The Undefeated E-Book

George Paloczi-Horvath

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 542

Beschreibung

George Paloczi-Horvath was born in 1908 into the feudal nobility of Hungary. Despite his privileged background, he came to realize that his family's wealth was based on the exploitation of a brutalized peasantry. By the 1930s he was an active anti-Nazi; in 1941 he was forced to flee the country. Returning after the war as a dedicated communist, he was nevertheless arrested, tortured and imprisoned by the communist regime. He spent 1,832 days in prison, many of them in the solitary confinement of underground prison cells. Here he discovered the reality of a Hungary ruled on the Stalinist principles of fear, betrayal and face-saving double-think. In 1954 he was released, but after the failure of the Hungarian Revolution he escaped with his wife and baby to Britain.

Leseprobe

The Undefeated

GEORGE PALOCZI-HORVATH

For Georgie

Contents

Title PageDedicationForewordChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyAfterwordCopyright

Foreword

WE LIVED AT THAT TIME in a sort of catacomb like the early Christians and we talked about salvation. Our physical survival seemed quite hopeless. We were prisoners of an evil system bent on our destruction. But some of us in that prison cellar and in similar catacombs all over the country were in fact doubly imprisoned; our minds were in chains. The obsession which helped to build up the evil system still held some of us in its grip. That obsession – a curious sort of controlled schizophrenia – made the life of its victims difficult even under ‘normal circumstances’; it turned jail existence into an unbearable nightmare.

And then some of us were saved; our minds were liberated by the relentless shock treatment.

My salvation came in 1951, when I had already spent two years in jail. I was feverish for days. I went through a crisis very near to a nervous breakdown. Then I slowly recovered and began to appreciate my return to the normal world of common sense and common decency.

We still sat in the very same catacombs; we were still emaciated convicts, the lowest of the low. No old and sick beggar in his senses would have changed places with us, but we – the freshly saved ones – were intensely happy. After years or even decades of mental strait jackets it was wonderful to be free within our skulls. We watched shyly and humbly the re-emergence of our consciences, the restoration of freedom within us.

My cellmates of that period were not all pessimists. There was a grey-haired man who believed that in ten or fifteen years we might be released. Knowing the story of my life, he said that the greatest responsibility in our group was mine.

‘You are a writer and intellectual, Sixteen (we called each other by our bunk number). You know both worlds. You have to write everything down when you are released into the greater prison. You must get a room for yourself all alone. You must write at nights, for years, and when you have written down the truth you must make several copies, somehow get aluminium containers, place a copy in each, and at various points in the country dig holes and put them away for the future.’

He liked to talk about all the details of this task and mused with quiet satisfaction about the time when my manuscript would be found and the truth known. He was sorry that our country had no seashore. What a wonderful thing it would be if we could put our messages in bottles and let the waves carry them to the shores of free countries!

In time things took an unexpected turn. After three more years we were released into the ‘greater prison’ as we called our country. Then the nation started to sizzle with revolt. We attacked the dangerous obsession and the evil system which had the powerful backing of a huge empire. We revolted and fought, and for a few glorious and crazy days we even thought that we were victorious. But the gigantic empire sent its armour and fire against us and our country was turned into the graveyard of a revolution. After the holocaust a great exodus started and on a stormy winter night I too struggled through the swamps on the frontier of my country to safety on foreign soil. As I lay at the foot of a haystack next to my wife and baby son, I thought of my grey-haired friend and his aluminium containers. What unshakable belief he had in the power of truth!

Now as I write I am thinking of messages in bottles, carried by the waves, carried on the ocean of time. I must try to report the facts. After an infinity in solitary confinement I see most things in a different light. Like many others I am a Rip van Winkle of the mid-twentieth century. Many Western intellectuals have fallen prey to the obsession; many learned to know intimately the evil system. Many went through tortures, brainwashing and solitary confinement. Many took part in revolts and many escaped. The world in my time is full of survivors, prison graduates and liberated minds. Their reports are conditioned by their intellectual tools and by their approach. Mine is that of a writer who has a background of social anthropology and of history.

There was a time not very long ago when the art of remembering became of vital importance for me. I spent more than a year alone in a humid, cold cellar cubicle, without anything to read. Some eighteen waking hours day after day, month after month in a cubicle three yards by four, with a wooden plank for a bed, four unlovely walls, a very bright naked electric light glaring mercilessly day and night – an ocean of time and a human being utterly dependent on his brain as mainstay, as entertainment – and as defense against madness!

I tried to defend myself by reliving my past. I searched all over my memory, I ferreted out tiny bits of my past, concentrating alternately on various periods of my life. Most of us prison graduates with long solitary-confinement records have good memories. After our terrible periods of loneliness we were thrown into larger cells, and there we compared notes with others. It turned out that in trying to fill out the millions of empty seconds, most of us had evolved similar systems. Most of us were aware that through our repeated struggles in trying to remember everything, our memories improved. The mental muscles, it seems, grow stronger with exercise – and exercise they certainly had in our case.

The days had to be partitioned into various mental activities in order to avoid the despair of ‘nothingness’. You lectured to yourself, you did mental translation exercises; some people even played chess in their heads with imaginary opponents.

