‘We have nothing but psychological factors and guesses to go on,’ I said, and suddenly I felt in my throat the cramp of two weeks’ starvation, together with the melancholy and humiliating taste of watery mush. ‘Let me remind you of Constantine’s statue standing before the Basilica San Giovanni in Lateran. Even the statues changed in those days of Byzantine tyranny. Instead of immortalizing the emperors with statues a little more than life size, they made them colossal. The requirement that the statue resemble its model was discarded. Enlargement and idealization prescribed by the rules of bureaucracy were the order of the day, and artistic quality was replaced by the rarity and costliness of the material.
‘I don’t know where Constantine’s statue was made and where it originally stood, but I know that the statue of his son, Constantine II, was set up everywhere in his life-time, among other places in front of the Achilleon in Alexandria. He looked down from there, eight metres tall, with a fleshy and genial face (although in reality he was skinny and neurotic), his narrow lips smiling benignly upon the surging crowds. Spies and informers prowled about the statue and those abusing the tyrant were immediately incarcerated in dungeons dug under the base of the monument. Still, they were unable to prevent pagans, Catholics, gnostics and Jews from besmearing the statue with tar and paint, or throwing camel- and ass-dung at it, not to speak of the Arians who hated him even more than the others because, though an Arian emperor, he demanded to be adored as a deity.
‘I must tell you, however, that in those days it was not only the statues whose eyes were devoid of the promising light of intelligence, not only the marble and bronze napes and hips which grew fleshy and ungraceful. Living people were just as bad. The sculptors were not so far from being realistic or, to be more exact, Arian-realistic. Even their contemporaries noticed this. A famous geographer, for instance, wrote that though he did not know why, the proportions of the human body seemed to have become distorted, more freaks were born than ever before and even the expressions of normal children were more stupid than in the past. What is more, food and wine lost their taste, and instead of being a shining, heavenly wheel, the sun looked down from the skies like the sweating bottom of an old harlot. When approaching Sicily by ship, Etna appeared smaller and less shapely than before, and the water of the sea more colourless and smelly than …’
Here I had to stop because a warder entered our cell and told us that with the exception of Kenedy we were to collect our things and stand in line in the corridor. We prepared in a fever of happy excitement, because we knew that as soon as we were settled in the camp proper we would be allowed to write to our families, who had not heard from us since our disappearance. And we were leaving our airless cell for the huge blocks of the camp, our small circle for the larger, more interesting and certainly also more secure community of prisoners.
‘Pinch me, George, am I awake or am I dreaming?’ Egri pushed me in the side twelve hours later, in a mood much more cheerful than our situation warranted. We were squatting side by side on the floor of a locked freight car, dressed in discarded army uniforms, so tired that we would certainly have collapsed had not our spines been supported, like those of heretics bound to stakes, by the stripes of red lead painted on the backs of our trousers and jackets, still smelly but already stone-hard. My cell-mates and the fifty men locked in with us at Gödöllö station were already asleep, except for two who kept vigil, like Egri and me, watching over the dreams of the others. One was a young man whose mystical smile conflicted strangely with the sharp look in his eyes and who reminded me of a youth by Antonello da Messina, though at first glance his face looked more vulgar than beautiful. Next to him sat a narrow-faced man with a nose like a carrot, who watched his companion with devoted, adoring eyes.
In the yard of the Kistarcsa camp I had already noticed with surprise how much thinner, paler, but at the same time calmer and more dignified these old prisoners were than my companions. It was not just the effect of their hair being long, like that of medieval knights, nor of the disfiguring blows which some of us, particularly Lencsés and Reinitz, had received the previous night. My companions and I could have been taken for ordinary criminals, while the others walked up and down the yard like the livid, bloodless ghosts of martyrs. When we climbed into the freight car and the two groups squatted down facing each other, Lencsés whispered in my ear that these people were certainly fascists. Egri wondered whether we were permitted to talk to them. The question, humbly put and clumsily formulated, was entirely neutral. Had I said no he would have taken my answer for an order and obeyed it, and he would have done the same if I had answered yes. But I remained silent, though I knew that Egri would misunderstand my silence.
When the train began rolling the old prisoners whispered among themselves, then threw us a few indifferent, quick glances. They probably thought that we were reds. Later we all lay down, but not a single word had been exchanged between the two groups. Even though we were crowded together in a very narrow space and most of the sleepers threw themselves about in their sleep, there remained a clearly discernible dividing line as though between two hostile camps; across this dividing line only the young man with the face like an Antonello da Messina and I exchanged a few conspiratorial glances.
I knew this locked freight car, crowded with unfortunate people on their way to an unknown destination, from so many books and stories told by friends that I almost felt at home in it. Obviously, I thought, no one can escape his fate; the experience from which I had fled to America had now caught up with me. This experience was probably the preordained lot of everyone born in this century – and born Hungarian – just as the stake had been in the sixteenth century, and the pyramids of skulls raised by the Mongols in the main squares of the towns in the thirteenth century. Our train, eight or ten freight cars with similar loads, its passenger car, the locomotive and the bumpers, crammed with AVO men armed to the teeth, rolled along the only direct railway to the Soviet Union. Egri’s cheerful mood was no better justified than his request that I should pinch him.
