My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  My outlook, mode of thinking and personality were thus unaltered, but what good did it do me? I wrote very few poems and, when I did, I hurried to the Széchenyi Library, asked for one of the bound volumes of dailies of the 1848-49 War of Independence and, beginning with the last page and working backwards, I underlined in the hundred-year-old newspaper the letters that added up to my poem. On my way home I tore up my manuscript and, rolling up the slivers of paper, threw them one by one into manholes. As I was remembering this I passed the second floor and my thoughts returned to the staircase. From the darkness and safety I must inevitably continue down to the doorway blocked by huge bales of paper and guarded, since an attempt at sabotage, by a porter who looked me over suspiciously every time I left.

  But even before the attempt at sabotage, whenever I saw the bales of paper in the doorway it always occurred to me how much I would enjoy throwing a petrol bottle into them. That would have prevented the publication of the mendacious and unreadable paper on which I worked, for at least three days. But the risk was too great and the result too insignificant. Three weeks earlier an unknown brother-in-arms threw a bottle of petrol and a burning rag into the doorway – at least that was what they had established in the course of the investigation. Unfortunately the fire had been put out before any serious damage was done. Although I had only left half an hour before the bottle was thrown, so that they would have been justified in suspecting me, to my great surprise the idea occurred to no one. In the evening, when I heard the news, I could hardly conceal my joy. In the following weeks I would pretend to myself that it had been I who had thrown the bottle, and that I had gone for a walk merely for the sake of having an alibi. I only regretted that I had been unable to obtain at least ten times as much petrol in order to blow up the entire building complete with editorial offices, printing shop and Stalin portraits. This fantasy was accompanied by the fixed idea that I had used my monogrammed handkerchief as a burning rag. So whenever I passed the doorway I had to fight down a treble anxiety: I saw the charred remains of my handkerchief everywhere, with the monogram still intact; I had to ignore the suspicious glances of the porter; and I had to forget the possibility that the AVO might be waiting in the street to arrest me.

  Going down from the second floor, in fact, I came face to face with the most threatening elements in my situation. This part of the staircase was so dark that I could no longer see the yellowish-green walls from which paint peeled off in strips like wallpaper, covered with small, white protuberances which, if I pushed them with my finger, trickled an inexorable stream of lime particles, like sand in an hourglass. I gripped the smooth wooden rail and closed my eyes. In the American army, whenever we had to cross a forest at night, two of my comrades would take my arms. I would face our destination, close my eyes, and would lead my comrades towards the target, never missing it by more than five yards. The last six months had felt exactly like those blind wanderings in the jungle, except that now I could not hear the rumbling of enemy guns, and there was neither direction, nor plan, nor aim, nor anyone to guide me. Yet the enemy was there, all around, invisible and motionless in the clammy darkness.

  A few weeks after the Rajk trial the situation had felt easier. I had begun to dream that I had been withdrawn from the spurting machine-gun fire and the land-mines which exploded like dirty-grey, sword-leaved bushes, looming above me as I crawled; that I had been sent back from the firing-line – the area of immediate, lethal danger – to the field hospital, where I lay among the gravely wounded, my condition not critical for the time being; only hopeless. I deduced this from various signs. When I received a letter it was obvious that the envelope had been steamed open. When I telephoned I seemed to detect that characteristic click betraying that the AVO was listening in. When I was walking in the forest I felt as if someone were following me. All these impressions, however, were superficial and uncertain; I could not decide whether they were only hallucinations or whether, on the contrary, they were a game played by the secret police, with a devilish knowledge of psychology, perhaps not even to collect information against me but only to destroy my nervous resistance by the most subtle means.

