My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  My grandfather too had always talked about light when he stood before me in the mill, holding his pipe like a fishing rod. He said that he would ride a beam of light after he died and fly in space at a speed of three hundred thousand kilometres per second. He must sit on a pretty long beam for he lived eighty-three years, the film of his life was eighty-three light-years long. My sister rode behind him, crossing rhombus-shaped star mists, rhombus-shaped like the splintering ice of the Danube; directly behind her rode my father, my aunt, my uncle and now came I! What else could happen, after all? Eiderdowns of mist on which the light of giant suns dance; the smell of pine-resin and gin, my fist is covered in carmine enamel and there is a red stripe around my neck where the dancing flames light it up, but who cares! Beautiful Milky Ways come and go, henceforth I shall wear a high collar, one can allow oneself such luxury after being hanged and walking among comets. The remaining problem is where to hold the family reunion. In some lovely place perhaps, to congratulate ourselves and each other on this wonderful century? There is an excellent roof terrace on Aldebaran. Since I met Amar as-Salahiya I have loved stars with Arab names, but grandfather is all for Sirius.

  When the three AVO men came to get me I guessed at once that the journey was not to take place. They did not tie me up nor did they break the bones in my arms as is prescribed by Soviet etiquette before hanging, but took me to the washroom, to face the aluminium mirror.

  ‘Now look at yourself! At your neck, idiot!’

  At first I did not see what they were laughing about. Only when I raised myself on tiptoe and bent close to the mirror did I notice that all round my throat there was a red line, the imaginary mark of the rope.

  Then I was taken to the lieutenant in command of the guards who handed me a document according to which, in consequence of my lawless actions inimical to the state, and in the interest of the security of the people’s republic, I was going to be interned for . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . years.

  ‘What are all these dots for?’ I asked.

  ‘Twenty-five dots, meaning twenty-five years, if you live that long,’ he laughed.

  A long line of men was standing in the yard, their noses to the wall. Behind them AVO guards were walking up and down, warning them in a blood-curdling tone not to turn around or look sideways. I glanced at my neighbour. It was the red-headed young man who, four years ago, had asked me at social democratic headquarters whether I had come home from America to be hanged. He had at least two weeks’ growth of beard but the red welts of blows peeped through the red bristle like cart-tracks. When he noticed me he gave me a warm smile, then began to snigger. The long-haired young man in the bloody shirt next to him seemed familiar, I must have seen him in the social democratic party, or in Parliament, or somewhere. He too was laughing, his entire body was shaking with it. Suddenly I too began to laugh, and even after the guard had kicked me in the bottom, I continued laughing, wheezing, panting, bent double with laughter, shrieking with it, until they pushed us all up the steps of the Black Maria. Even there, bloody, ragged, half-starved as we were, we laughed so hard that tears were streaming down our cheeks, and we fell, helter-skelter, spent and exhausted on the floor of the lorry.

  A few hours later we were herded into a hermetically isolated cell at the Kistarcsa concentration camp, the so-called ‘screening department’. This was where prisoners were usually kept for a couple of weeks before being transferred to the camp proper. We therefore spent our days in happy expectation in a small, narrow room with double-decker bunks along the walls and almost no space between them. There were fifteen of us in the room and, having nothing else to do, we talked all day long in the permanent semi-darkness behind whitewashed window-panes. The two fat ones among us floated between the lower and upper bunks with the lazy ease of big fat carp, careful not to get caught in the writhing arms of an octopus: the flailing, restless limbs of thirteen people. Only the top pane of the window was not covered with whitewash. Through it I could look out at a watch-tower built back in 1944 when several thousand Jewish intellectuals had been tortured here by the Hungarian Nazis, and at the broad crown of a beech tree which was slowly but systematically shedding its copper-coloured leaves.

