The next phase of the procedure was unexpected. As soon as the attorney had begged our forgiveness in the name of the people’s republic, Florian, the political officer, handed us each a judge’s order placing us under police surveillance. And then – befitting the solemn occasion – he warned us that the law promised six to ten years’ imprisonment should we drop but one word about the circumstances, place, or reasons for our imprisonment. He would advise us to report anyone who asked insistent questions and to tell our families that we had been on a study trip in the Soviet Union. Then with a conventional ‘Here, son’, Victor Emmanuel handed us our letters of discharge.
During the political officer’s speech I had already felt a cool breeze on my neck; as if I had suddenly grown, my head floated near the ceiling and while my heartbeats reverberated on my eardrums I heard loud, melodious birdsong. A slight nausea mounted in my throat and the pitiful figures, petrified in strange positions behind the table, looked like gangsters in a waxworks museum. I sped by them, unseeing, like a visitor carried up by an escalator.
At the gate I turned back once more while the guard inspected our papers. The barracks stood dark and deserted in the basin under the strong autumn sunshine. Between the pillars of the ruined rope-way tubs lay upside down on the road to the quarry. Around the AVO quarters, too, it was as if life had stopped. Menyhért Boka was sitting, legs crossed, on the white bench in front of the cells, listening, obviously bored, to the attorney’s impassioned harangue.
When, at about a hundred metres from the gate, we reached a dip and the fence of the camp disappeared from view, Mutor, whom Gabori and I had led along by the arms, drew his arms from ours.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I don’t need help.’
‘But we are skirting a ravine, idiot!’ cried Gabori.
‘Oh, I thought you knew I was pretending …’ said Mutor, blushing. ‘I have no tumour on the brain. You understand, don’t you…?’ and he walked on quickly, surely, a man we never knew.
The barber wondered whether we should not skirt the village where they might beat us to death. As I remembered it, the road led straight through the village and the mountainside on both sides was too steep to climb. Besides, the railway station lay just inside the village. Pista B. Racz, a former smallholder deputy, himself a peasant lad, ridiculed our fears. He promised to be the first to enter Recsk.
After approximately thirty minutes of walking, after a sharp curve in the road that lay between a steep mountainside and a ravine, we found ourselves face to face with an AVO detachment lying in the ditch behind three machine-guns. They aimed their guns at us. Mutor moved to the edge of the road to throw himself, if necessary, into the underbrush. Gabori took me by the hand.
‘Be a man,’ he murmured to himself in an offended voice.
I slipped my other hand under B. Racz’s arm.
‘Let’s talk,’ I said, ‘or at least pretend we are talking. Justum ac tenacem propositi virum nec civium ardor prave jubentium… Whether we survive this or not, we can congratulate each other on the beautiful century into which we were born. Justum ac tena—’
‘I can see only ricocheted bullets on the ground,’ said Sandor Visnyei, former social democratic deputy, behind me. ‘When we were retreating from Kiev I saw bullets like these lying in the streets of the Stanislav ghetto. But the road and the pavement were also covered with locks of hair and spilled brains. Here I see nothing of the kind, so there is no reason to be nervous.’
From the forest we heard the feverish cooing of a wild pigeon. I looked at the ground at my feet and the light dust stirred up by my shoe. When we reached the AVO men they laughed in our faces and, after we passed, fired a round of shots into the opposite mountainside. Then they dismantled their machine-guns, picked them up and set out towards the camp. But first they turned back and waved us a cheerful goodbye.
Once they had disappeared beyond the bend in the road we almost collapsed on the roadside. We gazed at the grey-pink, bare rock-wall of the Zerge, and felt as if we had just stopped work after ten hours of loading and unloading.
‘Well,’ said the former social democratic deputy, when we rose to go on, ‘let us now say adieu to this socialist re-education camp where so many of our comrades perished and where we have suffered so much.’
‘And where we had many a good laugh …’ Gabori murmured in my ear.
An hour later we stole into the village, heads bent, hearts full of anxiety. Pista Racz walked some fifty steps ahead of us, squat and calm. The first house of the village was like all village houses: there were a few slender fruit trees in its garden, between them lacy cabbage-heads and pumpkins on their creepers. The whitewash was snow-white. The ground under the eaves bore the traces of last night’s storm; the rain had formed small ditches and tiny clayey craters. A large, eiderdown-shaped cloud sat round and comfortable on the chimney. It was a house that looked as if a loving couple had built it for themselves in spring and were walking around on tiptoe behind the tiny windows among pitchers of milk, in the fragrance of freshly baked bread.
As I was thinking this a girl between eight and ten years old came running out of the house, her long, golden plaits flying behind her. She put down a large woven basket in the middle of the road, full of pale-pink, tender-skinned grapes. When we reached it her grandfather emerged, a long, skinny, barefoot peasant with greenish-yellow hair and moustache, almost like a Russian peasant straight out of Tolstoi. He shook hands with all of us. When the barber opened his mouth to say something he put a finger in front of his lips.
‘We know everything,’ he said. ‘Everything.’
Then he took nineteen large slices of bread from his knapsack, put a pinch of salt from his pocket on each and – according to the ancient custom of hospitality – offered us one each with a slight bow. He must have been watching for us and seen us coming down the slope. In the meantime the little girl had sped back into the garden and was staring at us with round, blue eyes, from behind the fence.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 60