My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  ‘No.’

  ‘So,’ he looked at me eagerly, ‘you believe in God?’

  ‘I don’t. But, lacking evidence, I have suspended judgement.’

  ‘Then look at the evidence,’ he exclaimed triumphantly, pointing to the cloud.

  The cloud represented the Holy Virgin holding the Child in her arms. It was not a likeness, but the actual thing. I was disinclined to believe my senses and submitted the sight to thorough scrutiny. The child was standing in his mother’s lap, raising one hand and putting the other lightly on his hip. The next moment, when the sun reached a point exactly behind the Virgin, a halo appeared round her head and shoulders – not a golden halo but an ethereal, silvery one.

  ‘Let us consider this a favourable sign,’ said the small and delicate professor whom I was supporting and who, since we had heard the thuds of the gun-butts, had been resting his head in the crook of my arm as though in a nest. ‘But let us not expect a miracle. I must confess that I am badly frightened. In this century the need for a miracle has been almost permanent and yet, unfortunately, none has occurred. Besides,’ he continued, ‘in medieval paintings they usually represented the Holy Virgin standing on the sickle of the moon. For she is akin to Diana, the virgin goddess, who transforms Apollo’s golden aureole into a silvery moon-ring before our very eyes.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Todi replied, ‘she is a mild, virginal and merciful goddess, comforter of all which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. But I object to your comparing the Holy Virgin with pagan Diana.’

  ‘Your namesake,’ the old professor said with a delicate movement of his wrist, ‘your namesake and example, Jacopone da Todi, would have given the same reply seven hundred years ago. And yet I must protest against your applying to us the tenth verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew… I revere justice too much to dare hold myself its depositary… At least that is what my great masters, Renan and Berthelot, taught me… Furthermore I believe that in your truly enviable faith you place the Holy Virgin on a pedestal perhaps not too high, but certainly too lonely, when you forget her forerunners. The Virgin Queen of Heaven with her only-begotten Son in her arms,’ he continued, panting, ‘has meant different things in the course of centuries …’

  ‘What else?’ Todi turned to me.

  ‘For instance the Virgin Queen of Heaven, Isis, with her only-begotten Son Horus.’

  ‘Stop that chatter,’ Kunéry, a former army officer, shouted at us from the third row. ‘In an hour’s time we shall all be dead and you can find nothing better to talk about than Isis …’

  I turned back and the sight of the young officer filled me with desperate anger. It was not that the subject of our talk had been particularly important to me. It was difficult enough to keep up a conversation while marching with parched throats, and yet I had felt that this talk, our somewhat snobbish, absurd and pathetic attachment to spiritual life, was less an intellectual necessity than a physical urge: an animal reaction of the will to live, without which I would surely perish.

  ‘Each according to his needs, my dear colleague,’ I said to the officer. ‘There are men, think only of Hindenburg, Voroshilov, Ludendorff, Mackensen, Franchet d’Espérey, Pétain, Budjonni or Horthy – who were supported to the ultimate frontiers of human life by the joint forces of healthy military living and stupidity. Allow us to attempt to survive the life before us in our own way.’

  At this moment the camp commander’s car stopped immediately in front of us. The shyster lawyer climbed from his seat and came running towards us.

  ‘At Mauthausen,’ Gabori said in a loud voice as he passed us, ‘the SS beat us in exactly the same way. Later, when the Americans came, we caught a few of them and …’

  ‘Fascists! fascists! fascists!’ the camp commmander roared, beside himself with rage, wiping his sweating forehead with a large red handkerchief.

  However, this time it was not us he meant, but his own men.

  ‘You sit down and rest!’ he shouted at us.

  We sat down under an acacia tree. The small leaves of the tree hung ochre-yellow and limp as if cut out of satin. The great rain cloud loomed directly above us but the contours of the Holy Virgin were no longer visible.

  Soon a few lorries arrived to pick up the old men and the cripples. Then the commander ordered Kéri to get the procession going, but at a comfortable pace.

  ‘This is not a fascist army!’ he exclaimed proudly, pointing to his men.

  ‘The dirty Jew,’ murmured the AVO man with the pointed nose and the gaping mouth. He was standing next to us on the side of the road with one of his comrades.

