Only after these preliminaries could the real work begin: the close examination of notes, letters, receipts, papers, and documents; we never sat down but stood next to each other, in the shared sphere of each other's heat and excitement; we read the stuff together and in unison, devouring with greedy curiosity what were for the most part routine and boring, or fragmentary and therefore largely incoherent, pieces of information, and only when it was clear that the other didn't understand or might misunderstand something and therefore draw the wrong conclusion did we break the silence with a few whispered words of explanation.
We were not aware of what we were doing to each other and to ourselves; in the interest of our stated goal we didn't want to acknowledge that as a result of our activity a feeling was forming, like some tough stain or film, a deposit on the lining of our hearts, stomachs, and intestines; we did not want to acknowledge the feeling of repulsion.
Because it wasn't just official and work-related documents that we came across but all sorts of other material that we did not mean to find, like our parents' extensive personal romantic correspondence; here, the material discovered in my father's drawers was unfortunately more serious, but once we put our hands on it and went over it thoroughly, painstakingly, with the disinterested sternness of professionals, it seemed that by ferreting out sin in the name of ideal purity, invading the most forbidden territory of the deepest and darkest passions, penetrating the most secret regions, we, too, turned into sinners, for sin is indivisible: when tracking a murderer one must become a murderer to experience most profoundly the circumstances and motives of the murder; and so we were right there with our fathers, where not only should we not have set foot but, according to the testimony of the letters, they themselves moved about stealthily, like unrepentant sinners.
There is profound wisdom in the Old Testament's prohibition against casting eyes on the uncovered loins of one's father.
Maybe if we had uncovered this forbidden knowledge separately, each of us alone, we might have been able to conceal it from ourselves — forgetting can sometimes act like a good comrade; but our situation was exacerbated by our attachment, this passionate and passionately suspicious relationship which went far beyond friendship but had not reached love; we got to know these secrets together and, let's not forget! while still sexually unsatisfied: the very object of these secrets was passion and its mutual gratification, and as we know, a secret shared by two people is no longer a secret; with her full knowledge and approval I read through letters written by a woman named Olga and also by her mother, both women writing from the height of emotional and physical rapture, cursing, berating, extolling, admonishing, fawning, and above all imploring her father not to abandon them, and, in keeping with the conventions of such love letters, decorating their words with encircled teardrops, locks of hair, pressed flowers, and little hearts drawn in red pencil; though old enough to sense the raw power of passion, in our aesthetic squeamishness we found all this very repugnant; with my approval and eager assistance, Maja had a chance to acquaint herself with the stylistically more restrained letters that János Hamar wrote to my mother and the ones my father wrote to Maria Stein, but my father and mother also wrote letters to each other in which they discussed their feelings about being caught up in this inextricably complicated foursome; and since all this was revealed to both of us, we should have made some judgment, or at least have appraised and characterized the information, put it in its proper place; needless to say, this went way beyond our moral strength — which otherwise we thought quite formidable.
How could we have known then that our relationship reenacted, repeated, and copied, in a playfully exaggerated form — today I know it followed a diabolical pattern — our parents' ideals and also their ruthless practices, and to some extent the publicly proclaimed ideals and ruthless practices of that historical period as well? playing at being investigators was nothing but a crude, childishly distorted, cheap imitation; we could call it aping, but we could also call it an immersion in something real, for Maja's father was chief of military counter-intelligence and my father was a state prosecutor, and therefore by picking up on hints and remarks they dropped, we were both initiated, almost by accident and definitely against their will, into the professional pursuit of criminal investigation; more precisely, for us it was turning their activities into a game that enabled us to experience their present life and work — which we thought was wonderful, dangerous, important, and, what's more, respectable — and also to bring their past closer, which, judging by the contents of those drawers, was filled with adventure, real-life dangers, narrow escapes, false papers, and double identities — we could see their youth; and if I were to go a little further — and why shouldn't I? — I'd have to say that they were the ones who blessed the knife with which we sought their lives; in this sense, we not only suffered for playing our games but also took great delight in them; we loved being serious, we basked in the glory of our assumed political role, not only filled with terror and remorse but bestowing on us a grand sense of power, a feeling that we had power even over them, over these enormously powerful men, and all in the name of an ethical precept that, again in their own views, was considered sacred, nothing less than the ideal, self-abnegating, perfect, immaculate Communist purity of their way of life; and what a cruel quirk of fate it was that through it all they were totally unsuspecting, and how could they have guessed that, while in their puritanical and also very practical zeal they were killing scores of real and imagined enemies, they were nurturing vipers in their bosom? for after all, who disgraced their ideals more outrageously than we? who put their ideals more thoroughly to the test than we, in our innocence? and since we also harbored the same witch-hunter's suspicion toward them and toward each other, which they had planted in us and bred in themselves, with whom could we have shared the dreadful knowledge of our transgressions, whom? I couldn't talk about things like this with Krisztián or Kálmán, nor could Maja discuss them with Hédi or Livia, for how could they have understood? even though we lived in the same world, ruled by the same Zeitgeist, this would have been too alien for them, too bizarre, too repulsive.