‘Still, I hope you will soon find comfort. Tomorrow you may already tell yourself that what you saw was but an optical illusion. Later you will reassure yourself that she did it for love. Jean-Jacques and Marx bequeathed to mankind a very useful method. With the help of this method you can forget about moral norms, you can ignore individual responsibility and you can trace back everything there is to social and historical causes. My mummy – you will say to yourself – was forced into prostitution by the historical situation and social conditions of the era, without prostituting herself she could never have raised her sons. And your heart will flow over with love and gratitude every time you see her standing on the street corner. As you are bound to your mummy by strong emotional ties you must at all costs find a way to justify your most sincere feelings by applying the falsest possible logic. The trouble is not that you discovered your mother was a prostitute. The trouble is that the prostitute is not your mother!’
I stopped talking. Bandi had listened with interest but without visible emotion and sat staring at the damask table-cloth. This time I swallowed two glasses of wine in quick succession: the worst was still to come.
‘Quite recently you formulated your attitude beautifully. You said that communist ideology was the prison of your mind but the horizon of your heart. Yet, I must contradict you. I should compare the Marxist–Leninist ideology not to a massive prison building but to a wobbly pillar left over from the past century. It could be brought down by a single kick but what would be the use? You are chained to it with the twenty-four-carat gold chain of Freudism. There could be nothing stranger than the situation in which you involved yourself. You are bound to an exclusive, conspiratorial, underground brotherhood by the very fact that you belong to an even more exclusive one. It would be a vain effort to apply the Freudian outlook to communism and reject its vulgar and mechanical materialism. And it would also be vain to look at Marx’s obsolete political economy through Freud’s eyes, because you would still remain chained to bolshevism by your mother-complex, your herd instinct, your frustrated sexuality and suppressed thirst for power – the very emotions that communism so passionately denies and to which it owes its best followers. Not even if you proved to yourself that the communist ideology is all wrong could you break with bolshevism. You could break with it only if Freudism failed. But Uncle Sigmund died only last night and I am afraid a psychological theory like his might live for decades and may survive all of us.’
Bandi nodded. Somehow, I had the impression that he considered my entire lecture rather as a compliment than as an attack.
‘I am convinced that you will never free yourself from communism,’ I concluded with resignation. ‘And that may be just as well. If I subtract from you your communist creed and your Freudian complexes that generate the high tension of your life, the remainder would probably be a very average, honest but entirely uninteresting person. The most striking feature of your psychological make-up is your reaction to this filthy political brass-band, the St Vitus dance you dance to the music of our modern age. Only by this reaction do you become what you are: the hero and martyr of our age.’
‘But why only I?’ Bandi asked, a little shaken. ‘If Ernö is right in his cowardly defeatism and the Germans invade us, all anti-fascists in France will be beaten to death. And in that case you will all be heroes and martyrs of our age along with me.’
‘No,’ I replied decidedly. ‘Martyrdom implies the rarity of martyrs. As in the early days of Christianity. When, under Diocletian the Christians were massacred, nobody paid any attention. Each of the early martyrs, on the other hand, rated a day of the year named after him or her. Those massacred under Diocletian had to make do with a collective name-day… At the time of the Inquisition, or today, when hundreds of thousands are massacred, one cannot attain martyrdom by simply sacrificing one’s life for an ideal; such things are regarded as elemental disasters or mass accidents. The things we expect from the heroes and martyrs of our days are increasingly severe and perverted; it isn’t the girondists and the social-revolutionaries who are the heroes of the French and Russian revolutions, but those who achieved a much less glorious and yet apparently much more exciting martyrdom through devious political and psychological labyrinths: the Dantons and Robespierres, the Zinovievs and Bucharins. If you are the hero of our age – of which I am certain – it logically follows that you cannot be beaten to death by the Germans.’
‘Who then will beat me to death?’
‘Ask the historian. He can give you exact and reliable information on this subject,’ I said, pointing at Ernö. Ernö looked back at me with frightened eyes, for he had understood my meaning. But, to extricate himself from a very uncomfortable situation, he called for the waiter and asked for the bill.
