GYÖRGY FALUDY

My Happy Days in Hell

Translated by Kathleen Szasz

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PENGUIN BOOKS

To Suzanne

Contents

PART ONE

France

PART TWO

Africa

PART THREE

The USA and the People’s Democracy

PART FOUR

Arrest

PART FIVE

The Forced-Labour Camp

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

My Happy Days in Hell

György Faludy was born in Budapest in 1910 and died there in 2006. he was educated at the universities of Vienna, Berlin and Graz and left Hungary in 1938 to live in Paris. He served with the US Army during the Second World War and returned to Hungary in 1946. As dramatized in his famous book My Happy Days in Hell, he was sent to a labour camp on trumped-up charges for three years. After the failure of the 1956 revolution Faludy left Hungary, living first in London and then in Toronto, before returning to Hungary for the final eighteen years of his immensely long life. He was a poet, editor and translator.

PART ONE

France

In November, 1938, in Budapest, I was invited to a party at which the guest of honour was a British MP. There was also a fat, very conservative and melancholy baron at the party, as well as a few skinny, radical and cheerful colleagues of mine from the left-wing periodical financed by the above-mentioned right-wing baron. The principal subject of conversation was Munich and its consequences. We argued, shouted, gesticulated and finally came to the conclusion that Hitler could do in Europe exactly as he pleased. Everyone was excited, only the features of the British Member of Parliament preserved their somewhat waxy, statue-like calm as he explained quietly why Chamberlain’s policy was correct. When we reached this point, our hostess, a serene and terribly rich lady, no longer young, who made no secret of it that she spent a month or two every year in a lunatic asylum, declared that the topic and mood of our conversation reminded her strongly of the first pages of War and Peace.

Our polite British guest hastily changed the subject and began to question us concerning our plans for the future. Béla Horvath, a young Catholic poet who, regardless of the time of the year and the occasion was wearing a bright, checked jacket, black trousers and a Michaelmas daisy in his buttonhole, declared that he would fight against Hitler even if he had to give his life for Christianity, for social justice and for Hungary’s independence. He spoke cheerfully, without tragic pose, and in a low voice so as not to disturb the intimate atmosphere of the silk-lined, box-like little salon. He quoted a great deal from the Fathers of the Church, but even more from Chesterton. At the end of his address he joined his hands as if in prayer, raised large, round eyes to the ceiling and thanked the Holy Virgin and his pet saint, St Catherine of Siena, for blessing him with such virility: a virility proved whenever his sense of duty made him speak at mass meetings, whenever his rebelliousness brought him into court, and whenever his pleasure led him into the bed of a peasant girl.

Horvath’s impassioned speech seemed to have further saddened the honourable Member, who said in his reply that he had not come to Budapest to interfere with our affairs, yet now begged us to allow him to express his modest and honest opinion. We were all young, some of us – I for instance – almost children. He did not wholeheartedly share our radical views, at least not here (by which he probably meant that only Westerners were worthy of freedom; for us even Horthy’s semi-fascist squirearchy was far too good), but he was afraid that should the Germans march into Hungary we would no longer be in a position to express our beliefs. Our periodicals would be confiscated, our books seized and we would be arrested and hanged in secret. The best advice he could give us, he said, was to leave Hungary. It was not impossible that there would soon be a war in spite of Chamberlain’s efforts. After the war, however, we could return and serve the ideals for which, today, we would sacrifice ourselves in vain.

We paid no heed to his words because we were too intent upon venting our anger against Chamberlain on the poor man. Two months later all the guests at the party, with the exception of the Catholic poet, had left Hungary. The good baron didn’t stop until he reached India. Some had gone to America, others to England.

It was not the honourable Member who made up my mind for me. All he did was to sever the last tie still holding me back – my fear that I would be called a coward for running away. Yet I had good reasons to leave. I knew that if I remained I would have to fight in the Hungarian Army as an ally of the Germans. I knew that if Hitler won the war Hungary would disappear from the map and a few decades hence only the Hungarian serfs of the German landowners would still speak Hungarian when, after a long day’s work, they stretched out their aching bones in the darkness of the stable. Only if Hitler lost the war was there a chance of survival for my country, but even that was not certain. It seemed clear to me that in case of war my place was on the side of the so-called enemy.

