‘To what family do you belong?’ Havas asked again, as if he were questioning me in some official matter. But his voice shook.
‘To the family of writers, my dear boy,’ I replied. The insult seemed to reassure him, although he blushed. Then, calm and collected as I had never seen him before, he said that I had nothing to worry about, that I must not pay attention to the malicious gossip spread about me. If I edited the anthology I should automatically clear myself. And the idea that we might never meet again was, of course, utterly ridiculous. Unless I intended to escape from Czechoslovakia to West Germany. However, that was something he would never believe of me.
‘You are doing me a great honour, my friend, by assuming that I am the only one who may disappear. In a communist country accidents may happen to anyone. It’s not only I who may be arrested but you too, or Uncle Sandor, or all three of us.’
‘These jokes are in very bad taste, comrade Faludy!’ Haraszti snapped at me from the door. ‘But tell me,’ he continued in an entirely different tone of voice, ‘on what do you base your supposition?’
‘On rumour-mongering and counter-revolutionary gossip,’ Havas answered for me.
‘On the circumstance,’ I said, ‘that you and Bandi are old communists – Hungarian communists, not Muscovites – and are only partisans but not servants of power. On the circumstance that Bandi and I have lived abroad, are therefore suspect, and in addition, prefer Dante to Surkov. On the circumstance that all three of us are fundamentally honest men; that is, men who must be wiped out.’
I waited for a moment to let them have their say, but they were silent. Bandi was staring before him angrily, while Haraszti came forward as if hypnotized and sat down in the armchair under the window.
‘Therefore,’ I said, ‘I was wrong when I spoke of parting. According to every probability we shall meet again. If not in prison then under the scaffold.’
I was filled with a kind of happiness for having, at last, uttered something essential. Bandi gazed at me with a distorted grin frozen on his face, while Haraszti clasped his knee in both hands and whipped the tip of his elegant shoe.
‘Courts of justice have always committed mistakes,’ he said in a slightly schoolmasterish voice. ‘Not even a communist society is proof against such mistakes. At least not in the first years of its existence. There have also always been Jagodas, imperialist agents penetrating our state security organizations and causing inexpressible harm. It is only natural that such scoundrels should cast their eye upon the best, the most loyal comrades. Let us assume for the sake of argument that I am arrested; even that would be further evidence of the strength of communism against which the imperialists have to apply such desperate weapons. I can assure you that even in prison I should remain true to the sacred cause of communism… Both with my life and with my death I should attempt to prove that justice is on our …’
When the commissionaire entered he fell suddenly silent.
‘You would get a royalty of ten per cent of the retail price of each copy for the editing of the anthology,’ Bandi threw himself into the gap heroically, ‘two forints a line for the poems you translate yourself and for prose text …’
‘What shall we drink to?’ Haraszti asked when the commissionaire had left the room. Apparently he didn’t feel like continuing with his oration.
‘To the anthology,’ Bandi suggested.
‘I don’t even know what anthology you are talking about,’ I lied. ‘Therefore, let us drink instead to the memory of the predecessor and spiritual forerunner of our good friend Sandor Haraszti: Peregrinus Proteus.’
‘All right,’ Haraszti agreed unsuspectingly. ‘But who, exactly, was Peregrinus Proteus?’
‘To Peregrinus Proteus, then,’ I said raising my glass. It distressed me a little that the barbs of my attack had turned against Haraszti who, at this moment, was much more attractive to me than Bandi. But then I told myself. Six of one, half a dozen of the other; that if the Russians captured not only our bodies but also our minds it was thanks to this great family of left-wing intellectuals to which these two misbegotten writers belonged.
‘Peregrinus,’ I explained, imitating Haraszti’s didactic style, ‘lived in the days of Marcus Aurelius and was head of a fanatical religious sect. Somewhere around 910, ab Urbe condita, he announced that in the presence of his disciples, friends and the celebrating public he would jump into a fire on the edge of a forest near Corinth. He would jump into a fire and burn himself alive to prove, with this act, the existence of God.’
‘What is the causal interdependence between the existence of God and being burned alive?’
‘That question was raised at the time by several decadent contemporary philosophers and bourgeois writers who, because of their class background, had failed to recognize the world-redeeming ideology. Among these was Lucian, who joined the long procession to the forest near Corinth. He went, however, not to watch Peregrinus jump into the fire but to dissuade him from it. He explained to Peregrinus that though mankind could only benefit from getting rid of such an ox, his own humanistic attitude compelled him to intervene. God exists or does not exist independent of anyone jumping into a fire: thus, Peregrinus’s suicide would prove nothing but his own boundless stupidity.
‘Peregrinus would probably have permitted himself to be convinced by Lucian had he still been in a position to do so. However, his disciples had already dug a deep ditch and lit a fire in it because they were afraid that, should he climb on to the usual kind of pyre he might change his mind at the last moment and get down again. After all it was he who had instilled into his disciples the world-saving ideology …’ I continued slowly, watching the teacher of Hungarian communists sipping his wine and sitting motionless in his armchair.
