My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  The peasants naturally beat the Jew within an inch of his life, but the government party won the elections in the district.

  I listened to the stories but grew sleepier and sleepier. The district administrator filled my glass, then got down to his more slippery stories. Dazed with sleep I heard him tell about a pale widow in a lilac dress and a large hat who opened a prosperous brothel with her two young daughters – and the financial help offered by Simon Pan. This story demonstrated the district administrator’s kind-heartedness and, reassured, I fell asleep.

  I woke lying on a bed with Simon Pan taking off my shoes. My friend lay in the other bed of the guest room in a nightshirt, his pipe between his teeth. At the foot of the bed stood a squat, dark-skinned gipsy with a shy, embarrassed smile on his lips. He held his violin to his chin but his right hand with the bow hung by his side.

  The district administrator covered me to the neck, stroked my head and told me to sleep on. Then he went up to the gipsy, spat on his forehead, took a ten-crown note from his vest pocket, tore it in two and stuck half to the gipsy’s forehead.

  ‘You will play for his excellency and the young master until morning, but quietly, to give them beautiful dreams. If you stop even a moment I shoot you dead. If you obey you shall have the other half of the banknote in the morning.’

  With that, he retired to the other room but left the connecting door slightly ajar. I heard him undress and throw his gun on the marble top of the bedside table. When I woke the next morning the gipsy was still there, pale with exhaustion, but playing valiantly.

  Twenty years later when the Paris express crossed the Hungarian frontier and I watched the snowy fields slip by with a strange sadness in my heart, I again remembered that scene. Or, to be exact, I had never forgotten it. But it took time until I had fully understood the meaning of that evening and in the meantime the two protagonists had often changed places in my mind. Immediately after the event I saw Simon Pan like some wonderful being straight out of a fairy tale; compared to him Laszlo Fényes seemed a drab, ordinary, almost insignificant person.

  One year later revolution broke out in Hungary and the former Prime Minister, Count Istvan Tisza, was shot. In those days I frequently heard Laszlo Fényes’s name mentioned. He was appointed commander of the national guard and later, in the young Republic, Governor of Transylvania.

  According to the terms of the 1920 peace treaty, Zsolna was annexed to Czechoslovakia. Only a year later could my parents and I visit my grandparents. From my grandfather we learned that Simon Pan had turned into a great Slovak patriot, pretended that he didn’t speak a word of Hungarian, and was occupying a very important post in the state administration. Laszlo Fényes, on the other hand, was in prison accused of the murder of Istivan Tisza. My grandfather declared that he was undoubtedly innocent and just because of his innocence would certainly be hanged.

  I did not fully grasp the situation, but somehow Simon Pan and Laszlo Fényes changed places in my imagination. The journalist suddenly seemed interesting, moving, heroic, and the district administrator a disgusting monster. I saw him with a bloated face, hair standing on end, roaring like a boar, while a soft halo drew itself around Laszlo Fényes’s undistinguished, angry face. Not even the fact that the judges found him innocent on every point of the accusation altered my admiration.

  As soon as I reached Paris I inquired as to his whereabouts and on the second morning I went to see him. None of my compatriots knew his address but I was advised to get out of the metro at Clignancourt and look around. Where I saw a jar of fat on the windowsill, wreaths of red pepper hanging from the latch and chives and dill in flowerpots, I would find Laszlo Fényes.

  In the small hotel room – in no way less depressing than my own – soup and vegetables were boiling, meat was roasting on four or five spirit stoves. A pair of shoes stood on a shelf, in one a bag of flour, in the other a bunch of carrots. A pot of geraniums, with pale, anaemic leaves, was standing on the floor under the window.

  Laszlo Fényes threw me a suspicious look but when I told him my name he put another plate on the table.