  As we approached the camp I noticed that the barbed-wire fence, following a cleared strip of woodland, ran up the two sides of a huge mountain. The fact that the camp’s territory included a whole, forest-covered mountain made me almost happy. Once within the fence we advanced for a while among apple and wild pear trees; a friendly little cottage stood on the side of the hill with seven plum trees in front of it; a little further on stood a towering, lonely oak, and a few miles up we saw, outside the fence, a hunting lodge on the edge of the forest, like the house of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in the fairy tale.

  The road was covered with freshly broken, movingly beautiful, pale blue andesite rock. Between the stones, here and there, I saw round or oval, filmy patches of scarlet, as if poppy petals had been trodden into them.

  ‘Blood, blood and blood,’ the professor woke me from my idyllic day-dream. Only then did I notice that prisoners were working not far from the road, in dirty old army uniforms like the ones we were wearing. Behind them AVO men with submachine-guns were sitting comfortably in the grass.

  I looked closer to see whether Bandi Havas was among them, but saw only Péter Casplar, former chairman of the trade union council, who was sharpening the end of a telegraph pole and who greeted me with a resigned flick of the hand.

  We reached a long, narrow clearing and were told to sit down on our overcoats. A deep, rapid streamlet wound its way along the edge of the clearing; its water was transparent and violet-coloured, as though indelible pencils had been dipped in it. On its bed I saw the sharp contours of a motionless vegetation: green and rust-coloured grasses and algae showing no sign of organic life. A metallic smell rose from the water as if the plants had just been galvanized.

  Opposite, on the other edge of the clearing, stood a few gigantic beeches, at least two hundred years old. Their trunks reminded me of the feet of prehistoric reptiles. The clearing ran up the steep slope of the mountain. Lemon-yellow acacias were followed by oaks with orange and rust-coloured foliage, like huge catafalques on which the wreaths are already wilting; then came pines and among them stones and rocks, their sharp outlines softened by the fresh and poisonous green of thick moss.

  Suddenly I knew whence that déjà vu feeling I was experiencing came. I had indeed been here before, in my fledgling days. Three of my classmates and I had decided to climb Hungary’s highest mountain, the Kékes. We had set out on a Saturday, in the autumn, had got off the train at Recsk and had come up this very same road, along the stream. I could still remember these huge beeches and it was then that their resemblance to the feet of reptiles had first occurred to me. That was twenty-five years ago.

  When the order came to strip ourselves completely, empty our pockets and put the contents on the ground, I obeyed automatically. I smuggled my few cigarettes and Suzy’s little embroidered handkerchief that had, by chance, remained with me, back into my trousers pocket. All in all we must have had some three thousand five hundred pockets. I hoped that they would not take the trouble to search them all.

  Some of us undressed with extreme slowness as if to gain time. In the deadly silence the old professor turned to me:

  ‘When do we dig the graves?’

  ‘Digging is unnecessary,’ I replied, ‘there is the bed of the stream.’

  However, I soon saw that, at least for the time being, we did not have to fe
ar the worst. There were only four AVO men with us, four submachine-guns. We were five hundred and it would have required a platoon to massacre us.

  The yellow, heavy rain cloud had now spread over the entire horizon. The air was so still that I could not even feel the smell of the forest. The gaping AVO man, whom we had in the meantime given the nickname of Dentures because of his numerous aluminium teeth, was walking slowly up and down the line. Behind him walked a red-faced cattle merchant, with a blanket in his hand in which he collected from his fellow-prisoners all pocket knives and handkerchiefs, wrist-watches, lighters, cigarette cases, toothbrushes, soap, pipes, identification papers, internment orders and court sentences. Although he was completely naked and couldn’t stop his teeth from chattering, he walked with a swagger. He was obviously very proud of being entrusted with so important a task.

  A yellow-faced, emaciated old man was holding on desperately to a catheter. He must, not long ago, have been very fat, for the skin of his belly gathered in huge wrinkles, like a leather bag.

  ‘What is this?’ Dentures asked in a low voice, pulling the catheter from the old man’s hand.

  ‘A catheter.’

  ‘You mean you can’t hear without it? I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Sir, I have an enlarged prostate and without this I cannot urinate.’

  At this minute we became aware of loud singing from the direction of the forest. A platoon of soldiers emerged from the wood about three hundred yards away. They were singing at the top of their voices as they advanced towards us with fixed bayonets, swinging their arms in the Russian manner:

  … you’re the richest, loveliest of countries,

  all your people know that they are free!