I, too, had participated in the tragi-comic dress-rehearsal. I, too, had been called up when the Hungarian Army was mobilized in the days before Munich. We had marched through the streets of Budapest to the railway station, accompanied by a military band. At the back exit of the station, however, we were loaded on lorries and driven back to the barracks. In the afternoon we repeated the performance and in the evening we marched through town for the third time. When, at last, we climbed into the train, we had to take off our new uniforms issued by the government and change into old, ragged ones. At the same time we had to hand in our new repeating rifles in exchange for old carbines into which shells had to be fed one by one.

A few hours later I – then commander of one of the signal platoons of the 11th Infantry Regiment – lay with my men on the southern shore of the River Ipoly, two hundred yards from the Czechs. To the left I could hear one of the battalions of the regiment wandering purposeless in the under-brush, until they gradually dispersed to lie down in the shelter of hollows or among the maize. They had no guns and most of their officers had remained behind in the villages because they were afraid of an attack. On our right the fields were deserted. The poplars on the shore, high above the Czechs’ concrete shelters, stood in the moonlight like old actors wrapped in dressing gowns, peering barefoot in the door of the larder to see whether there was any wine left. The thick, russet foliage of the autumnal bushes never stirred, as if it were painted; the stage was set for the great moment of ultimate destruction. While the clatter of the Czech tanks echoed across the water I thought that if they attacked now the Hungarian Army would be routed in two hours and the Czechs would march into Budapest by dawn.

When, the next day, we received neither supplies nor reinforcement, neither ammunition nor orders, I contacted the Czechs by radio. The troops facing us came from Pozsony and spoke Hungarian. They invited me to dinner that evening, and I went. When I was filling my rucksack with tins for our soldiers before I left the Czechs, the staff sergeant asked me with friendly directness how long it would be before we attacked. We shouldn’t pay attention to their concrete shelters nor to their hand grenades, he said, they all had their white handkerchiefs and towels ready. It was high time someone liquidated that rotten Czechoslovak democracy.

Next day I was summoned to battalion headquarters in the village. A young, tall and nervous colonel hauled me over the coals and declared that he would have me court-martialled for treason. The next minute, however, after he had sent his adjutant from the room, he recited one of my anti-Nazi poems and congratulated me warmly. He begged me to forgive him for arresting me and particularly for not being able to provide a jail befitting my rank, but he couldn’t help it. Thereupon he accompanied me to a pigsty which had been thoroughly cleaned out and furnished with a large, wine-coloured couch and a huge, poison-green, betasselled armchair. He made up for this lack of comfort by sending me wine, cigarettes and books.

The colonel profited by the chaos following upon Munich to send me back to my detachment which had, in the meantime, plundered all the orchards of the region and fed itself by throwing hand grenades into a nearby fishpond. Shortly after that we marched into Southern Slovakia, re-annexed to Hungary by the Vienna Resolution. In the territories inhabited by the Slovaks we were watched with fear and mute bitterness, in the Hungarian-inhabited regions we were received with cheers and flowers. We put up in a Hungarian village where, on the second day, my windows were broken by stones during the night and two of my men were knifed in a pub. This occurred after the peasants had found out that henceforth they would receive half as much for their wheat but would have to pay nearly twice as much for industrial products as they had done under the Czechoslovak Republic. A few days later a special company, the so-called ragged-guardists, arrived in the neighbourhood. These differed from partisans only in that they carried on their activities not behind the enemy’s back but behind that of their own armies. One of their characteristic feats of heroism was to emasculate a Jewish jeweller in front of his wife and children and place the few gold watches he had in his store in a Budapest pawn-shop – presumably for patriotic purposes. As the Ministry of Defence had ordered the regular army not to interfere with the affairs of the special companies, my battalion commander was helpless. Soon we were ordered back to Budapest and only the special company and the gendarmes remained behind to complete the work of liberation. It was then that I decided never to participate again in the military operations of the Hungarian Army, however patriotic I might feel.

