My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  At the café Amar told me that he had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, owned a small property in Southern Morocco and was now having a little holiday which he spent in idleness, enjoying the blessings of love and philosophy. During the days that followed we met at the swimming pool, sat on the stone wall dividing the sweet from the salt water, broke oysters from the rocks and ate them with the lemon we had brought with us while squatting in the hot sun we talked, mostly about historical or philosophical problems. Amar asked me to accompany him to his property which lay at a day’s ride from Casablanca, on the edge of the desert, close to the border of Rio de Oro. I should have been happy to accept his invitation but, on the one hand, Europeans were forbidden by law – in the interest of their own security – to leave the so-called pacified belt along the sea-shore, and on the other hand I was a little afraid of going on such a long trip with someone who never divulged anything about himself.

  I told Amar about the first problem. He said that he had thought of it but that it was easy to solve. He would lend me a djellaba and a fez, and then nobody would be able to tell me from a Moroccan. Even in my European clothes everyone thought I was an Arab. My curiosity and love of adventure outweighed my anxiety but, unexpectedly, I came up against the determined resistance of my friends. Bandi confessed his instinctive fear that my ultimate intention was to disappear in the desert and that this trip was to be a reconnaissance. He begged me to give up the idea and argued that I owed it nor only to myself and my friends but also to my fatherland, to Hungarian literature, to behave like a responsible human being. On the last evening before my departure Lorsy visited us at the five-room flat rented for us by Ujvary, and he, too, broached the subject. He said that I was facing a triple danger: first, that the Arabs would rape me, second, that they might hold me for ransom, thirdly, that they might even murder me. He warned me that my type always inspired Arabs to lust and murder. And even disregarding these extreme possibilities, there still remained the danger of kidnapping. A heavy ransom might be too much even for Ujvary, it would turn him against us and he might even discontinue financing us. Lorsy’s passionate pleading affected him so deeply that he threw himself on his kness before me. How could I be so cruel as to deprive him of his livelihood in his old age, he asked me, with tears in his eyes. I brushed off these petty bourgeois arguments and tried to explain to them that my curiosity had always been stronger than my fear and that my profession demanded the pursuit of adventure regardless of the consequences. To my joy Lorsy accepted my decision under the mellowing influence of a good dinner and a few bottles of wine and so, finally, did the others.

  The next morning, at Amar’s house, I put on a pair of embroidered linen trousers and a djellaba, pushed my feet into leather slippers and put a fez on my head. Amar taught me how to sit down on the ground with my feet crossed without using my hands, how to rise, how to look round me without turning my neck and how to move lightly and yet with dignity. Then he led me to a large, blue-tinged mirror.

  ‘Now there is no longer any difference between you and us, who are all the sons of Ali,’ he said contentedly.

  What I saw surprised even me. The mirror showed two brothers. Our skin was of the same hue though I wore the tan borrowed from the sun only on the surface while he wore the colour inherited from his ancestors ingrained in his skin.

  ‘What is smoke on you is stain on me,’ he said.

  This time it was not a servant girl but a slender young woman who brought us tea.

  ‘Sit down and take off your veil, Bouthayna,’ Amar commanded.

  The woman expressed her protest with a wild movement of her waist, but then she sat down obediently and rested her hands, holding the blue veil, in her lap. She was a gipsyish, very beautiful woman with a surprising likeness to Valy. She had a blue star tattooed on her forehead and a vertical line on her chin. The tattooing was compact and shiny like new linoleum. Bouthayna was so embarrassed that I hardly dared look at her but even my fleeting glances confused her to such an extent that I blushed and began to scan the books on a shelf behind me.

  ‘With a few exceptions,’ Amar said when we were again in the street, ‘all women and girls in Morocco are illiterate. As a result they are interested in nothing except gossip and love. It is impossible to talk to them and an intellectual relationship between a man and a woman is unimaginable. This may be why every woman deceives her husband at the first opportunity. Only during love-making can he be sure of her and even then she wonders and plots how to deceive him.’

