This refined sense of smell was of great advantage to us. The creaking of the saws, the snapping of the felled trees and the swishing of the axes prevented us from relying on our hearing, so we were thrown back on our sense of smell like hunted animals. The duty of AVO-smelling was undertaken by one man in each small group. This time Gabori was the ‘smeller’, Egri and I, squatting on the ground steeped in the vinegar-odour of the injured cherry tree, were useless.
Garamvölgyi did not belong to our work-group. To the undisguised envy of the entire camp he was chosen to herd the guards’ pigs. He owed this job to a very attractive young AVO guard – whom among ourselves we called the Fair Murderer – to whom, with a good deal of psychopathological tact, he had told a few anecdotes about the Emperor Heliogabalus. One of these anecdotes was that the young Caesar had ordered the boys with the biggest penises from all provinces to be brought to Rome; when he grew tired of them he had their sex organs cut off and personally fed them to the wolves of the Capitol. The job had two advantages: one, that Janos had absolutely nothing to do; two, that he himself could eat the leavings destined for the pigs. In the mornings, when he drove the pigs out to feed on acorns, he would come our way, to give us each a handful of raw maize, which we then chewed all day as if it were some hard candy.
He stood before us in his clean, long and elegant overcoat, with his tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses, his arms crossed on his chest like the swineherd of a rococo pastoral play. He told us that we would all soon go to hell, but I paid little attention to his warning. In the evenings I was ready to listen patiently to all complaints and did my best to comfort my companions, but during the day, in the soap-bubble of rain, vapour and mist, I drew back deep into my coat and my skin. There was no opportunity for long conversations and for the time being I still concentrated all my attention on economizing my strength and spending as little energy as possible. Besides, at such times I felt the need to be alone with myself – though surrounded by friends – and instead of talking to float like a bubble amidst dreams, phantasmagoria and hazy impressions in an utterly relaxed spiritual attitude.
It soon became clear to me that I owed both my physical and spiritual resistance chiefly to this way of behaving, which was partly yogi-like, partly monkish and partly schizophrenic. I paid no attention to the rain running down my spine, did not mind the lack of washing facilities and gave no thought to thirst, drinking only from the stream when, every second or third day, we worked near it. My physical suffering was thus much less than I should have expected. It seemed to me that I was acclimatized, that I had become used to, or rather, was sufficiently degraded for the camp; that disagreeable impressions stopped at the surface of my body and never penetrated my epidermis; that, though they crossed the threshold of my consciousness, they never reached the pain-threshold. The most interesting experience was furnished by a sudden toothache. Outside in the world, this toothache would have tormented me for two or three days before I made up my mind to have the tooth pulled. Here I tolerated the pain like a cave-dweller in the Stone Age who knew no dentist or pain-killer. I slept well and although I was conscious of the pain during the day I did not really feel it. It was as if someone close to me were complaining of toothache.
My day-dreams embraced the widest variety of subjects, some themes returned every hour, others I carefully avoided; the problems of my captivity and future, for instance, and memories from my past life. Mostly I restricted myself to the intensive but cool observation of the surrounding flora, as if I were attending a lecture in natural history. What preoccupied me most was the change of colour of the leaves. I watched them day after day as they were transformed from the blue-green and blood-red of the late October into golden and lemon-yellow, and finally into tar-black, the leaves of each tree differently and at a different time, until at last they merged on the ground in a dark chestnut-coloured carpet. But even on the ground they behaved differently. Some leaves, like those of the plane-tree, fell down flat like soldiers shot in battle; the leaves of the oak swelled and blistered like the skin on top of some thick, bubbling liquid; the leaves of the wild chestnut tree immediately disintegrated and were held together only by their veins, like a rotting catch by an old fishing net. The leaves of the wild cherry and the beech tree rolled up like the wrapping of a cigar and their example was followed by most of the other leaves. The small cylinders tossed and turned until at last they found the appropriate spot in which to decay in this forest mass-grave. Long-legged, egg-shaped insects played hide-and-seek in their tunnels, and scarlet bugs with two ugly black spots on their backs.
I had several favourites, for instance the water-spiders that scattered when my bearded face appeared in the mirror of the stream, and threw tiny rings with their running feet; or the completely bare hawthorn bushes offering their red berries in gnarled claws turned downwards, and reminding me of the hands of Lady Macbeth. Then there were the huge silver grapes of rain-drops hanging from the twigs until our axe cut into the tree. But it was the few golden-yellow leaves I loved best, which by some trick of fate still clung to the snow-white, straight branch of a birch. I admired this sight four times a day: in the morning when we arrived, when we knocked off for lunch, when we returned from the kitchen-tent and in the evening when we left the place where we worked. Those leaves on the birch branch were like a golden bracelet on the arm of a skeleton – though I found this image too sentimental to mention to my friends. Gabori, who was so concerned about my physical and spiritual welfare that he watched every one of my movements, looked up several times at the birch tree without, obviously, guessing what I saw there.
