My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  I had known Karoly Sarkany, Professor of Geology at Budapest University, before the war. He was anti-Nazi and never made a secret of his opinions, but was saved from persecution at that time by his international reputation. He hated the communists just as much, but got into no trouble with them for some time, until they consulted him about their plan for an underground railway in Budapest. This was a Russian-sponsored military project, and therefore could not be criticized. The line was to be built fifty yards below the surface. When Sarkany pointed out that in sandy soil it was dangerous to run a line at such a depth, he was arrested the same night.

  In the summer Professor Sarkany was brought to Recsk. According to the old prisoners, he arrived in a beautiful Russian car, wearing handcuffs and very cheerful. He was in excellent condition and told the prisoners that he was using his own typewriter in his cell, had all the scientific books of his library at his disposal and received all letters addressed to him from abroad in which he was asked for geological advice. With the advice he gave he earned approximately six to eight hundred dollars a month. With one per cent of his earnings he was allowed to buy himself cigarettes and sweets, the rest went to the state as payment for the use of his own typewriter and books, for board, lodging and protection.

  During the forty-eight hours spent at Recsk he thoroughly examined the mountain, had a few trial borings made and then, in the presence of some twenty prisoners, the camp commander and a few AVO men he summed up his observations and handed over the draft-blueprint of the future quarry. While he was explaining his plans he glanced expectantly at his old friend, Gabor Alapy, former engineer officer in the army. The camp commander approved Sarkany’s plan and Sarkany walked back, handcuffed and cheerful, to the waiting Pobeda.

  The Zerge was a tent-shaped mountain. The side on which we worked was very steep, whereas the opposite side descended in a series of ridges. Sarkany advised that the quarry should be cut into the steep side, to a depth reaching almost to the core of the mountain. His purpose in devising this plan was unmistakable. Had he really wanted to open a quarry he would have chosen the gentle slope of the mountain. As it was, the weight of the giant peak would press down more and more heavily on the clayey northern slope, rich in springs and thus less resistant the more deeply we cut into the mountainside. One day there would be a landslide.

  As I bent over my saw – Garamvölgyi was still talking in his montonous, nasal voice – I saw the bare andesite pillars of the mountain top crashing down on the quarry which, at this moment, was still covered with wood and grass. I saw the power-house cracked open like an egg-shell by the heavy machinery inside, saw it slide and tumble over the edge of the lower level, saw the rope become slack and the buckets plough up the concrete road. I saw the remaining trees bend in all directions like the bristles of an old toothbrush, and the barbed-wire fence sag like a fishing net hung out to dry while in other places it tensed to breaking point, emitting a falsetto buzzing.

  This vision was highly enjoyable but it did nor solve our problems. I remembered the anarchist Souvarine from Zola’s Germinal; this was how he too imagined the destruction of the mine when he dislocated the props in the shaft, dreaming of the destruction of society as a whole as he set out in the night. I could hardly cherish such hopes. In a society like ours sabotage was a great emotional satisfaction but from the point of view of the system it was almost negligible. The system was supported by the state police force and by nothing else; and if one day, every mine in the country blew up simultaneously, this, as far as the system was concerned, would be a useful phenomenon, not a harmful one. Terror produces sabotage; the sabotage produces more terror. This adds new fuel to the three-phase motor of the state apparatus of which terror is the ignition, economic disaster the necessary pressure and sabotage the petrol.

  ‘Look out! She’s falling!’ yelled Gabori, and Garamvölgyi jumped forward to shield me and pushed the tree with all his might in the opposite direction. A minute later the cherry with its snow-white cross-section and its orange ring immediately under the bark lay dead at our feet. From the sound of its falling we knew that it had broken to pieces on the rocks.

  When we moved on to the next tree Janos came closer. He must have noticed that we were not interested in his conversation because he changed the subject.

  ‘It has always been my dream to go into a pastry-shop and order six pieces of chocolate cake at once,’ he said and the corners of his mouth curved downwards. There was self-mockery in his face, but under the assumed cynicism the little boy in him was near to tears. ‘But I never had enough money to eat more than one or two. And now I shall never eat chocolate cake again. Never. Not even one slice.’

  He looked at me and I read reproach in his eyes. Perhaps because I had seen so much in this life and had had the opportunity to eat so many slices of chocolate cake. How many? During my student years and in America – during twice five years – I ate two slices of cake each day. This added up to seven thousand two hundred slices – six hundred whole cakes. If I calculated that a cake is about ten centimetres high, this gave a cake-tower twelve storeys high. At the bottom were the heavier cakes: caramel, chocolate, nut; then came the fruit and rum cakes, and finally the feather-light chestnut-creams and vanilla cakes with whipped cream. In this respect I had nothing to reproach myself with; I had eaten all the cakes that were coming to me.

  Unfortunately, it was somewhat different where women were concerned. Only the night before Gabori had told me about Eva Balogh, the very pretty girl employed by the cultural department of the social democratic party, who used to be my official guide when I went to the provinces to lecture. When she had come back to the office one Monday morning, Gabori related, she had cried and thrown tantrums and complained to everyone that ‘again nothing has happened!’ I had liked Eva Balogh, but I had thought it was her job to accompany me, and that it was my poems she had favoured, not me. Then there was that beautiful woman in her polka-dotted skirt, the wife of an engineer, with whom I had flirted so out-rageously on New Year’s Eve, 1948. Three days later she came to see me at the editorial offices, my room-mate disappeared with a knowing smile on his face and she perched on my desk and spread her wide, polka-dotted skirt over my manuscripts. We agreed that I would telephone her in a few days, but the liquidation of the social democratic party intervened and the taste of life was so bitter in my mouth that I did not ring her. And all the other opportunties I had missed! Suddenly the faces of at least four dozen women appeared before my eyes. Usually I had not even noticed their advances because I had been convinced that they admired me only for my poems and I would have felt it immodest to ask them to extend their admiration to my person as well. No use crying over spilt milk! Now it was too late.

  While I mused, Egri scolded Garamvölgyi for dreaming about six slices of cake instead of looking for a way to send messages to our families by one of the AVO guards. His wife had received no news of him for five months now, and what about Janika’s mother? Besides, to hell with cakes! Why wasn’t he clever enough to snitch a sausage from the AVO kitchen when he went for the slops in the afternoon? Garamvölgyi replied that the guards always walked in twos to control each other, and if Egri had no other wish than to be beaten to death he could try sending a message himself. With that he distributed some of the pigs’ maize and departed, offended.

  When we had felled the next tree and stopped for a moment to get some rest I remarked that this business of sending messages was hopeless. The AVO guards were well paid, they informed on each other, and our isolation was almost complete. However, we might try the contrary and obtain some information as to what was going on outside. The best thing, of course, would be to lay our hands on a newspaper.

  ‘The party’s daily, for instance?’ asked Gabori innocently.

  ‘Of course. Half a page anyway, or even a quarter of a page. We could figure out a great deal from it.’

  ‘There is a whole newspaper in my trousers pocket,’ declared Gabori proudly. ‘In the evening I
shall try to sit behind you and read it to you. I daren’t bring it out here. Do you want a cigarette? I mean a whole cigarette, not a third?’

  He brought out from his pocket an almost full packet of cigarettes and a pencil.

  ‘I felt a bottle of brandy in the Gravedigger’s hip pocket while we were fighting, but there was no time to get that too.’

  ‘And the prognosis?’ I asked the physician. Had I been able to speak aloud, my question would have had an accent of curiosity; after all I was asking for a medical opinion and the least I could do was to show interest. But I had to whisper. We were sitting on his bunk with our heads drawn into our shoulders, surrounded in the twilight by exhausted men drying their feet, talking in low voices or listening to our words openly or covertly. My whispering sounded excited even to my own ears, although I was absolutely calm and had no doubt about the answer I would get.

  Doctor Acs was the living image of Imre Komor. The same narrow, delicate face, high cheekbones and elegantly receding forehead with two flat protuberances over the temples, like those one sees on the muscular bellies of young boys on either side of the navel. I knew only that he had been chief bacteriologist in a smart Budapest sanatorium and was now imprisoned for the second time: first, in 1944, for hiding Jews, and now for hiding nuns, although he came from an old Protestant family, was a convinced atheist and disliked both Jews and nuns. His basic nature was identical with Komor’s, who fought for the rights of workers and peasants although he detested them; but because Doctor Acs struggled against each case of injustice individually and practically, he bore his fate without resignation and self-justification, while Komor, having invited the oppressed and persecuted to rebellion, moved over to the side of the oppressors and persecutors.

  ‘And the prognosis?’ I repeated.

  Instead of replying Doctor Acs offered me the top of his dixie with a few slices of carefully toasted bread on it – the wildest extravagance according to the conventions of Recsk hospitality. Then he lit a cigarette, threw back his head and let out the smoke through his nostrils. I looked at his beautiful, expressive mouth, the lips lightly but hermetically closed as if chiselled. Where had I seen lips like those? Komor’s, of course, but where else? On one of the Egyptian Pharaohs, but not in a granite statue, it was of sand-stone, I could still remember the granules. It must have been Amenophis III or IV. Suddenly I felt a flea-bite in the centre of my navel and shuddered with pain. I was used to the fleas pulsating and streaming in my armpits and between my buttocks but this bite was unexpected. I should catch it, but by the time my fingers found the spot the flea would be gone. Yes, it must have been the lips of Amenophis IV; he was the only ruler of the eighteenth dynasty interested in social and intellectual reforms.

  ‘The prognosis is simple as a slap in the face. If we take as a basis the present rations, with the working and psychological conditions, everyone in this camp will starve to death within a year. Except, naturally, those who do no work. Some of the young boys may hold out for two or three years. But within twelve months ninety-five per cent of the inmates will be dead as doornails. All of them, I tell you. All. And twelve months is the utmost limit. We shall begin to have casualties in six months; in nine months people will die like flies in the autumn. You can take this literally, because in nine months it will be autumn.

  ‘I am sorry that my prognosis is not more favourable, Gyurka, but there it is. I am a biologist and I know how long the human body can survive, working twelve to fourteen hours a day on two thousand two hundred calories, without animal protein and sugar. Sugar is not so important because the organism produces sufficient sugar from starches; but meat, oil, milk and eggs are irreplaceable. The little meat and oil we get are practically useless. Here you have the general picture. Are you interested in details?’

  ‘Of course. But first, answer me one question. You said a little while ago that you have performed two appendectomies in the shed. While you were operating, the chaff from the loft floated down into the patient’s open abdomen. You had no penicillin. Both recovered in a miraculously short time. Yes, and you had no gauze, you bandaged them with torn underpants. Let me ask you: don’t you think that you over-estimate the alleged rules of biology? Aren’t you forgetting that unknown factor, the resistance of the spirit and the adaptability of the human body? After all, Simeon the Stylite lived for forty years on top of a pillar in the desert near Aphroditopolis, eating nothing but barley boiled in water. He never washed except when the rain bathed him, just like us. I do not believe that his diet or his living conditions were better than ours.’

  ‘But the psychological conditions were considerably better,’ Doctor Acs smiled. ‘He believed in God, not in Harry Truman. I do not deny, however, that our body adapts itself to conditions. There are hardly any colds or cases of pneumonia here, although the appearance of such illnesses would seem natural. The tubercular and those with stomach ulcers may recover, thanks to the food and the climate, before they die of starvation. But, please believe me, had there been a particle of animal excrement on the chaff falling into the patient’s abdominal cavity during the operation he would have contracted peritonitis and died. Only immunity or vaccination can protect us against typhus bacteria and only food can save us from starvation. Those whose nourishment is below the minimum subsistence level must sooner or later die. This is a law; neither spiritual fortitude nor physical toughness can exempt you from it. However, we can distinguish certain definite categories within these general rules, the various types of quickly and slowly starving people. Powerful bodies like that one for instance,’ he pointed to Joska Borostobi squatting on his bunk and carving a cigarette holder from a briar root with the help of a nail and a sliver of glass, ‘go much more rapidly than for instance Gabori with his fifty-five kilos. I don’t believe Gabori has lost more than two or three kilos while Borostobi, who weighed a hundred and ten, cannot now be over ninety. But there are considerable differences even between people of the same physical structure. Not every organism utilizes even the two thousand two hundred calories we get. Take the leguminous plants that form approximately one-third of our nourishment. Somebody may love beans or lentils but his intestines pay no attention to this preference and assimilate only fifty, or twenty per cent of the lentils, while someone else who swallows the same food with disgust may utilize it completely. The spiritual attitude – how deeply someone can sleep under the given conditions, how economically he deals with his energy at work, whether he is in a constant panic while idling, or phlegmatic like you – is important but not sufficiently so. It means another two or four weeks of life.’

  He looked at me fleetingly, while with a characteristic movement – again reminding me of Komor – he smoothed down his hair with the back of his hand, but the movement lacked its usual calm, and that embarrassed him.

  ‘Your chances,’ he said almost angrily, ‘are a little better than average. You will go sometime after about half of the others. However, they have given me a surprisingly large quantity of dextrose with the medical supplies. Approximately eighty-eight thousand calories. With this quantity the life of a couple of people – people who are important to the nation – can be prolonged for one or two months, perhaps even longer …’

  Again he smoothed down his hair but this time he looked, embarrassed, at the middle button of my jacket. I made a movement of protest.

  ‘Under such conditions there is no point in prolonging life, as you know very well. What sense is there in my living two months longer?’

  ‘It is my duty, as a physician, to prolong life. Whenever I perform an appendix or gallstone operation successfully I only lengthen a life. It is always death who kicks the final, decisive goal; all the doctor can do is to equalize while the game still lasts.’

  ‘This is quibbling.’

  ‘But what if something happens during those two months? If conditions improve, if you are exchanged for Nazim Hikmet, or if a revolution breaks out in the Soviet …’

  ‘Roll call!’ someone
shouted from outside. We rose from our places slowly, we had been told that very day that henceforth roll call would be held in the barracks. This made life considerably easier. It meant that we could eat our supper in the barracks, take off our boots and, instead of standing for hours on the snow-covered hillside, could wait here, leaning against the bunks, wearing our favourite footwear, wooden clogs. When searching the barracks the AVO always took everything from us, but they did not seem to mind the clogs that our fellow-prisoners made for us in the carpenter’s shop. I loved them most in the evening when we invited guests to our bunks. It was part of our etiquette that, after knocking on the side of the bunk, the guests slipped out of their clogs and climbed in while the clogs stood side by side at the foot of the bunk like cars before a brightly lit villa somewhere in the West.

  The space between the rows of bunks was three metres wide, which gave hardly enough room for all hundred and fifty of us to stand. Gabori warned us beforehand not to talk to each other while we were waiting, because we were surrounded by curious ears. Since our nachalniki had moved from the barracks into the pretty, one-storey building we had had to build for them and where they were two to a room, they had organized a dangerous network of spies in the barracks. As the spies were given lighter work, or received an extra dixieful of food, they quickly increased in numbers and, to retain their privileged position, often reported conversations we never had. It would have been wisest to stop talking altogether, but my friends and I considered this a voluntary relinquishing of our last freedom which ‘under the given conditions would be useless and would only precipitate things …’ By ‘given conditions’ we meant slow starvation, and by ‘things’ death itself, but we regarded these words as improper and avoided using them.