I was once, aged 22, invited for a series of interviews by the British secret service. The interviews, designed to assess my suitability for espionage, took place in a blacked-out room in central London. I was intrigued by the process, somewhat flattered by the approach, but then at the end of the interviews came the moment of truth – or, more exactly, the moment of duplicity. I was invited to sign the Official Secrets Act and thereafter, I was told, no one could know of these meetings – not my family, not my girlfriend (now my wife), not my friends – and that would, potentially, be the defining fact of my life from now on. I sat there with a pen poised above the dotted line and had a sudden, unnerving sense of that future, the divisions of loyalty it would involve, the psychological doubleness it would require. I doubt very much I was ever spying material anyhow, but, in that moment, pen poised, I decided not to go ahead.
I mention that story now only because I was reminded of how that moment felt while sitting one afternoon last month in snowy London with András Forgách. Through spy fiction and films, we have perhaps become blasé about the family betrayals required by state secrecy. Forgách, a Hungarian, reminds me that in the east of our continent, where those compromises were a fact of life for many families for whole lifetimes, they are rarely so sanguine.
A playwright, teacher, novelist and artist, Forgách is one of the last of those ferociously well-read Eastern European intellectuals who came of age as a dissident under Soviet communism and learned, after the revolutions of 1989, that the market economy imposed different kinds of limits on artistic liberty. He slips in and out of several languages, while speaking perfect, nuanced English. He has the wild hair and half smile of the pathologically curious. He is first excited to tell me he has a son – his first child – who is just over a year old. He is 65. Over the course of a couple of hours, he patiently tries to explain to me, in bursts of anecdote, the other ways in which his entire life has recently been upended.
For the previous few days, I have been piecing together that story from his sometimes riddling memoir, No Live Files Remain, which is a voyage around the life of his parents, in particular the life of his beloved mother, Bruria, who died in 1985. It is a semi-mythologised tale, told in turns by Forgách as fiction, and poetry, and journalism, a story rooted in the compacted history of the Cold War. The book has been something of a literary sensation not only in Forgách’s native Hungary, but also in some of the 14 countries in which it has been translated; the film option, with a nod to The Lives of Others and The Bridge of Spies, has been sold to Film4.
The genesis of the book was a call Forgách received in autumn 2013 from a researcher at the secret police archive in Budapest. In contrast to other ex-iron curtain countries – particularly the former East Germany – little effort or resource has been put into indexing that archive in Hungary. “And,” Forgách suggests, “all the dominant political forces are very happy about that. They destroyed a lot. They stole a lot. They used some for blackmail, but most of it is gone.” It was only by chance that Forgách had been contacted. The researcher happened to be a childhood acquaintance, and when he saw Forgách’s name in a file he felt duty-bound to contact him to discuss what he had found.
The call and the subsequent meeting in a café changed everything. “There are things in life we can fathom only if they happen to us,” Forgách writes. “One such event is our mother’s death… Or, try this one for size, one very fine day – OK not such a very fine day – it turns out your mother was recruited by the intelligence services of the communist regime…” In some ways, the secret files opened up for Forgách the saddest story he had ever heard; it was also perhaps news he had been waiting all his life to know, to help make sense of things.
I suggest to him that the lives of our parents, particularly before we are born, are always the first mystery available to us. Characteristically, he disputes that idea.
The truth is, he could hardly have known more about his parents’ past lives, he says. His father had been, in his own extended family, one of only three survivors of the Holocaust. Forgách’s formative years were therefore crowded with tragic stories of befores and afters, of the lives of all the aunts and uncles and cousins who were murdered by the Nazis.
On his mother’s side the past was, if anything, even more vivid. Bruria grew up in Tel Aviv, where her father was a legendary literary figure, a novelist and the translator of Joseph Conrad and Bertolt Brecht. His mother had rejected her homeland in adopting communism and moving to Hungary and becoming a fervent anti-Zionist. Even so, when her father visited the family, he was greeted as a kind of god. “He looked like Einstein,” Forgách says, “white hair, blue eyes, we all gathered around him.”
Those rival histories were further captured in two sets of letters Forgách had inherited. The first set were those exchanged between Forgách’s mother and father, from when they first met, two young idealists. The letters revealed what Forgách always knew: “It was love from my father’s side; it was not love from my mother’s side.” (His mother was instead infatuated with a British soldier, whom she met after the war, and never got over.)
The second set of letters was even more revealing. They were sent by his grandmother from Tel Aviv, every week for 30 years, to her daughter in exile. Forgách used these letters as the basis for a family memoir he wrote in 2007. It ran to 700 pages and took as its title the Hebrew phrase that punctuated all of his grandmother’s writing, which translates as “C’est la vie”. Once he had completed that book, Forgách thought he had exorcised all of his complex family history. “And now,” he says, “I realised nothing of what I had written was true.”
What was never in doubt was that his parents were Stalinists, even after 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the popular revolt. “The structure of the beliefs my parents had in their heads at the end of their life was the same as they had when they were 16 years old,” Forgách says. He had no idea, however, that these loyalties were stronger even than those to their children.
The details of his mother’s betrayal discovered in the files are often quite banal, an alternative family history told in footnotes, in which she despairs at her children’s wayward political beliefs, provides names of their more free-thinking friends, and works to infiltrate and undermine the “Zionist conspiracy” on trips abroad. Her confessions take on a more sinister note in the early 1980s when she is persuaded to provide her handlers access to her son András’s own apartment, at which perhaps Hungary’s most notable political dissident, the poet György Petri, was then staying.