The most dangerous times came in the evenings when one was tired but was forbidden to lie down and sleep. It took effort to occupy oneself, to forget one’s situation. In the evenings I permitted myself the luxury of reliving my travels. It was great luck that I have been in some forty countries and could occupy myself with reviving some of my journeys. And again this reliving of the past strengthened the mental muscles. I first noticed this in reviving in detail the trip between Cairo and Istanbul. Actually I made that trip eleven times during the Second World War. The Haifa-Beirut-Tripoli railway was not built then, and the journey in reality took nearly five days. When I first tried to revive it in memory it took only two hours. (One could tell the time by prison routine.) Some two weeks later I let my mind dwell again on the Cairo-Istanbul trip and I did not get through it in my head in one evening. And at the end of my solitary-confinement period it took three whole evenings, because I not only remembered hundreds of details of the journey, the faces of the sleeping-car attendants on the Cairo-Haifa run and on the Taurus express, but also the various people to whom I talked on the trips and my moods and thoughts at various stages of the journey.

Another pastime was trying to remember the names and faces of all the people I had met in Tehran or Cape Town, Stockholm or Paris, and all the other cities I had visited in my life. I counted the remembered names and it turned out that my memory contained thousands of them.

But all this is only the superficial upper level of one’s memory. Going deeper, one has questionable experiences.

In the cellar cubicle I dwelt patiently and calmly on my early childhood. And even amidst such singularly advantageous laboratory conditions when there was nothing to divert my attention, and concentration was often not work but luxury – even amid such conditions very little trustworthy material came back to me of my earliest childhood.

From my fifth year the bits of the past started to multiply. But were those bits virgin memories – pure recollections uninfluenced by outside sources? I had reasons to doubt it. By digging to the sources I often found that I have talked to somebody about those bits of my childhood. So, for instance, I remember very well a scene in the garden of my grandparents’ estate when I was three. A naked little boy running towards a huge wooden tub filled with water. For many years I believed that I remembered this scene not only with my brain but also with my skin – and it was only as a millionaire of time during my cellar existence that I found out the contrary. It was not firsthand memory; what I actually remembered was only a snapshot of the scene.

Another frequent pastime in solitary confinement is passing judgment on one’s past actions and behaviour. There is a chance to face oneself squarely, to sum up and to judge. Doing so, one comes face to face with the problems of ‘personality’. Even the best of memory is not a quite trustworthy guide to one’s past; the thing would be, perhaps, to find the general and prevailing tendencies – in other words, to trace the development of one’s self. The difficulty in describing and dissecting your own past is the difficulty of a microscope’s viewing itself, a dissecting knife’s dissecting itself. In an autobiography you cannot help but use your own intellectual, emotional and moral tools – tools which are suspect even if you can attain a great degree of objectivity.

Common sense and common decency – these are in most cases the most reliable test of the story of a single human life.

About eighteen months after I ‘saw the light’, our prison conditions underwent an amazing change for the better; I was given a typewriter in my cell and managed to write nearly twenty thousand words of my autobiography, writing in English so that if the guard came in suddenly I could tell him I was doing a translation. When I was transferred to another jail I left a copy with my cellmate, Paul Ignotus, and when we were released we both succeeded in smuggling out our copies. What follows is much altered and expanded from that earlier version. But it is written with the same intellectual tools that were sharpened by solitary confinement, and based on standards of truth and objectivity I set myself when there seemed little chance of my memories being reduced to the printed word and when the act of remembering was a way of staying alive.

Chapter One

I WAS BORN IN 1908 IN BUDAPEST, the second city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Francis Joseph the First, with his ruddy cheeks and enormous cotton-wool whiskers, was to be for a further eight years Kaiser of this strange anachronism. In the Balkans the Austro-Hungarian troops were occupying a Turkish province called Bosnia, French troops arrived in Morocco, and up north the tall and lean tennis-playing king of Sweden handed the Nobel Prize to scientists for discoveries with questionable consequences. Rutherford was already at work and Lenin visited daily the library of the British Museum in London.

Some people contend that the nineteenth century really came to a close in 1914. If so I could say that I was born into several centuries. The twentieth was beginning to show its nightmarish outlines; yet Budapest was still a replica of Paris of the Second Empire, and my family was top-heavy with representatives of the old feudal times. They lived on their estates without really being aware of the liberation of serfs, the elderly uncles still talked more Latin than Hungarian and regarded the non-nobles as a kind of subspecies of humanity. If our age is really a gigantic watershed between quite different historical periods, those of my generation can rightly say that they witnessed a dynamic change similar to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. By a social accident I knew intimately some very intensively living relics of feudalism: huge red-faced gentlemen with Gargantuan appetites, thin-lipped matrons who always walked beneath nonexistent baldachins, or fussy old bachelors who preferred the company of bees, hounds, or game to humans. Later on, during various turns of the twentieth century I saw them peering into the bewildering, strange world in which they were as out of place as a huge molten gold watch limply hanging on a treetop in a Salvador Dali picture. Aunt Isabella, who taught me table manners according to the Spanish etiquette, once remarked that there is some consolation even in a piece of bad luck. The fact that I had broken my right arm and consequently my left was stronger was positively a good thing: it was easier for me to learn to hold the knife in my left hand as you must when you eat at court. She cold-shouldered the machine age and stuck to her carriage with – now very modestly – two horses, nor would she use those contraptions called elevators or lifts. She was killed by the slow blast of a Thermit bomb.

