My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  Bandi departed to find out when the Spanish consulate would be open and how soon we could obtain our transit visas, and returned with two bottles of wine. He related that a wine merchant was standing in the middle of the road handing out wine to all passers-by. He had also visited the harbour; the police cordon had disappeared and it was whispered that ships would soon sail for North Africa. We were not interested. After midnight the Portuguese consulate began distributing the passports. Everything was fine.

  In the morning we walked down to the Spanish consulate. Again the square was filled to capacity but this time the crowd was shouting, screaming, cursing, quarrelling. They had been told that the Spanish consulate would give a transit visa to anyone possessing a valid Portuguese visa. The Portuguese visas granted us were, however, invalid because the consul had forgotten to sign them. We raced to the Portuguese consulate but the doors were locked. The brief announcement tacked to it read:

  CLOSED FOR THE SUMMER

  IN URGENT MATTERS TURN TO

  CONSULATE OF PORTUGAL IN BORDEAUX

  We walked down to the harbour. Bandi told us everything he had learned the previous day. Passage on the ships to North Africa had to be bought in the customs building. The procedure was as follows: you paid a hundred thousand francs to a customs official. For this amount you were permitted to board a ship, without even giving your name. If you could not pay a hundred thousand francs, you had to wait by the fence of the customs building. Here tickets were distributed and if you were lucky you could get one. With this ticket you could enter the customs building and if you could prove that you were a distinguished democrat you were permitted to board a ship, free of charge. All ships were going to Casablanca.

  The fence of the customs building was high and topped with iron lance-heads. Every twelfth lance was longer than and twice as thick as its neighbours. People were standing twenty deep along the entire length of the fence. On top of one of the lances sat the Polish Jew who had wanted to emasculate himself three days ago in front of the Portuguese consulate. Blood was dripping from under his long black kaftan but nobody was paying attention to him.

  ‘I was the Polish eagle who was to be gored,’ he cried when he caught sight of Valy and Lilian. ‘Now I am the Gallic cock and I gore myself.’

  I told our women to sit down on the other side of the embankment. There were so many people in front of us that I was afraid we would never reach the fence. Dazed with exhaustion I leaned against the man standing before me and a few minutes later I noticed that the law of gravity worked not only vertically but also horizontally. The unresisting mass opened before me and closed behind me like a block of ice when a steel wire is slowly cutting through it, exactly as we had been shown in the school laboratory. The reason was perhaps that most of these people were much older than I and they were certainly more exhausted. As my body leaned against theirs I felt as if my muscles were twice as hard. Half an hour later I reached the fence and fell to my knees. Ten minutes later Bandi joined me.

  Towards noon a slender flight officer appeared in the door of the harbour building and advanced towards us with springy, dancing steps. He had a short, thick, crooked nose as if the tip had been cut off with a knife and large, cinnamon-red nostrils.

  ‘The entrance tickets!’ people sighed around me.

  The flight officer came very close to the fence. He stopped about two yards from us, lifted the green book of tickets high as if to show it to us, then walked comfortably from one end of the fence to the other, so near that the outstretched hands almost touched him.

  ‘Give one to me, lieutenant, to me!’ some begged, but the majority waited in silence.

  When the officer reached the end of the fence he turned round, shifted the book to his other hand and walked back. The fence between us had by then lost all meaning or at least its meaning had become meaningless. No one knew any more who was inside, who outside, whether we were prisoners behind bars or he a wild beast in a cage.

  After having peered into our faces as he walked along, the officer sat down on a bench in the middle of the fenced-off area, put the green book of tickets down beside him, selected a cigarette from his gold case, opened his paper and began to read. He read quickly and avidly as if every printed line were dealing with him and him alone. From time to time he looked up, brushed us with a glance, then turned back to his paper, blowing smoke-rings into the air. Like a young man waiting for his beloved on a garden bench.

  Then, when we had given up all hope, he jumped from the bench, ran to the fence and tearing a handful of tickets from the book pressed them at random into the extended hands, by fives and tens. In the confusion that followed the unfortunate men who snatched the tickets first usually lost them to a hundred grabbing fingers and had to wait patiently for the next distribution.

