My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  ‘Long live Stalin! Long live Stalin! I love our dear comrade Rakosi!’

  In the pauses between the thuds of the rubber truncheon the ‘Long live Stalin! Long live Stalin! I love our dear comrade Rakosi!’ rose six more times, ever more strongly, ever more enthusiastically. Then I heard a splitting sound as if they had broken the victim’s jaw along with his teeth. Then absolute silence, as if both victim and torturers had been buried alive under sand.

  I felt that I knew that voice. I knew everybody in that cellar. The social democratic politicians, ministers, under-secretaries, generals, police chiefs, university professors and deputies who were here partly because they refused to sell their party to the communists, partly because they had not refused. But which of them would acclaim Stalin? This stupid trick, this fun-fair barker’s humbug would never have occurred to the old trade union leaders, nor to Istvan Ries, Minister of Justice, nor even to Arpad Szakasits, President of the Republic, weak and cowardly but entirely without baseness or cunning. If anyone, only György Marosan would be capable of it; but the voice was not Marosan’s voice.

  I stood by the door for a long time, listening for the steps of the AVO men. Two hours later the same warder who had made me undo my trousers opened the door and pointed to a dixie full of meatballs. ‘Pick it up and eat, you rotten plutocrat,’ he said. For hours I kept pacing the cell, two and a half steps up, two and a half steps down, afraid that he might return with the rubber truncheon; but he did not show up.

  After having spent a fortnight in my cell I was led before a pink-cheeked, fat-lipped, slightly bald major who was waiting for me at the window of his room, resting his backside on the sill and raising himself on tiptoe to seem taller. During the interrogation he threw back his head and with a lock of hair hanging over his forehead, his eyes bulging and his arms crossed over his chest, he bustled up and down the room, triumphant in his likeness to Bonaparte on the bridge at Lodi. As there was no name-plate on his desk I christened him Napoleon the Grocer.

  The questions he asked me were so confusing that on this first day I couldn’t make out what he wanted from me and I felt that he did not know it either. On the second day he ordered me to write my autobiography in at least thirty pages; Two days later, when I had finished, he read it carefully, then declared that if what I had written were true I should be decorated and not imprisoned. Then he called me Orwell’s dirtiest disciple and spat into my eyes. During the following two days he made me tell him about every love-affair I had ever had, down to the smallest detail. It seemed as though he were simply passing the time of day until they had finished searching my room and collecting data and evidence against me.

  During the following week, after he had made me write two more autobiographies, had torn them up and flung them in my face, I at last discovered what he wanted. I understood from certain remarks he made that they had not searched my room, knew nothing about my past activities and, what is more, were not even interested in them. They wanted nothing but that I should furnish, or to be more exact, invent, the proofs supporting the eight false charges against me. I had to realize that the AVO were not investigating, not examining, not proving and not reading. According to communist logic the very fact that they omitted to search my room, although they were accusing me of preparing an armed uprising, demonstrated that they were preparing to stage a show-trial. My remaining doubts were dispelled by Napoleon himself who, reminding me that I was a poet – a man of imagination – encouraged me to write a ‘really beautiful and credible confession’. He said that if I refused he would have me taken to the cellar and beaten so thoroughly that they would have to take me out of the building in a dustbin. However, apart from a few slaps, he did not hurt me.

  Finally he declared that we would write my biography in co-authorship. He sat down to the typewriter and I dictated. But when he handed me each finished page it turned out that he had typed something entirely different from what I had said. At first I would argue for hours concerning an expression; when, for instance, instead of putting down that my father was a university professor he typed ‘As far as my father’s profession is concerned, I come from a rich bourgeois family.’ When I protested, he declared that nobody was responsible for his background and offered to delete the word ‘rich’. ‘Write,’ I insisted, ‘that my father was a college professor, because that is what he was.’ But the Grocer refused to mention my father’s profession; perhaps he feared that it might make a favourable impression on the audience at the trial.

  He also omitted that I had studied philosophy, that I had been condemned in contumnaciam to eight years of prison for my anti-Nazi poems, that all my books had been burned by the Hungarian fascists, that I had been invited to America by Roosevelt and that I was secretary of the Free Hungary Movement. Thus I realized that truth had absolutely no place in this concoction. The only purpose of trials such as mine was to justify the politics of the communist party by a practical demonstration, or rather, like a biblical parable. The defendant had to be of bourgeois origin, he had to be a former lackey of the Horthy régime, he had to be a traitor to the working class from the cradle and, at the same time, a pro-Westerner, an egg-head and an admirer of Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini and Tito at one go. Since there was no real human being suited to their purpose, the AVO, willy-nilly, had to invent such beings.

  As time went on I became more and more bored with the whole procedure. I watched the shadows of the guards walking up and down in front of the building, reflected on the white ceiling above the window hung with thick curtains, so that the interrogator had to shout at me repeatedly before I heard his question. My creased suit, dirty shirt and unshaven face made me self-conscious, the hard bunk hurt my back and I was nervous because since the Grocer had tried to blackmail me with cigarettes I had stopped smoking. But I was even more annoyed by the dullness and lack of drama in the interrogation; by the fact that the accusations were as stupid as I had expected them to be and the procedure even clumsier. I thought with a certain envy of my communist comrades in misfortune who were probably trying to defend themselves and convince their interrogators of their innocence. They were at least fighting for something, while I knew beyond doubt that fighting was foolish. By some means or other they would extract from me the confession they wanted to have and I knew that the text of the confession was absolutely unconnected with whether they would hang me or not, because that was decided long before my arrest and if not, it depended on their whim.