  But there was no doubt in my mind that my file in the archives of the secret police was growing thicker and thicker. If, for instance, they had tortured Zoltan Horvath, they must have found out a great deal about me. There was also the diary of Györgyi Vandori, from which parts were quoted at the Rajk trial. There was no way to find out if she had written about me in other parts of it not read publicly, or if she had quoted me when I called Stalin a Caucasian highwayman. There was Almassi, Népszava’s librarian, with his sunken yet protruding eyes in a flat, motionless, mask-like face. With him I had always been on my guard. Yet, the fact that I never said anything compromising in his presence was not enough to save me; I should have reacted to his clumsy provocations, I should have defended the communist party, Rakosi and Stalin with a great show of passionate conviction. What is more, I should have denounced him for his subversive statements pretending, with moronic hypocrisy, that I didn’t know them to be part of his job. But my fidelity to some memory of human dignity prevented me from playing this idiotic but obligatory game although I knew that every time I failed to denounce him, he denounced me.

  By the time I had reached the first floor on the office staircase my anxiety had become even more acute. At this point I always tried to comfort myself by recalling agreeable things, most often my hiding place at Dunaharaszti on the Danube, near the island of Csepel, one of the country’s oldest communities.

  My trips to the country had become rare: I dared not visit old friends for fear of compromising them and there was no point in visiting strangers. The only place of refuge remaining was this inn, some twenty miles from Budapest. I went there when I wanted to see no one, not even Suzy. I usually left at midday and was back at the office the next afternoon. Sunday rowing parties approached the inn by river – few people knew that it could also be reached by a cross-country path. I never went on Sundays, but on a weekday I would take the local train to Dunaharaszti. I would turn on to a small footpath, and after descending a sharp slope and crossing a small wooden bridge, would find myself in a deserted, mysterious world. On every side, wherever I turned, horses and cows stood belly-deep in shallow ponds which looked like the pegged-out hides of giant animals, gone green and mouldy. Here and there a naked, sleepy peasant child would sit nodding on the back of a cow. After a while I left the animals and children behind: from that point I would be walking through small puddles which reflected, for a second, the open collar of my white shirt. Marsh-tits twittered in the rushes and sometimes a mosquito would zigzag across the path in front of me on an oblique course, like the twitching shoulder muscles of a naked, galloping horseman.

  On my way to the inn I always experienced a sudden wave of happiness; the same happiness that I had felt four years before, when I had travelled through the country, drinking wine with the peasants in the cool of the vineyards and dreaming of Hungary’s future. The hope was dead, but of the country this had survived: the naked peasant children with their high, yellow cheekbones on the backs of bathing cattle, the three shades of yellowish-green in the grass, the osier-beds and the rushes, the mosquitoes, the parching summer heat, and the writhing, living ponds changing their irregular shapes every hour, connected by secret underground channels with the water of the Danube. This was the Hungarian landscape, the original, the ancient, the genuine: not Horthy’s, not Franz-Joseph’s but the thousand-year-old, the Arpadian; the three-and-five-thousand-year-old, that of the Bronze Age, the Stone Age. This was the country’s ground-plan, the original layout: the Hungarian Lowland, with its infinite flood areas, its marshes and distant woods flat on the rim of a far horizon. This yellowish-green was the basic colour of the painting framed by the dark green of the forests.

  Perhaps I should have considered the things superimposed on the original picture as more important: the narrow tentacles of the Roman roads weaving their way slow
ly from the south-west towards the north-east, only to stop abruptly at the bank of the multi-branched cold current of the Danube; the parrot-cages of the railway lines, their double wires shining in the daytime with the silvery gleam of knitting needles, and at night eaten by rust; the telephone and telegraph wires, which I had lately come to see as a refined giant muzzle covering the country’s face; the stripes, oblongs and deltoids of the cornfields which had undergone so many transformations in a thousand years, beginning with nothing but honey-yellow patches of wheat, then diversified with pale oats and reddish rye, then later again with blue-green vines, with the deep green bushes of potatoes and with the dwarf banana-palms of maize. How often these fields had been divided and joined together again since the common tribal estates were first split into as many plots as there were heads of families in the country! Between AD 1000 and 1400 they had been organized with frightening speed into latifundia, with a castle on top of the highest hill in the neighbourhood and in the castles petty monarchs, each busy digging away the earth from beneath the other’s castle, until the Sultan arrived and put his pashas in their place. One hundred and fifty years later, after the Turks had been driven from the country, the fields were again divided, the smaller plots going to German settlers, the larger ones to the Hungarian gentry. In 1848 part of the larger estates were again split up; the rest of them were divided in 1945; and now, five years later, they joined together again by force, and the ancient system of serfdom was being restored under a modern Russian name.

