My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  ‘Perpina,’ Aunt Marfa read. ‘You must go to Perpina. This is what Léon said.’

  ‘Perpignan, on the Spanish frontier,’ I corrected the message, amazed.

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I have never heard of that town,’ replied Aunt Marfa.

  ‘Well?’ Bandi said looking at me questioningly. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We are going,’ I said, and rose. ‘And what are you going to do?’ I turned to the procuress while from the corner of my eye I watched Lilian who was sitting there unmoved, crushing pale green vine leaves between her fingers. ‘Are you coming with us?’

  ‘With the greatest pleasure!’ Aunt Marfa answered enthusiastically. ‘We are fed up with this hole!’

  In ten minutes we were ready, said goodbye to our hosts and set out towards the town. I was surprised how glad everybody had been to do something instead of waiting for things to happen. This sudden decision had shaken all of us alive. The transformation from small-town citizens into hobos seemed unbelievable and, perhaps because of that, rather amusing. We were soon overtaken by an ox-cart but it could take only three, Aunt Marfa, Valy and Bandi whose feet were badly blistered from his innumerable excursions into town. Lilian and I remained alone but a few minutes later we too were picked up by an ox-cart taking new potatoes to market. We lay down on top of the potatoes and immediately began to kiss furiously. While she bloodied my lips with her sharp teeth, I thought to myself that I ought, instead, to be working on a poem bemoaning the fall of the Third Republic; though, fortunately, the circumstances of that fall had relieved me of my obligations.

  Arrived in town Bandi and I went to see Fényes. We found the old man in the garden, sitting on a three-legged camp stool under the star-shaped foliage of an apple-tree. Next to him stood a bucket of cold water and in it a bottle of wine. Only his cold grey eyes betrayed his bitterness. He informed us that from midnight on the trains would travel only from Toulouse-Sète-Avignon southwards, therefore we had better start immediately. If we remained the Germans would make hash of us. We must get to England by ship, canoe or raft, there were probably British ships at Bayonne that would take us.

  I begged him to come with us but he refused with a sharp movement of his head.

  ‘If there is no other way out,’ he said, ‘I still have my old revolver. I am tired of retreating. I have retreated more often than befits a Hungarian gentleman… Don’t gape at me! Have you never seen an old man before? Anyway, there is still plenty of time to finish this bottle.’

  When the bottle was empty he took us to the garden gate. He made a brief, uncertain gesture as if he wanted to embrace me, then blushed and turned away.

  The next day at noon we reached Bayonne. As we were walking into town from the railway station troops were marching parallel with us in the middle of the road, but before we came to the bridge on the Adour they scattered in all directions, paying no heed to the non-commissioned officers who were desperately shouting after them. In the market-place at least ten thousand men, women and cars lined the streets. Strangely enough we came upon acquaintance after acquaintance in this dense mass of people. From the windows of a café Franz Werfel greeted us with a melancholy wave of his hand, at the foot of a fruit-stall in the square the German playwright, Mehring, lay resting on the ground. He told us that his car had reached the middle of a bridge over the Loire when the French and the Germans began to shoot at each other from either side of the river. Fishermen had helped him off the bridge and he had walked the rest of the way to Bayonne.

  We continued towards the harbour. When we approached the Adour we caught sight of a mast and on top of the mast, to our great joy, a Swedish flag. However, we were soon stopped by a policeman who told us that civilians were not allowed in the harbour and besides, no ship was sailing. We turned back into town to look for a place where we could spend the night. In the market-place we ran into an acquaintance of Lorsy’s, an angelically mild, grey-haired, pink-cheeked Hungarian who looked like a cardinal but was an anarchist, and had spent the last twenty years of his life in exile. He had just returned from St Jean de Luz where he had hoped to board a British ship, but the British were taking only their own fellow-citizens, Poles and Czechs. No Hungarians, no matter who they were.

  We roamed the streets dismayed and helpless, there were no rooms to be had, the hotel porters laughed in our faces. Involuntarily we started back towards the railway station. Opposite the station we found an empty bistro. The patron, standing in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, looked us over carefully, then declared that he had nothing to offer except some Viandox. We gratefully accepted the hot soup.

