My Happy Days In Hell
Page 3
My grandfather immediately declared himself ready to oblige the stranger, the only difficulty being that he had promised his grandson to take him sledging. To which the stranger replied that children should never be cheated and that, therefore, he would take me along. Before we set off he gave me a small glass of gin because, he said, he would not take even a baby out into this biting cold without giving him a drink.
Soon we were sitting side by side in the sledge, wrapped in heavy blankets. On the seat, next to the stranger, I noticed a military haversack with the neck of a bottle sticking out of it. When we left the town behind the horses gathered speed, the icy wind hit our faces and we flew on and on like time.
I cast a sly glance at my neighbour. From the side, his face lost much of its bullying quality; with his long, straight, pointed nose he reminded me of the sad-faced knight, Don Quixote, as I knew him from a children’s edition of Cervantes, going to battle against the windmills.
When we reached the wooden bridge of Budetin and the coachman raised his whip to egg on the horses, the stranger jumped up and grasped the coachman by the shoulder.
‘You scoundrel!’ he shouted, ‘Leave those horses alone! I told you, didn’t I? Or are you deaf?’
‘We shall be late, your excellency,’ the coachman pleaded. ‘At this pace we shall never reach Hatarujfalu by nightfall.’
‘If we are late, we are late. I don’t care.’
In the meantime the clouds had dispersed and the sky was deep blue as on a May morning. Under the blanket we shared I felt the friendly, animal warmth radiating from my neighbour. His argument with the coachman had filled me with a glowing friendship for him.
An hour later, at the foot of a hill, the coachman again reached for his whip. My friend emitted a deep, inarticulate growl and his hand went to his right hip as if for a gun. The coachman must have sensed the movement because he turned a frightened face towards us.
‘Forgive me, your excellency, but it is in my wrist.’
‘What is in your wrist?’
‘The whipping of horses, your excellency.’
‘And do you know what is in my wrist? The slapping of your face!’
The coachman sighed with relief. The passenger was not quite the monster he pretended to be. A few minutes later, on a straight section of the road, he turned back with an insolent grin:
‘Has your excellency ever been to Battonya? Has your excellency ever met the squire Janosfalvy? No? I was in his service until 1904. He was a fine gentleman too, like your excellency. And he too loved horses, and every kind of animal. He forbade me to whip the horses. Because I was his coachman. Not even the cows could be prodded on his estate. It took his peasants a week to plough an acre of land. He would allow neither meat nor fish in his kitchen. He was the chairman of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. He lived on salad, like a rabbit. And he stuffed himself with raw tomatoes, like a pig. And eggs. And what a beautiful dining-room he had! Panelled walls and a chandelier as big as a piano. One spring the swallows built their nests in that chandelier. From then until late September the windows of the dining-room had to be left open. And the juice of the fledglings ran down the squire’s face as he sat eating his dinner, and the droppings landed on his bald head but he said nothing. He loved animals. But he knew no mercy when it came to his fellow men. Four families lived in every room of the servants’ quarters and he beat his own wife with a rope soaked in salt water. She was a sickly woman and soon died of it. His son, disgusted with his father’s carryings-on, moved to the capital.’
‘Have you finished?’
‘There is only the end to come. I mean the squire’s end. He died in the summer of 1904, early one morning. It took him a long time to die although he had two doctors attending him. But he had a difficult nature, he had. As soon as he had closed his eyes the bailiff entered from the yard, his boots shining, his gun on his shoulder. He went into the sick-room to make sure the squire was really dead. Then he opened the window. The chickens were scratching about among the dahlias. A large white cock, not less than thirty years old, sat on top of a rose tree. As usual. The bailiff took his gun from his shoulder, shot the cock, then shot the hens, one after the other. When he was through he jumped over the windowsill and ran into the orchard. He shot the jackdaws and crows sitting on the fruit trees. The shooting brought the whole farm alive, the gardener began chasing the ducks from the salad beds. You should have seen them, your excellency, how indignant they were! The footman kicked the dogs from the armchairs in the house and two of the maids threw the cats from the window in dustpans. The grooms reached for their cudgels and gave the donkeys a good beating. There was a lot to make up for. In the evening, when the young squire arrived from the capital, everything was ready for the funeral meal. The pheasants were plucked, the pigs killed and two cows were turning on the spit in front of the manor house. The house, the fields and even the village were drenched in the smell.’
