My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  Five of the fifteen men in our cell formed a special group. Although they usually kept their voices down, sometimes loud arguments broke out between them so that in a few days I had learned a great deal about their lives and their arrests. Two of them – two tall, athletic men – represented two opposed proletarian types. Tahy was a young, attractive worker, whom a sculptor of the Rodin school would gladly have modelled with a hammer in his hand. The other, Breuer, with his huge eyes, giant nose and strong jaw, was the kind of cringing but impudent ragamuffin who had enough heart to be careful, when stealing a pram, not to hurt the baby when tipping it out. Although he was at least forty years old, his quick movements, friendly smile and smart replies lent him a youthful and boyish charm.

  The spiritual leader of this group was called Lencsés. The thick lenses of his spectacles robbed his eyes of all expression, while his round, frustrated, wilted, slightly embryonic face reflected both greedy curiosity and desperate boredom. Like many dogmatic communists he had a slightly crooked, transparent, waxy nose with dry, pink nostrils. The other intellectual of the group, Reinitz, was a pasty-faced, naïve, benevolent, officious and silly technician, who had obviously had his face deformed at birth by the gynaecologist’s forceps. His nose deviated towards the corner of his mouth and lay flat against his cheek, so that even from the front he looked as if he were in profile, while the three-cornered tip of his ear pointed backwards, like that of a running hare. The fifth member of the group, Fritzi Meltzer, was a good-looking, fair young man – handsome in a vulgar way, without classic charm or style – who behaved very quietly and modestly. Except that in the mornings he would stand on his bunk completely naked, as if it gave him pleasure to show his body. He stood with his back to the whitewashed window, screwed his head round and gazed, enthralled, at the hazy reflection of his curved, pink buttocks, then turned round and inspected his scrotal sack, smooth and mighty like that of a bull. Then, slowly and reluctantly, with melancholy glances at his body, as if he were wrapping up his treasures to take to the pawnshop, he pulled on his tiny silk drawers.

  From their conversation I soon learned that during the war Tahy, Breuer, Lencsés and Reinitz had belonged to the same communist group. This faction, so often mentioned and condemned in brochures dealing with the history of the Hungarian communist party, was called the Demény faction and had fought with courage for communist principles. When, during the war, the Hungarian communist party was dissolved on orders from Moscow, Demény, the leader of the group, had opposed the liquidation of the party while Lencsés had unconditionally approved the Moscow decision. The other three members of the faction shared Lencsés’s views and broke away.

  Soon afterwards Demény was arrested by the Horthy police, and was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour for his communist activities. When the Red Army marched into Hungary, Demény was released – but only for a few days. The communists had not forgotten that he had once disobeyed Moscow’s orders and sentenced him to another fifteen years in jail on the charge that he had been a spy of the Horthy police.

  The four former Deményists had remained loyal members of the communist party and their circle had soon been joined by the white-collar worker Meltzer. But as time passed they had begun to talk more and more often about the good old days when a man had been in permanent danger of being hanged for his communist convictions. They began to loathe the present, when the reward of loyalty was a high office, a private villa and a car. They began to speak with affection of their former chief, Demény, and none of them objected – not even Lencsés their spiritual leader – when Tahy married his old flame, Demény’s daughter.

  Tahy, Breuer, Lencsés and Reinitz, with Tahy’s wife and her mother, Mrs Demény, were all arrested simultaneously. AVO investigators read back to them conversations they had held in their homes, from which it was easy to deduce that Meltzer had denounced them. Therefore they were all the more surprised when, arrived at Kistarcsa, they found Meltzer in the cell with them.

  On the first evening they held a rather stormy session. Lencsés explained at great length – as he always did – that in the case of ordinary, insignificant members, the party never took petty mistakes very seriously. Consequently, if they had been arrested for such relatively unimportant gossip, the party must have been keeping an eye on them, which it would only do if it considered them prominent members. They had been thrown into prison as an educational measure, in order to rid them once and for all of the remnants of the past – their damnable bourgeois mentality – so that later they could serve the great cause of socialism in posts more important than those they had hitherto occupied. They had every reason to be grateful to the party.

