My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  On the afternoon of the day when we moved into our new apartment I went out on to the balcony and made a vow that I would take the first opportunity to get rid of her. I waited a whole year for such an opportunity. In the meantime relations between my parents and my wife became worse and worse. My parents’ objection was that Valy came from a relatively insignificant family and had received no dowry – to which I was absolutely indifferent. Their objections, however, compelled me to take my wife’s side and the more they ranted the more gallantly I had to defend her. My journey to France offered the long-awaited opportunity to leave her behind. Because of the foreign currency restrictions I could take no more than a few hundred francs with me and my future in Paris seemed absolutely insecure.

  Apart from these three negative reasons, my emigration had two positive ones. The first I shall call the yearning for adventure. My life had become too dull, a simple matter of routine, and I hadn’t been in Western Europe for over three years. The second reason was Paris itself. Not French democracy, not French military power (which I believed would be able to rout Hitler in no time) and not the city itself, much as I loved it – but the culture of Paris which to my generation was the centre of the world and the shrine of our ideals. It was in the garden of this shrine – we thought – that the antidote to the German poison grew.

  We loathed German culture not because of its content but because of its monopolistic influence. When Hungary was founded one thousand years ago the state order of the Holy Roman Empire was adopted. Our Kings’ advisers, our craftsmen and our artisans had all come from Germany. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century our urban bourgeoisie was almost exclusively German. All our intellectual trends came from Germany ready-made, like bread from the baker: the Reformation from Worms and Wittenberg, the Counter-Reformation from Melk, even the ideals of enlightenment by way of Vienna and the German translations of Voltaire’s and Diderot’s works printed in Vienna. Our school system was like that of the Prussians, German elements prevailed in our aesthetics and philosophy, our encyclopaedias were translated from the German. In our grammar schools Lessing figured with one, Schiller with three and Goethe with two plays in the obligatory reading, but there was no Shakespeare, no Molière.

  We protected ourselves against this Niagara of German culture in two ways. The more atavistic and instinctive protection was a vulgar chauvinism which, though it was in many ways ridiculous, still seemed, with its impassivity and cocky humour, less ridiculous than the tragic and hopeless pathos of the adorers of the West. The trouble with this trend was that, together with German culture, it also rejected the rest of European thought and technical civilization. In summer, particularly in the eastern part of the country, passengers in the Orient Express often wondered why the girls and women working in the fields near the railway lines turned their backs on the train, lifted their skirts and displayed their bare, white behinds. The passengers may have believed that this gesture of peasant contempt was directed against the rich and idle travelling in the train, but in fact it was directed against the railway itself, built by German engineers eighty years before. When anaesthesia was first introduced in Hungary the famous Professor Magyar denounced this decadent and harmful western method and insisted that his own method, the so-called Hungarian narcosis, be used. He made his assistants strap the patient to the operating table and hit him over the head. When one of the country’s foremost newspapers sent one of our best writers to Rome to see the world and write reports on the election of the new Pope, he dispatched a few articles on the difference between stables and cow-sheds he saw in the villages near Rome and stables and cowsheds in Hungary. The rest held no interest for him.

  The lowest category of West-lovers consisted of the dandies and old gentlemen dressed in cloth from Manchester who sat at the small tables of the Danube cafés, reading The Times even if, as it sometimes happened, they understood not a word of it. The Times was their letter-patent of nobility. The other extreme was embodied in Sandor Petöfi, one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century, who called Goethe an ice-cold, heartless German, despised his work and considered the ‘divine Béranger’ his unique, brilliant paragon. I adopted more or less the same attitude. My father read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms – I read La Rochefoucauld; he read Nietzsche – I read Pascal. The favourites of my fledgling days – Anatole France and Ernest Renan – were conspicuously absent from my father’s bookshelves, which were loaded with German classics and German philosophers. My father believed that only a German university could make a man out of a man; I, on the other hand, knew all the Paris metro stations by heart and the order in which the sidestreets opened from the Boulevard St Germain. I set out for Paris as a medieval pilgrim set out for Rome: with humility written all over his face but pride in his heart, because he knew that salvation was awaiting him at the end of his journey.

  Finally, the sixth and seventh reasons for my emigration were that two of my acquaintances were already there. One of them was a young Austrian actress with whom I had spent my student years and whom I had not seen for three years; the other was an old politician and publicist, Laszlo Fényes, whom I had met but once, in my childhood. In those days he had appeared to me as a supernatural being. I had often thought of him since; his legend lived on in me as it lived on in the entire country which he had left over fifteen years before.

  I had met Laszlo Fényes twenty years before in a small town in northern Hungary, called Zsolna, where my grandparents lived. We used to go there regularly, twice a year, in the autumn and in the Christmas holidays. My grandfather lived in a large, L-shaped, one-storey house opposite the railway station, looking out towards the mountains. Once upon a time it had been a guest-house and it was so old that every part of it and every piece of furniture it contained was bound to every other by sacred ties of friendship as if they had lived together for centuries. When someone knocked on the front door towards evening, the tall-stemmed wineglasses in the cupboard at the other end of the corridor began to dance like young girls waiting in the twilight to be taken to their first ball; and when a cart turned in to the back gate, the small kitchen window flew open by itself, remembering the servants of yore who used to stick their heads out when the mail-coach arrived, asking the coachmen to tell them the latest news.

