Gabori replied that ideal beauty was nothing but a social convention. A society agrees on what its members will regard as beautiful. We have a few dozen female blueprints – basic types, put together from the features of film stars, fashion models, magazine illustrations, the covers of trashy books and the portraits of fashionable painters. Film and stage, post-cards and books, friends and acquaintances, posters and the dummies in shop-windows, all proclaim these types to be the modern ideal, and we submit to this mass-hypnosis and consent to regard the women who most resemble these blueprints as beautiful.
‘How fortunate that we are not always in a position to do so,’ I said. ‘Let us suppose that two hundred men are sitting in a restaurant, each by himself. Suddenly a beautiful woman enters. Not a cliché-beauty, but, let us say, Botticelli’s Primavera. Her shoulders pointed; the contours of her lips disagreeably sharp; her nose too long, her forehead higher than necessary. Separately each of her features is ugly, but the whole creates an impression of absolute loveliness. In fact her beauty is irregular, unforeseeable, unimagined, an unbearably exciting beauty.’ I looked at Helvetius, illuminated for a moment by the searchlight.
‘The two hundred men,’ I continued, ‘will exclaim with one voice: what a beautiful woman! And yet they have not conspired to find her beautiful. And the more unexpected, the more extraordinary the woman, the more she will please them. It seems to me that the ideal of beauty is not merely a social convention but also a Platonic idea: a Platonic idea living in us.’
‘Do you mean to say that you believe in a priori ideas?’ asked Gabori with some surprise.
‘I have always believed in them but I haven’t dared say so for years, not even in prison,’ I replied triumphantly; and suddenly I felt as light as if I had just slaughtered the dragon and were sitting on the red carpet of its blood, surrounded by lovely virgins whom I had saved, playing, like a juggler, with the dragon’s seven heads.
‘When I was little,’ I continued, ‘my mother had two friends who used to visit her. One had dark, wiry hair, a square face, high cheekbones and a swarthy skin like an Abyssinian princess, and was ugly. The other had soft lips, a pointed little nose, pink cheeks and white skin; she was as beautiful as the most beautiful rococo lady on a snuffbox. When the ugly one came into my room I screamed and kicked until she fled; but when my mother’s pretty friend came in I smiled and began to cry only when she left. I was then six months old, or so my mother says, and knew nothing about social convention, not even the convention of speech. Thus, it seems that the Platonic idea of beauty lived in me long before I learned the word “beauty”. And I don’t want to limit myself to this one Platonic idea. I believe that the other Platonic ideas, the moral laws and the categorical imperative …’
‘They are bringing someone,’ Garamvölgyi interrupted from the window.
I looked out. A prisoner was being led down from the hill where the commander’s house stood. He looked like Michnai who, I had hoped, was already in Vienna. I broke into goose pimples and felt the hair rise on my nape. Only when they reached the lamp by the guard-hut did I notice that there were two of them, a short man following behind the tall one: our two fellow-prisoners were being returned to the barracks. At the same moment I heard the baying of hounds approaching from another direction, and it seemed to me that they were hoarser than usual.
My friend and I slipped quickly under our blankets. We lay down as we were, there was no time for the others to return to their bunks. If the guards looked into the barracks they might beat us up, or set the hounds on us or, worse, report us to Lieutenant Laszlo Nagy, the political officer, whose greatest pleasure was to discover indications of conspiracy. About a month ago he had sent four of our fellow-prisoners to Budapest because he found them near the fence. Allegedly two had been hanged for attempted rebellion.
Helvetius was the only one who was not afraid. He climbed down and started towards the door to find out what was going on. We watched, hardly breathing, as the doors were unlocked from the outside and our two fellow-prisoners were pushed in. The next second we heard wild shouts of fear and surprise. ‘Hold on, mine has got loose!’ – ‘Don’t shoot, idiot, can’t you see me standing in your way?’ ‘This blasted animal has gone crazy!’ Then they began to laugh like mad. The barrack was filled with an unexplainable, rumbling noise, as if a windstorm bad entered the door to sweep along the bunks. Then the door was locked and everything was quiet.
