My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  I put my hand on Todi’s shoulder.

  ‘It is ready, we can take it out,’ said Jamnitzki.

  Todi looked up at me with his burning eyes and grasped my hand.

  ‘The Holy Virgin,’ he said, ‘promised me that we would all be free by Easter.’

  I remained silent though he was obviously waiting for a reply. He – I said to myself – doesn’t smell the squirrel, perhaps he does not even see it. But for me this squirrel is the whole world. If I eat some of it that means the end of my prestige not only in the eyes of my companions but also in my own. First to be called a kulak, and then this! I would have nothing left to hold me up but would collapse like a folding rule. This squirrel is the sea-water of the shipwrecked sailor, if he partakes of it he dies. What can I win? A quarter of a squirrel, one hundred calories at the most. But even if they offered me not a quarter of a squirrel but four hundred squirrels…

  I felt as if a strong hand were trying to disconnect my brain, the way one disconnects the electric current in one’s home before going off on a holiday. If the hand succeeded I would throw myself on that squirrel with bared teeth and bloodshot eyes. Fortunately at this moment the guard opened the door of the barracks.

  ‘Do you have a daughter, old man?’ he asked one of the men waiting at the door, the mild, rotund and erudite Béla Solymos, the only member of the Upper House who had, at the time, voted against declaring war on the Soviet Union. The guard’s voice was kind and he sounded really interested.

  ‘I have an adopted daughter,’ the old gentleman replied.

  ‘What is her name?’

  ‘Clara,’ Solymos answered, smiling.

  The guard hesitated a moment.

  ‘You see,’ Todi whispered in my ear, ‘there are still decent men even in the AVO. He is bringing a message.’

  ‘In that case,’ the guard said, ‘tell me how you f— your Clara?’

  For a few seconds there was absolute silence.

  ‘Well, will you or won’t you tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you don’t, you won’t go to the outhouse. Well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you change your mind you can knock on the door,’ the guard said, and went out.

  The four rascals were standing around the stove eating the squirrel. The violence of temptation weakened to a point where I was again able to speak. Paul Musza walked by noiselessly and when he reached the end of the barracks, he turned back. I raised my hand and stopped him.

  ‘What is your opinion on squirrel eating, Paul?’

  ‘St John the Baptist ate locusts. Why shouldn’t the son of man eat squirrel if he is hungry? I wish there were a hundred squirrels for each of us every day.’

  I smiled and in a moment forgot the entire squirrel problem. Then I sat down on the ground next to Todi and watched the huge shadows thrown by the legs of the four rascals that crossed like the supporting pillars of a bridge in construction. Suddenly I heard Purgly’s grating, throaty voice from the corner.

  ‘I am surprised at you, my dear Uncle Béla. You are a gentleman and therefore it is your duty to consider your friends. We have no intention of shitting in our pants because your false modesty or whatever it is prevents you …’

  ‘Speak for yourself, captain, not for me …’ North-Eastern Inrush interrupted.

  ‘And I am simply amazed at your impertinence!’ cried Porpak. ‘I am surprised, Tamas, that with views like yours you could serve with the hussars. Or rather, I am not surprised. At forty you were still only a captain, though you are a relative of Horthy’s. That in itself explains …’

  His words were swallowed up by the barking of the police dogs. The guards were changed and from the neighbouring barracks the men were let out to the outhouse. Todi rose. It was time to go to sleep.

  I undressed, kneeling between Egri’s and Gabori’s legs. Only Garamvölgyi was still awake, or had been awakened by the barking of the dogs. He raised himself on his elbow and looked out of the small window.

  ‘The daily circus performance,’ he said as I crept up to him.

  Some twenty AVO guards were standing under the window in the strong light of the searchlights directed at them from the watch-tower. It took a few minutes until my eyes got used to the blaze, and I could distinguish what was going on down there. Our fellow-prisoners were crawling in the mud on all fours with their bottoms bared, one behind the other. First came Uncle Géza Toth, then Porpak, Purgly and finally Solymos. Each had to push his nose into the bottom of the one in front of him, with the exception of Uncle Toth, who raised his head desperately into the air like a turtle when it comes to a wall and does not know what to do.

