My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  ‘In Mauretania I resolved to turn to smuggling because banditry was a game of hazards, he who did not know when to stop always lost in the end. It seemed as if I had completed the circle and returned to my original occupation, commerce, and any superficial observer would have come to the conclusion that my paternal heritage, Arab rationalism, had at last come into its own. What did I care! My mother’s heritage, the light of Persian mysticism kept my soul in a perpetual glow and made me utterly indifferent to all that went on outside the convolutions of my brain.

  ‘However,’ he went on after a moment, ‘even this form of life is not the last. As I grow older the whip of lust stings more and more cruelly. I think that I shall part with my followers and return, as a hermit, into the caves of the Tibesti Mountains so that when, at the approach of death, I look back upon my life, I shall have enjoyed all the pleasures of the earth. It is also possible, however, that I shall open a brothel in one of the towns of the Guinea Bay and offer for sale the little girls of ten and eleven whom I once so zealously bought.

  ‘The difference,’ he sighed, ‘is negligible. Al-Maari writes that we are sliding deeper and deeper into the death-ditch of life; thinking is senseless, despair pointless, and our horror is alleviated only by the illusion that we are holding on to another body; Rumi and Iraqi, on the other hand, allege that the universe is but the shadow of the Deity’s shadow, that nothing exists except the thought in our head, because that is the Deity itself. Girls, naturally, do not exist at all.’

  For a few moments he watched the effect of his story, ready to brush off any sign of appreciation.

  ‘My story has no ending,’ he said at last in a low voice. ‘I told it to you because I see a certain similarity between your fate and mine, and I hope it has been of some use to you. Many have wanted to hear the story of my life and have loudly insisted that I tell it. You, however, asked no questions and perhaps this put me into the mood. When I began I felt that your soul was drawing closer and closer to mine, towards the end I felt that it was receding. I believe that we have now reached the proper distance.’

  The last sentence was spoken with a calm finality and I knew that our conversation was now over. I rose, my teeth chattering, and bowed deeply to the old man without pronouncing a single word. The master marksman accompanied me to the edge of the depression where he spread a few mats and blankets on the ground. It was a cold night. According to my custom I undressed to the skin and slid under the blankets. Amar and the Riffkabil boy remained sitting near the fire. They had put out the lamp and sat there motionless face to face. Their white outlines stood out sharply from the greenish-blue, phosphorescent background of the rock wall.

  I was almost asleep when a feeling of wild terror electrified me in to complete wakefulness. My fear had nothing to do with Sidi Mohammed’s story or the events of the day; perhaps not even with my flight from Paris, the bombing of Juvissy or the waiting in Bayonne in the unbearable heat. It may be that not having allowed myself to be afraid at the time, the anxiety remained dormant in my nervous system. Even with my eyes closed I could clearly see the landscape around me: that cruel moon-landscape, with the icy moon like the breast of a naked woman leaning out of the window of a lunatic asylum. I sat up with a single bound, shaken with an almost epileptic attack of death-fear and beating the empty air with my elbows. I did not fear my hosts, nor was I scared of some real or imaginary danger. In those days I used to bite my blanker and cold sweat would break out over my entire body. Later, in my student years, I would get out of bed and run down into the street to be among people. My friends always reassured me that in time I would get used to the idea of death but I did not.

  Now again I could have screamed with despair. One day, twenty or fifty years hence, what did it matter, I would have to die and from then on it would be as if I had never lived. Billions of new variations of man would be born, but my variation would never, never return. I would rather be sick and miserable, a cripple suffering the pains of hell than not be at all. Yet complete annihilation was inescapable. God willing I should one day be given a place of honour in the Kerepes Cemetery of Budapest, there would be a marble column with my name on it in gold – but who would care? By the year three thousand everyone would have forgotten my name, by the year five thousand the marble column would have turned to dust, the cemetery would have disappeared under a wheat field, a heap of ruins, an industrial plant or the jungle, the language in which I wrote would also have disappeared and the nation to which I belonged would have died out. Even this second annihilation would not be the end. Then the sun would lose its heat, the earth collide with another heavenly body or explode, and Michelangelo’s statues and Beethoven’s symphonies would be flung after me into Nirvana.

