The next morning I decided to return to the capital. Like most of my actions at that time, this return was inspired by two motives. One sprang from my tender feelings for Suzy Szegö. The second was a sort of compulsory concession to the unwritten laws of the people’s democracy, which regulated my actions, my words and even, when I was in a public place, my movements, although I did my utmost to restrict its manifestations to the negative: to passivity, silence and stillness. The Rajk trial was nearing its end and I had to be in the capital when the sentence was announced. I could have heard the trial over the radio built into the car, but I knew that the editorial staff would listen collectively, as usual. These burnings of heretics were regarded as festive and joyful occasions, as in a certain sense they really were: they came as climaxes to long weeks of uncertainty, and put an end to campaigns of arrest so that everyone could feel safe for at least a few weeks until a new wave of arrests began. But if the heretic on the stake was widely known as a faithful believer, the audience – namely the whole country – felt involved in the same suspicion and thus it was advisable to be present at such collective radio-listenings and at the party meeting after them unless one wanted to be accused of complicity.
I have a weighty reason for describing my love for Suzy Szegö in such obsolete terms as ‘tender feelings’. Compared to the two fundamental and extreme manifestations of sexual life in the people’s democracy – over-rationalized sexual relationship and irrational love-making – our love seemed indeed to be old-fashioned. Marriages, and even the majority of love-affairs, were determined by what rating the partners had in the party. An intellectual who had not taken part in the underground movement and had come to the communist party from another party and was therefore suspected of heresy (of being a communist, that is, for logical considerations and not because of blind faith); or an intellectual who, on the contrary, had participated in the underground movement and was therefore even more suspected of heresy (of, in this case, nationalistic deviation from the Moscow line) – such people did best, if they wanted to keep their jobs, flats and party membership, to marry the daughters of the parry bureaucrats returned from Moscow. Nobody knew what kind of connections those former emigrants had in Moscow, or which of them was still a spy of the Soviet Secret Police, so the bare fact of being a Muscovite meant immunity for them and their families, regardless of whether they had spent their years of emigration in a Russian house or a Russian prison. A young girl, however, who joined the party in 1945 out of opportunism (which was considered officially as capitulation before the Red Army – a good mark), but whose father was a former manufacturer now living on parcels sent by his relatives from America (which was added to his daughter’s crime-sheet), did best to leave her parents’ home, meet them only secretly or not at all and marry an AVO officer or an engineer recognized as an expert (which did not necessarily mean that he was one). Such marriages, which were becoming more and more frequent, exempted the person in question from the persecution otherwise due to him or to her, and though mostly unhappy, were pretty stable.
The other extreme was represented by sexual intercourse performed with the speed of sparrows and discretion of dogs. People fell upon each other without discrimination, premeditation or prelude in parks, woods, state automobiles, on desks of offices, in party premises, party stairways, party lofts and party gardens; mainly because, owing to the scandalous housing conditions, and lack of hotels, they simply had no other opportunity. At such times both men and women were able, at last, to experience some real satisfaction, after being numbed or driven to furious despair by a working day increased to twelve, fourteen, sometimes twenty hours by collective newspaper reading or collective radio-listening, Marxist seminars, decoration, procession, wall-newspaper editing, women’s and youths’ days, house-to-house agitation, village propaganda, party meetings, trade-union meetings, workers’ conferences, factory committee meetings, membership meetings, Hungarian-Soviet Society meetings and overtime. The satisfaction was not caused by physical delight but only by the knowledge that however overworked and tortured they were, they still had some energy left. Because of the twenty kinds of conference and party work, nothing was easier than to find a reason which would explain to parent, wife or husband why one had to stay out the whole night, so everyone made love happily and vengefully on the party’s furniture, in the party’s time, with the party’s help and on the party’s account, while the party bureaucrats shut their eyes, partly because they considered that kind of love-making as an innocent security-valve for all party members, and partly because it gave them one more handle for blackmail when the time came.
In such an environment my tender feelings for Suzy did indeed seem old-fashioned, although our love was neither more special, nor more romantic than the average; only – at most – stronger. Others, however, found it different and watched it either with benevolence or with envy, or foretold an early and bitter end to it, which made us carry it with some exhibitionism and pride. There was in fact no difference between us and any ordinary lovers of the twentieth century; the extraordinary was not in ourselves but in the society around us. This society was like that of a medieval town, which marched one day in a pious Lenten procession and on the next day performed orgies on the pavement of the same street. Suzy and I walked in those interchanging periods of procession and orgy, arm in arm, like simple lovers, and thus scandalized them.
