My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  The second morning I was led across the yard to the main building. In the corridor, close to a door, they told me to stand quietly with my face against the wall. While I was waiting, I pictured to myself my last free days with a painful, almost unbelievable exactitude: my discussion with Bandi Havas and Haraszti at the Athenaeum; our passage on the ferry-boat last Sunday when the nose of the boat divided the surface of the lake into a blue half and a green half; and I felt again the perfume of the coffee that had been put down before us at the espresso where Suzy and I had talked that last afternoon, three days ago. I had been standing there for two hours or more when I heard an agreeable, ringing voice from behind the door:

  ‘Let that fascist come in!’

  A captain was standing behind the desk: an attractive, elegant young man with fair hair, a narrow waist and almost classical features.

  ‘Soon,’ he said gaily, winking at me, ‘you will feel the weight of your behind on your neck.’

  He was quoting a line from a Villon poem in my translation. ‘Sit down,’ he continued kindly, then fished out from his desk drawer a typewritten page and a rubber truncheon. ‘You know me, don’t you? No? Well, I was there at your Villon recital at the Academy of Music two months ago. I talked to you in the interval.’

  For a while he stared into my face with obvious pleasure.

  ‘Your name?’

  While he typed out my data he looked with enchantment at his own hands, illuminated by the sunlight streaming in through the upper window. Nacreous, silver half-moons shone on his nails, but their ends were yellowish, thick and rough.

  ‘Do you know why you have been brought in here?’ he asked threateningly.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he continued tolerantly. ‘It’s enough if we know. Read this.’

  He handed me the typewritten page. It began by my admitting that I had committed serious crimes against the Hungarian working people and the laws of the people’s republic in that:

  first: I was an agent of the American secret service;

  second: I had organized an armed uprising for the overthrow of the people’s republic;

  third: as a right-wing social democrat I had carried out various sabotage actions;

  fourth: I maintained close relations with the head of the Hungarian Trotskyists, Pal Justus, and various Trotskyist circles abroad;

  fifth: after Justus’s arrest I had become the head of the Hungarian Trotskyists;

  sixth: I had written fascist articles in Népszava;

  seventh: I was friendly with people of a clerical or reactionary attitude, made imperialist propaganda in my conversations and hated the Hungarian people above all.

  Then the paper said that I was making this confession of my free will, without compulsion, to relieve my conscience. A few lines below, in another type, came an eighth, according to which, fearing arrest, I had taken a train to Czechoslovakia with the intention of going on from there to Western Germany and reporting to the American secret service.

  ‘Will you sign?’

  ‘There isn’t a word of truth in it,’ I replied.

  The captain picked up his rubber truncheon and swung it.

  ‘We shall see,’ he said. ‘We too have our arguments. They convinced Rajk. They convinced Pal Justus. They convinced Zoltan Horvath. They’ll convince you too.’

  ‘Each of the eight accusations is false. According to number one, I am an American spy. Where, when and why did I spy? What armament factory, barracks or industrial works have I visited? What secrets have I learned? To whom have I handed over the espionage report? And why should I have done all this? For fun, instead of writing poetry? For ambition, to gain fame and to be included in the Illustrated World History of Spies? Or have I been hired as a spy by the late Franklin D. Roosevelt, postpaid and free of charge in order to …’

  ‘Now stop this,’ the captain interrupted me, pretending to suppress a yawn. ‘I didn’t have you brought here to listen to your lectures. Answer me: Will you or won’t you sign the confession?’

  He got up, walked over behind my chair and began to tickle my nape with his rubber truncheon.

  ‘What happens if I don’t?’

  ‘We’ll stop playing around and will beat you until you do. And if that doesn’t help and if we don’t kill you by mistake, we’ll send for that Suzanne Szegö. And your mother. We’ll beat the shit out of them. But don’t build on that. You won’t see them. You’ll only hear their screams from the next room.’

  ‘I can’t think if you stand there behind me,’ I said and looked up into his face. He looked back, his pupils expanded.