  On the corner of the market-place a canopied carriage passed close by us with Valy and Lorsy sitting in it. Neither recognized me. For a second Valy’s glance alighted on my face, unaware that it was that of a man, while Lorsy’s glance hit me between the brows like a bullet as, with haughty indifference, he leaned back against the black leather head-rest. For them an Arab is not a human being, I thought to myself, without a trace of anger.

  ‘Be careful not to talk to me in the bus until we have left the town behind us,’ Amar said. ‘You need not fear that our fellow passengers will speak to you. Your clothes are too elegant for that.’

  A very long, low vehicle was waiting for us in front of the garage. Two people sat with the driver, three crouched on the floor in the back and three squatted in the luggage rack on the roof. The driver greeted Amar with deep reverence. With a light movement of the hand my friend ordered the three on the roof to get down. They obeyed, grumbling, and lifted down the burning charcoal stove on which they had probably planned to cook their mutton or tea during the trip.

  We took our places on the back seat. At the town limit we were stopped by soldiers who wore a piece of khaki cloth wound round their steel helmets.

  ‘All brothers!’ one of the soldiers called to the other and motioned to the driver to carry on.

  We drove at a crazy speed between copper-red fields, along bumpy highways, uphill, downhill, through villages and gorges, always towards the butter-yellow sun-disc swinging before us like a pendulum. The landscape did not seem unfamiliar to me, neither did the houses or the people. It was as if I had already seen these flat-roofed little cubes with the one tiny window next to the front door, the water-carriers with their goatskin bags, their copper-coloured bare legs pillar-straight like young beech trees with root-shaped muscles streaming down around the ankles; the old men squatting with their backs against the long stone wall as if unable to move and waiting resignedly for someone to come and help them rise; the women, their date-stone eyes staring with wild curiosity from behind blue veils; the children in their coloured wraps running to and fro in front of the car, the only lock left on their shaved heads fluttering in the wind; the camels with their turtle-heads supported by long, sluggish necks; the hard-featured men sitting in mint-smelling tea-houses who pretended to ignore our arrival, turning their heads slowly with disdain after the car as if the seven deadly sins were travelling in it and the great Babylonian Whore were sitting at the wheel. I was overwhelmed by this feeling of familiarity and thought that I could have described this landscape precisely and faultlessly in a school composition many years ago. I could have described the flowers of the field though I had never seen them, the people sleeping in the shade of the roadside trees or of the houses, with a net on their faces to protect them against the clouds of flies hovering above them; the green, empty skins of the barbary figs scattered on the ground near the villages, the female donkeys wandering homewards with their heavy teats dangling, the lipless wells along the roadside opening into the red, arid soil like so many navels; the old but still virile wanderers walking with their chins stuck forward so that their white beards pointed straight towards the ground like unkempt icicles, the lapis-lazuli blue humming-top of the sky whipped into faster and faster revolutions by rebellious angels – I could have described all of this biblical, heroic landscape with its tumbling stone walls, windowless, apparently uninhabited huts; the scattered carcases of dead animals, the ram-horns and the traces of fires, some still smoking;
things, which, had I seen them in Europe, would have reminded me of the Thirty Years War, but which here represented permanence, calm and peace. It was all as familiar to me as if I had seen it a hundred, nay, a thousand times. What I felt was not the timid and uncertain familiarity of the déjà vu, nor the slightly bored familiarity of the often seen and no longer interesting: this landscape was simply familiar, without any emotion, home-like and agreeably indifferent like something I had become used to but still loved.

  Only one thing seemed unusual: the speed. From time to time the driver bit into a yellow, pie-shaped cake which he fished out from under his feet, or quarrelled with his neighbours or, turning back, carried on long conversations with the Arabs sitting behind him. He did this even on the sudden curves which he took without slowing down. I thought that he must have travelled along this road innumerable times but when, at a crossroads, he lost his way and then drove back at the same breakneck speed I began to wonder whether we would survive this day.