Uncle Arpad read only Horace and Virgil. In his youth when the family wanted to visit some relatives on a distant estate during the winter, they travelled by ox cart because the roads were impassable for horse-drawn carriages. When crossed, he boxed the ears of his peasants and he would not receive the Lord-Lieutenant of the county who had married outside of nobility. Human beings for him began with ‘chamberlains’; that is, people who can prove on both sides sixteen noble ancestors. A merciful stroke took him away before his estates in Transylvania were lost; otherwise he would have starved, for a nobleman does not work.

These elders longed for the time when our kind had still the right to behead people, and they treasured family diaries for items like this: ‘This Monday morning my lord Szemere visited me to sue for the hand of my good daughter Anne for his good son Geyza; after breakfast I heard the case of three villains and had two of them beheaded. My lord Szemere said those cursed Germans are to be blamed for all this villainy.’ They despised the so-called counts and barons elevated in return for treason by the Hapsburgs – damn their eyes – barely a century or two ago. The hurricane-like changes in the last decades of the sleepy Austro-Hungarian monarchy made them dizzy and distempered; they had to forget and drink. They drank a lot. Then they disappeared into family crypts, or eked out a bare existence in genteel civil service, or occasionally emigrated to the Americas, where surprisingly enough they adapted and became useful twentieth-century citizens, as did my two maternal uncles Miklos and Sandor. Within three years of coming of age, they ‘liquefied’ my grandfather’s estate of some five thousand acres; that is, they changed the land into card losses, wine, women and gypsy music and then went out penniless to South America, where one became a prosperous hotel owner in São Paulo, the other a successful railway contractor in the Argentine. My grandfather after paying their ‘debts of honour’ was left very poor. With the remnants of his fortune he bought a few hundred acres near Budapest at Imrehaza, with a small manorhouse where he never could entertain more than twenty people.

My mother came from a Transylvanian Calvinist family, the Kovacsy’s of Hadad. When she was sixteen her family arranged her marriage to a man of twenty-eight, Zoltan Paloczi-Horvath, a barrister who belonged to another old Calvinist clan. The chief factor in the alliance was that the male descendants of the union would all be royal chamberlains, able to prove sixteen noble ancestors on both sides. My mother, still half a child, was simply told she was to be married – that was that. She knew more about her future husband’s lineage than she did of him.

In the fourteenth century the Paloczi’s were oligarchs in northeastern Hungary, and one of them became Prince Primate of Hungary. Both the Paloczi’s and the Hadadi-Kovacsy’s belonged to that group of ‘rebel lords’ who turned Protestant when the Protestant revolution reached Hungary, a conversion which was due in many cases to political reasons. The anti-Hapsburg and anti-German nobility embraced Calvinism, the ‘Hungarian Religion’ or Lutheranism, the others remained Roman Catholics and were rewarded by the Hapsburg Kaisers with titles. Old Michael Karolyi used to tell us that his great ancestor was raised to earldom for treason.

This Calvinist nobility was proud of having a ‘longer ancestry’ than most of the Roman Catholic dukes, counts and barons. Till the turn of the twentieth century many families of this middle nobility – that is, those with no title – still had very large estates. But the liberation of the serfs in 1848 set the landowning aristocracy on a downward path. They began to lose their estates, now managed for them by dishonest bailiffs, and the one feature of modern capitalist society they did find useful was the banking system; they borrowed heavily, and when they could not pay their mortgages, bit by bit the estates were sold.

The Paloczi-Horvath’s had large estates in northern Hungary and in Transdanubia, and in the middle of the last century still owned some fifty thousand acres. The famous Calvinist College of Sarospatak was founded by two ladies: Susanna Lorantffy, the wife of George Rakoczi, and Maria Paloczi-Horvath, who gave seven thousand acres to the newly founded college. By the time I was born, my paternal grandfather had managed to lose all his land and only my grand-uncle Istvan was left with a large estate. So my father had to read law, which, apart from a commission in a crack hussar regiment, was then considered to be the only profession fit for a gentleman, if he must work at all. My father was a hussar officer in reserve and gave his name to a law firm in which his partners did most of the work and he most of the spending.

He must have been a rather heedless, superficial young man, something of a roué, with his side whiskers and enormous moustache, and his conviction that his name must secure for him a pleasant existence.

His name certainly did secure a suitable match and a very easy time indeed as long as the marriage lasted. His wife’s parents paid all his household expenses, and at dawn every Monday morning a cartload of the best their estate could offer in food and wine left Imrehaza for Budapest and the newly married couple.

The marriage was no success. They were married in 1896, in the year of the ‘millennium’, when Hungary celebrated her thousandth year as a sovereign nation. My mother was almost a child when her first child, my sister Margot, was born; she had grown up in a large and complicated household of which she was supposed to be the showpiece. Now she saw her husband when they gave dinner parties or went out together, but most evenings she spent alone while he disappeared into his man’s world of nightclubs and all-night card parties. During her pregnancies she almost never saw him. In her loneliness she escaped into a world of books and music. But after nearly twelve years of marriage, in 1908, a few months after I was born, she came to know of a particularly sordid affair of my father’s and not long afterwards she herself fell in love with a young bourgeois, the deputy director of a small bank. She braved the inevitable scandal, was divorced, and marrying out of her class, entered a different, kinder and more sympathetic world.

My mother’s second husband lived comparatively modestly; they could afford only two servants and they lived in a small five-room flat. My stepfather was a liberal-minded, ambitious bank employee, who soon became a director and later founded his own firm of chartered accountants. He travelled a great deal in Europe and entertained all sorts of foreign financiers, manufacturers and engineers. While in my father’s class people spoke Latin and German, and comparatively rarely, French, in my stepfather’s circle almost everybody spoke French, German and English, and often two or three other European languages as well. In my father’s feudal world they lived in the past and were conscious of their decline; in my stepfather’s bourgeois world they lived in the future and looked confidently forward to an ever-expanding European existence.

