My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  Such thoughts preceded my poem to Suzanne. As in most of the others, I was unable and did not even try to incorporate the thoughts that had initiated the poem; they furnished, at the most, the basic mood. I spoke, in the first place, about our love and the images I associated with it, not the Rajk affair or other political events, but the lakes, the reed-banks, the hidden dales of Hungary, the freshly excavated Bronze-Age grave in which the two pink skeletons lay with their knees drawn up like embryos in their mother’s womb; I described our cross-country wanderings, the heavy wines we drank in little inns, hidden among the reeds, the way we sat in the car, at night, at level crossings in the forest, until the lamps of the locomotive appeared like the sharp, deep-set eyes of an old man; and the Latin, even Provençal hills of Transdanubia where we sat in vineyards looking down on the poplars in the valley, like the pillars of a blown-up bridge.

  I pictured these things not for the sake of accuracy, but mainly to bind Suzanne to our love with the help of the entire Hungarian landscape. I spoke of the possibility that I might, one day, return and we might meet again, perhaps in a few years, perhaps in two or three decades, when my eyes would be as deep in their sockets as the locomotive lamps at night in a forest, at the level crossings. I spoke also of the possibility of my death and of Suzanne marrying someone else. Whatever happened, I swore humble, merciless and eternal fidelity; that I would conceal myself in frosted glass and mirrors, wrap myself in mist and in dreams, playing hide-and-seek with them; that I should accompany her and her husband when they went boating, the water reflecting me and my dislocated neck; that I should be there in the bloom of every grape, sit between them at the table and in bed, drinking to them with the heavy wine of my memories becoming ever clearer, ever sweeter; that I should hound their ageing, shapeless bodies with mine that would remain light, ethereal and young. Then, with a final chord that might have been a late nuptial song or a message from beyond the grave, I finished. Immediately I felt a rare happiness; happiness about the richness of the images, the sound, the sharpness of the vision; the rare happiness I felt when I had written a poem which would probably survive me. But this thought made me hesitate, since for the time being I was the only existing manuscript of my poem and we were bound together; it could not survive me without my survival.

  One morning I was led up before the American expert whom I hadn’t seen for six weeks. I thought he would continue the interrogation, but instead he asked me what I thought about Roosevelt and whether the elevators ever broke down in the New York skyscrapers? The next morning he inquired about Arab women and when he learned that they shaved their pubic hair he became so interested that I had to keep to the subject until midnight. Our conversations went on during the entire week, and I began to hope that my affairs had taken a favourable turn – because of the confusion, lack of co-ordination and organization characteristic of the AVO one could never be certain of anything. The interrogator never again mentioned the Trotskyist trial of which I was to be one of the principal defendants; and at the same time he let fall that I had ‘wasted his time’, and that I ‘seemed to have friends everywhere’. It appeared possible that perhaps no charges would be preferred and that they might even let me go free.

  The next Monday I was taken into a large cellar room. An ugly little lieutenant with a walrus moustache was sitting behind the desk in his shirt-sleeves and knickerbockers, engaged in pulling on with great difficulty a pair of beautiful, shining riding boots. I was painfully impressed by the circumstance that from a captain I had been demoted to a lieutenant, and also by the fact that we were in a cellar. It seemed obvious to me that this was the place where people were tortured.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ he shouted at me when he had finished pulling on the boots. ‘What is going on in that rotten mind of yours? That I am a guttersnipe? What? Well, take it from me that I am as much of a freedom-fighter as yourself!’

  He got up from behind the desk, approached me and began waving his fist in front of my face without, however, coming very close. Instead, he stalked me from the side, from behind, like a hyena.

  ‘Or is it your poems you are so proud of? I could write poems like yours any time I wanted to. But I don’t!’

  That was how it went on the whole morning. In the afternoon he brought a heavy file out from his safe. He said it contained the evidence they had collected against me. The sight of it – at least a thousand pages – sent a cold shiver down my spine, but when he lifted it a few times to demonstrate its weight I reassured myself that the file was probably a sheaf of blank paper.

