For a ninth argument I could say that my mother, my only living relative, was waiting for me. If I did not go I should have to forget my entire life, thirty years of it, and change my entire attitude. In the seven years of my exile I had lived in furnished flats and refused American citizenship when it was offered me, because it made no sense. Although my Hungarian passport had expired, to me it still seemed valid, and I hung on to it. Perhaps it was true that the door through which I should enter Hungary could not be opened from the inside, and perhaps my entering would close the door of America, and that door would prove impossible to open from the outside. But even so, the question outlined by Professor Vambéry – whether dictatorship or democracy would triumph in Hungary and Eastern Europe as a whole – was the most important problem in the next few decades. It pained me greatly that the most important problem of my day should be a political one, but that did not alter the fact that it was my duty to face it. I was trying to comfort myself with the hope that perhaps the difference between the two sides would not be so great as the professor supposed; I hoped that communism would be able to create some sort of social justice beyond the powers of capitalism to establish, but essentially it was not so much the outcome of the conflict which interested me, as the conflict itself – and that was no longer a merely political problem. It was the problem of the behaviour of people in battle as observed by Pierre in War and Peace, or of their actions behind the lines as described in Vanity Fair, or above all of their suffering as retreating armies as depicted by Stendhal. If I delayed my return I might well be left behind, and I had one duty and only one: to be on the scene from the beginning of the battle, no matter which side triumphed.
‘Those are my arguments,’ I concluded, watching Vambéry, whose face had gradually lost its brightness, even to the corners of his mild eyes which always seemed to smile, even when he was angry. ‘I want to be honest, however, and I admit that I have a counter-argument which is almost as strong as all my arguments put together. I am afraid. Terribly afraid.’
Vambéry remained silent, offered me a liquorice – a sign of particular consideration – then declared that my arguments convinced him. Then he rose, saying that he must telephone his wife that he would not be back that afternoon. As he crossed the room his grey but still muscular nape and his arms, moving like slow paddles, betrayed the emotions he guarded so jealously. He considered his after-dinner nap as sacred – almost as sacred as human dignity or Roman Law.
When the ship left the harbour, he was standing on the exact spot where I had first seen Dr Hollos, five years ago. He looked tired, but was still holding out his arms towards me. Wearing the black cape he had inherited from Laszlo Fényes, with his little pointed beard, he became a few minutes later like one of those miniature statues of philosophers or fauns which the fifth-century Greeks liked to keep in their houses. Then he grew smaller and smaller until he was nothing but a black dot on the quay. ‘And now he will begin to grow again,’ I thought, as I turned to go down to my cabin.
Fear, which had attached itself to me the moment I boarded ship, remained my constant companion throughout the journey. There was, indeed, little opportunity to forget its presence: it seemed to me as if I were descending, ring after ring, into Dante’s Hell. The ruins of Le Havre, the harbour improvised from old iron barrels, showed only the exterior signs of destruction; Paris looked like a provincial town at dawn with American jeeps whizzing along its broad, deserted streets. When one evening Valy and I visited one of our old haunts, the Café Flore, we were the only guests. I didn’t see one of the old waiters and the new ones hovered round us with painful, utterly un-Parisian politeness. When we reached Germany I wore my American uniform but this precaution turned out to be completely superfluous. When, with the ruins of Pforzheim in the background, the ticket-collector appeared in the door, my uniform made him too timid to ask for our tickets; he pulled his head between his shoulders and slunk away. The miserably dressed German civilians dared not come into the compartment where Valy and I were alone, and this made me feel so bad that I would have changed my clothes at once had I not registered all our luggage.
In Prague bitter diappointment was awaiting me. Before my emigration I belonged to that group of Hungarians who not only detested but openly opposed the chauvinism of the Horthy régime. I had repeatedly gone on lecture tours among the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia and it was always obvious to me that this minority enjoyed better living and greater liberty in this alien country than the majority in their own. I expressed this opinion in the Hungarian press, as well as my wish to see in Hungary a democratic system like that established in Czechoslovakia. For this opinion right-wing government circles called me a Czech agent and a traitor, and started various court proceedings against me. The sentence, still pending, was one of the reasons for my emigration. But even apart from the deep and intimate friendship between Professor Vambéry, the two Masaryks, Professor Jaszi, and the former Czechoslovak Premier Milan Hodza, we were, during the period of our emigration, in very close contact with the Czechoslovak government in London. We discussed all our actions with the Czech government and pledged ourselves in joint proclamations to promote, after the war, the co-operation, and if possible the federation, of our two countries.
In Prague I was received with icy coldness. The social democrat director of the Czech radio was very sorry not to be able to put me before the microphone, but he hoped I understood – after all, I was Hungarian. Minister Fierlinger who, a few months before, had offered to take my private letters personally from New York to Budapest, informed me through his secretary that he could not receive me. And when the director of the radio was showing us round we were almost beaten up in Venczel Square because, having no other common language, we were speaking in German. What was even more painful was the fact that the Czechs had succumbed to the same excessive chauvinism against which we had once so passionately fought in Hungary. The national minorities had been exchanged, but at the same time, allegedly for strategic reasons, the Czechoslovak government had annexed a small but densely populated part of Hungary. This annexation cut Hungary’s most important artery of communication, the Budapest–Vienna highway, and created even more hatred between the two countries. I had to realize that the dreams we had cherished during the war would never come true, and that everything was going on from where it had been left off in 1939.
