My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  When he appeared on the morning of the ninth day I knew what I would do. After the first two dozen slaps he stopped, as usual, to get his second wind.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he screeched.

  ‘Because I had a love affair with an old Catholic bishop.’

  He-Devil’s mouth fell open with amazement.

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Ninety-three,’ I replied without moving a muscle.

  ‘And where did you f—?’

  ‘On the main altar, at midnight,’ I said, smiling, and closed my eyes as if I were remembering indescribable delights. But all the time I was watching He-Devil from under my half-closed lids. He almost crossed himself with fright, backed away, blinked at me suspiciously and left the cell. He even forgot to put out the light. When he failed to return the next day I felt sure that the exorcism had been successful, and I began to dance with joy. As a matter of fact, I had been dreaming of solitary confinement for quite a while but I had never told my friends for fear that it might hurt their feelings. For two years I had never been alone, and I yearned to write poems, which was impossible in the barracks.

  A few days later Mongol took me to a smaller cell where Lieutenant Toth was waiting for me, standing in a corner. Or rather, he was not standing: he leaned his back against the angle of the wall, pushed the back of his bent head into the ceiling, straddled his long legs and reached out his snaky arms towards me. He looked at me like a large spider waiting for his victim in the corner of his web. I stood resigned; I knew that he could take hold of me without moving.

  I noticed his extremely strong smell of toilet water only when, instead of starting on the terrible beating I expected, he addressed me with a short speech:

  ‘We have found out,’ he said, caressing his beautifully shaven, smooth, bluish face with the palm of his right hand, ‘that there are, in this camp, a few notorious scoundrels who disturb the peace of the place, organize sabotage, disparage the State Security Organization and constantly spread false rumours. There aren’t many of them. To mention only two: there is Todi and there is you. Two fascists! We were patient. Very patient. We hoped you would come to your senses. But you didn’t. You have only yourself to blame, Faludy. I’ll make a quiet man of you, a very quiet one, never fear. I shall dispatch you to a place you wouldn’t find on the map!’

  He fell silent. I felt utterly bored. What can this man do to me if he doesn’t even hit me? What power does he have over me, if any?

  ‘Do I bore you?’ the lieutenant asked suddenly. ‘Answer me. I give you my word of honour that I won’t hurt you. Well, do I bore you?’

  ‘To death, lieutenant, sir.’

  Mongol led me into a standard cell, number 12. I counted seven horizontal and seven vertical bars on the whitewashed window – that is, sixty-four squares. There was a rusty, empty, three-gallon can in one corner and fleas swarmed in the dust covering the floor. I felt immediately as if my legs had been sprinkled with curry, for I was barefoot. The bunk, five smooth boards laid side by side, was about twenty centimetres above the ground and took up exactly half of the cell. Three heavy beams ran across the ceiling with cobwebs hanging from them. After inspecting the cell I decided that I was feeling wonderful and that I would begin working on my poems the next day. The guard opened the door, pushed in my boots and Lieutenant Toth threw into my lap a small pillow filled with straw.

  ‘Here, you stinking fascist, now you have nothing to complain of,’ he said disdainfully.

  At noon I heard the cook, accompanied by the guard, go from cell to cell and put down a full dixie before each door.

  ‘You don’t leave anything here,’ said the guard as they reached my right-hand neighbour. ‘Nor here.’

  This happened every morning and every noon. Only in the evening did I get something to eat: a dixieful of mush and a piece of bread. Not more that four hundred to four hundred and fifty calories. But I had been in pretty good condition when they brought me in – in the last few months I had regained approximately two-thirds of the weight lost, and so had most of the others. This was due to the improved food, and also to the nationalization of the Globus canning works, or rather to the consequences of the nationalization. The Globus works were manufacturing cooked foods in glass jars for domestic consumption. A considerable part of these foods got spoiled and were withdrawn from circulation to be used – as we learned from our comrades who had returned from Budapest prison hospitals – as food for prisoners. Each day every prisoner was given a half-litre jar of pigs’ liver in rice, beef goulash or some other delicacy. The cooks always brought twice as many bottles as there were prisoners, because some of them were completely inedible. We cheated by dividing the contents of a spoiled jar into two jars and adding water, so that when we returned it to the cook, we got two good jars in exchange for an inedible one.