This dispassionate and amusing observation of nature did not, however, last long; a few weeks later we were all overwhelmed by the terrible sight of the forest’s destruction. While we were cutting out only a few trees here and there, we noticed nothing, nor did I take too much to heart the withering and death of small plants. After all, I had always known that the glorious fulfilment of spring and summer was followed by death. But everyone mourned the final destruction of the forest. We knew that Hungary had few forests and that this was the oldest and most beautiful. Even during the first few weeks we had been saddened by its defilement. The moss, which we used as toilet paper, disappeared and the rocks beneath it looked like revolting lepers; our feet wore away the grass, and the clearings turned into lakes of mud; we ate the beautiful red berries of the briar bushes to assuage our hunger for vitamins and tore up the ferns to suck their slender, white roots that were sweet as saccharine. Whenever we worked near juniper bushes I filled my pockets with their berries. As long as the stock lasted I gave my friends three berries each morning to clean their teeth with. Hours later I could still feel their taste, but by then it was like the taste of my first glass of gin drunk in my grandfather’s inn with Laszlo Fényes before we set out to visit Simon Pan.
Real despair took hold of us only when the death of the forest became evident after we had cleared a good part of the mountain-side for a quarry. One morning our nachalnik, an old Stakhanovite by the name of Kreybig who had been arrested because he wanted to leave his job at a state factory and go to work in another state factory where they offered him more pay, sent us up to the mountain top, just below the peak. We owed this wonderful job – wonderful because nobody could follow us up the eighty-five-degree slope – to Gabori who, the night before, had related to Kreybig how, on the day of the Americans’ arrival, he had, with his two hands, hanged his kapo in the German concentration camp of Dachau. We had to cut down a few oak trees, but these oaks up at the top were entirely different from those we had felled below in the valley. They were ancient, crooked, hollow, gnarled and distorted; some grew from cracks in the rock, long and slim, with their sides flattened; the cross-section of another resembled a three-pointed star; with a third it was impossible to establish whether it was two trees in a close embrace, or one tree split in two at the base. When we reached the top it was still raining mildly but the valley opening before us showed us the te
rrible havoc we had wrought in the forest.
Later the rain cloud descended and the sky sparkled bright blue above our heads. Immediately above us an eagle circled. As we felled the trees we had to hold on to rocks and bushes with one hand. When one snapped we crawled rapidly away. Sometimes, after we had sawn through the trunk, the tree remained standing, or leaned back a little against the rock, like an old man against the head-rest of his armchair. At other times it crashed, taking its roots and the huge rocks embedded in the roots along with it. It rolled over and over down the slope into the deep valley with loud, painful sighs ending in a death-rattle, like the sighs of a suicide throwing himself from a mist-enwrapped bridge into a galloping stream. While Garamvölgyi explained why we would soon perish, I thought of this suicidal fall of uprooted oaks.
Then, without any transition, I thought of Suzy. This occurred twenty or thirty times a day without causing particular emotional upheaval or compelling me to delve into my memories. Just as the Portarini girl who walked in the streets of Florence, who often laughed, who perspired in the summer, who ate and drank, who chattered and quietly panted in her sleep when the torches fixed to iron rings had burned down to ashes, had almost no connection with the idealized Beatrice deprived not only of her physical functions but also her physical existence and transformed into a wraith by Dante – so Suzy also had transformed herself into a transcendent and cool ghost since my arrival in Recsk. My vision of her was inexact and ethereal, awakening no greater pain than the image, had I conjured it up, of Diane de Poitiers, Poppea Sabina or Roxane. But it was not of some historical figure she reminded me; it was rather of a girl in a Botticelli painting or in the pink and blue tapestries in the Cluny Museum – not one particular girl, but the abstract image of a girl. She was insubstantial, coldly brilliant, like a vision but an every-day vision that no longer surprised or moved. I thought of her as if she had been dead a long, long time; a dead girl once very dear. Yet, I knew all the time that I was playing a cunning game, that I was looking at the negative of her image, because in reality it was I, not she, who was dead.
Suddenly I became conscious of Garamvölgyi’s bored but triumphant nasal voice:
‘The camp commander has promised the nachalniki that he will set them free as soon as they have liquidated us to the last man. In addition, Gyurka Nadaban told me that the lime pit has been dug two metres deep, twenty metres long and six point one metres wide. This makes two hundred and forty-four cubic metres, half the space for the bodies, the other half for the lime cover. This means one hundred and twenty-two cubic metres for the bodies. Nadaban said one can figure six and a half bodies per cubic metre, one hundred and twenty-two times six and a half makes exactly seven hundred and ninety-three, the number of inmates including Nadaban and the nachalniki. Clear? In addition the date of Robespierre’s rule of terror was one thousand seven hundred and ninety-thr …’
Janos stopped and stood as though petrified, leaning on his shepherd’s staff, gazing after the pigs that had disappeared in the forest as if he were still seeing them with his mind’s eye. The so-called master-miner, a noncommissioned AVO officer in civilian clothes, had appeared at the bottom of the footpath. He was called Andras Toth and came from Egerszolat, a few kilometres from Recsk. According to fellow-prisoners who came from the same village he had been, six years ago, head of the local arrow-cross party and had, with his henchmen, dug up the Jewish cemetery to look for jewellery – which he didn’t find. He was an ugly little man with a tiny head, a pointed, red nose, and when he wasn’t about we always called him the Gravedigger.
