A few days later Bandi visited me a second time, during the afternoon. I received him with bad grace, although all the information I had got about him was excellent. He was known to be a selfless, loyal friend, un homme chaste, and everyone reassured me that I would soon get used to his ugliness and forgive him for it, as others had done before me. We went out for a walk and sat on a bench by the river in the lukewarm, almost stifling evening mist. There he told me, in a nutshell, the story of his life. He had lost his parents early, and while still very young had joined the underground communist party. He distributed leaflets at gates of factories, painted communist slogans on walls in the middle of the night, organized, agitated and enthused. Later the party used him as a messenger between Budapest and Vienna. He did not mention that to a man of his conspicuous appearance, this appointment was highly dangerous. However, he spoke at great length about his break with the communist party. He still believed in the ideals but had become disgusted with the leaders who jeopardized the lives of party members without turning a hair, even when it was utterly unnecessary. He was disappointed in them because they co-operated with the fascists as soon as Moscow ordered them to do so and he had also quarrelled with them ideologically, because they disqualified Freud’s teachings which he admired, and held political morality to be a petty bourgeois deception.
Finally, he was expelled from the party. After his expulsion his best friends turned away in the street when they saw him, his girl-friend spat in his face and two weeks later he was arrested by the police. The judge knew every detail of his activities as a messenger, details which according to Bandi only the party leaders themselves could have known. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. While he was in prison his former comrades accused him of being an informer and persecuted him more cruelly than the guards. When he came out of jail the party relented towards him and he too forgot his resentment, although he refused to join again. His yearning for the party – he added at this point – was still considerably stronger than his disgust with its leaders.
He explained that he realized he had been driven to the communist party by his ugliness, his loneliness and his yearning for a family; by the ideology only in so far as he could not exist without some universal ideal that imposes order on the affairs of the world.
‘Something that settles the affairs of the world once and for all?’ I asked.
‘Once and for all,’ Havas said and looked around. He held a cigarette clamped between his protruding upper teeth and his lower lip and drew on it with an application as comic as if this were the first cigarette of his life. ‘He is looking around for some conspicuous example of social injustice,’ I thought maliciously, but there were neither beggars nor even clochards about. Between the bookstalls lovers were leaning over the parapet and although their bottoms thus exposed looked thin enough under their worn overcoats I hoped Bandi would not cite them as examples of capitalist exploitation.
‘I didn’t care much about the poor,’ Bandi intruded on my thoughts. ‘I joined the underground movement in search of love. Perhaps it is my mother I was seeking, mother-love, but at the same time I, too, felt like a mother separated from her child whose breasts grow unbearably heavy with accumulated milk until she is compelled to distribute it to the needy. I distributed it, at last, among the members of the great communist family. It was not out of idle curiosity that I asked you whether you were a communist. I asked you because then and there I had begun to like you and until then I had considered only communists as members of the family. But when you replied that you had never really been one I immediately decided to extend the family to all intellectuals sympathizing with the movement.’
When he came to the end of his sentence I raised my hand in protest but, carried away by his own eloquence, he failed to notice my gesture.
‘Let me go on,’ he said, ‘because if we let it go at this my confession will be but half true. It was not only love that led me into the communist party but also hate. Not hate against the rich. It is the disorderliness, the haphazardness, the incalculableness of the world that I hate. I have always had an irresistible desire to settle the affairs of the world, outside as well as inside, in my soul. I searched for a direction to follow, for a light that would lead me out of the chaos of my own thoughts and emotions. Because basically I am a religious man, you know, who must believe in something. Faith is the only satisfaction I yearn for and this yearning arose much earlier than my acquaintance with the Communist Manifesto. My primary passion and need was the search for an ideal and this passion is as old as my power to think.’
‘I am afraid it is even older,’ I said curtly and rose from the bench.
‘You are right,’ Bandi replied with resignation. ‘It is older.’
I felt a huge wave of antipathy, almost loathing, sweep over me and decided to prevent him from going on with his subject. At the next street corner, however, I asked him with unforgivable stupidity, what had given him the idea that I could be a communist.
‘The fact that you wrote against the fascists. In one of your poems you compare the communists to the primitive Christians, don’t you?’ he asked triumphantly.
‘Do you believe that every anti-fascist must necessarily be a communist? On the contrary! He who denies fascism must a priori deny also communism and if he hasn’t found that out yet he will find it out in time … And as far as metaphor is concerned: I compared the communists not to the primitive Christians but to the heretics of the fourth century. Don’t ask me to go into detail.’
‘Don’t give me any of your humanistic indulgence, please,’ Bandi begged, resting his back against the corner of the Rue du Seine. ‘Every Settembrini must sooner or later lose patience with me. A moment ago I confessed, quite truthfully, but with slightly provocative intent, that I was a fanatic by nature. My attitude to the party is that of a faithful Catholic to his church and although I am ready to admit that the party is a prison to my intellect I must add that it is at the same time the horizon of my heart. The party and the church attract the same conflicting attributes: they are at the same time bogged down and soaring, cruel and mild, petty and generous, compromising and unbending, stinking and fragrant. I will also add that my attitude to the communist ideal is that of a believer to the deity: a mixture of adoration and doubt. Yet, however conspicuous the similarity, it is a comparison that does not touch the heart of the matter, namely: that communist man is a typical phenomenon of the twentieth century and represents a much higher degree of development than the Christian who has his future behind him. You can suggest many more analogies but you cannot convince me.’
