My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  On a warm, spring afternoon Zoltan Horvath knocked on my door. He came to ask me what I intended to do with his friend’s poems, adding that the Saturday before he had heard Rakosi telling Justus that he intended to appoint him Minister of Public Culture. I should serve my own interest by having the poems printed. I looked up at him and Horvath blushed a fiery red; only then did it occur to him – although he was a clever man – that he had approached me with the clumsiest possible captatio benevolentiae. I replied that Justus’s poems would never appear in the literary columns of the paper, but if he wanted to publish them in the political columns I could do nothing to stop him. He asked where they were and I pointed to the waste-paper basket. Without showing the slightest resentment, Horvath knelt down by the basket and picked out his friend’s poems. Sitting there, looking down at my editor’s bald head and at the tufts of black hair protruding from his mobile nostrils, I suddenly felt sorry for the fat, panting man. He put the manuscript in his pocket and ran down to the printing shop. Two hours later he came into my room again, his eyes popping, begging me in a whisper to go down to the printing shop and take Justus’s poems out from the press. In the meantime he had learned that Justus had been arrested as Tito’s fascist agent, and accused of high treason and conspiracy.

  A few days later Justus’s thin, ugly, blonde wife, who had once worked as a secretary at Népszava, appeared at the editorial offices to talk to her husband’s best friend, Zoltan Horvath. She was turned away. She told me in the corridor, crying bitterly, that after her husband’s arrest she had been fired from her job without a penny; that the AVO had seized the little cash they had at home and her husband’s only treasure, his library; and that she had been forced to keep her little daughter at home because each morning her schoolmates had received her by shouting: ‘They’ll hang your daddy, they’ll hang your daddy!’

  I immediately began to make a collection for the unfortunate woman, with the help of Suzy and of the fat Ica, another member of the staff of Népszava, who had been secretary to Justus. A few hours later, at an editorial conference, Zoltan Horvath rose to speak. Without mentioning names and in a warning rather than an aggressive way, he said: ‘There are among us certain comrades who interpret socialist humanism quite falsely. From sheer sentimentalism they have been collecting for the wife of a traitor. You must realize, comrades, that a traitor has no wife, a traitor has no daughter, a traitor has no family – a traitor should go to hell!’ While he spoke, perspiration ran down his yellow-brown forehead – it was he who was the best friend of Justus and not we – and the tufts of black hair protruding from his nostrils were more lugubrious than ever.

  Two days later Zoltan Horvath came again to my room. He looked worried and said he had learned that the fat Ica was being followed by secret police, which he considered natural, since she had been secretary to Justus. Nevertheless, in Horvath’s opinion, it was easy for her to clear herself. In two days a party meeting would take place, where Ica should stand up and speak a few contemptuous words about Justus. As the widow of a communist martyr and the most stupid member of the social democratic party, she might justifiably expect some tolerance. But Ica refused to listen to Horvath’s advice. So would I persuade her – he still felt concern for her – to behave in a reasonable way: she could do nothing to save Justus, but by denying him she might save herself.

  I refused to comply with Horvath’s wish, replying that I certainly would not persuade anybody to do anything against his conscience. Just before the membership meeting, however, he himself spoke to her and almost begged her to rise at the meeting and declare how grateful she was to the AVO for having unmasked the imperialist agent Justus who had misled her with his cunning practices, so that now she cursed his memory. Horvath even took the trouble to write it down on a piece of paper for Ica to learn by heart, because it would sound more sincere, more heartfelt if she recited it without notes. Ica declared that nobody yet knew the charges brought against Justus; if the hearing proved the charges true she might change her opinion, but she was not prepared to pass sentence on her best friend before the Court did so. After this statement she no longer struck me as stupid. At the party meeting a long speech was made by a well-known communist journalist, who called Rajk and Justus imperialist beasts. After this speech, which lasted for about two hours, the chairman of the meeting suddenly addressed Ica and asked her whether she had anything to say. Ica stood up with a glowing red face and a piece of paper in her hand, stammered something which nobody could understand, and quickly sat down again. She disappeared that same night, two weeks after the arrest of Justus.

