My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  … Denn Engel kommen nicht zu solchen Betern

  und Nächte werden nicht um solche gross.

  Die Sich-Verlierenden lässt alles los

  und sie sind preisgegeben von den Vätern

  und ausgeschlossen aus der Mütter Schoss.

  and I just let it go. Hunger was gnawing at my stomach and creeping up my gullet. The dirty, ragged overcoats hanging from the beams brought to my mind the retreat of the Grande Armée in Russia. The uniform of Napoleon’s soldiers was red and blue, not khaki like ours, but perhaps after crossing the Berezina they too lost colour. Risotto à la Milanese and Arrigo Beyle, Milanese, I repeated to myself. Why did Stendhal, born in Grenoble, demand that this lie be written on his tombstone? And why was I thinking of Stendhal? Probably because he too wore an overcoat like this when following Napoleon’s army on its retreat from Moscow. What did he do? Did he comfort the soldiers? Not at all! He washed in snow-water every day, just like me, and made notes. He didn’t care who died or why, he cared just as little about his own fate, he was interested only to make his notes for his book, nothing else.

  Suddenly Pali Jonas’s smooth, intelligent face appeared by my bunk. He had just returned from the infirmary and had talked to Doctor Acs. Szuha was dead and in the morning an army surgeon had arrived from Vac, the medical superintendent of the camp and of the Vac prison. Acs had shown him the body and appealed to his conscience. The colonel had shrugged his shoulders and replied that he couldn’t prescribe sausages for the prisoners. Why didn’t Doctor Acs ask Churchill for help?

  Jonas’s words woke me up from my apathy. I sat up and looked around. Garamvölgyi was squatting at my feet gazing, as if hypnotized, at the shirts under my elbow. Egri had brought out from his pocket a huge piece of paper. It was part of a cement-bag and he could have been put in short chains for stealing it. Not even the AVO could obtain cement from the factory until it returned the large paper bags in which it was delivered. We regarded cement-paper as even more valuable than real cigarette paper, because it tasted good and burned slowly. Wrangel was just coming in with a full dixie in his hand which he placed on the shelf above his bunk. He had received it in the shed behind the kitchen, obviously in exchange for information. Perhaps a week earlier he had confessed to me one night that in his fear of starvation he had turned into an informer but would never inform on me. I told him that he must not count on me as a witness for the defence in his trial, and that I wouldn’t move a finger to save him from being hanged. He said he knew it. A few minutes later, when I was already half asleep, I felt him kissing my hand and wetting it with his tears. I shuddered with disgust but was too tired to draw away my hand.

  I looked at the shirts: there was one white and five coloured, and one of these was obviously torn. When I lifted the white shirt, Garamvölgyi threw me a pleading look. I handed it to him and he held it in his arms like a mother holds a baby. Then, while the others put their shirts under their heads, he examined his. When he noticed that one cuff of the white raw silk shirt was missing his mouth turned bitter and when he discovered two small holes in the shoulder he flung it down furiously. Then he gazed unmovingly and admiringly at the pink shirt with white polka-dots that I kept for myself. He didn’t know it was torn.

  ‘What are you looking at, Janika?’

  ‘You gave me the worst of the lot again.’

  ‘Let’s change,’ I offered.

  ‘Would you really do that for me? You know how vain I am where shirts are concerned.’

  When he noticed that I hesitated for a second, he raised his hand.

  ‘Well, will you or won’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, throwing the shirt in his lap.

  ‘You are very good to me, I shall never forget this,’ he exclaimed gratefully. He crawled back to his bunk and tried to put on the clean shirt. When he noticed the tear he shuddered with fury but said nothing. He flung down the shirt, crawled back to my bunk and looked at me with hostile eyes.

  ‘I would never have believed this of you, George,’ he said at last.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you would make me accept a torn shirt to get the beautiful white one yourself.’

  ‘I didn’t make you take it. You wanted it.’

  ‘I am young and inexperienced. You should be ashamed of yourself for cheating a young boy!’

