I was about to intervene when the postman arrived with a registered letter from Laszlo Fényes in Montauban, telling us that he had just received an invitation from President Roosevelt to come to America. To his knowledge our friends in America had obtained the same invitation for Valy, myself, Lorsy and Bandi, but as no one knew our address, it would take a little time before we received it. I hoped that this good news would put an end to Bandi’s and Lorsy’s perpetual squabbling, but I was wrong. Lorsy declared that for the sake of America, that real Garden of Eden, he was ready to leave this Eldorado, while Bandi refused to put a foot in a country whose consul sat down to eat under Mussolini’s portrait, not even if they beat him to death here in Casablanca. He remained firm, although Lorsy tried hard to persuade him to change his opinion. I, on the other hand, resolved there and then to accept Amar’s invitation, but I said so neither to him nor to anyone else.
The American visas did not arrive, but the agents of the Gestapo, disguised as tourists and recognizable from a distance of two hundred yards by their swagger and their walking sticks, did. Very soon a few Frenchmen, known for their democratic convictions, disappeared and Europeans were stopped at every corner to identify themselves. I protected myself against this persecution by going about in Arab clothes. My only worry was my wife. I decided not to go away with Amar before the American visas arrived or until I had found some other way of getting Valy to a safe place and thus being rid of her. A few days later the Hungarian refugees in Casablanca – there were sixteen apart from us – met at our apartment at Bandi’s initiative. We came to the conclusion that as they could not go to England, and as a trek through the desert to Egypt appeared a little too romantic, there remained but one solution; to go to Martinique. There was a chance that the authorities would not object to our sailing from one French colony to another, but permission had to be obtained at the French Government-House in Rabat. The mission was again entrusted to Lorsy, who departed to the capital with nineteen passports in his pocket. He promised to be back within forty-eight hours because it was impossible to circulate in the streets without a passport.
When eight days had gone by without news from Lorsy, one of our unfortunate companions, a Hungarian sailor who had served as a volunteer in the French Army, tried to kill himself. I decided to follow Lorsy to Rabat. Only late in the morning, when the bus entered the old town gate of Rabat, did I realize what a difficult task I had shouldered. Where was I to find Lorsy in this town of two hundred thousand inhabitants and teeming with refugees?
A shirt, broad street opened from the bus terminus, probably Rabat’s main street. It was bordered on both sides by arcades, and under the arcades there were dozens of cafés. The terrace of the third café on the left was so crowded that people were sitting almost in each other’s laps. In one corner of the terrace I noticed two hands holding an open copy of The Times, as if to suggest that the man sitting behind that Times was sacred and inviolable, at least the ambassador of a neutral power if not an active minister, for had an ordinary mortal dared to read that paper he would immediately have been arrested and taken to an internment camp. Those hands could belong to no one but Lorsy.
‘Take a seat, George, my dear,’ Lorsy said, as if we had parted an hour ago. ‘I am happy to see you here… You want me to fold The Times? But why? However, for your sake …’
He took off his glasses and wiped them elaborately. Without his glasses the expression of his blue eyes was childlike and innocent.
‘Oh, you want me to get down to brass tacks? All right, then. What are our friends in Casa doing? Are they worried about their passports? No reason to worry. The passports are in the safest possible place. After all, no one can expect me to run around with nineteen passports in my pocket in this heat… I keep them at the hostel, of course. In my wardrobe? By no means! I have no wardrobe. Nor do I have a room. I sleep in a bathtub, a beautiful, large tub… The passports are hidden behind the tub in the left-hand corner. You see, they have nothing to worry about… That they cannot go out in the street without their passports? Let them stay in. People pursued by the Gestapo should lie low… Why I haven’t written for a week? Why didn’t you write when you went off into the desert? Was there no mailbox? Or did the monkeys steal the letters from the box? Well, if there were no mailboxes there, there are no pens here. Last night I came down here to write, because I can write only at the café, with the café pen… but the pen wasn’t soft enough, there were flies in the ink and I lost my inspiration… Don’t grumble, George, dear… In an hour’s time you shall see for yourself how much I have accomplished. Naturally, I cannot just enter the consulate and ask the consul to stamp visas on nineteen passports! There are at least a hundred thousand people waiting for visas. The first step is to find the right connections, the second, to use them to the best advantage. I have already made excellent contacts, another day or two and everything will be settled… What contacts, you ask? You shall see within the hour. I am going to take you along with me, I have already spoken of you, praised you as the world’s best translator of Villon and Rabelais. They are expecting you.’
