For a few seconds there was complete silence.
‘Will you say it, or won’t you? If not, it’s the rats for you!’
A door banged in the corridor and Garamvölgi, who had forgotten his pain listening to the conversation, began to howl again:
‘I can’t stand this any longer! Sergeant, shoot me like a dog!’
‘I should be ashamed to act as you do,’ I said quietly.
‘Let’s try and distract his attention,’ suggested Acs. ‘A few days ago you said, George, that this camp was the symbol of the ideal communist society. Would you explain why you said that?’
‘Even an idiot would know why,’ said Garamvölgi. ‘But never mind. Go on, tell us, George.’
‘We have been given the job of opening up a quarry,’ I began, closing my eyes and realizing suddenly how great an effort it was for me to talk fluently. ‘We have been given the job of opening up a quarry,’ I repeated. ‘We all know that it will collapse before the job is accomplished and that we shall all perish. Just as outside communism will collapse before it is accomplished, but our contemporaries will all perish before it collapses, Here, as outside, the authorities are not interested in production, they use work to keep us busy, and turn us into weak, tormented, mentally degenerate wretches. The only difference is that here they are doing it more openly, more violently and more rapidly than outside. Here the conditioning to communism is carried out with the help of a handful of beans – more practically and realistically than outside. Outside, they still tolerate family ties and separate apartments and permit a man to have two suits of clothes. Here, where communism has almost been reached, handkerchiefs, books, newspapers and watches are no longer required. Even the right to spread rumours has been taken away from us, as it is in Orwell’s book, because even subversive action has become a state monopoly. The iron curtain is replaced with a barbed-wire fence, but within it the monolithic power has no need to fear Western competition. So here it can throw culture, science, propaganda on the dust-heap and needs to make no effort to win us for communism. Outside, they would reach this stage only if communism became victorious throughout the entire world.
‘At the same time, they have also attained the final stage of communism as far as the psychological effect is concerned. There are signs of it outside, too, but here we have perfection. They have gained absolute power over our bodies by violence, cunning, threats and a network of informers, and they can do with us what they please. But at the same time they have taught us to think. Their moral effect is like nitric acid separating the gold from the filth. Because of it scoundrels become even worse scoundrels, rotten to the core, but the gold of honour remains unchanged, or rather, receives an added sheen. He who extends even his little finger to them must inevitably …’
‘Well,’ Acs turned to Garamvölgyi. ‘Do you still feel the pain?’
For a reply Garamvölgyi began to scream and simultaneously we heard a cell door open on the opposite side of the corridor.
‘You can come out, Kertész,’ we heard Mongol’s voice. ‘I told you that your mottled-arsed Holy Virgin would not protect you from the rats! Say it.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘The tin-Christ of Buda.’
‘On my responsibility I won’t.’
‘On whose responsibility, then?’
‘On yours, sir!’
‘Shut up, you idiot! What do you mean, on my responsibility?’
‘I mean that you will have to answer for it, sir, before God and men.’
‘The hell I will! You can say it on Faludy’s responsibility or Doctor Acs’s.’
‘I can’t do that, sir. They are not answerable for the fact that the powers above compel me to swear. If I have to commit a sin, then I must throw the responsibility upon the godless authority that …’
‘Swear on your own responsibility, Kertész! You won’t! Then back to the rats …’
When the door slammed, Garamvölgyi moaned again.
‘Perhaps you should go on with your explanation,’ Acs suggested.
‘No, don’t …’ wailed Garamvölgyi.
‘Then what shall I talk about?’
‘Nothing.’
Suddenly I had a saving idea.
‘What about enumerating the English kings… and then perhaps the caliphs, and after the caliphs from Childebert to Vincent Auriol?’
Garamvölgyi swallowed the bait. Ten minutes later he was in full swing:
‘… after the Omayads came the Abbasid… first Abdul Abbas who ordered the blood-bath of Damascus, from 750… from 754 the founder of Baghdad, al-Mansur, from 775 …’
On the other side of the corridor Mongol opened the door again.