My mother soon found herself at home here, for her own family was relatively unconventional. Her younger sister became a painter and her brothers, as I have said, turned into successful businessmen in the Argentine and Brazil. She travelled constantly with her second husband and enjoyed their full life together, their common interests in music, theatres and art, and his wide circle of friends beyond the world of bankers and businessmen.

I grew up in my stepfather’s household and my first memories are associated with a big flat on the fourth floor of a house in Felso-Erdosor Street. As I grew old enough to take stock of my surroundings I learned that I had two fathers, ‘Daddy’ and a ‘Sunday Father’, whom my nurse took me to visit every Sunday. I did not like him. I kissed him because my mother told me to, but I hated doing it. ‘Daddy’ I loved because my mother loved him and because he was handsome and good; ‘Zoltan-Papa’ was not bad-looking either, but I did not like his looks. Somehow I guessed that he had been unkind to my mother, though she always spoke nicely about him. And there was a subtler reason for my dislike: the unconscious hatred I felt towards my beloved ‘Daddy’ for not being my real father was transferred to ‘Zoltan-Papa’ and grew into an intense bodily revulsion. Not only did I hate kissing him; I even took care not to eat in an even rhythm with him, feeling that if my soup spoon were to touch my lips when his spoon touched his there would be bodily contact. I avoided it.

I envied boys who only had one father and never talked to my school friends about the two-fathers situation, and when my younger brother Tomi was born I envied him; Daddy was his real father and he had no Zoltan-Papa to visit on Sundays.

The summer after my sixth birthday, war broke out, and I had to pay a farewell visit to Zoltan-Papa, and liked him better because of his splendid hussar uniform, his helmet with white horsehair wound about it, his long sword and handsome shining riding boots with their clashing spurs.

Of all the games I played, my favorite was ‘playing in my head’. My German governess, Miene, became quite worried when she observed how I used to sit for hours on end in the nursery, staring vacantly into space, doing nothing. I never explained, when she scolded me, how busy I was ‘just sitting there and not playing’. I didn’t mind being called stupid; I enjoyed sitting quietly and letting things happen in my head.

This is how it is done: you sit still and colours and smells happen in your head and body – a colour, perhaps, that makes me feel sore-throat hotness or Balaton coolness, or makes me feel forbidden-good. You can feel with your whole body things which are not there; yet no one knows you are doing it, no one calls you a liar, as Margot did when I told her about Tahiti. She herself had previously told me all about Tahiti, about its people and its coconut palms; she had shown me pictures. For whole afternoons I played Tahiti, bathed in its warm blue seas, crunched raw coconut between my teeth. Naturally I now knew more about it than she did – but when I described it to her she said I was lying.

This intense, compulsive daydreaming stood me in good stead in prison. Once while I was a prisoner I was given a handful of plums. They were deep blue, and some of them still carried on their skin that thin layer of wax which makes them seem light blue while they are still on the tree. I absently rubbed the wax of one plum and my hand remembered a former self – the little boy who discovered this plum-wax for the first time. I was walking with mother in the huge orchard at Imrehaza, and she reached up and picked me a plum. The afternoon, mother’s lovely gesture as she reached up into the leaves, the smooth roundness of her arm and the quivering summer air made the plum a royal present. I rubbed off the newly discovered plum wax, my fingers delighted in the sun-kissed warmth of its skin and my heart overflowed with happiness to have such a beautiful mother.

I see that summer afternoon through the haze of four decades in a light soiled by the scum of the boiling times. During an eclipse we once watched the sun through country-style dark glass, a piece of glass covered with a thin film of candle smoke. And now the years between cover my vision with their smoke, everything in my childhood seems darkened. But in my cell, as I fingered the plum, that summer afternoon unfolded all its splendours and showered happiness on me. My mother was humming a tune, little lights whirled in her hazel eyes, her bronze-auburn hair reflected sunrays that stole through the leaves; and her figure swayed slightly. I knew then that I wanted to be my mother’s child. Soon afterwards I was to hope fervently that my body was flesh out of my mother’s flesh, that there was nothing in me of my father. Soon I was to search myself, my skin and bones, the way my hair grew, for signs of my father – happy, always, to find nothing of him. Later on this manhunt changed into a fight against a whole set of ancestors lurking in my bones. But that is another story.

The summer days at Imrehaza are coupled for me with mother’s singing voice, with mother’s piano sending out to me in the garden waves of music that fade quickly on the afternoon air, an old tune that I still love. This was goodness, this was safety: I played in the garden, she played her piano in the big cool room and at any time I could run into the house and stand close to her, and watch her long, flowerlike fingers dance on the white and black keys.

I developed slowly in my first five years – all my life I have had periods of stagnation followed by sudden unexplained flowerings. I began to be enchanted by the world of colour, smell and sound, the sweet sensation of taste and touch; life soon became the theatre of my five senses. Then came books. Through them I began to guzzle up half the world. I read novels when I was eight, by ten I was a voracious reader.

