My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  The major talked now to one, now to the other. He said that if Magyarits would remain in Hungary and Boka would revoke his memorandum he would set them both free immediately. The old pilot, with his self-made pipe between his teeth, laughed into the major’s face. Boka only shrugged his shoulders.

  *

  The past six months had been considerably less idyllic. On the March morning when I was released from the cells, my friends had carried me up to the mountain in a veritable triumphal procession. There were no AVO guards around and the nachalniki kept their eyes on the landscape. We talked all day and reached for our pickaxes only when the talk began to bore us. We broke, on the average, fifty kilogrammes of rock; the norm was two cubic metres, which is five thousand six hundred kilogrammes. The most enjoyable sight, however, was the crack only fifty centimetres wide but unfathomably deep between the mining level and the mountain, signalling that very soon the entire plateau would crumble.

  Ten days later, as was to be expected, they recalled the camp commander, the Good Major. His place was taken by a lieutenant-colonel, formerly a shoemaker, an insignificant little busybody whom we called Victor Emmanuel. A short time after they began again to drive us, beat us and, at the suggestion of the chief nachalnik, Dezsö Tamas, they set up a so-called corrective brigade. This brigade consisted of the hundred and fifty most dangerous subversives of the camp, that is, the most intelligent and the ten most cunning informers. We were marched out before daybreak and returned to the camp only after sunset, after all the others had been herded in, and we had to crawl from the mountain to the camp gate on our bellies. We were bossed by the two most cruel nachalniki, Kerekes and Talian, we received no cigarettes and our daily rations were considerably lowered. Egri – who to his shame and heart-ache was left out of this brigade – put a packet of tobacco under a certain bush each evening, with the important news and messages written on it and as we crawled by, Gabori slipped it into his pocket. We were breaking stone in the quarry under strict AVO supervision. Victor Emmanuel often came to look at us, accompanied by the new political officer, a young, grinning fellow called Istvan Florian who was not even able to pronounce the world ‘imperialist’ correctly. Victor Emmanuel always did me the honour of speaking to me directly.

  ‘I am sorry for you, my poor boy,’ he used to whisper sadly, nervously rubbing his hands while I stood before him, naked to the waist. Then he would pat my neck.

  ‘I must go,’ he would say, ‘I don’t want the political officer to catch me talking to you.’ Then he would sink his nails into my flesh until blood ran down my back.

  At the end of April Egri sent us the following message on the pack of tobacco: ‘Eisenhower’s speech caused all to piss in their pants. Great improvement expected soon.’ The next day, at dinner time, when Kerekes came into the barracks to order the cook, as usual, to spoon off the thin layer of frozen fat from the surface of the soup and send it back to the kitchen, Dentures began to shout at him and called him a dirty swine. The next day we noticed a passive, incomprehensible nervousness among our guards but we could not even guess at the reason. Only in the evening, when no one was beaten up after roll call, did we realize that there hadn’t been a single blow all day. It was obvious that the guards had received very strict orders not to touch us, because they wandered among us sadly, their heads bent, and were so jumpy that we almost felt sorry for them.

  One morning, early in June, the mountain lurched forward to such an extent that the concrete pillars of the engine house standing on the edge of the mining level slanted. Three days later the steam engine slid from the engine house through a beautiful round hole it punched in the wall and fell over the precipice. The rope-way carrying the stone to the railway line eight or ten kilometres away slackened so that the tubs were lying on the new road. On the 20th of June we received the following message on the pack of tobacco: ‘East German workers rebelled. Hardware store of widowed Mrs Joseph Stalin bankrupt.’ The same evening a lorry full of fruit arrived at the camp; we hadn’t seen cherries for three years.

  The next morning we were led to the trench that, according to our engineers, was to hold all our dead bodies. Here Victor Emmanuel addressed us:

  ‘I want you to be as happy as possible in the short time you still have to spend here. Therefore I should like you to transform this ditch into a swimming pool and enjoy the pleasures of the summer. I have already ordered the diving board.’

  We went to work on the swimming pool, while two of us watched the sky for the American planes. This time even I believed they were coming. The same evening they disbanded the corrective brigade and henceforth treated us like anyone else. The next day – twenty-four hours later – we learned that Imre Nagy was the new Prime Minister. We read about it in the newspapers the AVO guards left lying on top of the woodpile, on the threshold of the toolshed and in other conspicuous places.

  Two days later I was fetched for questioning. A young, handsome lieutenant who had just arrived from Budapest received me.

  ‘I have gone through your file, Faludy, and read the confessions you made three years ago. You are a naughty boy, Faludy,’ he said, looking at me attentively but cheerfully. ‘Yes, you are a very naughty boy. You lied to the State Security Organization, you deliberately misled us. Don’t you know that this is a punishable offence? Or did you sign this rubbish under physical or psychological compulsion? In that case, you must revoke your confession. Right now. And at the same time you are supposed to give me the names of the person or persons who forced you to make a false confession incriminating yourself. We shall proceed against these imperialist saboteurs who have wormed their way into the officer corps of the AVO with the merciless severity of the …’

  I stopped him by raising my hand.