‘… the firstborn son of Caliph Muhammad al-Mahdi was killed by his brother, Haroun al-Raschid, from 786… then came his two sons, al-Amin and al-Mamun …’
‘Did the rats bite you, Kertész?’
‘They did, yes, they did …’
‘Did you like it?’
‘It was dreadful, sergeant, sir, dreadful …’
‘Then say it after me and don’t gape there like a duck! That the tin-Christ of Buda stick into your arse his scabrous …’
‘Yes, sir. That the tin-devil of Buda stick into your arse his …’
‘I’ll tear you to pieces, you shit! Not into me, into you!’
‘That the tin-devil of …’
‘Christ!’
‘Devil!’
‘Christ! Christ! Christ!’
‘No! Devil!’
‘How dare you contradict me! Get inside!’
We heard Mongol’s slow, uncertain steps as he went back to his small desk by the stove. Suddenly I noticed a strong, penetrating smell.
‘Burning textile,’ Acs said. He had already been sniffing the air for a few moments.
‘Henry II until 1559 …’ Garamvölgyi declared triumphantly. ‘The Capet dynasty died out with three brothers and so did the Valois with Henry II’s three sons, Francis II, Charles IX and …’
Suddenly we heard Uncle Horvath’s deep voice above the chorus of moans.
‘Come here, son, take these strings off me… it isn’t nice to play such jokes on an old man… you hear me, sergeant, you lout!’
‘Where are you, Horvath?’ asked Mongol, who had forgotten into which cell he had locked Horvath.
‘Here!’
‘Where?’
‘In hell!’ mumbled Uncle Horvath in the cell next to ours.
The sergeant must have taken the rope off him because the old man thanked him loudly while Mongol tried in vain to shut him up.
‘Bring me a bottle of wine and some salted almonds,’ the old man ordered as the guard left his cell and locked the door.
The smell of burning fabric became more and more unbearable. Garamvölgyi noticed nothing. He had reached the Third Republic.
‘.… was shot down by an anarchist in 1894… a year later Casimir Perrier resigned… the sixth, Félix Faure, had a beautiful, long beard. He liked to tie it, at night, to his mistress’s long hair. One night, when he died while copulating, the poor woman was so completely entangled with the corpse that they had to be cut apart, while in the morning, at the Élysées …’
‘I can’t hear you. Louder!’ Mongol encouraged Kertész.
‘That the tin-devil of Buda put his scabrous penis …’ Kertész sighed.
‘What’s that, penis?’ Mongol shouted. ‘How dare you use such bigoted expressions?’
‘That the tin-devil of Buda put his scabrous… his scabrous …’
‘Get it out!’
‘His scabrous penis. Vulgo; pr—’
‘What is vulgo, Kertész?’
‘Sergeant, sergeant!’ Acs yelled excitedly. ‘I smell burning flesh!’
‘Shut up or I’ll step on your balls, old quack!’ shouted Mongol. ‘Yesterday you burned one of your fellow-prisoners to death and you dare open your mouth? What is vulgo, Kertész?’
A moment later, however, he came in
to the cell and untied Acs and myself. Outside, leaning against the white-hot iron stove, sat Dani Kis in short chains. He was conscious and gazed at us, nodding his tired head. His limbs were so tightly bound that they must have been completely numbed, so that he was oblivious to the pain and to his situation. On his right arm and thigh the fabric of his suit, the lining and his shirt were smouldering like shells on top of the glowing stove. I was nauseated by the smell of burning human flesh.
With a quick movement Acs tore Dani away from the stove. Mongol pushed me into the common cell, and then, a few minutes later, Acs, who told me that Dani had been taken to the infirmary. His arm and thigh had burned to the bone. If he survived he would remain a cripple for life.