The second reason for my emigration was even more pressing. I had written a few satirical poems about the Hungarian fascist leaders. One of them, a deputy by the name of Andras Csilléry, had a heart attack when his malicious secretary showed him my poem after dinner; a poem the social-democratic party disseminated in the form of a leaflet. I had always considered this the greatest achievement of my life. However, until March, 1938, none of my victims had conceived the idea of starting legal proceedings against me. The day following Hitler’s entry into Vienna a great many leading officials, judges, prosecutors and intellectuals queued up before the arrow-cross party headquarters at 60 Andrassy Street, to be received into the party. They stood there for hours, many of them red with shame, for few of them truly sympathized with the Nazis. Still, they waited patiently and found comfort in the thought that there was nothing else for them to do since the West would leave Hungary in the lurch as it had done Austria. The atmosphere of the entire country changed from one minute to the next. A series of actions for slander was brought against me and the Public Prosecutor started proceedings because of my anti-Nazi poems. In one case I was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and it seemed probable that the Supreme Court would increase the sentence. In December, 1938, one of the department heads of the Ministry of Justice – Béla Csank – whom I had never met, summoned me to his office and urged me to leave the country as soon as possible because my arrest was impending. I received the same message from the head of the Budapest Police and from Istvan Antal, Minister of Justice. I was deeply moved by their solicitude, mainly because I had considered both my determined enemies. Istvan Antal asked me to let him have a dedicated copy of my poems before I left.

The third reason for my emigration was the mad urge to run away not from the army, not from prison, but from my beautiful wife whom I had married barely a year before.

I had met her three years earlier in the dusty reception room of the liberal newspaper for which I worked. I was sitting there correcting the proofs of some poems of mine when a tall, lovely girl walked in with a provocative, insolent and silly arrogance that immediately repelled me. Outside, heavy snowflakes were falling from a yellow-grey sky; not the first snow of the year.

She excused herself for the intrusion and explained that she had come to copy out a poem from one of the paper’s back numbers.

‘Take off your coat,’ I said and watched her peeling off her fur coat. From the way she did it it was evident that she was used to men helping her off with it.

‘The Faludy poems,’ I said, ‘are always cut out from the office copies and taken home. You won’t find a single one …’

At first she refused to believe that I was the author of the poem in question. She had imagined me much older, much more dignified. However, she was glad to have been wrong and began to praise my work to high heaven. I cut her short by declaring that I was busy at the moment but would give her a ring very soon and bring her the poem in person. A week later I called on her and asked her to meet me at the indoor swimming pool so as to make my intentions quite clear. She came but I was again disappointed by the way she moved. She walked towards me in her two-piece white swim-suit exactly like a small-town prima donna who knows – and knows nothing else – that she is the belle of the town and that all men, from the grocer to the mayor, are crazy about her. Yet her beauty soon made me forget her movements and the excessive make-up on her face. She had a low, rounded forehead, large brown eyes, a short, straight nose, long, exciting lips and a lovely figure. We sat under the sun lamps and I entertained her with a number of amusing stories. She bent forward to listen and involuntarily showed me her small, boyish, pink-tipped breasts. Never before had I seen breasts so beautiful, neither in the Paris music-halls nor in museums: not even on Titian’s Venus or the headless Aphrodite of Cyrene. My voice betrayed my excitement and, becoming aware of the reason, she straightened up.

‘Back!’ I snapped at her, ‘back as you were before!’

Obediently she bent her shoulders, then burst into tears. Suddenly I was sorry for her and assured her that I was not the kind of man her mother had undoubtedly warned her against, who seduced girls and then threw them out. She was surprised that I knew her mother’s way of thinking so well, but my reassurance comforted her. Ten days later we were sitting in a pastry-shop when I thoughtlessly declared that I would gladly marry her. She blushed with pleasure but made no reply. Later we walked to the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheatre on the outskirts of town and sat down on thick snow. We kissed until we sank deep into the snow and found ourselves on a wet marble bench, at the bottom of a funnel-shaped well. This is where I woke up. My love for Valy had lasted from the swimming pool to the amphitheatre.

On the way home, I suddenly remembered what I had said to her at the pastry-shop and a wild panic took hold of me. I would gladly have walked the ten miles to her home on my bare feet in the snow to entreat her to forget and forgive, like Henry IV under the walls of Canossa. But it was very late and I knew that her father – a venerable cabinet-maker – retired early. I tossed and turned all night, helpless and desperate, exactly as I was to toss one and a half years later when I was to meet Valy on the following morning at the Register office. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was insane to keep our date because our marriage was doomed in advance; yet I also knew that I would go because I had promised it to her that afternoon at the pastry-shop and because once or twice she had reminded me of that promise.