  ‘I cannot offer you a dinner like the one Simon Pan once gave us,’ he said. ‘Besides, I have had to give up heavy foods. Six years ago, in Vienna, I had a stomach haemorrhage. I was admitted at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus for observation. The next morning, however, when I woke in the common ward I noticed a priest standing in the open door, saying mass. Have you ever heard of such insolence? I got out of bed, took my things and left without seeing a doctor. Since then I have been curing myself.’

  Only his side-whiskers were missing, for the rest he looked exactly the same. During dinner he questioned me about Hungary, but he seemed fully informed, knew even the gossip. He then told me why he had to leave Hungary. In the socialist newspaper for which he worked he had published a detailed account of the murders committed by the white terrorists. He reported that these murders had been aided and abetted, and in at least two cases – those of the social democratic journalists Béla Somogyi and Béla Basco – inspired by the regent: Miklos Horthy. But his enemies grew even more incensed when they found out that, dressed as a beggar, he had knocked at the door of Gyula Gömbös, later prime minister, and had listened quietly while Gömbös’s silly and good-hearted old mother, who had given him a glass of milk and a piece of bread, boasted of the two German patriots hidden in their loft whom she provided with food. These were the men Fényes was looking for: the escaped murderers of the German chancellor, Matthias Erzberger.

  Fényes had to emigrate and in 1934 he participated in the February fights in Vienna on the side of the socialists. He was wounded, escaped to Pozsony, from Pozsony to Prague, from Prague to Paris.

  ‘Do you speak French?’ he asked me suddenly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course. You translated Villon into Hungarian. When I was young I had a French governess but I remember nothing of what she taught me. I asked you because, not knowing the language, I move about with difficulty, at least in the streets. This is one of those cold, foggy; winter afternoons when one should visit cemeteries. Would you like to accompany me to the Père Lachaise?’

  Chopin’s grave was the first he wanted to see. Then came Ludwig Börne, the great liberal German journalist who died in exile in Louis-Philippe’s days. Then we visited the grave of Otto Bauer, leader of the Austrian social democratic party, and the neighbouring grave, that of an unknown Spanish loyalist. Opposite stood the Mur des Fédérés, a sinister, bullet-scarred wall. On it hung a few wreaths with five-pointed red stars and wind and rain-torn strawberry-coloured ribbons with the inscription: ‘To the memory of the Communards.’

  ‘Shall we go closer?’ I asked politely when I noticed my companion looking in that direction.

  ‘No,’ he replied curtly.

  We entered an ugly little bistro opposite the cemetery wall. The old gentleman asked for red wine. When he put down his glass, his stiff cuff emitted the same rattling cough I remembered from our first meeting at my grandfather’s inn. We sat side by side on the leather seat running the length of the bistro. The weather had brightened and the evening star shone bright in the evening sky. I glanced at my friend: he wore the same determined but resigned Don Quixote expression he had worn that time on our way to Hatarujfalu.

  I am not thirty yet, and already life is a succession of memories, I thought. What does this emigration still hold in store for me?

  My neighbour’s thoughts must have coincided with mine. He brought out a thick, black pocketbook and extracted a few snapshots.

  ‘This,’ he handed me one, ‘was taken in 1919, during the Commune, when they wanted to execute me. The rope was already around my neck when the reprieve arrived.’

  The picture must have been taken a few minutes before the arrival of the reprieve. It showed Fényes walking between two Red Army men across the cobbled yard. In his left hand he held a large piece of bread and bacon, in his right a pocket knife and he was eating with obvious enjoyment. I
n the right corner of the snapshot I could discern the scaffold with the loop.

  Another picture showed his mother at the window of their manor house, watering the flowers on the sill, and his father, riding to the hunt at the head of a large party. On the side of the road stood a group of peasants, their heads bent, the brims of their hats touching the dust – the light, flour-like dust of the Hungarian lowlands.

  In the meantime the bistro had filled with people from the neighbourhood, men on their way home from work, skinny, faded women. They spoke loudly, drank greedily and though individually they seemed cheerful enough, collectively they created an almost hysterical atmosphere in the worn, ugly, yet friendly little place. I looked at my neighbour who seemed to guess my thoughts.