I met Suzy for the first time a few days after my return home, when I went to see Béla Zsolt, the most courageous liberal journalist of the country, at the editorial offices of Haladas. At that time Suzy was not yet a communist and wrote excellent short stories and articles. She was deep in conversation with a woman friend, in a corner of a huge room with dirty windows which made it seem as though it were raining outside, although the streets were bathed in a lovely spring sunshine. She was leaning her hip against a desk, the top of which was strewn with the ashes of her cigarette; her red handbag, half open and revealing a purse, a flapjack, her documents and a handkerchief, lay in the middle of the desk. Her blonde hair fell in a single wave from the parting to her shoulder, like a stage curtain at the moment when it comes together, only to fall apart again for a fraction of a second. She had an oval face and greenish-grey eyes; not an impressionistic face put together from patches of colour, or from muscle and tissue, but a face put together of contours; she could have been painted – and indeed she was painted – by Botticelli and by Botticelli alone, perhaps in one of his lost pictures. She pressed her two long, spindle-shaped thighs slightly forward so that the shape of her knees was clearly visible through her tight, checked skirt. ‘This woman and I will run away this very morning to San Francisco,’ I decided and resolved to introduce myself. But then I became involved in a conversation with Béla Zsolt. Suzy left and I forgot her.
I met her again one and a half years later when, at the time of the liquidation of the social democratic party, she came to work for Népszava where I was employed. At that time the social democratic paper was being transformed into a trade-union journal, its editor was sacked and his place was taken by Zoltan Horvath, former foreign editor. Horvath was a short, squat, bald, intelligent, uneducated and uninhibited man with rolling eyes, a glib tongue and tufts of black hair protruding from his nostrils. He drank five or six litres of strong black coffee a day and gave proof of an unlimited capacity for work which, from the professional point of view, was of little value because he could not write at all. He was called the Judas of the social democratic party, not only because he had been one of the loudest propagandists for the merging of the two parties, but because he undertook the task offered me, as I have described, by Rakosi’s brother. As a reward they promised him the job of Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs, but when the merger went through they appointed him editor of Népszava and showed him no particular consideration.
Horvath, who had never let anyone stand in his way, defended not only Suzy (who was a daughter of a rich industrialist, although at that time she had turned
with utter devotion to the system) and myself, but also our colleagues (who despised him) from the persecution of the communists. When someone fell ill, he took him to the best sanatorium in his car, he provided money, he looked after his family – in short, he behaved like a father to all of us.
Because of him I survived relatively easily the painful period while Népszava was transformed into a trade-union journal – which meant that its subscribers were raised from forty thousand to over a hundred thousand, but that nobody ever read it. Everything was fine until the party appointed as co-editor a one-time cloth-merchant by the name of Gacs. Gacs was a veteran communist and Révai’s brother-in-law: a handsome, insolent, fairly young man, who wore suits made of cloth from Manchester, had owned a small weaving-mill with a few workers whom he exploited mercilessly up to the time of nationalization, and who spent at least as much time commenting on the fact that he wore only suits made of Manchester cloth as he did on abusing capitalist exploitation. Although he understood not a word of Russian his desk was always adorned with the latest issue of Pravda; when someone entered his room it was with the Pravda that he quickly covered his packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes, so as not to be obliged to offer one. A short time before, he had married the widow of a Hungarian communist leader – a friend of his – who was executed in 1944. Gacs used to assure us that the memory of his friend was still green. Whenever – he explained – after a long day’s work he and his young wife went to bed, they always sat up on the pillow and rendered homage to his memory with one minute of silence, then – as he expressed himself – they had a little chat about the dear departed, before they got down to the brass tacks of love-making.
When Gacs took over his room in the editorial offices he brought with him a big, clumsy, red-headed worker with an asymetrical face. He introduced him as Bicsak, a communist hero, with whom he had worked in the underground movement, and he told us that from now on this young worker would read and judge every manuscript. A few days later I handed Bicsak a short article I had written on the three hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Westphalia. I was standing at the window of my room, looking out at the dark grey drizzle. I had just learned that my old friend, Rustem Vambéry, had died of heart failure in the New York subway and I was remembering some of his words on human dignity and Roman Law when Gacs sent for me. Bicsak, with his asymetrical face, was sitting in a deep leather armchair opposite Gacs’s desk; neither invited me to sit down. Gacs asked Bicsak whether he had read my article and what he thought of it, to which Bicsak replied with a single word: ‘Shit’. He pronounced this word with extraordinary rapidity and cheerfulness, emphasizing only the first letter, upon which Gacs informed me with unconvincing sympathy that Bicsak personified the working class and that what he didn’t understand, no other worker would understand. It was up to me to learn to write more plainly, in the language of the people. With this he dismissed me but first, so that I should harbour no illusions concerning the fate of my article, he tore it up and threw it into the wastepaper basket.