Jan Masaryk, Minister of Foreign Affairs, with whom I had spent an evening with Vambéry in New York, received me rather coolly. When we were alone, however, he complained bitterly that he was helpless against the chauvinism reigning throughout the country, but particularly among the Slovaks, although they, having served Hitler eagerly, had nothing with which to reproach the Hungarians. During dinner he drank more than usual, but without losing his gift for telling stories or his excellent humour. Then he expounded two sharply conflicting theories. The centuries of Austrian occupation and the years spent under Hitler’s rule had taught both the Czechs and Hungarians every trick of the trade. We had learned how to serve the oppressor without putting ourselves in his hands. He referred to the Czech national heroes, to Tom Thumb and the good soldier Schweik who, while apparently submitting to it, had tricked brute force. The time had now come when we must listen with devoted expressions to Soviet orders, smiling only with the wrinkles in our bottoms, under our trousers, as did the lackeys of the Byzantine emperors. Heroic gestures would be of no avail; we would have to speak the language of flowers, be patient and cunning, as we had been under Hitler. The essential thing was to survive. It was his hope that the Western powers would in time discover that Stalin would have to be forced out of Central Europe by permanent political and economic pressure. Even the Russians themselves might realize that the exploitation of the Danube valley was not profitable and might, when the opportunity came – perhaps with the next palace revolution – clear out as the Tartars did in 1242, at the news of Genghis Khan’s death. Then, at last, we could translate our dream of a Danubian Federation
into reality.
His second theory was considerably more pessimistic. It was one of history’s bitter jokes – he said – that Czechoslovakia, created by his father and Woodrow Wilson, should be annihilated twenty-five years later by another American president. We must discard our illusions, he warned me. Roosevelt had sold us to the Devil, bag and baggage. Now the Devil’s commissars would roast us alive on the spit.
Masaryk told me all this with a plentiful seasoning of anecdotes and in a cheerful tone of voice. The table was loaded with bottles and bottles of the tart red wine made from vines brought from his fatherland and planted in the Moravian hills by the University-founding Czech king, Charles of Luxembourg. His words filled me with anxiety, but the more we drank the more ready I was to forget it. I lit one cigarette from the butt of another and watched the smoke caught by the draught and pulled out through the half-open window like a treble thread of blue wool. Whenever my eyes followed the smoke they fell on Russian soldiers walking impatiently back and forth on the hard, grey cobblestones under the window of the Palace.
The next day, in Pozsony, I found out that there was only one train a week from Pozsony to Budapest, which took twenty-four hours to cover a distance of two hundred kilometres. But what was even more annoying, I was told, was that the Soviet soldiers stripped everyone coming from the West of all their possessions. They also punished those coming from the East, who had nothing but their lives, for their poverty. A few days earlier the train from Budapest had arrived with three hundred completely naked passengers. The Russians had stripped everyone, including the engineer and the stoker. Only the very old and the children had been allowed to keep some of their clothes. Although I cherished no exaggerated illusions concerning the Soviet Union, had I heard this story two weeks earlier, in America, I should certainly have branded it as pure invention. But now, in addition to disappointment I was overwhelmed by the bitter realization of my helplessness.
When I was demobilized at Fort Dix and my buddies found out where I was going, they presented me with some fifty woollen shirts and trousers to distribute among the poor in Hungary. I had with me new medicines, still unknown at home, medicines and vitamins for my mother, chocolate, coffee, tea, a few thousand cigarettes – all the things I would not be able to buy in Hungary. I had with me clothing, gifts and various useful articles both for people I knew and for people I had never met; among them a hearing aid for a half-deaf communist ideologist who had only recently returned from Moscow. It had been handed to me by the ideologist’s brother, a rich industrialist in New York, though he feared that he was sending his brother a treacherous gift, since only his deafness saved him from a bullet in the nape at the time of the Moscow purges.
The woollen shirts had already been stolen from my suitcase by French customs officials, together with a bundle of manuscripts wrapped in them; approximately a thousand poems translated into Hungarian from almost every language in the world. I had made them during the seven years of my emigration, whenever I had nothing better to do, partly to keep my hand in, partly so that when I got home I could publish the first anthology of world poetry in the language. After that robbery I decided to defend the rest of my luggage with my life. I was saved by the captain of the best Hungarian football team, the FTC, who embraced me enthusiastically in the lobby of a Pozsony hotel. His team had beaten the Pozsony team the day before. They had come in their own bus and though there were some fifty people ready to pay for the ten empty seats, he said that they would gladly take us along free of charge.
The next morning we made ready to go. The captain, Sarossy, laid on a festive reception, making his team stand in a half-circle in front of the bus and sing an anti-fascist poem of mine, written ten years before, which had in the meantime been put to music. We were made to sit in the place of honour, in the front seats of the bus. Sarossy sat behind us, but kept silent – in a few minutes we would reach the Hungarian border and he did not want to interfere in my thoughts at that solemn moment. Strangely enough I was not at all moved. While Valy stared greedily out of the window, her beautiful, long neck tense with excitement, I watched the hands of the driver.
