I felt that I was advancing on the rails of determination towards doom. But was this determination valid only for the present? In a second I reviewed my entire past which appeared to me like a deep shaft, exactly like the one into which I had now plunged. I swallowed to shut out Bandi’s voice telling me in detail about the cat he had shaved with his father’s safety razor, and was back in my childhood. As always when I remembered those days – which was not very often – I recalled my grandfather, the miller, standing before me in the mill with his long-stemmed pipe in his hand, and I heard him telling me that once he was dead nothing would remain of him except the reels of his life carried into space on a light-beam at a speed of three hundred thousand kilometres per second, straight as an arrow on the constantly widening girth of a gigantic soap-bubble. Nobody would ever catch up with it unless by chance, or by an act of mercy, the fourth dimension about which he had read in Einstein’s works, wound it back again. Suddenly I saw him as clearly as if he were there before me in the white cloud of flour, but there was a light-beam under his feet and he was flying in the flour-dust of the nebulae in the gigantic mill of the Lord. By the time I reach Sirius he will have reached Aldebaran; I shall never catch up with him.
I sipped some cognac and shivered.
Havas fell silent. I turned my head and looked out into the night through the window on the other side. Suddenly I noticed the flickering of gunfire on that side as well. The Germans were approaching from both directions.
Try and get back to the mouth of the tunnel, I advised myself. I had always been more interested in the genesis of memories than in the memories themselves, more interested in the limits of consciousness and the border-clashes between conscious and unconscious than in the topography of the conscious. I had often played this game but now I was driving myself into it with a hysterical, furious frenzy. How far back in that tunnel could I remember? Around the age of five my memories became scarcer, they lost their sharpness and interdependence; half a year back it was no longer I who decided what I wanted to recollect and what I didn’t want. The important events of those days escaped me but I remembered the bronze statue standing in the corner of the room next to my bedroom, sparkling in the darkness, or the time when I locked myself into the bathroom and was afraid of starving because I couldn’t unlock the door.
I made a desperate effort to recall my early childhood: the shape of my mother’s breast; the scene when they taught me to walk and I hung on the nurse’s arm like drying clothes on a clothes-line; the blinding first ray of light – but in vain. Many of the things I thought I remembered were things I had invented or heard from my parents, observed in others or read in books. At the mouth of the tunnel I hit my head against a rock. What was behind that rock? A mountain? Or another tunnel?
Suddenly the train slowed down with its brakes screaming. We were standing in a fully illuminated station, Juvissy.
The station was deserted, as if the railway staff had been evacuated together with the population of the town. The open door of the station-master’s office creaked on its hinges. Somewhere a telephone rang but nobody picked up the receiver.
‘Do you hear it?’ Bandi whispered in my ear.
An aeroplane was circling above us, humming mildly like a bee above a summer garden. As there were no French aeroplanes it could only have been a German one.
‘And love, is that nothing?’ Valy asked in the next compartment.
‘A man must pay,’ Aunt Marfa declared. ‘He must learn to put down the money on the bedside table before he takes off his pants. Afterwards he would give only half as much. And the woman should count the money twice, slowly, before putting it away. He must learn that she is doing it for money, not for lust. There is nothing worse for a woman than to be known as passionate. Men will flock to her like bees to honey but they won’t pay – why should they if she enjoys it! – and behind her back they will call her a …’
The plane came down in a nose-dive, screaming. Bandi jumped up and yelled at the top of his voice:
‘Put out the lights, morons! The lights, you scoundrels! The lights.’
The roaring of the plane swallowed his voice. I felt as if it were flying straight at my forehead. ‘It will cut off the top of my skull,’ I thought. Exactly the top, and from that moment everything will be upside-down. The saucer on top and the cup on the bottom. Bandi stopped shouting. The aeroplane seemed to have spared us this time. I was almost reassured when suddenly I heard a noise like the slamming of the door. Compared to my anxiety the sound was insignificant. The bomb must have dropped somewhere outside, in the fields.