  ‘I am not in a position to denounce AVO officers while I am still in the hands of the AVO. I am, however, ready to revoke all my confessions.’

  ‘You are a smart fellow, Faludy,’ the lieutenant said and pushed a document before me according to the printed text of which I revoked my confessions made under duress but could not, try as hard as I might, remember who extracted those confessions from me.

  When I returned the setting sun was peering forth from among the slender trees of the Kékes Mountain. I stopped in the middle of the hanging gardens and looked down upon the swimming pool in which some of my fellow-prisoners were soaking their feet. A cool wind was blowing and I shivered because, for the first time, I realized that I was soon going to be released. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Won’t the boys catch cold, Georgie?’ asked Victor Emmanuel solicitously.

  *

  From the middle of the month the inmates of the camp were released in groups of ten, twenty, fifty a day. The first to go were the safe-breakers, ordinary criminals, smugglers, and then came the politically indifferent elements. Later only four or five people left every day and then nobody. One night a hundred and twenty of our comrades were taken by lorry to Kistarcsa with the explanation that this would speed up administrative procedure and with the promise that they would soon be released. Among them were Todi, Gati, numerous Catholics and former communists: approximately two-thirds of the camp’s élite. The selection and removal made us all suspicious. We had read in the press that Imre Nagy had decreed the immediate and complete liquidation of the internment camps. One night the AVO picked out the eight so-called Titoists of the camp and they disappeared without trace.

  In the middle of August, when the discharging of prisoners was accelerated, our fellow-prisoners returning from Budapest prison hospitals told us that the hundred and twenty who had been taken to Kistarcsa had again been tried for the same alleged crimes, found guilty and thrown back in jail. They also related that the treatment had improved in the other Hungarian prisons but that nobody had been released. Other news they had for me was that Bandi Havas, who had gone insane at 60 Andrassy Street, had been beaten to death a year ago by AVO guards at the Vacz penitentiary.

  Under such ci
rcumstances I waited nervously, anxiously, for the barber. I had often imagined my release in the years past but always in a different form. I had dreamed of a triumphant mood, of looking at the world through bars of tears. Instead I felt fear, disgust and, even worse, apathy. I wasn’t even certain whether I would be released or not. After the transfer of the hundred and twenty men to Kistarcsa our numbers decreased from day to day but there were still twenty-five or thirty men who looked at each other questioningly after a new group departed, because none of them was ever included. These men, or rather eighteen of them, were now waiting to be shaved. These men were the public figures, parliamentary deputies and leading intellectuals of the camp; the very men who opposed the régime more uncompromisingly than the average in their deeds as well as in their thoughts. The selection was extraordinarily clever of the AVO, which usually showed little sense for fine distinctions. The experience of forty months and hundreds of reports from their informers had made them realize at last that their greatest enemies were not the men who spat on Rakosi’s picture but those who talked about history and philosophy in their free time.

  It seemed probable that they would try us again or simply stick us into some other prison. But there were even more depressing possibilities. The week before, after a group of twenty prisoners had left and Gabori and I were burning straw mattresses on top of the hill, he had called my attention to a familiar sound shortly after the group of twenty had marched out through the gate on its way towards the railway station of Recsk. We heard machine-gun fire from the valley, approximately two or three kilometres away. The next day we listened again. Again a group of twenty marched out by the gate towards noon, waving cheerfully to us who were standing among the burning mattresses in the ashes of which we were baking potatoes. We almost believed that we had had hallucinations the day before, when suddenly the machine-gun fire began again. I could clearly distinguish the sound of three machine-guns, each firing thirty to forty rounds. I figured that fifteen or sixteen must be dead, three or four wounded and one untouched.

  ‘The wounded are finished off with a pistol,’ Gabori murmured. ‘But we are too far off to hear the shot.’

  We decided not to say anything to our comrades, but in the evening it turned out that they too had heard the machine-gun fire and had drawn the same conclusions. I argued that it was unlikely that the AVO would go to the trouble of writing letters of discharge, provide everyone with civilian clothes and hand them their fares, only to shoot them dead a few kilometres below the camp. It would be much simpler to lock us in and set the barracks on fire. Gabori declared that I had spent too much time in the West to understand this kind of logic. This complicated and cowardly method of committing murder was absolutely characteristic of the secret police.