  But when I wandered in the marshes I was not interested in the present, nor in the recent past. I felt as if, after having searched through cheap prints and faulty reproductions, I had come at last on the real portrait of my country. As the ponds connected with the waters of the Danube, so was I bound to this land by mysterious underground channels and arteries. I too was no more than a writhing, living pool, feeding on Danube water until, at last, I too would dry out. Because it was not only I who had found a last refuge, like the almost extinct beaver and the lapwing, in this unchanging, primeval world which a thousand years ago had embraced half of the Lowlands and had now shrunk to a strip along the river only a few hundred yards wide. It was in these marshes that the men of the Bronze Age had buried lovers side by side in a squatting position, so that their ghosts should not return to haunt the living. It was here that people hid from the Tartar invasion, cutting dug-outs in the grey, clay soil like beavers; and these dug-outs were enlarged by other men, and connected by dykes cut through the reeds, so that they could live a free though confined life during the hundred and fifty year of the Turkish occupation. When the modern age dawned, it was in such haunted, wolf-infested marshes that the soldiers of many a lost struggle for liberty found safety; when their pursuers came to the end of paths leading straight into water, they stopped as if rooted to the ground, believing that the marsh would swallow them up at their next step. But the quarry had jumped into light craft and paddled to their reed huts, where they sucked raw lapwing eggs for breakfast and made their rush mats bridal couches for the prettiest girls from the neighbouring villages. When the rationalists of the nineteenth century drained the Hungarian marshes, they never dreamt that they were depriving descendants of a last refuge: descendants who, a hundred years later, would seek out what was left of those marshes as the only place where they could be free.

  The inn at Dunaharaszti kept an excellent wine. If I wanted fish for dinner I walked down with the inn-keeper’s daughter to the fish-trap, and picked out the best to be killed and grilled for me. I slept in a tiny guest-room, the only extra room in the inn, which they let to no one but me, with a straw mattress on the bed, a paraffin lamp on the whitewashed wall and a chair by the window. In the mornings I would row out into the middle of the reed-bank and lie naked in the sun. A red-tailed bird – I believe it was the same one every time – would perch on a reed at my head and sing into my ear with boundless enthusiasm. I did not know its name but decided, out of gratitude, to look it up in an ornithological reference book.

  The greatest joy came in the evening. When my hosts had gone to bed I would put out my lamp and watch the moonlit poplars opposite my window, the leaves of which turned little black mirrors towards me every time the breeze ruffled through them. Later I would climb out through the window. I was very careful that my hosts should not know of my nightly excursions, although there was really nothing secret about them. Reaching the river, I undressed and waded into the Danube. I let the current carry me down the middle of the moonlit expanse of water, going on with the tale of ancient Hungary that I had been telling myself as I came along the muddy path. Soon I would stop thinking altogether.

  The once mighty stream of the Danube – a stream which could carry not only tree-trunks but whole masses of densely entangled forest and which could be forded only at the place called Horseferry, opposite the island – this stream once so wild and powerful, which found itself new beds year after year, divided the country from north to south into two essentially different and wholly incompatible Hungaries.

