My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  I put so much effort into conveying my will to him that I almost collapsed with exhaustion. A few minutes later, as he was coming back, I repeated the whole performance.

  A moment later I heard the welcome clatter of the dixie on the floor.

  ‘All right, you. Take it in!’ he cried. In my excitement I didn’t even hear him open the door. There was a kilogramme of pigs’ liver in rice in my dixie. I ate half and poured the other half into my pocket for the next day.

  I repeated this game every fourth day when Stable-boy was on duty. Once, however, when the door opened I found myself facing the Nut. As I reached for the dixie he kicked my hand.

  ‘Leave it there!’ he ordered. ‘You move too slowly. You are not hungry.’

  ‘I am hungry all right,’ I replied, looking down sadly on the full dixie – ‘but this pittance wouldn’t fill the belly of a mouse …’

  ‘What? Could you eat two of these?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Repeat what you said.’

  ‘I said I could eat ten!’

  ‘All right,’ the Nut nodded. ‘You can take it in. But I am taking you at your word. And if you don’t eat up at least half of what you said – do you see this iron rod? Well, I shall beat your balls with it until they burst. Understood?’

  On the fourth day, at noon, the Nut took me to an empty, dark cell. A few minutes later he took me back to my own and locked the door on me. Ten dixies were standing on my bunk side by side, in all, twenty-six pounds of rice.

  I started with a well-prepared plan. I stepped out of my wide boots and poured a dixie of rice into each. Then I stepped back into the warm rice. It felt wonderful, because the weather had turned cold. Then I folded my trouser legs into my boots, as I always wore them. Next, I distributed the contents of dixies three and four into the other six dixies and ate up five and six without effort. I was eating away on number seven when the Nut returned, with a thick iron rod in his hand. When he saw the six empty dixies he gazed open-mouthed at my stomach. Then he searched my pockets, disturbed the thick layer of dust on the ground, looked under the bunk, inspected the three-gallon can in the corner, and finally called in his fellow-guard, the Gnome.

  ‘This bastard here has gobbled up seven kilogrammes of rice in half an hour,’ he said admiringly.

  ‘He’ll bust his guts!’ the Gnome replied happily and walked out again.

  ‘Now you will believe me,’ I turned to the Nut, ‘if I tell you that outside I used to eat a whole fattened goose for dinner and drink four gallons of wine with it.’

  ‘Sure,’ the Nut said and shivered. Then he reached for the still full dixies.

  ‘Leave those!’ I cried, throwing myself on the dixies as if I wanted to defend them with my body. ‘I want to eat them!’

  ‘Don’t you want to leave some for your neighbour?’ the Nut asked, pointing towards Todi’s cell.

  ‘All right,’ I replied after some hesitation.

  A few minutes later Todi, who had listened to the whole scene, knocked a cheerful message on the wall.

  ‘Hahaha! Hahaha!’

  Until late in the evening the Gnome came in every half-hour to inspect me as if I were his bride.

  ‘Well, aren’t you swelling up yet?’ he inquired. Seeing that I wasn’t he departed with a long nose.

  Having turned two of the guards into my serfs, paying tithes in bread and rice, my self-confidence increased to a ridiculous degree. Soon I won over the Mongol too by writing four- and eight-line poems into the albums of his peasant girl sweethearts.

  The enslavement of the Gnome presented great difficulties and I should never have succeeded had chance not come to my aid. One winter morning he asked me whether I should be willing to scrub the WC floor. This was regarded as a favour. I gladly agreed because it gave me an opportunity to wash myself at last – after five months – in the bucket used for scrubbing. I looked out through the window at the snow-covered pine trees, then went down on my knees and began to wash the seat of the bowl. But the brush slipped from my stiff fingers and fell in, to be carried away by the stream.

  When the Gnome noticed what had happened he took me to the guard room. He made me stand close to the table and sat down behind it to write his report with maddening slowness.