‘To pinch your arm and wake you,’ I said cautiously, ‘I should have to be Sancho Panza and you the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, while as it is, I am by nature Don Quixote and you, if you will forgive me for saying so, with your practical thinking and your closeness to the realities of this world, are my armour-bearer, more faithful than any Sancho Panza. In order to wake you, it is your realism that I should need. As it is I can only repeat what I have said before: we have been projected into the unreal world of a picaresque romance where those whom you still insist on regarding as well-meaning windmills are in reality evil and merciless wizards. And these galley-slaves dragged away to some forced labour camp are not thieves, bandits or highwaymen, as one would expect, but innocent and noble knights. Our situation is so completely lacking in reality that I am often led to doubt my own perception, but you don’t seem to have realized it yet.
‘Will anyone ever believe our story when we tell it? And if no one will believe us, why should we tell it? However, it is no use worrying about that, because it is highly probable that we shall never live to tell our story. Both Lieutenant Toth and Major Prinz have given us their word that we shall be released after three months of forced labour. And now our train is on its way to the Soviet Union.’
Suddenly the train came to a stop. My eyes met those of the Antonello da Messina youth. The carrot-nosed man sitting next to him opened his lips.
‘We are standing in the station of Hatvan, at platform 3.’
‘You asked me to pinch you,’ I said in the sudden silence. ‘But what is the use of waking you? As I see it you intend to follow the example of Mr Goyadkin who regarded everyday reality as a continuous nightmare, and believed only in his nightly dreams. I could invent no more agreeable escape from prison.’
Egri shook his head.
‘Then perhaps you have escaped into the opposite extreme. You find it ridiculous that everyone here should play the role of a heroic fighter for freedom.
Perhaps they are doing it because it is a noble and rewarding role, or perhaps because it gives them the moral strength to put up with their lot. Yet the fact that someone plays Coriolanus on the stage doesn’t make him Coriolanus in life. I know it only too well. I, for instance, did not return from America to fight against the communists but to enjoy Hungarian democracy, and when I saw that a reign of terror was approaching I remained not because I was brave, but because I was curious. I am afraid our companions are in the same boat. Either they observed events with indifference or passive disgust, or they were in favour of it until they were arrested. But the circumstance that the spy-hysteria of the system constantly demands new victims, or that someone’s position is coveted by someone else, turns no one into a freedom fighter.
‘We would be freedom fighters only if the AVO’s accusations against us were true. Since they are untrue, our companions are in a rather delicate situation and are behaving inconsistently. On the one hand they haughtily refute the AVO’s accusations – on the other they play themselves up as freedom fighters. They obviously hope that history, which will find a great scarcity of heroes in our age, will be merciful to them and accept their pretence as reality. I understand your motives in refusing to delude yourself and choosing the other way out by confessing to the imaginary crimes of which you are accused. As the only genuine criminal among all these mock-criminals you can thus walk proudly and endure the just sentence meted out to you with great patience and fortitude of mind.’
Egri gave me a scared look with his small mouse-eyes. He had a round, fleshy face, strong and broad – almost a peasant face – but as I looked at his profile under the rim of his cap in the dancing light of the paraffin lamp, he resembled, with the pointed outline of his wax-white nose, a frightened little boy. Obviously he had not fully grasped the meaning of my words and was now making ready to think them over carefully. This reassured me, for I was sure that Egri would do his utmost to face the truth without reservations and, having faced it, would act accordingly. Had he lived in the past century when the dividing line between the white of morality and the black of evil was sharp and unmistakable he would never have committed the stupidities for which, a while ago, I had still been angry with him. In 1947 he had resigned from the social democratic party and joined the communists, disowned his friends and played the role of a good communist with so much conviction that in the end he convinced himself. Unfortunately he was a slow thinker and could not keep pace with events. He acted hastily, unthinkingly, and then adjusted his ideas to his actions. He was like a toy train which, when it is derailed, runs into a table-leg or the wall, but when it is put back on its lines, rolls on without a hitch.
In the meantime the train had begun to move. Carrot-nose listened with bated breath to the clicking of the points, then, his eyes closed, as if he were pronouncing a magic prophecy, he said:
‘We are not going to the “Glorious”, but up a branch line into the Matra mountains.’
The little station in which we stood bore the name of Recsk. The trees on the hillside opposite appeared as near as if Great Birnam wood had come to meet us. The late autumn morning was surprisingly mild, vapoury, dusty and grimy. When the AVO men removed the chains from the freight cars, the prisoners, about five hundred of us, climbed down. A tall, one-legged man with a crooked nose, and supported by two crutches, dismissed his helpers and stood to attention like a soldier; only his thick, fair hair fluttered in the breeze as he gazed with sharp eyes into the distance like a general before a battle. A queer little man, who also had to be helped down, stood for a while as if uncertain what to do next, then suddenly squatted down on all fours. Even the young were yellow with exhaustion and leaned with rattling teeth against the side of the wagon.