‘I have no intention whatsoever of convincing you,’ I laughed. ‘Heretics like you can be cured only with the smoke of the stake. Therefore I refuse to take our differences too much to heart. Not only because, unlike you, I want to change neither the world nor your opinions but also because already on the bench you tried to draw me into an argument and compel me to contradict myself. I know what you mean by humanistic indulgence. But if – and I am aware of the honour – you compare me to a Thomas Mann figure and identify yourself with Settembrini’s opponent, the Jesuit-communist Naphta – because this is what you did, didn’t you? – suggesting that we continue the great debate of The Magic Mountain, let me inform you that this is out of the question. It is you who are outside of Time, not I; it is you who have remained behind the twentieth century. In The Magic Mountain the two men argue on and on until both discover that their argument can be resolved only by a duel. Yet in principle both disapprove of duels. However, twenty-five years have gone by since then. It has become evident that such preliminary arguments are utterly useless. Thus, if we took our differences seriously we should have to stand face to face on the river-bank with pistols in our hands and shoot until one of us dropped dead into the water. Am I right?’
‘You are,’ Bandi replied moodily.
‘Let me suggest therefore,’ I continued, ‘that we stop analysing each other’s and our own Weltanschauung
and stick to ordinary human relations, all the more so as relations between two natures as conflicting as ours can never be ordinary anyway.
‘But, though I am disinclined to argue,’ I went on more mildly as we walked towards my hotel, ‘I should like to impart to you an impression. On one point you divorce the Christians from the communists and refuse to allow a comparison. And yet this is the point where, in my opinion, you are at one with the once-triumphant church.
‘While we were sitting on that bench you told me the story of your life. I closed my eyes to see what you were telling me in images. There you stood before me, in the classroom, your hair a flaming red and your Adam’s apple moving up and down like the hammers of a concert piano, busy organizing a band of your classmates to paint communist slogans on the house walls.
‘I saw not only you but also the others. For instance, that little fat boy in the window recess with pouches under his eyes and an old, worried expression. He permitted himself to be persuaded by you because he was afraid that should you win, you would liquidate him along with the other members of the former ruling class. Driven by cowardice he volunteered for the boldest ventures. Then there was that tall, elegant, melancholy youth in his white leather sandals. How it hurt him to watch the suffering of the poor from the beautiful carriage that brought him to school every morning! You, however, despised him because he joined the movement for sentimental reasons… The third stands behind you, with the shadow of your head on his knee: only thus does he feel secure. You prefer him to the others because he truly admires you, yet you know that he is silly and ungifted. He has never been able to learn the four obligatory Sappho poems by heart, however hard he tried. He joined the movement because he wants a secure future.’
‘I protest against the four Sappho poems,’ Bandi interrupted. ‘Only one of her poems survived.’
‘Yes, but at the time you stood there in the schoolroom there were still hundreds of them… Perhaps there was also a fourth boy in your group who hated his father, a fifth who told happily of the good beating he had received the night before when he was caught distributing leaflets, a sixth who was driven to you by his desire for adventure, and whose older sister oppressed him at home – I can only see types and I know this is a rough generalization. However, I feel certain that not one of your classmates had your fanaticism, your courage and your will to act and thus you were the most mature among the adolescents – probably to remain an adolescent in maturity.’
‘And what is all this to convey, if I might ask?’
‘You shall see. Let me go on. The next moment I saw you leading your classmates on a midnight outing. The others consider these excursions boyish antics, but you know that they scare your enemies and have a deep, psychological effect. You take the gang into a residential district. You stop before a house. One holds the paint-bucket, you dip in your brush and wipe it on the rim. You don’t like the letters to be smeared. You are always very careful to make no mistake in the wording. Then without haste you paint the symbols of the underground movement under the words.’
‘Why do you express yourself in such a roundabout way? I wrote: DOWN WITH THE BOURGEOISIE! LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY! and then painted the hammer and the sickle.’
‘I am not repeating to you your own story, what would be the point in that? I am only telling you what I saw while listening to you. There are certain differences between your memories and my image of them as far as your clothing, the time, the place, and other such unimportant items are concerned. Instead of the rough tweed worn by adolescents I saw you and your friends wearing something like a nightgown; and when you left there remained on the wall a fish, the sign of the cross and a sentence in ancient Greek: ΧρνστοςΟει ‘γιος Σωτηρ – Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour.’