  The men sitting in the centre of the depression noticed my movements. Sidi Mohammed threw me a brief glance over his shoulder and whispered to the others. I did not want my hosts to think that I was watching them, therefore I lay back quickly, turned on my side and observed them from under my arm laid across my eyes. They went on talking and from time to time glanced towards me. Finally, the Riffkabil rose and approached me like a cat with light, inaudible steps. I recalled that on his right hip, where his djellaba had a slit, he wore a pistol close to his skin. As he approached, the pistol stood out sharply under the white linen, like a boss on a column. Will this be the ending of Sidi Mohammed’s story? – I wondered.

  I glanced up from under my arm and watched the Riffkabil spread out a mat and blanket next to me on the ground. He stood so close that I could have touched his ankle. This is how they finish off their wounded – I thought – quickly and painlessly… The Riffkabil threw an inquisitive glance in my direction; then, with a quick movement, he reached for the slit of his djellaba. But it was only the linen he grasped, and with a light movement he slipped out of the wrap. He folded the djellaba into a regular square, put it on the mat, threw down his pistol and knife and, soundlessly as he had come, he ran away. Behind my back I heard the splashing of water but I dared not turn round. He was probably washing himself. His bone-hafted knife in its silver scabbard sparkled on the mat next to his blindingly white djellaba, the deep wrinkles and folds of which reminded me of an antique bust freshly dug up from the black earth.

  He returned on tiptoe, entirely naked. Then he slipped under his blanket and turned towards me. The distance between us was less than a yard but I was still pressing my arm over my eyes and peering out from beneath it. The dagger lay in the middle, between our two arms. I watched his face, searching for the features of Gaiseric’s or Gelimer’s descendants, vandal cruelty, but I found that he resembled a German medical student examining his patient curiously, musingly and somehow uncertainly. Soundlessly, at a snail’s pace, he slid towards me, pushing himself forward now with his hip, now with his elbow, until he slipped out from his blanket and under mine. His body was emanating a light but penetrating perfume, that of withered flowers in an arid field; I felt this perfume not only in my nostrils but in my throat and further down in the ramifications of the bronchia, right into the apex of the lungs.

  We started early at dawn. The smugglers lent us a camel and the master marksman accompanied us on donkey-back to bring the camel back. Sidi Mohammed himself saw us off. He seemed much older than the night before, and also smaller than he did when, like a king, he throned it in the centre of the mat, pressing his back against the straight-backed armchair of the night. However, he moved with surprising agility, not the agility of a merchant behind his counter but that of a sportsman. Before I mounted the camel that lay before me with its legs folded as though it would never again rise on its feet, the chief took me aside.

  ‘Last night,’ he said in a low voice as if he were telling me a secret, ‘you were afraid of death. During the night I wondered what drug to recommend to you apart from the one you took. The best antitoxin would be resurrection, of course, but to someone who refuses to believe that the filthy worms populating the earth will resurrect, I must suggest something
better.

  ‘In the past I, too, feared death. Now I no longer fear it. If I could, I should collect around my death-bed eyeless beggars, hydrocephalic children and mad old hags. I should order a feast and make them eat until they began to vomit, then I should command emaciated, hectic drummers and short-legged, fat-bellied fluters to play gay melodies and I should bid my guests dance, gambol, somersault and copulate around my bed to show me once more how vile and ridiculous this earthly fare really is.

  ‘Once, when I, too, was sometimes visited by the terror of death, I behaved like a reckless merchant faced with ruin who continues to spend lavishly because he knows that he will die before he is declared bankrupt. To comfort myself I savoured the fact that others, too, have to die: Alexander the Great, Saladin, Caesar and even Mohammed himself. Let me give you as a farewell present a verse by Abu Ali Ibn Sina, which I often recite to myself:

  The man of virtue, learning or of art

  Explores two worlds and seems to stand apart

  From idle fools; but like the fools he must

  Come to a silent end in a pinch of dust.’