‘Don’t try to fool me. An hour ago you had no idea that I would show up here!’
‘And yet, I announced your coming,’ Lorsy said, unmoved. ‘What would you say to a bottle of ice-cooled wine? Look,’ he begged with a sheepish smile, ‘let’s forget for a while this disgusting business of passports …’
I resigned myself to my fate. An hour later Lorsy called for a cab.
‘To the Governor’s palace,’ he instructed the driver.
We stopped before the largest of the administration buildings scattered all over the park. A dignified Arab commissionaire came down the stairs to meet us, greeted Lorsy by name and helped us alight from the cab. We waited for a moment in the tremendous lobby while the commissionaire spoke on the house telephone. Suddenly a door flew open on the first floor and a young man called down to us, bending over the banister:
‘Mon cher, cher Monsieur Lorsy!’
‘Who is that?’ I asked my companion.
‘That is Monsieur Grimaud, Governor Nogues’s secretary.’
We mounted the stairs. The commissionaire hastened away to fetch refreshments while other servants held beautifully worked bamboo armchairs for us to sit down. Lorsy introduced me to the secretary.
‘My friend Faludy is the greatest living Hungarian poet. Last year, on the occasion of Racine’s three hundredth anniversary, he translated Phèdre into Hungarian… But we talked about Racine yesterday, didn’t we?’
Monsieur Grimaud gazed at Lorsy with the adoration some people bestow on Mona Lisa’s portrait. He paid no attention whatsoever to me. I was annoyed by Lorsy’s silly lies but I soon found out that they served a certain purpose. Monsieur Grimaud declared that he would be charmed to hear more about Racine. Lorsy complied and continued where – as he said – he had left off the day before. Monsieur Grimaud listened enthralled, swallowing Lorsy’s words greedily, his little Adam’s apple sliding rapidly up and down like that of a zealous student.
Lorsy discussed Racine’s vocabulary. He stated that this outstanding poet made do with two thousand and a few hundred words, one-tenth of the number Shakespeare used, while in Shakespeare’s works every abstract word had also a particular significance depending on who used it, when, and with how much emphasis. With Racine the same word always covered the same notion.
But Racine had it easy in Louis XIV’s century! He stood in a solidly built, heavy baroque colonnade: he believed that the laws of morality and the rules of the political game were exact and eternal, like the rules of conjugation. To our misfortune – Lorsy held out his arms helplessly, clutching a martini in one hand and a caviare sandwich in the other – our age is no longer a baroque colonnade but a swampy jungle with pythons strangling the breath out of us. Words have lost their meaning. What one man calls slavery, another calls freedom, what is sin to one is virtue to another. But, to be more exact, it is not that words have degenerated, for
words are only labels stuck on to ideas, and machine-guns can harm neither ideas nor the concept of virtue. What has really happened is that a label bearing the word ‘Cyanide’ has been stuck on a bottle containing syrup, and a label bearing the word ‘Syrup’ on to a bottle containing cyanide.
‘And who exchanged the labels?’ asked Monsieur Grimaud provocatively.
Lorsy pretended not to have heard the question.
‘The Roi Soleil,’ he continued, swallowing his martini, ‘said: “L’état c’est moi.” ’
He pronounced the word ‘état’ quickly and without emphasis. I recalled that Pétain had introduced the use of État Français instead of République Française. The same thought occurred, without doubt, to Monsieur Grimaud.