  ‘The notorious György Faludy has accomplished a sabotage action by throwing the WC brush into the bowl to endanger the hygiene of the camp and spread the plague …’

  He looked up at me repeatedly to see whether I could read what he was writing and stuck his left hand into his trousers pocket to move it slowly up and down for an unmistakable purpose. It occurred to me to put him to a test. I made use of my particular gift, namely that I can break into tears whenever I wish. I closed my eyes and visualized my funeral. I saw Suzy standing by my grave, blonde, emaciated, clad in deep black. There were no orphans: for that I was too late getting out of jail.

  ‘I request that the above-mentioned György Faludy be punished either by corporal punishment or by further withholding of food rations …’

  Heavy tears were running down my cheeks. The Gnome turned his face towards the small window beside his desk and the misty pane reflected his lewd grin. His hand moved faster and faster, his breath came in gasps and his tongue stuck out from between his lips. When he had finished he led me back to my cell but on the way he pushed half a loaf of bread under my arm.

  The third day he came back to my cell, called me a dirty capitalist and swore that he would starve me to death. All the time he was waiting to see whether I could cry. I was in no mood to play and he left, disappointed. Forty-eight hours later he would have visited me again had he not been prevented by an unexpected occurrence. I succeeded in talking to one of my friends which, though it was of little practical use, I considered a great moral victory because it wounded the AVO in its most vulnerable point. The camp authorities made a point of it that the inhabitants of the camp and of the cells should not be able to communicate. When we spoke to our guards we had to say our names in whispers and we were led to the WC one at a time. I could never fathom the purpose of this secrecy as we all knew who was in the cells and so did the inhabitants of the camp. A year ago, when a fellow-prisoner called Dénes tried to smuggle in a note through a cell window, the guards beat his head with iron rods until his brain was injured. He was taken to a Budapest prison hospital and never returned.

  On a November morning when the Gnome was on duty I suddenly distinguished the voice of Robert Gati, the communist journalist.

  ‘I beg to report that I have come to whitewash the walls of the corridor!’ he announced in a loud voice. I heard the Gnome take him to the middle of the corridor and stay there while Robert quickly but haphazardly worked away on the wall. The whole thing seemed highly suspicious to me. We had eight masons and two house-painters in the camp, old professionals, and Robert was certainly not one of them. As most of the work to be done was in the living quarters of the AVO guards, they wanted no amateurs. It seemed impossible that Robert should have been advanced to the rank of a house-painter since I was shut up. The only imaginable answer was that he had escaped from his place of work and grabbed an unguarded pail of paint and a brush in order to get near me. This boldness was amazing but just like him.

  An hour later the Gnome had grown tired of standing around and had retired to his office. The next moment Gati was at the spy-hole of my cell.

  ‘Hallo, George, it’s me, Gati!’

  During the next few moments he pushed a huge quantity of bread, cut into strips, through the spy-hole, talking unceasingly as he did so.

  ‘You have lost weight, but not too much… we are all relatively all right… they don’t drive us too hard… we talk a lot… André Gide has died… terror in the country is unchanged… democracy is consolidated in West Germany… this is good news… the Korean war is still on… and the other good news: Eisenhower has been elected president… everyone hopes that this will improve our situation …’

  A few hours later when the Gn
ome emerged from his office, Deak, the informer, called him to his door and told the guard that the house-painter had talked at great length with the inmate of one of the cells opposite his. He didn’t know what, the only word he heard was West Germany. The Gnome questioned first Banvölgyi, then Todi. Although they must have heard every word of our conversation and both knew who the culprit was, I had nothing to fear from them. The Gnome left me until last because it was me he suspected least. In the end he declared that we would get no food and would stand with our noses to the wall until we confessed. An hour later the eight house-painters were in one of the cells at the end of the corridor but they must have had alibis because after a good beating the Gnome let them go. We stood four days and four nights, then the Gnome pretended to have forgotten the whole affair. He must have realized that his superiors would hold him responsible for having permitted the house-painter to work in the corridor without being guarded.