When, three days later, the same fate overtook my review of a performance of Macbeth, I asked one of my colleagues, a young worker, to intervene. This young man explained to Bicsak that I was one of the foremost poets in Hungary. Thereafter, to Gacs’s disappointment, Bicsak described every one of my articles not as ‘shit’, but as ‘a masterpiece’, even if I wrote absolute rubbish. A few months later it became known that Bicsak had been an enthusiastic member of the Hungarian Nazi party, one of the bodyguards of the arrow-cross leader, Szalasi, and had a dozen thefts and probably even a few murders on his conscience. I expected Gacs to feel embarrassed at having introduced this man as his comrade from the underground movement, but he did not. After having fired Bicsak, Gacs often boasted of having saved us from this hooligan.
In the following months Gacs was forever inventing new tricks to exasperate me. Horvath was unable to come to my aid because Gacs’s connections in the party were better than his, but I made him send me out of town as a reporter as often as possible – until Gacs was transferred to the trade union council.
On one of those trips I took Suzy with me.
We had become better acquainted by then, although our friendship had not gone very far. We used to go down to the espresso for a cup of coffee during or after office hours, and I kissed her when I arrived and left, but I was on the same footing with all female members of the staff, kissing the young because they were young, the old because they were old. I took her on this trip without any ulterior motive, just to have someone with whom to talk on the journey. I visited a few provincial museums; the director of one of them told me that a peasant had dug up the corner of a Bronze Age cemetery in the neighbourhood. I could take a look at it if I was interested. An hour later we were standing on a fragrant, breezy hillside. The short, skinny peasant was just opening up a new grave with extraordinary caution, inspired not so much by archaeology as by his respect for the dead however ancient they might be. He had put his greasy black hat on the ground, weighting it down with a stone so that the wind should not carry it away. We were gazing down into the open grave of a loving couple of the Bronze Age. They were lying one close behind the other, with knees drawn up. Their skulls and their broad, butterfly-winged hip-bones had been full uncovered, but their vertebrae were still embedded in the earth, and their arm-bones were not yet visible. The pink paint that had once enhanced their complexions was now sticking to the bone: the man leaned his forehead against the woman’s nape as if he wanted to kiss her neck, and the strawberry-ice-coloured bones in the grey grainy earth suggested not transience, but eroticism. Putting down his hoe the peasant stepped up to us. Suzy was standing close to me, and when, keeping my neck stiff, I glanced sideways at her, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that this was our wedding ceremony.
The next time I wanted to take her with me, Horvath protested. Suzy was a young girl, I a married man; he, as editor, could not condone such things. I didn’t argue and didn’t even tell him that I had left Valy some time ago and quite independently of Suzy. A few months earlier, while I was working hard on a play at about three o’clock in the morning, Valy had got out of bed, had come to stand before my desk and had begun to reproach me, apropos of nothing, because I had never bought her a hat. I had replied by enumerating the hats that I had not only bought her but had helped her to choose: a large straw hat with a red ribbon in Africa, a red velvet beret in New York, the grey pagoda-shaped one and the one she had copied from the portrait of Mad Joanna, Queen of Aragon. I had admitted that this was less than any woman had a right to, but still, they were hats. Facts did not alter Valy’s opinion and she continued to shout at me and abuse me, saying the most offensive things, for an hour and a half. I didn’t mind the abuse, I was used to it by then, but she screamed it at the top of her voice in a villa with walls as thin as paper. The next morning, on my way to Népszava, I took the same bus as the owner of the villa. He was standing next to me on the platform and said suddenly, very politely, without the slightest trace of irony: ‘Look, Mr Faludy, buy your wife a hat. If you don’t we shall never be able to sleep at night.’
I got off the bus, walked back to the top of Rose Hill and, with the excuse that I had forgotten to take something with me, threw my manuscripts, shaving things and toothbrush into an attaché case, left the house and never returned again.
Thus, after having visited the mile post, I wanted to see Suzy and I also felt that it would be proper to return and to attend the collective radio-listening. But I had other reasons for coming back. I was also interested in the fate of two of my colleagues who had been working with me on Népszava, had suddenly disappeared, and were now so-called witnesses in the Rajk trial (but under arrest, of course, as witnesses at a communist trial usually were). And I was further interested in the trial because of one of Rajk’s fellow-accused, Pal Justus, whom I had known very well.
Justus had been one of the leaders of the social democratic party, Rajk’s deadly enemy, and apart fr
om that was a scholarly, honest man, though just as fanatical in his own way as his fellow defendant and enemy. Justus had always treated me with esteem and friendship – an attitude which I did not reciprocate – and often sent his poems to me at Népszava. I did not publish them because I did not find them good enough.
Justus had co-operated with his close friend Zoltan Horvath in bringing about the merging of the two parties, but his motives were entirely different. He believed that there was no point in sacrificing ourselves for the sake of the West in exchange for a few short obituaries in the Daily Herald and the Populaire in which our names would be misspelt. He believed that if we yielded to the communists it would save thousands of social democratic leaders and workers from the scaffold and prison – even if we were called cowards by our Western friends, who so valiantly emboldened us from abroad. After the merger Justus was appointed director of the Hungarian radio, in celebration of which he sent me another sheaf of poems.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 28