Valy was a faithful, honest, loving and selfless wife; she was an excellent housekeeper and she adored me. Or rather, not me, but a gigantic bronze bust of the Platonic idea of the poet as seen by a blue-stocking. When I worked she retired to the kitchen so as not to disturb me by moving about in her room next to mine, and sat motionless on a kitchen stool until daybreak. When we went out together she praised me so loudly and so long that I fled into the darkest corner to hide my shame. She imagined herself my Muse and believed that should she leave me I would perish on the roadside. Thus it was in my own interest that she protected me and bossed me. As time passed she froze out all my friends and acquaintances. Once, when someone gave me a pot of tulips and she noticed that I looked at the flowers three times in succession, she threw the pot out of the window. She was jealous, hysterical and touchy and because she believed that all poets were solemn and pompous she tried to cure me of my easy-going indolence and irreverence. She loved quarrels, the noisier the better. Whenever we quarrelled she enumerated all the crimes I had committed against her, from the oldest to the most recent, sobbing and screaming until all our neighbours woke. If I fell asleep during these scenes, she shook me awake and reproached me for being a wash-out, good for nothing, not even for a quarrel, and if I still slept on she resumed the quarrel in the morning.

On the afternoon of the day when we moved into our new apartment I went out on to the balcony and made a vow that I would take the first opportunity to get rid of her. I waited a whole year for such an opportunity. In the meantime relations between my parents and my wife became worse and worse. My parents’ objection was that Valy came from a relatively insignificant family and had received no dowry – to which I was absolutely indifferent. Their objections, however, compelled me to take my wife’s side and the more they ranted the more gallantly I had to defend her. My journey to France offered the long-awaited opportunity to leave her behind. Because of the foreign currency restrictions I could take no more than a few hundred francs with me and my future in Paris seemed absolutely insecure.

Apart from these three negative reasons, my emigration had two positive ones. The first I shall call the yearning for adventure. My life had become too dull, a simple matter of routine, and I hadn’t been in Western Europe for over three years. The second reason was Paris itself. Not French democracy, not French military power (which I believed would be able to rout Hitler in no time) and not the city itself, much as I loved it – but the culture of Paris which to my generation was the centre of the world and the shrine of our ideals. It was in the garden of this shrine – we thought – that the antidote to the German poison grew.

We loathed German culture not because of its content but because of its monopolistic influence. When Hungary was founded one thousand years ago the state order of the Holy Roman Empire was adopted. Our Kings’ advisers, our craftsmen and our artisans had all come from Germany. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century our urban bourgeoisie was almost exclusively German. All our intellectual trends came from Germany ready-made, like bread from the baker: the Reformation from Worms and Wittenberg, the Counter-Reformation from Melk, even the ideals of enlightenment by way of Vienna and the German translations of Voltaire’s and Diderot’s works printed in Vienna. Our school system was like that of the Prussians, German elements prevailed in our aesthetics and philosophy, our encyclopaedias were translated from the German. In our grammar schools Lessing figured with one, Schiller with three and Goethe with two plays in the obligatory reading, but there was no Shakespeare, no Molière.

We protected ourselves against this Niagara of German culture in two ways. The more atavistic and instinctive protection was a vulgar chauvinism which, though it was in many ways ridiculous, still seemed, with its impassivity and cocky humour, less ridiculous than the tragic and hopeless pathos of the adorers of the West. The trouble with this trend was that, together with German culture, it also rejected the rest of European thought and technical civilization. In summer, particularly in the eastern part of the country, passengers in the Orient Express often wondered why the girls and women working in the fields near the railway lines turned their backs on the train, lifted their skirts and displayed their bare, white behinds. The passengers may have believed that this gesture of peasant contempt was directed against the rich and idle travelling in the train, but in fact it was directed against the railway itself, built by German engineers eighty years before. When anaesthesia was first introduced in Hungary the famous Professor Magyar denounced this decadent and harmful western method and insisted that his own method, the so-called Hungarian narcosis, be used. He made his assistants strap the patient to the operating table and hit him over the head. When one of the country’s foremost newspapers sent one of our best writers to Rome to see the world and write reports on the election of the new Pope, he dispatched a few articles on the difference between stables and cow-sheds he saw in the villages near Rome and stables and cowsheds in Hungary. The rest held no interest for him.

