‘Stop that. We have something more important to discuss,’ Bandi said. ‘We have to get off this ship. It is going to explode.’
‘Has that idiot Rozgonyi driven you out of your mind?’ I asked.
‘I never spoke to him. But I feel it in my bones that this ship is going to sink. Look at the people. Death is written in their faces. Their cheeks are covered with blue stubble as if it were growing in the grave. They stink like corpses. Some have only been living to fight against the Germans, others to sell rabbit-skins to Amsterdam. But now one can no longer fight against the Germans and Amsterdam has no need of rabbit-skins. They have accomplished that for which they were born. Consequently they must die. It is also quite likely that this is the seventeenth ship. According to reliable statistics every seventeenth ship goes down. I can assure you that this ship will sink if for no other than for statistical reasons. If it finds no floating mine to sink it, it will explode on the nose of a sardine …’
‘George, darling,’ Valy begged, ‘why do you want to die so young?’
‘He whom the Gods love dies young,’ I replied, absent-mindedly watching the wine-bottles dance in the wind.
‘If you come with us I shall forgive you all your sins. I shall even steal these three bottles of wine although I never stole anything in my entire life. Do you know why I shall steal them?’
‘Why?’
‘Because their owner will not be needing them. He will explode.’
‘And what about your collected works?’ Bandi wheedled. ‘Are they finished?’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘if you feel certain that this ship will sink I have no objection to leaving. Let’s go.’
Bandi ran off happily and a moment later returned with Aunt Marfa. The procuress had straw sticking in her hair and her face was half amused, half angry.
‘You were so clever, so calm, so reasonable and now all of you have gone utterly mad. At last we have found a ship, she sails in half an hour and you are determined to go back to certain death. Do you want my little daughter to become the prey of German soldiers? But if you insist,’ she added hesitantly, ‘we can ask Léon… Léon, the spirit …’
‘There is no table here and besides we have no time,’ Bandi shouted. ‘Are you coming or are you not?’
‘No,’ the procuress replied unhesitatingly.
I sped down the steps and began to hammer at the cabin door with my knuckles. An animal roar replied from inside. A moment later Lilian opened the door, but only a crack. She was barefoot and wore the red bedspread as her only garment.
‘George, darling, you sweet madman, what do you want here? This kind gentleman has lent us his cabin, I must show him some gratitude, mustn’t I? Don’t you understand?’
‘Listen. We must leave this ship.’
‘Stop it, darling. I told Étienne you were my brother. If you start a scene of jealousy Étienne will kill you. He is strong as an ox!’
The cabin door flew wide open with a threatening squeak. A middle-aged man stood on the threshold clad in a pair of trousers. His chest was covered with unkempt, rusty hair like dry seaweed. He looked at me out of tired, stupid eyes, then he closed the door gently.
‘You misunderstand me, Lilian. I am not jealous. All I wanted is to tell you that we are getting off. This ship is going to blow up.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I feel it.’
‘And Marfa? Is she getting off too?’
I stammered.
‘Don’t lie to me!’
‘I never lie in important matters. Aunt Marfa does not want to get off.’
‘In that case leave me alone and stop being an idiot!’ she said and slipped past me back into the cabin.
Trotting back along the shore of the Adour all three of us were in a filthy mood indeed. All at once it seemed idiotic to have left the ship. When we got back to the customs building it was again besieged by hundreds. We climbed on to the embankment, put down the wine bottles in front of us and lay back. We were too tired to uncork them. Very soon I fell into a not exactly disagreeable apathy. I followed the flight of a bee circling above my head, tried dreamily to decipher the meaning of the various cloud formations and forgot all about the present. Bandi was in the same frame of mind, so Valy’s entreaties that we go and line up for tickets fell on deaf ears. I declared that I was tired of standing around, we would now rest and then set out on foot towards the Spanish border.
Valy looked at us with unconcealed disgust, rose and hurried down to the customs building. Some ten minutes later she was back with three tickets for the Cap Figalo, sailing at noon for Casablanca. We drank the wine, put our rucksacks under our heads and went to sleep.
