My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  I looked at Komor, searching for a sign of irony in his face. There was none. He was gazing at Suzy happily, almost proudly.

  ‘And how would you define a real bolshevik?’ I asked him. ‘Someone who believes in Marxism–Leninism …’

  ‘To be a bolshevik is not a question of faith. Our Bible does not begin with the sentence: “In the beginning was the Word.” We say: “In the beginning was the deed.” What could you do for the party, Suzy?’ he asked her.

  Suzy blushed.

  ‘I could die for it,’ she said after a second’s consideration.

  ‘That is not enough,’ Komor said with obvious disappointment. ‘One must be able to kill for the party.’

  ‘Kill innocent people?’ I barred his way to prevent him from leaving the room on this highly effective curtain line.

  ‘In the absolute sense, everyone is innocent,’ Komor replied. ‘And in the relative sense everyone is guilty whom the party declares to be guilty.’

  He went out of the door, with the manifest intention of going back into his room, but he found himself opposite the door of the library, through which Rajk’s voice was coming loudly. He remained rooted to the spot, but instead of consternation, he showed absent-mindedness, ennui, even some self-complacency, like someone who had witnessed hundreds and hundreds of trials. As soon as he noticed my scrutinizing glance, he smoothed his hair with the back of his hand and turned his beautiful profile away.

  ‘I wanted to organize the armed forces with which I intended to overthrow the people’s democracy from the Hungarian fascist émigrés living in Yugoslavia, Austria and Italy,’ said the voice. ‘In addition to this armed force Prime Minister Tito also offered me other armed forces …’

  ‘Did Prime Minister Tito also offer you other armed forces?’ the judge cut in.

  I cast a mischievous glance at Komor, who noticed my glance as well as the faulty timing. Then, with an apologetic and at the same time encouraging flick of his wrist, he hurried away. Suzy and I, contrary to our usual practice, had gone out into the corridor with him when he left the room, so that we too were opposite the open door of the library.

  Some thirty members of the staff were sitting on chairs and on the green table listening to Rajk’s confession. Of the fourteen original, social democratic members of the staff, only seven had kept their jobs; the rest were dismissed as soon as the communists took over. I was the only one of the seven now present. The others were writing the papers for the next day. The thirty people in the library did not write; they had been sent to the paper on orders of the cadre department of the party and spent their time chatting, sitting around, discussing politics; sometimes they wrote a news report or tried to rewrite the news bulletin, but it was never publishable. They could be classified in three very distinctive categories. Some of them were honest workers, ordered by the party to join the paper against their wishes. These longed to be back in their old jobs and felt ashamed of getting a salary for loafing. Others were dilettantes, who joined the paper by pulling party strings; these wanted to have their poems printed and felt humiliated when they were refused. The rest of them – the greatest part – were ragamuffins without inhibitions; these knew quite well that they need do no work while they could secure promotion by bragging, denunciation and police-connections. Almassi, the informer, was sitting at his desk with his back to the listeners, poring over his books; from time to time he turned sharply and measured everybody with his eyes.

  Rajk spoke fluently for at least ten minutes about his meeting with Rankovich; as if he were speaking a monologue on the stage. Meanwhile I tried to discover the message hidden in the flick of Komor’s wrist as he ran away. Probably he wanted to let me know with the apologizing part of the gesture that the staging of the trial was still somewhat inadequate. With the encouraging part of the gesture he was indicating that methods of communist propaganda would improve, and that I would gradually get used to them, as he had done.

  I watched my thirty colleagues listening to Rajk. I found the view rather comforting. They all sat with downcast eyes or gazed at the corners of the room, at the bookshelves or at the wall, avoiding the picture of Lenin in the centre; some of them put their arms round the back of their chairs, as if they were clinging to them. A balding young man whose ears had turned purple sat directly behind the door, some two feet from me. Half a year ago he had changed his German surname to Rajk, which explained the present colour of his ears. He twisted and turned nervously on his chair. As soon as Rajk had finished his monologue, the presiding judge asked some questions and ordered a break.