‘It was he who had explained to them that no sacrifice was too great for the sacred cause, not even death. Therefore, he had no reason to be surprised when his pupils took him at his word. But the ordinary people, whom the prophet had wanted to feed on ideology instead of on bread and meat, had always looked upon him with suspicion. They were glad to be given at least a circus performance instead of bread.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘To Peregrinus Proteus?’ I asked. ‘What could have happened? His disciples pushed him into the fire and he burned alive. Lucian, however, as befits a thinker, walked away in peace and wrote a book about Peregrinus.’
A rather painful silence ensued. Havas gave me a mildly reproachful look because I had offended against the prevailing etiquette by talking about something which it was bad form to mention. Haraszti made no reply, but compressed his finely chiselled lips and, inclining his head to one side, gazed into the air.
The silence was broken by Bandi. He threw a conspiratorial glance at Haraszti who, however, failed to react, then suddenly began to speak about the anthology. In this way he indicated that he considered all I had said null and void. He explained that the task for which they had picked me was beautiful indeed. Then he delivered a long lecture about clericalism being the most dangerous enemy of the people’s democracy, and how we must fight against the priests on every front. After the persecution suffered by the clergy in the last two years, after the Mindszenty trial and, last but not least, after my story abut Peregrinus, this seemed not only out of place but utterly crazy. Bandi noticed this too, but made all the greater efforts to whip himself into the necessary frame of mind. At times he looked at me as if he were expecting an answer but I kept silent, concentrating on pouring out more wine, which greatly embarrassed him. Finally he declared that it would put me into a very favourable position politically if I agreed to become the editor of this Rakosi-inspired anthology.
‘Never,’ I said.
‘But you have hated the clerics all your life!’ Bandi screamed at me. ‘It was you who translated Florian Geyer’s song into Hungarian! If reaction came to power again they would tear you to pieces as they would us!’
‘I won’t be blackmailed,’ I answered.
‘This is not a political question.’
‘What then?’
‘A question of taste. One doesn’t write against those who are being persecuted and who cannot defend themselves,’ I replied, rising from my chair. I poured the last drops from the three bottles into the three glasses and handed each his glass. I notice that Haraszti was looking at me with warm appreciation and that, as always when we were in danger of our lives, the front of Bandi’s shirt was wet with perspiration. I had intended to shoot a few more arrows at them before I left but somehow the condition they were in mollified me and I raised my glass.
‘To whom do we drink?’ Haraszti asked resignedly.
‘To your health. To the three of us. To the fact that though we belong to different families our thoughts are identical. To the circumstance that although we speak differently we think the same. To the knowledge that although we sleep in different beds we have the same dreams!’
I nodded to Bandi and made a deep bow to my Peregrinus as he sat motionless in his armchair, then I hurried from the room lest I express the thoughts that were in my mind. The wine, drunk on an empty stomach, mounted to my head; on the staircase I did not quite know whether I should laugh or cry, but when I stopped outside the front door in the burning noon sunlight and felt its beams penetrating the two corners of my frontal bone like two hot, golden hypodermic needles, I knew that I too wasn’t far from going mad.
PART FOUR
Arrest
When the green-painted iron door of cell No. 48 fell to behind me I drew a deep breath of relief. I felt a cool breeze behind my forehead and a delicious tingle in my gullet, as if an invisible abscess had burst open in my body. My situation gave no cause for cheerfulness. I too, like so many of my friends and enemies, had now disappeared down the AVO drain. The charge against me confronted me with the alternative of the gallows or life imprisonment, and my cheeks were still burning with the fever caused by the shock of my arrest nearly three days earlier.
I was in a windowless, underground cell surrounded on three sides by a corridor, on the fourth by the lift shaft. As I began walking up and down the slippery concrete floor, midges flew into my face. Opposite the door an inscription, printed in capital letters, showed through the mirror-smooth new whitewash: GOD HAVE MERCY ON ME, and, below it the name of a notoriously atheist Member of Parliament who had disappeared a year ago. When they locked the door behind me I decided that I would revive old memories: Amar’s kashba, the view of Bermuda, or Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. On no account would I examine my state of mind, so as not to go mad.
But was this idyllic mood and the slight tingling in my loins not already a sign of madness? I sat down on my bunk and established that my knee reflexes were absolutely normal. Then I repeated to myself the forty-eight states of America, the formula of the cubic content of the sphere, the date of the Treaty of Westphalia, the names of the Roman Emperors from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius and the inscription on the grave of the two hundred fallen at Thermopylae:
The dystich made me feel definitely sentimental. I was almost reassured by the results when it suddenly occurred to me that all this was no proof. As long as I was alone in my cell, that is alone in the world, the definition of reason and madness depended on my arbitration. It was quite possible, for instance, that though mad, I was perfectly correct in remembering that the envoys pledged themselves to observe the Treaty of Westphalia at Osnabrück, on the twenty-fourth of October, 1648, or it was equally possible that the cubic content of the sphere was a figment of my sick imagination and that no such geometrical figure as a sphere existed. Perhaps even the tiny, invisible midges I could feel on my face did not exist. Finally, it was conceivable that the name of the first Roman Emperor was September, and that I was playing a crazy game with myself when I called him Octavianus Augustus.