  ‘Don’t think. Sign,’ he said lightly but went back to his chair.

  ‘Give me time to think it over.’

  ‘Are you mad? Two months to think it over and a roast duck every day?’

  ‘No. Five minutes to think and a cigarette.’

  I sat back in my chair: the brutal force of the smoke hit me in the chest. My questioner looked absentmindedly at his wrist-watch. Obviously most people who came up before him refused to sign. After all each of us – even the arrested communists – were used to thinking according to Roman Law and could not immediately accept that these people could do with us as they pleased – and do it regardless of whether we signed or not. I had to accept that they could kill me or not, as they liked. There was no point in not signing. There was no point in signing after two months of torture. Zinoviev signed, Bucharin signed, Rajk signed, Pal Justus signed, Zoltan Horvath signed, all of them after having tried desperately to convince their jailers of their innocence – something our jailers must have known.

  ‘Give me your pen!’

  The captain was so surprised that he raised both hands in the air.

  ‘In eleven copies,’ he said greedily and gave me his pen. Then, helpfully, he blew on my signatures until they dried, so as not to spoil the documents.

  A little while after I had been taken down to the cellar, I at last discovered the real cause of my mysterious happiness. I was happy simply because I was in jail. Every particle of my body protested against the admission that I should feel happier in the most frightful building of the country, in a windowless, underground cell fitted with three wooden planks instead of a bed and a two-hundred-watt electric bulb ablaze above the door, than I had been in a society outside which I detested but in which I enjoyed until the last minute the love of Suzy, the shape of the clouds, my walks in the reedbanks at Dunaharaszti and the smell of wine. And yet, this was what was making me feel well: that at last I was where, in a communist state, I ought to be. No matter what injustice or stupidity my jailers committed, they had put me finally in the place where I belonged and in a position worthy of me. They had put an end to the shameful situation in which, more than once, I had been compelled to keep silent when I should have raised my voice, or to praise that which I loathed. But, leaving those lofty principles aside, my jailers had saved me from an everyday life in which I had to give up my writing, my friends, all human relationships, my habits, including that of thinking, all in order to make place for fear, insecurity, helplessness and humiliation. When they locked the cell door behind me I suddenly regained my freedom: the right and the unlimited opportunity to think.

  My objections to acknowledging the liberation of my conscience went deep. True, I considered materialist philosophy, particularly as the communists interpreted it, to be obsolete rubbish left over from the Age of Enlightenment; but still, I refused to believe that its contrary should be true and that a relieved conscience alone could create in me agreeable, almost erotic physical reactions. Three days ago, I was still called ‘comrade’ and did not protest against it; I had to go to party meetings because there was no way to avoid them; thus I had not been able to sever certain elusive ties binding me to the system. I had tried to behave as decently as possible, in the given conditions, without endangering myself. I did not behave badly, but I had given no proof of moral courage; not only because it w
ould have been utterly useless, but also because my views on moral courage were rather unorthodox: I regarded political and human honesty as a pose which I had assumed since my early days mainly to impress myself and my biographers. This was the main reason why I was astonished at being so happy only because my conscience had less to be ashamed of than it had a week earlier. It seemed almost incomprehensible that conscientious and moral factors should affect me so deeply, should dominate my whole body, so to speak.

  The idyllic feeling still persisted after I had undressed and spread my clothes carefully on the three boards of the bunk to lie on. I closed my eyes and imagined that I was sleeping in a baroque garden, or rather in a garden on a stage, probably at a performance of a comedy by Lope de Vega: the electric bulb was the morning sun, the green cell door the garden gate and the whispers of the jailers in the corridor those of the prompter. But as soon as I fell asleep I saw the flat-nosed, gorilla-like monster at the Criminal Records Office to whom I had been led earlier that day, and the fat, limping AVO man, the bath-master, whom I had also visited and who stood in trunks and a gunbelt before the old stove into which he was feeding books by André Gide, Ernest Hemingway and Panait Istrati. The water from the tap in my dream was ice cold or scalding hot, as it had been that morning, and I imagined that they had taken me to the police station in Hell where the Monster of Düsseldorf keeps the records and Jack the Ripper is the chief. Later, American planes began to circle above my head. My American paratrooper buddies were coming to rescue me. Although they jumped out above the Danube, the west wind was so strong that they came down exactly on the roof of 60 Andrassy Street, above which other triumphant planes were circling. When I woke with a start I suddenly remembered that I was next to the lift-shaft. It must have been ten o’clock: the AVO men were arriving for the night shift, to bring out the rubber truncheons from the desk drawers and the clients from the underground cells. But was it really the lift I had heard? I closed my eyes and concentrated on Truman’s planes.