When Bandi and I climbed out of the train we were surprised to find that approximately thirty carriages ahead of us a shapeless mass was hanging from the smooth, black wall of the coach. There was complete silence but for the running feet of the stretcher bearers. Suddenly all the lights went out, only the carbon filaments glowed red for another second or two in the darkness.
‘What happened?’ Aunt Marfa asked anxiously, leaning out of the window.
‘Nothing,’ Bandi replied.
We climbed back and a second later the train started moving, gathering speed as if it wanted to get away from there without delay.
Bandi drew back into the corner of the compartment. The women too had fallen silent. Only I didn’t feel like sleeping. I experienced a sharp, almost erotic thrill at the thought that once again my tipper was allowed to run on unchecked in the shaft. But I was even more pleased by the circumstances that in the meantime I had recalled what was to be found behind that rock at the mouth of the tunnel. Not a mountain, but a relatively thin layer of earth beyond which two shafts opened. Further on each shaft forked out, then each of the two new shafts again forked out, until, around 1800 I counted sixteen shafts and at the time of the Renaissance I had one thousand six hundred ancestors, unless some of the shafts had joined in the meantime. Further back, in the days of Adam and Eve, there were again only two shafts and there my research ran into a new wall or rather into the terrible explosion of creation.
I opened my eyes to see Lilian standing before me. She had come so noiselessly that I hadn’t heard her at all.
‘I brought you some chocolate,’ she whispered, offering me a bar of the ribbed Swiss chocolate I liked so much. She was so close to me that when I lifted the chocolate to my lips the back of my hand brushed against that part of her abdomen which, on the stage, she covered with a silver shield. In my nose and mouth the smell of the chocolate mixed with the strong perfume of lilies she always poured into her palm and rubbed into her hips and loins with a vulgar but very attractive movement. I felt as if I were sitting in the first row of the Folies Bergère, but it was not Lilian’s body I saw behind my closed lids but that of her partner, a charming, fair boy who had remained in Paris to await the German officers. Lilian backed into the other compartment but on the way ran three fingers through my hair.
At dawn we crossed the bridge over the yellowish and absolutely motionless water of the River Loire. Later, at Vierzon, the train was overrun by refugees. I sat in my corner and tried to sleep, but my ears continued to register the stories told by the new arrivals about French troops chasing the refugees who held them up in their flight with gun-butts, about a concrete fortress on the Belgian border where the troops retreating from near Brussels could not take refuge because their officers had run off with the keys to the steel doors; about General George who had been taken prisoner with his entire staff and the military plans the very moment he arrived at the front. Yet all this left me so completely untouched that I might have been listening to insignificant episodes of the Peloponnesian war.
The next day, early in the afternoon, I was walking with Lorsy in the market place of Montauban. From the railway station we had gone directly to the mayor, who had received us with joy except for Aunt Marfa and Lilian whose appearance did not fit in with his ideas as to how a social democratic, political exile should look. He entrusted us to the care of a municipal councillor. As Mo
ntauban was already crowded with refugees, Bandi, Valy and I were billeted with a peasant family a few kilometres outside the town. The next day I walked into the town to find Fényes and Lorsy. I found the latter in a café, in company with Aunt Marfa and Lilian. The dancer and her alleged mother had been placed by the elderly municipal councillor in the town’s best hotel where Léon Blum had been unable to obtain a room on the same day and where, by the way, Lorsy lived.
‘I have every reason to be optimistic,’ he explained, when I asked him why in hell he was so cheerful. We left Lilian and the procuress at the café with the old town-councillor who had found them their hotel room and was hanging round their table in order to make love to Lilian. We walked up and down under the arcades of the market-place in the sticky afternoon heat, among fat fruit vendors, giant heads of lettuce, stalls loaded with snails and fish: a true, peace-time atmosphere of calm and plenty.
