The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  I had a formal dinner appointment that I could not cancel. After dinner I had to go to a late rehearsal. The same the next day. I was a busy little rnan. I began fidgeting with my appointment book.

  Nemeth said he and Juci had read in the local paper in their village that I was in Paris. That had shaken them out of their lethargy. They had borrowed the money for the train. Otherwise they would still be there, Juci making handbags...

  My dinner appointment was with Malraux, and there would be several heroes of the Resistance present, men who had been parachuted into France and had survived the Gestapo. I could not be late. It did not occur to me to remember our dead friend, Maria, and her last, desperate embrace at the station in Lugano. Nor Nadeshda, standing alone on the quay in Baku.

  Nemeth said Juci was sorry she was prevented from coming along.

  -And how is Juci?

  -O thank you, very well. I hear you have married again?

  -No, not yet, but we hope to get married soon. I am sure you will like her ...

  And Karinthy? Dead. Rappaport? Dead. Attila? Dead. Muenzenberg? Dead. Cousin Margit? Yes, and her mother, husband and children. Never mind, we two have survived it, long live the Old Firm.

  I really had to change for dinner. We talked through the open bathroom door. We came at last to that urgent technical matter. Nemeth explained the situation: he needed enough money for six months to live, to write a book, to find his feet again. Otherwise he and Juci had no other choice but to go back to Budapest.

  I said that to go back to Budapest meant suicide. The Russian grip on the satellites would gradually tighten, everybody who had spent the war years in the West would be suspect and doomed. Nemeth agreed. We discussed the amount of capital he needed to pay his debts and start on the new life in Paris. It was not a small sum, nor a sum that seriously hurt me. I had no bank account in France, so we arranged that it would be delivered in cash the next day at his hotel.

  The day after the money had been paid out to Nemeth, I rang him at their hotel, and was told by the concierge that they had paid their bill, packed their luggage, and left by the morning train for Budapest.

  There is little to add, by way of comment, to this story. Nemeth had left no message. I never heard of him again. Through indirect sources I learnt that after his return to Budapest he was allowed to work, in a subordinate capacity, on a newspaper, and occasionally to publish a book review under his name. After the arrest of his closest friend, Paul Ignotus, his name no longer appeared in print. In July 1953 he was still free, the only one in our circle who had returned to Hungary and survived the purge. He was described to me as a destitute old man, huddled in a corner of a coffee-house, unknown and forgotten by all.

  On November 13, 1953, the Hungarian newspapers carried a short notice in small print: 'Andor Nemeth, critic and author, died yesterday at the age of sixty-two. He had been a collaborator of Nyugat and other Left-wing magazines.'

  When we were both young, and hopefully founded the firm', Dr. Rappaport, Nemeth's psychoanalyst, had commented: `A literary partnership is an association of two people each of whom sees a father in the other'. In this particular partnership, Nemeth to me had been the Mentor, I to him the Provider. By the time we met in that Paris hotel room, one half of the silent contract could still be revived, but only one. This would be my excuse, if excuses had any meaning. Freud says somewhere that the death of the father is the most critical event in a man's life. He did not mention that this event may occur not only once, but several times.

  XXXIX. The End of a Typical Case-History

  A MONTH after France declared war on Germany, on October 2, at seven-thirty in the morning, I was arrested in my Paris flat by two detectives. The next three days I spent in the company of hundreds of other suspect aliens--mostly political refugees from Germany and Spain-­at Police Headquarters. During the day we were kept under guard in a large lecture-room; at night we were herded, men and women, into the coal-cellar of the Prefecture where we slept on newspapers on the coal.

  On the third day the males were taken in Black Marias to the Rolland Garros Tennis Stadium in Neuilly, where we were dumped into the dressing­rooms under the stands. We spent a week there, and were then transported by train to the camp of Le Vernet, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. This place was officially designated as a Concentration Camp for Undesirable Aliens (habitual criminals and political suspects), as distinct from the normal internment camps for civilians of German nationality. It had the reputation of a penal colony, and deserved it. I stayed in Le Vernet for altogether a little under four months.