This experiment having proved useless, I decided to investigate the causes of my serene attitude. Three days before, when they arrested me, I immediately felt relaxed. This sensation of ease became apparent simultaneously with the petrifying amazement of the arrest, and played second fiddle, so to speak, from the very first moment. I had been on my way to Czechoslovakia to spend my holiday in the mountains at government expense. On the Hungarian–Czech border two detectives had taken me off the train and driven me back to Budapest in a police car. They had told me reassuringly that they were taking me to 60 Andrassy Street to be questioned as a witness, and that I would be home by morning. I nodded at this transparent but kindly lie and wrapped myself in silence. I thought of the sleepless nights when I had still been waiting for my arrest; the arguments of formal logic according to which it was impossible that they should arrest me because I had done nothing; and my feelings telling me that in spite of all logic I would be arrested. At last it had happened. I felt like someone floating, relieved, above his own body a few minutes after death, looking down disdainfully, with the haughtiness of a young spirit, at his corpse and at the fear of death he had once experienced. I offered my detectives a packet of American cigarettes. They reached for it greedily and gave each other a look heavy with significance. Then I kept my eyes on the road: the blue-black poplars, the yellow village churches, the hares jumping about madly, blinded by the headlights.
I was led into a large, ground-floor cell at the Secret Police Headquarters at 60 Andrassy Street. A young sergeant with fever-spots on his face sat in a cane chair at the door.
‘Give me everything you have on you,’ he whispered. For a second I stood undecided in this atmosphere of sweat, blood and human excrement, then I put down before him on the table my money, my lighter and my watch. When his eyes fell on my Parker pen he threw me a respectful glance and slipped it with a quick movement into his pocket.
‘I shall write down on this envelope what you had on you,’ he said, girding the silver-studded belt I had brought with me from Arizona around his own middle. ‘So you can’t make me responsible for your stuff!’
While he wrote I looked about the room. At one end, in a sort of alcove, some ten people were sleeping on a platform, men and women, helter-skelter. About the same number of people were sitting on chairs turned towards the wall, their heads bent forward, at a distance of two yards from each other. These were all men, like the four standing in the corners. Those had their noses pressed against the wall and their knees were trembling; their trousers were wet. One man was lying on the ground in a puddle of blood, saliva and urine. He was tied up from his shoulders to his knees, like a mummy, and lay with his face pressed to the cement floor so that I saw only his fat, ham-coloured nape with three somewhat oblique wrinkles filled with perspiration. It seemed to me as if I had seen that nape in Parliament some years ago.
And I had seen not only that nape, but the whole scene. I recalled a film based on a piece of trashy literature which had been made in three or four variations since my boyhood. It was about a sadistic physician in whose house several people disappeared. The hero of the film, although he had been suspicious from the first, fell into the trap. The physician’s servants grabbed him and dragged him down to the mysterious cellar. This scene, here, was the one in which the camera moved over the motionless collection of Dracula’s victims. The four men in the corner stood as if they had been frozen into an ice-block. The mummy on the floor survived by drinking his own urine. The men sitting on chairs had been bewitched before their blood had been sucked from their bodies; only God knew how many weeks or months they had been sitting like that. At this scene, in which the clumsy artificiality of the scenario clashed with the brutal realism of the staging, a sigh of horror and wild laughter had risen from the audience. That was how I felt now. From the very beginning I had known that something absurd would happen; not only in the police car that had brought me here or during the past few years; I had known it when I left America, I had known it at the air-base in Kodiak and in Africa, on the day we escaped from Paris, and even on the evenin
g of the day Freud died, when we dined at Fontainebleau with Lorsy and Bandi. And I had not been the only one to guess it: Bandi and Lorsy and Professor Vambéry had known it, as well as my American friends, the liberals, the fellow-travellers and the communists; they had guessed it as I had guessed it. I knew that there was a mysterious building in every communist state where terror was manufactured, but I had never pictured to myself what really happened in those cellars. And had I, overcoming my laziness and cowardice, permitted my imagination to conjure up this picture, I should have rejected it as a perverted and unreal figment of my imagination. Even now, when it was there before my eyes, I still could not admit its reality and, like the audience at that awful film, I was half horrified, half amused. It was all too senseless, illogical and horrible to be real; and far too ridiculous to be really horrible.
I spent thirty-six hours in that common cell. Most of the time I was sitting on one of the chairs turned to the wall. Only the snoring of the sleepers and the endless babbling of the mummy broke the silence. Of the four men standing in the corner three collapsed from time to time. The sergeant threw a bucketful of water on them, stood them on their feet and slapped their faces. The fourth did not collapse once. He must have been standing for only one or two days. The babbling of the mummy consisted of four or five sentences. Sometimes he cried with deep conviction: ‘I am a Member of Parliament. My immunity has not been suspended and I have committed no crime.’ Then, a few hours later he complained that he had been kept tied up for ten days, although according to the law nobody could be detained for more than twenty-four hours; or he demanded that a lawyer be sent to see him and that his family be told of his whereabouts. Every time he began to speak the warder hurried over and began to kick his nape and his ears, but he went on talking.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 34