Mother was worried by this at first; she did not relish the idea of a poor little wonder-child; but when she found I was racing through books looking for facts – facts about people, colours and scents, landscapes and events, facts about the world – in the same way that other little boys collect stamps or tin soldiers, she saw there was no harm in my reading. So I went on, tearing through travel diaries, historical novels, everything I could lay my hands on. Certain books were kept locked away; I pinched the key of course, and soon found out for myself how dull those books were, mostly about a lot of uninteresting ‘he and she’ business. I remember reading Zola’s L’Argent – the only thing that interested me in it was a description of Mount Carmel in Palestine.

I soon developed the habit of cramming as much as possible into my day, a habit which never left me – even under jail conditions I managed to lead a crowded life. By eleven my day was divided into several equally busy sections. I threw myself into my school life, read a lot, and devoted part of every day to furthering various ‘aims’. One of these ‘aims’ was to become captain of a bunch of kids I played with during the afternoon in the big playground of our city park. They were quite different from my schoolmates and I was different when I was with them. In school I was quiet, studious, reserved. On the landscapes I became a roaring tough. But most of all I looked forward to a half an hour or so of intensive daydreaming in the evenings. If, as captain-candidate, I happened to hear something which caught my imagination, I went on fighting and throwing my weight about, but filed away what I had heard as material for my evening pursuit.

One afternoon while we were playing handball, a big freckled boy – the captain I was planning to oust – was stopped by a girl of about ten. She wanted him to come and eat a sandwich; he said he was not hungry, and she shrugged her shoulders so that her blond curls danced as she turned away.

‘Who is that?’ I asked.

‘My sister Herta – a silly kid who makes up poems in her head.’

I was still bedazzled by her golden locks. ‘Herta who makes up poems in her head’ was collected for my daydreaming. The ball came flying towards me; I smacked it back, meanwhile making a delicious private rendezvous for the evening with Herta. Private, yet not private. I certainly did not want anyone in the real world outside myself to know about my daydreams; all the same I had my audience. I had developed strict rules for the game: my fantasies had to be rounded-out stories, acceptable not only to me but to ‘everybody’. I always imagined an audience of strangers, and while daydreaming, I had to take into account their imagined tastes, opinions, sensibilities. In addition, my fantasies were much more than verbal expressions; my audience saw the same images, shared the same bodily sensations, felt the same feelings that I conjured up in myself, and if I did not feel intensely and accurately while imagining my story I would fail to please and entertain them. The private theatre of my skull contained playwright, manager, actors, critics and audience.

All the details of my imagined story had to reach a high degree of realism, and on the ‘Herta’ occasion, I had to make up real poems. There we were walking in Tahiti on a cliff high above the summer-evening-blue sea, among the cocoa bushes with their flaming red berries.

‘Let’s make a poem about the chocolate of Tahiti’, I suggested. She looked at the bushes pensively. She was making up her poem and so was I. The spicy air of Tahiti was giving our cheeks butterfly kisses as we walked on in peaceful silence. And behind the scenes of my private theatre I was furiously busy, for it was evident that I should have to have poems ready for both of us. We had rather a long walk that evening in Tahiti; it went on all the time my real-life self was being compelled to eat his dinner, endure his bath, and get a good-night kiss from Mother. It was quite an ordeal to go through a normal boy’s evening and at the same time compose two poems, direct a whole play and last but not least, as an ‘actor-feeler’ not to have a single dissonant feeling in my body. My audience would have been terribly shocked, if, while walking with Herta in the enchanted air of Tahiti, they had detected the sensation of nausea. Yet the real-life boy had to eat roast liver with paprika, he had to smell the sweet air of Tahiti while actually eating this revolting dish.

At last it was dark in the nursery, and the world became less complicated. As we sat watching the short tropical sunset, Herta said, ‘Let me hear your poem.’ I repeated it. Then she said hers. By the time the last verse, softly spoken, dropped into the sea, I was almost asleep after a very exacting experience.

After all daydreaming is common enough, and there is nothing special about daydreaming while doing something dull. What seems to me singular about my fantasy is the way in which I imagined an audience-critic for whom I had to act with all my five senses, with all my bodily feelings. Perhaps this compulsive and rather obsessional activity had its uses. Here is my only clue: my daydreaming ceased at the age of thirteen, when I began to write.

Chapter Two

MY FATHER spent his summers ‘visiting’. He started out at the end of May and went from one estate to another, one of many guests who passed their time drinking, playing cards and tennis, hunting and philandering. He did not return to Budapest until after the vintage festivals in the Tokaj district in the first week of October. After I was ten he took me for a few weeks every summer to the estate of one relative or another; so I had ample opportunity to compare the two worlds – my father’s and my mother’s. Not unnaturally I attributed the difference between them not to classes, but to human beings, to characters, to families. My father’s world represented everything I disapproved of.

My father and his friends were impossible reactionaries. Even after the First World War they still looked upon non-nobles as cattle. They disapproved of general education, of humanitarian principles generally, and they were extremely chauvinistic. During the White Terror after the First World War and after the brief Bolshevik interlude in Hungary, there were many anti-Semitic outrages and I heard my father and his associates chuckle with pleasure when they read in the morning papers that some Jews had been lynched. The White Guardists who placed a bomb in the club of Jewish merchants in Budapest, killing many, were friends of father and of Uncle Istvan. Istvan Paloczi-Horvath, the lord of the Orkeny estate, who opened the front gates of his park only to royalty, was the first president of the Awakening Hungarians, worthy forerunners of Hitler and Belsen and Dachau. These were the people who in the nineteen-thirties went around bragging that thanks to them fascism and Nazism were really invented in Hungary.