  A few days earlier, however, I had still cherished a few illusions, if not about communist justice, at least about its executants whom, remembering Ivanov and O’Brien, I had imagined to be much superior to this; probably because Koestler and Orwell had based their characters on the communist old guard, and had also observed the literary convention that they should be opponents worthy of their heroes. My Grocer, unfortunately, didn’t even satisfy the requirements of a penny-dreadful. What incensed me most was not that he had no idea of geography, spelling, syntax or history but that although he was bustling up and down like mad and constantly falling into his Napoleonic poses, and although he showed more than a necessary interest in my person, he was even more bored with my case than I was myself. I was convinced that he had received detailed instructions as to what I was to confess, so that naturally he was bored; and the main reason I loathed him was not because he could eventually have me hanged but because I was compelled to converse with him.

  On the second day of our joint biography-writing my fury exploded. We were discussing events in 1938–39 and the Grocer summarized my reasons for emigrating as follows: ‘I could not resist my cosmopolitan nature, my unrestrained ambition and my yearning for money, therefore I travelled to Paris to contact various diversionary elements and became a member of Laszlo Fényes’s Trotskyist group …’

  I told the Grocer that Fényes had been a socialist, not a Trotskyite. I warned him that this passage was so stupid, so obviously AVO-inspired and drafted that not only foreign journalists but even the m
ost loyal and idiotic party member could not believe it at the trial.

  ‘Then you can say it without worrying. It involves no risk,’ the major replied with a loud yawn. ‘Besides, what difference does it make to poor Fényes whether we call him a socialist or a Trotskyist?’

  We argued for a long time. I had learned during my interrogation that the Grocer divided humanity into two main categories: those who were already dead, or arrested or hanged; and those who were still free – that is, who had still to be arrested and hanged. He spoke leniently about the dead ‘who chose liberty and escaped from us to the graveyards’; but when speaking about the prisoners in the cells below us there was even a certain fatherly warmth in his voice. He discussed them as a farmer would his livestock, which he must feed, which he must keep clean and which, when necessary, he must castrate, or, rather sadly, send to the slaughterhouse. Of the other category, those still unarrested, he spoke with a hatred that almost made him foam at the mouth. He called Imre Komor, the editor of Népszava, ‘an old Trotskyite horse-thief’; said about a famous writer, who, in order to avoid dealing with the present took the subjects of his novels from history, that ‘he is disguising himself as a carrion beetle although he is a scorpion’; and, when talking about one of the best actresses of the country, added, ‘we shall bring her in as soon as we have room in the cellar, and we’ll make that harlot drink her own urine’. I learned a great deal from the remarks he let drop, which often permitted me to guess what was going on outside and who had been brought in during the last few days. There was always a certain gentleness in his voice when he spoke of them.

  We were still arguing about Fényes and my emigration when, unexpectedly, he asked:

  ‘And when did you become acquainted with poor Bandi?’

  ‘What Bandi?’

  ‘Poor Bandi Havas, of course.’

  Suddenly I was overcome with nausea and almost fell from my chair. I closed my eyes quickly to avoid watching Napoleon’s pleasure at the effect of his words. I had been seeking the owner of the voice cheering Stalin on an entirely wrong track, among the social democrats, and that was why I had come to the false conclusion that he was an unfortunate impostor who could invent no better trick. But now I knew that the lunatic who had cried for Stalin could have been no one but Bandi Havas.

  I went on sitting there with my eyes closed, trying to think. When Bandi was brought in he probably did not believe, as I did, that he had fallen into the murderers’ trap. He probably believed that after a short and friendly conversation which would convince his comrades of his innocence, they would let him go. Perhaps this was how other communists thought, too, at the moment of their arrest. But what happens to a believer who discovers in prison that the priests of his church are cynics, his inquisitors heretics, his executioners pagans? He is faced with an appalling alternative: either he relinquishes his faith, or he sacrifices his sanity. Obviously the majority will defend themselves against going mad and will betray the faith that has betrayed them, so that the false accusation of heresy finally becomes true; not because the believer accepts the accusations brought against him as true, but because he discovers that his accusers know it to be false. After so much self-humiliation and cowardice, Bandi had made an insane, but still a manly and impressive gesture, and had chosen the other solution. He had thrown himself overboard so as not to have to sacrifice his faith and his party; he had chosen to believe his accusers when they said he was guilty, perhaps he even thought them right to beat and torture him. He admitted to heresy not only by signing a prefabricated confession, but by handing over his soul to the party’s judgement. He protected his faith by recognizing sins he had never committed. He must have been the only person in the building who could sincerely wish Stalin and Rakosi a long life. Yes, he is the hero of our age – I thought. The hero of our age in the sense Lorsy and I had prophesied at Fontainebleau, ten years ago, on the day of Poland’s fourth dismembering. I had been arrested by my enemies, he by his comrades; my doom was self-evident, uninteresting and rather ridiculous, because I had voluntarily gone through a door which could not be opened from inside; but Bandi had always been inside this closed room, his doom was tragic and characteristic of our age, belonging to the very essence of its history. The shedding of my blood was only a private affair, and a very common one at that, but the shedding of Bandi’s blood cried to heaven.

