My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  It was absolutely necessary to listen to the indictment against Rajk, she explained. However much I might know about everything, it would teach me how to recognize the cunningly masked imperialist spy who had penetrated the party and how to unmask him. In addition, the party would certainly appreciate my show of interest. She pronounced the word ‘party’ with panting emphasis and awe; to her it meant something like a combination of Orwell’s televisor-network and of the omnipotent, omniscient deity. While she was lecturing me, Pal Gedeon, the foreign editor, came out of his room. Gedeon was a professional journalist, a tall, thin, quick and polite young man with a bird’s head, a small moustache and thinning hair. He knew exactly what he was being paid for and therefore never omitted the Great Stalin to whom we owe everything, the Glorious Soviet Union, leader of the peace camp, or the Tito, the lap-dog of the imperialists led on a dollar-leash from any of his six fluent, garrulous, and wholly mendacious weekly articles. Less than a year earlier Gedeon had still been calling Tito the partisan leader and freedom fighter of unequalled heroism. I usually thought of my colleague as a waiter who served rotten fish to the guests with perfect manners and on a silver platter. As Gedeon was usually very busy and difficult to entice out of his room, Annie immediately concentrated her energies on him and I could slip unnoticed into Suzy’s room.

  I hitched myself on to the desk, pushing off, as if by accident, Stalin’s brochure on nationality problems and shifting Suzy’s red handbag from the middle of the desk. Some little time earlier I had criticized the party’s agricultural policies in front of Suzy; when I had just about convinced her with my arguments she had suddenly declared that in spite of all, she agreed with the party. If the party said that her red handbag was white she would, henceforth, regard it as white. Since then I had persistently persecuted the handbag, pushed it, kicked it whenever I could. When I had turned my back to the portrait of the Caucasian and Suzy had put her handbag safely into the drawer of her desk so that all bad demons were dispelled, I took her hands in mine and began to play with her fingers.

  She said she was glad that I had come back from the country so soon, or rather that I had come back at all, instead of roaming around or running away as was almost to be expected from someone not so much fickle, but rather dreamy and absent-minded, like myself. Then she looked me over carefully to see whether I was still as agreeable and handsome as she usually found me. Finally, she made sure with a quick glance that there was nothing in the corner of my eye that would lead her to suppose that I had been up to mischief. She also looked me over to make sure my permanent good mood was still in force, undisturbed by even a shadow of sorrow. She did this so that she could help and comfort me if necessary; assist me, whom, from the human point of view, she considered a unique phenomenon although from a political point of view I was an old-fashioned, mild, bourgeois democrat who was unable to understand the needs of our time.

  I could not tell Suzy about my experiences on this trip, nor could I ask about the Rajk trial because that might have led to a quarrel. And as to the affairs of the newspaper: they held no interest whatsoever for me. When we were sitting like this I usually felt like a stupid country bumpkin who, having nothing to say, strokes his beloved’s arm or plays with her hand. At other times, after a brief silence, we would begin to talk: I would tell Suzy about my African and American adventures, events that had no connection with the two of us nor with the present; or I would make love to her in extemporized verse, to which she listened with some surprise but great patience. When travelling in a bus together we sometimes pretended not to know each other; I would make passes at her like a practised woman-chaser and she would play the shocked and offended lady until, accepting my invitation to come and see my etchings, she got off the bus with me to the great indignation of the passengers. At other times we amused ourselves by discussing our financial affairs in public in a loud voice but not according to the decimal system, which completely mystified our listeners: ‘You have four forints? Excellent. So have I. Four and four makes thirteen …’

  Now, however, I remained silent, playing with Suzy’s long fingers. I threw a suspicious glance towards the wooden case above the window that held the heavy iron shutters, to make sure that there were no new finger-marks or scratches on it, indicating that in my absence it had been opened and equipped with a microphone. A yellow, autumn sun was lighting up the narrow strip above the curtain. In the meantime they had switched on the wireless in the library opening from the corridor opposite Suzy’s room. It was not the trial yet; a monotonous, nasal voice was reading something but the words became audible only when Almassi, the librarian, opened the door without knocking. He pushed his long, pale face obliquely through the opening, his greedy eyes darting around furtively like those of an animal in its lair. The librarian was a police spy. With the exception of Suzy, every member of the staff was aware of it. We also knew that he was being blackmailed because of his fascist past and that he could save himself from prison only by supplying other inmates in his stead. In the afternoons he went from room to room, asking everyone stupid and provocative questions, then ran back to the library to write his report. He had to hurry because he was very conscientious but possessed a bad memory.

  ‘Aren’t you coming to listen to the trial?’

  I did not move but grasped Suzy’s fingers strongly in mine. She looked up at me questioningly.

  … Rajk and his vile accomplices wanted to destroy our new, happy and free life… I heard the bored, nasal voice of the radio-commentator. These conspirators and spies, agents of the imperialists and Tito…

  ‘We are not coming,’ I replied to the police spy.

  ‘And why not?’ Almassi asked sharply.

  ‘No comment,’ I replied and indicated with a flick of my wrist that he was dismissed.