  We sat silent but suddenly I noticed that Bandi was staring with popping eyes at something behind my back. I turned round and saw that the patron was painting little red swastikas on the wall where the yellow oil-paint and the whitewash met in a ragged line. He was obviously unskilled in painting – as well as unfamiliar with the Nazi symbol – because he painted them the wrong way round, anticlockwise.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I suggested.

  ‘But where shall we go?’ Bandi asked.

  ‘To Perpignan. We may still find a ship that will take us to Africa.’

  At that moment a gigantic clap of thunder shook the earth and set the cups and glasses on the table tinkling. Then the rain came down in torrents.

  ‘We are idiots,’ Lorsy said meditatively. ‘Why in heaven’s name do we have to go to England where there is a war on. In Lisbon there is sunshine, in Lisbon there are rich Hungarians and their addresses are in my notebook. We are citizens of a neutral country, there is no reason why we shouldn’t get visas to another neutral country. If we don’t like it in Portugal we can still go to America. And apart from that,’ he turned to Bandi, ‘Portugal has been Britain’s ally for centuries …’

  ‘I have been told,’ Aunt Marfa mused, ‘that life is very gay in Lisbon. Very gay.’

  ‘Except for those who have to work for a living,’ Bandi remarked.

  ‘A courageous little people,’ Lorsy continued, ‘already after the Tortesillas treaty …’

  ‘… they were smart enough to organize a police force that is known today as the vest-pocket Gestapo,’ Bandi continued with false melancholy.

  ‘They have a pious government,’ the procuress hastened to Lorsy’s aid.

  ‘As pious as Prince Alba and as Christian as the Inquisition,’ Bandi agreed.

  ‘In your place I shouldn’t be so particular,’ Lorsy said angrily.

  ‘Be serious,’ Valy chided, ‘and tell me what kind of country Portugal really is?’

  ‘It smells of mint.’ I cut off the argument.

  When the rain stopped we left the bistro to look for the Portuguese consulate. It stood in a dirty little back street and there was a queue many hundreds of yards long before the gate. We were a little surprised that Lorsy’s brilliant idea had occurred to so many but we took our places at the end of the queue except for Lilian who – wearing a pale blue silk skirt – sat down on the edge of the wet and steaming pavement. The fierce sunshine beating down on us at an oblique angle burned my nape as if a dozen wasps were stinging it. A few minutes later the sky darkened again and large, violet clouds came rolling out from behind the roofs.

  ‘Even God is a fascist!’ Bandi shouted, shaking his fists at the sky.

  When the shower was over a couple of policemen came walking along the line and asked everyone to hand over their identity papers. The French were made to leave the queue.

  ‘Go home,’ the policemen told them, ‘the Germans won’t do anything to you.’

  Then they made Lilian get up from the pavement.

  ‘If you are tired,’ they told her, ‘go to Biarritz and lie down in the sand …’ Soon Lorsy made friends with a squat gentleman wearing horn-rimmed glasses who turned out to be a Hungarian though he had lived in France for thirty years. Before me an old woman with terribly swollen legs and an inch-thick layer of powder on her face sat in a barber’s chair. She informed the pe
ople around her in a voice that carried for miles that she was a British citizen and lived in Lourenço Marques, but her weak heart had prevented her from moving fast enough and therefore she had missed the British ship. In the past, she wailed, when a British citizen got into difficulties in China or South America, a British man-of-war appeared in the harbour and woe to the town if even a hair on the Britisher’s head was damaged. But now? She had to pay two hundred francs a day for that barber’s chair… God knows, the excitement might kill her…

  She lit a long cigar and wriggling her huge behind to indicate that she was talking to me, she asked whether, if she sent him a cable, the First Lord of the Admiralty would send a man-of-war to Bayonne to fetch her.

  An hour later, during which time we had not advanced an inch, ten soldiers arrived in close military formation led by a very young, very short and very cocky fair-haired sergeant. When he noticed that his appearance caused general laughter he mounted the steps leading to the entrance of the consulate, opened his small, narrow lips as wide as they would go and began to shout at us:

  ‘You are laughing, are you? Well, I’ll show you that I am not such a toy soldier! I shall have everyone who disturbs the peace put to the sword! Put – to – the – sword!’ he screamed in his thin little voice. ‘Don’t be mistaken, it is not for cabbage that you are standing in line here but for your lives! For – your – lives!’