  The first few hundred pages were denunciations. Puss-in-Boots read them with emphasis but did not betray the names of the denouncers. I found it, however, easy to guess who they were. Most of them came from Almassi, the librarian of Népszava. Usually he had been forced to invent, to lie or at least to distort. He was probably paid for each report separately. Here and there, however, when he had succeeded in solving some of my insinuations which I had thought him too stupid to understand he had written the truth. Thus, for instance, I had once used the word televisor in front of him. It never occurred to me that the AVO had made him read Orwell’s book and that, consequently, he would discover that I too had read it.

  On the second day we were still busy with Almassi’s reports. Then came other denunciations. A short memorandum was sent in by György Maté, party secretary of the Writers Association. Puss-in-Boots gave it to me to read. ‘In the course of the screening,’ it said, ‘I established that Faludy is an imperialist agent. Request urgent measures. Maté.’

  ‘This is what I would call prima facie evidence,’ I said, and yawned.

  ‘You won’t be bored for long, my friend,’ Puss-in-Boots exclaimed in an offended tone and brought out a fat copy-book. It was Györgyi Vandori’s diary, some of which had been used in evidence in the Rajk trial. And, indeed, I was no longer bored but only angry with myself for ever having talked at all with this hysterical blue-stocking; for having comforted her and seen her home when nobody dared to approach her; for having begged her again and again to burn her diary in which, according to her own admission, she had put down all the political secrets she knew and every private political conversation she had witnessed.

  The first entry dealing with me was in May, 1946: ‘I saw Faludy at the social-democratic headquarters. He has just returned from America. He is very haughty and looks at everyone down his nose. I talked to him for two minutes. I feel sure he is an agent of the Americans. How charming he is! It may be useful to be friends with him.’ There were also remarks like: ‘Faludy denies being a Trotskyist. But I feel this is only a front.’ Before her arrest she wrote: ‘Until now Faludy avoided me but now, suddenly, he has softened. Perhaps he loves me, after all. Or is it only solidarity because he too is a Trotskyist?’ Then again: ‘Faludy saw me home today, almost to my door. He too hates the régime. We were followed by detectives. Were they watching me or him?’ And finally: ‘Faludy advised me today to burn my diary. Sooner or later the henchmen of the AVO will drag us all over the hot coals. I find his anxiety ridiculous. Burn you, my dear diary? Never!’

  When I remarked that the diary of a silly goose cannot seriously be considered evidence, Puss-in-Boots declared angrily that the diary had played a very important role in the Rajk trial and besides, I should see how right I had been when I called the employees of the State Security Police ‘henchmen’. As far as my Trotskyism was concerned, he had decisive evidence in these files and tomorrow he would rub my nose in them.

  When I was led before him the next morning there was no file on his desk. Instead the room was filled with the aroma of American cigarettes. The suitcase with which I had set out towards Czechoslovakia and from which he had taken the American cigarettes lay open next to the desk. Before him on the desk lay my little red notebook, which he began to read. Suddenly I felt a wave of panic engulf me because I remembered that on the fifth or the seventh page I had recklessly written, three years ago, and then forgotten:
>
  Since I live among these I have come to love capitalism

  Fictis causis innocentes, etc.

  Savonarola – Calvin – Robespierre – Stalin

  The grandchildren will all be idiots

  Let these beasts explode with fury that there is still a Roman

  living among them

  Rakosi’s head: an ostrich-egg (rotten!!!) sticking out of the

  Hungarian swamp

  The new Trinity: Father Marx (the Creator, antediluvian beard); Lenin, his Only-Begotten Son; Stalin, the Holy Ghost (descended upon the world on tongues of flame).

  I could guess what a beating I should get if he ever read it. Fortunately he was still on the first page, where I had noted down the rhyme schemes of the last six lines of the sonnet.

  ‘You’ll give us the solution of this code, never fear, or we’ll beat the shit out of you,’ he screamed. He jumped up from his chair and pushed the notebook under my nose. ‘What does this mean?’