The lowest category of West-lovers consisted of the dandies and old gentlemen dressed in cloth from Manchester who sat at the small tables of the Danube cafés, reading The Times even if, as it sometimes happened, they understood not a word of it. The Times was their letter-patent of nobility. The other extreme was embodied in Sandor Petöfi, one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century, who called Goethe an ice-cold, heartless German, despised his work and considered the ‘divine Béranger’ his unique, brilliant paragon. I adopted more or less the same attitude. My father read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms – I read La Rochefoucauld; he read Nietzsche – I read Pascal. The favourites of my fledgling days – Anatole France and Ernest Renan – were conspicuously absent from my father’s bookshelves, which were loaded with German classics and German philosophers. My father believed that only a German university could make a man out of a man; I, on the other hand, knew all the Paris metro stations by heart and the order in which the sidestreets opened from the Boulevard St Germain. I set out for Paris as a medieval pilgrim set out for Rome: with humility written all over his face but pride in his heart, because he knew that salvation was awaiting him at the end of his journey.

Finally, the sixth and seventh reasons for my emigration were that two of my acquaintances were already there. One of them was a young Austrian actress with whom I had spent my student years and whom I had not seen for three years; the other was an old politician and publicist, Laszlo Fényes, whom I had met but once, in my childhood. In those days he had appeared to me as a supernatural being. I had often thought of him since; his legend lived on in me as it lived on in the entire country which he had left over fifteen years before.

I had met Laszlo Fényes twenty years before in a small town in northern Hungary, called Zsolna, where my grandparents lived. We used to go there regularly, twice a year, in the autumn and in the Christmas holidays. My grandfather lived in a large, L-shaped, one-storey house opposite the railway station, looking out towards the mountains. Once upon a time it had been a guest-house and it was so old that every part of it and every piece of furniture it contained was bound to every other by sacred ties of friendship as if they had lived together for centuries. When someone knocked on the front door towards evening, the tall-stemmed wineglasses in the cupboard at the other end of the corridor began to dance like young girls waiting in the twilight to be taken to their first ball; and when a cart turned in to the back gate, the small kitchen window flew open by itself, remembering the servants of yore who used to stick their heads out when the mail-coach arrived, asking the coachmen to tell them the latest news.

Two rooms at the front of the house made up my grandfather’s pub – the same two rooms that had once served as public bar and dining-room. Slovaks in white trousers and black boots stood around in them, their slow movements stirring the pipe-smoke and the smell of their mouldy sheepskins into the penetrating aroma of marc-brandy. Dead flies lay between the panes of the double windows on stiffly extended wings, with their legs pulled in like oars.

The roof of the old house was flat and small with a wild vegetation sprouting from it. This I found all the more wonderful as no one in the capital possessed such a roof garden. In wintertime only the tiny red carnations remained, like patches of clotted blood at the end of dry, straw-coloured stems. The huge loft, however, with its window in the roof, where the most diverse mysteries awaited me and where no one but the draught and I knew our way around the heaps of discarded furniture, broken plates, cracked kettles and various odd pieces, was more interesting even than the roof garden. Great big wooden barrels stood in the corners in which I liked to squat for hours like a Robinson Crusoe waiting for his Man Friday. At other times I contemplated the blue and violet glass flowers, moved to tears by their melancholy fate, or played with old jars that had once held mercurial ointment. I found queer-shaped, opalescent bottles haunted by the ghost of ancient perfumes: perfumes used by sutlers and itinerant whores following the armies of Oxenstierna and Wallenstein at the time of the Thirty Years War.

I was happiest, however, when I was allowed to go to the mill and sit on the flour sacks. The mill stood at the bottom of the garden. My grandfather performed his daily chores with slow, familiar movements but sometimes he would stop before me and talk. He would fix his protruding eyes on my face, bend his neck – strong as a bull’s – and his beard, white with age and flour, fluttered in the draught. He waved his long-stemmed pipe like a fishing rod. He did not tell me fairy tales, neither did he explain his work. There were but two subjects that aroused his passionate interest: the secrets of the universe and United Europe. He talked simply yet excitingly, the way children should be talked to. Although I understood little of what he said, I remembered every word of it, and years later discovered what he had meant. While he spoke he watched me with tender, appreciative eyes. At the time I thought that his glance expressed only love for his grandson, but later I knew that his joy in me was partly due to the knowledge that when he died there would be someone left to witness the creation of the United States of Europe.

At times visitors looked in at the mill, acquaintances, neighbours, who sat on the flour sacks and gossiped. During these visits my grandfather did not light his pipe but went on with his chores barely listening, asking a question or two out of politeness for his guests. I, however, listened with the greatest attention. The men told of embezzlements and revelries, abductions and secret love affairs; they told malicious anecdotes about the king and the dukes, blackguarded the Prime Minister, Count Istvan Tisza, and called the generals of the monarchy a bunch of idiots. I felt as if I had fallen among conspirators. At home my parents never talked politics and – though with mute disgust – were resigned to the existence of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The human race living here seemed to me entirely different from that which I knew in the capital. The people who came to visit my parents did so to fulfil their duty as relatives, acquaintances or friends. They had no worries, no adventures, no love affairs and, what is more, they knew of no such weaknesses in other people.