These, then, were the people who started me on the way to the obsession. It was enough for my father to utter any opinion for me to embrace instantly the exact opposite. Father was reactionary, I became progressive; Father was anti-Semitic, I started to befriend Jewish boys; Father was for the Germans, against the French and British, so I naturally became anti-German, determined to speak perfect French and English. Father had a contempt for America, ‘a nation of salesmen’, hence when the time came, I broke with his family and went to an American college.

According to the divorce settlement I was to remain with my mother till I completed my fifteenth year. After that I was to live with my father. At the end of the school year when I was fifteen, I was transferred to my father’s care and he took me to Orkeny, to my uncle’s estate. There was the usual crowd of retired hussar colonels, reactionary politicians and White Guardists. I befriended a young bachelor of agriculture named Labay in the estate management office, who showed me around. Behind the huge park, beyond the estate office, behind the stables lived the estate servants in long rows of miserable huts, each containing two tiny rooms and a kitchen. Every hut was shared by two families, often by twelve to fifteen people. Till then I had had a vague idea of the picture-book peasant, the salt of the earth, the fountain of cultural rejuvenation, the backbone of the nation. I shall never forget my first visit to a peasant hut on my uncle’s estate.

The air in the hut was a fog of dishwater and sour sweat and rancid fat and wet linen. Opposite the small door, by the cooking stove, two middle-aged and two old women were standing humbly to attention, greeting us with the customary ‘God’s welcome to your honours!’ Through the damp darkness sharp sunlight projected our shadows on the wall behind the women. Several very dirty babies were playing on the muddy ground while other children stood about gaping at us. I saw as through a mist several beds piled high with pillows, heaps of rags in the corners, a fly-blown picture of Kossuth and a few cooking utensils hanging on the wall.

In a minute or two I was out again in the brilliant summer sunshine. Labay understood my hurry.

‘They stink, don’t they? Of course for us, used to the smell of the stables, it’s not so bad. Still, I never go into a hut if I can help it – only I wanted to fix up tonight with Mary. A well-trained girl – always washes herself in my room with scented soap, before the ‘darning’ … Don’t make such a sour face, old man. I tell you what. Let me fix you up with a girl for tonight. You can have old Jaszai’s room, it’s next to mine. You’ll give her a few crowns, of course …?’

‘You mean to say that all these girls are prostitutes? That any of you can have them for a few crowns?’

‘Prostitute is a city word. Anyhow, they aren’t prostitutes. It’s the custom, or tradition if you like, that we landowners, estate manager, overseers, ‘use’ the girls. Incidentally this is their expression. When we sleep with their womenfolk, they say we “use” them.’

‘And this goes on all over Hungary?’

‘As far as I know, yes. Of course only on the estates. We use the girls if we feel like it and they are in no position to refuse. But we never order married women to come in. There would be trouble. And they age too quickly, anyhow. How old do you think the woman next to the stove was? … Forty-five, my foot, she is a good deal less than thirty. But then, five children, a lot of work … well, so it is.’

‘How many of them live in these huts?’

‘Two families. Maybe eleven or twelve people – I don’t know. Why this sudden interest? What’s bitten you? In a reforming mood?’

‘No, I’d just like to know. How much is their pay?’

‘That’s not so easy to answer. They get almost no money at all, but they have free lodging, they get some wheat, barley and so on and they can keep chickens.’

‘But, practically speaking, they are serfs?’

‘Well, if you want to play with words … They are poor. The poor are poor. That’s all. The thing is not to be poor. There are about a hundred million people now in Europe who live like your uncle’s estate servants and some thousand millions who are even worse off in places like Asia. So what? Come on, the girls want to play tennis.’

‘And you know all this and go on … and “use” Mary and … I think it’s awful.’

‘We’ll talk about this, old man, some other time. Now come on or we’ll be late for tennis. There is only an hour till sunset.’

… That summer afternoon; the little gate leading to the servants’ quarters; the brilliant green grass, the red tennis court, the dazzling white dresses of my cousins, girls whom one doesn’t ‘use’; the big redfaced men of the family; the endless dinner in the huge dining room – rich spicy food washed down with cool, dry wine; uncle’s shortclipped pronouncements, Father’s long-winded political arguments and I, all the while remembering the nauseating smell of the hut, wondering what’s happening now between Labay and the girl he is using and knowing that my Europe is just as lifeless and phony as Father’s, that the famous human chauvinism, the intellect accepting responsibility for entire humanity lives on a small isolated park, that I am wrapped up in the cotton-wool of my class, that my entire body, my brain and my nostrils are foreigners to millions of Hungarians, millions of Europeans, that any middle-class intellectual of Asia or Africa is probably much less foreign to me than this peasant Mary or her father, less exotic than the old woman over there saying ‘God’s welcome to your honours’, that …

And later, walking in the dark park, flashes of summer lightning, the feeling of being alone in the world, or of being between two worlds – I had left a world behind me. Now the males of the species were gathered round a table in a kiosk at the far end of the park so as not to disturb the ladies with their roaring. The females in the manorhouse novel-reading, gossiping, divided into subspecies: my grandmother’s tough uncomplicated world, the aunts’ provincial world, and my cousin Rita’s postwar world. Now down in the park a gypsy band warms up, plays old folk songs and fake folk songs; Uncle Geza sings in his throaty bass, beginning in a whisper and ending in a roar, the drinkers’ mood swaying up and down the emotional scale from brash gaiety to patriotic melancholy, the bandleader watching the most important faces, anticipating their change of mood and changing from one tune to another.