‘What smell?’
‘The smell of blood, your excellency. Blood.’
My neighbour smiled but made no reply. Half an hour later the coachman halted the horses on the hillside, just before the top, and jumped off his seat.
‘The star.’ He pointed to the evening star pale in the blue sky.
‘Well?’
‘Shabes, your excellency. I cannot drive on. I am a Jew, your excellency.’
‘Are we to spend the night in the open because you are a Jew?’
‘I will go into the village and send a goy to drive your excellency. If I can find one.’
When we were alone we got down into the fresh snow. Now at last I could ask the question that had been turning in my head all afternoon.
‘Uncle, who are you?’
‘Difficult question,’ the stranger smiled. ‘I have been asking myself that question for the last fifty years but I still haven’t found the answer. Let’s turn the question around. Who do you think I am?’
‘Somebody who cuts people’s throats.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘You said so to my grandfather at the pub. You said you wanted to finish Simon Pan.’
‘True, I did say that, but I meant it figuratively. However, if we come down to it, you are right,’ he added pensively. ‘I do cut people’s throats. But only bad people’s throats. And not with a knife. I travel around in the country, visit the bad people, and then I write up what they are doing. And then they are sacked from their jobs. I have finished four hundred scoundrels to this day but there are many more left. I still have to travel a great deal.’
‘And what does your wife say that you travel so much and are never at home?’
‘I have no wife,’ replied the sad-faced knight. ‘But I have a dog.’
It had turned completely dark when a limping young coachman arrived from the village, wearing felt boots. Half an hour later we stopped before the house of the district administrator.
‘Why do you stop, you idiot!’ my neighbour shouted. ‘Take us to the pub, you goof, the pub!’
But he was too late. The tinkling of the sledge’s bells had warned those inside of our arrival, the large French windows flew open, and in a second the three steps leading to the road were overrun with laughing, shouting men streaming out of the brightly lit house. I immediately recognized Simon Pan among them. His body, from his Adam’s apple to his loins, was shaped like a huge, regular ellipsis, as if his short legs were carrying the petrified, giant egg of a dinosaur. In one hand he waved a long cigar, in the other he held a hand of cards.
‘Here you are at last! We thought you would never arrive! Your dinner has gone stone-cold …’ the men shouted.
My friend stood up in the sledge.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said in a humble voice, ‘you are mistaking me for someone else. I am a poor travelling salesman, selling good liquor at low prices.’ With this he raised his haversack with the bottle in it.
‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ Simon Pan exclaimed. ‘You are Laszlo Fényes.
You have come to write me up in your paper. I got word from Budapest as soon as you took the train. You thought you were very smart getting out at Zsolna. But I was even smarter. My Jew was there waiting for you at the station. The famous Laszlo Fényes walked straight into my trap. Well, walk into my house now.’
‘Very kind of you. But, as I have decided to reveal the truth about you I cannot accept your hospitality. I shall spend the night at the inn.’
‘No, you won’t. I gave orders to close down every public place. And the town crier announced to the villagers that I strictly forbade anyone to talk to you. So, if you won’t accept my hospitality you can spend the night outside in this beastly cold with the boy. Come in, man. I’ll tell you everything you want to know, all the shady deals, all the lousy tricks, everything my peasants would never dare tell you because they fear me more than God. Come in, man, come in!’
We alighted and the men returned to the dining-room where they continued to drink over the ruins of the finished dinner. Our host took us into the smoking-room where a table, laid for two, was waiting for us. Then he excused himself and returned to his card game in the corner of the room.
Perhaps a hundred candles were burning in the golden candelabra on walls covered with cherry-coloured silk. There were oil prints between the candelabra, one a portrait of the young Franz-Joseph, one of Queen Elizabeth. The third represented the poet, Sandor Petöfi, wounded in the left breast and writing ‘Fatherlan’ in blood in the dust of the battlefield. The missing letter was meant to signify that he died the hero’s death before completing the word. In the dining room gipsies stood behind the drinkers, softly playing their favourite melodies.