  Petrified, we all stared at the approaching soldiers. Sweat broke out on my forehead, drenched my brows and dripped into my eyes. Fountains broke under my arms and ran down to my elbows pressed to my side. Animula vagula blandula, hospes comesque corporis – I repeated to myself quickly, and bent my head. Is there no better way to spend the last moments of my life? I asked myself while my eyes ran down the colonnade of thighs and legs. From under the wrinkled leather-bag of the old army doctor’s belly an orange-coloured, forked jet of water trickled in so miserable an arch that it hit the inside of his thighs and ran down between his trembling knees.

  ‘You can piss all right, you old scoundrel, if you want to!’ Dentures exclaimed cheerfully, and flung the catheter into the stream.

  Five minutes later, when the song of the soldiers rose up from down in the valley, Dentures ordered us to dress.

  And then the rain came down. Our toothbrushes and family photographs, pocket-books and documents were burning with a fierce yellow flame on the edge of the forest. The red-faced cattle merchant, who was already dressed, stood by the bonfire and whenever the AVO men looked away, stuffed a pipe or a cigarette holder into his pocket.

  By the time I had pulled on my trousers it was pouring so thick and fast that the more distant, colourful trees and the mountains had disappeared as though behind a curtain and only the clearing and the angry green of the mossy rocks was still visible. A small, self-contained hell with a sulphur-yellow, sizzling fire in the centre.

  PART FIVE

  The Forced-Labour Camp

  When, ten minutes after the first search, I learned from the old inhabitants of the camp what I had already guessed – that we were not allowed to write to our families, could receive no letters, parcels or visitors and that no books, no newspapers, no paper, pencil or pen were available – I experienced only a moment of acute anxiety which soon softened into a chronic, tame melancholy.

  It became evident very quickly that the information I had received from Kenedy at the Kistarcsa screening camp was true in every detail, although according to the two hundred social democrats who had been here since early summer and had built the camp, the treatment had lately improved. The guard huts built in the crowns of the ancient oaks and approached by rope ladder had been taken down, the beatings we received were but a pale imitation of those given before and the blows which had deafened many of the inmates had been discontinued. Unlike the first inmates, we were permitted to sit on the ground while we were eating, but we were not too eager to soak our behinds in the muddy, slippery clay. We consumed the half pint of barley-coffee we received for breakfast, the soup and vegetable we got for lunch and the vegetable served us as dinner standing on the hillside in front of the camp kitchen, where the cauldrons and cooks were protected against the rain by corrugated sheet-iron mounted on four posts. We poured the hot soup down our throats, spooned out the vegetable (automatically counting the little pieces of horse meat put in it three times a week) and then Gabori, Egri, Garamvölgyi and I squatted down side by side. Egri broke a cigarette in three equal parts – Garamvölgyi did not smoke but drew his cigarettes, to give them to us – then asked someone for a light. While we smoked I told them about Africa, California or Paris and they listened eagerly, enthralled, not caring about the rain running in rivulets from their hair into the collars of their jackets.

  The rain fell for two months, exactly until Christmas morning. Sometimes it rained without pause for twenty-four hours, sometimes only during the day or during the night, but there were mornings when the sky cleared and overclouded again ten or twenty times. By the afternoon of the second day our overcoats were wet through and they never dried out again. At first we tried to dry them in the barracks by the large brick stove, but there was only one stove and there were a hundred and fifty overcoats. If we spread them over the stove they caught fire, and we were far too exhausted to hold them up. A few days later, when the shoulder pads of our jackets were wet through from the muddy logs we carried and even our shirts were dripping with water, we gave up the struggle against the rain.

  It was much more difficult to get used to wet boots. Often we were unable to pull them off in the evening and had to sleep in them, at other times the sticky mud tore them off our feet when we most needed their protection. In the evening all eight hundred of us had to stand up in the shape of a chessboard on the hillside while the commander and his men watched us from the hilltop. AVO men ran up and down between our ranks with their electric torches, but sometimes it took hours before they had counted us to their satisfaction. It was not that they were slow – they wanted to get it over as soon as possible and go down to the village afterwards – but they were not very strong on figures and the more they hurried the more mistakes they made. After the counting they dismissed us and we stumbled down the steep hillside in the dark, falling over logs and tree stumps, crossed the stream bed and climbed up the other side towards our barracks with a pale, blinking light above the door. The AVO men ran after us, beat and kicked those falling behind and herded us into the building, closing the heavy door with the iron cross-bars. If someone lost a boot he could hope to find it only in the morning. They protruded from the slimy clay like old discarded stove-pipes and were filled ankle-deep with water. We never troubled to empty them but simply stepped into them.