  To my great relief I was not questioned again during the next fort-night. On my first morning in the cell I was already able to see that something in it had changed. The whitewashed wall had lost its smoothness and become patterned with damp spots, shadows and cracks. Soon the latter combined to form easily discernible, permanent frescoes, sketches and signs. On a level with the bunk I discovered the elegant arch of the Golden Gate Bridge and close to it the outlines of the British lion. At eye-level, in the middle of another wall, a wintry landscape with trees showed through the whitewash. Only after careful examination did I discover that it was not a landscape at all but a multiple scaffold with the victims hanging from its arms like grapes – the kind seen on the execution-hills of medieval towns.

  On the end wall, where the atheist Member of Parliament had written his GOD HAVE MERCY ON ME, four apocalyptic horses were drawing a coach towards the large, vertical, zigzag crack. Behind the coach, to the left, I thought I could read the letters MMIR. I soon decided that the moist crack running from south to north on the wall-map was the River Rhine; but who were the travellers in the coach? Aristocrats escaping from the French Revolution? After a morning of hard thinking I came to the conclusion that the letters MMIR stood where Paris lay on the map and could consequently mean nothing else but the initials of Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre. So the passengers in the coach were girondists fleeing not from the revolution but from Robespierre’s reign of terror, and their coach had got stuck in the mud of the road. The myrmidons would catch up with them and drag them back to the Conciergerie.

  I was annoyed that it had taken me so long to solve it. When I was first brought down to the cellar and the iron door closed behind me, pressing out the air with a sibilant whisper, and when the rusty bolt was shot into place, the two sounds had reminded me of the two syllables of the word gi-ronde. And when I caught sight of the bare bunk I remembered Vambéry’s last words in New York harbour and suddenly everything I ever knew about the Gironde had come back to me. Among the girondists André Chénier and Mme Roland were closest to my heart: the image I drew to myself of the latter was so sharp that I could see the powder spilling from her wig and could almost smell her perfume. But what I was thinking about was not the similarity of our fates but the differences between them. Robespierre – however much I disliked him as a puritan who did not go to the café for his amusement but played billiards with human heads – was at least a man, attractive, witty, within his own narrow logic consistent; his followers adored him and he believed in what he was doing. My baldheaded jailer, on the other hand, was nothing but one of Stalin’s henchmen, ugly, dull, unoriginal and a cynic behind his mask of a jovial grocer. He knew in his head, resting on two fat-rolls instead of a neck, that he was hated by the entire country and despised by his Russian master. And this was why André Chénier was allowed to write poems in prison, and why I in the communist Conciergerie was given no paper and pen; this was why they would kill me in secret and kick my body into the lime-pit.

  The tumbril taking the condemned to the Place de Grève, from which they could call to their friends and relatives and even proclaim their opinions, seemed to me a triumphal car taking its passengers straight to the Pantheon. The fact that I would not be able to assure Suzy and posterity of my innocence was as dreadful to me as the idea of my execution. From some of my opinions and remarks – when, for instance, I had said that while Stalin assured the workers of his great love for them three times in every speech he made, Truman’s America paid them three times more wages without prattle – Suzy might conclude that I had been an imperialistic agent, although I had only stated a fact. What I said after the Rajk trial might justify her in thinking that I had been one of Rajk’s accomplices, although I had protested only because he had been hanged for invented crimes and not for his real ones.