‘You must not believe that my optimism springs from the base consideration that the mayor of this old and noble town named after the Mons Alba takes care of my food and lodgings and will do so for a long time to come. I derive my optimism not from selfish and petty considerations but from historical-philosophical contemplations. I thought of this yesterday while sitting at the café with the charming Madame Marfa who told me in confidence that she was carrying fifty thousand francs in her handbag. This, as we immediately swore eternal friendship, was more reassuring to me than if the money had been in my own pocket. Her charming conversation, however, did not prevent me from following my own thoughts and I came to the conclusion that the Germans cannot win this war.’
He stopped and turned to me, still deep in thought. Only then did I notice the bottle of wine sitting in the pocket of his black alpaca coat. Red burgundy.
‘I am not crazy,’ he continued, ‘and I do not believe that the Germans will be held up at the Seine, the Loire or the Garonne after having crossed the Meuse, the Somme and the Marne. These things are not decided by rivers.
‘But still, Hitler will lose the war. Not for reasons of strategy or ideology, but because the general current of modern history never allows the worst, the most frightful, to happen. The thing that happens is never the worst but always the most disgusting. Remember the sixteenth century. When Soliman II got going in the Balkans it was to be feared that he would occupy all of Europe. That would have been the worst. The best would have been had Charles V, Francis I and the Pope formed an alliance and kicked out the Turk at one stroke. However, neither the worst nor the best happened, but the most disgusting: Francis I and the Pope allied themselves with Soliman whereupon, instead of occupying Europe, the Turks took only Hungary and exploited her for one hundred and fifty years. Then think of the First World War. It would have been a terrible catastrophe had William II defeated the West and it would have been ideal, had the West, after defeating William II, created lasting peace. However, here again the most disgusting prevailed: the West won the war but the limping peace treaty it imposed on the defeated enemy caused the same war to be fought a second time twenty years later. Now I cannot imagine anything worse than Hitler winning this war nor can I imagine anything more ideal than the West winning the war and democratizing the entire world, including the Soviet Union. But this would be too good, therefore the most revolting remains: the West will ally itself with Hitler against Stalin or …’
He could not finish the sentence. For some time already we had been disturbed by the continuous mad screeching coming from the direction of the café where we had sat with Marfa and Lilian. A coarse, excited female voice screeched without pause and without punctuation as if its owner were declaiming a ten-thousand-syllable word. It was going strong when Lilian appeared round the corner with Aunt Marfa at her heels. When they noticed us their faces brightened.
‘How fortunate we are to find you! Save us, poor helpless creatures!’ the procuress cried, taking Lorsy’s arm. Lilian held on to me, though it was obvious that she was amused by the scandal. Her pale yellow silk skirt was drenched in dishwater from her navel to her knee. As she stood there in the strong sunshine an exciting, leek-smelling cloud of steam rose from her humid lap. Aunt Marfa’s lips were trembling and her eyes were full of tears, although she had received but little of the dishwater. Slivers of lettuce and bay-leaves hung in the hair round her forehead like a wreath.
The councillor, she related, had talked to them from the next table, mainly to Lilian, of course. The innocent conversation, however, was soon interrupted by the gentleman’s wife who had suddenly appeared with a bucketful of dishwater and had thrown it at them, without cause or reason, of course.
‘Oh, why did we ever leave Paris!’ she wailed. ‘We could have got along with the Germans somehow, but in this dreadful little town we shall perish, Monsieur Lorsy!’
Taking advantage of the opportunity Lilian pressed her body to mine, which did not prevent her from following with her eyes the tall lieutenant who passed us for the third time.
The procuress immediately forgot her troubles.
‘Don’t you make eyes at that scoundrel, you silly goose!’ she chided the dancer. ‘He couldn’t even buy you that cheap, thousand-franc ring, don’t you remember? Does he think we shall accept his services for nothing? Come on home and change. Will you see us home, gentlemen?’