  ‘He is a terrible beast… that… that… that Laszlo Rajk,’ muttered Rajk’s namesake.

  Seeking help, I took Suzy’s arm. We were standing very close to each other and I thought: none of these thirty people believe in Rajk’s guilt any more than I do – but I turn for help to the only person who does believe in it.

  ‘Let us go down to the street,’ I said.

  While we walked down the stairs it occurred to me that I was doomed. Even if they do not kill me, it would not be worthwhile to stay alive. I felt only one sincere wish: to talk to a Westerner and tell him all about it.

  My wish was fulfilled earlier than I had hoped. A few weeks after Rajk had been executed, Julien Benda came for a visit to Budapest. The author of The Treason of Writers, whom I knew from Paris, telephoned saying that he would like to see me and would gladly agree to an interview. We met in the hall of the Hotel Bristol, a hotel reserved mostly for foreign guests. He had aged a great deal since I had last seen him in Paris ten years before, but he seemed very happy and self-assured. An insignificant journalist sat next to him, and two men whom Benda believed to be interpreters – correct, in so far as they both spoke French, but they were also agents of the secret police. Benda told us what he had seen in town and then began to talk about the real purpose of his visit: the Rajk trial. He gave a pretty exact summary of what he had heard in France concerning Rajk’s alleged innocence and said that he hadn’t been quite sure what to believe. Then he went on to tell us that he had been talking to writers, lawyers, criminologists and politicians in Budapest, among whom there was not a single communist.

  These men had openly admitted that on many questions they disagreed with the party. They went on to explain to him in great detail exactly what Rajk had done, and how conspiracy, espionage and treason had been proved beyond a shadow of doubt. On the basis of what he had heard he could, at last, make up his mind. The verdict passed upon Rajk was just; it was the duty of every state to protect itself against such criminals. He expressed his gratitude to the Hungarian government for having invited him. Returning to Paris, he would now write a book about it all to open the eyes of Western public opinion concerning the Rajk affair, and unmask those fascists who were spreading vile slander against the Hungarian people’s democracy.

  While he was talking he brought down his heavy stick again and again on the thick grey carpet under our feet as if to give added emphasis to his words. Several times I was sorely tempted to interrupt and tell him a few facts. For instance, that all the people he had talked with were professional non-party members, as we used to call them, and that before meeting him they had been briefed by the party’s press department. I wanted to tell him that Professor Gyula Szekfü, whom he had seen, and who was the greatest living historian of the country, was blackmailed into obedience by the party. Should he disobey, they would deprive him of the expensive medicine with the help of which he prolonged his life from one day to the next. I wanted to beg him to write, not about Rajk but about us, who would sooner or later suffer the same monstrous fate, and who were being literally fried alive by these red devils steeped in inferiority complexes and ridiculous even in their terribleness, just as Jan Masaryk had foretold: Jan Masaryk, who had since been pushed out of the window of his palace. Even so – I should have told Benda – we could somehow put up with our fear and helplessness, our moral misery and the stench of our burning flesh and rotting souls, if w
e did not also have to put up, from time to time, with visits from the West of decent old nincompoops like himself, Andersen-Nexö or Eluard who refused to face facts or preferred to believe the propaganda and the Byzantine hospitality of the police state, then wrote a book on how happy, cheerful and healthy we were.

  The detectives sat quietly sipping their coffee, offering American cigarettes and jumping from their seats to give us a light. At times they gave me a friendly, conspiratorial glance. That they regarded me as one of them, a cynical scroundrel, was the most unbearable of all. Had I been able to communicate my thoughts to Benda he might never have begun that apology for the Rajk trial left unfinished because of his death. The communists could never convince a visitor so thoroughly that a well-aimed kick in the small of his back could not bring him to his senses. I did not even have to fear that the detectives would drag me away with the excuse that I had gone out of my mind and was raving, although I was certain that they would have been convinced of it. My arrest could have taken place only after parting with Benda, in the door of the hotel. Next day they would no doubt force me to telephone him from the police HQ and tell him that I was recovering from my nervous breakdown somewhere in the countryside, naturally at government expense. But then, I would never see Suzy again and would now be drinking the last espresso coffee of my life. This sacrifice was neither subjectively nor objectively worth the effort of telling Benda the truth. And yet, I was filled with a burning desire to do so.

