My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  This was not because I had become accustomed to the fear of death since I had been in prison, but because I had never become accustomed to it in all my life. At the age of nine or ten, almost every night, whenever I remembered that I should die, I would jump out of bed, switch on the light, or bite my pillow in utter despair. When my classmates in the first grade in grammar school were throwing paper pellets at each other I would think: this is how deadly bacilli fly around me, and one day one of them will hit me. When I heard words like humanity, fate or life, I saw hosts of men running with bare breasts towards machine-guns that mowed them down, generation after generation. If on some border the customs officer inquired about my destination, a graveyard emerged before my eyes. Whenever I lay back on my bed or took a sunbath at the swimming pool I always remembered that one day I would lie in the ground in this very same position. It was never the proximity of death that I feared, but its inevitability. Having always been conscious of deadly danger, even in the safest situation, and having always trembled at the thought of death with the greatest cowardice, I could not experience much greater fear at any moment of my life.

  Until then I had never thought that it was possible to make a poem without pen and paper, but apparently they did not belong to the essence of poetry, not even to the ceremony of poem-making. Homer probably created his epic before writing was invented in Greece. I imagined him walking along the sea-shore or in a garden (I had to discard the legend of his blindness, for a blind man would never speak about an ‘oily, wine-dark sea’) reciting to himself his hexameters. There was no reason why I shouldn’t do the same. The tinyness and semi-obscurity of the cell constricted my imagination and thereby caused it to explode. Forgotten scenes from my childhood and youth filled my mind; the world outside came to life again, and seemed more clear-cut to me than ever before: it had petrified into a somewhat dramatic stage-setting, complete with actors. It seemed to me as if one minute after my arrest the whole world had been declared a historic monument: all movement, all change had ceased; my friends had turned to stone in the position in which I had last seen them. I was standing in a huge picture gallery and I read hundreds of frescoes into the whitewashed walls of my cell.

  My only problem was to memorize my poems. On the first day I thought up only twenty lines, but gradually I increased it to an average of fifty lines a day. I repeated each line twenty times, and all the previous lines three times in succession. By evening I had always forgotten the whole poem but the next morning I knew it without mistake. My preoccupation changed even the subjective length of a day: to me the time from six o’clock in the morning when the guard appeared with the soup until between nine and ten in the evening when he collected the dixie, never seemed longer than three-quarters of an hour. Thus, I completely forgot the present and the future and even came to disregard the noises seeping into my cell; except the brief howling to be heard once or twice a week, usually late in the evening that ended in a short, strangled death-rattle. The howl was always preceded by the guards dragging something mute and lifeless, probably an unconscious or drugged man, along the corridor, and by the sound of a body dropped into a bath filled with liquid. The basin must have been somewhere at the end of the corridor, behind a cell door. Five or six seconds after the howl I could smell acid, but whether it was hydrochloric acid or sulphuric acid I was never sure. I supposed that the victim, become useless to the AVO either because he had already signed a confession or because he refused to make one, was beaten half dead and then thrown into the bath of acid. For a few minutes I would stand petrified in my cell, but immediately afterwards I would find rhymes more beautiful and metaphors more unexpected than had ever occurred to me before.

  In a month’s time I could whisper to myself a whole volume of poems. I devoted the first of them to my father’s memory, or rather, to the memory of our life-long quarrel. When I emigrated to Paris we were on bad terms and I addressed my letters to my mother whenever I wrote. Back in Budapest, I found only his grave. This was how our long feud, lasting over fifteen years, had ended. And yet, it was from him that I had inherited an essential part of my being: my cheerfulness, my patience, my interest in philosophy and art, my intense but never immoderate enjoyment of the pleasures of life, my fear of death, my yearning for travel and adventure. In his youth he had been an assistant teacher at the University of Johannesburg – perhaps even he did not know how he ever got there. The outbreak of the First World War found him in Switzerland, the Second in Italy. Both countries would have been glad to offer him asylum but he returned home, although he, like me, was only attached to Hungary, but did not like to live there.

  Our differences began when I was still in grammar school. He always listened to my arguments, though he never considered them important. He said – and in this he was right – that several hundred chemical engineers were living in the country and with the exception of one or two they all earned a very decent living. At the same time, there were hundreds of poets and with the exception of one or two they were all starving. At the university they would give me a degree that would be recognized throughout the world. But I could not obtain a degree in poetry, and who could guarantee that my poems would meet with success, no matter how extraordinary they were? Poetry, beautiful as it might be, was but a violet vapour, intangible and difficult to define, nothing on which to build a life.