  Early in December they stopped starving us and we all received full rations. I threw all my ingenuity into fighting the cold in order to go on with my work. I put several kilogrammes of dust into my boots, threw my overcoat over my head and stood all day in the tepid tent of my own breath. I thought up forty or fifty lines each day and after each new rhyme repeated three times all the lines I had done that day. In the morning I started out by recalling all my poems of the previous days. I was working on a carefully planned volume where the sequence was very important and this presented an extra difficulty. I hoped that my fellow-prisoners would learn the poems by heart and those who survived would take them out with them into the world, but I couldn’t expect them to learn the table of contents as well. After long deliberation I decided to start each poem with a letter of the alphabet, in exact order from A to Z, and thus the table of contents would be clear, even should I be dead.

  The days passed far too quickly. As I had no blanket I undressed each evening to the skin, filled the pockets of my clothes with dust, put my underclothes under me and the rest on top of me. I pulled up my knees to my chin so that I was completely covered and stuck the sleeves of my overcoat into each other. Thus a C-shaped pipe conducted the warm air I expelled down to my navel and I felt as if I were in a centrally heated tent. My face was burning with the excitement of working on a poem, and after the lights were put out I could always do twelve or sixteen more lines. By March I had almost completed the volume. However, my invention of fuelless central heating made me even prouder.

  Towards the end of the year, but particularly in the new year, the AVO men visited my cell more and more often. They gave me all kinds of tasks: to draw and cut out large letters in red cardboard, and the numbers 7 and 3. From this I concluded that they were preparing for Stalin’s seventy-third birthday. At other times they made me fill in questionnaires. They said I was to answer questions like: what books do the prisoners read? – do the prisoners like to listen to the wireless? – what are the prisoners’ psychological problems? – using my imagination to the full. These were questionnaires sent out by UNESCO. Mostly, however, they came to listen to my stories. Towards the middle of January, by the time I had accustomed them to listen to my lectures, I declared that henceforth I would talk only in the evenings. I had two reasons for this: first, that the repeated visits interrupted me in my work, second, because it was usually in the evening, after the lights were out, that they amused themselves by beating up my fellow-prisoners. I hoped to put an end to that practice. However, they accepted my ultimatum only after a few days’ hesitation. Each knew that the others also came to my cell, but now there had to be open complicity, because none of them could conceal these sessions from the other guards on duty.

  Usually they came to fetch me after roll call. They took me to the guard room, one took his place on the bed, the other by the stove. I stood by the window so as not to get too warm and talked until both became sleepy. Then one would take me back to my cell and return to the guard room to sleep – and there would be no beatings that day. I didn’t have an easy time with them. Of my experiences they appreciated only my African adventures, but they delighted in the stories of Boccaccio, The Arabian Nights, Rabelais, Marguerite of Navarre and Brantôme. Surprisingly enough they were fond of poems. Not lyrical poems like Verlaine’s or my own, but epic poems: the works of Janos Arany for instance and François Villon’s ballads, which I had to recite again and again as the weeks went by. I was even more successful with the work of a few secondary, nineteenth-century poets, in the first place two poems I had been made to learn by heart in school though they revolted me. One was The Polish Captive by a poet called Csengey, telling how the proud Tsar wanted a Polish captive to recite a verse of congratulation on his birthday. The captive refused and told his captors that his name was Koscziusko, upon which the Tsar and his nobles blushed with shame. The other was a poem by Reviczky, entitled Death of Pan. In this the poet elaborates on a story by Aulus Gellius. At the time of Christ’s death on the Cross the pilot of a Roman galley, called Thamus, heard mysterious voices in the night on his way from Greece to Italy. The voice commanded him to tell Emperor Tiberius in Rome that the ancient gods were dead. Thamus refused to believe the heavenly voice. The next day, however, as the galley passed near the Cape of Palodes, he heard from the shore the cries of the naiads, nymphs and fauns: ‘The Great Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!’ They liked this poem so much that I had to recite it almost every night.

  Early in March the Mongol came to fetch me at the usual time. When I stepped out into the corridor I saw, to my amazement, that my fellow-prisoners were already lined up along the wall, pale and shivering with cold. I was told to stand beside Todi. The next moment the two guards threw themselves on us and beat us and kicked us with such force that blood was spurting in all directions. When they came to the end of the line, they started again at the beginning. They repeated this performance once more, then kicked us into our cells. In the darkness I wondered what the cause of their fury could be. Had war broken out? But then, as Recsk was on the air route between Kiev and Budapest, I should have heard the planes.