  We stood there until late in the evening. In the meantime Valy had acquired a large tin of meat and some biscuits, and Lilian forty packets of cigarette tobacco which she slipped into my rucksack. We did not open the tin but decided to go back to our camping place, find Lorsy and dine together. Lorsy, however, was not in his vegetable basket. We ate, then lay down to sleep.

  I dreamed that I was standing on top of a hill in the middle of the Great Flood, and that water was pouring down on me until I was knee-deep in it. A deafening clap of thunder woke me from my dream, and I found that my feet were indeed wet because the eaves protected us only down to our knees. I sat up and looked towards Lilian. A flash of lightning showed her staring into my face with wide-open, glassy eyes.

  In the morning we went to look for Lorsy but his basket was empty except for three wine bottles. We set out towards the harbour. Seeing us approach with our rucksacks the passers-by turned away their eyes or lowered their heads in obvious embarrassment. From their behaviour we concluded that the Germans must be near indeed. In the market-place we ran into Lorsy’s crocodile-eyed friend.

  ‘What are you doing here? Have you missed the ship?’ he asked, amazed.

  ‘What ship?’

  ‘The ship Monsieur Lorsy found for all of you yesterday. The one that took him to Casablanca at dawn!’

  ‘The scoundrel! To have left us behind!’ Aunt Marfa wailed.

  ‘I just don’t understand anything,’ I said. ‘Ernö hasn’t said a word about any ship …’

  ‘Yesterday,’ Crocodile-eye explained, ‘I accompanied Monsieur Lorsy to the harbour. We found a lovely 1,000-ton freighter. Hundreds of people were standing around on the shore begging the captain to let them come on board. He stood looking down on us but made no reply. From time to time he spat, but never far enough to hit us.

  ‘Monsieur Lorsy got tired of waiting. He opened his arms wide and began to orate. He spoke about the French gloire and about seamen’s honour. He spoke solemnly and convincingly, beautifully and movingly, believe me, it was better than Mark Antony’s funeral oration! Finally he addressed the captain directly: “Let us suppose, Monsieur le Capitaine,” he said, “that at this moment the Allies possess one thousand ships and the Germans also one thousand. If you take this ship to Africa the Allies will have one thousand and one ships and the Germans only nine hundred and ninety-nine. Therefore, in reality, this ship is not one ship but two ships …”

  ‘In the end the captain was so completely bowled over by Monsieur Lorsy’s avalanche of words that he promised to have the ship ready to sail by five in the morning and would admit as many as could find a place to sit on deck, in the only life-boat, in the engine-room, on the lower deck and in the lavatories.

  ‘I,’ Crocodile-eye concluded, ‘lacked the courage to board that ship. Last night I heard over the radio that the Germans were dropping floating mines in the entrance of all French harbours to prevent the ships from leaving.’

  ‘He left us here to face death,’ Aunt Marfa cried. ‘And yet all he had to do was to cross the street and he could have saved us all! The scoundrel!’

  ‘Scoundrel? No. Simply lazy,’ Bandi said meditatively. ‘He did want to visit us
last night but suddenly he felt too exhausted to move. And in the morning he was so excited that he simply forgot all about us. At this very minute he is standing at the railing of the ship, accusing himself and shedding large tears into the ocean.’

  ‘Or vomiting into it,’ Lilian remarked soberly.

  ‘Whether he sobs or vomits, there isn’t time to discuss his character now. Let’s go to the customs building.’

  We had plenty of cigarettes and this made waiting considerably easier. The air officer came out once every hour and by nightfall he had distributed two hundred tickets. Worn out as we were, we did not even think about sleeping in the magic garden but lay down beyond the embankment in the grass. I was not yet asleep when a terrible thunderstorm broke out, as if runaway elephants were dancing above us. We found shelter under a railway truck and spent the night mostly awake. Early in the morning Bandi and I stood again in the queue before the fence. Again we did not obtain tickets. Late in the afternoon I decided that it would be sheer madness to spend another night at Bayonne, the Germans were due any minute. I told Bandi that we would walk to the Spanish border and cross into Spain illegally. Compared to the Gestapo, Spanish prisons were Gardens of Eden.