  I figured that in my present condition I could survive on four hundred to four hundred and fifty calories a day for eight or ten weeks. Looking at the window I thought that the sixty-four squares symbolized the remaining sixty-four days of my life. From then on I calculated time not in months and days, but in window-squares, and established in the morning that I had reached square number so-and-so of row so-and-so. The prospect of death did not frighten me as it used to, instead of despairing I trembled with fury, disgust and hatred. Between the bombing of Juvissy, the blowing up of the Château de Boncourt and the period of starvation last February, I had escaped death twenty-two times. I hoped that I would again escape it and could no longer create in myself the internal tension befitting the dramatic occasion. On the other hand, I loathed the AVO for its lack of imagination; instead of inventing something new, it conjured up again the well-known spirit of starvation. I was careful to limit my movements to the minimum and decided to devote all my attention to poetry.

  I used the first three days to get used to my hard bunk, familiarize, myself with the daily routine of the punishment cells and find out who my neighbours were. My sharpened senses – the sense of smell and hearing – were a great help. My eyes were of little use here. Standing on tiptoe on my bunk I reached only the lowest row of squares but I couldn’t see through the whitewashed glass. True, very soon I discovered a pinpoint hole in the whitewash through which, when the sun shone, a tiny beam penetrated to paint a slowly advancing ochre-yellow circle on the opposite wall. Looking out through the tiny hole I could see only a clay slope. The path ran on the crest of the slope, some ten metres from where I was. In my hermetically closed cell I could smell the fragrance of carnations blooming on the other side of the building, I knew when the lilies were in full bloom and distinguished the perfume of petunias. In the morning, at about five o’clock, I woke when the cook stepped on to the bridge leading across the stream to the cells, about a hundred metres from my bunk. I smelled the coffee the others had for breakfast and knew, at noon, whether they were getting liver in rice or beef goulash. This smell of food at noon was so strong and tormenting that I had to stop working on my poem.

  Very soon I learned to recognize the guards on the corridor by their smell, their whisper and the way they walked. There were always two on duty and they were relieved at noon: first Mongol and the Stable-boy, then the Gnome and the Nut. I knew the Stable-boy by the rancid body odour that filled the corridor when he was on duty. He was an unusually tall, middle-aged man with a crooked back. When he asked something I had to repeat my answer twice or three times while he listened attentively, his dirty-blue, suspicious eyes never leaving my face, or his hand the butt of his gun. He never slept, never put out the light in the cell when he was on duty every fourth night, but walked up and down the corridor and looked in every few minutes through the spy-hole to make sure I hadn’t escaped.

  Mongol gave me a benevolent smile when I appeared. When I had been sentenced to spend two weeks in short chains, he had chained me up only on the first day and even then very loosely. After that he put me in a cell with a straw mattress on the floor and let me sleep until dawn. The Gnome,
with his hump, his dilated pupils, his long hair worn à la bohème, and his intellectual attitude reminded one of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame or a sixteenth-century Inquisitor from some Spanish provincial town. When he was on duty he liked to stand around in one cell or another and hold long, moralizing monologues, telling us that we should bear our punishment with humility and be grateful to the AVO, the fist of the proletariat, for the patience and benevolence it showed us in spite of our crimes. When he reached this point we had to nod – if we missed he would punch and kick us. Once, when, afraid of the kicks, I began praising the AVO’s generosity, he looked at me with indescribable disdain and stalked from the cell. He came even on the days when he was off duty and could have been chasing the girls in the village.