  We had been carried a long way on the rhythm of the camel’s gently-swaying minuet before we lost sight of him, still standing on the edge of the cliff, on a little hillock, the Riffkabil boy beside him and a head taller than he. They neither waved nor smiled, but gazed after us stiffly, immovably, like two slender rocks against a background of larger, more rugged boulders.

  Amar’s kashba stood on a flat hilltop a little below the peak: it was a rusty-pink tower, almost square. It was enclosed by walls of the same colour – or rather the walls zigzagged round it in wild disorder like the squares, diamonds and oblongs scribbled by a child. Two walls ran down the hillside to encircle a trench-shaped well, a grassy, muddy depression and the few hundred date-palms which grew in the valley. Another wall framed a rusty-pink square of stony clay on the hilltop: this was where, thirty years ago, they used to lock up the slaves for the night. Its heavy iron gate, torn symbolically from its hinges, lay on the ground: the former slaves and their children – eight families – still lived in the same yard, in their tents. Amar told me that he had often suggested that they should move to the upper floor of the kashba, but they had refused, saying that even a tent was too good for them. Special walls had been built round the animals’ pens and another, oblong yard served to house the caravans. Outside these walls, and separate from them, ran several others of various thicknesses. In the valley, beyond the well, extended a poor pasture. From the hilltop one had a good view over the rusty-pink desert, the rusty-red foothills of the Atlas and Anti-Atlas Mountains; at sunset even the sky hovered like a rusty-pink bell over the glowing landscape and the moon rose rust-coloured from the torpid vapours whirling above the well.

  The lower part of the tower was one solid block of stone with only a narrow, tortuous spiral staircase weaving its way upward to the house proper. On this pedestal stood a regular, two-storey Arab house with its interior yard where four palms grew in the corners. Of the five rooms of the lower floor three yawned empty behind carved door-frames and coloured windows. The room in which we spent the day was cool and agreeable even during the hottest hours. A narrow, cushioned seat ran right round the walls, which were hung with dark Persian carpets. Between the carpets hung two large, greyish-pink glass dishes; inside the glass there was a delicate black pattern, like lace. Judging from the almost invisible cracks in the glass they must have been hundreds of years old. According to Amar they had been made in Cordoba under Abd-ar-Rahman III, and their commanding, haughty beauty degraded the extremely valuable Persian carpets to ordinary wall decorations.

  The unusual and agreeable perfume pervading the room came from the joint action of heat and dryness on the room itself. In this heat every object emitted a smell, the sandalwood pipes on the brass table no less than the Persian carpets on the walls. The window-frame and the cedar-wood door also had a smell – strangely enough the renascent aroma of freshly cut wood combined with the sweet smell of drying wood, although the cedar-wood had probably been cut centuries ago. Even the brass table and metal objects had a smell, neither borrowed nor acquired. I felt the smell of brass and silver in the air and, together with the smell, a metallic taste in my mouth, just as I could taste the cedar-wood when I was five yards from the door, as if I were bending over a freshly cut trunk and putting my tongue on the still humid, rough surface. Also Amar had a smell of his own, not a smell of perspiration, of body, but a smell of flesh, like a newly killed animal. I could taste this flesh-smell too, just as I could distinguish the fresh, jellied smell of his bones, particularly the shoulder and thigh joints, and the horny smell of his long, narrow nails. The smell of his body and the objects drove the strong, spicy smell of the kitchen out of the room to lie motionless over the deep yard outside the open door.

  On the brass tables and about the room approximately eighty books lay scattered. The Arab translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Poetica, the Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina, used as a textbook at European universities for five hundred years in the bungled translaion of Gerardus de Cremona; two volumes of al-Maari’s poems: Embers at the end of the Poker, and Superfluous Ambitions, given this name by the blind poet because it was written in treble rhymes; Arab Shah’s biography of Timur, in which at Timur’s wish he recorded all his master’s horrible atrocities and crimes because the purpose of that biography was not to whitewash Timur to posterity but to frighten his enemies. There were volumes by al-Mutanabbi, al-Farid, al-Israili, Abu Nuwas and the poems of the famous Akhtal who, though Christian, had been a court poet of the Omayads and used to break into the throne-room with a large golden cross on his chest, his beard dripping with red wine, to read his latest creation to the caliph.

