For the last few months I had visited the inn among the reeds whenever I heard of a new arrest, whether or not I was indifferent to the person arrested: in each case I saw the promise of my own doom. I had gone there, for instance, when Arpad Szakasits, President of the Republic, was arrested and after him almost all the social democratic ministers and deputy ministers. A few days before I set out on my visit to Bandi Havas, the police spy Almassi had come into my room to tell me that now it was Anna Kéthly’s turn. He did this in his role of spy: it was important that journalists should know who had been arrested, so that the person’s name should never again be mentioned. I was so deeply shaken by Kéthly’s arrest that I chased Almassi from my room, left a message for Komor that I was taking a day off, and caught the train for Dunaharaszti. When I came to the part of the flood area where even horses did not venture, I noticed that I was being followed. The man behind me was a short fat fellow, pushing a bicycle and panting in his hurry. He disappeared before I reached the inn.
Arriving there, I found a melancholy surprise awaiting me: two bulldozers, with dredgers, were at work nearby. The inn-keeper explained that they were digging a canal to connect the Danube with the River Tisza. They were going to drain the marshes and the whole flood area, so that inn, birds and boating parties were doomed.
That night I went for a long swim and hid under the branches at a place where I could not see the distant acetylene lamps shining into my eyes like death-rays. In the early morning I again walked down to the river. Among the reeds and the small, dancing boats, hundreds of white-bellied dead fish rode the ripples. The inn-keeper told me why. A communist cobbler’s assistant had been appointed managing director of one of the chemical works on the outskirts of Budapest, and his first innovation had been to have waste chemicals containing nitric acid emptied into the river. It would be a hundred years, said the inn-keeper, before it would again be possible to catch the fat and ancient carp and the rapacious sheat-fish which had lived on the river-bottom in this place. As I was plodding back to the inn, the little man with the bicycle stepped out from the bushes. I looked him over carefully. He had a mottled face and was dumpy, self-assured, but at the same time melancholy – no doubt because he had been forced to spend a night in the reeds on my account.
All this had happened a week earlier, on a Thursday – but it was nothing compared to the Sunday. One of our staff, Kisban, was sent into the country on a story and Suzy and I decided to go with him for the trip. Soon after our car left Budapest an AVO Hudson showed up behind us. Its driver tried desperately to keep pace with us but our small British car was too fast for them even on those bad roads so that we soon lost them. We drove along the eastern shore of Lake Balaton and about half-way along the lake, at Szantod, we took a side road to the ferry in order to cross to the opposite shore. While waiting for the ferry Suzy and I swam far out into the lake: the rocky peninsula of Tihany with its deep green trees reached out to us like a large, black fist. By the time we got back the AVO car had caught up with us, and it crossed with us on the ferry. In Tihany we had lunch at a wonderful little restaurant which had not been expropriated and turned into a sort of soup-kitchen because it was the favourite eating place of Soviet party functionaries spending their holidays in a nearby hotel. I ordered fish, chicken, two kinds of wine, a brandy as an appetizer and chocolate cake and black coffee with whipped cream to end with. While I was talking to the waiter Suzy looked absent-mindedly at my American silk shirt of which the cuffs were slightly frayed. She was probably thinking that I would do better to buy myself a new shirt with the money I was spending on this dinner, while I was thinking that it didn’t matter at all if they hung me in a ragged shirt, while it mattered a great deal that my last dinner should be all a last dinner should be. Instead of upsetting me, this thought increased my enjoyment a thousandfold. I had been particularly cheerful since morning and Suzy seemed to appreciate my stories though she would have preferred talking about emotional problems. I enjoyed the dinner like a noble Roman who knew that when he had finished he would step into his bath and, obeying the imperial command, cut an artery. I watched oily drops of the green local wine climbing the sides of my glass in narrow stripes, and the crumbs of the fried fish’s crust lying on my plate like shipwrecked fragments of a miniature boat. I leaned my shoulder against the ivy-clad wall of the garden so that I felt the soft tentacles tickling my skin through the thin silk shirt, and the breeze blew Suzy’s straight, blonde hair into my eyes. In the glowing, almost blinding sunshine it seemed to me as if the courses of stars, planetary systems and comets were flashing, shining, circling and sparkling before my eyes. The happiness that overwhelmed me, behind the stone walls of that old garden on top of the mountain of Tihany was almost transcendent: the perspective of the horrors of the world began a good deal lower down, at the bottom of the sloping garden where in the flour-dusty road I could see the bonnet of the Hudson in which the AVO was waiting. In her utter innocence Suzy had not even noticed that we were being followed. Kisban thought that they were after him, for both his father and he were former social democrats; he threw nervous glances towards the road from time to time. Only Kakuk, the driver, paid no attention to the car.