At dawn we tottered back, exhausted, to our barracks with our blankets on our shoulders. Uncle Horvath fell back near the pit where, according to the engineers, there was room for thirteen hundred corpses, with the necessary covering of lime. I went back for the old man. The stream, swelled by the heavy rains, had overflowed into the pit, transforming it into a small, round lake. Uncle Horvath was standing on the bank watching the surface of the lake with his head bowed, a beautiful, serene smile on his lips. It was quite obvious that he didn’t know where he was. He was humming a melody from the last act of the musical Janos Vitéz. This musical is based on a folk legend about a shepherd boy who comes to fairyland in search of his dead bride. He stands by the Lake of Life and, to bring back his loved one, throws a rose into the blue water. Uncle Horvath was singing the shepherd’s song:
Blue lake, limpid lake, lake in which all life is created…
The blows, the concussion and two weeks of nightly punishment-cell wore me out completely. I was still in possession of my mental capacities but I doubted whether I could hold on to them for long. I was rapidly losing strength and my will-power was almost gone. The first morning, on my return from the cell, I found a slice of bread in the pocket of my overcoat. Only Helvetius or Egri could have put it there. I decided to investigate after work and return the bread to its rightful owner. However, the temptation was too strong and I devoured it on the spot. On another occasion I noticed that Robert Gati, who, to do me a favour, had fetched my supper along with his, was transferring half of his own portion into my dixie. When I protested, Gati declared that he was a very small eater and his condition was far better than mine, so he was not giving me anything but was only levelling. I didn’t have enough energy left to spoon back the food into his dixie but the next day, when he offered to fetch my dinner, I refused and went for it myself.
In the first week of February only two of our fellow-prisoners died of starvation but in the second week the number of victims began to increase rapidly; one, two, or even three a day. The older prisoners were still whittling pegs under Korda’s watchful eyes and their condition had considerably improved; so had that of Lund’s brigade, since by moving the marking pole he had almost completely freed them from work. Most of those who succumbed were middle-aged, between thirty-eight and fifty-two. After a few weeks we could always tell in advance, from their complexion and their somnambulistic walk, who was going to die within the next two or three days. As none of us possessed a mirror Egri and I inspected each other’s faces every morning, after having made a sacred pledge to tell each other the truth. I feared that Egri would not have the courage to tell me, so I also made the same arrangement with Helvetius who, I thought, was too naïve not to betray the truth by his expression. Of our circle of friends no one, with the exception of Borostobi, had yet succumbed: though we had a feeling that the island on which we were standing would soon be inundated by the flood.
We were building a road several kilometres below the camp, to lead from the railway station to the quarry. We were working on the upper half of the road; the lower, we heard, was being built by the inmates of another camp recently set up near Recsk. Each morning, accompanied by a large number of guards, we walked several miles along muddy or snowy ridges to our place of work. Once there, we had to move the several hundred metres of barbed-wire entanglement that surrounded us, and, in addition to wounding our hands, we tore our already ragged clothes. Talian, our nachalnik, made us take off our overcoats because – he said – the weight of them made us even more lazy. We lacked the strength to warm ourselves with work and thus almost froze to death in the icy wind blowing on the northern mountain slope.
I and some of my comrades who were beginning to show signs of complete exhaustion were usually made to do the heaviest jobs. The stronger ones paved the road, on their knees, while we had to carry stones in so-called racing-barrows with boards attached to their sides so that they took a load sixty per cent heavier than usual. The idea had been Dezsö Tamas’s, the chief kapo. We found the load excessive, so three of our fellow-prisoners – all former navvies – went to the political officer to complain. They told him that the shape, size and capacity of barrows had been moulded by the experience of thousands of years throughout the world. The former grocer’s assistant replied that in the Soviet Union they had introduced double-decker barrows because socialist man is more resistant than any other type of man. Their complaint proved only that they were reactionary blackguards who had no place in the new world. Then he sent them to solitary confinement.