  Internment in a concentration camp during a war is in itself not a pleasant experience. In my case it came too soon after imprisonment in a civil war. Only two years separate the events of Dialogue with Death from those of Scum of the Earth. The breathing space had been too short, and the experience, therefore, particularly trying. As I have described it in detail in Scum of the Earth, I can, to my relief, pass it over in silence.

  As Hungary remained a neutral country until 1943, I did not fall into the category of enemy aliens, and my internment must have had other reasons. What these reasons were I do not exactly know to this day. I was arrested, interned, released and re-arrested without ever being interrogated or told the nature of the charge. According to one theory, the police did not know, or did not believe, that I had broken with the Communist Party; according to another, the Party had played one of its routine denunciation tricks on me; according to a third, Marshal Petain (then French Ambassador to Spain), had given a promise to Franco's Foreign Minister to the effect that all foreigners in France who had fought with the International Brigade, or had taken a public anti-Franco attitude, would be interned for the duration of the war. At any rate, Stalin's pact with Hitler had turned all Communists and fellow-travellers in France into passive allies of the Nazis and a potential Fifth Column. In this bewildering situation, the French bureaucracy found a welcome diversion in starting a witch-hunt among the detested anti-Nazi refugees; and as usual in a witch-hunt, the first victims were the innocents.

  Apart from all this, I had also been unknowingly involved in a grotesque incident about which I only learned, from French government sources, after the war. My last but one domicile in Paris had been a studio near the Porte d'Orleans, at 7 Rue Antoine Chantin. It was a furnished studio which I had taken over from my old friend, Johannes R. Becher--the Communist poet laureate and author of the `Hymn to Stalin'--on his departure for Moscow. Becher had lived in the studio with his girl-friend--slim, pretty, red-haired Lily, who looked like a Tanagra figure and worked for the Soviet apparat. During my internment, a routine search was made by the police at the various domiciles that I had occupied, including the studio in the Rue Antoine Chantin. There, in the water-tank of the W.C., protected by a water-proof wrapping, they found a scroll--the blue-print of the anti-aircraft defences of Paris. Sweet Lily must have forgotten it in its hiding place when she left with Becher for Russia. I had lived for nearly a year in the studio without knowing of the document in the water tank. Had I discovered it after my break with the Party, I would have been caught in the classic conflict of conscience whether or not to hand it over to the police and thereby to denounce Lily, who had always been nice to me. Luckily, I was spared the conflict. Even more luckily, the police did not implicate me in the matter. They must have traced back the origin of the document to Lily, who was out of their reach; otherwise they would obviously have levelled a charge of espionage against me. At any rate, the story of the loo-tank papers', like that of the pumpkin papers, is another instance of the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere which keeps intruding, all his life, into the Party-member's world.

  I was released from Le Vernet at the end of January 1940, this time, again, as a result of British pressure. But the French bureaucracy, sulky and hostile to foreigners at the best of times, was already riddled with potential collaborators who detested the anti-Nazi refugees, and six months later gleefully handed them over to the Gestapo. The
y were obliged to let me go, but only temporarily; they discharged me from the camp, but withheld my identity card, which meant that I ceased to have a legal existence, as it were.

  During the next four months, until France capitulated, the police played at and mouse with me. My civilian status was now that of a person under a deportation order which cannot be executed owing to wartime conditions. This entailed reporting to the Police once or twice a week, and at times every day, queuing up each time for three to six hours to obtain the rubber-stamp which granted a further stay of a day or a week, according to the mood of a police-clerk at the desk. This game was called le regime des sursis (reprieves), was played with thousands of political refugees in France, and led to a number of suicides among them. I kept up my morale by finishing Darkness at Noon and working over the English translation with Daphne.