  I thought I would try a few cautious allusions. I quoted from Jean Barois and Histoire Contemporaine, without mentioning the name of Captain Dreyfus. When this failed, I compared our French guest to Walafridus Strabo: I told him that his good health and vivacity contrasted with the physical condition of the Reichenau Abbot just as flagrantly as the book he was going to write on the Rajk affair and Hungary in general contrasted with Strabo’s book – at least in so far as their reality or irreality were concerned. Benda certainly knew that during his grave illness Strabo had seen in his visions the hell which, after recovery, he described in a poem. Thus, the old man should have understood my allusion: that the Abbot of Reichenau had described Hell although he had never seen it, while he himself had visited Hell without realizing it. Unfortunately I failed again. I had to be so careful in my choice of words that the unsuspecting old man let them go by unnoticed. I was about to give up when Benda got up and limped away towards the WC. I hurried after him triumphantly: after all, truth remains truth even in a lavatory. However, a man in civilian clothes, obviously a detective, nipped through the door before we reached it and locked himself into one of the closets. Another one, who emerged from a corner of the hall, placed himself close to us.

  ‘I can see you feel happy now that you are back home,’ Benda said to me.

  ‘Like Arius in Constantinople,’ I replied.

  The old gentleman seemed to deliberate; he must have remembered that Arius was murdered in a public lavatory by his political opponents in Constantinople.

  ‘You still possess a sense of humour,’ he said vaguely. I should have liked to go on talking, but as I had already finished the business which the old man hadn’t even begun, and as the detectives were throwing suspicious glances at my trousers, I had to leave so as not to suffer the same fate as Arius.

  Six months later, towards the middle of July, I set out on a hot Thursday afternoon from the Népszava office to visit Bandi Havas. A few days before, he had telephoned me, asking me to visit him at his office in my own interest. He added that he would be very glad to see me again. The invitation itself seemed no less enigmatic than the emphatic warning, so I had certain misgivings when at last I decided to go.

  The previous autumn he had been Councillor at the Hungarian Legation in Paris. When the Ambassador, Count Michael Karolyi, had come to Budapest in an attempt to persuade Rakosi, in his grandiose and naïve way, to pardon Rajk who had confessed to crimes that, in Karolyi’s opinion, he could never have committed, Bandi had sent a telegram to the Hungarian government in his own name and that of the Legation staff, in which he demanded that the fascist beast Laszlo Rajk be punished with the utmost severity. Had Bandi acted in the same way in Budapest, I should have paid no attention to it. But Bandi lived in Paris at that time, under the star of the categorical imperative. His wife and his little son were with him in Paris and Rajk was not only his superior but also an old friend. Bandi did not have to apply to himself the less severe moral standards imposed at home by circumstances and the will to survive. He should have resigned from his post and spoken up for Rajk on the Paris radio.

  Karolyi, whom Rakosi dared not have arrested, resigned after his return to Paris. Bandi, however, remained in his job. Later, as a reward for his loyalty, he was given the task of organizing the Legation’s espionage service in Paris. He approached this task with great zeal. He stuck a false red moustache on his upper lip from under which his huge teeth protruded, betraying his identity from half a mile away, put a beret on his head, donned a pair of dirty, frayed trousers and had himself driven into the suburbs of Paris to visit some dives. Of the first four men he tried to win for the Hungarian espionage service and to whom he immediately handed over large sums of money in the lavatories of the bistros, three were agents of the Deuxième Bureau, and the fourth – a Hungarian university student – gave him a good beating, on the spot. Thereupon the French government – which could not be expected to possess a sense of humour in such affairs – immediately expelled him as persona non grata.