  Fourteen of us were newcomers, with bloody shirts and red welts on our faces. The only old inhabitant of the cell, and the owner of the only straw mattress, was a tall man who greeted us with a friendly smile, although he immediately remarked that he had been there for a year and had seen hundreds of prisoners come and go. His yellowish-brown, wrinkled face resembled a gigantic raisin; he wore an eyeglass in his right eye and when he talked – sometimes even when he didn’t – he made circular movements with the narrow lips of his toothless mouth like a ruminating cow. Though he seemed pretty old to me, his back was as straight as if he had swallowed a rod, and he moved with an elegant, affectedly casual ease. Each evening he put his trousers under his mattress to keep the crease as sharp and straight as though they had just been brought home from the tailor’s. In the mornings he greeted each of us individually with a deep bow and a friendly good morning, tied his pink tie with the white polka-dots in front of the window, watching his reflection, pulled a horrible-looking, smelly rag from his pocket, rubbed his shoes until they shone, and then sat down to clean his nails.

  His name, he said, was Kenedy. He talked with elegant gestures and in well-rounded, somewhat involved sentences. Having spent a great deal of time in prison, he gave us advice with paternal benevolence. One of his noteworthy suggestions was that, as soon as we were transferred to the camp proper, we should find ourselves boy-friends. ‘If you don’t heed my advice,’ he explained seriously, ‘I am afraid your sweet and gentle souls will suffer atrociously from vain yearnings for mesdames your wives.’ The course to follow – he said – was to select our lovers from the lower classes, if possible, partly because then we would have someone to clean our clothes and make our beds – no occupations for a gentleman – and partly because, being used for manual labour and consequently properly fed by the AVO, they would be in a condition to oblige us whenever we felt like it.

  Yet Kenedy was not a pushing sort of fellow; he preferred silence to talk. When one of us told the story of his arrest he would listen devotedly, chewing his long, empty cigarette-holder and swinging his crossed ankles as gentlemen used to do in the drawing-room when, pulling on their pipes, they listened to their friends telling amusing anecdotes. To him these stories took the place of an evening at the theatre, the cinema, the café; they were his social life, his books, and thus, though they were usually far too long, he listened with rapt attention, great enjoyment and endless patience. His joy was especially great when he came upon someone who had been arrested for espionage. With sharp little comments he derided the AVO methods of investigation, making fun of the investigators’ inexperience in matters of espionage – though on other subjects he refrained from criticism, from prudence – and besides, interrupting the speaker was a breach of etiquette.

  Peter Arok – a corpulent man of about forty, general manager of the Hungarian Nitrogen Works whom I knew by sight from social democratic party headquarters – summed up the story of his arrest in a single sentence.

  ‘They arrested me,’ he said, ‘because I have sold the blueprints of the factory’s machine installations to the British Intelligence.’

  With a sudden, ruminating movement of his lips Kenedy dropped his eyeglass – always a sign of surprise with him – which fell straight into the right breast pocket of his white-dotted pink shirt, a pocket created for this very purpose. Until lunch, when he ceremoniously donned his jacket, he always sat in his shirt-sleeves.

  ‘Parbleu!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you mean to say, my young friend, that you, general manager of the works, were not aware of the facts that all the machines had been supplied and fitted in 1946 by a Manchester factory? So that if – let us suppose it for a moment – if the British Intelligence had really been interested in the blueprints they could, at any time, have obt
ained them from Manchester?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course I knew it,’ Arok replied, blushing as if he were ashamed of the idiotic charge on which he had been arrested.

  For a while Kenedy swung his ankles in silence, then he returned his eyeglass to his eye and declared that though he had worked for the British Intelligence for twenty-five years, the state had never been able to prove it. And now he was going to be released.

  ‘And I owe it all to you, my dear young friends!’ he cried, throwing us kisses like a ballerina. ‘The real spy makes hay when these amateurs are locking up people like you!’