  ‘Keep going, scoundrels, keep going, murderers! Purgly, push your moustache into Porpak’s arse!’ shouted the captain of the guards, a short, bigheaded little man with a crooked back whom we called Gnome. His voice was hoarse with excitement and pleasure. ‘Solymos! You can get up and go to the outhouse! But first tell us how you f— your wife! Do you hear me? Answer!’

  ‘I hear you but I won’t answer!’ croaked Solymos from between Purgly’s buttocks which looked like two dirty, wrinkled handkerchiefs hanging from a nail.

  While I watched the scene from the corner of the window thoughts that I registered with shame chased each other in my mind. First: that my bowels were functioning faultlessly, consequently nothing like this could happen to me. Second: that my sleep was so healthy and deep that I usually never heard the barking of the dogs except in my dreams. Thirdly: why was I looking out of the window? From sadism or because I wanted to write about it all one day? To answer the last question I would have to make up my mind whether I still believed that I would survive. Or can one be simply curious – curious without a trace of moral indignation?

  ‘Awful!’ I whispered in Garamvölgyi’s ear.

  ‘It goes on every night.’

  ‘Every night?’ I asked, unbelieving.

  ‘Yes, every night. Not only here but in every camp of the country and in every camp of nine other countries from the Elbe to Indo-China, what is more, not for the last three months but ever since 1945, and in the Soviet Union for seventeen years more. And it will still go on when we have been under the ground for a long, long time.’

  The guards fell on the four men, beat them, kicked them, pushed their faces into the mud. Suddenly I felt as if I were watching some horrible performance from a comfortable box. I crept back to my place, lay down and stuck my fingers in my ears. However, when Porpak began to sing a well-known drinking song at the top of his voice, I could not help hearing.

  Red wine, red wine, I’ve been drinking red wine

  My shining star, my darling.

  Now where are my feet, oh where, oh where?

  The guards laughed so hard their sides were almost splitting. Porpak was standing in the middle of a long, narrow, slippery plank which bridged the stream. One of the guards put his foot on one end of the plank and made it jump up and down, but the sick man, lit up by the searchlights, straightened his back and, his mouth foaming, sang on, balancing himself with theatrical movements:

  Now where are my feet, oh where, oh where?

  But the girls still love me, the girls are here,

  My shining star, my darling.

  ‘Look,’ Garamvölgyi whispered, ‘he is like the leading man of a musical comedy. Or a troubadour who came back an old man from the Holy Land to sing under the window of his beloved. Or he could be the Romeo of a travelling company. Or perhaps Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire under Canossa. The sleet goes very well with the scenery and in the tower not the guards but Countess Mathilda is having a high old time with Pope Gregory VII …’

  ‘All right, I’ve had enough world history for today,’ I whispered furiously and lay down.

  The singing soon stopped, Garamvölgyi fell asleep and after a little while the four old men were herded back into the barracks. Garamvölgyi ground his teeth in his sleep, Egri groaned and I was still awake. Musza was still walk
ing up and down in his bare feet. Every time he passed my bunk I heard him murmur something. I could distinguish a few Latin and Hungarian words. After a while I realized that he was repeating the Lord’s Prayer again and again, mixing Hungarian words with his faulty Latin.

  ‘… et ne nosin in tentacione, my good Lord …’

  The more desperately I tried to fall asleep the less I succeeded. My fingers contracted convulsively into fists, my left leg grew numb and only the burning pain in my thigh reassured me that it was still attached to my body.

  ‘… sicut dimittimus debitoribus omnibus AVO guards, nam tuum est …’

  At any other time Musza’s prayer would have moved me but now it only increased my fury. I decided to ask him whether he truly believed that such weapons – prayer and incantation – were of any use in the fight against Evil? I was about to get up and ask him when I suddenly realized that we had no other weapon. This, unexpectedly, calmed me down and I fell asleep.