  The Nut didn’t look different from any attractive, red-cheeked peasant lad, and yet it was he who caused most of the trouble with his incalculable moods. In the mornings and evenings, at a certain time, we were led to the WC for three minutes each. When the Nut was on duty he would usually walk along the corridor and shout into every cell: ‘There’s no shitting today!’ This was all the more painful as we got no water to drink except from the jug standing in the WC. At other times, when I reached for my dixie on the floor outside my cell door he would send it flying with a well-aimed kick. But it also happened that he made the cook give everyone double rations. When on duty he visited every cell after ‘lights out’ and slapped the prisoners around. Mongol did the same but he always left me and my right-hand neighbour out. The Stable-boy hit only those who had offended against discipline.

  We could talk to the guards only in whispers, yet I could follow a conversation from a distance of five or six cells. In this way I had soon discovered that my right-hand neighbour was Todi. In the cell opposite there were two people, both, to judge from their speech, peasant lads, whom I did not know. From the lectures the Gnome delivered in their cell I knew that they had gone on hunger strike. In the first days Doctor Acs came every morning and every night to feed them artificially after the guards had beaten them half unconscious, and later they were put on starvation diet. Next to them came the cell of the informer Gergely Deak, who had denounced me for carrying on imperialist propaganda when I was telling my fellow-prisoners in the infirmary the story of my days on Ellis Island. I did not know why he was there, but I knew that the guards gave him extra pieces of bread and a straw mattress to sleep on. My left-hand neighbour was the eccentric lawyer called Titus Banvölgyi, whom the AVO arrested because, returning from internment, he had demanded the restitution of his flat, his library and art treasures. He had been in the punishment cells for several months because of an occurrence for which the entire camp envied him.

  When the political officer went away on holiday, Banvölgyi had asked to speak to his deputy. The deputy was a notorious moron. Banvölgyi declared that he wanted to divorce his wife. He asked the sergeant to forward his request to the authorities. A few weeks later he was taken to Budapest, to his great pleasure straight to the law court. Here he not only saw, but also talked to his wife whom he idolized, while the judge decreed the divorce. When Banvölgyi returned and the political officer heard about the affair he was livid with fury, and sent Titus to the cells. I often listened while he lectured the guards on prison regulations and demanded decent treatment. They beat him instead, but the next day he began again.

  Although I tried to pay as little attention as possible to my physical condition, I grew so weak after the first two weeks of starvation diet that I thought I would not last sixty-four squares. At roll call my knees shook so badly that I could hardly stand. One Sunday night, when the Stable-boy handed me my bread ration for the day, he smeared the spoonful of plum jam – my dinner – over my shaved head. After he had left I had a crying fit, but later, sitting on my bunk, scratching the jam off my head and sucking it from under my nails, I told myself that I deserved all I got for having left America. When I sat or lay down my body ached all over. The flesh had literally disappeared from my bones and I felt as if I were sitting on broken glass. After a few days I had to stop writing poems and began to conjure up in my mind the American landscapes I had known: the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers at Pittsburgh, trout-fishing of an evening in the streams of Pennsylvania, the Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco shrouded in mist, the muddy, grey banks of the Big Snake River, where I used to wander with my army buddies, the airfield at Kodiak, my Eskimo friends and the top hat on the totem-pole, or Washington which I visited with Vambéry to complain about American political dilettantism to some official in the State Department. If only I could once again voice such complaints in Washington!

  On the fourteenth day of my starvation I woke one morning to the realization that a new cook was bringing the food. His steps on the wooden bridge were lighter, fresher, almost happy. When, some ten metres from my door, he began putting down the dixies, I was certain it must be Helvetius. In my excitement I pressed my mouth, my nose, my entire body against the heavy cell door. As he passed my cell he brushed the door with his shoulder. On the way back he repeated the performance. A moment later I caught the smell of linseed oil. Now I was sure. The last day before my incarceration Helvetius had stolen a bottle of linseed oil from the engine-house and had put some on my hair as well as on his. The smell accompanied me to the cells but on the Thursday following my conversation with Lieutenant Toth, they had shaved my head. The barber came once a week, every Thursday, and he was the only fellow-prisoner I saw. He went with a small, three-legged stool from cell to cell and while he was shaving us the guard stood in the open door watching. We could communicate only by signs. I gave him a gay smile, which meant that he was to tell my friends outside that I was well, and he caressed my nape, which meant that they were thinking of me.