  ‘We can remedy the situation very easily. Let’s change again.’

  ‘Are you joking?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Or would you really give it back?’

  ‘Here, take it!’ I said with a side-glance at Gabori and Berzsenyi, who had been watching the scene. Then I inspected the shirt that was to be mine. I suddenly realized that the pink shirt with the white polka-dots, with a pocket on the right side, had once belonged to Kenedy – he had the pocket specially made for his eye-glass. On the left side there was a long tear – the tear always made by the prison doctor when he ripped open the shirt of a hanged man in order to put his stethoscope on his heart.

  An hour later some twelve men were sitting around me on our straw mattresses in the dark. For a year and a half we had not missed a single evening but now we were so tired that if Szuha had not died we would never have had the energy to sit up. We were prompted not only by the fear of death but also by rebelliousness, as if this were a protest meeting which gave us the opportunity to boast of our courage. As I sat between the kneeling, squatting, sitting friends I remembered Roman sarcophagi with the relief of the deceased on their side, sitting up on his death-bed to have a last talk with his friends and family about his life, his principles and experiences before reclining on the wrinkled sheet wet with perspiration to abandon himself to the sly vision of non-existence. I said nothing because my mind was full of Kenedy. Now that I knew he had been hanged his surrealistic personality had suddenly become very real to me. I thought that he had played at being a spy, had made a game of it, stupidly, shortsightedly, until at last he was believed and hanged.

  Our conversation was rather slow in hitting its stride. Gabori related an argument with a French industrialist when he was last in Paris.

  ‘The idiot believed that his workers would be better off if the communists took over in France, and that he himself would be appointed to some important post out of gratitude because he had given them financial support. I told him that once the communists seized power in France his workers would be much worse off and he himself would be hanged. Do you know what he said? He laughed in my face.’

  ‘Why didn’t you bring him here?’ said Uncle Bandi Horvath, the paralytic old man who was already half dead, from the lower bunk. In the mornings his neighbours helped him to dress, at night he urinated into our boots – never into his own – but in his clear moments he often hit the nail on the head with biting remarks. At times he talked to us about his past life, how he had knocked his wife about – she was twenty years older than he – whenever he found a speck of dust on the carpet, and what fun he had scaring young lovers among the trees of Budapest parks. His rheumy blue eyes twinkled gaily and he seasoned his tales with the most revolting obscenities. When we were working in the forest Garamvölgyi often kicked him in the bottom to make him shut up.

  Our conversation became suddenly livelier. Egri declared that the strongest weapon of the communists, against which Western culture, richness and humanism were powerless, was the fact that the West didn’t know them. Zoltan Sztaray, a young sociologist, spoke about the frustrations of the Western – in the first place French and Italian – intellectuals and about the suicidal neurosis of Western culture. Zoltan Vér, a tall, pale journalist with a cocky moustache who resembled Cyrano de Bergerac’s brothers-in-arms from Gascony and who had already spent five years in various concentration camps, said that it was up to me to defend the West against these unjust accusations. However, I refused to comply.

  Wrangel, whom I had noticed earlier sneaking out to the outhouse with his dixieful of potatoes to eat it in peace, was back on his bunk on Egri’s other side, with his eyes c
losed and his face a deadly white. From time to time old judge Rigo, who was a little deaf, called up to us from the lower bunk to speak louder.

  Egri, Gabori and eight more men were sitting round me in a narrow circle and two more kneeled at my ankles, motionless. While we others put our heads together and whispered, as if we were engaged in preparing a revolt, the two at my feet were like two marble statues, two kneeling guardian angels watching over us in the dark, never moving, not even when the beams of the searchlight, sweeping the window, lit them up for a moment, a sparkling white.

