My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  The whole town, the entire region walked by the windows of that café: veiled Tuareg men who stopped up their nostrils – with cotton-wool imported from England – to protect themselves against having to inhale the stench of the town-dwellers; healers who cleaned out the festering sores of their patients in the street with their tongues. Opposite, along the tall wall, squatted the visitors who came down from the mountain villages of Atlas; they remained there for a week or two observing life in the market-place, then rose and returned to their villages. At the table next to mine sat the professor of the Arab Lyceum with his two boy-lovers. Sometimes he played chess with me while the two boys watched with devotion until I beat him at the game. Outside, the square filled with donkeys carrying dates and vegetables; the teats of the she-asses hung down as if they had two cocks attached to their bellies. Caravans of spindly-legged camels arrived, walking with an almost transcendent stride, and in the early afternoon the Pasha’s flat-footed soldiers came marching by. At the head of the detachment, in front of the sergeant, a sheep advanced with dancing steps, and when the sergeant shouted right turn! the sheep turned gracefully from the Djema el-Fnaa into the street on the corner of which the café stood, glancing back to make certain the troops were following. Every four hours I listened to the cries of the Muezzin of the Kotoubia Mosque, coming to me across the little garden that separated me from the Mosque.

  Late afternoon was the period of angry quarrels and street-fights. In the café, however, the fighters did not attack straight away as they did in the street. They would sit in opposite corners, their long legs drawn under them, staring at each other. Ahmed, the waiter, would watch them sometimes for hours. Then suddenly, one would jump up and run towards the other, pulling out his dagger on the way. Yet he never reached his opponent, because the watchful Ahmed always caught him and with the help of the old Legionnaire threw him out through the window. The victim would sit on the roadside cursing and waiting for his enemy. He never bore a grudge against the waiter or the Legionnaire, however much he may have hurt himself falling. He knew that it was forbidden to wield a knife in the café and that if they threw him out they had a good right to do so.

  The bus from Zagora arrived just before sunset, when the yellowish-pink light set the whole market-place ablaze. Seventy or eighty people were crowded into the small vehicle built to hold twenty-five. The children, carried on their mothers’ backs like rucksacks, hung out of the windows. Thirty to thirty-five people sat on top of the bus in the baggage-rack. The bus stopped with a jolt. The passengers who had travelled on the top with their glowing charcoal burners jumped down, but no one from the inside got out. Arms, legs and waists formed a star-shaped hurdle in the narrow door. Finally, someone was catapulted out like a stone from the crater of an erupting volcano, then after a while another, then at last the bus seemed to vomit them out in a single stream until its belly was empty. Meanwhile wooden cases and pieces of luggage were thrown out of the windows. At times a basket would fly open to disgorge a cobra that wound itself around the still warm wheels of the bus or slithered across the square to disappear among the piles of oranges.

  My deepest joy, however, was the evening. I sat in the open window of the café, directly by the street. The drums and the flutes of the snake-charmers had fallen silent and the night was alive with the monotonous voice of the story-tellers and the whisperings of the procurers. At times a hoarse-voiced boy or a veiled woman would call to me from the street to come to bed with them; opposite, from above the white stone wall the bluish branches of the magnolia trees would wave to me, sending out swarms of fire-flies like a procession of mute orphans carrying candles.

  One afternoon we were invited to tea by our fellow-countryman, the former Legionnaire, now station-master in Marrakesh. He lived at the other end of town, in the European district. It was the last day of Ramadan. Valy, Bandi and I came back to the Djema el-Fnaa by bus. The market-place showed a picture entirely different from what we were used to. At this time of the day, just before sunset, people were usually sitting on the ground with fruit and bread on a mat before them, watching the sun and waiting for its disappearance so that they might begin to eat. Now, however, they were standing around in groups in the corners of the square, talking excitedly. Here and there a fez was thrown high into the air.