‘Louis XIV,’ Lorsy continued, ‘identified himself with the French State. When his dinner was brought in the steward of the royal household cried: “The King’s dinner!” upon which everyone present had to make deep obeisance to the dishes, sweeping the floor with their hats. He burned Heidelberg to the ground and not only did he offend against all earthly and heavenly laws but he was completely unaware of offending against them. Yet, however unlimited his power, it never occurred to the Roi Soleil to change thousand-year-old ideas and to oblige all Frenchmen to call imprisonment in the Bastille a matter of honour and glory as certain heads of state are doing today.’
At these words Monsieur Grimaud began to show signs of nervousness. With a sly glance in his direction Lorsy made sure that his words had achieved the desired effect, then he returned to discussing Racine. A little later a young official by the name of de la Brouquière joined us to listen with bated breath to Lorsy’s lecture, and shortly afterwards the excellent art historian, Funck-Brentano, came into the room. When all five of us rose to go out to dinner I whispered to Lorsy to bring up the matter of our visas. He replied that greed would only spoil our chances, the gentlemen not being, as yet, sufficiently softened up.
We dined at a restaurant called Kyrnos, sitting at the table until five in the afternoon, and talking. Then Lorsy and I drove out to Sale. Lorsy, who was afraid of growing fat and exceeding his hundred-and-ten-kilogramme average weight, suggested a ten-minute constitutional on the hilltop, along the streets of the small town built in the crater. Then he led me to a café built on the cliff-edge above the sea like a bird’s nest. The deep blue, motionless surface of the sea was dotted with old-fashioned sailing boats with colourful sails. Conjuring up the spirit of the place, Lorsy talked about the pirates who had once preferred this shore to Tunisia, and had sailed out from here all the way to the St George Canal.
Before tasting his champagne he splashed a few drops on the ground – ‘as an offering to the Gods of Antiquity,’ he explained sentimentally.
‘Sitting here and looking down on these multicoloured sails it is almost impossible to believe that the Emperor Tiberius is no longer among us. But even apart from that, I feel in Morocco like an ancient Greek sophist among the practical, uneducated and crude Romans. The snobbism of our hosts vies with that of the Roman nobles. This is why we are more honoured among them than we should be were we to eke out our existence among refined, erudite people. You must trust me, George. I have conversed in this town only for a week, and already I have made the necessary contacts. You may rest assured that you shall obtain your visas. Our friends in Casablanca are convinced that I eat and drink and spend my time in brothels. They do not comprehend that to me eating and drinking mean nothing except in good company. And as far as love is concerned… I find the kinetics of love-making far too exhausting. To tell the truth, I am far too fat and far too lazy to turn on my belly for so little pleasure.’
After having thus reassured me, he took me to a restaurant and then back to the hotel where, after considerable bargaining, he obtained a bathtub for me too. Remembering our friends in Casablanca and ashamed of myself for having idled away the whole day, but also in order to sleep with a good conscience, I gathered up the passports from under Lorsy’s tub. They were all there, all nineteen of them, but so wet that I had to dry them out on the flagstones of my bathroom in the warm night air. In the morning we breakfasted at the café where I had discovered Lorsy the day before.
We were getting ready to proceed to the Governor’s palace when Bandi arrived, sweating and excited, from Casablanca. He was beet-red with fury, called Lorsy a blackguard and me an idiot. He was also clutching an unusually long and sharply-pointed nail-file in his hand, which Lorsy eyed with some apprehension although he said nothing about it.
When we reached the palace Lorsy declared that only I could come up with him, but Bandi stuck to us like a leech. When Monsieur Grimaud caught sight of us he swallowed and gave Lorsy a reproachful look. However, the atmosphere soon improved. Grimaud began to discuss relations between Vichy and Roosevelt, which gave Lorsy an opportunity to deliver a short lecture on the Hungarian policy for survival. Hungary – he said – had spent three hundred and seventy-seven years of the last four hundred under foreign occupation. He related how our rulers allied themselves with the head of the Holy Roman Empire against Byzantium, with the Pope against the Emperor and with Byzantium against both; then with the Germans against the Turks and with the Turks against the Germans…
Monsieur Grimaud seemed particularly grateful for the lecture. He himself was probably wondering how to serve Vichy in such a way as to remain acceptable to the next regime. In the meantime de la Brouquière had come in. This young man was a strange mixture of self-confidence, mannerisms, solemn curiosity, swagger and melancholia. The day before he had remained stubbornly silent, but now he appeared resolved to question the oracle, our good Lorsy, on his own affairs. Grimaud, however, who knew his colleague’s problems by heart and was bored by them, plied Lorsy with new questions, preventing the other from speaking. When we rose to go to dinner at the Kyrnos, Bandi, who was still clutching his nail-file, stepped up to Lorsy and whispered in Hungarian.