Later in the afternoon, having a strong sporting spirit, he made a fool of the AVO driver who was unable to overtake us. That night, when we got back to the capital, I noticed another AVO car in the avenue leading to the Népszava villa, parked under the overhanging branches of huge trees. When I entered my room I had the feeling that it had been searched during my absence, although I could discover no traces of the search. Suzy was still down in the lounge talking to colleagues who had been listening to news of the Korean war. I put out the light and, retreating into the far corner of the room, I watched the garden through the open French window. It seemed to me as if under every one of the large, dense bushes a shiny black AVO car was hidden; huge, shiny, black dung-beetles; yet in the room, behind the balcony door, I felt perfectly safe.
I felt equally safe by the time I reached the bottom of the office stairs and stepped through a similar arched exit, emerging into the uncertain light of the yard and the sharp whiteness from the bales of paper. I arrived so quietly that the porter failed to notice me, and gave a jump when he caught sight of me. I felt as if I had caught him in flagrante; perhaps it was he who had thrown that petrol-bottle, to be promoted to porter from yard-sweeper and handyman. There was no car in the street except Komor’s, only one or two lorries in front of the printing works. No one suspicious loitered in the proximity; I saw only two familiar paper-boys in the narrow Miksa alley, and a few housewives with shopping bags.
I was so relieved that I stopped in the doorway, lit a cigarette and urgently revised the trend of thought which had accompanied me down the stairs. Perhaps the general psychosis of the people’s democracy had caught up with me too, as it had caught up with everyone since the days of the Rajk trial.
I thought it possible that last Sunday we had not been dogged by the AVO, that it had travelled the same road to Tihany quite by accident and that the car I had noticed opposite the Népszava villa, of which I felt so certain that it belonged to the AVO, was only the private vehicle of the party functionary living there who always kept late hours. Nor had my room been searched; these people were not so shy that they would perform a search so discreetly, in my absence. Last Thursday, when I had set out from the inn, no cyclist had emerged from the reeds; I had simply dreamed it all up in the terrible depression and anxiety following Anna Kéthly’s arrest. I tried to conjure up the mottle-faced, dumpy little man with his bicycle and suddenly I saw him clearly, as I had seen him that morning emerging from the reeds and pushing his bicycle along the narrow path skirting the inn’s dung-heap; and now I remembered, I recalled quite clearly that through his translucent body I could see dung-heap and the dried horse-droppings sprouting stalks of straw, and that I had smiled because he was wearing horse-droppings in the place of a heart. It had been a vision; a vision and nothing else.
Nor was the systematic arrest of the social democrats a cause for anxiety. Only politicians, ministers, under-secretaries, trade-union leaders and deputies had been arrested, they had not yet seized a single writer, nor any social democrat who, like myself, observed quietly and refrained from voicing his political opinions. Not a single social democrat had been arrested who…
‘What’s that? You are still running around free?’ A tall, British-looking individual interrupted my thoughts, whom I noticed only after I had almost landed in his arms on the corner of the boulevard. Our meeting was so sudden and unexpected that it was seconds before I recognized Baron Gedeon Horvath.
‘All the social democratic VIPs have been arrested. Now I know at last that you are not a VIP,’ he added, smiling when he noticed how he had frightened me.
