My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  The greatest problem of all was our permit of residence. As I did not possess the two to three thousand francs, for which some fixer could have obtained the permit, I had to have our temporary permit extended from month to month. This involved at every single occasion a two- or three-day wait in the yard of the Préfecture. The extension of the permit depended entirely on the goodwill of the clerks. True, they generally granted it, and it was not so much the waiting I minded but the rudeness and intentional humiliation that went with it. When the war broke out I volunteered for the French Army and was found fit for service. I fervently hoped that now at last we would be permitted to remain in France until I was called up.

  One day Valy and I were caught by an alert in the street. We went into a nearby hotel where we were known, but when we descended to the huge, vaulted cellar where the guests had taken refuge the landlady complained that we were breathing away their air and would have to go. She led us up the stairs, pushed, us out into the street and locked the front door in our faces. A few seconds later we were picked up by a patrol, conducted to the police station and the next day I received my expulsion order. Only I and not my wife, which showed that gallantry had not died in French hearts.

  The expulsion order meant that my permit of residence had to be extended every eight days, so that now I spent half of every week at the Préfecture. I was always careful to be interviewed not by a male clerk but, if possible, by an elderly, slightly withered though not aggressively ugly female. And I was always lucky. Had I not been I would have been deported back to Hungary where there was a warrant out against me for desertion to the enemy and treason.

  Still, the villainy of the authorities and the unbearable atmosphere at the Préfecture failed to drive me to despair. My old friends who were more experienced in emigration than I was had warned me in good time that only communists and – to a certain extent – Catholics were loyal to their own kind, democrats never. I knew what to expect. I had sought asylum in France, not loyalty, and, though in the most heartless form possible, that asylum had been granted.

  When, after the outbreak of the war, the general loathing for foreigners increased, it found me and my fellow-emigrants utterly indifferent to it. The continuous insults drove us out on the margin of society and we knew it was useless to remind the French that we were all in the same boat.

  Thus conditions threw us together and our double exile – from Hungary and from French society – lent our friendships and conversations extraordinary intensity. We felt like a bunch of roving knights hopelessly in love with the same woman, but whether that woman’s name was Hungaria or Marianne was a secret we kept from each other and often from ourselves as well. Though we stopped wooing the lady we preserved our love for her, and remained haughtily true to that love, because love is one’s private affair and in no way concerns its object.

  Our abstract adoration, however, was often sorely tried. We had to separate ideas from phenomena, the principles of French democracy from the institutions of the French state. We had to forget – like the knight his lady – the French Parliament in which both the right and the left wished for the victory of the enemy, and the French Government which, by its very helplessness, helped to fulfil that wish. We had to forget the Prime Minister of France who forbade the press to write against Goering because he believed that Goering would one day seize power from Hitler and would offer the French peace. We had to forget the general staff looking at us from the pages of the illustrated papers like a bunch of impotent old fogies interested in nothing but their bowel movements or, at best, their intrigues; the air defence, unable to scare off even a single enemy aircraft but sounding the alert when the balloons of the meteorological institute appeared above the Seine; the police which could not catch a single Nazi spy but arrested German anti-fascist emigrants to the last man. We had to forget their military plan to win the war without tanks, without planes, sitting in the Maginot Line and leaving their allies in the lurch. What we missed was the very character of France: logic, rational thinking, political sharpsightedness, the merciless analysis of facts and the inherited military virtues. In our compulsory retirement we believed that, though latent, these virtues were still there and therefore, ignored by and ignoring the inhabitants of the town, we found ourselves in a dead city like Pompeii in which only the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the public buildings, bridges and statues were real. We clung to them like romanists cling to the stones of Pompeii, its inscriptions and charred parchments, because they know that outside of their imagination these are the only evidences of antique town life.

  We had nothing to do but to talk and to think. Our permanent hunger – not the rumbling, acute hunger which makes men’s eyes bulge out of their sockets, but the imperative need for more and better food – made our souls susceptible and our bodies light. We felt that we could easily rise up and levitate five feet above the ground if we wanted to. Spiritual acrobatics seemed even easier, whether they involved childhood memories, the hitherto unregistered phenomena of our emotional life or simple games of logic. This silent hunger devoured our inhibitions as it did the superfluous fat on our bodies and while it liberated our imaginations it compelled us to dream. Added to exile and hunger there was also a third component which began to transform our ways of thinking – or mine, at least: time. Not the passing of time but the almost unlimited amount of time I had at my disposal. Until then I had rarely thought about everyday problems and never about what I was writing, for in my work thinking was a hindrance rather than a help. Now I began to think intensively, if not about my work, at least about my life. Until this time my thinking had resembled a stream carrying fallen leaves, dead branches, all kinds of objects, without, however, changing them. Now it resembled a stream of vitriolic acid in which everything dissolved. This difference, I found, was simply and exclusively a question of intensity; that is, a question of the time at my disposal. It had often occurred in the past that I discussed a subject for several hours, but now I had sixteen, eighteen hours a day at my disposal and if we did not solve a problem until four in the morning we could go on arguing the next day and the next and the next.