I was wakened from a deep, coma-like sleep by the pressure of a hand on my shoulder.
‘Wake up! We must leave. The Germans have taken Pontoise. They will be here by morning.’
Even in my sleep I recognized the over-dramatic touch of Bandi’s weak hand. I heard his words but their meaning escaped me. Only when he and Valy overturned the bed and I rolled from the mattress on to the cold floor did I fully realize what he had been saying. The dirty yellow gleam of the weak electric bulb stung my eyes like sliced onions. I began to dress with the slowness of a snail. Bandi and Valy stood by the fireplace watching me anxiously and with hostility. There is no hurry, I thought. Hundreds of thousands are waiting at the railway stations… the trains will be bombed by the Germans… he who runs too fast towards Damascus to escape death is intercepted by it along the road.
A few weeks before, Laszlo Fényes had brought us the news that the socialist mayor of Montauban had invited all of us, leaders of both the Hungarian and the Austrian emigration, to come to his town. In his letter he had warned us with charming naïveté not to remain in Paris because should the French capital fall, even if only temporarily, into Hitler’s hands, the Germans would without doubt hand us over to our respective governments. I persuaded Fényes, who had a forty-four-year sentence hanging over his head in Hungary, to accept the invitation as soon as possible, but when he asked Valy and me, and even Bandi whom he often violently abused for his former communist convictions but still loved, to accompany him, I refused. Both Bandi and I had decided to help in the defence of Paris and, apart from that, I did not consider the matter urgent.
After Fényes’s departure I went straight to the Ministry of Information where I submitted my poems to the censor several times a month before sending them home to Hungary: an act always considered purely formal but which permitted us to conduct interesting conversations and exchange gossip. One of the heads of department assured me that the Germans were still two hundred kilometres from Paris and that the capital would be defended from house to house. But, he said, should anything unexpected occur, he would immediately send word and have me evacuated with the Ministry.
Next morning thousands of refugees flooded the streets; cars, horse-drawn carts, bicycles rolled towards the Porte d’Orléans, and those who had nothing to drive, walked. I hastened to the Ministry of Information but found the doors locked. From the bistro opposite the building the porter shouted to me that the entire staff had been evacuated to Tours early in the morning. By the time I got home I found Lorsy waiting for me. He had walked along the Champs-Élysées watching the black smoke rising from the chimneys of the various embassies. From the smoke of those archives, he said, he had learned more than if he had been permitted to read the documents themselves.
Lorsy decided to take the train to Montauban and Bandi accompanied him to the railway station. I, however, made up my mind that the best way to avoid the dreadful stampede at the stations was to set out on foot with my wife towards the south. I would wait for the very last moment, when the worst of the panic was over, and steal out by the southern gate while the Germans were marching in by the northern. Until then I decided to forget the whole matter and sat down to write my poem to the Hungarian language that had been
bothering me for weeks. Strangely enough the endless crowds billowing below in the street, the smoke from the burning oil reservoirs that hung above the Jardin des Plantes like a low storm-cloud and the music of the windows set rattling by the distant, irregular gunfire, rather elated than disturbed me in my work. I became more and more absorbed in my task: this language was the only language I would never lose.
Late in the afternoon Bandi dropped in on us completely exhausted. Patches of perspiration, shaped like sugar-beet torn from the ground, showed under the arms of his greenish-yellow shirt. He told us that hundreds of thousands had thronged the Gare d’Austerlitz when he and Lorsy got there at dawn. By about three in the afternoon they had advanced to the entrance to the platform. This relatively rapid progress was due to the determination of Lorsy, who pushed forward like a tank. When Bandi had warned him indignantly to keep his head, the historian replied that his head was in the right place: whatever Bandi might think, it was the duty of every humanist to proceed with the maximal brutality in order to save himself, because in saving himself he was saving the ideal of humanism.