  ‘These are the forty different rhyme schemes of the tercettes of the sonnet,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you trying to fool me?’ shouted Puss-in-Boots, kicking me in the side.

  ‘This fifteen-line column,’ I went on imperturbably, ‘contains the three-rhyme variation. Here you see: aba-bcc: this is what Shakespeare preferred. I myself prefer the more unusual aba-cbc, the resigned abc-bac, or the melancholy abc-bca. These here are the two-rhyme variations: for three a and three b; for four a and two b; and for two a and four b. For instance, the heavy and baroque aaa-bbb, the playful, rococo aab-abb, the elegant aab-aab and the attractive aba-bba. I never have written a sonnet with these two rhymes.’

  ‘And now you never will,’ Puss-in-Boots said with a sigh. ‘And what kind of a rhyme is this anyway? Can you give me an example for abb-aab? Or for aba-bbb?’

  Until noon I explained with unflagging zeal the rhymes of the sonnet, so that he would read no further in the notebook. I was surprised by his interest in poetry but somehow it filled me with foreboding. During the two hours he took off for lunch, when I had to wait for him with my nose pressed to the wall, I was again and again bathed in perspiration. However, he returned in an excellent mood, put my notebook back in the file and declared that my lecture on sonnet rhymes was very interesting. To show his gratitude, he fished out one of my American cigarettes, broke it in two and threw me half.

  Then he rose, opened his safe and brought out a folder almost as fat as the one containing the denunciations against me. I felt the blood mount to my head. The tips of my fingers tingled and went numb. Now comes the final catastrophe, the main accusation which has not yet been mentioned.

  Puss-in-Boots took the folder and brought it over to my side. He was bending forward, as usual, his eyes on his gieaming boots, but instead of weighing the folder on his palm to show me how heavy it was, he held it close to his knees, limply, not triumphantly.

  ‘I’d like to ask you a favour, Comrade Faludy. I have a nephew who writes poems. Would you read them? I am very interested in your criticism.’

  ‘Your job is to murder me, not to make me read poems,’ I replied insolently. ‘But all right. Give them here.’

  I was taken to a new, clean cell. The guard brought me dinner, then maize, grapes, and cakes and black coffee to end with. I received the same fare following day, Sunday. It would have been surprising had Puss-in-Boots been a good poet but I was spared that surprise. There were some seventy poems in the folder, mostly lyrical, but one of them a three-thousand-line epic. They emanated the characteristic smell of dilettantism, so that after reading a few lines I gave up and put the folder under my head as a pillow.

  On Monday morning, contrary to AVO custom, Puss-in-Boots motioned me politely to take a seat when I entered. ‘Well, how did you like the poems?’ he asked excitedly.

  For a few minutes, I watched him writhing. After all, I was master of the situation, though only for a short time. ‘Does your nephew have some trade or profession? I mean, apart from writing poems?’

  ‘Of course he has,’ Puss-in-Boots straightened up proudly.

  ‘That’s good news,’ I nodded. And then, very clearly and in great detail, I explained to him the aim and meaning of poetry. He listened to it as to a revelation, in the vain hope that he might learn something from it. Then I got down to his poems and took them completely apart, proving to him that he didn’t even know Hungarian. I asked him to tell his nephew, as tactfully as possible, that he was writing decadent, rotten, reactionary poems of Western orientation. I begged him solemnly to forgive his nephew, but to try and lead him back to normality with a strong hand. He would never, under any circumstances, become a poet, and a communist society must fight with every means at its disposal against such dilettantism.

  I had decided to tell him the truth while still in my cell, because apart from any utilitarian consideration I hated dilettantes even worse than AVO men. Now that I had told him frankly what I thought of his poems I felt almost happy; what must happen, must happen. Puss-in-Boots, however, switched the conversation to another subject, but he was obviously at a loss, not quite knowing what to do. First he read me a few new denunciations and then, with a studied gesture, he ordered me to name my espionage contacts abroad. Did I know Allan Dulles? Rankovich? And what about Zilliacus, the notorious agent of the British Intelligence? When I declared that it was ridiculous to call Zilliacus an agent of the British Intelligence, he boxed my ears until I saw stars. It annoyed me intensely to suffer these blows for the sake of an incorrigibly pro-Soviet British Member of Parliament who could perhaps still be saved – but perhaps not – if it were he who were receiving them. Puss-in-Boots soon stopped hitting me and declared that my not having met Allan Dulles, Rankovich or Zilliacus would not save me from the gallows. Then, earlier than usual, he sent me back to my cell.