At times the nachalnik made me stand in the ditch at the side of the road to dig. The work itself was not too bad, but after a while I was unable to straddle the ditch and had to stand up to my knees in the icy water, which completely filled my boots. In the mornings, while we were waiting for the guards under the hoary trees by the gate, Egri invited me to dinner and told me in detail about the delicacies he was going to offer me. At other times I invited him to dinner. But on the way to the road work we no longer talked. As soon as I picked up the shaft of the barrow or took my place in the ditch I started wool-gathering. I dreamed mostly about my childhood friends, our games, my grandfather’s house and mill, and the morning passed with incredible speed, never seeming longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. During our lunch break I sat with Egri or Földvary on the roadside, huddled together, silent. The afternoon again seemed no more than an hour. Only when we were marching back to camp along the rough, uneven hillside did I suddenly feel sweat break out over my whole body with fear that I might not be able to walk all the way back.
My situation, however, was unbearable only when the guard called ‘the SS’ stood near me. According to fellow-prisoners who had been in Dachau, this guard had worked there a short eight years before. He was a real giant with a long, red nose, a livid face, a short, strong neck and protruding shoulder blades. He stood among the bushes with his arms crossed and never spoke a word to anyone. When Talian reported someone to him he called the culprit with a hardly visible movement of his forefinger, took him by the neck, knocked his head repeatedly against the barbed wire of the barrier, then, still without a sound, kicked him far out from among the bushes.
Once Talian caught me as I was standing still in the ditch. He pointed to the stump of an oak tree where the road was to continue and told me that unless I dug it out within three hours he would take me to the inspector. He meant the SS, who pretended to hear nothing. Three hours would have been sufficient to dig out the stump had the soil not been frozen and had I been given the necessary tools. But I had no saw, no shovel, and the pick-axe was too heavy for me to lift. I felt certain that I would not survive a beating by the SS. A moment later Egri was at my side and in a short while he had dug out half of the stump. The SS stood up to the waist in the underbrush, never looking towards us. When Egri was called away the boy with the Antinuos face took his place. I protested violently; he was just as exhausted as I. But he begged me with boyish charm to let him try.
‘Give me ten minutes,’ he said. ‘I still owe you for the lessons in philosophy.’
In fifteen minutes he had dug out the stump from the ground. When Talian returned he gaped, unbelieving, at the empty hole and looked questioningly towards the SS. But the inspector held his head haughtily averted
and kept silent.
Next morning, when Egri looked at my face his eyes seemed strange for a fraction of a moment. Helvetius assured me that I looked much better than the day before, but I became suspicious and followed him into the washroom. The scene I came upon was so amusing that I could hardly refrain from laughing aloud. Egri was standing in a corner, his head bent, his arms hanging lifeless by his side. Big tears were running down his face. The attractive butcher boy was swearing in whispers, hitting the wall with his clenched fists. Suddenly I felt as light as if I were already a ghost. I stole in on tiptoe and smiled at them.
‘Don’t be shocked,’ I said. ‘I have always respected other people’s sorrow but I find it extremely funny that you should weep for me like two professional mourners …’
But I stumbled and was suddenly so weak that I gasped for breath. I put my arm round Helvetius’s neck, kissed him on the cheek and drew Egri to me. So we stood for a moment until I regained my strength.
At the barrack door I ran into a former naval officer, Frici Kopilarcsik, in the softly falling snow. He pushed a packet of cigarettes into my pocket, while Brigadier Lund stuffed a portion of bread in the other. While we were lining up for roll call, someone smuggled two packets of tobacco into the cuff of my overcoat, so that I had more tobacco and bread than anyone in camp. For a moment I wondered which was the more moving: human solidarity or the fact that I would soon be dead. Then I forgot everything and escaped into day-dreams.
This time Talian assigned me and two of my fellow-prisoners to the lightest jobs: I had to shovel the snow from the already finished section of the road. This section was surrounded not by an entanglement but by an ordinary barbed-wire fence, and there were watch-towers along it manned by benevolent, or at least indifferent regulars. My companions worked on a distant part of the road so that I walked alone in the billowing snow moulded into hills and vales by the wind. The guard in the watch-tower threw down a box of matches so that I could light up quite often. I noticed that I had eaten both my bread portions only when my fingers encountered nothing but a few crumbs in the bottom of my pocket. My stomach was full, but somehow my entire body remained just as hungry as it had been before. I noted this, however, without attaching great importance to it and returned to my dreams.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 55