The Dossier by Alan Furst

The Dossier by Alan Furst

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

My Family’s Journey to America

By Kati Marton

Illustrated. 272 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26

The year is 1955; most of the world has taken sides in the cold war. In Budapest, behind the Iron Curtain, a little girl, 6 years old, lives one of the more privileged lives in that city. In an apartment on a tree-lined street on one of Buda’s hills, she is adored by her attractive parents, prominent journalists; she wears pink sweaters and cute shoes — patent leather Mary Janes — from America; she loves going to school; she loves her playmates. But then, on an icy February night at 2 in the morning, the light goes on in the room she shares with her sister, and life changes forever.

“ ‘Get into our bed,’ my mother said. As we slowly awoke, one of the searchers moved in. Like a hunter stalking big game, he sank his knife into our beat-up stuffed rocking horse. Straw spilled out of my oldest possession, as my sister and I ran to the room next door and dove into our parents’ bed. We were too dazed to ask where Papa was. Or did we know somehow? ‘Elvittek,’ Hungarian for ‘they took him away,’ was a word I often heard as a child. . . . So now my father had been elvittek, taken away.” Four months later, her mother was also elvittek. Taken away.

To many in Budapest, this would come as no surprise. Endre and Ilona Marton were a high-profile couple, intellectual celebrities. He was the Associated Press correspondent in Budapest, she reported for the rival U.P. Almost all foreign journalists had been forced to leave Hungary, but the Martons, Hungarians who spoke and wrote near-native English, seemed invulnerable. Endre Marton dressed well, smoked a pipe, drove a white Studebaker convertible and applied his Hungarian irony and wit to the gross distortions of government press releases. The Martons were welcome at the American Embassy and played bridge with American diplomats. So, they must be spies. Thus the AVO, the ferocious secret police of the Hungarian Stalinist state, was ordered to accumulate sufficient evidence of espionage so that the Martons could be arrested. It took some time, but by 1955, the AVO had what it needed.

Little wonder. As the head of the Hungarian state security archives would put it, many years later, “Everybody in your circle, whether your parents trusted or did not trust them, was informing on them.” And so they were — the governess, the dentist, the colleague. Recruited, most often (though not always) intimidated, by the AVO, they reported every contact with the Marton family. Meanwhile, AVO surveillance teams followed the Martons, bugged their telephone and opened their mail, filling file after file with the details of Kati Marton’s childhood.

With an unforeseen, to say the least, result: “Enemies of the People,” Kati Marton’s seventh book, a powerful and absolutely absorbing narrative of her parents’ journey — a series of escapes, from Hitler, from Stalin, eventually to America. Though if you think the AVO left them alone after that, you’re wrong.

Marton is a highly respected author and journalist. She has worked for ABC News as a foreign correspondent, reported for NPR, won many awards, headed the Committee to Protect Journalists and worked with the International Rescue Committee. So, some years after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, when the records of secret police operations in Hungary became available, Marton knew she had to read the file (one of the biggest, it turned out) on herself and her family. It was, after years of concern for the victims of totalitarian states, her turn.

And what came next, “Enemies of the People,” has all the magnetism and, yes, the excitement, of the very best spy fiction. But would that it were fiction. Marton’s a gifted writer, and she knows about suspense. As you watch the AVO watching the Martons, as you see Endre Marton, a sophisticated and courageous man of culture, slowly crushed by interrogators in prison, you wonder when he’ll begin to cooperate, to give them what they want: names, dates, acts of espionage. There’s some of Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” in this book, and more than a little of “The Lives of Others,” the German film about the Stasi, the East German secret police.

Here is one Dr. Leo Benko — could Graham Greene have come up with a better name? — planted by the AVO on Endre Marton as his cellmate: “I do not perceive the slightest trace of regret in him. During our first days together he was quite worked up, but lately he is rather broken in spirit and apathetic and doesn’t seem to notice anything around him. . . . In my opinion, . . . if he is still withholding any secrets, then, knowing his nature, there is only one way to force him to confess: by threatening his wife, and, even more, his children. I am certain, that if his wife and, even more, his children were placed in harm’s way, there is not a secret that he would not disclose to save them.” What Benko may not have known, and what Endre Marton certainly didn’t know, was that his wife was in a cell just floors away.

There are other villains — what else would you call him? — in this book, but there are also heroes. When the Martons are finally allowed to meet, in an office in the prison, an AVO major leaves the room, permitting them a moment of privacy (maybe). As Ilona Marton takes her husband’s hands in hers, she whispers, in English, “Darling . . . the Americans will free us.” And so they did. Though there are American villains here, including one in the embassy who spied for the Hungarians, American news media and diplomatic efforts did save their lives. But the true central character in “Enemies of the People” is surveillance itself — the operatives, the informants, the cameras and microphones — and what it becomes once committed to paper:

“Surveillance record, Aug. 27, 1954:

“10:05 a.m. [Marton] in a gray and black striped suit . . . and his two little girls left their home and got into car (license plate CA894) drove to Alkotas Utca 1, where we photographed him stepping out of the car. He then went into a stationery store with the little girls. Inside, he bought them school supplies. Ten minutes later, the little girls carrying their school supplies, Marton left the store.

“11:43 Marton drove to Gerbeaud and, after finding a table, ordered ice cream. The three consumed the above while chatting.

“12:20 p.m. Holding his children’s hands, Marton walked back to his car. They drove to Vaci Ut 7 and entered a toy shop.”

There is more of this report, then Marton writes: “To the AVO I owe a long-ago summer day, washed away by dramatic events to come. It is now restored to me.”

If Marton was able to retrieve a sweet memory of her past, she was also to discover details, intimate details, of her parents’ lives that she might well have preferred not to know. “A Pandora’s box,” the foremost historian of the AVO correctly called the Marton files. But, in the end, “Enemies of the People” becomes a treatise on human nature — at its best, at its worst — and Marton is enough of a good journalist, and a good human being, to take that for what it is: applaud the love and the heroism, deplore the cowardice and the cruelty, and go on with life. She doesn’t dwell on her feelings, but it could not have been easy for her to undertake this project. Yet, as the narrative draws to a close, she understands that the twists and turns of Europe’s brutal history can sometimes, with luck and courage, end well. And turn out to be, at least for Marton, and certainly for the reader, an honestly inspiring story.

Alan Furst’s most recent novel is “The Spies of Warsaw.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Furst-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3