  At dinner time three AVO guards came in. All three were handsome, young, bright and looked more intelligent than the rest. One brought a dixie full of stew and macaroni, the other a small table with paper and a pencil on it, the third a glass of wine and a few cigarettes. They surrounded me and looked into my face with curiosity and cheerfulness.

  ‘This is your supper,’ one of them explained. ‘You can write to your family if you wish. If you want to sleep you can have a pillow. But no sleeping pills. It is now eight twenty-three p.m. At five in the morning you will be taken to the concentration prison, there to be hanged. At five thirty.’

  They stood waiting for my reply.

  ‘Well, have you nothing to say?’ the youngest asked with an uncertain smile.

  They went out but every few minutes one of them looked through the Judas-hole. My first coherent thought was that I still had eight and a half hours left. I should apportion the last thirty minutes separately, on the way. Naturally, I must first try to make up my mind whether they were really going to hang me, whether there would be a reprieve at the last minute or whether the whole thing was a joke. These AVO guards looked like impostors – but then, why shouldn’t henchmen look like impostors? There was no point in trying to sleep. I was not going to write a letter, either. I was certain that it would never reach the person to whom I had written it.

  Even if I tried to convince myself that I would not be hanged, I still had to face a horrible night. It seemed easier to accept the thought that they would hang me at five thirty. In that case, I could write a beautiful poem during the night; it would make the time pass quickly, and I was not going to wet my trousers in front of the three impostors. This was the simplest, apparently the bravest, but deep down the most cowardly solution. To eat up the stew quickly but save the wine for later, as a reward if the poem turned out well. The poem must be long, at least three times the fifty-line pensum I had given myself for every day, so I should have to hurry.

  I already knew what I was going to write about the moment the three impostors left my cell. My grandfather’s house in northern Hungary emerged before my eyes, and the pine-covered mountain opposite. Whenever I was in trouble I
thought of this house: in the train at Juvissy, on the ship when we left Bayonne, at the massacre in Marrakesh, during attacks of malaria without quinine, on the way to New York with fish-poisoning, in the US Army at – there was no time for enumeration. I always knew that I would return to this house; I knew it from the time I was seven and was put to bed in the guest room at Christmas and noticed the light of the stove. This happened after my grandmother had come in, tall and thin, with a dish filled with oranges and candied fruits. She sat down on my bed and fed me the fruit bit by bit, because there too I was the favourite, as I was the favourite at my parents’ house, at Vambéry’s house and presumably even here at the AVO’s house.

  But what was it about the light? I could write my poem safely in treble rhymes; when one is about to be hanged one can think of an abundance of treble rhymes. My grandmother took the lamp with her when she left and the light streaming from the open door of the stove (the fragrance of pines! should I write about that?) danced on my eiderdown and painted my fists carmine. It was an unquiet, frightening light, not because it danced but because it occurred to me that I too would return to this house in the shape of an unquiet, frightening light. It was not later that I thought of this, when I should gladly have returned to that house in search of happiness though I had not been really happy there, but at the time, at seven years old, when I first watched the dancing flames of the stove.

  Since then everyone who had lived there and whom I had met in that house had died; I was the last to die. Laszlo Fényes lay in a New York cemetery. My grandparents departed, as they should, in old age. My aunt who had rested in the roof-garden among the red carnations, with a volume of Nietzsche in her hand, the pages of which were ruffled by the wind, not by her, had cut her throat; my sister had been shot into the Danube by the Hungarian Nazis, my aunt and my uncle had been gassed. I should wave to my mother when I soared up. She did not belong to my father’s family and was still alive eight hundred yards from my cell. I should wave to her from the air.