‘This is a day of animals, George,’ said Egri in the silence. ‘In the morning the lizard, and now these …’
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the next moment Helvetius appeared on my bunk carrying the huge, white dog which he used to feed in the kitchens.
‘Three of them are here,’ he announced triumphantly. ‘They have deserted to us.’
Opposite, on the lower bunk, I suddenly discovered the black-and-white striped hound that scared me to death every time I saw it. It was working its way up the narrow triangle between, the legs of Uncle Péter Csaplar, bus-driver, and Kalman Kéri, staff colonel. It chose Uncle Péter until the old man, mumbling in his sleep, put his arm about the dog’s neck. The bitch, brought to me by Helvetius, settled down without a sound behind my back.
‘The argument is closed,’ I said and placed my head on the wonderful, living pillow. ‘We can consider it as proved that even dogs have their Platonic ideas.’
‘About what?’ Garamvölgyi asked mildly.
‘About man,’ replied the paralytic Uncle Horvath from the lower bunk.
Joska Borostobi, the kind, handsome county official, died exactly one week after he told me that he would no longer participate in our discussions. He collapsed at work, whereupon his nachalnik, Géza Junasz, member of the Hungarian national football team (who had been arrested because he lodged with an alleged Trotskyist) hit him until he bled. Later they took him to the infirmary but Doctor Acs refused to give us any information about him. After the lights were put out Garamvölgyi told me to look out of the window. Two AVO men were coming down the hill towards the hospital, each carrying a mattress. A few minutes later they came out again but now they each held one end of the two mattresses that had been tied together. The sight was unexpected because the AVO men never carried anything heavy; at the same time we couldn’t understand why it was necessary to lug two mattresses about in the middle of the night. As they advanced along the ridge of the hill, about a hundred metres away from us and lit by the lights illuminating the double barbed-wire fence, we suddenly noticed a large, coconut-shaped object slip from between the mattresses. The two men stopped, deliberated for a moment, then turned the mattresses around so that the bottom was on top. Then I could clearly distinguish Borostobi’s lifeless head sticking out from between the mattresses before, finally, it slid back between them.
We could not quite understand the necessity for such discretion, but we were no longer surprised at Borostobi’s death. Four men had died during the last week under similar conditions, while a young engineer, Szeremley, was crushed by a rock weighing several tons. When the rock began to slide his neighbours called out to warn him. They said that Szeremley looked up at the rock, and although he could have jumped to safety, remained where he was, bending his head in resignation. On the following Saturday, in the square between the barracks where they announced the names of those sentenced to solitary or other punishment, the officer added a sentence to the usual speech. He declared that Szuha, Borostobi and the others ‘had been sent up to Budapest to a prison hospital for treatment’. About half the men sentenced to solitary confinement received their punishment because they had talked about the deaths and complained loudly about the low calorie content of our food. At this time the AVO spread through their informers a rumour that the Americans had landed in Albania and Yugoslavia and were approaching the Hungarian border. This was done to calm us. The simple souls who believed the story were certain that we would be liberated within a week. They lived in constant euphoria, made plans for the future a
nd in the meantime, comforting themselves with the thought that it wouldn’t last long now, went on breaking stone, carrying heavy loads, pushing the tumbrils. They literally worked themselves to death. Three of the four dead belonged to this category.
The false news, followed every two days by other rumours (rebellion in Warsaw, attempt on Rakosi’s life, Chinese-Soviet conflict), was invented by the AVO to give us new hope, while punishments became daily more severe, to strengthen discipline. The AVO was obviously afraid that we might rebel and get ourselves mown down by machine-guns, rather than obey communist etiquette and die quietly without fuss. Their twofold precautions had very real justification: we had seriously been considering rebelling before we died of hunger, and killing a few of our tormentors before we ourselves were slaughtered. The AVO probably got wind of the plans which we were now too weak to carry out. Meanwhile those who were still strong – nachalniki, informers, cooks – were waiting impatiently for us to die, most of them believing that after we had perished the AVO would release them.