  He liked to talk to me in the conservatory, among his test tubes, in a white coat, his arms crossed on his chest. He raised one of his eyebrows and watched me with tenderness. With his olive complexion, silver hair and domed forehead he resembled at times a famous gipsy musician, at times Einstein, then again Karl Marx. I would tremble with fury. It was not that I had doubted his benevolence. I knew that in his youth he too had wanted to be a writer. I had found some of his poems in his desk drawer, hidden under business correspondence. Some had been written during the First World War when he was serving in the Balkans as a first lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army. A few of these poems were addressed to a pretty landlady in Cetinje, a big, hefty woman who threw out the more obnoxious guests with her own strong hands and with whom my father drank thick Thracian red wines under the setting sun until their tongues stuck to their palates. It made me particularly angry that my father should try to dissuade me from doing something that he himself had tried. I also knew that he pursued his profession, in which he was known throughout Europe as an expert, with the ambition and zeal of an alchemist, but not with love. When he was alone in the flat he locked himself in his room and played the violin. Sometimes I watched him through the keyhole: he stood on the bear-skin by the window, next to the piano. He clasped the violin to him with hand and chin, like some coveted prey. His face would still be alight with joy when, later, he left the room.

  One of the most exalting moments of my life was when, while my father was praising the real and positive world of Mendeleyev’s ninety-two elements and speaking with disdain of the violet vapour of poetry, the retorts – filled with the violet vapour of mercury – exploded behind him with a powerful noise, overthrew the Bunsen burners and broke some of the conservatory’s windows. While my father was busy putting out the small fires I walked quietly away with the triumphant realization that even the ninety-two elements – of which I doubted not only the number and succession but also the very existence – had come to my aid.

  After the explosion, though I was tactful enough not to laugh about it, the conflict between us was never bridged. Later, when he found out that instead of studying chemistry I was attending lectures in philosophy, history and medicine, or sitting peacefully in the university library, there were rather noisy scenes, though my father was a mild man. Subsequently, when in spite of my youth I became a well-known poet in my country, he spoke proudly of me to the others but never revoked his former opinion to my face, I never expected my father to apologize to me. All I expected of him was to congratulate me just once, between the two of us, on my success. He, however, could not resign himself to it – presumab
ly in my own interest. If he could now see me in prison he would probably assure me, with an aching heart, that had I become a chemical engineer this would never have happened to me. Perhaps he would have been right. I should probably hold a university chair, I should be a member of the party, my students would loathe me and I would loathe myself. Even if they were to hang me, my choice had been the right one.

  The apartment house in which my parents had lived until the middle of the ’thirties received a direct hit in 1944. By the time I returned to Budapest even the ruins had been cleared away. But I still pictured my father in his old study, floating in space four floors up, like a fragment of a disintegrated heavenly body. And this is how I described him in my poem: standing on the bear-skin next to the piano, turning his back on the desk and the bookcase with the busts of Heraclitos and Democritus on its top and the chemical and philosophical books on its shelves – the former now obsolete, the latter out of fashion. He stood there as he used to do, in his creased, loose, spotted black suit but not without some elegance, with his short legs, protruding stomach and huge, strong chest – looking like a big violin. And I listened to his playing behind the door, hovering, as he did, in space. Then, cautiously, I tried the door. To my surprise it was open. ‘Why don’t we make friends, Daddy?’ I asked. But he pretended not to notice me. And I dared not hold out my hand to him because it is bad form to hold out your hand to your father even if he is dead.

  The next poem was addressed to Rustem Vambéry. While at liberty I had dared to think of him only at night. At such times I accompanied him along the road to annihilation. I saw his skin turn purple, become bloated and begin to rot; I saw his swollen fingers spread out in the coffin; he could no longer hold his fountain-pen to write letters like strings of pearls; I saw filthy puddles fill the sockets that once embraced his wise, ironical eyes. His nails had fallen off and lay beside him like ten pale shells.

  This is what the first eight lines of the poem dealt with. Then I went on to describe the atmosphere of our conversations in his room on the twelfth floor at the Hotel Van Cortland. I listened with only half an ear when, sometimes, he mentioned Roman Law. The law, he said, could be compared to an old-fashioned, uncomfortable, dirty though rather massive building, its corridors walked by vain and haughty judges, and money-hungry, noisy lawyers. But if someone were to bore a hole in the wall of this building, all the filth of the gutter would stream in until we were submerged to the lips. It was not by chance that Voltaire chose to rehabilitate the memory of Calas or that Zola fought with such unwavering energy for the not very attractive Captain Dreyfus. They knew exactly what follows every time society tolerates even one innocent man’s condemnation.

  There was a third poem to be written, the one to Suzy. That poem must be true, whatever the future might hold. If they hanged me the poem must be different from the one I should write if they did not hang me, and it must also fit Suzy’s attitude – which was unknown to me. I was no longer worried about our argument, about the red handbag which turned into a white handbag at the patty’s command. I knew that Suzy would sooner or later discard the communist fanaticism that she had assumed precisely in self-defence against communism. The question was only: when?

