My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  Then without any transition, he translated to me a paragraph from the brochure lying on the desk. It explained that socialist realism was the most advanced literary method, all the more so as it portrayed man in his social interdependences with scientific exactness, and therefore the central committee of the Soviet communist party advised writers, in their own interests, to apply this advanced method in their work. When Biro asked me what I thought about it I decided not to be so weak as I had been when I praised the communists in Fényes’s name. I asked him whether the author of the brochure was a professional writer. When he replied that he wasn’t I said that this was obvious. A writer writes books and not Orders of the Day for other writers. A writer knows that methods of writing cannot be made uniform, nor can they be prescribed. There are impressionist writers, surrealists, romantics, socialist realists – but most writers are several of these even in the same book. Only someone entirely divorced from literature can conceive the idea that a writer must follow a certain method. I granted that Zhdanov was not alone in his idea; there had been many theologians and Church Fathers in the past who had prescribed subjects, form, obligatory source-material and an optimistic ending. Thus, in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries profane poetry was persecuted and only religious themes were tolerated. The poet was obliged to write his poems in iambic verses of four feet, grouped in four-line stanzas – that is, in Ambrosian verse – could choose his theme only from the Bible and had to stick to its words. And the optimistic ending was: Hail to the Father, hail to the Son and also to Thee, balsamic Holy Ghost, from century to century, from millennium to millennium!

  ‘So Comrade Faludy believes that there is no socialist literature?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. There was also a Christian literature, and a very important one. Jacopone da Todi, Thomas of Celano, Hildebert de Lavardin, Pierre Abélard or Adam St Victor, for instance. But they wrote at a time when the Church no longer insisted upon determining the visions of the poets and, consequently, the poets were no longer obliged to put the resolutions of the Synods into rhyme …’

  The names I mentioned made Biro blink; it was obvious that he had no idea what I was talking about. At any rate, he said, I would have to read and learn a great deal. Then, again without transition, he began to talk about the social democratic party. He explained how important the role of that party was in Hungarian democracy; but it could fill its role only if the left-wing elements were in the majority. Unfortunately, the social democratic party was teeming with deadly enemies of the communists, to mention only the right-wing Anna Kéthly and the Trotskyist Pal Justus…

  ‘Approving of everything you and Orban agreed upon this morning,’ he continued calmly, ‘I think it would be best if you joined the social democratic party. Then you could report to Comrade Révai or to myself every week, in urgent cases more frequently, on what is going on in the headquarters of the party and in the editorial offices of Népszava.’

  I felt that I was blushing furiously with excitement.

  ‘You don’t know me and you cannot know me,’ I replied. ‘You must have left Hungary when I was still a schoolboy. Since then I have lived in New York and you in Moscow, or I don’t know where… For this reason I am not offended by your suggestion. Let us pretend I have not heard it, and let us forget about the whole thing. Perhaps we could speak about something else …’

  Without betraying his discomfiture by the slightest sign, he turned the conversation to Hungarian literature, emphasizing the very large editions in which the communist publishing house could publish my works and what gigantic royalties I could obtain for them. Half an hour later he sent out for more coffee and then, while I was sipping mine, repeated his offer in identical words, except that I should have to report not to him but to Révai, or even to Rakosi himself. I rose and took my leave stiffly. In the hall he tried once more to make me change my mind but I gave him no reply. When I reached the street I noticed that Biro was just closing the window above my head; he had probably given instructions to his driver. When I approached the car, the chauffeur turned away his head. This was rather bad: the streetcars did not yet go so far out, it would have taken me an hour to walk home and there were only thirty minutes left to the curfew. Everyone seen in the streets after that hour was shot down by the Soviet patrols without warning.