  Late in the afternoon the driver put us off at a roadside café and turned back with his passengers towards the sea-shore which we had left at Agadir an hour earlier. We ordered dinner and after dinner set out towards the east, along a gully.

  ‘We shall have to walk only two kilometres,’ Amar reassured me. ‘On top of the hill we shall wait for the caravan that is to take us to my kashba some forty kilometres from here.’

  During the following fifteen minutes the landscape changed its physiognomy completely. It was still biblical and heroic but much more austere, rocky and bare like an Etruscan fresco, or the background of a Michelangelo painting. The tamarisk bushes disappeared, the gully narrowed to a kind of ditch coming up to our ankles, the fields covered with scanty grass tufts turned into stony wasteland. At last we reached the lonely hilltop.

  ‘Here we shall wait for the caravan. But before you sit down turn this way and smell the breeze.’

  For a moment Amar kept silent, then he continued:

  ‘This breeze brings neither smoke nor the perfume of flowers, it brings neither the smell of the sea, nor vapour nor dust. It is tasteless, empty, odourless, but constant. Transcendent and constant. It has no strength. It is as if an ant tried to push you over with its tiny front legs; or as if ten ants tried to bowl you over with the help of a glass rod the thickness of a matchstick, quietly, invisibly, untiringly, stubbornly. If you pay no attention you hardly notice it. But once you have noticed it you will always be aware of it. Do you feel it now?’

  We sat down side by side on the hilltop. Behind us we could see the inn and the last tamarisks, in front of us there was nothing but the desert. Already during the day I had felt as if, in possession of a time-machine, I were travelling backwards in time, into a feudal and theocratic past, the world of the Arabian Nights, across towns with bazaars and open markets resembling perhaps not Baghdad but Basra or other provincial towns of the Caliphate a thousand years ago. Now I was even further back in the past, as if I were observing the past at the time when light, the heavenly bodies and the earth were already created, but not yet plants, animals and humans; or, on the contrary, as if I were a witness of the last days of the world when the humans had already disappeared with their plants and animals. When we were leaving the tamarisk bushes behind us I had felt as if I were standing on a stage from which stage-hands were busy carrying out the pieces of scenery; only the bare stage-roof of the sky was still there above me while under my soles I felt the bare, rough boards of being.

  After a while Amar took his lighter from his hood and offered me a cigarette. When he bent forward I discovered a silk rope running across his chest and when I followed it I saw the outlines of a yatagan at his hip. Although I knew that the Arabs usually carried a knife, this discovery disturbed me a little.

  ‘When is the caravan coming?’

  ‘It should have been here long ago.’

  ‘Perhaps it won’t come at all.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he replied indifferently. ‘The moon is full, I know the region pretty well, we shall have a nice walk of forty kilometres.’

  ‘Couldn’t we start right away?’

  ‘Let’s stay a little longer. I should like you to watch the sunset from here. There is a moment before it turns from scarlet to blue and purple when suddenly everything becomes green. For a second only. But you cannot see it from anywhere else as you can from this hilltop.’

  Half an hour later the sun set and then the scarlet glow began to disappear under the edge of the horizon.

  ‘Watch now,’ Amar said.

  At that very moment six figures appeared at the foot of the hill. They approached us in a scattered military formation, leaving a distance of thirty or forty yards between them. They were clad in rags but each carried a gun.

  ‘Robbers,’ Amar explained calmly. ‘When they reach us we shall rise and greet them. It would be senseless to run or try to defend ourselves. If they answer aleikum salem to our salem aleikum we shall know that they have no intention of killing us.’