  The next morning I heard Egri’s voice from the top of the slope outside my window, ten metres away. He spoke considerably louder than usual.

  ‘Do you know Reviczky’s famous poem, Pan’s Death, Tony?’

  ‘Who is Reviczky? I never heard of him,’ answered Tony Rainprecht. Then I listened to their departing steps.

  The dialogue was obviously meant to attract my attention. Rainprecht had been County Lieutenant, he was a university graduate and one of the most erudite men in camp. It was impossible that he shouldn’t have known who Reviczky was, or shouldn’t have been able to recite the poem by heart; just as impossible as for an Oxford don not to have heard of Robert Southey’s Blenheim.

  Five minutes later they were back again.

  ‘How did that famous Reviczky line go?’ asked Rainprecht in his agreeable, nasal voice.

  ‘The great Khan is dead! The great Khan is dead!’ recited. Egri enthusiastically, in a voice that made the sixty-four window-squares tremble.

  On the third day, towards noon, someone knocked on the door of my cell. I was so surprised that I forgot to answer. Never had anything like that happened to me before. Mongol greeted me with a loud ‘Good morning’ and let in the barber with the three-legged stool.

  ‘The Caucasian bandit has at last departed from our midst!’ he cried, and embraced me.

  I put my finger to my lips in warning and looked fearfully at the door where the guard usually stood, but there was no guard there.

  ‘To hell with them!’ the barber laughed and handed me a cigarette. ‘Yesterday Dentures went from one barracks to another begging the prisoners to forgive him. We hear that on the day of Stalin’s death a quarter of a million people went in procession in Budapest under red banners with a black veil tied to them. They covered their faces with their hankies and laughed themselves sick. The camp commander has completely lost his head. The guard in the towers has been doubled. But they are l
ooking outwards, not inwards. Do you know why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To see whether the Americans are coming. Well, in a day of two they’ll be here.’

  ‘Do you seriously believe this?’

  ‘Why? Do you think Eisenhower is an idiot?’

  ‘Not in the least!’ I protested fearfully.

  ‘Well, wasn’t it he who liberated Western Europe seven years ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why shouldn’t he liberate Eastern Europe now? He could advance all the way to the Urals without firing a single shot. Why then shouldn’t he come?’

  He searched his pockets for a match, and when he didn’t find one he called out into the corridor:

  ‘Be a good fellow, sergeant, give us a light, will you?’

  This time the Gnome came in and lit my cigarette for me. The first in nine months. I leaned my back against the wall of the cell and inhaled deeply while the barber was shaving my chin tenderly. Before he left he begged me not to forget him when I was a minister.

  The next day we were all released from the punishment cells.

  On September 17, 1953, there were only twenty-one of us left in the camp. Or rather, twenty, because the barber stayed only to give us all a good shave before we left. We were sitting on the ground in front of the barracks in the warm September sunshine. But only eighteen. The remaining two were sitting on the white-painted bench in front of the cells between the political officer and an AVO major with a tab on his collar that showed he was an attorney. When the wind blew our way we could pick up a word or two of their conversation. The major was explaining something, asking, begging, threatening, then begging again. The man sitting next to him was Uncle Magyarits, once pilot of a ship on the Danube, a West German citizen arrested, contrary to international law, in the Budapest port. He declared that he hated life in a people’s democracy worse than he hated jail and therefore refused to leave the camp unless they gave their word to deport him to his country. The other man was Menyhért Boka, former Christian party deputy, who had, two months before, submitted to the AVO a memorandum addressed to Matyas Rakosi in which he declared that the day was approaching when all the leading communists, Rakosi first, would be lynched by the people. As a good Christian he could not condone such a thing and therefore he suggested that Rakosi should resign and cede power to certain Christian party politicians, among them Boka himself. They would then hold democratic elections and guarantee a transition without bloodshed. Neither Rakosi nor the others would be hurt: on the contrary, they would receive good pensions.