  My constant partners in these conversations were Ernö Lorsy, the historian, and Bandi Havas, a young, red-headed poet from Hungary. It would be inexact to call them friends because only Laszlo Fényes was my friend. He and I talked the same language. When he recounted stories from his life, his experiences, these stories contained his moral attitude, his political and philosophical views, as a glass of sugar-water contains sugar, invisible but potent. Bandi was different, he loved arguments about social issues or discussing his emotional life bashfully but with gusto, as if he were making a confession. He was my antithesis, or at least my reciprocal value, like the integral to the differential or four plus to four minus. Lorsy, on the other hand, was a being who could in no way be compared to me. He offered his incredible erudition to be scanned like a lexicon but was as indifferent to emotional ties as the Encyclopaedia Britannica which expects, at the most, to be kept at hand and often used. Not so Havas who offered me his eternal, flaming friendship. For years we lived in close proximity, often in the same flat, shared a table and repeatedly saved each other’s life (together with our own and, in the given circumstance, we had no choice); I even came to like him to a certain extent, as one would a four-legged pet, but my basic attitude towards him remained contemplative, critical, non-friendly and merciless. This attitude; moreover, was not one that had evolved gradually: I had chosen it in the first moment of our meeting and maintained it to the end.

  I adopted this – to me – surprisingly ruthless attitude because Bandi was unlike any of my former friends and close acquaintances. It was usually strong characters which attracted me, knights sans peur et sans reproche like Laszlo Fényes, or rationalists, witty and erudite and liberal, leftovers from the past century, who lived virtuously although they did not believe in virtue. Apart from these two categories I liked cultured men of wide learning, me
n who could discuss every aspect of human knowledge without forming a definite opinion. Yes, I preferred men who lived in the past, in the days of antiquity, the Renaissance or the nineteenth century, because I too, being unable to resign myself to the most important phenomena of the present, would have preferred to live in those days rather than in my own. I deplored that the role of fate had been taken over by politics, that technical civilization was leading mankind into a blind alley, that man’s time was taken up by cars, the radio and the monomania of politics. There was nothing to make up for the annoyance of having to live in the twentieth century except the slight comfort offered by the amazing discoveries of astrophysics.

  When twenty-four hours after our first meeting, I inquired among my acquaintances about Bandi Havas, two of them said he was the ‘hero of our age’. I, whose relations with the twentieth century were far less intimate than those of my acquaintances, saw in Havas only a caricature of the hero of our age, a most original and yet a most typical caricature. I immediately resolved to put aside my strong antipathy, to observe him with impersonal curiosity and to use him in a novel. Although at the time I was interested in poetry alone and was not even planning to write prose, I thought that had Bandi Havas not walked into my room that morning I should one day have had to combine the ‘hero of our age’ from ten or twelve different people, while now the most perfect specimen was there ready before my eyes; I felt the way Flaubert would have felt had Madame Bovary rung his bell one day and walked in with her two lovers before he had even begun to work on his novel.

  Bandi knocked at my door one morning at about eight, in the days before my wife’s arrival in Paris. He introduced himself through the keyhole but his name meant nothing to me. I was angry because I never liked to be woken early and this prejudiced me against him. From his excited, weak and rather high voice I immediately concluded that he must be ugly, and the fact that he rose at dawn threw a doubtful light on his character. I didn’t know at the time that it was not selfish ambition that drove Bandi from his bed at six in the morning but his ridiculous though sincere concern about the fate of mankind. Every morning he woke filled with hope that the affairs of the world would certainly be settled by nightfall.

  When at last I opened the door I was indeed dumbfounded by his ugliness. This was more than I had expected. I made him sit down in the only armchair in the centre of the room and climbed back on to the bed, sitting with my legs crossed.

  There he sat before me with his stiff red hair standing on end, his large, shovel-like front teeth protruding from between pale lips. Tiny drops of perspiration covered his forehead and his long, hooked nose, although a dirty yellow mist was hovering outside the half-open window. His face and hands were bestrewn with rhomboid-shaped freckles as if he had taken a sunbath under a sieve. He held a large cardboard box under his arm from which he immediately offered me some crumbly cakes which, he said, had been made and packed for him three days ago in Budapest. I felt certain that he had never let go of the box since he left Budapest, sleeping with it under his head in the train.

  He spoke rapidly and although my armchair was solid enough his violent gesticulation repeatedly threatened to overthrow it. He was young and thin, he chortled with laughter, and his long skinny legs wriggled and danced as if they were attached to his body by wire and not by tendons, joints, muscles and cartilage. Crumbs from the cakes fell from his fingers, from his lips, so that he hardly swallowed anything. He praised my last volume of verse with great understanding and with such passionate enthusiasm that he jumped from his chair, ran into the wall and backed into the mirror.