Some two hundred AVO men and soldiers were standing round us, their submachine-guns pointing at us. In the background were lorries and four tanks. In the middle of the ring, where Lieutenant Toth and Major Prinz were standing expectantly as if waiting for a reception committee that never came, there was a swarm of AVO men. It was almost unbelievable that this was not a film company on location, shooting a film about the Gestapo dragging off Hungarian or Polish patriots to a concentration camp during the last war. The whole thing seemed unauthentic, not like the film itself, but like a rehearsal; something was wrong, some factor of realism was missing, either around me or in me. For a second I remembered last night’s conversation. Perhaps I was indeed Don Quixote, who saw noble knights in galley-slaves?
At that moment a squat and sweating lieutenant broke his way through the ring of power, accompanied by a few plain-clothes detectives. He passed us, panting with haste, and cried from afar:
‘There you are! I didn’t expect you till seven… And who are these? Didn’t I tell you that I wanted healthy, strong young men? What am I to do with these cripples? Half of them will kick the bucket before we even reach the camp!’
At this point he stumbled over the feet of the little red-nosed man on all fours.
‘Stand up, can’t you! What’s your name, where are you from, old swine?’
Slowly, comfortably, the little man straightened up and turned uncomprehending, limpid eyes on the lieutenant.
‘Don’t you understand? When were you born?’
‘At manuring time.’
‘An idiot! An idiot!’ the lieutenant repeated with a theatrical gesture of utter desolation.
While the lieutenant conferred in low tones with Prinz and Toth, the Antonello da Messina-faced young man informed me that the camp was about ten miles from the station, up in the mountains. He said we ought to do our best to be at the head of the procession and must not allow ourselves to be hurried because of the old men and the cripples. If, on the way, we should be fired at, we must run straight at the machine-guns to give the others time to scatter. The squat little lieutenant was the camp commander, and was called Schwartz. He had formerly been a shyster lawyer at Salgotarjan. The detective with the beret, standing behind him, had, only five years ago, been an arrow-cross informer.
‘How do you know all this?’
‘From my neighbour.’
‘And where does your neighbour get it?’
‘From his neighbour. You’ll soon learn that in prison everyone knows everything.’
‘And who is the little man on all fours?’
‘Uncle Endre Horvath. He was brought in two weeks ago. He was chairman of the social democratic party organization in a Budapest suburb. He is an iron founder… Paralysis,’ he added. ‘I pray for him every night.’
I told him my name, whereupon he embraced me and begged the Holy Virgin to bless me. He introduced himself as Istvan Todi, professional soldier, and expressed his delight at meeting a real socialist at last.
The camp commander ordered us to stand four in a line with our backs to the freight cars, then pointed to a tall, elderly man.
‘You there! Step out! Take the lead and order a right turn!’
The man’s chin trembled, then he cupped his palms in front of his mouth: ‘Boys! At my command all right turn!’
‘He doesn’t know the first thing about commanding, the old moron,’ said the shyster lawyer in a melancholy voice, shaking his head. ‘What was your profession?’
‘Chief of Staff of the Hungarian First Army.’
I took my place in the first line at Todi’s side. Each of us selected an old man as our neighbour so that we could adjust our steps to theirs. Immediately behind us came our bodyguards: Egri, Gabori, Garamvölgyi and, Ajtai, the railwayman from Hatvan who, during the night, had established the direction of the train from the clicking of the points. When we reached the main road the AVO men began shouting at staff colonel Kéri to speed up, but he paid no attention to them. Then one of them pressed the barrel of his submachine-gun into his side and another, with a gaping mouth full of aluminium teeth, slapped his face. The colonel ignored them. He glanced back to see whether we were following and turned contemptuous eyes at the tanks creeping back and forth in the f
ield beside the road.
We were advancing along a copper-red farm road towards wooded, rocky, blue-green, gothic regions. The landscape seemed familiar, as if I had been here before in childhood and later, when in my dreams I revisited the scenes of my youth. There had been no rain for weeks or months, the dust rising from under our heavy steps settled on the roof of my mouth; and I felt as if the skin at the corners of my eyes was drying up and breaking open like the arid, autumnal soil under my feet. Before us a heavy, yellowish-grey cloud rose higher and higher above the mountains as if we were approaching the Great Wall of China. The most interesting feature of this rain cloud was its absolutely straight edge with a small protrusion in the middle. I had the impression that I had already seen a threatening rain-wall like this somewhere, sometime; then too I had advanced towards it along a narrow, zigzagged path until I came so close that I was almost engulfed by its dark, forward-thrown shadow. But where had it been? I couldn’t remember the place; all I knew was that even then I had been threatened by some danger and that the protrusion of the cloud had looked like a dragon’s open mouth ready to swallow the burning disc of the sun, while now it was like the bust of a woman, raising its head high towards the sun. From the end of the line we heard shouts and curses, the AVO men beating those who could not keep up. We slowed our pace still more.
‘Are you an unbeliever?’ Todi turned to me.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 41