My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  ‘ “Confess that you are Major Schultze, the notorious German Agent …”

  ‘I denied the unfounded accusation, as usual, and as usual was led back to my cell. Let me make it brief. This went on for three and a half years, every morning at half past nine. Every single day I assured the lady – who was, by the way, very pretty – that I was Ödön Berzsenyi, lawyer, from Budapest, and every single day she ordered me to confess that I was Major Schultze, the notorious German agent. It was enough to drive the sanest man crazy. That I did not go mad was due to the fact that every single evening – also on Sundays – exactly at eight o’clock, two guards took me to the flat of the pretty lieutenant, where I spent the night in the most delightful manner. At six in the morning I was taken back to my cell and at nine thirty I was taken before the lady who, in her official capacity, tried with great zeal to convince me that I was not Ödön Berzsenyi, but Major Schultze, the notorious German agent.

  ‘After three and a half years, on a cold December night in 1946, my pretty lieutenant – whom in the meantime I had taught to speak Hungarian – spoke to me thus:

  ‘ “Listen, my darling Ödön. I have to go to Vienna on official business but on the way I shall stop off at Budapest and try to do something for you. Give me the address of your family and I shall obtain papers to prove that you are indeed Ödön Berzsenyi and not Major Schultze, the notorious German agent.”

  ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather – had I not been in bed – I was so surprised.

  ‘ “Then you know that I am Ödön Berzsenyi?” I asked her.

  ‘ “Of course, I know. That’s why I want to get you released.”

  ‘ “Won’t you get into trouble, for helping to free the man they believe to be Schultze?” I asked her anxiously. I must confess, I didn’t want anything to happen to my pretty lieutenant.

  ‘ “Don’t be silly, darling,” she laughed. “Did you notice those eighteen cells on the right and eighteen on the left? Well, each of them holds a Schultze. We have thirty-six Schultzes and you are the thirty-seventh. If we let you go we shall still have thirty-six.”

  ‘The next day my lieutenant left for Vienna and for the next three months I was questioned by a sergeant every morning at nine thirty. Then my lieutenant returned – with my papers. I was immediately released. On the last night I visited her a free man. Towards morning my pretty lieutenant became sentimental.

  ‘ “Look, darling, why do you want to go back to that dirty, poor, ruined Budapest? Isn’t it better for you here, in Archangel? I have a lovely room, there is even a water tap in it …”

  ‘I felt as if a chasm had opened at my feet. I mumbled something about my poor, sick, old father whom I wanted to see once more and finally we agreed that I would return. In the meantime she would obtain Soviet citizenship for me and we would live happily ever after… At least this is what I promised,’ Berzsenyi added with some melancholy.

  At this moment the lights went on again and we heard the bolt being pushed aside.

  ‘Go on, it’s only the store-keeper,’ Gabori reassured Berzsenyi.

  It was usually at this time that the store-keeper corporal appeared to select men for night-work. Usually he asked Istvan Todi, the prisoner responsible for order in the barracks, to appoint the men and Todi always chose the informers and the ordinary criminals, so we had nothing to fear.

  ‘When I said goodbye to my lieutenant at the railway station,’ Berzsenyi continued a little nervously, because of the light and the repeated interruptions, ‘I cried real tears, which surprised even me. The trip from Archangel to Moscow took four days, that from Moscow to Ungvar two days, but the last thirty kilometres took six weeks.’

  The corporal entered the barracks and without speaking to Todi, looked along the bunks.

  ‘You, come along!’ he pointed to three young men.

  ‘On the Hungarian border I was arrested,’ Berzsenyi said while we were all watching the corporal. ‘They accused me of being Schultze, the notorious German agent …’

  ‘… and you,’ the corporal pointed at me. Then he looked at Berzsenyi, who immediately reached for his trousers.

  ‘You stay where you are, Uncle,’ said the corporal.