  Another two weeks later Mrs Justus was arrested for ‘trying to win sympathy and talking too much’. Zoltan Horvath came again to my room and said that he had a presentiment of evil concerning another member of our staff, Györgyi Vandori, who had also been a close friend of Justus. Horvath did not believe that Györgyi Vandori could save herself with a statement against Justus. Thus he only asked me to persuade her to burn her diary before the AVO got hold of it.

  At that moment I felt a cold shudder because it occurred to me that Horvath might be an agent provocateur of the secret police and that if he was I was lost. I always spoke to him frankly whenever we were alone. So I did not promise to talk with Györgyi Vandori about the ominous diary, although privately I decided to do so.

  Györgyi Vandori was a blue-stocking with a musky smell, who constantly molested me with her love. By then nearly everyone on Népszava avoided her, since it was common belief that she would soon be arrested. One evening she came into my room and complained with tears in her eyes that everybody was afraid of her and she had no one to talk with. I saw her home and tried to cheer her up, although she bored me to death and on top of that we were followed by detectives. It was then that I tried to persuade her to burn her ominous diary. I knew that she recorded all the gossip, private conversation and confidential information that she could collect, and that she had been doing it for years. I was also afraid that, with her feverish imagination, she invented both events and conversations. I tried to make it clear to her that if the AVO got hold of this diary its contents would provide evidence against dozens of innocent people, who might well be arrested and even killed in consequence of her literary ambitions. After I had pleaded with her for nearly an hour, she at last promised to burn the diary. Then, thinking perhaps I had seen her home because I had fallen in love with her, she invited me up to her flat and I refused politely. The next day she did not come to the office; she had been arrested.

  Nearly a fortnight passed, but Zoltan Horvath did not visit me in my room again. Finally I got nervous. I went to him and asked him who would be arrested next according to his presentiment of evil? For the first time in our acquaintance Horvath behaved brusquely, almost arrogantly, towards me. He assured me that the arrests had come to an end so that I could stop worrying and should mind my own business. He seemed very cheerful, as if he had fulfilled a difficult task and was expecting the praise to which his good work entitled him. The next day, early in the morning, Suzy and I left for our holidays on Lake Balaton. It was therefore only later that I learned that Horvath was arrested that very day on the charge of being ‘one of Tito’s most dangerous agents’.

  Since their arrest I had heard nothing about any of my acquaintances. It was only from the indictment that I knew of Justus’s role in the trial as an accomplice of Rajk (although they were deadly enemies and never spoke to each other), and that fat Ica would figure as a witness, that is to say as somebody who knew everything about the espionage relationship between Justus and the Yugoslavs. This seemed quite ridiculous. Allowing that Justus had such connections with the Yugoslavs, which was impossible, he certainly would not have told Ica a thing about them. I also learned that long passages from Györgyi Vandori’s diary would be read out at the trial, providing a wide range of evidence against Rajk and his accomplices.

  I was puzzled by this information, since the blue-stocking with the musky smell had prom
ised me to burn her diary. I could not tell whether she had kept her promise or not. Perhaps she really had burned the diary, but the police had made her re-write it with a text that met their demands even better than the original one. But she might just as well not have burned it. And I remembered how I had tried to comfort her just before her arrest, saying in my zeal things I never truly believed: for instance that they would certainly arrest me before her. I had also agreed emphatically when she cursed and abused the system in terms which even I found exaggerated. On that last evening, when I had to turn down her invitation, I said politely that I had a terrible headache from correcting a proof of a speech by Stalin, and that I always got a headache and nausea, when I had to read anything pronounced by that Caucasian highwayman. The stupid goose had offered her mouth for a kiss, but her eyes had been sparkling with mental activity. At that moment I had thought: this idiot has promised to burn her damned diary, but she will not burn it; no, she will run straight upstairs in order to write down quickly what I have just said about the Caucasian highwayman. All this I remembered later, very precisely. I tried to comfort myself with the theory that if she had indeed recorded my words, I should already be in prison. But I could not get rid of the evil presentiment that she had written down what I had said, and that she had not burned the diary.