Baron Horvath had been a big landowner until the end of the war, but had acquired such merit in the anti-Nazi resistance that in 1945, by special decree, they left him his castle and three hundred acres of his estate. Two years ago the communists had tried to incite the peasants to chase him from his castle and divide his land, and when all attempts proved vain, they brought in several lorry-loads of arrow-cross men and former convicts from the next county, and these carried out the expropriation under police guard. The régime compensated Baron Horvath by granting him a lorry-driver’s licence in Budapest and every time we met I felt deeply ashamed, as if I, too, had been responsible for these acts.
His words embarrassed me so much that I could hardly mumble a reply, and hurried on. I scuttled into the Athenaeum building, ran up the stairs and when, on one of the tall doors opening from the central hall I noticed Havas’s name, I pushed aside the porter who wanted to announce me and entered Bandi’s room without knocking. He was sitting behind his desk in his shirt-sleeves; opposite him a ventilator was revolving in the wall, causing a breeze that peeped indiscreetly into the papers lying on the desk and tousled Bandi’s red and silver hair. The window was open and so was the door leading into the managing director’s room. Coming up the stairs, I had thought that observing the etiquette of our old friendship, Bandi would embrace me, which – because of his attitude in the Rajk affair and for a thousand other reasons – would be extremely painful and out of place. However, when all I got was a rather friendly handshake, I felt it to be arrogant condescension.
Or was he simply afraid of me? I took a seat on the other side of his desk, facing him squarely. We asked each other polite questions and gave polite replies which affected me like some grotesque but in no way amusing ritual. But at least it gave me an opportunity to observe my surroundings. With the help of the ventilator I discovered on the desk a file, hidden under several sheets of paper, on which, in Bandi’s hand, written in red ink, I saw the words, ANTI-CLERICAL ANTHOLOGY. Below, still in red ink: Faludy and three interrogation marks. Beyond the open door Sandor Haraszti, the managing director of the publishing house, was walking up and down in front of his huge desk in a brightly checked suit. From the fact that the draught made his soft, silver hair stand on end like a crown of feathers, I deduced that in his room too the window must be open and a ventilator revolving on the wall. His gentle lips were contracted into a straight line and he bore his beautiful, classic profile like the monstrance in a procession. Unlike him, Bandi was uglier than ever, but while his ugliness used to be mitigated by a sort of irresistibly grotesque charm – the comic quality of a punchinello handled by a clever puppeteer – it now gave him an acid, prematurely old look and his clownish gestures no longer made only his body ridiculous, but his entire being. At least that was how it seemed to me after having seen the interrogation marks after my name.
Sandor Haraszti had been one of the leading personalities among the Hungarian communists. Unlike his comrades, who in the ’twenties and ’thirties emigrated to Moscow, he had remained in Hungary and had worked in the underground movement. His principal activity was the teaching of Marxism–Leninism so that all communists, including the Muscovites, had at one time been his pupils. He remained a teacher, but without becoming an ideologist, which I considered a point in his favour. A few days after my return from America we had met in Michael Karolyi’s salon and had immediately quarrelled. At the time he edited a communist boulevard-paper; and on that particular day he had published an editorial in which he made an extremely boorish attack on the founder of Hungarian sociological science, Oszkar Jaszi, for his liberal views. While we were sitting in deep armchairs waiting for Karolyi I mentioned that I didn’t agree with his editorial; that it surprised me that while the country was lying in ruins and mass-murderers were walking among us, he found nothing else to worry about but the liberal views of Professor Jaszi, one of the great men in Hungarian science, and the apostle of the Danubian Confederation. Haraszti replied that since I had joined the social democratic party, I had better read the social democratic papers and stop sticking my nose in where it didn’t belong. His tone was so offensive that I jumped up and we were about to fall upon each other when Karolyi entered the room. Since then we had hissed with hatred whenever we met.