  After this short breathing space--if it can be called that--of uncertain and precarious freedom, France collapsed. The roof fell in over our heads, and the chase was on again. When the Germans were only a few miles from Paris, I was arrested once more. I managed to fool a rattled Police official, bluffed my way out of the camp, and went underground. As the story of these events, and of my subsequent escape from France is described in Scum of the Earth, I can again confine myself to a brief outline.

  For a few days I remained in hiding, first at the flat of Adrienne Monnier, then at the Paris P.E.N. Club. I then got to Limoges, where I assumed a new identity by signing up for five years with the Foreign Legion, under the assumed name of one Albert Dubert, taxi driver from Berne, Switzerland. To complete the transformation I grew a walrus moustache.

  As Legionnaire Dubert I hung around for three months in various barracks in German-occupied and Vichy-France, until, in August 1940, I reached Marseille. Uniformed and moustachioed, I must have looked fairly convincing, for I was employed as a regimental messenger between the region's Headquarters in the Fort St. Jean, and the German Port Supervising Commission in the Fort St. Nicholas. The messages concerned only the daily parade state and contained no military secrets, but this employment gave me a certain freedom of movement for making contacts in the town. At the end of the month I linked up with three British officers and a staff sergeant who had escaped from German captivity and had been interned by the French. By various means we all obtained false papers, which gave as our destination Casablanca, the Moroccan port not yet under German supervision. Just before we left, I ran into an old friend, the German writer Walter Benjamin. He was making preparations for his own escape to England, by a different route; unable to obtain a French exit permit, he intended to walk to Spain across the Pyrenees, as hundreds of other refugees did. He had thirty tablets of a morphia-compound, which he intended to swallow if caught; he said they were enough to kill a horse, and gave me half of the tablets, just in case.

  We travelled via Oran and Oudja. In Casablanca we established contact with a courteous and versatile representative of a hush-hush set-up which I like to call `the British apparat'. With his help the five of us, plus some fifty other escapees, embarked on a 270 ton fishing boat, which in four days somehow managed to roll and toss us past the German submarines into the neutral harbour of Lisbon. After being congratulated on our escape by the British Consulate, my four companions were flown the next day to England, whereas I was informed that I could not go, as I had no visa.

  I waited in Lisbon--the 'Neutralia' of Arrival and Departure--for two months. The visa was never granted. With my false papers, I was again in danger of being arrested and deported, this time by the Portuguese police; and across the frontier lay Franco's Spain. Every day the refugees streaming into Lisbon brought news of the capture or suicide of our friends left behind in France. Europe was gone, and England seemed lost; in the Portuguese Press, London under the Blitz was described as `a sea of flames'. Twice the British Consulate in Lisbon asked the Home Office to reconsider my visa, and twice it was refused.

  In cell No. 40 there had been the hours by the window; in the concentration camp there had still been hope. To have come this far, and then have the door slammed in one's face seemed to mean the end of the journey. The day after the final refusal of my visa, I learned that Walter Benjamin, having managed to cross the Pyrenees, had been arrested on the Spanish side, and threatened with being sent back to France the next morning. The next morning the Spanish gendarmes had changed their minds, but by that time Bcnjamin had swallowed his remaining half of the pills and was dead. I took this to be an obvious hint of the language du destin, and tried to follow his example. But Benjamin apparently had a better stomach, for I vomited the stuff out. It was the second time I had given in to self-pity, with the same ridiculous result: but after that, I felt much better.

  I had two alternatives before me. The first was to get to a neutral country, either Palestine or the United States (where I had been offered a visa by the Emergency Rescue Committee); but I knew that to run away from Europe now would mean to condemn myself to life-long self-reproach, frustration and sterility. The alternative was to try to get to England without a visa-­which in view of the Home Office's refusal, and the Fifth Column scare, would mean another certain imprisonment or internment. Nevertheless, it was the only logical choice--according to the logic of the Europe of 1940.