  Because of all this I drove back to Budapest, passing the place where I usually stopped to dine: the Inn of Dunapentele. I had liked the inn-keeper’s stories, loved his wines and simply adored the medieval Hungarian dishes he served, such as the meat soup cooked with germinated wheat that his dwarf-wife had stirred on the stove, standing on a footstool. I couldn’t even picture the inn-keeper without the inn, which had been in his family for eleven generations, with its heavy smell of paraffin and pipe-smoke; and I had therefore been extremely surprised when, a few months before, he had come to visit the editorial offices and, catching sight of me, had drawn me aside.

  Almost inarticulate with fury, wiping his purple forehead with his red-checked handkerchief, he had told me that the party wanted to take away his inn. He knew that one could not piss against the wind. He had not long ago offered the inn, the wine-cellars, the pigs, and everything else to the state, on condition that he could stay on as tapman and his wife as cook. He didn’t even mind if they put a manager on his neck, so long as he was allowed to stay. But the local party secretary wanted to live in the inn himself, so he had been declared a kulak and he was told the inn would be requisitioned. He asked my help but I had to refuse; since he had been declared a kulak, not even a Minister could have saved him.

  That night he killed his screeching dwarf-wife and his silent, tubercular daughter with a pole-axe, slaughtered his cattle and pigs, opened the taps of his wine-barrels, then hanged himself on the lovely wooden gate through which so many diligences and coaches had driven. I had learned all this from an article entitled The Last Crime of a Bestial Kulak written by one of the young members of our staff.

  This article was never published. Imre Komor, the new editor-in-chief who had recently arrived from Moscow to occupy first Gacs’s and now Zoltan Horvath’s place, read the first few lines standing by the desk, as he always did, then returned it to its author. He raised his hand and smoothed his hair, all silver like a beautiful rococo wig. Then he spoke, briefly and succinctly, but with an amazing glibness, reminding one of the orators in the French National Convention of 1793, just as his handsome, noble, elegantly pink face, his straight, pointed nose and slightly bent back (that at times made him look like a hunchback, though he was not) reminded one of Maximilien de Robespierre. He explained that the purpose of a communist newspaper was not to disseminate information. ‘The press,’ he said, ‘to quote Lenin’s words, is a collective propagandist, a collective agitator. We do not write about murder, crime, traffic accidents. Except, of course, if they are reported from capitalist countries.’

  Thus there was no restaurant on the two hundred kilometres of highway. Before starting I bought food for the journey, and at noon I made the driver stop on a friendly hilltop. It was a warm, early autumn day; fleecy clouds swam in the sky from which a raindrop would fall on us from time to time, as if we were sitting in a greenhouse. I looked at my driver, at his brutal, stubborn, but intelligent face, and suddenly I felt like laughing.

  It was the same man, Kakuk, who had driven me three years before on my first tour. Before starting that morning, I had asked him to take me to the social democratic headquarters, where I had to talk to someone for a few minutes. When I came down and looked for the car I saw a skinny old bearded Jew standing on the pavement with Kakuk. ‘You rotten fascist scoundrel, what did you do with my dining-room carpet?’ he shouted and hit Kakuk with his stick. He repeated this performance several times and finally yelled for a policeman. At this Kakuk, who had until then been bearing the blows with patience, began to run away, followed by the old man.

  The big, heavy driver and the Jew at least seventy years old raced like athletes at the Olympic Games. I climbed into the car. In those days it was not unusual for someone to recognize his wife’s murderer in a tram, or his stolen treasures in the shop-window of a decent firm. Ten minutes later Kakuk reappeared panting, jumped in behind the wheel and drove off fast. I asked him whether he had indeed been a member of the arrow-cross party.

  ‘Of course I was,’ he replied.

  ‘And what makes you a social democrat today?’

  ‘The same thing. One must make a living.’