Petri, Forgách’s friend and mentor, was the author of the first samizdat (underground) publications in Hungary and the co-editor of a banned newspaper critical of the Soviet-backed regime. The files suggest that Forgách’s mother had been persuaded that the secret police were interested in spying on an apartment across the street; she concocted a cover story involving her offering to clean Andras’s apartment while he was out. In this way, it seems, she gave the authorities their first access to Petri and his associates.
It was not that long after this betrayal that Forgách’s mother died. In the final footnotes to the fictionalised part of this story, which quote verbatim from the files, he turns on her, in outrage at the financial bargain she had struck for a certain piece of information offered. “Mum, there is no need for this. For 2,000 forints? Just say the word, and I’ll give you 2,000 forints. Here you are. Here. Take it!”
At the root of this hurt is a half-acknowledged Oedipal rage, implied throughout the memoir. At one point, as we speak, Forgách pulls up some family photos on his phone – in one he is a baby smiling in his mother’s arms; in the other he is 25 or 26, still staring at her adoringly.
“I knew my mother always had secrets,” he says. “When she was mortally ill, my brother made a video of her, you know, ‘Tell us about this or that in your past.’ She said on film, ‘I would like to tell you everything, but I am not able to do so.’” Forgách knew that she had love affairs – he thought it was about that.
He explains his mother’s double life in different ways. Some of it, he suggests, was a cry for help in her marriage. His father was brilliant and needy, apparently bipolar, a journalist and, it seems, also an informant for the regime for a period in London. His own files are lost. He suffered three “shocks” or breakdowns, Forgách says. The first came in the 50s, the second 10 years later, after which he underwent electro-shock treatment, and the third, which destroyed him, in 1973. “He realised he could not go on. He was 53 years old,” Forgách recalls.
Bruria insisted on looking after her husband at home, along with her four increasingly wayward children. “My mother was a fantastic person, very warm but quite chaotic. I think serving the secret service was a kind of counterpoint to the chaos of the rest of her life.” It gave her a structure, Forgách suggests, perhaps even someone to talk to.
“She was extremely beautiful, very cultured, and yet she was so narrow-minded about politics. That is the paradox of the personality. If she at 14 or 16 decided that Stalin was the greatest person in the world, and that Zionists were killers and Nazis, she could not give up on that lie.”
Forgách himself swallowed some of it, too, indoctrinated until he was about 16. His mother suggested at one point to her minders, he discovered, that he might also be of use to them. But in 1968, when Soviet tanks went into Prague, he saw the hollowness of his parents’ reality.
His initial response to that event was to move further to the left. Along with his brother and sister, also artists, he joined a Maoist group – much to his mother’s dismay – again as revealed to her state minders. “We were part of a group led by a guy, a sculptor who showed all the classic signs of a revolutionary leadership,” he recalls. “Very hard line about political philosophy, and fucking all the 16-year-old girls who joined up. After about a year, I thought, enough.”
It was then that Forgách met Petri, the poet on whom his mother eventually spied. A national hero to many Hungarians for his bravery in criticising the regime, Petri became a focal point of dissent. As well as offering him a place to stay, Forgách helped him print his samizdat newspaper, and distribute it, right up to 1989. Petri drank himself to an early death in 2000 but he was, says Forgách, a “great writer and a deeply intelligent man”.
If his mother had lived to have seen 1989, I wonder how he thinks she would have reacted to the fall of the regime.
“I think she would have become a strong feminist, a green probably,” Forgách says. ”She was going in that direction, but no doubt she would have kept this very archaic Soviet anti-Zionist rhetoric.”
What happened to the Hungarians who were exposed as informants after 1989? “If it was an actor or a writer or a politician, that was big news. If it was a normal citizen, it was not news.” Quite soon, after the Berlin Wall came down, the popular line on the secret police files hardened into a simple binary. The wider public brusquely condemned the individuals – “Informant!” – or expressed boredom: “Enough of the past.”
A version of those polarities has been reflected in Forgách’s own family. His sister, Susan, still uses their mother’s name as a pseudonym for her art. She is totally against her brother’s decision to write about what has been discovered about her. “She says this is treason against our family, against my mother’s memory,” he says.
Forgách was torn originally by these arguments, but ultimately felt he had no choice but to tell the story.
One of the reasons, he says now, is the current rightwing, repressive Hungarian regime of Viktor Orbán, which is reminiscent in some of its policy and tone to what went on under the Soviets.
“We are living in a time when debate is being closed down again,” he says, “and truthful statements of whatever kind are absolutely necessary.”
Forgách has been vindicated by the fact that the book has reopened a debate about the role of the police state in Hungary, and found all the right enemies. One, a former minister in Orbán’s government, suggested that Forgách “wanted to clean his parents, but they are uncleanable”. Another, a prominent supporter of the current regime, offered a line that has populist support. “The officers of the secret service were just doing their jobs,” she has suggested. “The real traitors were citizens who aided them, people like the parents of Forgách.”
He has also been charged with profiting from his family secrets; he recently walked into a café in Budapest and an old political acquaintance shouted out: “Forgách! You have a lot to thank your mother for!”
He smiles ruefully. “The fact is I do have a lot to thank my mother for,” he says. “It was the love I had for her, and still have for her, that made me strong enough to write this book.”
Before the end of our conversation, I ask Forgách, on the scale of sympathy and judgment, where he would now place his mother.
He thinks for a moment. “I don’t judge her,” he says. “But there are moments in this history that are shameful, and painful. I am crying for her. She gave my name to the officers, the names of my friends. But I think if you love somebody you see them as a full person. Otherwise, which of us would escape from judgment?”
No Live Files Remain by András Forgách is published by Simon and Schuster at £14.99. To order a copy for £12.74, go to guardianbookshop.com
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