  We were climbing up the steep mountainside without hurry in a long, single line. Half to the left, beyond the deep valley, we were greeted, as we were every morning, by a Japanese water-colour: the grey of the snowy, wooded mountain range with its blue and black dots. To the right, at a few yards from us, bare hawthorn bushes followed the snow-covered path. Between the gnarled twigs the setting moon appeared white and round. At my every step it leaped up and down as if a hawthorn bush’s long hands were playing basket-ball with it. Above my head the still mountains and the dancing moon were bridged by an unbelievably limpid early morning sky with a few large but already blinking stars.

  Almost at every step I raised my head to admire the sky. The enthralling change of colours we had watched in the autumn was repeated in every season, though in a specific way. In the winter the beech trees were the most beautiful of all, because their crowns put forth swelling buds as early as January, making the tree look like a large pink puff. In May we sniffed all day long at the strong smell of acacia brought by the breeze from the opposite hillside. In summer we concentrated on mushrooms – not the edible ones which we devoured by the dozen whenever the guards looked away, but the much less utilitarian toadstools which, with their mad colours and odd shapes, fitted so perfectly into the half-crazy fairy-tale world of our imaginations.

  In the meantime our conversations were gaining a growing hold on us. We were all losing weight and strength but while the solitary, taciturn and friendless among us lay on their bunks in the evening full of despair, gazing with dull eyes at the beams of the ceiling, we sat on our mattresses to talk like well-balanced, cheerful ghosts round an imaginary chimney. We could no longer restrict our conversations to the hours after dark. Towards spring, while for weeks we were carrying stones down from the mountain and up to the commander’s hill where we were building a house of culture for the AVO, or in the summer when seven of us were harnessed to a cart like horses to carry stones to the double serpentine lead linking the gate of the camp to the quarry according to Professor Sarkany’s plans, we talked almost all day. And when I had to cart sand alone or was working in a spot so exposed that we couldn’t talk because of the proximity of the nachalniki, I would ponder our conversation of the night before, or wonder what subject to discuss next. When the sun shone or we had beans for dinner I could usually think logically; but when it rained, or when I had no cigarettes, or when the fermented sauerkraut we had for dinner ran bubbling through my bowels, I would weave loose associations around my themes and my thoughts went round and round it in widening circles. The weakening of my body was accompanied by the highly agreeable phenomena of weightlessness and spiritualization, so that my fate, my misery, my tormentors and my work seemed at first secondary, later irrelevant, negligible, and then, slowly, almost imaginary. Time was filled with problems of history, aesthetics and philosophy, with our conversations, with the phenomena of nature, so there was none left for anything else and the days flew as though Nausicaa and her girls were playing ball with the golden apple of the sun and the silver apple of the moon beyond the illuminated edges of the horizon.

  Thus, between the two poles of our life, one of which we called (after Knut Hamsun) spiritual fornication with nature, and the other of which was the Magic Mountain world of our conversations, we skipped the plane between, which we defined as the ‘Zolaesque component’. The everyday life of the camp was so monotonous, anyway, that it was not worth noticing, and we banned everything connected with the camp from our conversations. Only in the morning, when, panting, we climbed the steep hillside, would I recapitulate the more important events.

  Apart from a few changes in our way of life and in the AVO personnel we noted only two significant events – and even the change in our way of life was only relative, consisting of the fact that water had been laid on to the camp so that washrooms and water closets were built in the barracks, and there were punishment cells instead of a cave. On the other hand we had to listen all night to the wailing of the people put in short chains for punishment. They built a kitchen and a hospital for us, but in the new kitchen they cooked the same old beans, potatoes and cabbage, while in the hospital the prisoner-doctors lacked even the most important medicines and instruments and had no authority to keep the sick in bed. Neither did it make much difference that the lieutenant commanding the camp was replaced by a captain, and the anti-Semitic, thieving political officer, a gentleman, by an arrogant and sadistic Jew.

  The first of the two important events was the non-occurrence of an expected series of happenings. Almost a year had gone by since Doctor Acs’s prognosis, and according to him ninety-five per cent of the camp’s population should by now lie buried in the lime-pit where my friends and I sometimes squatted to talk and where Florian Wrangel prepared his horoscopes. No one had yet died of starvation. The death rate was surprisingly low. The old man with the catheter died of cancer; old Porpak had a heart attack one night while singing in the middle of the plank and fell dead into the streamlet; an electrician called Janke was shot dead by an AVO guard when, on the orders of another guard, he was running towards the barbed-wire fence to fix a telephone line; one of my fellow-prisoners was crushed by a rock weighing several tons while working in the quarry, and another went out of his mind and died soon after being taken to the prison hospital. As the population of the camp had risen in the meantime, with the arrival of a new trainload of prisoners from Kistarcsa, to thirteen hundred, the death rate was less than four per thousand in fifteen months: which, according to the optimists, insured our lives for another hundred years.