  Seeing that we gave little credit to his words he delivered an exhaustive lecture on the art of espionage. As we were all utterly unfamiliar with the subject we suspected him of making fools of us and told him so. To prove himself, Kenedy then asked us to give him a description of our AVO investigators, so that he could tell us who they were. One of my cellmates described his investigator, whose name he had learned by chance, and immediately Kenedy came up with the right name, and the man’s rank and age. On another occasion he told us the manpower of the Soviet occupation army in Hungary, where the units were stationed throughout the country and what arms they carried. He also told us at length about a mysterious punitive camp established by the AVO somewhere in the Matra mountains, near Recsk. According to him the prisoners in this camp worked sixteen hours a day, including Sunday, were never allowed to sit down, not even when eating, and were tortured in various ways until they died. When, the summer before, an inmate by the name of Dobo had escaped from the camp his entire family was arrested and brought to Kistarcsa in retribution.

  Kenedy’s stories served only to increase our suspicion. He had told us himself that he had been locked in this room, known as ‘subdivision for spies and imperialist agents’ for a year and the events he had just described had taken place only a few months before. When we expressed our doubts he shrugged his shoulders and declared that he didn’t give a damn whether we considered him a fool or a liar, we would in time find out for ourselves that he was right.

  One evening, when I joined him for a little private conversation, he confessed to me that he had never been happier than he was in this cell. Formerly, when he took a train to establish the condition of the concrete road running parallel with the railway, estimating from it the size and number of the Soviet tanks using it, and then dined on rabbit stew in some provincial town, he would look at the bottle of wine before him, the pretty woman sitting opposite who would share his bed for the night, and he would see not the bottle and not the woman but the loop of a rope dancing above them in the blue smoke of his cigarette. Here, at last, he felt secure. And in addition, he had the company of most distinguished people. Pity that there were so many Jews among them.

  Sometimes he invited me to sit on his straw mattress and told me news of the Korean war, or of the latest wave of terror to engulf the country. On other occasions he told me about the secret political trials then going on. He could tell me all I wanted to know about prison conditions in Hungary and how justice was being meted out: for example, that Vladimir Farkas – son of Mihaly Farkas, Minister of Defence and one of the heads of the AVO – amused himself by urinating into the mouths of prisoners after first knocking out their teeth. He told me that in the death-row of the Budapest Central Prison the prisoners’ daily fare consisted of half a pint of black coffee and a piece of bread, so that many died of starvation before they could be executed. As the bread was distributed in the evening, their torment was increased by the problem when to eat it. If they ate it in the evening they would have to suffer unbearable pangs of hunger all through the following day. If they left it for the next morning they might never be able to eat it because the AVO henchmen came for their victims in the middle of the night. He told me that at the prison of Vacz there were three times as many prisoners as there was room for, so that from time to time a few dozen prisoners sentenced to fifteen or twenty years were ordered to come, with their effects, to the prison office as if they were to be transferred to another institution. When someone was hanged, the prison doctor, too lazy to unbutton the victim’s shirt, would tear it open over the left breast so that he could place his stethoscope over the heart. The shirts were then laundered and issued to other prisoners when they received a change of underwear. Strangely enough, the number of torn shirts always coincided with the number of ‘transferred prisoners’.

  Kenedy’s stories made me shudder although I hoped that he was lying or acting as an agent provocateur. Yet there were always details – the problem of the bread, the torn shirts – that in my opinion neither Kenedy nor anyone else could have invented. Once he noticed my horror and immediately declared that he would now lead me from these sombre landscapes and show me more cheerful prospects. And so he did. He talked in great detail and with obvious pleasure about the amorous life of the prison governor, and on another occasion conducted me on a symbolic tour around the camp and acquainted me with our surroundings. In our corridor – he explained – there were nine cells; nine like the circles of Dante’s Hell. The first, called the cell of lèse majesté, housed those who – however improbable this might sound – had indeed committed something: at least a small offence against the unwritten laws of society, good manners and good taste. For instance those who had spat on Rakosi’s portrait, had sung chauvinistic songs when drunk, were or had been unable to prevent their dog from lifting his leg at the corner of a Soviet Memorial.