  I was watching Amar’s beautiful, noble profile: the straight and cruel outline of his nose, the compressed, merciless corners of his mouth. I felt a mad impulse rise in me to slap him hard so as to see blood spurt from that face, not only because he had led me into a trap and had sent for his bandits, but also because he was still trying to fool me. I thought of the civilized and secure shore-belt which I had so recklessly abandoned. Now I should have to write to Ujvary for the ransom. With the excellent espionage system these blackguards had they would ask for at least a hundred thousand francs for my release.

  The bandits waited until all had reached the hilltop and then approached us in a group. For a few moments they and Amar yelled and screamed at each other like banshees, then suddenly all began to laugh.

  ‘Do not be afraid,’ Amar turned to me. ‘These are peaceful people who invite us to dinner.’

  I did not bother to reply but set out with one of the bandits behind Amar and the others who were gossiping loudly and gaily.

  ‘Do you speak French?’ I asked my companion. He was a fellow with limp, thick lips and a crooked nose, holding a telescope-gun, the butt of which was covered with mother-of-pearl squares. A heavy smell of mutton-fat emanated from his white and brown striped djellaba.

  ‘A little. We could talk better in German or Spanish.’

  ‘Where did you learn German?’

  ‘I served with Abd el-Krim’s general staff; for a while I was commander of the guard at his headquarters. You know,’ he explained, ‘there were many officers of Austrian and Hungarian extraction among Abd el-Krim’s men. Many had run away from the Foreign Legion, but many had come straight from Europe, They were professional soldiers who could not find work in their countries after the First World War. It is from them that we learned German. Because we were all fighting in Abd el-Krim’s army against the Spanish, Verstehst du mich?’

  We were stumbling along in the twilight among huge, ragged rocks.

  ‘For a while,’ my companion continued, ‘I was commander of the guard on the mountain-top above Tetuan. The town was in Spanish hands but the steep five-hundred-metre cliff was ours…

  ‘I am a master marksman,’ he went on, ‘and I knew all the officers down there not only by name but also by their faces. There were a few who had committed atrocities in the Riff. For instance, there was this Captain Alcala. I knew that man from Ceuta. Because Ceuta is the town where I was born. Captain Alcala’s son often played with my son on the sea-shore. The captain’s son liked to build sand fortresses and mine gathered shells to cover the towers. One day Captain Alcala came down to the sea-shore and told his son not to play with that dirty Arab brat. At least, this is what my son told me.

  ‘Do not believe that I swore vengeance or that the matter caused me much heartache. But when we were keeping watch on that mountain-top I recalled the incident. We had not cut the telephone lines and neither had the Spaniards; we used them to abuse each other in our time off. On Saturday evening I called up the
Captain in Tetuan and reminded him of what he had said to my son two years before. Then I warned him that I was a master marksman and told him that I would shoot him like a dog if he went out on the broadwalk the next day after church. He laughed and replied that I could never hit him from that distance in a big crowd. Sunday morning I killed him. He came along with his wife and son, swaggering like a peacock. From time to time he glanced up to where we were. I shot him when he was looking up so that nobody could call me a sniper.

  ‘However,’ he said, ‘I shall show you tonight what I can do.’

  ‘You are very kind indeed,’ I replied wryly.

  We descended into a deep depression. In the background I noticed the shapes of sleeping camels and donkeys; in the centre of the clearing four men were sitting around a glowing charcoal fire. One of them, an old man with a shark face and a seven-day beard – obviously the leader of the gang – greeted us heartily and asked us to sit down on the mats.

  I sat down sadly. The whole scene was more like an ordinary, cheap piece of trash than like reality. While Amar and the leader of the gang engaged in excited conversation in Arabic my eye was caught by a young boy in a burnous lying opposite me on the other side of the fire. In this absolutely unreal environment he was the most improbable feature, with his girlish face, light brown hair and blue eyes. Even his long leg stretched out on the mat was entirely different from the straight, pillar-like legs of the Arabs; he had beautiful, shapely shanks like the Indo-Europeans.