  ‘Did you believe the Nazis?’

  ‘Exactly as I believe the social democrats today and the bolsheviks tomorrow!’ he replied, smiling at me.

  True to his name, which means cuckoo, he kept a couple of girlfriends in every county. I was always careful to spend the night in or near towns where they lived, because in the morning Kakuk would show up sleepy, but always with a fat goose or a basketful of eggs in his arms. He was grateful for my consideration but our friendship was restricted to the duration of our trips. At the editorial offices he behaved as if he did not know me at all. Lately, however, he had begun to treat me with a certain gentleness and now, while he was stuffing chicken, green pepper and pickled cucumber into his mouth, I noticed him watching me with anxious eyes.

  ‘They’ll get you too, Comrade Faludy,’ he said at long last. He spoke calmly, unemotionally, and swallowed down the food.

  ‘They won’t,’ I said indifferently. ‘I had nothing to do with Rajk.’

  ‘And what had Justus to do with Rajk?’

  ‘But I am not interested in politics.’

  ‘Those on top all sit in the same sledge. The turn of each comes to be thrown to the wolves. They always throw out someone.’

  ‘Nobody wants my job. My work cannot be accomplished by …’

  ‘Don’t say it! That’s exactly what Comrade Justus said two days before he was arrested. As we were stopping at a street light.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked, reaching for the wine-bottle. Unfortunately the bad road had spoiled the good wine; it had no taste left, and it was warm into the bargain.

  ‘Comrade Justus said that he was indispensable. And yet he did not write articles as beautiful as yours.’

  ‘Do you read my articles, then? Do you understand them?’

  ‘The hell I do! But they are beautiful,’ he said with awe. ‘It would be better for you if they were less beautiful.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they can see from those articles that you are not one of them.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, rising. ‘Now I shall walk on a bit in the maize field. In ten minutes, when you have finished your cigarette, come after me.’

  ‘I should like to ask you something if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Go ahead!’

  ‘Why did you come back from America?’

  ‘Because one doesn’t like to live in a foreign land.’

  ‘I see,’ Kakuk said, digesting my answer. ‘But when you saw that you had come to a pigsty, why didn’t you go back?
Why?’

  His question was passionate, almost demanding.

  ‘They guard the border. With dogs, machine-guns, barbed-wire fences. You know it.’

  ‘I do. But why didn’t you escape when the road was still open?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I missed the last train, I suppose,’ I replied and walked away through the field towards the hilltop. I did not look back but I could feel the driver’s sharp, suspicious and yet admiring glance between my shoulder-blades. He must have thought that I was an American spy, for what other reason could there be for my being in Hungary?

  It was exactly three o’clock by the large clock in the editorial offices when I tried to sneak into Suzy’s room but was intercepted by Annie, who stood watch in the corridor to catch as many members of the staff as possible for the collective radio-listening; She was a tiny, energetic, little middle-aged widow of good bourgeoise background, working at Népszava as a typist, and because she was terrified of being fired – she had a son of sixteen to bring up – she did her utmost to appear a good communist. Because of her zeal she was made the party group steward and was given a thousand little jobs to do. There was no membership meeting at which she didn’t speak, though she never denounced anyone. The kind of thing she would say was: ‘From this platform I call the attention of the women of the world …’ or, ‘I warn Mr Truman and suggest that he …’ for which she was usually enthusiastically applauded. Imre Komor, our editor with the Robespierre face, used on these occasions to turn to me and say loudly, ‘Oh, sancta simplicitas …’ Of the fifty members of the editorial staff, we were the only two who understood even that much Latin.

  In the course of a few months Annie had become completely transfigured; she walked on clouds, bathed in the transcendental happiness of a pious Catholic. She didn’t understand a word of the communist dogma but identified herself with it completely. She regarded it as a privilege to work day and night for the party, was radiant with joy at having been given an opportunity to prove her importance from daybreak till midnight. She organized, managed, decorated, collected membership fees and chided those coming late to work, all without malice but with a frightening arrogance.