  We lived in solitude for about a week. Usually Amar would translate to me, or we walked down to the well to bathe and to talk. On the last afternoon he was reclining on the couch with al-Hacen’s book in his hand explaining to me that the ancient theory of Arab scientists and that of Professor Lyell concerning the origin of mountains is almost identical – when one of the tenants entered, announcing that minstrels were arriving in the evening. Amar was so glad that he jumped up and explained to me, walking up and down in the room, how fortunate we were. The al-Abiyya brothers came up from Mauretania only rarely; they were the last surviving scions of a famous family of minstrels.

  They arrived very late. Amar had the table laid in the yard and a few torches were lit in the background. The minstrels were middle-aged, yellow-skinned Berbers, probably twins. Like many Berbers, they had a thicker layer of flesh on their faces than other people, evenly distributed over their protruding cheekbones and chins, giving their faces a mild, genial expression. They were tired and sat modestly at the table and when, after dinner, Amar asked them not to sing as usual but rather to recite, they were obviously pleased.

  ‘First,’ Amar said, ‘console the stranger with a few poems about the continent where he was born. Perhaps you could recite al-Andaluzi’s Farewell to Portugal, King al-Mutamid’s poem about Toledo, Ibn Zaydun’s poem about Cordoba and Ibn Hamdis’s poem about Palermo …’

  The ranis rose and, their contours lit by the torches behind them, recited the poems alternately. While one recited the other helped out in whispers whenever necessary. They spoke in the classical language, different in both vocabulary and accent from the dialect in which they had been speaking a few minutes before, and in a sing-song rhythm so slow that it gave Amar time to interpret.

  We were sitting comfortably on cushions while the minstrels stood, and I was afraid that this might create an uneasy atmosphere between us and them. Fortunately it did not seem to do so, perhaps because it was not a foreign master whom the minstrels were entertaining with creations of their own culture as Arab poets used to entertain, once upon a time, the Turkish pashas. These poems were written by Arab invaders, oppressors, and the Berbers acquired their culture as well as their language. At the same rime, Amar could not reg
ard himself as the exclusive owner of these poems, all of which had been written over seven hundred years ago. Since then the invaders and the invaded had made friends, and they shared the melancholy knowledge that the culture they now jointly owned was a dead culture which neither could do anything to resuscitate. Perhaps Ibn Zaydun’s poem about Cordoba was the most beautiful of all; yet, while they recited it, I felt a stange sensation rising in me, a slight feeling of Unbehagen, caused perhaps by some hitherto unrealized European nationalism in me that rebelled against the idea that the Moors had at one time been so much at home in the towns of Europe.

  When they had finished I asked them to recite whatever they liked. They began with Arab poets who have lived in Spain and led me back in time to the days of Mohammed. The yard was bathed in the competing light of the torches and the rust-red moon, and I closed my eyes to devote myself completely to this long and dreamy journey. We set out from Seville’s rose-arboured streets, a European atmosphere with love-poems of a European tone, to return to the African towns of the Caliphate, the mystics of Fatimide Cairo and Arab Sicily which differed little from Theocritus’s; to al-Mutannabi, who visited every court from that of Syria’s governor, Saif ed-Daula, to the Egyptian eunuchs and grew rich on his poems. This poet, when he was on his way home with his load of gold, was attacked by bandits at the crossing of Shatt-al-Arab. He was about to spur his fast horse to flight when his servant suddenly began to recite the poet’s famous lines on courage. The poet turned his horse, faced the bandits and was killed. Then we visited Baghdad, the great capital of a liberal world, where Haroun al-Raschid and his sons recreated the atmosphere of Marcus Aurelius’s Rome, and where Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and unbelievers, mystics and rationalists, argued and debated in the shadow of the gigantic library. From there we went on to the nomad tribes of the Arab peninsula, into the days before Mohammed, into a world of primitive tribal warfare and vendetta. Finally, in the last long poem, the verses of which the brothers recited alternately, we journeyed to Byzantium. The poem told the story of the depraved young equestrienne, Theodora, and her marriage to the Emperor Justinian.