  I must find a way to get rid of this fellow, I thought to myself.

  ‘Are you a communist?’ he asked suddenly and without transition.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And have you never been one?’

  ‘Oh, yes. At the university, but only for a few weeks. Never really.’

  When I noticed that he was waiting for an explanation I added: ‘It is not obligatory to err. It is frequent, but not obligatory. Perhaps it is instructive, but it is not obligatory.’

  ‘Neither is suffering?’

  ‘Suffering is,’ I replied quickly. ‘But why do you believe suffering is the privilege of the communists?’

  ‘That is my experience. Pity that you de-personalize the question and refuse to give me a straight answer.’

  I examined my bare ankles, still tanned from last summer’s sunbathing. I felt that I ought to blush because my opponent had unmasked me: his arrow had wounded my Achilles heel. I had practically no vulnerable spot but for my strange inability to suffer.

  I was not yet twenty when my poems, written with relative ease, had made me famous throughout the country. While I was doing my military service the editor of a large liberal daily ‘discovered’ me and reprinted my poems from a small, insignificant periodical. I made no particular demands on life, was not interested in money, and the women I liked but was too shy to woo soon grew tired of my helplessness and came to my room to lie across my bed. I was a good deal happier than others thought. The wishdreams of my youth (I wanted to be a famous poet and nothing else) had come true to a degree and nothing had prevented me from remaining loyal to the ideals of my boyhood. But I was happy in the first place because existence, the bare fact of being alive, was sufficient to make me happy. The more I feared death during the night the happier I was during the daytime. The details of my profession, a four-syllable rhyme, for instance, had always been more important to me than outside events, people, material worries, the future. The luminous circles I saw when closing my eyes, a kaleidoscope, the coloured pebbles of the river-bank, the passers-by watched from the window of a café, a flowering cactus or the bloom on fresh fruit amused me and obliterated everything else from my mind for hours at a time. I felt that even if all this were taken from me, if I were thrown into a dark hole, I should remain untouched because I could, like a projector, unroll the images of the world for my entertainment.

  During my university days the problem whether or not I would become a poet often tormented me, but I knew no other mental crisis. This circumstance was due to the realization that my categorical imperative was incomparably stronger than either my will or my passions and could always be relied on, trusted like the automatic pilot steering an aircraft.

  My mother had brought me up with extraordinary severity. When, as a child, I pushed the horn of an automobile in the street she threatened me that I would have to pay the price of the entire car. This is why, as an adult, I married my wife. I married her because I had promised to do so; that is, I submitted to my categorical imperative, or rather, identified myself with it. This identification, however, extended only to my actions, not to my thoughts, for I knew that the marriage would bring unhappiness to both of us. I was like an aeroplane steered in a certain direction by the automatic pilot while the passengers inside see that they are running into a storm. I chose the storm because I hoped to get out of it sooner or later; I chose the storm without thinking – because it was the task of my automatic pilot, my categorical imperative, to save me unnecessary worrying.

  In the territories that do not come under the jurisdiction of the categorical imperative my iron nerves and my nature protected me against serious emotional upheavals. As I thought in images, not in ideas, I obeyed my instinct and not my logic to which I denied not only the vote but also the right to free speech. I honoured rationalism only in the great men of the nineteenth century: Renan, France, Berthelot, and in my old friends. In my own profession I found it little if any use.

  The red-headed visitor sitting opposite me in the armchair had good eyes and took precise aim. I did not know suffering and with my playfulness, my dreaminess, unpretentiousness, and self-confidence, my successes and my disposition that conceived life the true, unique, wonderful, royal gift of nature there was very little chance of my becoming lastingly unhappy. I had fled Hungary to escape prison, suffering, perhaps even death, and would return there, after a period of p
rivations, a champion of justice, the exile with the martyr’s halo around his head. Sooner or later I would get rid of my wife and if not I could always find comfort in other women. Thus, suffering was nowhere in sight and it was questionable if, with a nature like mine, it was possible to suffer at all. I realized, of course, that it was not to be happy, but to write good poems that I was brought into this world. And, because literary works are improved by suffering, I acknowledged its value and never ceased yearning for it. But only for this reason. I considered suffering an instrument, not a virtue as did my red-headed visitor in the armchair.

  He dropped the subject and turned the conversation to his acquaintances, in Paris. He spoke of Roger Martin du Gard who was fond of him, and would sometimes compare him to one of his heroes, Jacques Thibault, which made Havas inordinately proud. He mentioned Gide (who, he confessed, had received him coldly when he approached him at the Café Dôme), one of whose poems he had translated into Hungarian. Bandi, being what he was, could not refrain from reciting the entire poem. It dealt with the coming cataclysm, after which some would wake in the swamps of the Congo, others in the jungle or on some oceanic island, but there would be some who never woke again.