My friends and I felt it our duty to expose the rumours and to convince our fellow-prisoners that it was better to do some quiet sabotage and to work more slowly instead of losing their heads with joy and engaging in senseless feats. Our task was difficult and of doubtful value. We were working from the premise that some miracle would happen to prevent our death, but at the same time we were almost certain that death would soon come, and that our efforts were only prolonging our own suffering and that of our fellow-prisoners. In my own case, strangely enough, it was Borostobi’s death which generated the necessary energies. When I saw that dead head lolling from between the sandwiched mattresses I was suddenly overcome by fierce pangs of conscience. I blamed myself for not having tried to change his mind when, a week earlier, he had announced that he had lost interest in our discussion of Platonic ideas and would henceforth live a vegetable life. I had been wrong in applying my principle of never interfering in other people’s lives, because this time it was death, not life, which had demanded interference. I had disobeyed a distinct, though incomprehensible, order from my categorical imperative to speak up – an order which had been clear, even though logic and reason protested against telling dying men that we would not die.
My task and that of my friends was also highly involved. In the mornings, when before we marched out to work I sought out my acquaintances as they stood with chattering teeth in the square between the barracks, they would usually greet me with the request: ‘Say something comforting, George, it doesn’t have to be true!’ Attempts to disprove the false but comforting rumours circulating in the camp were thus made almost impossible by the fact that the prisoners were determined to believe them. Not only the simple souls, but the intellectual élite as well, such as Ödön Berzsenyi, would read into such scraps of newspaper as they could lay hands on, not what was in them, but what they wanted to see in them. One morning Berzsenyi handed me half a page from a newspaper, saying that it contained good news: the Yugoslavs had attacked Bulgaria with British support. I read the article, which dealt with a Yugoslav–Bulgarian border incident. There was not a word about the British in it. I mentioned this to Berzsenyi, who grew angry and said that I didn’t know how to read a newspaper.
While checking exaggeratedly optimistic false rumours, we had to be careful not to drive our companions into despair: lethargy – as in Borostobi’s case – led to the same result: early death. The news that Churchill had become Prime Minister was more catastrophic in its consequences than any of the false rumours spread by the AVO. Until then the political prisoners had put their faith in the American people and in the new President to be elected. They held a poor opinion of Truman and spoke of Roosevelt with something akin to hatred. ‘It is not Stalin or Rakosi who are responsible for our fate, but Roosevelt,’ they used to say. But everyone, including the simple peasants, was familiar with Churchill’s wartime role and knew what he had said in his speech at Fulton. When it became known, one evening, that he was again Prime Minister, the younger among us turned somersaults on their bunks and old peasants distributed their last cigarettes. Nine out of ten believed firmly that our captivity would be over within a few months. The next morning the mountainside resounded with the blows of pick-axes and the miners’ trucks rolled downwards at a frightening speed. Within the next forty-eight hours seven people had been taken to the infirmary, and four of them died immediately.
We did all we could to disprove the news. I did not even try to explain that it was not in Churchill’s power to liberate us and that, in the present situation, England could undertake no independent political action. No one would have believed me. I tried instead to persuade them that the British general election was not due for another year, that for the time being there was a Labour majority and that Churchill’s premiership was a false rumour spread, obviously, by the AVO. Three days later, when I had more or less succeeded in calming the general hysteria, Knocke fished a piece of newpaper from the sewer from which, to my great surprise, I learned that Churchill had indeed become Prime Minister. I immediately destroyed the paper and continued to refute the rumour with the greatest energy.