  When Bandi returned to Budapest he was given a good dressing-down by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and dismissed on the spot. For two weeks everyone thought that he would be arrested, but instead he was appointed personal secretary to the Managing Director of our largest publishing house, the Athenaeum. After such preliminaries this was regarded as a favour. Although Bandi’s office was only a hundred yards, as the crow flies, from my own – we were in the same block of buildings – I never saw him. I heard that he avoided his old friends, frequented only party officials, began every tenth sentence with ‘we proletarians’, was unbelievably arrogant with his subordinates including typists, janitors and chauffeurs, and that his hands were trembling. He had plenty of reason for the latter. As a one-time member of the communist underground, Rajk’s friend, Tito’s guest at Bled and a refugee to France and England, he could easily have been arrested and accused of having been Horthy’s police spy and a French, British or Yugoslav agent.

  The idea of meeting him made me shudder. As I walked slowly down the dark, cool staircase at the Népszava office I felt perspiration break out over my body although it was at least ten degrees colder here than in my room upstairs. The sweating was restricted to the triangle between my two armpits and my navel, although in more serious cases it had also extended to my neck. At such times my silk shirt felt like a concrete tube and my nipples pricked me as if their points were suddenly turned inwards. This time I perspired rather mildly: my thoughts concerning Bandi’s fate had reminded me of my own future, but my excitement was counterbalanced to a certain extent by the safety and calm of the cool, dark staircase.

  Our editorial offices were on the fifth floor of the building and the staff always went up and down in the lift. I too would use the lift when I arrived with Suzy, but when I arrived alone and someone else invited me into it, I would run up the stairs with youthful ardour, or pretend to have a phobia against lifts. In that way I could enjoy the calm of the staircase several times a day, and had spent the best moments of the last few months on it. The staircase held three main joys for me. Firstly, I could think there undisturbed, something I could do nowhere else. Secondly, I could not be arrested there. In my office or at the villa belonging to Népszava where I lived, I could have been picked up at any hour of the day or night. They could also arrest me in the street. Many of my acquaintances disappeared in AVO automobiles which stopped by the kerb, pulled in by an impersonal arm reaching out for them. They could have arrested me at the door of the office or at the
door of the building, but while I was walking up or down the stairs I felt absolutely safe. Thirdly, I met no acquaintances there. Although I rarely intentionally met anyone apart from Suzy and my mother, I could nor help running into acquaintances in the doorways of cafés or restaurants, in the lobbies of theatres or cinemas. If they were party members or public functionaries our meeting threw them into such a state of panic that it was really embarrassing. They looked at me as though I were a ghost – sometimes a walking corpse, whose presence must be avoided at all costs, but sometimes a vampire who must be propitiated. There were some who, in the first interval of a play, approached me with open arms and stuck to me like leeches until we had to go back to our seats – but who in the next interval turned away their heads when they caught sight of me at the buffet.

  Today, as usual, I was wandering down the stairs at a snail’s pace, enjoying the situation. I stopped on every step, shifting the weight of my body from one foot to the other. Just below the fourth floor, a dirty little frosted-glass window high in the wall admitted some light; whenever I reached this point I would hold up my right hand to admire the length of my fingers, the suntanned smoothness of my skin and the regular, silky half-moons at the base of my nails. Sometimes I would stroke my thigh or grip my shoulder, shuddering with pleasure. My limbs were still hard and smooth, there was no middle-aged flabbiness about them and I was still whole.

  As I wandered down I realized that not only my body but also my senses, my thoughts, my soul were still unharmed. Or rather that my entire being, my mode of thinking, my personality, had remained constant, not only during the last four years but ever since my university days: incapable of development but also incapable of degradation and adaptation, youthful and conservative, naïve and uninfluenceable, rebellious but stuck to one place for ever. I regarded the communist ideology as I did any other ideology, as a yoke, a thumb-screw which, even though imposed on millions and apparently greatly enjoyed by a few, still remained a yoke and a thumb-screw. I had rid myself even of the illusions I still cherished on my way home from America: that communism disagreed only with individualists like myself, but agreed with the large masses of the people; or that the realization of the second slogan of the French Revolution, even though on the lowest possible level, could hold some significance in a country where it was by no means advisable to remember the first.