  I was still sitting there, with my eyes closed, feeling my temples swelling with torment like two large blisters, my throat and windpipe flattened out like paper cylinders under a heavy fist, my toes curling back tensely under my foot till they stuck in a hole in my shoe. When I opened my eyes the Grocer was standing by the window, his arms crossed on his chest, a triumphant, watchful smile on his lips.

  ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘that you don’t want to denounce your friend Bandi. And you don’t have to. Havas has admitted everything. He even betrayed your spy-contacts and those of Uncle Sandor Haraszti. He confessed that you three had worked together on the restoration of capitalism, Uncle Sandor in the service of Tito, he in the service of the British, and you in the service of the Americans. Learn from your friend’s example and make a full confession. Admit everything,’ he concluded, pointing his finger towards the dirty wall where Felix Edmundovich Dzerdzinski’s black beard looked trim and well cared for under the glass protecting the old-fashioned oleograph.

  During the following weeks Napoleon the Grocer extorted a detailed confession from me in which I admitted that I had gone to France to join Laszlo Fényes’s Trotskyite group and to engage in anti-Soviet activity while working on the post-war restoration of capitalism. Then he handed me over to a plain-clothed AVO investigator who called himself an American specialist and made me describe how, with Vambéry, other arch-reactionaries, and the imperialists and fascists of America, I had engaged in subversive activity and had joined the OSS, America’s espionage organization. From his questions I concluded that they were preparing a Trotskyist spy-trial of which I should be one of the principal accused. I therefore did my best to invent details of a kind to make foreign journalists guess what was going on. I told my interrogator, for instance, that I had been recruited for the Office of Strategic Services by two American agents: Captain Edgar Allan Poe and Major Walt Whitman, describing the two men in great detail. In case one of the investigators or the judge might discover my purpose I invented a third American agent, the club-footed Z. E. Bubbel – an anagram of Belzebub – whom I intended to unmask only at the trial. I talked at length about the wild orgies we had staged at the New York headquarters of the OSS from where – after we had got drunk to the gills on Coca-Cola – I had been carted home by Belzebub himself. When my interrogator asked me for the New York address of the OSS headquarters I was unable to answer, because I had never been there, so suggested that he should look it up in the New York telephone directory; upon which he gave me a beating and made me stand for two days and three nights with my nose pressed to the wall. By then he had put the address into my confession.

  One evening during the interrogation, which usually lasted until ten p.m., I was just about to invent the instructions with which I had been sent home to Hungary by the American espionage organization, when my interrogator was called from the room. On his return he summoned a guard to remove me. The guard did not take me back to the cellar but put me in a car and drove me to another yard in the huge AVO headquarters. I was then made to walk down many steps into a deep cellar where I was put in a cell. Only then did I realize how elegant my former quarters had been. Here the bunk was mouldy and there was half an inch of water on the floor. There was no ventilation and a constant gasping rattle came from the next cell. The guard warned me that I was not allowed to sit down during the day and would be taken out to the lavatory only once every twenty-four hours. Should they catch me giving way to my needs in the cell they would make me drink my own water for a week instead of supper.

  The next day I expected them to fetch me for interrogation, but nothing happene
d. It was the same on the following day, the next week and all the following weeks. At first I thought that they had discovered the lies in my confession and were punishing me for having tried to fool them, but I soon had to discard that idea. Had I been right they would probably have beaten me, bur they would not have interrupted the questioning. Perhaps they had sent me down here to put me to the usual tortures: but when day after day went by without anything of the sort taking place, I discarded that idea too. It was silly to seek for reasons in this completely irrational set-up. The most probable answer was that my interrogator had received new instructions, or that a new, more important prisoner had been put in my old cell.

  This question did not preoccupy me for long, and I soon gave up guessing. On the second of those forty-two days, while I walked up and down in my cell like a pendulum, it flashed through my mind that I was in a privileged position. To hold mass a priest needs an altar and an altar-boy; to follow his bent a craftsman needs tools, a painter his brushes, a minister his desk, a worker his machine. I was the only man in this cellar who had in his head everything he required for his profession. The mere thought of being able to make poems filled me with a swaggering happiness that made me walk up and down with a smile on my lips. I felt that I was fooling my jailers and, at the same time, forgetting my miserable situation. At times it crossed my mind that the AVO had arrested me without cause and therefore, according to its own logic, it would have to hang me; for what else could they do with me? Every time I pictured my execution, my knees gave way, I stopped in my tracks and began to watch the rings forming in the half inch of water that had collected on the floor of my cell. In the next second, however, I shrugged my shoulders haughtily and forgot all about it. The poems on which I was working were more interesting to me than the problem of whether or not they world hang me.