  The women were still asleep on the embankment, under railway trucks. Before waking them I looked down on the landscape that reminded me of a map spread out on a table. The River Adour was rolling across emerald-green fields, narrow dirt-paths dogging its steps all the way to the dunes blocking the horizon, beyond which lay the sea. Far away, perhaps half-way between myself and the sea, a ship was anchored in the river. Thick, white clouds of steam rose from its funnel.

  ‘It is hooting!’ Bandi cried.

  My knees began to tremble with excitement. Indeed, a second later the sound of the hooting hit our ears.

  ‘We can still catch her!’ Bandi yelled. ‘That was only the first!’

  The women climbed out from under the freight cars, we picked up our rucksacks and began to run along the muddy road. We waded knee-deep in mud, fell on our faces, rose and ran on, until finally we decided to slow down. Valy and Lilian advanced side by side like two beautiful horses in a race. Bandi and I exchanged glances, then broke into wild laughter. Wasn’t it exceedingly funny that we should pursue our lives with such zeal and determination? In front of us the setting sun was caught between two purple rain-clouds as in a pair of pincers or the lips of a mythical dragon. And then the ship’s funnel hooted for a second time. The gathering storm-clouds loomed before us like an insurmountable wall, more and more forbidding as we came closer. God knows how long we had been running but there were only fifty yards between us and the ship when it hooted for the third time.

  We ran up the landing stage but the gangway had already been pulled in. A bearded captain stood on the bridge with a fish-shaped pipe in his mouth. The bowl of the pipe had two little glass eyes that sparked and shone, and a sudden gust of wind brought down a shower of sparks upon us.

  ‘Can we jump?’ Bandi asked the captain.

  The ship was moving away slowly from the shore. Fortunately the deck and even the rail were lower than the landing stage on which we stood.

  ‘I have received strict orders,’ the captain said in a quiet, friendly voice as if he were talking to someone sitting in an armchair opposite his – ‘to shoot everyone whom I see boarding this ship. If I see them boarding it,’ he added with emphasis. Then, with a regular, military about-face, he turned away and disappeared.

  When we hit the deck it was so frighteningly dark that we saw no one and stumbled about half-blind between a multitude of tall iron barrels. We met no one, as if the captain with his devilishly glowing pipe were the only passenger on a vessel bound for hell.

  Finally we discovered a door hidden behind heavy rain-soaked tarpaulin. We stepped into a completely dark room smelling like a hospital.

  In front of me someone was counting slowly in Hungarian: ‘One hundred and thirty-second victim… one hundred and thirty-third victim… one hundred and thirty-fourth victim… fifth, sixth, total: five new victims …’

  I took the man by the arm and pulled him towards the door. He was a squat little man with a huge nose, wearing a French uniform with two rows of decorations on his chest.

  ‘What the hell is the matter with you? What do you mean by victims?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were Hungarian,’ he excused himself. ‘My name is Rozgonyi.’

  When I introduced myself his face brightened.

  ‘A poet? Excellent. Then I shall tell you what I am afraid of. This ship is going to blow up. Look,’ he said, pointing to the barrels upon which a heavy rain was beating down, ‘do you see what is written on them? They contain explosives.’

  ‘Have you never seen a ship that carried explosives?’

  ‘This afternoon the passengers were cooking their food on the lids of these barrels. On open paraffin fires, of course. When I warned them they just laughed. And look at this crazy anarchist!’

  The captain was approaching out of the darkness with a burning pipe in his mouth.

  ‘We shall sink, captain!’ Rozgonyi said.

  ‘If it is written that we shall sink, sink we shall. Do you know how many ships have sunk since the Phoenicians first dared brave the seas? Just think of it: the riffs, the rocks, the storms, the battles! Salamis, Actium, Lepanto, Aboukir, Trafalgar, the last war and now this!’