  For a while I listened for his receding step to make sure he was no longer at the door. Then I dropped Suzy’s fingers. The monotonous nasal voice stopped and suddenly I heard Rajk – the voice which I remembered from the Paris café. He was replying to the presiding judge’s questions, lengthily and fluently as if he were reciting long monologues from various plays; but I could not quite get what he was saying. I was thinking that now the police spy must be busily writing his report: ‘While everyone was listening to the radio broadcast of the Rajk trial George Faludy and Suzy Szegö refused to join the collective,’ or perhaps, ‘Faludy and his mistress, afraid of being unmasked, hide in their room like cornered beasts.’

  The door of the library opposite opened again and suddenly I could clearly hear Rajk’s voice replying to one of the judge’s questions:

  ‘Yes. I recognize the photograph. This is the field guards’ hut near Paks where I met Rankovich. And this is mile post No. 116.’

  I bent forward a little and caressed Suzy’s cheek with my face. My eyeballs, which for more than thirty years had functioned smoothly like the finest Swedish ball-bearings, suddenly felt like two dry clots of earth in their sockets. My toes, which at other times lay quietly side by side in my shoes, like sleeping horses in a stable, were curling up as they do with cramp. What caused these symptoms? Was I afraid that in a few days I would share the fate of Rajk, Justus, Zoltan Horvath; that I, too, would be forced to confess that I had regularly met the head of the American Secret Service in the middle of a maize-field in Transdanubia, to get orders for the preparation of Rakosi’s assassination? Or was my nausea mainly the result of the circumstance that I could not confess my fears to anybody, not even to this girl whom I loved and with whose fingers I was now playing? Or had I been overwhelmed by moral indignation like some Frenchman at the beginning of the century, in Dreyfus’s times, so that I longed to dash into the library, cut the radio to pieces, jump on the table and cry out the innocence of Rajk, until they sent me to join him in the box? For is it not easier to be hanged innocently than to witness the hanging of somebody else, who is innocent? I again touched Suzy’s cheeks with my face, and sighed.

  ‘What is bothering you?
’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Me? Nothing,’ I lied, jumping off the desk. I walked to the window; the yellow light was still shining above the curtain:

  … Look, love, what envious streaks

  Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;

  Cold light, and against it I would shut my eyes,

  Sleeping in the shadow of your hair, blonde branches

  In which the autumn weaves no spiders’ webs,

  For not a hundred thousand brethren

  Can love with a love so strong as that between us.

  So what would I care for our houses’ opposition –

  If it were not that I see your Capulets

  Stab from behind, and stab with poisoned knives,

  And if you did not call their evil good…

  I was so deeply engrossed in my poem that I did not notice Imre Komor coming into the room on soundless rubber soles until he was standing by the desk. He had come into my room just as soundlessly a year ago, after his return from Moscow, where he had spent twenty years as an emigrant. At that time he had stayed in the office for no more than half an hour and the members of the staff had waited in crowds outside his door: each anxious to call Komor’s attention to his own merits and the shortcomings of the others. Komor, however, had slipped out by a side door and come straight to my room in his elegant black suit, with his silver head, his compressed, haughty lips and Robespierre profile. We had talked for two and a half hours about Aeschylus, on whom he knew everything, even that he had hated the Athenian mob and people’s courts, just as Komor knew that I hated the communist system and the communist people’s courts. He had brought up the subject of Aeschylus in order to charm me with his knowledge, sweep me off my feet with his erudition and show me that not all communists were barbarians as I probably believed, at least not he. Before leaving he had pointed to a bilingual edition of Poe on my desk, and had asked me what I was doing with that rotten, decadent book.

  ‘I am reviewing it,’ I replied.

  ‘Consider it as expropriated,’ he declared and, pocketing the book, returned to his room to let in the intriguers. That same evening, at the editorial meeting, he repeated every word they had said – indicating the source – and while the culprits hid their faces, he threw me a triumphant glance. Three weeks later, when I visited him at his home, I discovered the volume of Poe, read almost to shreds, on his night-table.

  Komor belonged to the old, so-called great guard. Everyone knew that he had excelled in the international communist movement since his early youth not only with his burning idealism and intelligence but also with his personal courage. First, he became secretary to the Hungarian communist leader Béla Kun. When, in 1937, Béla Kun was arrested in Moscow, then killed, Komor was also imprisoned as a Trotskyist. He was released only seven years later. But this he never mentioned, not even in the form of an allusion. Owing to his merits and his talents he was a member of the highest party bureaucracy; but his attitude concerning his position was conspicuously ambivalent.

  On the one hand, nothing was more important to him than that he should receive an invitation to the gala performance at the Opera every seventh of November, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and the question whether he would sit on the platform or in the stalls, and in which row. When, ten days after his arrival from Moscow, he had still received no invitation, he raged, wept and shouted at his colleagues – which conflicted strangely with his good manners and his pride. When he fell ill, which happened rather often because of his bad heart, he boasted to everyone that Rakosi had telephoned personally and that Révai had visited him. This boastfulness also conflicted with Komor’s good taste, but still, it was understandable. The invitation to the Opera, and Rakosi’s telephone call were indications of his privileged place in the hierarchy. The loss of these privileges was equivalent to the loss of his job, misery, prison, or even the scaffold.