  Strangely enough not one of us cursed the rain or even worried about it. It enabled us to wash our hands and faces in the morning – no other provision had been made for our hygiene – and when it rained the AVO kept to their huts, leaving us alone, while our kapos whom, as in Soviet labour camps, we called nachalniki, sat around their camp fires. And the rain had another, much less tangible, advantage. It accentuated the narrow, drab and inescapable limits of our existence, saving us from vain and painful dreams by cutting off the far too beautiful view and hiding the two highest peaks of the country, the Kékes and the Galyatetö with their luxurious hotels, where I was to have spent the summer with Suzy. The cold, swampy forest was a décor befitting our primitive way of life and the atmosphere in which we lived. Even those less well-versed in thinking out things for themselves were aware of this aspect of the weather and were duly grateful to the ever-present rain clouds that shrouded our existence of doubtful value and even more doubtful length into a wet
and monotonous mist. Thus, every single day seemed to last two months while in our memory two months lived on as a single, endless day.

  One afternoon I was holding one end of a saw while Egri held the other, pulling it back and forth across the trunk of a wild cherry tree as in a slow-motion picture. I was looking at the sawdust that accumulated in a small cone beside the trunk of the tree. When it was approximately an inch high, a raindrop landed on its point so that now it looked like a white volcano with a mountain lake in its crater. I knew that subsequent raindrops would wash away my little volcano, so I turned away to escape witnessing its destruction, keeping my eye on the four or five blood-red leaves clinging desperately to a twig of a blackberry bush.

  Gabori stood a little behind us, cutting a wedge in the trunk of the tree we were to fell next. His main job, however, was to watch out for AVO men. At first we noticed them in the still dense wood only when it was too late. The dilemma seemed insoluble. We never got enough food to work at the rate they demanded, but if they caught us squatting or just standing idle, they beat us up and threw us into the dungeon, where the water stood knee-high, and starved us for three or four days. When Egri and I were sawing wood in the clearing, we used to cut into the log and then, turning the saw with its edge up, would save energy by pulling it back and forth in the same groove for three or four hours. But when we were felling trees immediately along the footpath we could not use this method.

  Fortunately our senses became simultaneously refined and dulled with miraculous rapidity. My face, hands, feet were soon anaesthetized by the continuous humidity, and my shoulders and back became indifferent to the weight and roughness of the heavy logs. My sense of touch was virtually extinct. As to my sight, I limited it intentionally, as did my companions. I walked and stood with my head bowed, my shoulders sagging and never straightened out except at night, after the light was put out and we sat talking on the edge of our bunks. I was very careful never to gaze around me in a wide circle like a lighthouse. I had discovered that an AVO man or nachalnik, even if his back was towards me, would turn around automatically at the flash of a lighthouse. My sense of smell and my hearing, on the other hand, had considerably sharpened, particularly my sense of smell. During the second week at Recsk I found out that though I never saw an AVO man until he was about five metres from me, I could smell him from a hundred metres. My fellow prisoners were of the opinion that the AVO must have arrested the owner of a perfumery in one of the nearby towns and have kept the perfumes for themselves. We usually worked on the northern slope of the mountain, our guards coming up from the valley below, and the north wind often helped us smell them from afar. As time went on, their smell of perfume became stronger and stronger, as if they were drenching themselves in scent every morning. It was the same with the kitchen: we knew from a distance of five hundred metres whether we would get cabbage, peas, lentils, potatoes or beans for dinner, though sometimes smell-hallucination confounded the stench of the boiled beans with the fragrance of boiled ham that was certainly not being cooked. The plundering of a perfumery seemed so convincing an explanation of the AVO smell that at first I too was inclined to believe it. It was weeks before I realized the truth. It was not perfume we smelled on our guards; they never used scent. As we never washed and possessed no soap, it was the smell of scented toilet soap that we believed to be perfume.