First we were given boiled beef and horseradish, then soup, then fried carp, fried chicken and pancakes. My friend was served marcbrandy with the boiled beef, beer with the fish and champagne with the pancakes while I received only wine from the bottle brought in with the chicken. Our host joined us for a moment and drank a toast in champagne to Laszlo Fényes.
‘Now come the more substantial dishes,’ he reassured us.
And indeed, after a five-minute pause, we were served roast pork and sausages, then roast duck, curd noodles and finally a cream cake. When we had consumed it all the footman asked my friend whether he wanted black coffee boiled in rum or in cognac.
‘In water, son.’
‘His excellency the district administrator will not allow us to use water for the coffee. He says that is a stinking Jewish custom.’
‘It is a Turkish custom, son, but never mind. I’ll do without coffee.’
Seeing that we had finished, our host rose from the card table and pulled up a chair between us.
‘I am at your service,’ he smiled at my friend winningly. ‘But before we start on the facts permit me to ask you a question. Are you a descendant of the great statistician Elek Fényes?’
‘He was my great-grandfather.’
‘I thought so,’ the district administrator nodded. ‘That makes us distant relatives. The mother of my deceased brother-in-law, Pal Janosfalvy, who chewed grass while he lived, was a Fényes girl. I know your family chronicle pretty well.’
‘Very flattering,’ Fényes replied icily.
The district administrator was all sweetness and light. He poured champagne, drank to his guest and watched him with shining, almost devout eyes. He spoke so beautifully that I began to doubt the veracity of the stories circulating about him. The journalist, however, remained stiff and unfriendly and every time his host bent closer to him as if about to make a confession, he drew back almost angrily. At such times the muscles above the corners of his mouth tautened and twitched. I resented his unfriendliness. It seemed to me that of the two the district administrator was the more attractive figure, although Fényes treated him like a leper.
I had drunk three glasses of wine and felt dazed; the panelled wall with its cherry-red silk was rocking gently like a Roman galley covered with purple carpets.
‘I have often compared the histories of our two families. We are certainly the two poles of the Hungarian globe. Your departed grandfather, Laszlo Fényes, owned five thousand acres in County Bihar. He was a true gentleman and drank like a fish. God bless his memory. Your father, Laszlo II, was left but two thousand acres of the fat Bihar soil. He sat in the House behind Prime Minister Kalman Tisza for fifteen years without opening his mouth once, except when he cheered. He too was a real gentleman. He lost his two thousand acres at the card table, God bless his memory. And here you are, Laszlo III, without land, without wealth, and in addition, a rebel. And yet, you got into Parliament without buying drinks or distributing bribes. I can’t imagine how you did it, but you are a man after my heart. I like you even if you come here to wring my neck for me. Your health! Bottoms up!
‘But let me get down to brass tacks. My departed grandfather, Simon I, had nothing he could call his own except an old letter of nobility and whatever he saw when he looked behind him in the tub every Christmas, when he took a bath. For twenty-five years he was county recorder of Trencsén. He drank like a fish and yet he acquired nine hundred acres of land, every handful of it by cheating on the land-register, by crooked railroad deals and bribery. God bless his memory. My predecessor in office, my departed father, Simon II, was called the scourge of the Slovaks. He increased the family estate by five hundred acres, God bless his memory. In his youth, he chased skirts. When I was a child – but why don’t you drink? You too, child! – I remember him coming home from Zsolna early one morning. As usual, he was bringing an old whore with him who had to sit in front, with the coachman. At the door he ordered her to get off and climb into bed next to his wife, then he lay down between them with his clothes and boots on. Because to him women weren’t even worth undressing for.