There are hundreds of other worlds – the fat old bailiff’s world, the young agriculturists and overseers, playing cards, getting drunk, ‘using’ girls. And vast unknown worlds – the peasants and workers here in Hungary, in other countries and continents. And the worlds inside people, the world of sex that lights up pictures in the mind of Labay and the peasant girl, of the unknown girl he promised to get for me, a plump girl squatting half-undressed on a bed, her face like the janitor’s daughter in Budapest.

What happened then? I only remember standing under a tree, the glow of a cigarette end, and Labay saying ‘The little bitch didn’t turn up after all. Come up to my room and have a drink.’

A small white-washed room, poorly furnished with a bed and a shelf of books which I examined while Labay was getting out the wine. History, philosophy, religion. … many of them given by a Father Toth to a Joseph Leibner.

‘Who is Leibner?’

‘I was. I changed my name before I went to the University. A Hungarian should have a Hungarian name … Well, here’s how.’

We drank.

‘But I thought you were a Calvinist?’

‘I am. But I was a Catholic before.’

‘Of course! I heard you were a convert, that’s why Grandmother likes you so much –’

‘Drink up, old boy … Convert my foot. I simply grew to hate the good fathers. And one’s got to have some sort of religion – officially. And a Calvinist’s the thing to be nowadays in Hungary, if you want to get on. Horthy’s one. And Bethlen and most of the high-ups.’

‘You’re a cynic, aren’t you?’

‘Words, old boy, words. I am a realist. Come on – drink up. You’re an idealist, of course. You wait – life will get you.’

‘I believe your cynicism’s just a pose, Joseph.’

‘Clever fellow! What a discovery! … “Pose” … words again … well, have it your own way. I’ll tell you what your pose is – the young, clean genius, the … Tell you what. Let’s open a bottle of brandy, it’ll be good after wine. I don’t mind now – the little bitch not turning up. She’ll come tomorrow. Nice hard breasts, beautiful white belly. Won’t undress until I’ve turned out the light, can’t see her properly unless there’s moonlight. But I’ll train her.’

‘Does she enjoy – well – sleeping with you?’

‘I don’t know and couldn’t care less. I like my fun. I’m not sentimental. You know something? You’re all right if you have nothing to do with the girl – nothing as far as your soul is concerned. I’m going to be bloody careful not to get involved with a girl – like Rita, for instance – that I might lose my head over and spoil my career. Not till I can get married. I mean to marry well, some day. I shall be fairly important myself … let’s drink to the future!’

The rain was falling in torrents. Labay drank a lot and I finally made him angry by trying to get under his defensive armour, uncover some past injury, make him admit he was not indifferent to the sufferings of the estate servants.

At last he burst out, ‘Now listen, little brother, I know all about you. Your old man bores us to tears talking about you when you’re not around. I know you guzzle up all the books you can lay your hands on. You don’t make a bad use of the education your family’s buying for you – that is, the education the estate servants are buying you. And when you talk about me getting hurt in the past you’re damned right I was. All right – I’m a cynic, a go-getter, anything you like. And why? Because of poverty.’

His father had died when he was eight years old, leaving his mother with debts and a son to educate.

‘All that stuff about a mother struggling to educate her son – you’ve no doubt read about it in books. In reality it means a room smelling of stale cabbage, a stinking w.c. in the corridor, a tenement full of nagging women, Saturday night brawls, going to school in clothes you’ve outgrown, headaches and humiliations, ticked off by teacher for the books you “forgot” to buy …’

When he was fourteen his mother couldn’t afford to keep him at school any longer. But he was clever and wanted to finish his education and his mother desperately wanted him to get back into his father’s class, to become a gentleman. So he thought of a plan: he would tell the priest at school that he had wanted to serve Holy Church himself, but his mother had no money, so he had given up his dream and resigned himself to being apprenticed to some trade. He knew well enough that the Church would have him educated if he promised to become a priest. His mother and he had terrific rows over it, for she had high moral principles.

‘But in the end she agreed that I should, so to speak, embezzle an education from Mother Church. It wasn’t easy, with her principles. But of course if you’re poor enough you can’t afford them. I kept on telling her I’d repay them, after I’d passed my exams I’d have to tell them I’d lost my faith, but I’d work hard to become a lawyer, I’d repay them everything. After all, they couldn’t take back the knowledge they bought for me, spoon by spoon from my skull.’

He’d suffered for it, too. Living a sanctimonious lie for years, keeping up the pretence of saintliness when he wanted to drink, go out and get a girl … pretending he liked the very poverty he hated like poison. He grew to hate them so much that after leaving them, after the nauseating scenes following his ‘loss of faith’, he became a Calvinist.

‘So that’s the story of my conversion. If I was a sentimentalist like you I’d say I was just an escaped prisoner of poverty. It’ll never catch up with me, I promise you. I’m in my last year at the university. I’ve a job to keep me going. I play a part in university politics – I’m a member of the ‘Awakening Hungarians’. Am I an anti-Semite? Brother, I don’t believe in anything … I believe in myself … in this good brandy. No principles, no convictions – I carry no ballast! I’m as free as air. The road’s clear ahead of me! You thought me the typical agronomist? Well, so I am if I want to be. Husky chap in riding boots, smelling of manure, kicking the peasants on their backsides, getting drunk when I want to …’

My head was splitting. This is awful, I thought, I must save Labay. But first I’m going to be sick. I was. Labay gave me some black coffee, then both of us dozed off. His alarm clock went off at two-thirty. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you’d better start the day with me.’ We ate smoked ham and black bread, drank some sligovitz and went out through the dark park to the cowsheds.