On the platform Lorsy penetrated the ranks of a girls’ school. When people around him began to shout and ask him what business he had there, Lorsy turned to them and with a sweeping movement of his arm replied: ‘Je suis l’instituteur!’ He stroked the girls’ hair, gave instructions, shouted and cajoled and in the meantime pushed steadily forward, treading down the frightened children like young grass. Bandi had remained standing at the entrance, watching his friend shamefacedly. The last he saw of Lorsy was that the latter had taken hold of a fat girl’s two pigtails and was sledging into the train in her wake. He was so disgusted with his friend’s behaviour that he left the railway station forgetting his luggage which contained fifty kilogrammes of newspaper cuttings. He found the loss tragic because it was from these that he had hoped to write the history of the Second World War following the pattern of Roger Martin du Gard’s The Thibaults. I reassured him by saying that the rules of the First World War were no longer valid for the Second: the newspaper cuttings would have been nothing but a burden to him both in his flight and in his literary work.
It was our own flight I was picturing to myself, in my sleep, when Bandi woke me. I saw ourselves hiding in cool forests under hazel bushes where nothing but a few delicate mushrooms grew in the smooth, black earth; I saw ourselves asleep in the loft of a peasant house with the moonlight weaving labyrinths of black and silver bars on the straw; I saw ourselves sitting in the park of a French castle where slender fountains flashed in the sunshine like raised swords, and we soaked our feet in the basin, sharing the water with silly, fat goldfish.
My despair when Bandi and Valy tipped me out of bed was caused by the sudden, cold realization that I would have to give up the somewhat obsolete Odyssey I had dreamed about for an ordinary train ride, on which the only variation offering itself would be whether or not we would reach our destination alive. This was the only, truly the only cause of my disgust. The knowledge that in a few minutes, when I left the hotel, I would have no home, no bed of my own, no possessions for a long time to come and that I was going towards absolute insecurity – that made me rather happy. I shouldered my rucksack and indicated that I was ready to go. Bandi and Valy were still standing motionless by the fireplace. Bandi was gazing longingly at the classics lined up on the mantelpiece and Valy was staring with a haughty but pained expression at her dresses hanging behind the open door of the wardrobe.
Two women were waiting for us in the corridor outside our room. I had completely forgotten about them in my bemused state, although the evening before they had knocked at our door and begged us to take them along. The older of the two was a fox-faced old procuress made up like a movie star, the younger, allegedly the former’s daughter, danced at the Folies Bergère and had always sent us free tickets for the opening of a new programme. It was Valy who had made their acquaintance a few months earlier. They had heard that I was unable to obtain my royalties from Budapest because of the currency embargo and, as they wanted to help relatives in Hungary, we agreed that they would give us the cash and my publisher would pay it out to their relatives.
Lilian’s body was milk-white, so blindingly white that it reflected the light like porcelain. But whenever I tried to recall her face it was her lovely, snowy bottom that appeared before my eyes. It seemed to me as if some crazy art student had drawn two eyes, a mouth and a straight nose on this bottom, changing it into a face for his own amusement. When, at regular intervals, she came to see us with her mother, she sat quietly, with a silly, haughty smile on her lips and when our eyes met she looked quickly away. Paupers like myself held no interest for her.
Aunt Marfa, as her alleged mother liked to be called, always wore black, held herself like a lady but made up for her daughter’s silence with an endless flow of chatter. She had lived in Paris for thirty years and her trade gave her an admirable knowledge of human nature. Her gossip was usually rather vulgar but at times she would deliver a truly inspired dissertation on the art of procuring. She was both ashamed of, and deeply interested in, her profession. While she talked she would sink into the depths of the armchair, but from time to time she straightened up with a sudden, violent jerk of her body. Bandi and I often wondered about this frequent but always unexpected change of position. I suggested that it indicated her struggle against old age but Bandi insisted that it denoted a moral itch: the procuress was trying to rise, at least to the waist, above the moral quagmire she knew and described so well.