‘I see,’ Bandi said and swallowed noisily. ‘You mean to say that I should have acted in a similar way had I lived under Nero …’
‘I never determined the time. A while ago, when you spoke about Settembrini, you were twenty-five years behind in time. I can well understand why you should want to smuggle yourself back from Constantine the Great’s days into the heroic age of Nero, two hundred and fifty years earlier. Unfortunately, conditions have changed in those two hundred and fifty years. The pagans liberated the slaves. Perhaps under the influence of Christianity, perhaps not. The plan to overthrow the state had been dropped from the agenda; in Byzantium a central power, much more horrible, much more uninhibited and hypocritical than the former, had come into being. Classical literature is condemned as decadent, the works of the philosophers are burned and the creations of Greco-Roman sculpture hacked to pieces. Soon the distributed land is taken back from the peasants to form large church estates and the paying of wages is left to the Heavenly Bridegroom.
‘Why do you look as if you had bitten into a sour apple? This is your world where you thrive like a fish. The social problems that have never really interested you are gradually forgotten and men kill each other for a notion that does not exist, a word that has no meaning. Here you can wriggle and writhe in one uninterrupted St Vitus dance from cradle to grave. I am not in the least surprised that in your exultation you should consider every attitude that differs from yours vain and rigid, but mainly obsolete and old-fashioned. This is why I dared suggest that you may not be as modern as you believe and that you too had your historical predecessors among the heretics.’
‘Why do you say heretics and not believers?’ Bandi asked nervously as we stopped in front of my hotel.
He looked at me with ravenous, grovelling eyes. I wondered whether I should tell him a merciful lie, but I met his glance and blurted out my thoughts.
‘You are far too honest to be a believer,’ I said almost pityingly. ‘They will burn you at the stake, Bandi.’
Suddenly my nose was full of the horrible smell of burning human flesh. Bandi receded by twenty yards and stood straight, tied to an imaginary stake. His rigid, tousled red hair was the tip of the flame that covered his entire body.
‘And yet, you not I are the hero of our age,’ I said with a shudder.
Running up the stairs to my room I saw the grin with which he registered my last words. It was exactly like him: simultaneously benign and devilish.
*
I had met Lorsy, the historian, in Budapest. When Havas brought him to visit me I threw a disapproving glance at his paunch which had, in the meantime, grown out of all proportion.
‘Forgive me my appearance, George,’ he said with an expression of worried helplessness on his face. ‘I was compelled to commit this act of tastelessness by my instinct of self-preservation. This was the only way to smuggle out of Hungary twenty extra kilogrammes of lard, twenty kilogrammes of lard that I could neither pawn nor give away. Just think of it: over one hundred thousand calories… Two months’ food supply,’ he added with disgust.
Apart from his mother tongue, Lorsy spoke perfect French, English and German. In any of these languages he could deliver first-class, improvised lectures on world politics, historical subjects or any literary event. His lectures were far superior to anything published in the international press on the given subject. His gifts and his erudition predestined Lorsy to live not on his own fat, but on caviare, lobster, pheasant or whatever he liked. But ever since he had left the university, thirty years earlier, his character had completely paralysed his gifts. How often we begged him to write down what he had just finished telling us at the café! How often Bandi offered to take the manuscript immediately to the editor of a large daily! But no. Lorsy would promise to write it down himself during the night, but he never did. When asked for an explanation he declared that any subject already discussed bored him so much that he could not think about it again.
Immediately upon his arrival in Paris a well-known publisher had written to Lorsy asking him to come to his office, because he wanted to commission a book on the history of the French fortresses, a book that would have been entitled: From Vauban to Maginot. After several l
etters and telephone calls Lorsy set out resignedly towards the Boulevard St Germain where the publisher was waiting for him at his office. He never got there. The resistance of the medium – as Lorsy liked to describe it – intervened. He met an acquaintance, asked him for a small loan and entered a café where he conversed with various people until late in the evening. Another time he walked down to the river to browse among the books, woodcuts, reproductions, until the bookstalls were locked up. Then he walked home, peaceful and contented, and never noticed that he hadn’t eaten all day.
Bandi, who realized Lorsy’s weaknesses but was unable to resign himself to them, offered the historian his services as a secretary. Free of charge, naturally. Lorsy refused, but the day after the publication of the Stalin–Hitler pact, when Bandi was running from friend to friend to find comfort in his terrible despair, Lorsy took pity on him and graciously accepted his services. Bandi’s first task as a secretary was to obtain a little money from somewhere, get Lorsy drunk and drag him to the publisher’s office where, in his dazed condition, he signed a contract. It was from Lorsy that I learned this story; Bandi was so ashamed of himself because of the Stalin–Hitler pact that he dared not show his face.
Only towards the end of September did I see him again. I was sitting in my room, reading how the Soviet Union and Germany were gobbling up Poland between them, when I heard Bandi’s voice calling me from the street.
‘Come to the window, George. I have sad news for you. Uncle Sigmund is dead.’
He was standing in the middle of the road and his face, raised to the window, was bathed in sunshine and pathos, but to tell the truth it was not really sad. The fact that he was the first to impart the news to his friends greatly mitigated his pain. He said he was on his way to Lorsy, who had often visited Uncle Sigmund at his flat in the Lange Gasse, to make him write an article on the dear departed and sell it to the papers.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 6