  On the other hand, however, Komor avoided the company of the Muscovites, though this caste stuck together even when they hated each other bitterly – and in spite of the fact that only good connections ensured him the invitation to the Opera. At first I believed that Komor despised the practice of bootlicking because he trusted his own merits, although he must have known that no merits can survive in a people’s democracy without bootlicking. Only later I realized that Komor, although he never disputed their leadership, must have hated the cynical Rakosi, the raving madman Révai, the stupid Farkas and the cunning racketeer Zoltan Vas. Komor was fanatical, cultured, an initially honest and pure partisan of the communist ideal and he must have known that his comrades had never been honest or pure partisans of communism, not even fanatics – with the exception of the madman Révai.

  He looked up to power but he despised those in power; the only problem I did not understand was why Komor did not do anything to get hold of this power, although it was due to him, by virtue of his past, his knowledge, his ability and his talent. I did not find the answer until the afternoon when we were sitting in his room with Suzy, as usual, and while chatting Komor was informed by telephone of Rajk’s arrest.

  He turned to us. ‘They have arrested Rajk.’ He kept silent for some five or six seconds. Then he raised his hand as usual and smoothed his hair, that all-silver hair like a beautiful rococo wig. ‘How fortunate that I never go anywhere,’ he said at last, with some humiliation. This was his only comment on the Rajk affair.

  Among the members of the editorial staff he was on friendly terms only with Suzy and myself. He despised the professional journalists as insignificant people or former social democrats; and he simply ignored the few dozen workers newly appointed to the paper by the party’s cadre department. Not because they had as little chance of becoming journalists as a fifty-year-old fat lady of becoming a ballet dancer: this he did not care about. He merely felt disgusted by the unreliable proletarians whom – unlike other communist intellectuals who idealized the workers – he did not fear. He knew beyond a shadow of doubt that they were opportunists and cheats, not real communists like himself.

  ‘All right, then,’ he said when he came into Suzy’s room on the day of Rajk’s trial and closed the door, silently and softly so as not to offend the voice of the former Minister of the Interior as he shut it out of the room. I enjoyed his appearance, as I always did; and on this occasion I was also relieved in that I was now breathing the same air as someone who, like myself, was convinced of Rajk’s innocence, although he never would mention it. And not only would he never mention it; he probably fully agreed that this man should be convicted on charges of which he was innocent. His intelligence, his erudition and his moral sense did not prevent Komor from accepting every measure taken by the people’s democracy; what is more, to save his moral sense he used his intelligence and erudition to create false justifications for those measures.

  He threw us a fugitive glance, not longer than a tenth of a second, while I registered malevolently that presumably he too was unable to stand the solitude in his room while Rajk was speaking. Then he smoothed his silver hair with the back of his hand. That meant that he had done his best, that he had struggled against our love as long as he could, mainly because, owing to my travels abroad, my political attitude and my way of thinking he did not consider my future in the people’s democracy to be promising and had therefore repeatedly suggested that Suzy find herself another mate. Our stubborn resistance, however, had gradually made him yield; more than that, he was now helping us to get married, had promised to find us a place to live.

  ‘All right, then,’ he said again and placed two manuscripts on the desk: an article of mine on the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth, handed in before I went on my trip, and one by Suzy on cosmopolitanism, which he had wanted me to write but which I had refused to.

  ‘I congratulate you on your Goethe article,’ he turned to me. ‘It is a masterpiece. I haven’t read so many interesting and original thoughts about Goethe for a long time. We shall not publish it.’

  ‘Wh
y not, if you find it so good?’ Suzy exploded.

  ‘This article has two faults,’ said Komor, standing straight in a corner of the room as if he were addressing the Convention. ‘George Lukacs does not write for the papers, Révai knows nothing about Goethe. Consequently, the article on Goethe to be published in Szabad Nép will be much inferior to yours. Do you need that? Would it be good for you if the article on Goethe published in the party’s official organ was much worse than the one we published under your name? That would only cause trouble. For all of us.

  ‘The second difficulty is that you have original ideas on Goethe. Who can guarantee, how can you know in advance, that the party will approve post-festa of what you write? How do you know whether someone might not attack you, pick a fight with you? Why didn’t you simply pick up George Lukacs’s book on Goethe and copy out part of it? Something written by Lukacs can cause trouble only for Lukacs, not for you. You see,’ he continued with a furtive smile, meaning that he wanted to defend me against his communist comrades, ‘Suzy has written an excellent, articulate article on something you wouldn’t even touch.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mean that I write better than George?’ Suzy asked with indignation. ‘Besides, I quoted the whole article from a brochure!’

  ‘No,’ Komor replied, ‘that is not what I meant to say. You both write very well. But this article of Suzy’s shows not only that she writes well. It shows more. It shows that Suzy knows what has to be written. It shows that she is on the road to becoming a true bolshevik.’