They overcame the strict prohibitions, at most with cautious allusions.
All three of them worked for the state news agency, up on Nap Mountain, and the only thing that distinguished them from the other drudge translators was that they were given separate rooms on the top floor of the extremely ugly quasi-military building, far from the storms of local intrigues and the continual mayhem that hurried news agency work generates. Their three, almost completely empty, bright rooms opened into one another, officially as a separate unit, with André as their chief. They translated strictly confidential state documents from Hungarian into foreign languages — André to English, Ágost to French, Kovách to German and Russian. Eventually, these documents would reach an international public, but just when and how, or by what means, was decided not by the news agency director but in every case, and not always logically, by the highest political circles.
It wasn’t their linguistic abilities but their trustworthiness that was priceless.
They were now beginning to discuss one such document, namely the latest report of the Theoretical College, which all three of them had translated in the previous few days, though there were signs that in the highest circle mud wrestling was still going on about the text.
The infamous and powerful body, the highest circle, had only three members, each a well-known university professor, Ágost’s father among them, but he, because of his recent mental decline, could not have had much to do with this. Still, André brought up the subject in hopes that Ágost might know something from his family sources. Hansi had been well along in the Russian translation when they telephoned from the prime minister’s secretariat to say that for the time being they would not need the translations. This call made André suspect that something was amiss; he did not understand why the secretariat had put a stop to the project. He knew the prime minister had direct contact with the Russian secret service, and he also knew that decisions were made based on the prevailing situation or, rather, on how the prime minister was leaning in any given situation. And he wanted to know which direction it was this time. Officially, the prime minister had no contact with the highest circle; yet with one of its most powerful members, Ágost’s father, he did have a close personal relationship. During the Spanish Civil War he had worked as a political officer in the International Brigades, yet he belonged to the influential circle of clandestine nationalists. André believed the text would never be published officially in Hungarian but would be floated for a while in foreign versions — not in Russian, though, because from the Russian viewpoint something was wrong with it. But why should they let the translators know this unless they had a definite purpose in mind. It would also be nice to know what exactly the Russians found wrong with the text. They could just dump the finished translation in the wastebasket without calling attention to it. If the call from the prime minister’s secretary was a hint that the Russians had protested even before the official translation was completed, what did he really want to convey to the translators. It surely was not a secret to Hansi that they had other sources giving them advance notice of various officially planned actions. So then why the phone call. The prime minister couldn’t have just wanted them to know what everyone else knew, something on which everyone, including himself, was working diligently.
Ágost either knew nothing of any of this or wanted to take his revenge by not letting on that he did. He put on his poker face, which neither of his two friends could see through. All three of them had special sources of information they jealously guarded and concealed from one another.
At boarding school too there had been such ritual behaviors.
They could give thanks for their confidential jobs to the exceptional ability with which they wrote and spoke better in foreign languages than in their mother tongue. Though Hans von Wolkenstein’s father was Hungarian, his mother tongue was German: his mother to this day lived and worked as a district doctor on the Czech border, not far from the family estate in a small town named Annaberg, in Erzegebirge. The three men were in close contact with military reconnaissance, military defense, and the civilian secret service operating abroad. All three of them had high military rank and had received decorations for their activities, about which, of course, very few people knew. André had been considered one of the most successful agents in the British secret service until a few months after the war, when he changed horses and went over to the Russians, for whom he worked no less successfully. He was given just a half hour to leave his last workstation, in Eindhoven, Holland, and allowed to take with him only a briefcase. Hans was first sent to the Russian-occupied zone of Germany to visit his mother and settle in Dresden, then completely destroyed; after a while, to his great relief he was transferred to the Hague, then to Prague, and finally to Budapest. But after a few months, with no reasons given, they handed him over to the Hungarians; he received a new name, since then he had been called János Kovách, and in the same hysterical way they removed him from the intelligence service. In the same year, Ágost was called home for consultation from Bern, where he had been the cultural attaché in the Hungarian embassy but in fact in charge of the South European section of Hungarian military intelligence; not only could he not return to his former post, but he was not allowed to travel abroad again.
In their peculiar exile in Budapest, they met for the first time in the autumn of 1955.
For completely different reasons, they were being kept out of circulation. They had no idea how long this enforced rest would last, and none of them considered the possibility of a lifetime of uncertainty as a piece of good luck. All three of them were waiting, in silent anxiety, and this too was one of the delicate matters they would not discuss with one another or with other people.
Nothing, not with anyone.
Their common past restrained them, because they hoped it had not yet ended. Its strong inner dynamic spared them the need for thoughtless chatter. They were not ordinary people, their temperaments and their fates were not ordinary. Far from one another, at distant points of Europe, left to themselves, they had spent their childhoods in various boarding schools, their youth in various colleges. They had learned about solitude long before they met, André in wartime England, Ágost in neutral Switzerland, and Hans, in truly exceptional circumstances, in Nazi Germany, from where, through illegal routes, he had been taken to Moscow. The reason why among themselves they were compelled to use that secret and supranational sign language which can be acquired perfectly only in boys’ boarding schools was that to this day each dreamed, counted, and thought in his own separate language. They were also alike in not understanding Hungarians, whom they disdained, and this profound disdain had become one of their favorite topics. The tension between their thinking and their behavior, between their own linguistic needs and the Hungarian they used for communication was so great, so full of deviations and misunderstandings to be clarified, of uncharted areas and breakdowns, that without the guidance of this mute sign language, which seemed very stable to all three of them, finding their bearings would have been nearly impossible. But by using it, they involuntarily steered their attention back to a time, and placed their sensitivities in a position, about which they could hardly talk, or rather, which could not be reconciled with their stations in adult life.