My favourite among the guests at the mill was Mr Remy, owner of the little town’s only hotel. He was an ugly, fat little man who never betrayed the secret of his Christian name. According to my grandfather, when he came into this world fifty years earlier as a healthy male child, his parents, partly because they were Anglophile, partly to save him from military service, registered him as Victoria.

Mr Remy belonged to the rare category of angry fat men. He walked slowly, with great dignity, pushing his protruding belly through the door with care and circumspection as if it were new-born twins in a pram. His speech was loud, excited and breathless; he knew everything about everyone, or rather, he knew everything that was to their discredit. He never praised anyone, but when he spoke of himself his voice softened and tears of self-adulation flooded his eyes.

I listened with rapture while he told of dissolute officers who could not pay their bills, of duels following the terrible quarrels that took place in his restaurant. The fights were divided into two categories: fights between two men started by some drunken guest usually because of a woman; and free-for-all fights started usually by the circumstance that a Czech did not get to his feet quickly enough when the Hungarian national anthem was played. The names of certain county officials and elderly army officers frequently recurred in Mr Remy’s stories, but the name of Simon Pan, district administrator of Hatarujfalu, appeared in every single one of them. He was the bogeyman of the region and although I had never met him he loomed so large in my imagination that I often saw him in my dreams.

Every Saturday the district administrator drove into town from his country residence and set up quarters in Mr Remy’s hotel. He came down to dinner, sometimes only to listen devoutly to the music, and then retired to sleep. At other times, however, he would rise, walk over to one of the tables and with his long arm – according to Mr Remy it unfurled like the arm of a polyp – would push his selected victim in the chest. Then he would pick the man up and take him on his lap. When he was in a good mood he would stroke and pet the unfortunate fellow, beg his forgiveness, ply him with champagne and entertain him until late in the morning. When he was in a bad mood, however, he would grasp the victim’s chin, force open his mouth and spit in it. Then he would wait for the other’s Adam’s apple to move to make sure he swallowed the spittle. He would repeat this performance several times, then chase the poor thing from the pub with kicks in the pants. There were Saturdays when he skylarked with his friends, broke the mirrors, kicked the furniture to pieces, shot every electric bulb in the chandelier and stood drinks for all those present. In the morning he would drive everyone home in his coach. Then he would dictate to the head-waiter everything he had consumed: ‘I had sixteen dinners, thirty-five bottles of champagne, two mirrors, three chairs, seven window-panes and two cracked ribs at twenty forints each.’ Because, as Mr Remy declared with awe, Simon Pan was a real gentleman.

Sunday mornings, when the weather was good, Simon Pan would take up his place on the promenade next to the little town’s only litter-bin in which the fallen leaves and horse-droppings were collected, and watch the people returning from church. He would select a few – usually Hungarians of the opposition because the Slovaks were all loyal to the government – pick them up by the scruff of the neck and fling them into the litter-bin. He never took more than six. When the bin was full he would close the lid, climb on top and from there smilingly greet his acquaintances, friends and enemies alike.

Mr Remy told in detail about all of Simon Pan’s doings – but omitted one. One Saturday – as the barber living nearby recounted – the district administrator and his friends stayed on in the restaurant after closing time. Mr Remy served the guests himself behind closed shutters. By dawn everyone was drunk and Mr Remy thought it was safe to put three unconsumed bottles of champagne on the bill. However, Simon Pan was never drunk enough to overlook such a trick. He declared that he would deprive Mr Remy of his licence unless he pledged himself to fulfil certain conditions. Mr Remy agreed. The following Saturday Simon Pan dined at the hotel. The restaurant was crowded. The district administrator ate in silence with a face as innocent as if he had never in his life harboured an indecent thought. When he had finished he climbed on to the table. Mr Remy, whose head was as red as a beetroot, climbed up behind him, and knelt down. The orchestra played a flourish, Simon Pan lowered his trousers and Mr Remy placed three smacking kisses on the district administrator’s bare behind. One of Simon Pan’s conditions was that the kisses must be smacking or the whole performance would have to be repeated.