  As we passed the Café Universel I noticed that there was a big, jagged hole in one of the windows as if someone had been thrown out through the pane. This was out of harmony with the café’s tradition and also with the character of Ahmed the waiter. Advancing along the narrow street between the town wall and the row of shops I was beginning to feel anxious. Suddenly we heard pistol shots from around the next corner where the street broadened out a little.

  The scene we witnessed when we got there was completely incomprehensible. A lieutenant of the Foreign Legion was standing in the middle of the road, with a revolver in his hand hanging dejectedly by his side; and before him in the dust lay three little Arab boys whom he had shot. For a moment I believed that the lieutenant had run amok, but I soon saw that he was not the attacker but the attacked. He was surrounded by some twenty boys, the same ragged little boys in their striped djellabas who were always crawling around our feet at the café, playing their tiny musical instruments or pulling the tails of the donkeys in the street. But now they had bricks and stones in their hands and were throwing them at the lieutenant, whose face and chest were covered in blood.

  The shot we heard had been his last. There were no more bullets in his revolver. We were about ten feet from him when a brick hit him on the nape of his neck. He fell and in a second the children were upon him like a cloud of locusts. We walked on, in the narrow, dark space between the lieutenant’s body and the town wall.

  Because the walls were a continuation of the cliff on which the town stood, there was nothing to be seen through the holes in the wall but the vibrating blue of the sky. Suddenly I felt as if this blueness were already that of the Beyond. The children were kneeling on the lieutenant’s chest, beating his head with bricks and with his own revolver until his skull cracked open and blood and brains bespattered the children’s faces and the dust. They paid no attention to us.

  A few yards further on a bicycle was lying in the road and beside it, a dead man: the son of the French store-keeper from whom we bought our soda water. We were in the very centre of a pogrom. The doors of the houses were locked, heavy shutters protected the shops and the Tribunal was still about five hundred yards away. It seemed certain that in a few minutes the children would have finished with the lieutenant and come after us in pursuit.

  ‘What a miserable way to die after all our vicissitudes,’ Valy sighed.

  ‘Let us die with dignity,’ I suggested. We walked on in the narrow alleyway with Valy between us. Had we begun to run we should certainly have attracted the attention of the children. Besides, who knew what was awaiting us around the next corner?

  After a couple of seconds we heard the patter of the children’s bare feet behind us.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ I warned Bandi.

  A shower of stones hit the dust around us. Then I was hit on the shoulder and Bandi probably between his shoulder-blades, because he tottered, his back sagged and he looked back towards the children.

  ‘This is the end,’ I thought.

  Then suddenly I heard a little boy’s voice shout in Arabic.

  ‘They are English, not European! Leave them alone!’

  Another brick fell at my feet. I stepped over it and glanced at Bandi, who had turned back again, gave the children a devilish, triumphant grin, showing his protruding gums, then, with a slight, arrogant flick of his wrist, shooed them away.

  We covered the remaining four hundred yards in about two and a half minutes. Perspiration was running from my forehead into my eyes and at every step I felt as if only a frayed thread were still attaching my leg to my knee. At the gate of the Tribunal I turned to Bandi to thank him for saving our lives. He only laughed and pointed to hi
s freckled face and red hair.

  The heavy iron door was flung wide open at our approach: the huge Negro, Bentoto, got hold of Bandi with one hand, of me with the other, lifted us into the air and began to dance with joy. He told us that the anti-European pogrom had been started by Italian fascist agents. They took advantage of the discontent caused by a shortage of petrol and sugar, and of the excitability induced by the long fasting, and they harped on the fact that the Arab soldiers had not returned from Europe while the French had.

  We climbed up on the roof where a fire had been laid under a huge cauldron of already boiling oil to be used, should the necessity arise, against the attackers. However, the Tribunal seemed safe, the children reappeared in the square a few times, once pursuing a young Italian who was freed from their hands by two elderly Arabs. Later a few older lads approached the building with burning torches in their hands but at the same moment a detachment of Legionnaires reached the square from the other side. The soldiers pursued the fleeing boys, caught a few, lifted them in the air by their feet and crushed their heads against the wall.

