My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  We climbed up on the upper bunks and looked out towards the hillside opposite where, in the damask-blue of the May afternoon an AVO battalion was advancing with armoured cars. We were madly excited, beside ourselves with joy, laughing into our mattresses so as not to be heard by the guards outside. We received no dinner and no supper, but cigarette smoke filled the barrack and we talked and talked until late into the night.

  Our joy fed on several sources. First, we were happy that eight of our fellow-prisoners (with whom we completely identified ourselves, so much so that we felt almost as brave as they) had succeeded in fooling the AVO with all its security measures, severity, power, flamethrowers, machine-guns and barbed-wire fences. Their act turned the secret police, so proud of its system of isolation and the terror it created through the entire country, into a lot of clowns. It did occur to me that they might kill us all during the night but I felt not a trace of fear. It was strange to discover that my hate for the AVO was stronger than my love of life.

  Another cause of joy was that we knew the escape would cost the camp commander, the political officer and his three detectives their jobs. Some of us hoped that they would be put into our barracks as prisoners the same night. Others thought they would be sent to the Yugoslav border, which was equivalent to a death sentence. We all hoped that at least one of the escapees would reach Vienna and from there go on to Germany. The four hundred kilometres to Vienna would take eight to ten days on foot, and within two weeks he would inform the West over the radio and in newspapers of what was going on at Recsk. Michnai knew the names of the thirteen hundred prisoners by heart. It seemed probable that the Hungarian government would issue a statement that it was all a pack of lies, that there were no internment camps in Hungary and consequently no punitive camp at Recsk, but we were certain that simultaneously they would improve the food and the treatment as they usually did in such cases. And from our comrade’s broadcast our friends and relatives would learn that we were still alive.

  For a few days we were restricted to barracks and the doors were opened only when the food was brought in. From time to time half a dozen AVO guards would come in and beat us up, or would make us lie on our bunks and jump about on our chests. But they could not kill our joy. Our only complaint was that our cigarettes ran out. Szuha, a taciturn provincial public notary with a head like a lion, held out longest, because he had exchanged his bread ration for cigarettes. His neighbours warned him that he would die of starvation, but he told them to mind their own business and went on smoking furiously. For a day or two we got smokes by cutting our cigarette holders in two lengthwise and smoking the nicotine-juice smeared on paper. Then we scraped off the inside of the cigarette holder with pieces of glass and smoked that.

  A few days later we were again driven out to work. There was no improvement in our food and we received more blows and kicks than before. Soon, as was to be expected, they replaced the camp commander, the political officer and the three detectives. One day, in the summer, we were assembled in the square between the barracks and were officially informed that seven of the escapees had been recaptured and that Michnai had been shot dead by the frontier guards on the Austrian border. We did not believe a word of this, but still found it rather disturbing. The summer went by and then the autumn; we were rapidly losing weight and strength, but nothing happened. We rarely mentioned Michnai although we thought of him often, and our hopes, though waning, were not yet dead. We imagined that he had gone to work for peasants in Czechoslovakia, a few weeks here, a few weeks there, getting closer and closer to the Austrian border. Someone remembered him talking about his student days and how he had once spent an entire summer camping in a forest near the Danube, hiding in the bushes, hitting stray geese over the head with a volume of Gibbon and baking them in clay. This was how we saw him now: in the summer hidden in the reed-banks of the Danube, in the autumn hiding in fragrant lofts, fed and loved by peasant girls who passed him on from village to village, always towards the West.

  Since water had been laid on in the camp our supply of information had become continuous and we no longer needed Gabori’s heroic and romantic methods in order to learn something about the world outside. The sewer discharged into a trench within the fence and the trench led into the stream. The AVO made Knocke, the almost completely deaf and one-legged former army major – whom they considered useless for any other kind of work – stand at the mouth of the sewer and watch the refuse coming out. He took no notice of the rubbish or of the soft, bright yellow excrement of the prisoners, but when he saw a fat, brown sausage coming along, obviously the product of an AVO guard – he shifted his weight on to his good leg and used his crutch to fish out the quarter- or half-page of Szabad Nép that swam behind it. He dried the loot under his mattress and on the following morning put it in my pocket. In the evening I read it behind Florian Wrangel’s broad back and returned the ragged bits of paper to the old man. He himself never read these pieces of newspaper because, he yelled in the stentorian tones of the deaf – the Americans were idiots and the Russians murderers. He used the paper to roll cigarettes.

  I never found anything relating to Michnai. One day, as we were marching back from work, we caught sight in the dusk of seven men, chained together, on the hill where the commander’s house stood. A few minutes later a sergeant called Mongol came into the barracks and asked for volunteers to beat the captured escapees to death. ‘These scoundrels are responsible for your situation!’ he said. ‘You would have been released long ago if they hadn’t run away!’ Nobody stepped forward. Then Mongol walked up to the tall, yellow-haired former army major Laszlo Téti who, with his hooked nose and abrupt gestures, reminded one of a Roman centurion. When Téti declared that he would rather be beaten to death than do the beating Mongol kicked him in the groin. While he was looking for other victims, an AVO officer called to him that they already had the required number of volunteers.