  With the passive connivance of the British Consul General in Lisbon, Sir Henry King, and the active help of the correspondent of The Times, Walter Lucas, I managed to get without a permit on a Dutch KLM aeroplane bound for England. In Bristol, I handed to the Immigration Officer a written statement explaining my case--and was, as I had expected, promptly arrested. I spent one night at a Bristol police station, was taken under escort to London, spent two nights at Cannon Row police station, and six weeks in Pentonville prison. There I felt at last safe to shave off my moustache; the procedure was watched by a guard to prevent me from cutting my throat. When it was finished, I saw two sharp furrows leading from the nostrils to the corners of the lips, which six months earlier had not been there. I had always suffered from a preposterously juvenile appearance; now at last my face had caught up with my age.

  If I should write a Baedeker of the prisons of Europe, I would mark Pentonville with three stars. It is the most decent gaol I have been in, though the plumbing leaves much to be desired. In Seville the installations were more modern, with water-closets and running water in each cell, and you were allowed to buy wine with your meals, but the people were shot and garrotted without much ado. In Pentonville we only had one hanging during my stay--a German spy--but on that morning the guards walked on tiptoe and there was a hush in the whole, large building. It was nice to know that you were at a place where putting a man to death was still regarded as a solemn and exceptional event. It made all the difference; it was, as a matter of fact, what this war was about.

  As some of the prisoners were genuine spies and others genuine suspects, the electric light was automatically switched off in all the cells of our wing as soon as the air-raid warning went, to prevent us from making signals to the raiders. The warning usually sounded with the fading of daylight around four or five in the afternoon--for we are now in December 1940. As a consequence, we had to spend fifteen or sixteen hours of the day locked up in our dark cells, until the lights were turned on again the next morning at eight o'clock. With the black-out curtains drawn and the tight-fitting heavy cell­doors shut, it was so completely dark in the small cell that one could not even pace up and down without bumping into the wall. I had had no previous notion how dark darkness can be. The only solution was to lie on one's bunk and to listen to the racket outside. We only had two incendiary bombs which fell through the roof on to the wire-netting across the main stair-shaft (which serves to prevent prisoners from committing suicide), but the possibility of another one falling into one of the cells, with the door locked from outside, was a worry to the administration.

  The `dark cell' is one of the most dreaded punishments among prisoners. And yet, locked up alone in a pitch-dark, second floor cell du
ring the bombardments, I felt, for the first time since the outbreak of the war, in safety. This must sound like a deliberate paradox to minds not acquainted with the logic of the apocalypse. It becomes less paradoxical when one realises that every one of my political friends and every member of my race trapped on the occupied Continent would have felt the same, and would gladly have changed place with me. In Pentonville, I was one of the lucky few who had arrived at his destination.

  I was released from Pentonville a few days before Christmas, 1940, equipped with a National Registration Card as proof that I had regained my identity, and the right to exist.

  At this point ends this typical case-history of a central-European member of the educated middle classes, born in the first years of our century.

  EPILOGUE: Portrait of the Author at

  Thirty-five and After

  `Of living English novelists I like Koestler the best.' This

  was said to me recently by a friend in France, where

  Darkness and Noon has, in translation, enjoyed a

  sensational success. `He is wonderfully living', I

  answered, `but he is not English; he is not a novelist; and

  how far is he, as a writer, even likeable?'

  RAYMOND MORTIMER, `The Art of Arthur

  Koestler', Cornhill, November, 1946.

  THE day after I was released from Pentonville, I went to the Recruiting Office to enlist in the Army. I was told that it would take about two months before I was called up. I used this interval to write Scum of the Earth-the first book that I wrote in English. When the call-up order arrived in the middle of February, I needed just another fortnight to finish the book, and my publisher wrote to the Recruiting Office to ask whether it would be possible to obtain a deferment. The answer he received deserves to be quoted in full: