feeling that tears are welling up, about to flow, I am not going to cry in front of a stranger. In any case, as I turn the pages of the report, I do not know whether to laugh or cry. It transpires that at one point the informer, whose work is highly regarded by his superiors, is confused in his allegiances. When I feel that I can trust him, and that he may even deserve an explanation for why I sometimes disappear for a day or two, I let him in on my life's big secret, that I have long been preparing for a marriage of convenience to help a Transylvanian family migrate from Romania to Hungary.
Naturally, I ask him to keep this between the two of us, and he really was as silent as the grave, though he would have had plenty to report. The great and good of the Budapest intelligentsia, those sympathising with the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, are involved in arranging the marriage, for which it is not easy to gain permission. I travel all around Transylvania with my friends, bringing home my smuggled goods and culture from everywhere, from Gyimes to Moldavia. My boyfriend does not say a word about that in his reports to his superiors. They are about books read, dinners and lectures.
It is frightening to think how long he would have written about my life, how long my life would have been an open book - more precisely a strictly confidential file - if one day I had not realised that his devoted attention and never-ending interest in me was becoming more of a burden than a compliment. I was spellbound by something new; unexpectedly and without reason, I had fallen in love with someone who as yet paid me no attention. I broke up with the boy - with the inevitable pangs of guilt, of course - and, for quite a while longer, in the critical moments of my life, my mother would remind me, "You see, if only you had married him."

All I can do is sit there with the pile of papers in my hand, and somehow I am ashamed of myself, very ashamed. For being so naive. "You silly goose," I say to myself, to that young girl; for I remember that she knew there were informers, but never tried to imagine what they might look like. Anyway, they observed from afar and, of course, observed others.
"You can identify who it is, can't you?" asks the journalist.
"This is all too much all at once. I'd like a bit of time; I'll call you," I reply, as if unable to understand the question. I don't know why, but I don't want to say his name out loud. I can't bring myself to say the boy's name. Perhaps because the girl in the story, the girl I once was, for many years had a quotation on her desk that read ".there are things one doesn't do. One doesn't open and read letters addressed to others, just as one doesn't bear witness at a police interrogation, even against one's enemy. One doesn't sign a false statement, not for a packet of cigarettes or for any other reward one could imagine. One doesn't deny who one is, for only the first step to insincerity is difficult; the following steps are quick, keeping to a rhythm, like those of a ballroom dancer."
The quotation is from a novel by Péter Hajnóczy. It was a book my girlfriend and I tore out of each other's hands. She was like an older sister to me. Maybe she knew me better than I knew myself - these friendships between girls are so exclusive, so unconditional. Often we would get ready together for dates. She would plait my hair, lend me her skirt, and the next day we would always discuss what had happened. She told me that the girls were jealous of me for being with the boy from the folk dancing group; for, not only was he tall and slim, he was also considerate and polite. I was a lucky so and so, she told me, but when she learned that it was over, that I loved someone else I hardly knew, she understood. She never said a word to the effect that I was stupid to leave a sure thing for a nightmare. She knew what love was. And her name, my girlfriend's name, is there on the Web, on that makeshift list of agents which was published only a few days after the journalist who called me handed me the agent's reports. I examined the list, cross-checked it, because a name doesn't prove anything. Yet her date of birth matched, too - the birthday we celebrated together so many times. And I see her room in front of me, crammed with books, a black and red rug on the wall I brought for her from Moldavia, the red typewriter on her white desk, and I imagine how, as soon as I leave, she sits down and writes down everything I have said while it is still fresh in her mind - before she forgets - who I met, when and where, what we talked about, whether he took me home, etc.
I won't even blink if one day it turns out that she was the "parallel network" who cross-checked my boyfriend's reports. Once she even mentioned that someone from the Ministry of the Interior asked her to take notes on the meetings at the young folk artists' studio. It was no more than an aside. Perhaps I didn't even respond, since it was so surreal to think of her in connection with the informers. Now I would be interested to know whether these reports of hers were as exciting, clever, full of twists and turns as were her letters, the letters she wrote to me, the pages of which, even thirty years later, radiate love and affection. I read her letters to me, look at the photographs, and for a while quite forget why I got them out in the first place. I still haven't got adjusted to this new knowledge. It has not had time to transform, to dirty, the picture of my girlfriend which I have inside me.

Without emotion, I ask myself, "Why did she betray me?" Maybe for a passport to Western Europe, so she could see how avant-garde art was doing in Cologne, Munich or Paris? I don't know, and I will never know, as it is more than a decade since she committed suicide. I think of her son, who is only slightly older than my older son, and whose clothes my children wore over many years.
Sometimes I hope beyond hope that she said no to the request to join the agents' ranks, and that her name joined the list "by accident". "A lover, her hair untidy, is easy to shoo away, your homeland less so," she wrote in a poem; for, her talents extended to writing, too. Yet, this hope is self-delusion. Similarly, I would like to believe that maybe she didn't submit any reports on me. But does that make any difference? Whether it was me, or someone else?
"And is it better now that you know?" asks an acquaintance who does not believe in stirring up the past.
"No, of course not. It's much worse," I respond.
"So what is it, then?"
"Maybe I am just a masochist," I reply, jokingly, though to myself I can't help thinking that however high the price, I have the right, we all have the right, to know how we lived, who we lived amongst then, who we live amongst now, and why, out of what interest or obligation, or perhaps out of what conviction, they falsified our most personal, intimate world. What right did they have to manipulate us? Perhaps that dictatorship was not so soft after all, as many would like to portray it? How big was this invisible and yet all-pervading Thoughtpolice, and who was in the right? I am reminded of another of her favourite quotations: "Say yes or say no, else we will never know where the truth lies." It's going to hurt, but without pain there is no catharsis, and no chance for the moral solar eclipse to come to an end.

 

Klára Tóth
is an editor of documentary films for Duna Television and author of a book on the film critic László B. Nagy. This article appeared in the 22 April 2005 issue of the Budapest weekly Élet és Irodalom.