  ‘It is not the sinking I am afraid of, but the explosion!’

  ‘To drown is a long and painful operation. Explosion is the best narcotic to make it bearable. Better than chloroform. It takes effect immediately, you don’t have to count up to eighteen. And there is no unpleasant after-effect. In fact, there is no after-effect at all, sergeant.’

  Valy and the procuress had, in the meantime, gone to sleep in the straw in the hold of the ship. Lilian had disappeared. Rozgonyi explained that though the ship was going to Casablanca it was, for the moment, sailing up and down the Adour waiting for high tide. The captain did not want to drop anchor because he was afraid that should the Germans take the town they would requisition his ship, the Château de Boncourt.

  We were all glad that the ship was going to Casablanca. Aunt Marfa confessed that she had already forgiven Lorsy for his desertion and could hardly wait to see him again. Bandi was happy because he had heard that a counter-government had been formed in Casablanca that wanted to go on with the war, and I was happy because I felt that my most secret wish was coming true: I would at last see Africa. Everyone was exhausted and we all lay down to sleep in the straw. Before falling asleep I suddenly remembered the ominous name of the ship and felt a strange anxiety. In 1789 the rabble had tried to set fire to the Château de Boncourt, ancient home of the Chamisseau family. When the round, Roman stone towers of the castle would not burn they put kegs of gunpowder in them and blew them up. The son of the squire who found refuge in Germany and became a famous poet and liberal wrote a poem about this event and asked God’s blessing on the peasants ploughing the soil above the one-time castle.

  Suddenly I was awakened by a subtle, tender caress.

  ‘Quiet, be quiet,’ Lilian whispered, ‘and follow me …’

  She was waiting for me outside the door, glued to the tarpaulin.

  ‘I have made friends with the first mate,’ she whispered. ‘He is a fine gentleman, you must not think of anything indecent. He offered me his cabin while he is on duty. Come with me, but be careful that no one sees you from the bridge.’

  The first mate’s cabin was small but painfully clean like the morning room of a first-class hotel before the arrival of the guests. There was a well-filled straw mattress on the bed with corners as sharp as a match-box and covered with a red blanket. I was so deeply moved by the sight of this room that I just stood there, stupidly, as if I had entered a royal chamber for audience and the chamberlain had bade me stop. In the meantime Lilian had locked the door and stuck the corner of her handkerchief into the keyhole.

  Towards dawn we were lying under t
he bed, and little blocks of wood kept falling on my head and shoulders. Only when Lilian stuck out her head from under the blanket that had slipped so that it was now hanging down to the floor did I discover that the small pieces of wood were African statuettes carved out of ebony.

  ‘It is five-fifty,’ Lilian said, ‘the first mate is coming off duty at six. I shouldn’t like him to find us here and I want to wash up before we get out. We have four minutes left.’

  I drenched myself with the first mate’s cologne so that my wife should not notice the strong perfume of lilies, then slipped from the cabin. I was happy that I should in a moment have the sea before my eyes. The boards of the deck and the steps of the ladder slid away beneath the soles of my feet like conveyor belts. A hot, strong wind and a vibrating blue sky received me. But the ship was standing close to the shore in the same place where we had boarded her the day before.

  A minute later I ran into Rozgonyi. He was coming up from the hold fully dressed, carrying all his effects.

  ‘I am getting off,’ he said. ‘The ship sails in an hour. I have no intention of being blown up with her.’

  ‘Stop that idiocy!’

  ‘It is not idiocy. Have you never heard that rats always leave a ship that is going to sink before she leaves harbour? Well, I watched all night. There isn’t a single rat on this ship.’

  ‘All right. See you again, sometime!’

  ‘Sure. In the afterworld!’ he replied with an insolent grin.

  Valy and Bandi were sitting in the bow on a barrel. Above them three bottles of wine hung in a wire net.

  ‘Well,’ Valy began, ‘did you spend a pleasurable night with your whore?’