  Some fifteen people were walking towards the hill, mostly nachalniki. One of them was Dezsö Tamas, the chief nachalnik He was a middle-sized man with rusty hair and a few lonely freckles in the corners of his eyes who had grown a large, soft belly while we had thinned to skeletons. Another was our new nachalnik, a large, handsome smuggler who loathed me and had several times made the AVO guards beat me up because I had ‘destructive conversations’ with my friends in the evenings, instead of telling them about my tramp of a wife. Another was the head cook Lepcses, a squat butcher with a blond moustache, who at dawn, when we were marching out bent double with exhaustion, liked to stand in the kitchen entrance with a whole cigarette in his mouth watching us and the morning star overhead, with an ironic half-smile. In one hand he would hold a dixie full of strong black coffee and with his other he would delve deeply into a ten-pound bag of sugar – the daily ration of thirteen hundred prisoners.

  ‘So you’re the ones,’ the lieutenant said contemptuously, and spat on the ground at their feet. The fifteen, however, stood undismayed, then set out along the muddy path to the hill-top, shaking their fists, giggling and encouraging each other. In the twilight we could still discern the seven prisoners waiting motionless, their heads bowed, under the giant oak. An hour later the nachalniki returned and towards midnight we watched the Black Maria standing in the focus of searchlights and the seven prisoners helping each other to climb in. They were in a pitiful state – but alive.

  On the hillside next morning instead of swearing and grumbling as usual, we pointed appreciative fingers at the hoary trees and the full moon, or just sighed. Amidst all this beauty we forgot the more important and more practical blessings – that there was no wind and almost no frost.

  Further up, at mining level, a new delight awaited us. Three hitherto undiscerned snow-capped sugar-loaves shone bright above the panorama framed by the Gömör–Szepes ore-mountains. For the last fifteen months we had climbed up here every single day but we had never yet seen a trace of these peaks. We soon agreed that one was the High Tatra, another the Iglo Alps. What the third
might be nobody knew.

  ‘Like the three hills in the Hungarian coat of arms,’ said Egri as we stood waiting outside the toolshed.

  ‘Not on your life!’ protested Elek Pokomandy, professor of history, who wore a red-and-white checked tea-towel round his neck for warmth. ‘The hills in the Hungarian coat of arms are green and joined together. These are white and separate …’

  ‘I’ll separate your heads from your shoulders!’ piped a squeaky voice down behind the line. The sergeant’s presence was no surprise, our noses had been aware of him ever since we had left the enclosure. We knew without turning that it was Dentures, because the stench of rancid hair-oil mixed with the cheap scent he used distinguished him from his colleagues.

  ‘Allot them their jobs, Talian,’ the squeaky voice went on, ‘and then get a move on, you bastards!’

  We fell silent. The stone-breakers picked up their sledgehammers, the hewers their chipping hammers and the loaders their forks. Egri, I and about ten others were given no tools. The cloud of scent receded. Dentures must have gone into the hut to sit by the stove.

  The foreman paired me up with Egri: our job was to carry stone to the breakers. We were both glad of the assignment because while we were carrying the stone it was safe to talk, and we had to load up on the edge of the mining level, behind a large heap of stone, where we could rest at every turn for a minute or two. We regarded this job as a gift of God, ‘the most agreeable pastime in the most painful situation’, as Egri used to say.

  ‘Let’s decide now what we shall talk about,’ begged Egri as we took hold of the shafts of the stretcher and set out towards the stone pile. He liked to make plans and always insisted that we stick to them. I often made fun of him because of it, for in this intellectual planned economy I discerned a remnant of Egri’s communist training, the belief that man’s spiritual requirements can be determined with the same exactitude as his physical requirements, and that these spiritual requirements are independent of man himself, of the opportunity and the momentary mood.

  ‘What would you like to talk about?’ I asked him politely. I almost asked him ‘How many syllables of poetry, in your opinion, is one man’s daily requirement?’ but I liked Egri very much and had no intention of hurting his feelings.

  ‘Begin where you left off last night, when you were quoting the words of the Barbarian king from Plato’s Charmides, that certain conversations cure the soul. Then talk about Africa, the African summer… Have you read Aragon’s book, Communist Man? Yes? Absolute rubbish, wasn’t it? He says that communists represent a higher morality… Talk about that too, it’s good for a laugh… Then you could continue with a subject you once mentioned. The women in fiction with whom you have been in love …’

  We put the stretcher down in the snow and looked around. It would have been difficult to imagine a spot more ideal than our loading place for the day. On one side, in a half-circle, there was the rock wall, in front of us a huge pile of rock, and on the other side the precipice. It was impossible for the guards to keep an eye on us. I knelt down in the snow and suddenly realized how exhausted, how terribly weak I was. Egri remained upright, his bull-neck thrust forward, his smile triumphant.

  We loaded the stretcher with big chunks of rock and started back.

  ‘Let’s begin,’ said Egri behind me. ‘After all we have only two hours.’

  ‘What do you mean, two hours. We have twelve.’

