My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  In the desk I discovered my sister’s medical instruments, scalpels and syringes, in an almost completely new cedar-wood box. As I bent over it I could still catch the fragrance of the wood and the smell of the glue. Next to the box lay a few ancient, worn rulers, the Indian ink my father had used for his drawings, and a poem in German which he had written to me when I grew into a lad. As far as its form went it was not a very good poem; my father expressed in it his hope that I would grow not only into a unique phenomenon, an inimitable entity, like every human being, but into someone outstanding and unforgettable. Under the manuscript lay a bundle of clean, but now worthless, bank-notes. With this money my father, mother and sister could have spent the war years in one of the best hotels in Switzerland, and if they had done so they would undoubtedly all still have been alive.

  From the desk I wandered over to the bookcase. Its glass doors were damaged by bullet-holes, like the old Dutch landscape hanging above the mantelpiece. I knew from my mother that they had not been hit by stray bullets from the streets, but by the bullets of the Russian soldiers camping in the room who had shot up the furniture for their amusement. In one wing of the bookcase stood German classics in an edition nearly a hundred years old: Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, Heine, Herder, Wieland. On the central shelves was the literature of our century – or what remained of it after I had carried off the pick. On the other side was my father’s scientific library. I soon came to the conclusion that the works on physics and chemistry had all become obsolete. So had Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte and Camille Flammarion’s Astronomy, Muther’s work on the history of painting and the illustrated chronicle of the First World War on the embossed title-page of which Emperor William and Franz-Joseph were holding hands above churning clouds while below them, in the battle-field, the German and Austro-Hungarian Armies were routing the enemy. Only in the middle of one of the central shelves, where a bullet had cut an irregular star-shaped hole in the glass, did I, to my pleasure, discover my father’s favourite books: the Bible, Goethe’s Faust bound in soft, blue leather, and Schopenhauer’s aphorisms. Because of the crack in the glass the titles on the spines appeared double, and between the lines which hovered obliquely one above the other, a small rainbow played hide-and-seek, like a message from another world. ‘Is that all that remains of a man?’ I mused, trying to conjure up my father’s picture: his black jacket; the thick, white, soft locks on his nape, like the petals of a chrysanthemum; his cheek-bones, on which the skin seemed to twitch with pleasure when, in his free time, he could put his violin under his chin. I was completely submerged in memories when my mother called me to dinner.

  In the next few days I visited friends and collected information. The nauseating, sweetish smell of superficially buried corpses which pervaded the squares and parks of the capital; the sight of the bagmen climbing the emergency-ramp to the other bridge over the Danube, pushing and cursing, in a long, black line like a stovepipe; the almost motionless cloud of dust hovering above the rubble from which broken beams and iron girders stuck out like the skeletons of antediluvian animals; the old friends and acquaintances whom I met again after seven years; the innumerable stories about other old friends and acquaintances frozen to death on the Russian front, shot dead by Hungarian gendarmes for their gold wrist-watch or by Russian soldiers for trying to defend their wives from being raped before their eyes; all this filled me with an almost unbearable tension, as bad as if I were in the middle of a battle among exploding grenades, dying comrades, showering bullets. My tension was increased by the fact that I had left the side of the winners for that of the defeated although it was with the winners that I was in sympathy.

  I found out that I could obtain a job on a newspaper, write articles, be allocated a flat or could even deliver a lecture only if I joined one of the parties: it did not matter which party of the coalition, I could make my choice. I was in no particular hurry to find a job, but it soon became clear that it was impossible to live on the income from my books. Soon after my return home, my publisher paid me 300,000,000,000 pengoes for a new edition of one of my volumes. I ran to the market, because by afternoon the money was worth only one-tenth of its morning value, and bought with the three hundred billion pengoes a chicken, two litres of oil and some vegetables. I had transferred one thousand five hundred dollars saved in America to the Hungarian National Bank because I thought it would be dishonest to deprive the Hungarian state of the hard currency and to traffic in dollars on the black market. Now I had to discover that everyone possessed dollars – the taxi-driver, the waiter, the market woman – everyone except me, who had just arrived from America. Small wonder that nobody believed me. Had I brought my money with me I could have purchased a five-storey house, which I had no intention of doing. Everything, from American cigarettes and coffee to penicillin, had to be paid for in dollars. When I collected my money from the National Bank it was just enough for key-money for a one-and-a- half-room flat. However, the flat was in the best part of town, at the top of Rose Hill, where I had always wanted to live, so I considered the problem as solved.