  The next day we learned that six of the originators of the murders had been arrested and hanged the night before. These events convinced Bandi that it was indeed impossible to live among the Arabs, and he decided never again to leave the building of the Tribunal. A few days later I applied mild pressure to make him accompany me to the Café Universel where the former idyllic atmosphere was fully restored. The fat white-slaver who, on our first day here, had tried to buy Valy from me and was deeply offended that I wouldn’t bargain, was back again in his corner doing business in whispers. The professor of the Arab Lyceum played chess with me. I beat him twice in succession, at which he ran out of the café across to the brothel for solace and when he returned we discussed Arab literature. The little boys who had missed, by a hair’s breadth, turning me into the only poet in the history of literature to be stoned to death, crawled around my feet playing their tiny instruments and offering me crickets for sale while I was writing a poem.

  A few days later our financial situation took an unexpected turn. Ujvary sent us a considerable sum of money and on the same day my good friend, Emil Szalai, copyright lawyer in Budapest, transferred my royalties to a Marrakesh bank in dollars. This was quite an achievement as I was an exile deprived of Hungarian citizenship and the Hungarian National Bank had never in its history granted hard currency to any Hungarian abroad. Although the sum itself was not large, in Marrakesh, where the dollar fetched five times its official rate, it made us suddenly rich. The monthly rent of a palace was somewhere between eight and twelve dollars. I commissioned a filthy little boy called Mohammed to find us a palace, saying that nine dollars was the highest rent I was ready to pay.

  A few hours later we stood in the marble-floored patio of a large house in the short Derb Toubib alley, under hand-carved cedar-wood beams. At our feet a fountain, carved in porphyry, spurted a jet twenty yards high above our heads. We looked at each other. Our shoes had hardly any soles left, our trousers were patched, but at the thought that the same evening we would move into this ten-roomed palace and spend the night in canopied beds among heavy Persian carpets, we broke into peals of laughter, the echo of which circled round and round under the arcade supported by slender pillars.

  The following day we employed an Arab maid called Aicha. Although our schedule changed but little and we acquired only the most necessary pieces of clothing, as if by magic the framework of a fairy world grew up around us. As the servant insisted on her right to give the master of the house his daily bath, I donned, on the first morning, a pair of black swimming trunks before stepping into the basin. When I climbed out and, on the highest step, waited for Aicha to throw the bathrobe on my shoulders, I became aware of loud sobs behind my back.

  ‘Oh, my master, my poor master, most miserable among men, woe to you and woe to your unborn sons!’ she wailed. Then she continued more calmly: ‘I have never yet served a eunuch. At Agadir I worked for a very fine gentleman for five years. He covered his empty eye-socket with a black cloth. But no one has ever told me that the nobility are wont to cover their empty purse and cut-off genitals with black cloth. The colour black – I hope I am not offending you, Master, for asking – it is with you, Europeans, the colour of mourning, isn’t it?’

  I peeled off my trunks. The good soul began to clap and dance with joy, begging the Prophet to bless my grandsons, then rubbed me down thoroughly with the towel. When she reached the lowest part of my back she exclaimed:

  ‘You are beautiful, Master, like the moon on the fourteenth day!’

  Thereafter, she repeated the same exclamation every morning when reaching the above-mentioned part of my body. But all this was done with childish awe, without banter or any ulterior motive.

  Each morning my mail was laid out for me in my stuccoed room with its coloured glass windows. A few days after we moved into our palace we received an invitation to dinner from the pasha, Ibn Glaoui, solemnly worded and written in green ink. He offered us a forty-nine-course dinner and afterwards the pasha took me by the arm and led me into the garden where rose-trees planted by the pasha’s grandfather in the skulls of his enemies bordered the path. The teeth were still grinning among the roots, which had pushed their way through the bone. Some bore the names of their owners painted in green on the forehead.