When, shortly before noon, we went down to the harbour, thousands were waiting to board the ship. Most of them had no tickets. Four soldiers stood at the foot of the gangway, their guns pointing at the crowd, and the captain informed us through a loudspeaker that anyone trying to board the ship without a ticket would be shot.
It was seven o’clock when the ship finally sailed. However, before going out to sea it had to turn round, which, as the Adour was narrower than the length of the ship, was a rather delicate operation. I stood at the rail between Bandi and a Dutch diamond merchant when suddenly complete, deadly silence descended on the ship. I looked towards the shore: at a distance of a few hundred yards the German flag with the swastika was fluttering gaily on the tower of the City Hall.
‘This is the end,’ Bandi said.
‘Don’t worry,’ the Dutch diamond merchant reassured him. ‘Nothing is lost yet. I have carefully studied the occupation tactics of the Germans lately. It is one of their fixed ideas to raise the flag the minute they arrive.’
‘Every army has the same fixed idea,’ I argued.
‘Very true. But the Germans do it in a different way. They send ahead a car with two officers and a few soldiers armed to the teeth. And the flag, of course. They go straight to the City Hall, and tell the mayor that the town is occupied. The soldiers raise the flag and the officers sit down for a glass of beer. A few hours later advance patrols arrive, search the streets and houses, and only then does the bulk of the army march in to occupy the town. It is followed again, a few hours later, by the various technical units and finally by the civil administration that takes over the water, gas and electricity works, the railway station and the harbour. We are now at the point where the officers sit down to guzzle their beer.’
A few minutes later the ship accomplished the turn.
The estuary of the river was bounded on both sides by cliffs. The open sea before the bow was a greyish black with white-frilled waves, agitated but no longer stormy. Still, it seemed to me as if the sea were higher than the deck on which we stood and as if the Cap Figalo had to climb up the side of a huge cog-wheel revolving in front of her. Lead-grey clouds hung on the edge of the horizon and immediately above the water where shortly before the red disc of the sun had blazed, a long, narrow stripe of ivory-coloured cloud framed the landscape.
‘Look,’ Bandi pointed.
Close in front of us the poop of a ship rose from the water, wedged between the cliffs, white and elegant like the semi-circular balconies of Austrian resort hotels built in the past century, where a constant breeze set the tablecloths a-flutter. The poop had no continuation, as if it had been torn from the body of the ship by the explosion. A piece of the twisted blade of the propeller rested mildly and harmoniously against its side like a man’s hand on a woman’s thigh. In the centre of the balcony large black letters proclaimed the name of the ship:
CHTEAU DE BONCOURT
I shivered and Bandi touched my shoulder.
‘Look,’ he said.
He held out his hand and on the tip of his pointing finger, behind the no-man’s-land of the blacked-out French shore I discerned the first bright lights of San Sebastian.
PART TWO
Africa
We arrived in the harbour of Casablanca after five days of semi-starvation durin
g a very strenuous trip, and were moved on to the deck of the hospital-ship Canada. For a week we were kept under severe medical supervision and finally, after being disinfected once more, we and all the other passengers were transported to the indescribably filthy stables of the Ain Chok internment camp outside Casablanca where we had to sleep on rotting straw. The camp had been empty for only a few weeks since the last of the Spanish loyalist soldiers imprisoned there had died of cholera.
We were kept in complete isolation, were not permitted to write letters and were not even asked our names. As we knew that Morocco’s governor, General Nogues, had given his allegiance to Pétain, our eventual liberation seemed at best doubtful. We were all the more surprised when, ten days after our arrival, two Hungarians who lived in Casablanca appeared in the camp: a tall and melancholy chemist called Fekete and a short, squat and lively haberdasher called Fortunatus. They had come to take us back with them to Casablanca, and when we thanked them they explained that they had been sent by someone called Ujvary, that it had been Ujvary who had bribed the authorities and that the car in which we travelled was his. When we inquired about opportunities to make a living they assured us that we had nothing to worry about, Ujvary would get us clothes, Ujvary would find us a place to live and would provide for all our needs. They spoke about this Ujvary as about some great, powerful and rather frightening institution, speaking his name with such awe that we dared ask no questions. Only when we were approaching our destination did they reveal that Ujvary had come here twenty years ago from Hungary, where he had played an important role in the proletarian dictatorship – and that he was today one of the richest industrialists of Morocco.