  As I didn’t know anyone in the neighbourhood at whose house I could have spent the night I began to run as fast as I could. Ten minutes later I caught sight of the illuminated windows of the social democratic party headquarters. There were no guards at the entrance, as there were at communist party headquarters. The bespectacled porter was reading a book, he didn’t even look up as I entered. A notice on the lift door announced that it was out of order. I ran up the steps. At the second floor I came upon a group of young people who recognized me from my picture in the newspaper. A red-headed, bespectacled boy of perhaps sixteen looked me over arrogantly from head to foot.

  ‘Are you that George Faludy who came home from America to be hung by the communists?’ he asked with a strange mixture of boyish insolence, curiosity and awe.

  A few minutes later I sat in Anna Kéthly’s room. While I was racing along the dirty, dusty streets between damaged houses, pictures of horror had been flashing through my mind. Now, suddenly, I was calm. Already the friendly, relaxed disorder of the party headquarters and the insolence of the red-headed boy had given me a feeling of ease, as if I had come from the barracks to a club, from an interrogation by the chief inquisitor into a pub; and the supreme calm of the lady minister sitting opposite me, her cool, hard beauty, completely restored my balance. She was almost sixty at the time, but still wore her beauty like an icy halo. Perhaps it was not so much an attribute of her femininity as the reflection of her moral conduct shining with nobility and even permanence from her incurious but observant eyes and her smooth, fresh complexion. It was a great joy to sit face to face with someone with whom, however different our views might be, I agreed on the most essential things, namely that honesty was more important than cleverness, character more important than success. When we met in the corridor she greeted me with cool friendliness, just as if we had last seen each other seven days, and not seven years, ago. She too was probably recalling the obituaries that bound us together. In 1943 it was rumoured in Budapest that I had been killed in Burma in the fight against the Japanese. Kéthly wrote a beautiful obituary in which she paid me homage. A year later, when the Germans invaded Hungary, Kéthly was put in a concentration camp but in New York it was believed that she had been shot. At that time it was I who wrote her obituary, in the weekly paper of the Hungarian emigration. Without mentioning these happenings we were now looking at each other with the resigned tenderness of those who had given each other the last rites.

  On the wall opposite hung a few postcard-sized portraits. Kéthly began by telling me that the best thing for me to do would be to write poems and forget about politics. I had no need whatsoever of the social democratic party, though the party needed me. And not only the party but the whole country. They needed, in the first place, my lectures, my journalistic work, my educational activities, my erudition. After a thousand years, the question whether there should or should not be a Hungarian democracy was now in the balance. She wondered whether, for a few years, I should be willing to sacrifice my work as a writer and become a teacher. The main thing was that I should not judge by what I had seen in a hysterical capital, but should go to the countryside, look around, give lectures, hold seminars. And if I disagreed with the Marxist teachings, I could always talk about myself, about literature, about America, about whatever I pleased. And if, returning to the capital, I decided to make the sacrifice, the party would be glad if I joined Népszava. The party was poor, the cause important, the sacrifice great but, she hoped, not vain.

  While she talked I looked absentmindedly at the pictures on the wall. Had anyone else made me a similar offer I should undoubtedly have rejected it, but Kéthly asked me with such sincere warm
th that I was unable to do so. Nor did I feel like starting an argument on the vanity of the sacrifice, because we both held that one should serve the cause one considers just, or partly just, regardless of its chances of success.

  The first picture on the wall represented Sandor Petöfi, the poet, struck down in one of the last battles of the 1848-49 War of Independence by some horseman of the Tsar who didn’t permit himself to be influenced by the fact that the poet, unarmed, was watching the battle from the edge of the road. Then came a portrait of the scholarly-looking Béla Somogyi, one-time editor of Népszava, who was blinded with a penknife by Horthy’s white terrorists in 1920, tied with barbed wire and thrown, still living, into the Danube. The subjects of the third and fourth photographs in the row, Illés Monus, former secretary of the social democratic party, and the round-headed, grey-haired Uncle Gyözö Gergely, former night-editor of Népszava, were well known to me. A year and a half before, when they were hiding from the Germans, a social-democrat turned Nazi recognized them in the street and shot them dead.