  The other really noteworthy event took place on May 20, 1951, when eight prisoners escaped. Previously, when discussing the question, we had all agreed that it was impossible to escape from Recsk. Our barracks were surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence, and between the two barbed-wire fences extended a ploughed strip of no-man’s-land five metres wide. Beyond the fence stood watch-towers, forty metres apart. The camp as a whole was again surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence with watch-towers all round it. When, in the evening, we marched from the larger corral into the smaller, the guards remained in the outer watch-towers until the roll call was over and we were safely locked in. In the morning the procedure was the same, only in reverse. After roll call, when we marched out into the larger corral, the guards were permitted to leave their places in the inner watch-towers. To disarm the guards and break out, as people so often do in films, seemed utterly hopeless. In the camp the guards carried revolvers, adding submachine-guns only when they took a party of prisoners outside the barbed-wire enclosure to cut wood in the forest or to work at the spring which supplied the camp’s water. But even had we laid hands on three or four submachine-guns and thirty or forty revolvers, escape would still have been impossible because the guards in the watch-towers followed our movements closely and would have mowed us down with their machine-guns, and the guards at the gate would have turned on us the flame-throwers waiting there for just such an opportunity.

  So the plan elaborated by Gyula Mi
chnai, a tall young cadet with a high, white forehead and thin blond hair, was all the more brilliant. In the carpenter’s shop he carved himself a machine-gun from wood, fitting pieces of tin where steel should have shown. Then, one Sunday morning, he went to the tailor’s and the shoemaker’s which were run by men who were in on his plan, and where the guards had their suits pressed and their boots mended, and dressed himself from head to foot in AVO uniform. Then, pulling the AVO cap down over his eyes, and herding seven of his friends, including the heads of the tailor’s shop and the shoemaker’s shop, he walked to the gate. There he commanded the soldiers guarding the gate to let them out. The soldiers opened the gate but one of the conspirators took fright and refused to go on. Michnai kicked him in the small of his back with such force that he flew several metres beyond the gate, thus establishing his identity beyond any eventual doubt, and the eight men disappeared in the woods. Under their prison clothes they were all wearing navy blue overalls, the kind worn by workers, and they had agreed in advance that they would not go home, but would scatter at once in eight directions, but all heading north in an attempt to reach the Czechoslovak frontier before night. There they were to turn towards the West and try to reach Austria.

  They chose a Sunday because on weekdays there was always a roll call at noon, before we got our dinner, while on Sundays we worked until three or four o’clock and were counted only before being locked in for the night. When the political officer – a tall grocer’s assistant from Sajoszentpéter – discovered the flight at five in the afternoon, nine hours after it occurred, he delivered a short, nervous lecture in the barracks, saying that we had shown ourselves unworthy of socialist re-education and the good will of the AVO and would now get a taste of the fist of the working class. Later the barracks were searched and those who possessed overalls received a few blows. The guard Dentures discovered the green shelf North-Eastern Inrush had made for himself, on which he kept his dixie, a few crusts in a dirty handkerchief, empty shoe-polish boxes and a few once beautiful but now wrinkled wild chestnuts, tore it off the wall and hit North-Eastern Inrush over the head with it. However, he gave him back the shoe-polish box in which he kept his tobacco. We had to strip to the skin and, as usual, the pockets of the old prisoners yielded a wide variety of completely needless objects. They could not get used to possessing nothing but their clothes and their dixie, and would collect whatever they could find: coloured pebbles, bits of wire, boot-nails, empty match-boxes, and berries. The AVO guards slapped them about a bit and took away these valuable possessions, but we knew the old men would immediately begin collecting again, as they always did. Finally the guards left and we were locked in again.