  One of them, a young student of philosophy called Elemér Földvary, looked, with the unbroken line of his forehead and nose, his tiny mouth and bird eyes, like a beautiful, ancient Greek Antinuos. In the day-time he worked on the andesite-pillars of the quarry face, hanging from the mountain peak on a twenty-metre rope and cramming two or three dozen Greek words I had written down for him on a piece of paper the night before. During our evening conversation he was mostly silent because, though he considered the subjects intellectually refreshing, he found them trivial and preferred to talk to me alone about mysticism, Gnosis, Plotinus or Persian literature.

  The other kneeler, Helvetius, had once worked in a slaughterhouse. Compared to Földvary he seemed a veritable colossus with a small, charming head on his athlete’s body, salmon-coloured, sensual lips, a freckled snub nose and a hundred coal-black curls around his smooth, snow-white forehead. We were certain that he was the only honest one among the cooks, who were usually given this job because they were informers. The AVO would never have put up with him if he hadn’t been so immensely strong. When we were unloading the lorries bringing our rations he walked up and down the steps with two 120-kilogramme sacks on his shoulders, or picked up 12–15-metre logs, heavy with mud, that even six of us could not move, to throw them into the lorry. He too was always silent when we talked, but every once in a while – with my consent – he would pick me up and carry me to his bunk, where I had to explain to him what we had been talking about or, as a special treat, recite one or two of my poems. When I finished he would carry me back to my place.

  Apart from Egri and Gabori these two were my favourite friends, but I think I liked the beautiful butcher best. One of the reasons for this was that while with the others intellectual conversations were a combination of routine and protection against adverse circumstances, Helvetius’s intellectual curiosity was spontaneous, elementary and eruptive like a volcanic outbreak. At last I had met Cashel Biron’s alter ego. I have always liked Shaw’s book and it did not detract from my appreciation that I had always considered its hero an improbable, artificial figure – until I met Helvetius. Last but not least it pleased me that my fellow-prisoners misunderstood my visits to Helvetius’s bunk, regarding them as erotic excursions. They not only envied me but invested me in their imagination with superhuman energies. It impressed them that someone who encouraged and entertained his listeners for twelve hours a day like a radio station, and arranged brains-trust meetings in the evenings, should spend his nights with an aggressively, challengingly handsome butcher-boy – and all this on the threshold of death by starvation. My young friend was flattered by the suspicion and in a way nurtured it. Whenever I visited him in his bunk he pressed his pale face, reminding me of a pale blue patch of colour in an impressionist painting, with pink, slightly parted, frightened lips, to my cheek and gazed at me with enchanted eyes. Contrary to the accepted custom of the camp, which demanded that the host give the longer half of a broken cigarette to his guest, Helvetius would share a whole one with me while the gigantic muscles of his arm ran down my shoulder and hip like streams.

  My friends were still discussing Western intellectuals, but their target now was the New Statesman and Zilliacus. Paul Jonas, former leader of the university students, squatting at my thigh, confessed that not so long ago he too had belonged to that category of left-wing intellectuals who served the idea with the altruistic notion that though it might eliminate them, it would, in the end, bring happiness to mankind. To comfort him Sztaray remarked that the left-wing intellectual and the amateur-suicide playing at politics was a characteristic type of our age, whereupon Garamvölgyi told the story of the Duke of Orléans, Philip Égalité, who represented the same type at the time of the French Revolution. He too woke from his day-dreams only when he was in the tumbril taking him to the guillotine.

  Our conversation shifted to the Encylopaedists, then to Rousseau and de la Mettrie’s mechanical materialism. Berzsenyi, raising himself on his elbow behind Gabori, declared that it was the latter we had to thank for state-imposed vulgar materialism. Jonas protested fiercely. True, the system preached dialectical and historical materialism but what it practised was the most radical idealism. The communist state-ideal cannot even be compared to the state-ideal of enlightened absolutism because it is transcendental and without a trace of utilitarianism. The state pays no attention whatsoever to the material welfare and happiness of its subjects. It restricts itself to the spreading of the communist state religion the way the orthodox Caliphs spread Mohammedanism. The individual farmer produces more than the kolkhoz, but the idealist state would rather starve its citizens than renounce winning the soul of the peasants. Ever since 1948 the state had been busy ridding the public administration, ministries, factories and enterprises of all experts and appointing shoe-makers in place of the managers, salesmen in the place of hospital directors, charwomen in the place of the tradesmen. The state didn’t care if the factories produced waste, if the goods produced rotted in warehouses, if the sick died like flies, so long as the functionaries lived happily in a mystical spiritual community with the communist ideal. Or, at least, pretended to do so.