  I was afraid that my arrest – however much it hurt her – would not be enough to open Suzanne’s eyes. Not that I suspected her of reacting like people in general. In general people behaved about their arrested friends in a way exactly opposite to that in which they behaved about the dead, of whom it is usual to remember only the virtues; of the arrested they refused to remember anything but their bad habits and bad deeds, partly to rid themselves of inevitable pangs of conscience, partly to reject all moral obligation to stand up for them. Suzanne would never sink so low; the trouble was that she might regard my arrest as a misunderstanding, as a judicial error, and so might reconcile, at least temporarily, the sorrow felt over my loss with her faith in the party.

  Suzanne had been driven into the communist party by her indignation against social injustice, by her father’s richness, by her rebellion against her parents, by her benevolence, her humanity and her historical and philosophical ignorance. Like everyone who joined the party for moral reasons, she gave up moral scruples as soon as she had joined. It was obvious that those moral scruples, silenced for a while, would sooner or later kill her faith in communism and would bring order to the emotional chaos which that faith had engendered in her. I was afraid, however, that this would take a long time.

  Strangely enough I came to this conclusion from the fact that Suzanne had never studied Greek and had taken Latin only for a short time, as a non-compulsory subject. In the course of the last few years I had noticed that knowledge of classical tongues and of the humanities existed in an inverse ratio with the penetration of communist ideas, which may have been why communists hastened to abolish the teaching of Latin in the grammar schools. Not one of my forty classmates had remained communists; those who had joined were disappointed within a few weeks or months. The most devoted, stubborn and biased supporters of the régime were middle-class people or intellectuals who had not studied Latin, while most of the communist writers or journalists occupying key positions had gone to technical schools, like Bandi Havas.

  I felt that it was the things I had learned in the Latin, Greek and history classes of my school that formed the stumbling-block on which communism foundered. Whenever I read the works or listened to the speeches of the ideologists or politicians of the régime, the precise rules of Latin grammar and style warned me that the subjects did not correspond to the predicates, that the tenses were incorrectly used and that the text was impure. Not only formally impure, but also in its essence, because the writer, or speaker, was lying – lying consciously – and was in addition bored with his own lies. The little I had learned in logic, correct and incorrect deduction, immunized me against the arguments, slogans, promises, predictions and statistics of the communists. The entire Graeco-Roman world rose up against their pompous, dull and bilious life, from their nurseries hung with Stalin’s portraits to their colourless and profane funerals, at which their corpses served merely as a pretext for the party secretary to attack Harry Truman in the funeral oration – all through their days steeped in intrigue, wasted in joylessness, in reckless hysteria or neurotic sham calm, without sincerity, sensuousness, walks, revelry and freedom: yes, the entire Graeco-Roman world rose up against them, the blue and serene skies of Homer, Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom, the idylls of Theocritus, the sepulchres of the Diphilon cemetery of Athens, Catullus’s erotics, the philosophers walking in the Stoa Poikile; everything that had been thought, done, written or said in the antique world, including the pornographic frescoes and curses preserved on the walls of Pompeii.

  I was immunized against the outlook of the Bolsheviks by the philosophical school which they called simply ‘the lackeys of Athens’s bourgeoisie’. Among others, Aristotle, who, as an idealist and a natural scientist, refuted by his mere being the thought of a philosophy which the communists tried to present as a continuous wrestling match between idealism and materialism. But above all I could never forget Socrates, at whom my classmates and I so often laughed because he stopped in the market-place of Athens to discuss questions of ethics with the fishwives. We had also found comic the ceremoniousness with which he arranged his death. And yet in the people’s democracy I considered him my patron saint, principally because it was from him that I learned that man can identify himself with the laws of his country and its official moral outlook only if the daimon inhabiting him approves.

  I supposed that the intellectuals who had never learned Latin and Greek, and Suzy too, would have to realize this one day. They, like Suzy, were indifferent to Christianity, so that neither classical education nor Christian ethics protected them from communism in which they sought an ersatz religion. On the surface, they obtained this substitute in an almost perfect form: seminars to take the place of religious education and party meetings to take the place of mass, the rigorous f
asts of the five-year plan-loan and the shortage of food to take the place of Lent, demonstration instead of procession, public self-criticism instead of confession, and instead of Abraham’s bosom the promise of an earthly paradise, the constantly retreating mirage of which was painted on the horizon before the ragged armies marching across the desert.

  These, however, were but appearances. Essentially the church is an eternal antithesis of the party, and in the end everyone who unconsciously seeks the church in the party must be disappointed. Not because philosophy cannot prove the eventual incorrectness of the church’s dogma while it can prove the incorrectness of the communist dogma, but because the ethics of the Christian religion are to a great extent identical with the categorical imperative, and thus the observance of the dogma fills the conscience of the faithful with serenity even if they rebel against the church, while the Socratic daimon must inevitably say ‘No’ to the changing slogans of the communist state religion; the more loyally the faithful serve the ideals of communism, in fact, the more inevitably do those ideals afflict them with inner conflict and nervous disorder.