While depriving our fellow-prisoners of such harmful illusions we had to supply them with other, less feverish, long-term dreams. I could easily have invented a dozen but I had no wish to become a central figure and therefore I turned to the religious Pista Todi for help. I approached him cautiously, tactfully, because however deep our mutual affection and admiration, I was afraid my request would offend him and turn him into an enemy. What I hinted was that we were in urgent need of the Holy Virgin, who ought to put in an appearance, if possible that same evening, if not, the next day. I suggested that she should inform him that our food would soon be improved and that a year from now, around Christmas, the régime would collapse of its own accord, without bloodshed, and that we should all celebrate the New Year at home with our families.
I watched his reaction closely as he sat on the floor before the stove with a perturbed look in his eyes. But instead of jumping at me, he pulled me to him and embraced me. The next morning the whole camp was buzzing with the news that the Holy Virgin had appeared to Todi in the radiant circle thrown by the open door of the stove, announcing that we would all be back home next Christmas. Everyone was deeply moved, including the atheists, who were as ready as anyone to take their part of the divine mercy. Though the majority still trusted Churchill more than they did the Holy Virgin, the effect of the apparition surpassed my boldest expectations. Only the two most devoted Catholics in the camp, Musza and a teacher of mathematics called Kertész, seemed disappointed. Particularly Kertész, who was more militant than Musza and who not only covered his ears when he heard the AVO men swear, but went up to them and warned them of the danger of eternal damnation. These two men were disappointed because two days earlier, on Christmas Eve, the AVO had come into our barracks to search it. They had made us all strip, had searched our clothes, had emptied the straw from the mattresses, torn the festive pine-branches from the wall, taken down North-Eastern Inrush’s shelf again and hit him over the head with it, confiscating his rock crystals, shoe-shine boxes and other toys, and had then built a fire in the middle of the square of the Bibles, New Testaments and Jewish prayerbooks they had found, and had solemnly burned that in the presence of the camp commander. Musza and Kertész had watched the scene from the window of the outhouse, praying to the Holy Virgin to come to our aid. And lo, the Holy Virgin had ignored their prayers and had appeared to Todi.
The appearance of the Holy Virgin marked the beginning of sabotage actions the scope and cunning of which amazed even me, who was considered chief expert in feverish loafing, the feigning of work and destruction. On the lower level of the quarry, groups of four hewed the rock, loaded it into miners’ trucks and emptied it down the slope. Each group of four had to mine and load at least twelve trucks a day. An AVO guard sat near the rail with a notebook in his hand in which he put down which group’s truck passed by him.
Any group loading and unloading less than twelve trucks was locked up and received one slice of bread a day instead of half a pound, or was made to work all day and sit in short chains all night so that they became weaker and weaker, and less and less able to fulfil their quota. Gabori’s trick was not to empty the truck on the slope but to push it back again along the elliptical rail, thus passing several times before the guard with the same truckload. This system was very dangerous, partly because the guard could easily, have noticed the absence of the noise made by the rock being tipped out, partly because it required a superhuman effort to push the heavy truck back up the slope.
On the day after the apparition the camp settled down to a long period of resistance. Istvan B. Racz, former deputy, a young peasant lad who was leader of the young generation of smallholders, invented a method adopted within minutes by all the thirty-five trucking groups: some hundred and forty men. They wired large roots – feather-weight as compared to the andesite rock – in the bottom of the trucks so that what looked like a full load of the usual two thousand eight hundred kilogrammes really only amounted to two or three hundred kilogrammes of rock. In this way it was child’s play to push the unemptied trucks back up the slope. The groups’ work was reduced to one-tenth and they spent their time listening to staff colonel Valér Czebe, who could whistle entire operas for them.
The only decent nachalnik, a social democratic engineer called Janos Lund, a mild six-foot-six giant, worked with his group on top of the mountain. They were cutting rock along a two-hundred-and-fifty metre front, right on the edge of the precipice, from where it tumbled down to land at the foot of the mountain. When they reached the triangulation point Lund decided that the construction which marked it would have to go down the precipice with the rock. There was no other fixed point by which the amount of rock cut could be measured, so Lund was ordered to drive a pole into the ground ten metres behind the old triangulation point, to act as a new one.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 52