Now, as Haraszti paced his room, he pretended not to notice me. But once, when he was facing me, I mercilessly caught his eye, whereupon instead of greeting each other we both stuck out our chins belligerently. By then I had given up my first idea that the two men wanted to laugh at me or provoke me. As soon as I had entered, Haraszti had turned on the radio without, however, trying to find a station. The singing of the radio and the humming of the two ventilator motors made it entirely impossible for the AVO to follow our conversation through the microphones fitted in the telephone receivers. I had to admit that this gesture was not only benevolent but friendly. During the last year, every time friends met at somebody’s house the first act of the host was to turn on the radio or pick up the telephone and carry it out of the room. Haraszti – like Komor – was the sort of idealistic communist who would never denounce anyone for opinions voiced in private. Had they done so they would have had to admit to themselves that there was no intellectual freedom; something they always stubbornly denied.
‘We have great plans for you,’ said Bandi, turning to me excitedly. While he talked he stabbed the wooden arms of his chair with his pointed elbows and stuck out his long legs until his thick soles dangled to the right and left of me from under the desk. I sat there on a plain chair, with my hands on my knees.
‘We know that you are not interested in money, but apart from the money you could also earn glory. There is no one in the entire country better fitted than you to do this job. What we want from you is an anthology …’
‘Are you speaking in the name of your publishing house or of the party?’ I interrupted. ‘Or do you use the royal “we” even when speaking only in your own name?’
Bandi blushed a deep crimson.
‘Gyurka,’ he said, ‘the idea is Comrade Rakosi’s. But it was my idea that we should ask you to carry it out. Sandor is also in favour of it. We are both worried about you. There are rumours in town that you don’t want to work for the party. That you refuse to sponsor anything with your name. That you draw back from everything. I know very well that this is not true. That you are fighting the enemy in your own way, as a guerrilla, though the party demands that you should obey orders like any soldier. There is nothing more suitable to dispel this misunderstanding than to undertake the editing of this anthology. This is why Sandor and I thought that we would ask you to edit this anti-cler …’
‘Excuse me for interrupting,’ I said in a voice so aggressive that it surprised me. ‘Before coming down to brass tacks I should like to ask you something that has nothing to do with the subject in question. Do you remember our first meeting in Paris eleven years ago? We were so young then that it never occurred to us that one day we too would have to die. When we fell in love we went around telling everyone about it. We made no separate peace, either with social conventions or with the world. Do you remember that morning when you came up to my room at the hotel and I was s
itting on my bed naked?’
‘Of course I remember,’ Bandi replied hesitatingly, but his face was alight with pleasure.
‘And what happened then?’
‘What do you mean, “what happened”? We walked down to the Seine and quarrelled.’
‘That was a few days later. But what happened on that particular day?’
‘I sat in an armchair. I told you that I had loved you even before meeting you. I said you too were a member of the great family of left-wing intellectuals. But you protested.’
‘And what did I do after asking you to sit down?’
‘You rose from the bed.’
‘And?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I went to the wardrobe.’
‘And you took out a bottle of wine,’ said Bandi, his ears turning red. He rang the bell for the janitor to order black coffee, but I protested. I sent the janitor to fetch three bottles of Balaton wine from the pub and when Bandi wanted to pay I told him that I was going away to Czechoslovakia within forty-eight hours at government expense, so had plenty of money; besides, it gave me pleasure to take leave in style.
‘Why all this leave-taking when you are coming back in three weeks?’
‘In our days one never knows when one is seeing someone for the last time. This is why I like to play at saying goodbye for ever. Besides, I don’t like the family drink of the intellectuals, black coffee. I belong to another family.’
‘To which family?’ Bandi asked absentmindedly, then suddenly looked at me attentively. Whenever we had been in danger of our lives, at the time of our flight through France, when we were pressed against the lance-shaped railings of the Bayonne customs house, on the ship which sank after we had got off it, in the internment camp of Ain Chok, or in Marrakesh during the slaughter we witnessed in the streets, there would always be a vertical scarlet line across Bandi’s eyeball. Now I saw it again, more conspicuous than ever. Haraszti stopped walking up and down in his room and stood in the door. Although Bandi was gazing down at me from behind his desk like a judge at a criminal, I felt suddenly relieved. They are afraid! I thought. More afraid than I am, because they have to expend all their energies on hiding their fear from others and from themselves. They are so afraid that they daren’t even shut the door between them.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 33