‘Ask him to get us our visas for Martinique. If you don’t, I’ll stick this nail-file into your behind up to the hilt!’
‘Don’t,’ Lorsy whispered back, ‘don’t, for heaven’s sake. This moment is particularly inauspicious both for the request and the stabbing: After dinner, when they are sufficiently mellowed by food and drink, I shall broach the subject. I swear by the life of my children that I shall. But don’t use that thing.’
At the restaurant Bandi sat close to Lorsy and didn’t take his eyes off him. De la Brouquière was also watching him, waiting for the moment when he could bring up his problem, but Grimaud was too quick for him. At first de la Brouquière did not notice that his colleague was blocking him on purpose, and when Grimaud at last told him rather rudely to shut up he was so amazed that he forgot to close his baby-lips, round with surprise. Yet, in spite of the slight tension in the atmosphere, we ate and drank abundantly so that by the time we had finished with the quince-stuffed pheasant Bandi and de la Brouquière were a little drunk and Lorsy had forgotten the nail-file.
When the waiter had carried away the cheese-tray I felt as if my waist were of lead and my bottom had grown roots in the chair. De la Brouquière took advantage of the momentary silence to pick up the two-beaked oil-and-vinegar bottle and, shaking it towards Grimaud, he began to shout:
‘You won’t prevent me from telling this gentleman, whom I trust, all my troubles and asking for his advice. You won’t prevent it!’ he yelled, and splashed some vinegar on Monsieur Grimaud’s pale grey, tropical suit.
‘I,’ he turned to Lorsy, ‘am a convinced, even stubborn, fascist. I hate liberals, socialists, but most of all the Jews. My colleague considers it shameful that someone should have convictions. What do you say, Monsieur Lorsy, is it a shame or isn’t it that I hold principles?’
At Lorsy’s encouraging but noncommittal reply he told us that his father, a county prefect, had been a convinced anti-Dreyfusard; he himself had, since his early childhood, admired Barrès, Léon Daudet and Maurras. A year ago he had prayed for his country t
o lose the war. This was the only chance for France to rid herself of her corrupt democratic politicians and raise the fascists to power. ‘I know it was a tremendous price to pay,’ he exclaimed, ‘but I believe it was worth it!’
‘When Pétain took power,’ he continued, ‘my friends here arranged a banquet. I got home blind drunk, vomited up my dinner and made myself a pot of strong black coffee. When I had drunk it I suddenly became quite sober. I meditated and came to the conclusion that in our days it was not principles, battles won or lost, or the size of the occupied territories that decided the outcome of a war but the industrial potential of the hostile parties. I realized that it was unavoidable that the United States and the Soviet Union should join in the war against Germany. The industrial potential of these countries, including England, being three times that of the Berlin–Rome axis, Hitler will without doubt lose the war. And then we, the fascists of France, will be lynched or executed. I don’t know whether it will be my compatriots, the Arabs, the Americans or the Jews who beat us to death, but someone will. Is my analysis correct, Monsieur Lorsy?’
‘Unfortunately, quite correct,’ replied Lorsy with a contented sigh.
‘There I sat in my armchair on the night of triumph,’ de la Brouquière continued, ‘and asked myself the question what to do in my desperate position. Am I to sacrifice my life for a lost cause? Or betray my principles, which are dearer to me than life itself?’
My Happy Days In Hell Page 18