  ‘Tomorrow, I’ll leave for the country and start looking round Annuska,’ I said, ‘and when I come back I shall go to work at Népszava.’ I was recalling all the others whose pictures were not on the wall, because all the walls of this little room and all the walls of the corridors of the social democratic headquarters, and all the walls of the houses along Rakoczi Street were still not long enough to hold them: the rebelling Hungarian peasants impaled by feudal landlords, the freedom fighters killed in battles against the Turks and the Austrians, the prisoners of the Seven Towers in Constantinople and the dungeons of Kufstein and Josefstadt; those executed by the German henchmen of Buda or hanged by Franz-Joseph after he had counted up to a hundred before signing their death-warrant, upon his mother’s advice, lest history call him a cruel monarch; those murdered by the white terrorists and those tortured to death in the Svabhegy villas of the Gestapo, and those shot into the Danube by the arrow-cross party.

  The nervousness and fear that had been my constant companions since I boarded the ship in the harbour of New York disappeared. I had become aware of and resigned myself to the situation: I was at home and had to submit to the customs of the country. To die for freedom or to end one’s days in prison for liberty was not considered a very special feat in these parts; the view I had hitherto taken of the matter was indeed exaggerated.

  More than three years later a car was taking me back to Budapest along the same Roman road on which I had driven into the countryside for the first time after my conversation with Kéthly. The road had since become very familiar to me. In the early days the old rattletrap lent me by the social democratic party had been stopped again and again by welcoming, kindly and curious peasants. Now, however, when the peasants caught sight of Népszava’s brand new British car, with its red flag and big, hulking driver at the wheel, they turned away or hid behind trees, bushes and corners.

  In those vanished days I had gone swimming in cool rivers near blown-up bridges, where we sometimes had to wait an entire day for the ferry; when we had been out of funds, which often happened, my driver and I had lived on the fruit of mulberry trees bordering the highway, had baked run-over hares over a campfire and had slept on the top of haystacks with the cruel moonlight in our eyes. For two weeks I had taught history, democracy, but above all thinking, to the people of a small town, Dombovar, then had continued my lectures in another small town, Szekszard. I had talked with peasants on the crests of billowing hills, who, having no draught-animals, had harnessed themselves and their families to the plough and who had asked me whether the land, allocated to them at the time of the land-reform, would not be taken away again for kolkhozes. I had assured them, as I had hoped, that it would not be taken away. I had spoken at night meetings in harvest-time, in ducal stables by the light of a single paraffin lamp; there had been no tables, no chairs, nothing but the platinum inlays made by the moonlight in the chinks between the planks of which the walls were built. Most of the men had been barefoot, with pebbles or tufts of grass between their toes and although everyone had been dead tired, the atmosphere in those stables was that of a great first night. Until then, my listeners had had no opportunity to attend a meeting; they had done it now, after a thousand years of incredible misery and humiliation, in the hope that a new and better life would start for them, and when we ended by singing the National Anthem: ‘These people have paid for their sins, past and future,’ tears had been running down all our faces. I had tried hard not to let my emotions get the upper hand, but the atmosphere of the audience, this vibrating and hypnotizing mixture of hope, happiness and fear, tiredness and excitement so familiar to me had been stronger than my resolution.

  Three years later, where was the happiness, or even the hope? I never visited Dombovar or Szekszard after the local party organizations had merged with the communists and I avoided all the villages where I had held meetings. I felt, in a way, responsible and was deeply ashamed that in spite of my promises I had been unable to prevent seizure of power by the communists. Neither I nor anyone else had the opportunity to perform heroic deeds. Even heroic words could be pronounced but once; and he who pronounced them, disappeared without trace usually the same night; which did not mean that those preferring cowardly silence were safe from arrest.