  The first person I visited was a school-friend, Gabor Goda. When, seven years earlier, we had said goodbye, Goda was a well-known short story writer, and a typical golden youth, witty, cheerful, cynical and reckless. When my mother told me that he had been rewarded for joining the communist party with a high office in the municipal cultural department, I was surprised; but not very much surprised. He immediately suggested that I too should join the communist party. His first and most important argument was that the communist party, and only the communist party, disposed of funds. ‘We hold the sack,’ he said with some irony but also a little pride. His second argument was that though the country was governed by a coalition, and although within the coalition the smallholders’ party held an absolute majority, the whole thing was no more than illusion. Real power, every key position, was in the hands of the communists; they were supported by the only real force, the Soviet Army. To rely upon the West might be a noble idea but in fact it meant suicide, he stated, and threw me from the corner of his blue eyes a quick, sharp glance. This glance of pity and irony was most familiar to me; it was the way my friend had always looked at stupid people whom, for one reason or another, he still liked.

  Another friend of my youth was Sandor Szalai, the journalist and psychologist, who in the meantime had become head of the foreign affairs department of the social democratic party. Sandor Szalai gave me a detailed account of the political situation. He said that the programme of all four great parties was socialism and democracy; the difference was only that each had a different idea concerning the proportion of the two components. The smallholders’ party, standing at the extreme right of the coalition, desired the largest possible proportion of democracy and the smallest possible proportion of socialism, while the communist party on the extreme left wanted much more socialism and much less democracy. The smallholders’ party was led, on the whole, by very decent but slightly old-fashioned gentlemen who might not be exactly to my taste. The national peasant party had almost no members in Budapest except a few narodnik writers; and in the countryside, where the peasants loathed even the word ‘communism’, its organizations were simply used as cover organizations by the communists. There remained the alternative of the two workers’ parties, and about them I should have to make up my own mind. It was not a philosophical, a political or an economic question, but simply a question of character. If I liked the bare-footed Franciscan brothers and preferred St Francis of Assisi to Ignatius Loyola, I must join the social democratic party; if I sympathized with the Jesuits, I must join the communist party.

  Béla Zsolt, the most significant, most courageous liberal journalist of the country, received me with open arms in the editorial offices of his weekly Haladas (Progress). He asked me to work for his newspaper, then he outlined the situation. What the communists did in the Soviet Union was both economically and intellectually catastrophic. But their activities in Hungary ha
d hitherto been praiseworthy. Had the Western armies marched into our country we should again have been saddled with Horthy and the Hungarian squirearchy, while as things now stood we had a parliamentary democracy and had even seen land-reform become reality – with a delay of a hundred and fifty years. The clearing away of the rubble, the restoration of public transport, the organization of the national food supply and the admirably rapid reconstruction of the country were also primarily the work of communists. If we had only non-communist parties, he said, the deputies would still be sitting before the ruins of parliament, debating the clauses of the election law. The West, as had happened so frequently in the course of our history, had left us in the lurch again, simply because it did not realize its own interests in Central Europe. We could at least hope that the Russians would be more reasonable: it would not even be in their interest to establish here the same infernal system as in the Soviet Union.