I had already had plenty of time to delight in the landscape and the familiar environment during the week we had spent in Pozsony. This, the ancient Hungarian crowning-town, had become the capital of Slovakia twenty-seven years earlier. The people, the clothes, the manners of the waiters, the behaviour of the shop assistants, the shape and polish of the tumblers – all was as familiar to me as were the trees, the wild, deep blue of the April sky or the rounded, woolly clouds, white all over, without grey shadows, which conjured up the shapes of Ceylon, Sumatra or Tasmania, sometimes an Iceland but never a New Zealand or a Celebes. One shore of the Danube, as we crossed the pontoon-bridge, was as like the other shore as the two shores of the Mississippi below St Louis are alike. The approach of my country’s border was heralded neither by a change in the landscape, nor by a change in the flora or the shape of the dwellings. When we stopped at it, it was with an entirely unexpected jolt, because we were in the Hungarian territory annexed to Czechoslovakia some weeks ago at the request of the Czech government, and while formerly the border had been marked by the Danube, now they had drawn it at random. Instead of the usual customs-shed we stopped in front of a villa-like building obviously requisitioned for the purpose. There was no barrier, only a telegraph pole laid across the road. A Soviet sergeant, two young men in civilian clothes and a Hungarian soldier stood before the building – the latter in an unbelievably ragged uniform, like a veteran reduced to begging.
Valy and I were the first to enter the building, accompanied by the Soviet sergeant and a civilian interpreter. The sergeant glanced at our passports, flung them into an open drawer and announced they would be returned to us in Budapest as soon as I had explained to the authorities why I had fled to the West with the fascists two years ago. I saw no point in arguing, but Valy could not resist explaining to the sergeant that I had been an American, not a fascist, soldier. The Russian, who could not take his eyes off my nylon shirt, replied that there was no difference: the Americans were no less fascist than the Germans. He consistently addressed Valy as Burzhujka – which the interpreter omitted to translate into Hungarian.
As we were going out I noticed that the next passenger to go in, one of the paying guests in the bus – a squat and vivid Frenchman in striped trousers – showed neither his passport nor an identification card. Instead he pressed a pack of cigarettes into the sergeant’s hand and this took care of all formalities. Sarossy applied the same method when the Hungarian soldier showed interest in the luggage; as a result, all he did was to climb into the bus, walk through it and get off at the other end. I stood despondently in the characteristically Hungarian, floury, white, light dust which lay as deep as puddles of rainwater. In the middle of my sole, under which, during the last seven years, air had been circulating, I felt the almost disagreeable pressure of Hungarian soil. When the bus rolled on I noticed that my pipe, which I had left in the ashtray, had disappeared.
That evening, while my mother and Valy were busy preparing supper, I walked up and down in my father’s former study as he used to do, long ago, before meals. My mother, who had lost her husband, her daughter and her parents within six months, had taken up the organization of a new life with admirable energy. She had never worked before: now she earned her bread as a social worker and did her own housework as well. Her small body, topped by a disproportionately large head, like some ancient Chinese statuette, scurried tirelessly back and forth among the rather dilapidated furniture, knick-knacks and keepsakes of the overcrowded flat. But the source of her energy was not in herself. Her strength had come from the knowledge that I would come back. At the moment of my arrival she almost collapsed at the front door. Later she grew a little calmer. Before sitting down to tea I discovered, in one of her wardrobes, the chocolate, coffee and vitamin parcels I had sent her from America, almost untouched. My mother said she had saved them against my arr
ival, because I would probably be very hungry after seven years abroad.
Of our once very large flat she had been permitted to keep only two rooms; the second only because she had said she was preparing it for me. But in the drawing-room, where I now walked up and down, nothing had changed apart from the broken and still unreplaced window-panes and the bullet-holes. Only the palms were missing from the large Chinese vases; their place had been taken by pounds and pounds of beans. These had been saved before the siege to keep the family from starving, and my mother was still watching over them jealously, fearing that they might again be needed. In spite of the fact that a sharp wind was blowing in through the broken window-panes I was almost smothered under the heavy weight of conflicting emotions. I would have liked to go out for a short walk, but the house door was locked because of the early curfew. I could not even go up to the roof-garden, where I had so often sunbathed in my youth. My mother warned me that there was an unexploded bomb, and besides, the whole roof was covered by the excrement of the fifty Russians who had only recently moved out of the house and who had used it for that purpose.
On the desk I noticed my father’s photograph in the uniform of a lieutenant. This was how he had looked twenty-eight years ago, when he returned from the First World War and was approximately the same age I was now, returning from the Second. His huge, gold-braided collar, stiff, waxed, coal-black moustache – all things imposed upon him by military regulations and the fashion of the day – contrasted strangely with the large and melancholy – even too large and too melancholy – eyes and the receding, frighteningly high forehead, not yet wrinkled but only furrowed. The sight of that high forehead reassured me, establishing at once that there was no likeness between us.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 25