  There were also other disturbing rumours in the camp. According to some the peasants of the community of Recsk received the released prisoners with enmity and beat them bloody with hoes and scythes. They refused another group free passage through the village so that the unfortunate men had to return to the gate from where, however, the guard chased them away. We heard that the AVO had explained to the peasants that we were the former land-owners who now wanted to take the land back from them. Remembering my adventure at the railway station two and a half years ago, this appeared probable and so did the news that the miners had prevented prisoners, all ‘former exploiters, counts, landlords and capitalists’, from boarding the train at Recsk, so that they had to start out on the hundred and forty kilometres to Budapest on foot. According to another rumour the inhabitants of Recsk hated us because ‘we had brought the AVO hordes upon them’. The AVO officers and guards spent their time off in the village terrorizing everybody, chasing the peasants from the pub and driving the locals to distraction with their carousing and excesses. Dentures and two of his buddies had, in the course of two years, raped every girl in the village whose father was a well-to-do peasant. If one of them happened to be a virgin, he whipped her afterwards for having bloodied his dress trousers.

  Behind this layer of fluctuating anxiety there was another, permanent and deep. What if I were not taken to another prison, not machine-gunned, not beaten to death in the village. What was the world I would have to face in a few hours like? After Beria’s liquidation and the East German uprising my friends predicted the fall of the régime. They thought it was impossible that the West should not take advantage of the situation, the acute palace revolt, the obvious weakness of the enemy, and would force the Soviet Union out at least from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. At first I shared their views but when, six months after Stalin’s death, nothing had happened, I gave up hope. At that point my friends began to expect that the régime would collapse by itself or at least that the structure of dictatorship would be loosened; but I thought that if the structure of dictatorship were loosened the régime would have to collapse, so that therefore there was no hope of any loosening.

  The nearer the moment of liberation came the more frightened I was. Was my mother still alive? Was Suzy waiting for me? Would my friends have the courage to talk to me? Would I have a place to sleep at night? Would I get a job as a worker or a night watchman? These questions, however, were only secondary. Formerly, when I had thought of my release, I had pictured myself in a free society. It had never even occurred to me that I should be released by a people’s democracy. True, I might perhaps sleep in a soft bed, see Suzy again, have matches in my pocket; there would be curtains at my window and I would not starve to death. Yet, instead of a triumph, this liberation seemed to me a defeat. I should again lose the intellectual freedom I had enjoyed behind the barbed-wire fences. Here I had the opportunity to be brave and honest. Outside, if only because of my family, I would not have that opportunity. Here I had cherished the illusion that, once released, I should be able to write my experiences; that my return from America and my adventures afterwards had not, in fact, been in vain. Outside, where a flat could be searched at any moment, it would be impossible to put down my experiences on paper and my unwritten memories would weigh me down like the fear of a new arrest. In here the solitude of the cell had taught us all to think, our knowledge of human nature had increased, our senses had become refined. We all believed that we had become more intelligent, more sensitive, more honest than before – while outside we would find a society that had stupefied, corrupted and desensitized its members. Formerly, in the people’s democracy, and here in prison I had always felt like a researcher who had renounced for a certain time the pleasures of life and had descended in a steel globe to the bottom of the sea to observe the life of the deep-water monsters, who would one day report his scientific experiences objectively and exactly, though without concealing his horror of them. Now, shortly before my release, I felt as if my steel globe had broken away from the chains securing it and would never be pulled up again. I would have enough air and food to last me until I died but I should never have the opportunity to report my findings. I should have to live in the globe until I died, observing the polyps, sharks and algae about which I knew everything there was to know, until I went mad with boredom and disgust. I had thought I should be covered with glory, whether I got out alive or finished in the lime-pit. But now I would have to exist, neither dead nor alive, in an alien world.

  After having been shaved we climbed up towards the warehouse on top of the hill. Gabori and I helped Mutor, our poor comrade with the brain tumor, who couldn’t walk straight. Each was given a suit of old clothes and a pair of shoes with holes in the soles. I alone was given back my suitcase which contained the somewhat bloody, somewhat mouldy, but still very elegant Burberry suit in which I had been arrested. For some mysterious reason the AVO had put a seal on the suitcase and the sergeant had always respected it. Not so the prisoners. In the course of the years the nachalniki had stolen my shirts, my bathing trunks and my handkerchiefs,, Then, when it became known that we would be released, a reverse process took place: my friends smuggled their own things into my suitcase until it was full of
objects I would have to return. I discovered in it Musza’s prayer books, a few beautifully engraved pipes and North-Eastern Inrush’s twenty portions of bacon, that he had saved so as not to starve to death outside.

  At the door of the staff headquarters we were met by the attorney who had talked to Boka and Magyarits. We were told to go past him slowly and he repeated the same words to each of us:

  ‘In the name of the Hungarian People’s Republic I ask your forgiveness for the injustice, the wrong and indignity you were made to suffer …’

  A few weeks ago he had shaken hands with everyone, now he only nodded.

  In the assembly hall of staff headquarters the political officer, the camp commander, two detectives, the Gnome and Dentures, and a few AVO guards were standing at the head of a long table. They seemed excited and sad. The political officer gave everyone a painful grin, then looked away and began to drum on the windowpane. Victor Emmanuel hung his head and the two detectives stood by like two undertakers. First, I was amazed. I had seen these creatures in many moods but never yet sad. Then it occurred to me that they were mourning the camp; their beautiful camp.