When, the evening before, they had knocked on our door the old woman’s face betrayed utter desperation. Her usual garrulity was replaced by a solemn, affected pride. She told us that Lilian was a Yugoslav citizen and that, according to her information, all foreign girls were taken to Nazi brothels. All Lilian’s gentlemen friends were in the front lines or had already escaped; her colleagues at the Folies would do nothing for her because they were all homosexuals and didn’t give a damn about women. As always when they were in trouble the women had turned to the spirits for advice. They had drawn the letters of the alphabet on the bedside table in lipstick and the spirit Léon had spelled out my name. This is why they had taken the liberty to come to me for assistance.
When we came out of our room (which I instantly forgot as if I had never lived in it), the two women were standing outside modestly and humbly. Their appearance filled me with pity and sympathy. Both were wearing pretty afternoon frocks – it was obvious that they possessed nothing else. They moved around in a cloud of scent and carried on their backs bundles made up of multi-coloured silk pyjamas. To complete this get-up the old woman held between her purple-nailed fingers a heavy, knobby, walking stick. The stick almost moved me to tears. There had always been wandering bards, itinerant students and actors, travelling whores, but procuresses were always anchored to one place by their profession. Here, in Paris, she was queen among her fellow-procurers but what would she do in Montauban? She must have been struggling with the same doubts, for her forehead was covered with perspiration. Solemnly and tenderly I kissed her hand and rearranged the shoulder-straps of her bundle.
‘Thank you, Mr Faludy,’ Aunt Marfa said in a grating voice. ‘We shall not be ungrateful.’
‘Come on,’ Valy cut the scene short, ‘and let me warn you, ladies, that I shall not tolerate any show of gratitude towards my husband.’
The large hall of the Gare d’Austerlitz was deserted. We thought we were too late but we were soon reassured that we had arrived at the most auspicious moment because, though the trains were still running, there were almost no more passengers left. We walked along the train in the pitch-dark railway station until we found an empty, obsolete compartment divided in two. The three women occupied one side of it, Bandi and I the other. Aunt Marfa offered us a bottle of cognac and the next second the train began to move soundlessly, almost on velvet feet.
The cheerful chatter of the women increased my anxiety. I drank slowly, remembering the
effect cognac had on me on our way to Fontainebleau, but I soon grew numbed and dazed, while a million ants were running up and down my ankles and elbows. Then Warsaw fell, now it was the turn of Paris. Suddenly ants climbed to my head, my entire body was crawling with them and even the cognac bottle seemed to itch in my hand. A rain of sparks fell outside the windows on both sides of the carriage: red ants, ants everywhere.
‘Let’s talk,’ I said to Bandi. He accepted with enthusiasm. I was a little afraid that he would repeat the prophecies he had voiced during the last few days, namely that the Soviet Union would never permit sweet France to be destroyed and would sooner declare war on Hitler, but fortunately he spoke of his childhood and its nightmares. While listening to him I pursued my own thoughts. Perhaps it was a grave error to have taken the train instead of sticking to my original idea of walking to the southern border. Now I was bound helplessly to a merciless course without being able to swerve to the right or to the left before the oncoming danger, as I would have done on the open highway. I was caught in a narrow, square, steel-lined tunnel cut by the train into the darkness of the night, there was no escape and at the end of this mad course I should run into a wall, invisible and impenetrable like the pressure of an explosion.
I looked out of the window. Towards the east the horizon was alight with gunfire, as if storm-clouds were lying low above the ground with their behinds in the air like a row of dead soldiers, emitting flashes of lightning. With half an ear I listened to Aunt Marfa who was explaining something to my wife in gay, excited tones:
‘… by the same token you could say that you owned a public swimming pool but would admit only one customer. One guest wouldn’t even pay for the scrubbing of the basin, my dear. To maintain a swimming pool you need many customers, the more the better. It is the same with women. Is it worth while to spend all that money on massage, rouge, powder, perfume, hairdresser, good clothes, a charming apartment, and so on, for the sake of a single man? Where is the profit? To maintain a beautiful woman it takes the joint efforts of many men… the more the better …’
My Happy Days In Hell Page 8