  To the west lay Transdanubia with its gentle hills, its vineyards, wine-presses, beautiful gardens and great manor houses, where our liberal politicians, our scholars, our priests and our magistrates were born and lived; our teachers, too, who would put their pupils across their knees and give them a good beating with the long stems of their pipes when they slipped up in reciting the poet (Virgil, of course), but would reward them with a lovely red apple from the top of the cupboard if they recited him well. Transdanubia, in whose inns friends would meet round their usual table to talk and argue over their wine-glasses until morning, and where the chairs around that table had been handed down from father to son like the libraries in their heavy walnut bookcases, where Seneca stood on the shelves as well as de Tocqueville, Strabo’s charming and instructive poem on gardening as well as St Augustine’s Confessions and The Spirit of Laws by Montesquieu.

  On the opposite, eastern bank of the Danube began the Asiatic and brutal Lowlands, flat, arid, treeless and gardenless, its villages atomized into small groups of cottages or lonely farms where only the telegraph poles following dusty, muddy by-ways indicated that we were in twentieth-century Hungary and not somewhere near Karakorum in the days of Genghis Khan. The Lowlands, from which came our prophets and tribunes, zealous to save and to change, but not to teach, humanity; the Lowlands where dawn and dusk do not paint the sky with slow, gentle brush-strokes as they do in Transdanubia, but where in the morning bonfires are lit in the sky, and in the evening the sun rolls down below the horizon like the severed head of a king. In the Lowlands the wines are rougher and more intoxicating than those of Transdanubia, and the guests in the inns break chairs over each other’s heads and stick knives in each other’s bellies instead of talking quietly. In the Lowlands there are no ancient buildings, no venerable orchards; instead of broad-crowned, mild chestnut trees, stunted acacias throw thin shadows on sweating heads, and no trees protect the houses: either they have been felled by the soldiers of plundering armies, or their owners have cut them down to keep themselves from freezing to death during the endless winters, or a neighbour has poisoned their roots. In the Lowlands there are no old and treasured libraries, no close circles of friends, no family vaults and no traditions. Driven by restlessness and misery, the people scatter like blown sand, and when they disappear nothing remains to perpetuate their names: no bench made by them, no tree planted by them, not even a cross on their graves, because those too will have been washed away by spring floods, or overgrown by weeds, or will have rotted for lack of anyone to tend them. The children will have gone off to America and will have forgotten the name of their fathers.

  Of the mighty, medieval barrier which the Danube had once been between the two parts of the country, the effects remained long after the cause had disappeared. It was in vain that Count Széchenyi tried to remedy it, half-way through the last century; in vain that he built a suspension bridge to link the East with the West, so that British liber
alism could cross its slightly swaying span together with world trade and industrialization. The two halves of the country remained hostile and incompatible, British liberalism never rolled across that swaying bridge, nor across later and more massive ones, and the country itself as a whole, instead of being the bridge between East and West intended by our first king when he founded it, became the springboard of the East towards the West. It was no use my breaking my head about it as I drifted on the Danube’s current.

  When I reached this point in my meditations I would stop swimming and would retreat into the ever blacker darkness of the entangled shadows stretched over the water by branches, bushes and roots. I walked along near the shore on tiptoe, up to my chin in water, stopping at times to spread my arms on the surface, then going on again. The round lips of fishes brushed my body and the soles of my feet were tickled by the sharp edges of open shells floating weightless on the soft mud. Out in the moonlight a silvery carp would arch above the water in a surprising feat of acrobatics, but I would hardly notice it. Under the low-hanging branches I felt as though I had left behind not only the present, but the Middle Ages, and was journeying back towards a more ancient world – the Bronze Age or even further – where, like the priest at some prehistoric and mystical ceremony, I was leading an invisible procession through the shadows of the various darknesses and depths of the night. Often I stayed there until the moon had set, and I could see myself as a naked primordial being, living half in the water and half on dry land, spying from under the concealing branches on the rake-shaped, beryl-green lights flashing on the edge of the horizon: messengers of the awful dawn, white as sour milk, before which I fled, trembling, my eyes half shut, into the darkness of my room.