  The next cell was that of the economic or bathtub absconders. Bathtub absconders were people arrested by the AVO in their bathtub on a Sunday morning, on suspicion of wanting to abscond. Economic absconders were those arrested for economic reasons; for the sake, that is, of their prosperous shops or desirable flats. The third cell was called the cell of the saboteurs, such as the engineer who had objected when the great planners decided to pipe the natural gas from Hungarian oilfields to Budapest and was therefore accused of sabotaging the capital’s heating system; and the other engineer who had not objected when the great planners decided to pipe the natural gas from Hungarian oilfields to Budapest and was therefore accused of permitting the oilfields to run dry for lack of pressure.

  The fourth cell was known as the salon of the two hundred prime ministers. Here lived the pub or café habitués, usually old-age pensioners, who met more often than the authorities considered necessary and were therefore accused of conspiring against the government. Some had been arrested because they amused themselves by setting up new governments on paper and distributing the ministries among each other. There were fortune-tellers who read a change of régime in their client’s palm or in the cards, and spiritualists who called up notoriously reactionary spirits like Franz-Joseph, Bismarck or Napoleon III. At one time the cell housed two retired professors of Greek who met every morning in a public park and, feeling perfectly safe, abused the system in Plato’s language. Unfortunately neither noticed that one morning they were overheard by Imre Waldapfel, Professor of classical philology at the Budapest University, who immediately denounced them. Later, they were transferred to the camp proper, where they died of starvation.

  The fifth cell was the so-called isolator. Here were those who knew something that nobody else must learn. As they were not even allowed to go to the WC, Kenedy knew nothing about them. The next three cells, including ours, were for spies and imperialist agents, one for light-weights, one for middle-weights, one for heavy-weights. The light-weights were the prisoners who learned from the AVO that they had had ‘connections with the OSS’ but hadn’t the faintest notion what OSS meant; middle-weights were men with relatives in the USA who had emigrated twenty or forty years ago – men, that is, with ‘foreign espionage connections’; we were heavy-weights, because we had spent many a holiday abroad as children, some of us had attended foreign universities or served in a Western army or, which was even worse, had corresponded with our friends abroad.

  The last cell in the row was the Greek cell. When he had been
brought here over a year ago – said Kenedy – the inmates of that cell had talked and laughed all day and in the evenings sang the Internationale and communist songs in a language he did not understand. One day Lieutenant Toth, the local head of the Internment Department, asked him whether he knew English, which he naturally denied, and then, whether he spoke Italian. This he dared not deny because his curriculum vitae contained the fact that at the end of the First World War, he had been taken prisoner of war in Italy. The lieutenant then led him into the next cell, where he was received by a dozen dark-haired, oily, fattish and gay young men. Two immediately began to question him in broken Italian as to when their training would at last begin and why the lieutenant was so angry with them?

  Kenedy soon found out that all twelve of them were Greeks living in London, who had come to the Continent to fight in General Markos’s communist guerrilla armies against the Greek government. The Bulgarian Legation in London gave them Bulgarian visas and they were told that they would be given guerrilla training in Hungary. At the railway station in Prague there was a solemn reception in their honour, with flowers, music, a buffet and a copy of Stalin’s short biography for each. At the Hungarian border they were loaded on lorries and brought straight here, where ‘the military discipline was rather severe, though they had no cause to complain’.

  Lieutenant Toth then instructed Kenedy to tell them that they were all imperialist agents whom the British secret service had sent to Greece. Hearing the words ‘imperialist agent’, the Greeks shook their fists, made slicing movements under their chins to show that they would cut the necks of the Greek monarcho-fascists, then bade Kenedy ask the lieutenant to give them guns and let them fight. Kenedy did his best to explain to them where they were, but they wouldn’t believe him. For days afterwards he listened to their laughter in the next cell, then gradually they fell silent. One night one of them hanged himself on the window, but the towel broke. The next day the AVO men beat the whole lot to a bloody pulp and chained their wrists and ankles together. After that the Greeks were silent and stopped singing the Internationale.