  Then Valy and I went to visit Bandi Havas. Bandi had arrived immediately after me. He came from London with his wife and his little son, as secretary to Count Michael Karolyi, President of the 1918–19 Hungarian Republic – who was received with a nationwide ovation. Bandi had changed little since our days in Africa, although he was much more arrogant than before and spoke about Karolyi and himself in the first person plural. He embraced and kissed me enthusiastically, then, at vertiginous speed, he enumerated the current objects of his adoration. The first three among them were the heroism of the British people, Stalin, and my poems. He went on to expound various world-saving ideas but failed to notice that his ailing, skinny little wife had just walked up from the cellar to the fourth floor with a heavy basket of firewood, panting with exhaustion. To my great amazement he showed himself cautious in his political opinion; he declared that he would refrain from joining any party and suggested that I do the same.

  The next morning I went to the headquarters of the communist party. At the gate I was surrounded by guards armed with revolvers who studied my identification papers very thoroughly. Then they asked me with whom I desired to speak. I replied that I wanted to see the head of the press department. They picked up the house telephone and from their conversation I learned that the head of the press department was called Laszlo Orban. Five people were waiting in his anteroom. When I entered, Orban, a smoothly shaved man with the look of a shop assistant, whose nostrils were extended in triumph, herded a guest from his room, then took me by the arm and led me into his office. It was crowded with huge armchairs, leather settees and a few monstrous dining-room chairs; collected, obviously, from several homes.

  ‘We are glad, very glad, that you have come to see us, Comrade Faludy,’ he said with a gesture more haughty than originally intended. ‘We know that all roads lead to us. This is why we didn’t take it amiss that you talked to your friend Goda first – who, by the way, is a good comrade – then to Sandor Szalai and Béla Zsolt. And finally with Havas,’ he added significantly. ‘He came to see us yesterday. You know, perhaps, that we are informed of everything —’ I had turned my head away in disgust and was keeping my eyes on the thick red carpet. ‘You must not be offended, Comrade Faludy,’ the solemn voice explained. ‘We must know what an important man like yourself is doing.’

  I closed my eyes. I could hear the steady hammering, now almost familiar, which came from the Danube where workers were busy on the emergency bridge which had to be repaired all the time to prevent its collapse. It was the only bridge between the two sides of the city – and of the country. So they had been watching me since my return and this commercial traveller here was even proud of it. Perhaps he only wanted to impress me, or perhaps it was a manoeuvre of intimidation. What would be the next step?

  There followed, as I expected, a nauseating, clumsy and to me almost physically painful glorification of my greatness as a writer. Then he said that the party would rebuild for me a damaged villa, on Rose Hill, which had belonged to the executed Prime Minister, Laszlo Bardossy. After the inflation – which would last only a few more weeks – they would give me, naturally in secret, a considerable monthly salary. He added that he fully understood my inner resistance, for I had been in opposition all my life, but I must realize that the situation was different now, because ‘today the state is ours’. I wanted to interrupt, saying that the state was not identical with the communist party, nor the communist party with us, but I changed my mind. In the meantime he had reached the point where he declared that the party wanted nothing from me except that, after I had had sufficient time to think it over, I should sign an application to join; though, if I preferred it that way, we could keep my membership an absolute secret, like that of…

  He swallowed the rest of the sentence and became suddenly so embarrassed that he rose from his chair, sat down again, opened the upper drawer of his desk in which I glimpsed an iron box, then blushed to the ears and closed the drawer. I had been listening to his speech with such rapt attention that at first I didn’t grasp what had happened. This is probably what he hoped, because that ‘like that of …’ had undoubtedly been a slip of the tongue. I understood at a single glance that however much I might despise him, the man sitting opposite me was, in spite of his loquaciousness and vulgarity, highly discreet, at least in party matters: cautiously, painfully discreet, because he knew that his marriage with the personified party which had lifted him out of a complete obscurity, would immediately be dissolved if he betrayed any of his experiences on the bridal couch. The ‘like that of …’ was the introduction to a sentence the subject of which could be none other than Bandi Havas; it was he who had been here yesterday morning to sign the application of admission, which he had denied to me the same evening. His application lay in that iron box together, no doubt, with a large number of other such applications; that was why Orban pulled out the drawer, that was why he slammed it shut too quickly.