  Two rooms at the front of the house made up my grandfather’s pub – the same two rooms that had once served as public bar and dining-room. Slovaks in white trousers and black boots stood around in them, their slow movements stirring the pipe-smoke and the smell of their mouldy sheepskins into the penetrating aroma of marc-brandy. Dead flies lay between the panes of the double windows on stiffly extended wings, with their legs pulled in like oars.

  The roof of the old house was flat and small with a wild vegetation sprouting from it. This I found all the more wonderful as no one in the capital possessed such a roof garden. In wintertime only the tiny red carnations remained, like patches of clotted blood at the end of dry, straw-coloured stems. The huge loft, however, with its window in the roof, where the most diverse mysteries awaited me and where no one but the draught and I knew our way around the heaps of discarded furniture, broken plates, cracked kettles and various odd pieces, was more interesting even than the roof garden. Great big wooden barrels stood in the corners in which I liked to squat for hours like a Robinson Crusoe waiting for his Man Friday. At other times I contemplated the blue and violet glass flowers, moved to tears by their melancholy fate, or played with old jars that had once held mercurial ointment. I found queer-shaped, opalescent bottles haunted by the ghost of ancient perfumes: perfumes used by sutlers and itinerant whores following the armies of Oxenstierna and Wallenstein at the time of the Thirty Years War.

  I was happiest, however, when I was allowed to go to the mill and sit on the flour sacks. The mill stood at the bottom of the garden. My grandfather performed his daily chores with slow, familiar movements but sometimes he would stop before me and talk. He would fix his protruding eyes on my face, bend his neck
– strong as a bull’s – and his beard, white with age and flour, fluttered in the draught. He waved his long-stemmed pipe like a fishing rod. He did not tell me fairy tales, neither did he explain his work. There were but two subjects that aroused his passionate interest: the secrets of the universe and United Europe. He talked simply yet excitingly, the way children should be talked to. Although I understood little of what he said, I remembered every word of it, and years later discovered what he had meant. While he spoke he watched me with tender, appreciative eyes. At the time I thought that his glance expressed only love for his grandson, but later I knew that his joy in me was partly due to the knowledge that when he died there would be someone left to witness the creation of the United States of Europe.

  At times visitors looked in at the mill, acquaintances, neighbours, who sat on the flour sacks and gossiped. During these visits my grandfather did not light his pipe but went on with his chores barely listening, asking a question or two out of politeness for his guests. I, however, listened with the greatest attention. The men told of embezzlements and revelries, abductions and secret love affairs; they told malicious anecdotes about the king and the dukes, blackguarded the Prime Minister, Count Istvan Tisza, and called the generals of the monarchy a bunch of idiots. I felt as if I had fallen among conspirators. At home my parents never talked politics and – though with mute disgust – were resigned to the existence of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The human race living here seemed to me entirely different from that which I knew in the capital. The people who came to visit my parents did so to fulfil their duty as relatives, acquaintances or friends. They had no worries, no adventures, no love affairs and, what is more, they knew of no such weaknesses in other people.

  My favourite among the guests at the mill was Mr Remy, owner of the little town’s only hotel. He was an ugly, fat little man who never betrayed the secret of his Christian name. According to my grandfather, when he came into this world fifty years earlier as a healthy male child, his parents, partly because they were Anglophile, partly to save him from military service, registered him as Victoria.

  Mr Remy belonged to the rare category of angry fat men. He walked slowly, with great dignity, pushing his protruding belly through the door with care and circumspection as if it were new-born twins in a pram. His speech was loud, excited and breathless; he knew everything about everyone, or rather, he knew everything that was to their discredit. He never praised anyone, but when he spoke of himself his voice softened and tears of self-adulation flooded his eyes.

  I listened with rapture while he told of dissolute officers who could not pay their bills, of duels following the terrible quarrels that took place in his restaurant. The fights were divided into two categories: fights between two men started by some drunken guest usually because of a woman; and free-for-all fights started usually by the circumstance that a Czech did not get to his feet quickly enough when the Hungarian national anthem was played. The names of certain county officials and elderly army officers frequently recurred in Mr Remy’s stories, but the name of Simon Pan, district administrator of Hatarujfalu, appeared in every single one of them. He was the bogeyman of the region and although I had never met him he loomed so large in my imagination that I often saw him in my dreams.