  Yet I often travelled in the country. I did it to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the capital, though I found peace not so much in the villages as during the six- to eight-hour drives between our destinations. On this particular occasion I set out, as usual, with the pretext that I was going to write a social survey for Népszava; but this time I had an additional and special reason to escape. I had read the indictment against Laszlo Rajk, the former Minister of the Interior: that he confessed that in the previous autumn he had met the Yugoslav Minister of the Interior, Rankovich, in a field guards’ hut near mile post No. 116, to conspire with him concerning the overthrow of the Hungarian People’s Republic. It was widely known that the Hungarian secret police, which was controlled directly from Moscow, watched and controlled all the Ministers day and night, so it seemed most unlikely that the Hungarian Minister would have got the chance to meet a Titoist Minister secretly, even had he dared to run such a risk. I happened to remember that the house of my old peasant friend, Janos Bulla, stood near that mile post No. 116. I decided to try to find out the truth on the spot.

  To drive from Budapest directly to mile post No. 116 would have been suicide. Therefore I pretended to look at various archaeological finds in Transdanubia and stopped at my journey’s destination only on the fifth evening, ostensibly casually. My friend Bulla was a self-educated man, who mixed Latin juridical expressions and Greek philosophical terms with his country dialect, always in their proper place but a little more frequently than necessary. In the course of his life he had collected a library of several thousand volumes which, in the old days, he used to keep in the loft, because Horthy’s gendarmes disliked educated peasants. When I had visited him three years earlier, he had been planning to move his library to the ground floor, but in the meantime he had discovered that secret policemen did not like educated peasants either, and had changed his mind. We talked in the loft, among his books, under the pale pink grapes hanging from the beams. While we talked I stood by the window of the small attic room, and by bending my shoulders a little I could see the famous mile post. There was no field guards’ hut there, nor had there ever been one, as my friend Bulla assured me.

  I tossed and turned, sleepless under the hot eiderdowns in the bedroom smelling of apples. I was stupefied by what I had just learned. I had not believed there had been a meeting between Rajk and Rankovich in the field guards’ hut, but I had never thought that there was not even a field guards’ hut.

  Then suddenly I started to think of Rajk. I had always loathed him and was only interested in his case, or, more precisely, in the implications of his case; that we were living in a country where innocent people could be arrested and hanged if and when the author
ities so pleased. But now, for the first time, I felt something like sympathy towards the detestable victim, who in my opinion was guilty of all crimes but those he was charged with. I had only once met him personally, ten years before in a Paris café in Bandi Havas’s company. Rajk had just returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he was said to have fought heroically. I found it rather unpleasant to converse with him. I would have been interested in his experiences in Spain; but instead of telling us about them he kept repeating over and over again that there were only two roads open to mankind, that of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat. He who did not follow the road of the proletariat belonged, in his passivity, to the other (this was addressed to me) and was consequently a traitor. While he repeated this wisdom, I gazed at the very beautiful Annamite girls sitting at the bar, and when the girls were just leaving and Rajk was still repeating his theory about the two roads, I replied that mankind could follow probably hundreds of roads and so could I, but now I wanted to follow the road of the Annamite girls. He may have taken my joke seriously, because he threw me a disdainful glance through the window of the café.

  In Paris I found him only ridiculous, but at home I watched his activities as Minister of the Interior with hatred. He was the second man in the communist party, Rakosi’s right hand, fanatical, cruel, incorruptible, reckless and boring. When some months earlier I learned that he was arrested my first thought was that murderers were murdering murderers. But when I read in the indictment that Rajk confessed to having been a spy of the Horthy police and had taken part in the Spanish Civil War as an agent of the fascists in order to demoralize the Loyalists, I was shocked. Antipathetic though the accused man was, the accusation in itself alarmed me; but even that, I found, did not alarm me so much as the non-existence of the field guards’ hut. Thus I wondered why it was just this rather unimportant detail that changed my attitude towards the person of Rajk; why it was now, for the first time, that I could not deny a kind of pity for the hero of the Spanish Civil War, who was defeated by the friends he had served with so much loyalty instead of by his enemies. I drank again and again from the wine placed next to my bed by my peasant host so familiar with human emotions, until the dawn came.