  In spite of the fact that I was completely exhausted (strangely enough, our tiredness was much more difficult to bear during the hours of rest than at work) the corporal’s choice gave me a certain amount of pleasure. The reason was vanity. The peasant corporal was looking for young men, the three he had selected were all under twenty. In the daytime, as an instinctive protection against the guards, the weather and hunger, I moved slowly, with sagging shoulders and bowed head, swinging the weight of my body from one foot to the other with deliberation, to seem older and weaker than I really was because, although the peasant lads who made up the majority of the AVO guards had been taught in party schools to hate the enemy, they had learned at home and in the village school that age should be respected. Only in the evening, after the lights were put out, did I straighten up and move freely as before. The corporal must have caught me out and this was why he thought me younger than Berzsenyi who was, in fact, a few years younger than I.

  My joy increased when I found that we were going to the railway station of Recsk to unload coal. My companions were glad because they hoped to be able to collect cigarette butts and I because I hoped to see people in the village. I was yearning for the sight of people, particularly children. However, we were all disappointed. As soon as we had climbed into the lorry it began to rain, which spoilt the butts and drove people into their houses though it was only about eight thirty. I got a whiff of smoked bacon as we drove through the village, and breathed deeply of the smell of freshly baked bread. Then we reached the station and the sturdy little locomotive at the head of the freight train reminded me of my travels.

  I was standing in one of the freight cars shovelling coal into a lorry. An AVO guard squatted in a corner of the car. As I started work he lit a cigarette, drew on it three times, then threw the almost whole cigarette on the ground at my feet. I did not pick it up. Already on our first day in Recsk my friends and I had decided that we would not permit ourselves to be humiliated. We were strengthened in our resolution by an empty filing card we had found one day on the dustheap. It was headed PERSONAL DATA OF PRISONER; and over the last two columns was printed: ‘Does he smoke?’ and ‘Can he be bribed with cigarettes?’

  The guard looked at me uncomprehendingly, then went on humming to himself. It seemed that my outing would end without anything interesting happening to me when suddenly a peasant appeared from behind the tracks. He noticed me immediately because I was standing under an arc lamp in the softly falling rain. When he came close he stopped and shook his fist at me:

  ‘Now you’ve got what you deserved, you damned kulak!’

  On the way back, under the tarpaulin, my companions laughed heartily about my adventure and kept calling me kulak. I laughed with them but inside, for the first time since my arrest, I felt real despair. I had borne my fate calmly, coolly, almost painlessly, more as a spectator than as a victim; but now I felt my strength deserting me.

  We all hoped that the West had not forgotten us and that, one day, they would come and save us. We did not wonder when that would be – we knew it would not be too late – but each of us had a different vision of how it would occur. Garamvölgyi believed that the Americans would drop a detachment of marines in the field below the camp; the marines would massacre the AVO guards in a few minutes, hang the camp commander, the political officer and the three detectives on the points of the star above the gate, and would carry us all off in aeroplanes. I dreamed that in the pale grey mist of early morning, American tanks would come rolling down the mountainside, flattening the barbed-wire fence. By then our guards would have run away and from one of the tanks a former army buddy would call my name. The staff officer among us thought that General Anders’s army would land in Poland, supported by the British, and would rout the Russians from Poland a
nd all the way down to Albania. Mennyhért Boka, a former Christian Party deputy, dreamed about a tiny aeroplane motor that the Americans would invent, so tiny that one could simply strap it to one’s chest, extend one’s arms and fly. They would drop such motors by parachute and we would all be in Vienna within twenty minutes; then Stalin would have to spread an iron net over Russia and the satellite countries all the way from Kamchatka to the Elbe. We played with these dreams as one plays with the idea of what fun one would have if one were invisible. Mennyhért Boka imagined that we would land in the Stephans Platz and there divide into two groups. The socialists would go to a café and the Catholics to church. Garamvölgyi planned to visit Trotsky’s grave in Mexico City, and I dreamed about taking a flat in San Francisco, on Telegraph Hill.