  The lecture was repeatedly interrupted by Tahy, who declared emphatically that the months spent in the cellars of Andrassy Street must have robbed Lencsés of his senses. He asked his friend whether he regarded the blows he had received as part of the socialist education or only as an introduction to it? Lencsés replied angrily and was enthusiastically seconded by Reinitz. When they had calmed down, Lencsés began talking about the Meltzer affair.

  There was no doubt – he said – that they had all offended against the party. They had criticized it, often laughed at its measures and judged them from the low point of view of bourgeois objectivism. He must admit – he went on – that he himself was the guiltiest of the lot, but the others had also sinned, especially Tahy, who had married the daughter of one of the party’s enemies; a girl, who, quite naturally, could not divorce herself from her father’s ideas. If Meltzer had denounced them, he had only been doing his proletarian duty. He must also have confessed his own share in the guilt or else he would not be here with them. Tahy again interrupted to say that Meltzer was a dirty scoundrel and that his arrest only went to show that the AVO locked up its own spies when it no longer needed them. Finally Lencsés put the Meltzer affair to the vote. With two votes against Tahy’s one – Breuer abstained – they decided to invite Meltzer to join them and permit him to take part in their discussions as a full member.

  The next day Lencsés informed us that until our socialist reeducation began he would conduct a Leninist seminar, nightly, after the lights were put out. That evening, after having swallowed the dinner – a few spoons of millet-mush – the inhabitants of the cell prepared themselves with despair for the seminar. Peter Arok, director of the Hungarian Nitrogen Works, plugged his ears with two small rags – remnants of the lining of his pocket. Professor György Sarospataky, one of Hungary’s foremost scientists – a powerfully built man with blazing brown eyes, well-padded cheeks, a broad, bushy, soot-black moustache with friendly, twirled ends, and an oval chin with a small, deep depression in the lower centre – turned towards the wall with the atavistic resignation peculiar to a people so often imprisoned as patriots, tied to the whipping post as peasants, burned at the stake as Protestants and enslaved as rebels. Kenedy, the master spy, retreated to the most distant corner of his straw mattress to watch subsequent events like a ferret from his lair.

  ‘We shall speak about the problems of Leninism,’ announced Lencsés in a loud voice. He sat on the edge of his bunk directly below me. Looking down between the boards I could see him lording it over his subjects, who squatted side by side at his feet. But Lencsés’s first words were interrupted by my neighbour, the red-headed young man, Janos Garamvölgyi who, four years ago, had asked me on the stairway of the social democratic headquarters whether I had come home from America to be hanged by the communists.

  ‘The only advantage of imprisonment,’ he called down to Lencsés, ‘is that we no longer have to listen to communist crap. Leave us in peace with your Leninist rubbish, you idiot!’

  For a moment Lencsés was struck dumb.

  ‘We shall speak about the problems of Leninism,’ he repeated, but in a considerably more subdued voice.

  ‘The first problem you should discuss is when to slaughter starving workers, as they did at Kronstadt,’ suggested Garamvölgyi.

  Lencsés did
not reply, but he began talking in whispers so that we could not hear a word of what he said. A few minutes later the door was flung open and someone put on the light. Lieutenant Toth, the local head of the AVO’s Internment Department, stood in the door. He was a tall, thin, long-legged man whom we had met when he had come to inspect our cell. According to Kenedy he had been one of the pillars of the arrow-cross movement five years ago at Esztergom. He had joined the communist party the day the Red Army marched into Hungary. A short, squat sergeant was standing behind him.

  ‘What is going on here?’ the lieutenant turned to Lencsés.

  ‘I am conducting a seminar …’

  ‘Get off that bunk and stand to attention when you speak to the lieutenant,’ the sergeant screamed at him, ‘and take off those glasses!’

  ‘… on the problems of Leninism, sir.’