  The line had lengthened behind us in the meantime. At the corner of the Dôme square, two or three hundred yards back, where a bearded Polish Jew in a black kaftan was standing, the line broke at right-angles. There was no noise, no pushing and shoving: we stood motionless, waiting. Only from the invisible vibrations of accumulated anxiety pressing down on my nape did I conclude that at least a thousand people were standing behind me.

  My neighbours stood with their heads bent; Valy snuggled up close to me, even Lorsy and his crocodile-eyed friend were silent. I glanced at Lilian who stood with a dreamy smile on her lips as if she were completely unaware of the seriousness of our situation. Soon I lost count of time, forgot my environment and drew back into myself. The tumble in the new potatoes with Lilian seemed as distant as the days of Alexander the Great. I pressed my wife’s hand tenderly and thought, with tears in my eyes, what a selfless, loyal wife she had been to me in spite of her hysterics and quarrels… Then I had to stop wool-gathering and concentrate my attention on a single phenomenon: the unbelievable hardness of the cobblestones beneath my feet. There were three possibilities: either the stone had grown harder or my feet softer or both. My body is deteriorating, I thought, objects are becoming my enemies, the earth no longer tolerates me on its back. I looked down at my shoes and observed that my once so beautiful black-and-white Oxfords were in a dreadful condition. Then, from under the point of my shoe, I heard a thin, sibilant, weeping voice. The nature of the sound was new and unusual; I established that I had never before heard a sound of exactly this frequency of vibration, since normally it would be inaudible to the human ear. Only then did I realize that I had been making treading movements with my feet, and quickly lifted one of them. Tiny ants were scurrying back and forth on the cobblestones, they had been crying for mercy. I pressed my chin on my chest and gazed down into semi-darkness – there was not enough room to bend down. Five little black ants were running in an excited, sinuous line. I had killed the sixth.

  Suddenly I heard a loud, solemn voice behind me and turned to see whose it was. The bearded Polish Jew was speaking, beating the air with his stick. Under the big black shadow of his hat his long, straight, milk-white nose jutted out sharply against his beard, his hair and earlock.

  ‘Open that door!’ he shouted in German. ‘Hundreds, thousands are standing beneath your windows, Mr Consul, hundreds and thousands whose lives are in danger! Where is your humanity, where is your mercy? Are God’s commandments not valid in Portugal? If so, tell us! Open your window and spit on our heads!’

  The door of the consulate remained closed so that from that point of view the speech was without result, but it awakened the waiting crowd and put an end to the apathy which had taken hold of all of us. People began to call the consul, demand to be let in, others criticized the attitude of all diplomats, their indifference, their inhumanity. Now everyone began to push and shove: as a result we were so tightly pressed together that even breathing became difficult. Taking advantage of this illusion of movement Lorsy pushed quickly forward. Very soon I could discern his large black hat some fifteen yards ahead of us, hovering high above the crowd, and the small grey locks on his nape, like white chrysanthemum petals. The voice of the Polish Jew behind me rose to a scream:

  ‘What? Do you have the courage to pretend that you are in as much danger as I? Do you know who I am? Have you never heard of the limericks I wrote against Hitler in the Yiddish paper of Berdichev? Do you want to see them? Here, I can read them to you!’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  ‘Do you know what Adolf will do to you? He will send you all to work. And do you know what he will do to me? He will have me emasculated!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘But he will be too late! I won’t be emasculated with an unconsecrated knife! Not on his life! I have a consecrated knife right here with me, I’ll do it myself and the sooner the better!’

  It needed three people to disarm the crazed Jew and the Tom Thumb sergeant shot three times into the air to frighten the crowd into silence. Then two of his soldiers took hold of the kicking, screaming man who was already foaming at the mouth and carried him away.

  ‘This madman has spoiled our chances,’ a red-cheeked man with a German accent remarked. ‘The consul will never open the doors to such rabble!’