‘In his old age he turned to cards. Sixteen years ago he was lying sick in the next room, in his widower’s bed, with his card partners around him. They had been playing for two weeks, from noon till midnight. It was his custom to send the coach for his three favourite partners every year when the first snow fell and not to let them go until the thaw set in. On that particular afternoon my father won every single game. After dinner his partners asked him for a return game. “Why not?” he said. “Of course I shall give you a return game, but you will have to wait until we meet in hell.” With that he turned his face to the wall. The partners thought he was joking. They shuffled the cards and waited. But the old man didn’t move. They thought he had fallen asleep and waited another half hour. Then they prodded him. He was already cold. He died like a true Hungarian gentleman, God bless his memory.
‘And here I am, Simon III,’ the district administrator continued with a mild smile. ‘I play cards, chase skirts and drink. And still, I doubled the family estate. How? You know it as well as I,’ and he laughed at the journalist.
‘If you look out of your window before going to sleep you will see in the moonlight the alpine pasture extending behind the house. When I took over my father’s heritage I looked at this piece of land and decided that it had been created by God to be an alpine pasture. Only, there was no water. The nearest stream ran across my neighbour’s estate, from the hillside to his stables. Not for long, though. One night, I commandeered the village population to perform an urgent and unpaid public job with shovel and spade. I myself led the procession to the top of the hill. By the morning the stream was running behind my house.
‘My neighbour, Kazmér, sent word that there were still judges in Hungary! Nevertheless he sold one hundred and fifty head of cattle to the dealer I sent to his door. Why should the poor beasts perish of thirst when I had plenty of water? The judges did their best. Three times they passed judgement against me but somehow the enforcement order never arrived. I had friends in the Ministry of the Interior. More than one. I had almost forgotten the whole affair when, in 1905, the government fell. Two weeks later I received orders from the county sheriff: the Brezina must be returned within two weeks to its rightful owner, Kazmér Prokovszky. I
read it over and over again, wondering what to do. In the end I returned the order to the county sheriff but not before I had written on its back: “Your Excellency, my dear old Steve! If you want your orders enforced, send an entire army battalion because, if I know Simon Pan, he will not easily let go of what he considers his own. Yours obediently, Simon Pan.”
‘Over twelve years have gone by since,’ the district administrator continued, ‘but the stream is still running behind my house.’
‘Aren’t you afraid that I shall make this public?’ the journalist asked with flashing eyes.
‘Go ahead, friend, tell your readers what a bastard I am,’ Simon Pan said resignedly. ‘I promised to tell you everything and you must use my story the way you see fit. That’s your profession.’
‘I’ll use it not for the sake of my profession but to serve public interest.’
‘That is as may be,’ the district administrator replied sadly. ‘But would you prefer a Slovak to sit in my place? Does it never occur to you that you are fighting your own class? Gentry against gentry? However, let me continue. It does me no good to argue with you …’
And Simon Pan went on to tell us with apparent gusto about his election experiences. Once, at election time, a branch line was being laid in his district. He arranged with the contractor that the foundations of the station buildings should be put down exactly two weeks before election day: in the loyal villages the station should be sited in the village itself; in the opposition villages it should be five miles away. Should the opposition villages change their minds, all right, let them have their station building in the village. If not, not. Nagybiccse resisted; its station is still standing five miles outside the village in the middle of nowhere.
One of the election districts consisted of one small loyal village and two large opposition ones. The only voting booth was set up in the loyal village. The problem now was to prevent the inhabitants of the other two villages from voting. Simon Pan surrounded one of the villages with gendarmes who told the villagers that plague had broken out in the area. He planned to deal with the other village in the same way but he discovered that there weren’t enough gendarmes. Thereupon he sent an old Jewish commercial traveller to the second village with strict instructions. The traveller announced with the help of the town crier that the same evening, shortly before the train was due to leave, he would buy up hens’ droppings for two crowns fifty a pushcartful. Who would have been fool enough to go voting when they could make so much money! The train left but there were still hundreds of pushcarts standing in line before the station building. The traveller walked up and down along the line in his long, black jacket. He pushed his walking-stick into every cartful, pulled it out, smelled the dirty end and shook his head. ‘There’s cocks’ droppings mixed in with it,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you hear me, men? I said hens’ droppings, didn’t I?’