Although he attacked anyone whose face he disliked with his cudgel, and changed his victims at random, he was the only AVO man nobody feared. We had no need of our sense of smell to foresee his coming: whether he came in the morning or in the afternoon he was always drunk: noisy, singing, cursing, spitting drunk. We recognized him from afar by his clothing. He wore a green, narrow-brimmed hat with a tuft of chamois-hair, a short, pearl-grey overcoat, butter-coloured riding breeches, purple- and blue-checked Scottish socks, white leather gloves and cherry-coloured boots. Yet we had to regard his attire as being in the best of taste because we recognized the various pieces as coming from the wardrobes of our fellow-prisoners, Counts Jozsef Somsich, Péter Zichy and Gyula Ambrozy, while the lining of the short overcoat bore the proud escutcheon of the marquess Alfréd Pallavicini.
He approached with a great display of geniality, explaining that we had been done a great honour by being permitted to open up the largest quarry of the entire country. On the day of the official opening we should all be released.
‘You can bet on it if I say so,’ he repeated in his hoarse voice, keeping his eyes on the ground. ‘Until then, work honestly. Outside, they have again introduced bread rationing. You get half a kilo free every day. The whole country is envious of you. Who else can afford to spend his days in the most beautiful health resort of the Matra?’
He watched us from the corner of his bloodshot eyes. The smell of alcohol radiating from him was rather agreeable, invisible stalls loaded with slightly fermenting fruit were swimming around me in the air. From the inner pocket of his overcoat, above the Pallavicini arms, protruded the party’s daily paper.
‘Our country is more beautiful every day,’ he said, pointing with his stick towards the peak of Mount Kékes rising above the lookout towers and the barbed-wire fence. ‘Do you see that big tower there, Gabori? The tower they are building on Kékes? Do you know what it is? What it is for?’
‘The national watch-tower, Mr Master-miner. It is from there the secret police will watch the Hungarian cemeteries.’
‘Idiot. A meteorological station,’ the Gravedigger replied angrily. ‘And do you know, Gabori, what they watch from a meteorological station?’
‘Meteors, of course.’
‘Hahaha! But look,’ he pushed the point of his stick into the muddy clay, ‘this mountain, on which we stand, is many hundred years old. Perhaps even a thousand. Who knows? True? What are you laughing at, Gabori, you stupid animal? Do you want to make me angry? A rotten bourgeois lad like you ought to show more interest in science. Particularly genealogy.’
‘Not genealogy, Mr Master-miner. Gynaecology.’
‘What do I care! But do you know what it is?’
‘Sure. The science with the help of which treasures are dug up from the ground, even from a Jewish cemetery.’
The master-miner gave a loud, animal roar. I could not understand Gabori’s purpose in provoking the drunkard. Some ten of our fellow-prisoners, who were carrying heavy logs, stopped and watched the scene curiously. The Gravedigger lifted his truncheon, Gabori started to run and the Gravedigger went in pursuit, but in his muddled state he became confused among the logs and tree stumps. Gabori turned back, came up behind him and tripped him. The next moment they were rolling in the slimy mud, fighting and cursing. A few minutes later Gabori returned to us, red in the face but very cheerful, which again I couldn’t understand because, though he was pretty drunk, the master-miner had given him a good beating.
Garamvölgyi went on with his lecture on our liquidation and I bent, vexed, over my saw. He had discussed this question several times, always in the same nasal voice, but we refused to argue, because arguments wouldn’t have led anywhere. From this Janos drew the conclusion that we were hiding our heads in the sand and refusing to face reality.
I tried to re-create my dreamy mood without, however, losing sight of the practical side of things – for instance that the tree we were felling should fall awkwardly and break to smithereens on a sharp-crested rock. If the tree remained whole the paymaster sergeant would sell it to the cabinet-makers of the region, the AVO would get drunk on the money and would have their fun with us when they returned from the village. Whenever we cut valuable timber we tried to damage it, and if there was no simple way of doing so, we sawed it up and hid it. We set up the wood-piles in the deepest mud so that they would rot, or in places where the stream would wash them awa
y; we gathered the cut branches in such a way that nobody could disentangle them, and hid the cornel-wood from which the shafts of the stone-breaking hammers were made, under these piles. It was not only we who acted like this. Everyone in the camp engaged in systematic sabotage without discussing it. Only in the evening, when with quick movements we nicked our axes on the rocks, did we exchange conspiratorial glances.
I ought to have despaired at the insignificance of our efforts. What little damage we did was to the state, and that didn’t interest the AVO in the least. By nicking our axes and working slowly we could, at the most, delay but could certainly not prevent the opening of the quarry and the very difficult work of stone-breaking waiting for us. This, however, occurred to me but rarely. What I saw before me in a light as brilliant as that surrounding Suzy, was the collapse of the mine. This apocalyptic vision was not a mere wish-dream but an idea based on very real foundations. I knew the plan of the mine, knew how it was conceived and knew the development to be expected.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 43