After that little event Mr Remy’s face lost some of its cheerfulness. He lost several pounds but continued to speak of Simon Pan with the same reverence as before and seemingly without resentment. Like the others, he too cursed the monarchy and its institutions but he accepted the representatives of those institutions as they were. He hoped that one day the monarchy would disappear but considered Simon Pan eternal and immovable like the mountain on the other shore of the River Vag.

One afternoon, between Christmas and New Year, I was sitting in my grandfather’s mill waiting for him to fulfil his promise and take me sledging. We were alone and the old man spoke to me as he usually did about the miracles of the universe. This time it was about the light which flies at a speed of three hundred thousand kilometres per second in space. Whatever happens on earth – he explained – disappears without a trace, but the reflection of the event flies along on the wings of light. ‘Imagine to yourself,’ he said, ‘a gigantic soap-bubble which grows and expands but never bursts. Well, that is the screen on which the history of mankind is projected. The creatures who live on the fixed stars, two thousand light years from us, are now watching the battles of Caesar or Alexander the Great and in two thousand years our life will be running on their screen.’

His hour would come soon, the old man continued, and he too would disappear, leaving no trace except the beam of light he would be sitting on. He wished me a long time on earth before I followed him but regretted we would never meet again, unless, he said doubtfully, Einstein were right and the fourth dimension of curved space turned back his light-beam. When he said that, he gave me a long restless glance. I was about to ask the old man to take me with him when he stepped on that beam of light, when suddenly I heard my grandmother’s voice:

‘Come in quickly, Father, we have company!’

My grandfather straightened up and made ready to go. Only on rare occasions did he go into his own pub.

‘I hope it is not some general,’ he murmured on the way.

A middle-aged, bearded man stood at the counter in yellow boots and green knickerbockers. He was drinking gin out of a beer glass. The horizontal figure-of-eight frame of his spectacles and his plain, country clothes clashed strangely with his belligerent, high shirt-collar and his stiff, rattling cuffs. His jaw-bone and his right hand were covered with scars that looked like notches on a yardstick – obviously souvenirs from various duels. His pink, protruding chin had also been cleft exactly in the middle by a sword, so that it resembled the plucked behind of a turkey. Anyone else would have seemed ridiculous in this get-up, with this exterior.

‘Friend,’ he turned to my grandfather, speaking in a sharp, jarring voice. Then he made a deep stiff bow. To my surprise, my grandfather took off his cap.

‘Sir,’ he replied. For a while the two men eyed each other tenderly, deeply moved.

‘I came about Simon Pan,’ the stranger said. ‘I want to finish him.’

He told my grandfather that he had taken the train the same morning in Budapest and had alighted at Zsolna because he wanted to reach Hatarujfalu unnoticed. He had hired a coach but they had been forced to turn back because of the snow. He asked grandfather to lend him his sledge. The coachman would drive it.

My grandfather immediately declared himself ready to oblige the stranger, the only difficulty being that he had promised his grandson to take him sledging. To which the stranger replied that children should never be cheated and that, therefore, he would take me along. Before we set off he gave me a small glass of gin because, he said, he would not take even a baby out into this biting cold without giving him a drink.

Soon we were sitting side by side in the sledge, wrapped in heavy blankets. On the seat, next to the stranger, I noticed a military haversack with the neck of a bottle sticking out of it. When we left the town behind the horses gathered speed, the icy wind hit our faces and we flew on and on like time.

I cast a sly glance at my neighbour. From the side, his face lost much of its bullying quality; with his long, straight, pointed nose he reminded me of the sad-faced knight, Don Quixote, as I knew him from a children’s edition of Cervantes, going to battle against the windmills.

When we reached the wooden bridge of Budetin and the coachman raised his whip to egg on the horses, the stranger jumped up and grasped the coachman by the shoulder.

‘You scoundrel!’ he shouted, ‘Leave those horses alone! I told you, didn’t I? Or are you deaf?’

‘We shall be late, your excellency,’ the coachman pleaded. ‘At this pace we shall never reach Hatarujfalu by nightfall.’

‘If we are late, we are late. I don’t care.’

In the meantime the clouds had dispersed and the sky was deep blue as on a May morning. Under the blanket we shared I felt the friendly, animal warmth radiating from my neighbour. His argument with the coachman had filled me with a glowing friendship for him.

An hour later, at the foot of a hill, the coachman again reached for his whip. My friend emitted a deep, inarticulate growl and his hand went to his right hip as if for a gun. The coachman must have sensed the movement because he turned a frightened face towards us.