  At noon, when Helvetius arrived with the dinner, he again brushed my door with his shoulder. On the way back he stopped for a moment and leaned against my door. The board separating us was only two or three centimetres thick so that I listened enchanted to his light, boyish breathing. He probably wanted to inform me that he knew where I was. In the evening, at last, he brought food for me too. He distributed the dixies quickly, noisily, but put down Todi’s and mine with slow care. When he departed and the guard opened the door I lifted the dixie in both hands to see whether there was a message scratched on it. There wasn’t, but when I had swallowed the thin pease pudding it contained I discovered a piece of bacon at the bottom. It was attached to two tiny hooks soldered on to the inside of the dixie. I figured that the bacon must have been twelve decagrammes, the daily portion of six men, eight hundred and forty calories. This, added to the mush and the bread, made a thousand two hundred and ninety calories. On this I could last for a year. I wondered whether Todi had also received bacon. Two hours later, when three guards were busy working over Banvölgyi, I had my answer. Todi made use of the opportunity to communicate with me in Morse signals:

  ‘Hahaha! Hihihi!’

  My joy lasted exactly two months. During that time I spent most of my days thinking up poems and I found a remedy for my only discomfort: that I could never wash. In the mornings I brought some water with me from the WC in my mouth and with it I rubbed myself down from head to foot. The portion of bacon in my dixie became larger every day, more and more people must have banded together to feed me and Todi. One evening Pali Musza was brought in and put in the cell next to Banvölgyi’s. He was evidently on full food because the next morning I found half a kilogramme of bread in the WC. I left half of it for Todi and concealed the rest in my trousers. The next morning there were two pieces of bread on top of the bowl, one for Todi, one for me.

  Early in October I was visited one evening by Lieutenant Toth.

  ‘What’s this? You are still alive?’ he asked, surprised. ‘How do you do it?’

  For a while he looked at me curiously, then he shrugged his shoulders and walked out.

  He must have guessed what was going on because, though Helvetius continued to bring the food,
the dixies were distributed by the guard, helped by the informer Deak. In addition, from then on Todi and I were the first to be let into the WC and thus there was no more bread. In theory, my daily ration was again down to four hundred and fifty calories, but only in theory.

  The guards – with the exception of the Gnome – were used to us by now. This was evident not only from their attitude to me but also by the way they treated Banvölgyi. When he explained to them the rights of a detained person – not having been sentenced, he did not consider himself a prisoner – the guards giggled and joked with him. When the prisoners were beaten, they left the three of us alone and concentrated their attention on the newcomers. They began to regard us as old pieces of furniture, or rather, as domestic animals for whom it was their duty to provide. In the evenings when we were waiting behind our doors for the food, I did indeed feel like a pig waiting in his sty for the slops. The guard usually told Deak to put more food in our dixies and a larger piece of bread into our hands when the door was opened. They did this instinctively, without pity or complicity, the way a farmer will feed his cattle.

  But even so that food alone would not have sufficed to keep me going and I decided to employ every trick to acquire more of it. One day at noon I smelled Stable-boy distributing pigs’ liver in rice among the prisoners. I was suddenly convinced that I would go mad if I couldn’t have some. I pressed my body against the door of my cell and when Stable-boy approached I began to hypnotize him through the planks. ‘You dirty animal, you beast,’ I cursed soundlessly, ‘you handful of snot without will, you stupid henchman, obey my will! Remember what your schoolmaster told you thirty years ago about good deeds! Remember that here, behind this door, you have a Hungarian poet whose name will be remembered long after dogs lift their legs against your caved-in tombstone. Give me food, miserable sinner! Obey my will! Feel an irresistible urge to put down a full dixie before my door! Give! Give! Now!’