  ‘Haven’t you had enough of politics, you dirty traitor to the working class?’

  ‘But, lieutenant, I only …’

  ‘I have always known Lencsés as a man of leftist convictions,’ murmured Reinitz, coming shyly to Lencsés’s defence.

  ‘Shut your trap!’ the sergeant yelled at him.

  ‘All right,’ the lieutenant said quietly, ‘come out, you two.’

  For several minutes we listened to the dull thuds of heavy blows outside in the corridor, then Reinitz came flying in through the door. He was soon followed by Lencsés with blood streaming from his mouth, his nose, his ears. Then the light went out.

  With admirable self-discipline Lencsés refrained from moaning.

  ‘It seems,’ he said uncertainly, after reaching his bunk, ‘that our state security organs find it somewhat premature that we should discuss Marxism–Leninism in such mixed company. They also regard it as a provocation that I, who have sinned against party discipline, should conduct a seminar. Are you all here? The fact is that I ran against the wall in the corridor and cannot see very clearly. Where is Meltzer?’

  Garamvölgyi, who was lying next to me, cleared his throat resoundingly. Indeed, Meltzer was nowhere near Lencsés’s bunk but he was not in his own either. When Lencsés, who grasped the situation before I did, said ‘Goodnight, comrades, goodnight, Mr Meltzer’ – Meltzer began to giggle. His giggles came from Kenedy’s bed, from the cell’s only straw mattress, from under the cell’s only blanket, which they had pulled up so high that not even the crowns of their heads showed.

  Although I quickly made the acquaintance of all my cellmates, my closest friends became the three boys whom I had already noticed when standing in the yard at the Secret Police Headquarters and who I had known in the social democratic party. Their pleasure at having me with them was truly moving. On the first night, after the others had gone to sleep, I talked with them until dawn in a mood of excited happiness, and they claimed that if they were allowed to spend their imprisonment in my company their life would be more colourful than if they were at a foreign university.

  All three – Garamvölgyi, Gabori and Egri – had been followers of Pal Justus, the ideologist of the social democratic party, who used to send his poems to me for publication and who was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rajk trial. They had been arrested for being Justus’s disciples. A year had passed since the Master’s arrest, but they were still under his spiritual spell. Some of their attitudes had changed considerably, but none of them had yet escaped from Justus’s magic circle. They agreed that even the most degenerate variant of Marxism was still preferable to any political alternative, and they clung to it even in prison.

  Garamvölgyi, with his reddish, fair hair and his round, bespectacled, expressionless face, looked like a young German mathematics teacher facing his pupils for the first time and trying to appear indifferent to hide his embarrassment. But in Garamvölgyi’s case embarrassment was only an appearance. Until the parties merged he was employed by the social democratic headquarters: he was regarded as our best and most reliable disorganizer. In the days of the coalition government, when the communists were still trying to win followers by talking about national unity, the social democratic party sent Garamvölgyi to various youth meetings. Wherever he raised his voice, immediate scandal ensued and the communists lost an opportunity to make propaganda speeches. Once he attended a lecture delivered by Jozsef Révai, who was exalting people’s democracy as the most advanced and perfect form of socialism. When, after concluding his speech, he asked whether there were any questions, Garamvölgyi rose and declared that he fully agreed with everything Révai had said and had only one question to ask: if all Révai had said was true, why did the Soviet Union still adhere to the obsolete, dictatorial practices of bolshevism? Révai was so surprised by the question (and perhaps so frightened by its implication, that he had offended against the Soviet Union) that he turned pale and gaped like a fish on dry land. After that he gave orders that all young men with red hair and freckles should be kept off the premises when he was speaking.