  ‘Everything is relative,’ Egri declared pompously. ‘Last night Zoli Nyeste lectured us on the relativity of time. If you sit in a spaceship that advances at the speed of light towards a fixed star, your heartbeats will slow down and so will your watch. Four years later you turn back and in eight years you are back on earth. But on earth twenty thousand years have gone by in the meantime and you have aged only by eight years.’

  We advanced with the gait of drunken sailors on the uneven, rocky ground but knew that we could not fall because our heavy load nailed us to the ground as if we were walking on soles of lead. When we unloaded near the breakers I turned back to Egri.

  ‘All right, but what is the connection with the length of the workday?’

  ‘Time is relative not only objectively, but also subjectively. If they had put me on this job with anyone else for a partner, the day would be forty-eight hours long. With you it is only two hours long. Now what about Plato?’

  We threw down the stretcher and knelt by it. A few yards away a curiously shaped andesite rock rose from the snow like a heavy, monumental desk, the desk of the boss. As if some giant had kicked it askew it looked, from the side, like a regular rhombus, but its surface was square and smooth. I thought of Michnai searching the snow-covered underbrush for hazelnuts. He finds a handful but they are all hollow and he throws them angrily away. I was in no mood to talk about Plato, Egri must have misunderstood me the night before as he also misunderstood the general purpose of our talks. In this respect he dived from his former materialism, straight into the transcendental: I insisted on conversation in order to preserve a certain degree of human dignity while we were slowly starving to death; Egri, on the other hand, believed that our conversation would save us from starving to death.

  ‘I would rather talk about the women in literature with whom I was in love,’ I said. ‘I feel weak and in the mood for day-dreams.’

  I let Egri take the front shafts of the stretcher and took the rear ones myself. The man doing the talking always walked behind. During our first trip I talked about Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. We unloaded quickly and hurried back to our loading place because close to the breakers the nachalnik Talian was driving a group of twenty prisoners who were putting down rails for the miners’ trucks. Behind the pile I spoke about Gyton in Trimalchio’s Feast. On our third trip the sun rose from behind the mountains and when we got back behind our heap a lovely surprise was awaiting us: a lizard, sunning itself on the blue surface of the desk-shaped rock. We loved these beautiful, lazy, yellow and black lizards that appeared once in a while in the quarry. We never tired of watching the strange, slow movement as they lifted one forepaw into the air and then simply forgot it there. At such times their foot reminded one of the tiny helpless hand of a baby.

  A few more turns and I was out of fiction heroines. I went on talking, though, about Botticelli’s Venus, Nefertiti from the Cairo museum and the unforgettable Aphrodite of Kyrene, all of whom I loved.

  ‘Do you ever add a head to Aphrodite or a body to Nefertiti in your imagination?’ asked Egri.

  ‘Never,’ I replied with deep conviction.

  Every time we returned to our loading site we noticed with pleasure that our lizard was still there, sunning itself on the blue stone. We counted the trips, as usual, and after the twelfth took a long rest. When we set out with the sixteenth load we came upon an unexpected, astonishing sight. It seemed as if the prisoners working on mining level had suddenly all been turned to stone. The breakers sat motionless with their hammers raised, the loaders and railworkers stood petrified, all gazing towards the edge of the mining level. The only moving thing in the whole tableau was the lion-headed notary, Szuha, who exchanged his bread ration for cigarettes. He was walking calmly, deliberately through the deep snow towards the forest.

  ‘Szuha! Where are you going? Don’t you know you are not allowed to leave your place of work? Come back here or I’ll kick your bloody arse!’ shouted Talian, beside himself with rage. His big hands were balled into fists but he made no move to follow the notary.

  But Szuha paid no attention to him. He walked on, leaving a straight track behind him in the snow, and somehow his movements no longer had any resemblance to ours. Even his head was held high, not bowed like that of the other prisoners. This is how, when still free, he must have walked on winter Sunday mornings going to church or to the pub: with calm dignity, taking deep breaths from the clean, fresh air, thrusting the point of his boots into the snow as if he were trying its thickness or hardness. He took perhaps twenty more steps and then, without a
sound, he collapsed.

  In a second Talian was at his side.

  ‘Trying to fool me, are you, old peasant exploiter? You won’t get away with it!’ he screamed, kicking the notary in the side. When the latter did not move he gazed down at him wonderingly, then lifted the inert body on to his shoulder and carried him back to the others.

  ‘Musza, Czebe, Todi, Jonas!’ he yelled. ‘Take this bastard down to the infirmary. Report to the sergeant-major that he collapsed. What are you staring at? Get a move on! And you,’ he turned to the others, ‘what are you waiting for? You keep moaning all day long and feel sorry for yourselves, but not one of you has kicked the bucket! Not one, not one …’ he screamed, looking at us with angry, reproachful eyes.

  We made seven turns without saying a word; took no rest and forgot even our lizard. When we stopped beside Pokomandy with our eighth load, the professor of history raised his arm, which meant that we should wait a minute, he wanted to talk to us.

  ‘The boys are back,’ he whispered. ‘Acs said Szuha is beyond help. Defatigation.’