  I felt my ears turning red and I wanted to rise, but Orban declared that he couldn’t let me go yet. We had not finished with official business and he insisted that afterwards we should talk like friends. He picked up the telephone and ordered wine and biscuits. While he spoke he looked at me with shining eyes, he was obviously proud of his knowledge that I didn’t like black coffee. Then he explained that he was too unimportant a man to discuss my affairs with me; therefore, upon learning that I had come, he had telephoned Zoltan Biro, who wanted to talk to me. He was no longer in the building but in the afternoon he would send a car to pick me up.

  ‘Who is Zoltan Biro?’

  ‘Head of the party’s cultural department,’ he replied, obviously surprised that I did not know. ‘And,’ he added, ‘he is Comrade Rakosi’s brother.’

  ‘Half-brother?’

  ‘No. Brother. Comrade Rakosi has several brothers, but all have different names.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there can be but one Comrade Rakosi.’

  The door of the first-floor flat in the large apartment building opened the second my hand touched the bell. I stood before my host, a grey, tired, elderly man with a completely expressionless face. He did not resemble his brother, who, in his pictures, looked like a round-headed, genial, provincial shopkeeper. This man led me into the library, then excused himself and left me alone. On the bookshelves I noticed the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, all in Russian or German editions; a number of ideological works, all in Russian; a thick book on socialist realism, also in Russian, and a few Russian authors, naturally in Russian. There was not a single Hungarian book among them; I pulled out at random a German edition of Marx’s Das Kapital published in Leningrad: the pages were uncut.

  On the desk lay open a thin little brochure, also on socialist realism and also in Russian. There were marginal notes in Hungarian, under-linings, and here and there exclamation marks. Also on the desk was Stalin’s portrait in a frame – not the photograph to be seen on posters and above the front doors of houses, nor the rarer one in which the Generalissimo was lighting his pipe; this picture was even smarter, and col
oured into the bargain: Stalin, in a white jacket with all his war decorations, coming down a flight of marble stairs: a ballet dancer, a maître d’hôtel. Judging from the decorations it was taken during or after the war, but apart from a few silver hairs, Stalin’s head was a shiny black – at the age of sixty-five. This is socialist realism, I thought. I was overwhelmed by a wild desire to make myself independent of the joyless atmosphere in this joyless room, and went to the window with its lace curtain. Night was falling: the sky shone a pearly blue and the setting sun painted the windows opposite a fiery red.

  ‘What a beautiful sunset,’ I said when Biro re-entered the room with the coffee. He threw me a frightened, helpless glance; it was obvious that in the circles in which he moved they never discussed such a subject. He placed the tray on the table and instead of joining me at the window, he sat down. It appeared to me as if he were thinking; thinking very intensely. He was probably trying to guess whether there was a trap in my question and how he should reply to it.

  ‘Yes,’ he uttered at long last. As if he were trying to calm down a madman or a naughty child. He spoke slowly and in a low voice, exactly like an actor playing Stalin in a film, and his words were accompanied by small, gentle gestures.

  He was pretty well informed about my affairs. He inquired about my wife, my mother, my friends in America, Vambéry and others. Then I tried to find out how long he had lived in the Soviet Union, what he had done there, whether he had a family, what he had accomplished in the fifty or fifty-five years of his life, but he eluded my politely formulated questions or pretended not to hear them. What interested him most was what Laszlo Fényes and my other friends – whom he had probably known though he did not say so – thought about the Hungarian communists. For the first time I seemed to detect some emotional undertone in his questions, the emotions of a man physically and spiritually crippled during the years of the Moscow terror, a man tormented by feelings of inferiority and yearning for the praise of his opponents. Had I stuck to the truth I should have repeated Fényes’s own words: that he hated the Hungarian communists more than his own excrement. But I felt suddenly sorry for my host and selected a few sentences in which, as a rare exception, Fényes had something good to say about one individual communist or another. Biro was so pleased that he broke into a smile, but he craved more and more praise so that finally I was compelled to lie.