  ‘You want to know what drove me from that manor in County Bihar out among plebeians, revolutionaries and socialists? And finally here? I know you want to ask me but lack the courage,’ he added musingly and lighted his pipe. He waited until the glowing spots merged and the top of the tobacco blazed up at every draw like the disc of the setting sun.

  ‘My story is brief and very simple.’ He leaned back in his seat, making himself comfortable, as he always did when preparing to tell a story, and his face broke into a smile.

  ‘It happened at the 1883 elections, back home at Ércsoklya. A little platform was raised in the middle of the village from where my father, my brother and I could watch the procession of voters. These processions were a kind of test-match: the contending parties showed their strength. First came my father’s followers in carts, on horse-back and on foot. Then came the opposition carrying national banners and cheering Lajos Kossuth. There were relatively few of them, mostly independent farmers owning fifteen to twenty acres, who didn’t mind whether the state did or did not give them tobacco-growing contracts or raised their taxes. They were led by three tall, handsome peasants with long moustaches, the principal canvassers of the opposition. When they noticed us, the landowner and his children, they shook their fists at us.

  ‘The next morning I was playing in the garden when I saw them again. They came in through the main gate, side by side, with six gendarmes behind them. Only when they came closer did I notice that they were handcuffed. I followed them into the corridor from where the fireplaces were fed in the winter, and climbed into the fireplace in my father’s room. My father was standing by his desk, pulling on a white glove. He wore that glove, always only the right one, when he inspected the work in the fields or was called by the steward when one of the farm-hands was causing trouble.

  ‘The three peasants stood in front of the desk, behind them the gendarmes. My father slapped each in turn, but they never said anything and never stopped bowing from the hip, like poplars in the wind. When my father had finished, he pulled off his glove and threw it on the table.

  ‘ “You can go,” he said. He looked after them from the window until they disappeared from sight. Then he sat down to his desk, and yawned. He covered the yawn with his hand although he was alone in the room. Well, he too had been brought up by a French governess.’

  He fell silent, then motioned to the waiter.

  ‘This is why I am here,’ he concluded. ‘And now have the kindness to tell the waiter that I have never drunk wine as bad as this in France.’

  He counted out the seven francs of our bill in small coins, then threw a ten-franc banknote on the table for a tip. With his greyish-green, old and somewhat rheumy eyes he blinked out of the window to where the light of the street-lamp danced uncertainly on the damp cemetery wall and lit up the small, white, almost decorative cross on top of a tall monument, like an obelisk.

  ‘No, don’t tell him anything,’ he said and shivered with the light and passing shiver of a man who – unlike myself – was not afraid of death but was only annoyed by it.

  From then on we met twice every week, not counting the Monday nights which we spent with our fellow-emigrants at the Café Napolitaine. I was inordinately proud of Fényes’s friendship, not only because he was a suspicious and unapproachable man who confided only in his contemporaries, friends of long standing, men at least forty years older than I, but also because of his extraordinary moral strength. Moral strength radiated from every pore of his body, invisibly but almost tangibly. It reached out from behind his uninteresting features, from under his worn jacket, and permeated the entire room in which he was. Once one of our fellow-emigrants brought along a man who looked like a professional fighter and had – some ten years earlier – been an intimate friend of Miklos Horthy. Fényes looked at the man, lifted his hand and pointed at the door. We thought that we would now witness a fight. ‘Get out!’ Fényes said quietly when the man showed no inclination to move. The man rose and slunk from the café with his tail between his legs.

  A few weeks later my wife showed up in Paris without informing me of her impending arrival. I was scared to death. I had always known that sooner or later she would join me and though I considered every day spent without her a gift of God, I did not particularly mind her coming, especially since I feared that she would be persecuted because of me in Hungary. To be perfectly candid it was not her fate that caused me anxiety; what worried me was that future Hungarian lexicographers or historians of literature might accuse me of infamy for having abandoned my wife and having cared only for my own security.