  Gabori looked like a lively, red jack-in-the-box, or perhaps the devil himself when, dressed as a commercial traveller, he entered the railway carriage in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. In 1944, he made the acquaintance of a few Gestapo prisons and torture chambers, later of Dachau; since then he had been in various occupations, was artisan, merchant, commercial traveller, employee of the cultural department of the social democratic party and finally one of the heads of the state wine-export enterprise. His investigator had also been a commercial traveller before he entered the services of the AVO and Gabori was quick to notice it. To make matters less painful for both of them Gabori offered his investigator a gentleman’s agreement. In exchange for two packets of cigarettes a day he would confess anything, as long as it didn’t involve anyone else and did not land him on the scaffold.

  Egri’s questioning had been more stormy. He had left the social democratic party for the communist party out of opportunism, and had been rewarded by the communists first with a good position, then with arrest and the accusation of having defrauded the Bulgarian people’s republic. What had happened was this: in 1948, when a severe shortage of black pepper threatened throughout the world, Egri, then general manager of the paprika-marketing enterprise, bought up the entire Bulgarian paprika output and sold it together with the Hungarian surplus, not as paprika, but mixed with crushed grain, as black pepper substitute, for approximately three times the price of paprika. With this manipulation he earned the Hungarian state several million dollars profit – but at the same time defrauded the Bulgarian people’s republic of twelve million dollars.

  ‘Yes,’ Egri concluded his story, ‘I did defraud Bulgaria.’

  It was obvious that he was deeply sorry for what he had done. Gabori tried to comfort him by saying that had he offered that sum to Bulgaria he would have been arrested for defrauding the Hungarian people’s republic. Gabori presumably hoped to impress his friend with his arguments, but Egri only sighed.

  Thus, though the three boys held different views, in all essential questions they agreed with their arrested, perhaps already murdered, Master. Garamvölgyi’s childish day-dreams culminated in a messianistic utopia in which, through some miracle, the Trotskyists of the world would one day seize power and put everything right that the forceful stupidity of the Stalinists and the tepid soft-headedness of the social democrats had spoiled. Gabori still hoped that the Platonic idea of Marxism would one day triumph over its unfortunate practice, while Egri conceded only that Soviet practice was mistakenly interpreted in Hungary.

  The trouble lay not in what these boys thought but in their way of thinking. In spite of their really impressive erudition they were unable to think in other than Marxist categories or speak in other than Marxist terms. They seemed not to know any other language, and therefore there was little hope that they would rid themselves of their political ideas. These clung to them like once beautiful and elegant, but now torn and filthy clothes that they would gladly have taken off had they known what to put on instead. They were afraid that if they discarded the famil
iar set of ideas they would, willy-nilly, become reactionaries, and the thought of living without an ideology, depending on their own mental resources, scared them horribly.

  I saw no point in starting political arguments and frightening them off. Besides, to attack their political convictions with political arguments would be to accept the convictions as a basis. I had always denied that human beings, or even their thinking, are determined by political categories. I knew that in a political prison my attitude would not make me very popular, but I resolved to remain true to my views rather than end up by re-creating in my own mind the intellectual prison of the people’s democracy.

  After I had learned everything I wanted to know about the opinions and the life-stories of my friends I led the conversation into other channels. I told them at length about my wanderings in Africa and America, with the secret intention of undermining the thin political crust on which they stood. At other times I made excursions into history, particularly the history of the fifteenth century when mankind rid itself of a universal ideology which, though it knew the answer to every question (the false answer, of course), wrapped thinking in a shell as thick as the eggshell holding a chick. Taking courage from the success of my lectures I decided one morning, after breakfast slops, to discuss Constantine the Great and the hereticisms of his age; the subject was well suited to the occasion and gave me an opportunity to belabour both Stalin and his opposition within the party. I began by telling them that Constantine the Great had everyone murdered who could have written a truthful biography of him, and that thus we had to make do with the biography written by Eusebius of Caesarea. This biography tells us nothing except eulogies; we learn nothing of the Emperor’s deeds and even less of the motives behind those deeds. His brilliance, his truly impressive depravity, his redoubtable political purposiveness and the stubbornness with which he established his monolithic rule by every means, using even Christianity, are all lost in the empty apologies and nauseating flattery of this hypocritical historian.