Lorsy gave the procuress his arm as if she were a queen requiring his services. He winked at the market women who had been watching the scene avidly with open eyes and mouths.
‘You love me, don’t you, George?’ Lilian whispered.
The plane appearing directly before us above the trees saved me from having to reply. The deafening roaring of its engine made us all stop. I thought it was going to hit us when, making a somersault above our heads, it flew on. I turned back and established that it was a German plane. But I also noticed that Lilian’s skirt was drenched at the back too, and stuck to her bottom like the skin of an onion, revealing not only the two hillocks but also the narrow valley between them that greeted me with a friendly smile.
She proposed that I visit her at her hotel the next afternoon, at three. I was depicting to myself the details of that meeting when we sat down to lunch with our hosts the following day. The windows of the large, dark dining-room were almost completely overgrown with wild vine and yet it was so hot inside that my shirt stuck to my chest as we spooned up our thick onion soup. There was dance music on the wireless and Bandi talked ceaselessly and enthusiastically to entertain us. Our host, a dignified peasant with flashing eyes and a goose-neck, listened attentively and kept nodding his small, round head in assent. His wife, a large, beautiful peasant woman whose white, hard, fat nape looked as if it were pulled tight over flexible fish-bone, reminded me of the great ladies of the Renaissance: Elisabeth Gonzaga or Beatrice d’Este. She was obviously bored by our conversation and kept her eyes haughtily averted from Bandi’s ugly face.
I was wondering how to ask for a barrelful of hot water after lunch so that I could take a bath before going to Lilian. In my daze I failed at first to notice that the dance music had stopped and that the company round the table was tensely listening to an announcement. The voice of the announcer was excited, wavering, quite obviously he was not at all certain whether to mourn or to celebrate. He informed us that Pétain had asked the Germans for an armistice which would come into force the next day at noon. He added that the Germans would occupy part of France, but didn’t say which part. Our hostess rose, turned off the radio with an energetic flick of her wrist and fled into the kitchen.
The first thought that occurred to me was that for me this armistice had come at the right moment; at least I would have a peaceful afternoon with Lilian. The next moment, however, I felt a sharp stab of pain. The Third Republic was dead. The mournful silence in the room was disturbed only by the cackling of a hen under the rose-tree outside the window. The sound became more and more unbearable. We listened to it helplessly and humbly, as to the words of a supreme ruler who held us in his power. Suddenly the peasant jump
ed up from his chair, picked up an overripe apricot from the table, ran to the window and flung the fruit at the hen with such force that the thick, yellow juice ran all over her feathers.
After lunch I sat in the arbour with Bandi and Valy discussing plans. I suggested we start the next morning, we were certain to find a ship in the Bay of Biscay that would take us to England. Bandi agreed and said he would come into town with me that afternoon. He was impatient to discuss our affairs with Lorsy and Fényes but the real attraction was Léon Blum who was in town. Bandi adored to talk to great men and he would have hated to miss this opportunity.
In the meantime our host had again turned on the wireless. The same excited voice was warning the population to remain calm, there was no cause for anxiety. He told them to remain where they were but added that this advice was not valid for foreigners who would do better, in their own interest, to leave France as soon as possible.
The announcer was still speaking when the garden gate flew open to admit a dust-covered Aunt Marfa and behind her Lilian.
‘Thank God you are here,’ the procuress cried, collapsing into a garden chair. ‘Léon says Mr Faludy’s life is in danger, he must leave immediately.’
‘Léon?’ I stammered. ‘Have you been talking to Léon Blum?’
‘No, the message is not from Léon Blum but from Léon the spirit,’ the old woman said with awe. ‘After lunch we asked the table what to do. Léon said: “Faludy’s life is in danger. He must start immediately.” We asked him where he was to go. Léeon told us that too. Here it is, I wrote it down …’
She brought out a piece of creased pink tissue-paper from her deep bag on which she had noted down the spirit’s message in lipstick. Bandi winked at me and grinned.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 9