  When she entered my hotel room her face reflected surprise and disappointment. She expected to fall into a den of iniquity and to find me in the arms of the actress from Vienna. She had probably worked out in great detail how she would react to the situation, how she would subsequently forgive me and save me from the moral mire in which I wallowed. Instead she found herself in an ugly, five-cornered room among the standard furniture of all cheap Paris hotel rooms, permeated with a constant composition of smells created by time, by the indifference of the guests, the spirit stoves smuggled in behind the landlady’s back and by frequent, over-hasty love-makings. Mice gambolled in the waste-paper basket while I lay on my huge bed, decorated with greenish brass knobs, reading Robert Herrick’s poems. The unexpectedness of this peaceful and by no means immoral scene scared my wife. Her preparations had been in vain, here she could play neither the Muse nor the angel of mercy.

  I too was surprised – surprised by her extreme beauty which I had completely forgotten in the last few weeks. Strangely enough my first thought was of what Fényes would think of her. Valy was a communist in theory but all the more vociferously, and there was nothing Fényes hated more passionately than devout bolshevik mysticism. When I told her about my friendship with Fényes she immediately declared that I must keep away from such old, reactionary idiots and make contact, instead, with the communist emigration that was expecting me with open arms.

  In spite of these not very promising preliminaries, the first meeting went off very well indeed. The old gentleman was completely charmed by Valy. Her beauty enchanted him and so did the excellent dinner she prepared for him on the small spirit cooker, guessing the old man’s taste in food. She knew by instinct that he liked his lettuce with lard and paprika instead of oil and vinegar, as prescribed by Hungarian baroque custom, and that in the case of spices he insisted on the Renaissance court cuisine, demanding that they be sharp and that they be plentiful. Fényes never paid much attention to female prattle and Valy tactfully refrained from praising Stalin though not from abusing Chamberlain and Daladier, a sentiment we warmly applauded. During those months to come Fényes appeared at our hotel every single Thursday for dinner, spruced up for the occasion, a flower in his button-hole and a bunch of flowers in his hand.

  We were too poor to visit the theatre, the movies or other places of amusement. According to French law foreigners had no right to seek employment, and illegal employment was punished by expulsion which was, in our case, equivalent to a death sentence.

  We paid our hotel bill with the price of the jewels we had brought with us from home and except for the two evenings a week when Fényes was our guest or we his, we lived
mainly on porridge cooked for the whole week in a huge pot. We received our meat, or rather our bacon and sausages, from our parents who regularly sent us parcels of food. Not once during the year and six months spent in Paris did I have sufficient money to go to the barber’s; Valy put a pot on my head, and cut off the hair showing underneath the rim with tiny nail scissors. But even if we had to go hungry, we always saved enough for cigarettes and the café.

  Our landlady, a small old woman always in black whose heavy body odour filled the corridors for hours after she had sailed through them, stopped us every evening as we were coming down from our room to go to the café. She was usually in her porter’s cubicle, sitting before a small table laid for one. Her husband, killed in the First World War, stared from the widow’s glazed, oval brooch into her onion soup: a shining white-skinned Frenchman with uncouth features, a straight nose and a huge black moustache who looked annoyingly like Guy de Maupassant. Madame Freynault complained daily that we were using too much water to wash ourselves, quarrelled because we were cooking in our room and spoiling her furniture with the fumes, or declared that we pulled the chain of the WC twice, although once would have been enough. After the outbreak of the war she added political threats to her financial ones: she threatened to denounce us to the authorities if we remained in our room during the alert, imparted her suspicion that we were signalling to German aeroplanes from our window and reminded us that while we were spending pleasant evenings at the café the poor French soldiers were suffering in the Maginot Line. Yet it did not even occur to us to move. We had already pawned our suitcases and besides, as our acquaintances informed us, other hotels were not much better than Madame Freynault’s.