  Two weeks later two large, stiff envelopes lay on the marble table addressed to Bandi and to me. The paper on which the letters were written was shiny and uncreased: Franklin D. Roosevelt did us the honour to invite us to America where – he said – we could continue our valuable work in peace and security until the end of the war. Although the letter had been preceded by a cable from Cordell Hull, the whole thing seemed like a miracle. Yet, in spite of the pleasure the invitation gave me I was suddenly filled with uncertainty. Should I leave this country, which I had learned to love, to live in New York?

  I was sitting there wondering when suddenly I was distracted by a light knock on the front door. Three Sudanese were standing outside in the street.

  These so-called Sudanese who roam across Morocco are not Sudanese at all but the members of the Negro tribe who speak Tuareg. They are usually well-built, tall men who differ from other Negroes in that, though their faces are black, their features are Indo-European or, to be more exact, classical Greek in character. These three had beautiful straight noses, narrow lips and high, domed foreheads like the statue of Olympic Zeus.

  They were identical not only in their dignified posture but also in their features. Probably brothers, I thought. The eldest was somewhat taller than the other two, the second was a little portlier than his brothers. Judged with European eyes, the eldest must have been at least seventy years of age, the youngest sixty-five, from which I deduced that in reality the oldest was around fifty-five and the youngest perhaps fifty.

  Behind them stood a donkey. According to Moroccan custom they had tied the reins to the animal’s feet, as a result of which its head and fetlocks were almost touching. It waited patiently in this humiliating posture.

  ‘Peace be with you, illustrious Master,’ they said in chorus, crossing their arms over their chests and bowing deeply.

  ‘Peace be with you,’ I replied. Then after some hesitation, I added, ‘Please, enter.’

  I had heard a great deal about these Sudanese. The most flattering of the stories circulating about them was that they would stab even their closest friends in the back; that they spread lice, the plague and syphilis; that their main occupation was the robbing of graves and highway hold-ups; that they began their love-life at the dawn of puberty with their mothers, continued it on the eve of their wedding with a he-goat, and concluded it on their death-beds with their male grandchildren.

  I conducted my guests into the reception room. Aicha brought tea in tall glasses and an unbroken sugar-loaf with a small copper hammer. Then she went out in the patio and sat on the threshold to keep watch on the company.

  The Sudanese sat
enthroned on cushions with their legs crossed under them. They spoke with dignified gestures, in well-chosen words and with great circumspection. They began by inquiring about my health, that of my father, brothers, uncles, nephews, sons and all male relatives, then continued with my stallions, rams, billy-goats and cocks. When I replied that I kept no animals they exchanged sly glances.

  After this introduction they turned our conversation to war.

  ‘The Europeans,’ the oldest among them said, ‘are killing each other on the borders of Egypt. The desert sand covers their bones like camel dung. But our caravans come and go for ever.’

  ‘Nothing is further from our thoughts than to offend your,’ the squat one interposed. ‘We know you are a follower of the Nazarene. But we have never before heard of a nasrani as illustrious as you are.’

  ‘Until today,’ the youngest said, ‘we would have no more entered the house of an unbeliever than we would have entered a pigsty. With you we have made an exception.’

  ‘To what do I owe this honour?’ I asked them curiously.

  ‘The Europeans live only to cheat and rob. This is why their merchants, excise-men, officials and Legionnaires come to Morocco. The Europeans are filthy, greedy worms. But you, you keep your eyes on more exalted things. And we know why. Because you have more money than you know what to do with.’

  This made me smile.

  ‘Each morning,’ the oldest took the word, ‘you proceed to the café. You carry a book under your arm. Because without books you cannot live. At the café you play a game of chess with the professor of the Lyceum. Then you read your book. You turn the pages like a whirlwind. Then you walk home along the hot, dusty, sun-drained road. After lunch you return to the café. You are a very fortunate man indeed that you have never slipped on a banana or orange skin and broken your neck. At the café you sit at a table writing and writing on large sheets of paper. What you write we do not know.’