  In my earlier behaviour she might find psychological evidence for all the eight charges against me and should she still not be quite certain of my guilt, she would come to believe in it in time, after listening to friends and acquaintances, reading about it in the papers and hearing my confession from my own lips at the trial. And in the end I would believe it myself. In a year, only my accusers, tormentors and judges would know that I was innocent.

  I was also concerned about the opinion of posterity. My friends might not need to be convinced, but they would die and the new generation would inherit neither their beliefs nor their experiences. Everything depended on the lifespan of the régime. True, it was not much stronger than a house built of cards, but a house that would not collapse by itself. It needed a kick or a breeze to bring it down, and as far as this kick or breeze was concerned I had nothing to hope from the knees or lungs of Western politicians. At Yalta, they had entrusted our lives to Stalin’s care; two years ago, they had encouraged us to stand up for our convictions and resist communist expansion; now, they were assuring us of their sympathies over the radio.

  It seemed hopeless and childishly naïve to struggle any more against the enemy’s forces, but I tried my best. Every time I was taken to the WC the warder stood in the open door watching my every move. It took infinite cunning to secrete a piece of toilet paper and take it back to my cell. Under the bunk, between two bricks, I discovered a deep crevice; this was where I intended to hide a message. Twenty or fifty years hence, after the fall of the régime, this building would be torn down like the Bastille, but before it vanished they would pass every particle of dust through a sieve to see whether the one-time inmates had left any messages.

  During the past two years I had diligently perused the better known prison diaries of Hungarian history and anything dealing with the imprisonment of our national heroes. I had little difficulty, therefore, in laying my hands on writing material. I tore out a few bristles from the broom the warder brought in the morning for me to sweep the wet floor of the cell. For a while I used my gum as an inkwell, and when it dried up I tore open my finger on the iron legs of the bunk and took blood from there whenever I needed it.


  I had to keep my message short. I WAS INNOCENT sounded cheap and unconvincing; besides, my intention was not to let the world know that I was the victim of a miscarriage of law; I insisted on informing the world that there was no law at all. THE NAZIS BOIL SOAP, THE COMMUNISTS TERROR FROM THEIR OPPONENTS sounded pedantic and affected. And it was only half true, since the communists boiled terror from the body of Rajk, who was not an opponent, and, anyway, it might well be that my case would never come up for trial, the documents would be burned, my name never again mentioned, so that they would not even distil terror from my body; they had brought me here without any reason and would liquidate me for no purpose. I WAS KILLED BY THE CYNICAL INQUISITORS AND IMPOSTORS OF AN IRRATIONAL STATE POWER sounded much better, but it needed a whole volume of explanation, a volume I would have no time to write. ARTHUR KOESTLER WAS RIGHT was a tempting solution, but this formula suggested that I discovered it only here, in jail, which was untrue. Besides, I rejected any comparison between Rubashov and myself. Still, after a number of variations this was the one I chose, with the addition I WAS GUILTLESS and a postscript of two lyrical words for Suzy.

  I used up ten or fifteen drops of blood for every letter, to make certain it would show on the paper for a few decades. I was busy on the last word of the postscript when the door of the cell flew open. The warder must have been watching me through the Judas-hole; he tore the paper from my hand, slapped my face and declared that my investigator would make sure I was punished. Five minutes later he returned with a rubber truncheon and ordered me to open my trousers and put my scrotum on the iron bed-head. For a second I wavered and cold sweat broke out on my forehead. At that moment inhuman screams broke out on the opposite side of the corridor. This was the first sound I had heard from my fellow prisoners since I was locked in the cell, except for the spasmodic coughing of the man in the cell opposite mine. This sound came from far away, at least five cells down the corridor. Anxiety was making my ear-drums throb and I felt as if hot water were streaming into my ears. Because of this I did not understand the words, although they were undoubtedly coherent. At the first scream the warder ran from my cell and locked the door on me. In the next second I was leaning against the door, listening to the sounds outside.