As we had no money to speak of, we took a single room for the three of us, where we hastened to wash off the filth of the camp. We would have liked nothing better than to go out, but Bandi’s only pair of trousers had disintegrated while we were still on board ship so that he had left the camp in his pyjamas. Valy sat down on the only chair in the room, Bandi and I on the bed. Half an hour later a messenger brought a huge flower arrangement for Valy and a grass-green jacket with a pair of lemon-yellow trousers for Bandi.
‘I wonder what happened to Lorsy,’ Bandi mused while putting on the trousers in front of the mirror.
‘Don’t ever mention that scoundrel again!’ Valy exclaimed, applying a thick coat of lipstick to her mouth.
‘I have forgiven him,’ Bandi declared magnanimously. ‘And you, George?’
‘So have I.’
Ten minutes later, leaving the hotel through the revolving glass door, we ran straight into Lorsy who was about to enter. He was wearing a beautifully cut black suit, a feather-weight silk shirt over the broad expanse of his chest and a delicately worked gold pin stuck in his heavy silk tie. When he caught sight of us he took off his spectacles and, with a smile of pure happiness on his face, opened his arms wide to embrace us.
‘Solamen miseris socios habuisse malorum!’
‘You can keep your quotations and your rotten sentimentalism, you base, soulless, cynical blackguard,’ shouted Bandi, raising his arm in a gesture so threatening that Lorsy backed in terror against the wall of the hotel.
‘How right you are, my dear Bandi. I am indeed a soulless, rotten old man. And it is also true that on the last evening in Bayonne I drank more than advisable at the house of Crocodile-eye. When I left he gave me two bottles of wine to take along for you but I must confess that I drank one on the way and that made me feel so ashamed of myself that I didn’t go on to your place. Instead, I opened the second bottle, but of that I only took a sip. God be my witness, no more than a sip, and even that only to mitigate my sorrow over the fall of France. I thought I would tell you in the morning, if you hadn’t found out in the meantime without me, that this ship was sailing. In the morning, however, I was badly under the weather … Anyway, it was a miserable little vessel, a three-hundred-and-eighty-ton row-boat with five hundred passengers on it. And what passengers! While I washed they stole my shirt. Imagine me, arriving here without a shirt! I must congratulate you for not having taken that stinking egg-crate!’
‘You are obscuring the issue, you dirty scoundrel!’ Bandi cried, raising his fist for a blow.
‘Of course, I am,’ Lorsy admitted humbly. ‘I am terribly afraid of being slapped, Bandi dear, but I submit. Don’t slap me once, slap me twenty times, thirty times! I deserve it. Go ahead, slap me, here, in the street, for everyone to see! I am a heartless old villain. I left you in the lurch. I left my family in the lurch. My wife and my two fatherless little children. They live in Geneva and I haven’t written to them for a year. Nor to my eighty-year-old mother in Hungary. I am a pig, a lazy, dirty pig, a coward and a scoundrel …’
Tears were streaming from his eyes on to the sharp points of his patent leather shoes.
‘You deprive me of the pleasure of hitting you,’ Bandi complained bitterly and dropped his arm.
‘Where have you left Aunt Marfa and her daughter?’
‘At the bottom of the sea.’
Half an hour later a hired carriage with a white canopy took us along the serpentine road running up the hillside. Gay little bells jingled on the four corners of the canopy and on the necks of the horses. Although our rags contrasted sharply with the elegance of the Hotel Anfa, the waiters fell over themselves in their zeal to serve Lorsy.
Large rain-clouds obscured the sun, and although the night was still far off, the iridescent shades of the ocean were the same as they had been when we sailed from Bayonne harbour.
‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ said Lorsy fastening a napkin round his thick neck and throwing a glance at the sea. ‘And let us imbibe this cocktail in their memory. Let our shame for having survived be alleviated by the knowledge, my friends, that a hundred years hence the order in which we perished will be utterly unimportant. Then let us remember that we could have perished in their place, and in that case they would now be drinking to our memory under similarly favourable circumstances … Yes, waiter, bring another round of Manhattans…
‘Lately, at this hotel, I have often remembered our dear Marfa. Her greatness revealed itself to me in its full glory although I did not yet know that she had departed from the world of the living. It was Monsieur Durant, the chef, who brought her to my mind when we discussed together the secret of various dishes. Monsieur Durant is a disciple of the great Savarin but I believe that his knowledge exceeds that of his master. He explained to me that the taste of a dish is determined rather by the mode of preparation and a thousand other factors than by the raw materials it contains. Thus, for instance, if beans are cooked for two hours with some bacon and a little flour stirred in we obtain a thick, gooey, lardy mush known as boiled beans. The same beans and the same ingredients cooked not for two but for twenty-four hours in a covered pot on a low fire so that only tiny bubbles rising to the surface betray the boiling, produce a dish fit for kings in which every single bean preserves the tenderness of the freshly shelled vegetable, the fragrance of the bean-flower, while the aroma of the smoked bacon rises from it like the bluish smoke from a thirteenth-century Gothic fireplace.’
I listened enthralled to Lorsy’s culinary lecture, although it occurred to me that we should perhaps discuss the origin of his sudden opulence, the provenance of the funds with which he would pay for our dinner, our prospects for tomorrow and the ways and means to get out of this country where we would, sooner or later, be arrested by Pétain’s henchmen unless the Gestapo got in first. But the joy of having escaped from Europe, the pleasure of being alive, this unexpected encounter, the beauty of the African town, the hotel and the sea filled me with such delight that I closed my eyes and listened smiling to Lorsy’s words.
‘… But the most involved and truly responsible task, according to Monsieur Durant, is the proper combination of food and drink. He swears that for each dish there is but one appropriate kind of wine. Roast pork must be accompanied by Chablis, smoked spare-ribs by Tokay, pork chops by Liebfraumilch. Some
wines, as for instance, the Béarn Rosé and the Chilean Riesling, have no counterpart in food, just as there is no appropriate wine for eel and calves-liver sauté. Monsieur Durant’s explanation is that long before the advent of the Incas some wild Indian tribe must have exterminated the animal species created by God to be served with Chilean Riesling, while the hills producing the wine to go with calves-liver sauté must have been the hills of Atlantis. Seeing that most of his guests are totally ignorant of these secrets it is always he who suggests the wine to be consumed with the various dishes. Those who insist on some particularly repulsive combination are forever banned from his hotel.
‘Listening to Monsieur Durant’s lecture I could not get poor Marfa out of my mind. For if this excellent disciple of the divine Savarin rose to such heights of fame by matching food and wine, what shall I say about dear Marfa who was a past master in the matching of men and women, an art requiring infinitely more psychological insight, social knowledge, imagination and absorption …’
At this point Lorsy drew in his breath sharply: Bandi had kicked his shin under the table. Luckily the waiter was engaged in serving us with lobster mayonnaise, which gave our friend an opportunity to pull back his chair and find a safer place for his legs. His face reflected absolute determination: he would finish his funeral oration at whatever cost.
‘When we roamed through the streets of Montauban, less than a month ago, the dear departed communicated to me a fraction of her abundant experience in life. I listened with awe, as if I were listening to the memoirs of the great procuresses of the Renaissance, the Putana Errante or Tullia d’Aragon. I am deeply convinced that it is my sacred duty to bequeath dear Marfa’s method – naturally with suitable discretion – to posterity in one of the works I am going to write. If there is enough time left …’
‘There won’t be,’ Bandi assured him with a sardonic grin.
‘I felt, that night, as if I were reading a hitherto unknown work of the inimitable Ovid, or by Aretino or Stendhal,’ Lorsy continued mildly. ‘I have no intention of boring, or rather, titillating you with details from dear Marfa’s life story. I shall not, as she did, draw a parallel between the affinity of certain men and women and the affinity of certain foods and wines. Neither shall I explain that just as beer should be consumed quickly and wine slowly, there are men and women made for brief and passionate, or for tender and long-drawn copulation; not to mention the resemblance of women to salads and hors-d’œuvre, the magic of which, as everyone knows, depends on the way they are dished up.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 12