  At that moment a short young man in black appeared on the balcony of the consulate. He had tremendous shoulders and a broad chest, and his legs were so long that it seemed as though the middle section of his body were missing. He looked exactly like a bronze bust on two legs.

  ‘I am the Portuguese Consul,’ he introduced himself. ‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting but I had to get in touch with my government before granting so many visas. My government approved, so come back tomorrow, all of you, hand over your passports and two hundred and forty francs. We shall work all day tomorrow and the day after, and in the evening we shall distribute the passports with the visas. Don’t worry and don’t be impatient. Portugal is a small country but her heart is big. You will all be admitted without exception.’

  ‘Long live Portugal! Long live the Consul! Long live Salazar!’ people shouted at the top of their voices.

  ‘Long live France!’ the little sergeant screeched in his thin voice.

  ‘Long live France,’ the crowd repeated after him. ‘Let us sing the Marseillaise!’

  The sun was still high in the sky but the thousands of refugees in the Dôme square were already at supper or asleep on the cobblestones. There was no place left for us so we set out on the highway towards Biarritz. We knocked on many doors but no one would give us shelter. Finally we came to an A-shaped, yellow house covered in cobwebs and vines like some bewitched castle, that seemed deserted. We kicked in the garden gate, walked up to the house and there, at Lorsy’s orders, made three deep bows to conciliate the spirits of the place. Then we threw ourselves into the worn garden chairs that stood in grass so tall that only the amethyst-blue candles of the delphiniums showed above it. Valy set out to reconnoitre and soon returned with two large loaves of bread, cheese, radishes and a paraffin lamp. After dinner Lorsy jumped up and informed us that he would now proceed to Biarritz and ask his publisher, who was on holiday there, for another advance on The French Fortifications from Vauban to Maginot. Should the publisher declare that those fortresses were no longer worth anything, he would reply that the same was true for the franc, so why not give him some.

  After he left, Bandi and I discovered a smooth, protected place close to the wall of the villa where, under the eaves, we would be safe from the rain. We tore up armfuls of grass and carried it there to make beds. It was
almost completely dark when Lorsy arrived with ten thousand francs in his pocket. He would not, however, stay with us because, being unable to sleep in the open, he had made arrangements with the greengrocer opposite to sleep in one of the huge spinach-baskets in the shop.

  ‘I am sorry, my dear,’ he turned to Aunt Marfa, ‘but there is only one basket free.’

  We lay down side by side with our heads against the wall: Bandi, I, Valy, the procuress and finally Lilian. When I knelt up to put out the lamp our eyes met for a moment. I listened to the sand trickling from the mouldy wall next to my ear, as though in an hour-glass, and then suddenly I was sound asleep.

  At dawn we all woke at the same minute. Lorsy was still asleep huddled up in the huge vegetable basket like a boa constrictor. There was also a second basket there which Aunt Marfa eyed with a mournful expression; it was full of spinach and on top of the leaves, close to Lorsy, there lay an empty wine bottle.

  ‘Get up, Ernö,’ I nudged him.

  ‘Leave me alone! But you can get me a cup of strong black coffee …’

  ‘We must go to the Portuguese consulate.’

  ‘Tell them to jump in the lake. I want peace …’

  Finally Bandi succeeded in dragging him from the basket. In front of the consulate hundreds were sleeping on the pavement. An hour later thousands thronged in the narrow alley. We stood there without food or drink until late in the evening. Only a few dozen of the many thousands had been admitted. In the evening the crocodile-eyed friend of Lorsy’s came to tell us that Tom Thumb was standing guard at the back door of the consulate and for ten one-hundred-franc notes opened it to anyone. The thousand-franc queue was running out and tomorrow we would be admitted free of charge. There was no cause to worry, the Germans were only at Bordeaux and it would take them at least another four days to get here.

  The next day towards noon we were beginning to lose our nerve and sent Lorsy to the back door with our passports. No sooner had he gone than the doors of the consulate flew wide open and those waiting outside were let in in groups of a hundred. We went and sat on the steps of the Dôme, chewing the ten kilogrammes of cucumbers the greengrocer had given Lilian that morning. Hours later Lorsy joined us, saying that he had handed in our passports and we would all have our visas for six thousand francs, our last money.