  Every Saturday the district administrator drove into town from his country residence and set up quarters in Mr Remy’s hotel. He came down to dinner, sometimes only to listen devoutly to the music, and then retired to sleep. At other times, however, he would rise, walk over to one of the tables and with his long arm – according to Mr Remy it unfurled like the arm of a polyp – would push his selected victim in the chest. Then he would pick the man up and take him on his lap. When he was in a good mood he would stroke and pet the unfortunate fellow, beg his forgiveness, ply him with champagne and entertain him until late in the morning. When he was in a bad mood, however, he would grasp the victim’s chin, force open his mouth and spit in it. Then he would wait for the other’s Adam’s apple to move to make sure he swallowed the spittle. He would repeat this performance several times, then chase the poor thing from the pub with kicks in the pants. There were Saturdays when he skylarked with his friends, broke the mirrors, kicked the furniture to pieces, shot every electric bulb in the chandelier and stood drinks for all those present. In the morning he would drive everyone home in his coach. Then he would dictate to the head-waiter everything he had consumed: ‘I had sixteen dinners, thirty-five bottles of champagne, two mirrors, three chairs, seven window-panes and two cracked ribs at twenty forints each.’ Because, as Mr Remy declared with awe, Simon Pan was a real gentleman.

  Sunday mornings, when the weather was good, Simon Pan would take up his place on the promenade next to the little town’s only litter-bin in which the fallen leaves and horse-droppings were collected, and watch the people returning from church. He would select a few – usually Hungarians of the opposition because the Slovaks were all loyal to the government – pick them up by the scruff of the neck and fling them into the litter-bin. He never took more than six. When the bin was full he would close the lid, climb on top and from there smilingly greet his acquaintances, friends and enemies alike.

  Mr Remy told in detail about all of Simon Pan’s doings – but omitted one. One Saturday – as the barber living nearby recounted – the district administrator and his friends stayed on in the restaurant after closing time. Mr Remy served the guests himself behind closed shutters. By dawn everyone was drunk and Mr Remy thought it was safe to put three unconsumed bottles of champagne on the bill. However, Simon Pan was never drunk enough to overlook such a trick. He declared that he would deprive Mr Remy of his licence unless he pledged himself to fulfil certain conditions. Mr Remy agreed. The following Saturday Simon Pan dined at the hotel. The restaurant was crowded. The district administrator ate in silence with a face as innocent as if he had never in his life harboured an indecent thought. When he had finished he climbed on to the table. Mr Remy, whose head was as red as a beetroot, climbed up behind him, and knelt down. The orchestra played a flourish, Simon Pan lowered his trousers and Mr Remy placed three smacking kisses on the district administrator’s bare behind. One of Simon Pan’s conditions was that the kisses must be smacking or the whole performance would have to be repeated.

  After that little event Mr Remy’s face lost some of its cheerfulness. He lost several pounds but continued to speak of Simon Pan with the same reverence as before and seemingly without resentment. Like the others, he too cursed the monarchy and its institutions but he accepted the representatives of those institutions as they were. He hoped that one day the monarchy would disappear but considered Simon Pan eternal and immovable like the mountain on the other shore of the River Vag.

  One afternoon, between Christmas and New Year, I was sitting in my grandfather’s mill waiting for him to fulfil his promise and take me sledging. We were alone and the old man spoke to me as he usually did about the miracles of the universe. This time it was about the light which flies at a speed of three hundred thousand kilometres per second in space. Whatever happens on earth – he explained – disappears without a trace, but the reflection of the event flies along on the wings of light. ‘Imagine to yourself,’ he said, ‘a gigantic soap-bubble which grows and expands but never bursts. Well, that is the screen on which the history of mankind is projected. The creatures who live on the fixed stars, two thousand light years from us, are now watching the battles of Caesar or Alexander the Great and in two thousand years our life will be running on their screen.’

  His hour would come soon, the old man continued, and he too would disappear, leaving no trace except the beam of light he would be sitting on. He wished me a long time on earth before I followed him but regretted we would never meet again, unless, he said doubtfully, Einstein were right and the fourth dimension of curved space turned back his light-beam. When he said that, he gave me a long restless glance. I was about to ask the old man to take me with him when he stepped on that beam of light, when suddenly
I heard my grandmother’s voice:

  ‘Come in quickly, Father, we have company!’

  My grandfather straightened up and made ready to go. Only on rare occasions did he go into his own pub.

  ‘I hope it is not some general,’ he murmured on the way.

  A middle-aged, bearded man stood at the counter in yellow boots and green knickerbockers. He was drinking gin out of a beer glass. The horizontal figure-of-eight frame of his spectacles and his plain, country clothes clashed strangely with his belligerent, high shirt-collar and his stiff, rattling cuffs. His jaw-bone and his right hand were covered with scars that looked like notches on a yardstick – obviously souvenirs from various duels. His pink, protruding chin had also been cleft exactly in the middle by a sword, so that it resembled the plucked behind of a turkey. Anyone else would have seemed ridiculous in this get-up, with this exterior.

  ‘Friend,’ he turned to my grandfather, speaking in a sharp, jarring voice. Then he made a deep stiff bow. To my surprise, my grandfather took off his cap.

  ‘Sir,’ he replied. For a while the two men eyed each other tenderly, deeply moved.

  ‘I came about Simon Pan,’ the stranger said. ‘I want to finish him.’

  He told my grandfather that he had taken the train the same morning in Budapest and had alighted at Zsolna because he wanted to reach Hatarujfalu unnoticed. He had hired a coach but they had been forced to turn back because of the snow. He asked grandfather to lend him his sledge. The coachman would drive it.