‘Forgive me, your excellency, but it is in my wrist.’

‘What is in your wrist?’

‘The whipping of horses, your excellency.’

‘And do you know what is in my wrist? The slapping of your face!’

The coachman sighed with relief. The passenger was not quite the monster he pretended to be. A few minutes later, on a straight section of the road, he turned back with an insolent grin:

‘Has your excellency ever been to Battonya? Has your excellency ever met the squire Janosfalvy? No? I was in his service until 1904. He was a fine gentleman too, like your excellency. And he too loved horses, and every kind of animal. He forbade me to whip the horses. Because I was his coachman. Not even the cows could be prodded on his estate. It took his peasants a week to plough an acre of land. He would allow neither meat nor fish in his kitchen. He was the chairman of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. He lived on salad, like a rabbit. And he stuffed himself with raw tomatoes, like a pig. And eggs. And what a beautiful dining-room he had! Panelled walls and a chandelier as big as a piano. One spring the swallows built their nests in that chandelier. From then until late September the windows of the dining-room had to be left open. And the juice of the fledglings ran down the squire’s face as he sat eating his dinner, and the droppings landed on his bald head but he said nothing. He loved animals. But he knew no mercy when it came to his fellow men. Four families lived in every room of the servants’ quarters and he beat his own wife with a rope soaked in salt water. She was a sickly woman and soon died of it. His son, disgusted with his father’s carryings-on, moved to the capital.’

‘Have you finished?’

‘There is only the end to come. I mean the squire’s end. He died in the summer of 1904, early one morning. It took him a long time to die although he had two doctors attending him. But he had a difficult nature, he had. As soon as he had closed his eyes the bailiff entered from the yard, his boots shining, his gun on his shoulder. He went into the sick-room to make sure the squire was really dead. Then he opened the window. The chickens were scratching about among the dahlias. A large white cock, not less than thirty years old, sat on top of a rose tree. As usual. The bailiff took his gun from his shoulder, shot the cock, then shot the hens, one after the other. When he was through he jumped over the windowsill and ran into the orchard. He shot the jackdaws and crows sitting on the fruit trees. The shooting brought the whole farm alive, the gardener began chasing the ducks from the salad beds. You should have seen them, your excellency, how indignant they were! The footman kicked the dogs from the armchairs in the house and two of the maids threw the cats from the window in dustpans. The grooms reached for their cudgels and gave the donkeys a good beating. There was a lot to make up for. In the evening, when the young squire arrived from the capital, everything was ready for the funeral meal. The pheasants were plucked, the pigs killed and two cows were turning on the spit in front of the manor house. The house, the fields and even the village were drenched in the smell.’

‘What smell?’

‘The smell of blood, your excellency. Blood.’

My neighbour smiled but made no reply. Half an hour later the coachman halted the horses on the hillside, just before the top, and jumped off his seat.

‘The star.’ He pointed to the evening star pale in the blue sky.

‘Well?’

‘Shabes, your excellency. I cannot drive on. I am a Jew, your excellency.’

‘Are we to spend the night in the open because you are a Jew?’

‘I will go into the village and send a goy to drive your excellency. If I can find one.’

When we were alone we got down into the fresh snow. Now at last I could ask the question that had been turning in my head all afternoon.

‘Uncle, who are you?’

‘Difficult question,’ the stranger smiled. ‘I have been asking myself that question for the last fifty years but I still haven’t found the answer. Let’s turn the question around. Who do you think I am?’

‘Somebody who cuts people’s throats.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘You said so to my grandfather at the pub. You said you wanted to finish Simon Pan.’

‘True, I did say that, but I meant it figuratively. However, if we come down to it, you are right,’ he added pensively. ‘I do cut people’s throats. But only bad people’s throats. And not with a knife. I travel around in the country, visit the bad people, and then I write up what they are doing. And then they are sacked from their jobs. I have finished four hundred scoundrels to this day but there are many more left. I still have to travel a great deal.’

‘And what does your wife say that you travel so much and are never at home?’

‘I have no wife,’ replied the sad-faced knight. ‘But I have a dog.’

It had turned completely dark when a limping young coachman arrived from the village, wearing felt boots. Half an hour later we stopped before the house of the district administrator.

‘Why do you stop, you idiot!’ my neighbour shouted. ‘Take us to the pub, you goof, the pub!’