  These day-dreams were our only luxury, a mild drug or a glass of excellent wine before going to bed. Our moral attitude and emotional balance, however, were maintained by the circle of friends we collected. I have never had so many devoted, faithful and selfless friends, and even though our careers, professions, education, philosophy and political principles may have been fundamentally different, our moral outlooks were as similar as if our attitude were determined not by individual consciousness but by a common categorical imperative.

  This phenomenon was less surprising to the other inhabitants of the camp than it was to myself who had belonged, both before and after my emigration, to a radical, democratic and socialist intellectual élite swimming against the tide – against the feudal and fascist tendencies of the majority – and who now found myself part of a national unity in which I had to sacrifice nothing of my original ideas. And this national unity did not stop at the fence of the camp. The regulars manning the watch-towers often threw us quick, conspiratorial glances when, in the course of our work, we approached the barbed-wire fence. We believed that this solidarity embraced the entire country and was valid not only for the present but also for the distant future. Should I perish, my fellow-prisoners would carry the memory of my name to every village of the country; and should we all perish, there would be a memorial above the collapsed mine bearing all our names. This was the most a man who had never aspired to being a hero could hope for.

  This was why I felt such despair after the peasant had abused me at the railway. To be taken for a rich peasant in spite of my long, oval face and delicate, long hands was humiliating enough, but the perspective opened before me by those fists shaken at a political prisoner was simply terrifying. I had taken it for granted that our people would come out of the Soviet occupation as unscathed as it had once come out from the hundred and fifty years of the Turkish occupation. It would straighten its spine and except for a few Russian loanwords nothing would be left to remind us that they had been there. The five-pointed stars would be taken down and destroyed within an hour, as the crescent moons were once destroyed; the land would be distributed among the peasants as the lands of the pashas and beys had been distributed, and the communist teachings would leave no mark because no one had believed them anyway. The behaviour of the peasant and the use of the word kulak warned me of another possibility: that in ten or twenty years the communists could produce an entirely different new generation. This generation would use more or less the same words as mine, but these words would stand for entirely different ideas, or no ideas at all. Of Plato they would know only what the Soviet philosophical dictionary has to say about him: ‘a hireling of the Athenian bourgeoisie’, and they would know nothing of his works. The conditions they would call happiness and freedom would be, to me, equivalent to unhappiness and slavery. And that meant I would have lived in vain: the ideas of my kind and my generation would have been burnt in their witch’s kitchen together with our dictionaries and encyclopedias, exactly as Orwell described it.

  When the guard switched on the light and let us into the barracks four men were standing behind the door, among them North-Eastern Inrush and the hussar captain Tamas Purgly. The latter threw himself on his knees before the guard.

  ‘Dear inspector, sir,’ he begged, ‘let me out to the outhouse, I can stand it no longer.’ His frightening black moustache wobbled up and down like that of a capricorn beetle. His moustache was the great passion of his life, apart from eating. He used boot-blacking on it and twirled it and curled it whenever he had a moment’s time.

  ‘The hell I will!’ the warder shouted and locked the door from the outside.

  ‘Scoundrel!’ hissed Purgly, sitting down quickly on the threshold. Only Porpak remained standing, a lanky old man who had a heart disease, a purple face, forget-me-not-blue eyes, a gaping baby mouth and a huge snub nose, and who moved like a ballet master. During the Horthy régime he had been a colonel in the police. His conspicuous appearance attracted the AVO lads as honey attracts bears and he received more kicks and slaps in a day than the rest of us in a week.

  ‘Why scoundrels?’ he asked Purgly, fidgeting as he stood. ‘Six years ago I would have done the same to them.’

  The lights went out. The barracks had settled down for the night and only a few were still awake: Istvan Todi, who squatted at a certain distance from the stove looking into the fire, Paul Musza, who walked up and down barefoot, his hands clasped on his stomach, his head bowed in meditation, and four men who were doing something around the stove, from where a strong smell of game came floating.

  One of them was a red-faced cattle-merchant, the other a fright-eningly dissipated-looking man called Zsoffka who every night tormented his old bunk-neighbour until the latter gave him his cigarettes and the little bread he had saved. About the third man, a certain Szanto, who was six feet tall and had a freckled moon-face, we knew only that he had been an AVO investigator at Miskolc whose greatest pleasure was to make the women whom he questioned sit on a hot stove. The cause for his arrest was that he did not share the loot with his buddies. These three were ostracized by everyone in the camp. The fourth man was even more disgusting. The colour of his slimy-brown, pock-marked face reminded one of the tobacco juice in a filthy cigarette holder, and his granite-coloured, swollen lips over black teeth were like the gate of hell: not Dante’s passionate and noisy inferno but a puritanical hell which devours its mute victims in haughty silence. I had noticed him on the first morning and had asked him who he was. His name was Jamnitzki and he had been director, producer and owner of the flea-circus in the Budapest Luna Park. He was arrested because he had seduced the wife of the party secretary of the Light Entertainment National Enterprise – a pastime which he regarded as light entertainment but not so the party secretary.

  At first I wouldn’t believe him, but when he told me how he kept his fleas in a flat glass container to make them lose the habit of jumping and how he fabricated the tiny coaches they drew from gold thread, I remembered that when I had last visited Luna Park before the war I had seen these rococo coaches, and Jamnitzki’s face came back to me. He had a cheap but amusing sense of humour and therefore, though he was despised by everyone, the barracks forgave him his friends and his minor squealings. He never informed on important, political affairs, or so he repeatedly assured us. When his victims were beaten up, he sat with them, confessed that he had told on them and comforted them with a few good jokes.

  That afternoon he and his friends had been working together in the forest and had discovered a squirrel. At Jamnitzki’s suggestion they felled the neighbouring trees and then brought down the squirrel with a well-aimed stone. Informers were also hungry – though not quite as hungry as we were. They obtained salt from the cook, and some bacon – probably in return for information – and were now engaged in preparing a meal. The skinny, reddish-brown, miserable body of the squirrel lay in a dixie on top of the stove among slivers of bacon and a few juniper-berries used for seasoning. As I went closer the smell of food hit me sharply in the face as if they were cooking venison, not a squirrel. My palate tingled but at the same time nausea was creeping up my throat. The light streaming from the open door of the stove cut a mauve tunnel into the darkness of
the barracks. The four rascals stood at the entrance of that tunnel like four thieves about to quarrel over the loot. Further back, in the semi-darkness of the tunnel, squatted Todi with his hands in his lap, like a godly hermit impervious to temptation.

  I stopped immediately behind Todi. Suddenly a wild, animal desire to taste that meat shook my entire body. ‘If I speak to them,’ I thought, ‘they will feel honoured and offer me a piece of meat. At least a leg! But then, tomorrow, the whole camp will know that I humiliated myself before these informers. This is the time to show how strong you are, George.’ Until then I had played the hero, however hungry I was. When Garamvölgyi had brought us a whole dixie full of slop under his coat Gabori and I had declared that we wouldn’t touch it. A week earlier Helvetius, the cook, had entered the barracks with some leftover soup and had beckoned to me to come and get it. It was wonderful, thick soup from the bottom of the cauldron, at least four hundred calories! ‘Give it to someone else,’ I had said loudly, for the whole barracks to hear, though I was faint with hunger. And I had felt that this refusal gave me four thousand calories of self-confidence. Only where snails were concerned did I know no pride. The entire camp was collecting snails for me, and this was not regarded as greediness, on the contrary, everyone admired me for it: oh, this gourmet who got into the habit of eating snails in France and won’t do without them even at Recsk! When I was given a snail I had to control myself not to swallow those thirty grammes of animal protein on the spot. I put it in my pocket for twenty-four hours until it had discharged its bowel, and then threw it into a hot soup or vegetable stew, but never into my morning coffee, however much I felt like doing so.