  ‘The Platonic idea of the communist state,’ Jonas continued, ‘hovers high above the obsolete experiments at étatism and looks down upon the welfare stare as a blessed soul from the Garden of Eden looks down on the copper coins dropped here on earth, into the hat of a blind beggar. And the central committee, representing the communist state idea, is a Platonic idea of the various councils of ministers and praesidia, the ideal of state wisdom, almost a deity representing absolute truth, and incarnating in its own womb the Dalai Lama. It sets before its citizens further, though much more limited Platonic ideas, just as it has its own obligatory Platonic ideas concerning everyday life, science, and all the arts.’

  ‘I can’t hear you!’ grumbled the judge below us, and to give his discontent emphasis, he kicked my straw mattress with all his might.

  ‘Before the grave-digger, for instance,’ Jonas explained mildly, ‘the state set the Platonic idea of the grave-digger. The communist grave-digger works in socialist emulation, he has no time to joke, as in Hamlet, and has long ago sold Yorick’s skull for a packet of tobacco. His main ambition is to win the title of “foremost grave-digger of the people’s democracy”. In his time off he doesn’t sit in a pub or chase women, he breaks his head about how to make funerals cheaper and faster. While digging a grave he thinks of the Party.

  ‘The police chief has his eye on the Platonic idea of a police chief. His duty is not to rid society of robbers and murderers because these endanger only the lives of citizens, but not that of the state. The communist police chief must arrest imperialist agents and saboteurs, and if there aren’t any he has to create them in order to justify the Platonic idea of the state which cannot exist for a moment without more and more proofs of imperialist aggression and the sharpening of the class struggle. In the same way the writers were given Fadejev as an example – or rather not the true Fadejev, who drinks himself into oblivion day after day to silence his pangs of conscience, but the Platonic idea of Fadejev: that is, of a writer who ignores reality because the chasm between the ideal and its realization is so deep that obligatory idealism cannot possibly take any notice of it. Instead of reality, the writer has to portray its Platonic idea, that is a society which knows no intellectual or spiritual conflict, which has eliminated unhappiness, railway accidents, cancer, the fear
of death, drought and egotism. He has to depict an ideal, quasi-paradisal society in which all asocial instincts have ceded their place to the passionate love of work, and sex is replaced by the orgies of the party meetings.

  ‘The Platonic idea set before the painters is the carefully drawn daub. The state has determined the Platonic idea of a correctly dressed, loyal party member, of morals, fashion and female beauty. The criteria of female beauty are: a modest, imbecile smile, a greasy nape, and short, fat hands. The breasts should be like the buffers of a cattle-wagon and the bottom must not be smaller than two twenty-pound water-melons. But this must never be talked about because the idealist society is more hypocritical than the petite bourgeoisie of Victorian England …’

  We were exhausted and would gladly have gone to sleep, but not one of us betrayed this desire. We were still waiting for something. Perhaps for our two fellow-prisoners who had been taken away for questioning and had not yet returned; perhaps for some unexpected event. We went on arguing about the Platonic idea; some of my friends denied its existence; only Joska Varga, who had studied philosophy and theology, insisted that such a thing really existed. Gabori declared, for instance, that the chair preceded the Platonic idea of the chair, and it was the same with beauty. The idea of beauty was different in Knossos and different again in Athens, just as our idea of beauty differs from that of the Zulu.

  ‘This,’ I interrupted him, ‘is no evidence against the Platonic idea of beauty. All it proves is that the idea of beauty changes according to the era and the country.’