Labay, bad-tempered, cursed the men, kicked a cowman who was half asleep. Men groaned, got slowly onto their feet, spat, then stood at attention when they saw us, saying ‘Good morning, your honours!’ Others were already tending the cows, moving sluggishly in the heavy, dung-smelling air. We went into a shed where harvesters were just getting up, a single oil lamp throwing a flickering light on young boys and girls, men and women, as they dressed. The animal noises, the trampling, the human noises, broken by a polite ‘Good morning, your honours,’ all subdued in the soft, sleazy, half-light, gave me a dreamlike feeling. I had no right to look, I felt, as a group of them drew water from the fountain and spilled it on their heads and hands; something was going on which I had no right to see, something sweatingly naked and private; it was as though I was being forced to witness the meting out of a humiliating punishment.

As we began to do the rounds in Labay’s little carriage, he said, ‘We were disgustingly drunk last night and talked a lot of nonsense. But you wanted to see how they live. Now you know. They work from dawn to dusk; they haven’t enough to eat; the cowhands are the worst off – they spend most of their life in the cowsheds. In four or five years they begin to spit blood. They manage to get other work, or go away, become beggars or die.’

‘And you kicked one.’

‘Don’t be silly. They are always tired and lazy – like the cows, they wouldn’t move without a kick. It’s how they wake each other up. Anyhow, I’m an outsider. I behave here as I am expected to do.’

Our horse trotted briskly along the dusty road; it was dawn. Labay, who had taken a fierce dislike to me, made sure that I missed nothing of the way my uncle’s estate servants were treated, the landless workers employed for harvesting, the dwarf-holders, the small tenants. By the end I had a complete picture of the lives of three or four million serfs in Central Europe who were living, with almost none of the elementary freedoms, on starvation level.

I felt a heavy sadness; and my sadness was partly for Labay who felt impelled to expose himself to me in the worst possible light, wanting to be a proud man ‘without morals’, wanting his revenge on humanity. Was I beginning to use the word ‘humanity’ too often, without really knowing what it meant? I longed to know the world, to go from caste to caste, meeting men, talking to them, eating with them, finding out what makes them tick. Books alone aren’t enough. You have to get beneath the words to the meaning of serf, estate, land-worker, peasant. Is Labay an unusual person or are there hundreds like him? Clever, knowing how to use his good brain, but without morals, without beliefs … They could be a terrible danger. In their hands all knowledge, all our human heritage would be a weapon to be used for their own ends.

By seven that morning I was back in bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I had to do something about the estate servants, about Labay. From that moment the humanity pain started; I felt it always, sometimes numb, sometimes unbearably sharp; I acted for it or against it, but I could never be neutral towards it.

Chapter Three

THAT SUMMER DAY in Orkeny I reviewed my experiences in the light of all the imagination and moral indignation of which a fifteen-year-old boy is capable. My father and his friends were committing a monstrous crime against millions of human beings and I was ashamed of my family name; the physical revulsion which had made me avoid eating soup in rhythm with my father was now transferred to the class he represented.

That night at dinner I revolted. There were some thirty people sitting down the long table at whose head my uncle presided, or rather, held court. No one, except for a few important guests, ever spoke until my uncle had first addressed them. Children, of course, were expected to keep silent. Unfortunately a certain Mr. Piroska, afterwards one of the vilest White Guard thugs, so bragged about his exploits that I forgot myself and made a few naïve remarks about humanism and the rights of the people. I was at once banished from the table, and next morning from the estate. Father was furious: I had forfeited my inheritance, lost forever the thousands of acres from which he had hoped in time to draw a generous allowance. He did not at all mind when I asked for permission to spend the rest of my vacation with my mother at Lake Balaton.

In September I went up to the college of Sarospatak. Walking through the park from the station with my suitcase I passed a statue of Simon Paloczi-Horvath, one of the college benefactors; and two bas-reliefs flanked the gate of the huge squat main building, one of Susanna Lorantffy, one of Maria Paloczi-Horvath. The clerk in the office where I handed in my birth certificate and other documents raised an eyebrow when I registered my name as ‘George Horvath’. (Horvath alone is a common name in Hungary.) But it was a liberal college and to the end I was called plain Horvath, though everyone knew my real name.

In Sarospatak my rebellious mood quickly passed. I felt free; I would have nothing more to do with my father’s family and I would eventually go abroad. Since my father and his friends paid so much lip service to patriotism I thought of myself as a ‘European’, a disillusioned man who was above feelings of narrow patriotism. This was my violent Sturm und Drang period. I read greedily and published my first short story – a Kafka-esque tale, though I had never read Kafka – in the college magazine, and followed it with more stories, iconoclastic allegorical fantasies with titles like ‘Zoo for Humans’ and ‘The Naughty Little God’. My literary idols were Anatole France and Bernard Shaw, and I read the Greek philosophers, particularly the sceptics and cynics, with my best friend Pippa. We were equally enchanted by the natural sciences and the humanities and produced plenty of poems, stories, philosophical essays, worldly-wise epigrams and plans for modern Utopias. We looked down on our professors with tolerant contempt; we read too much and were far too intense. It was Pippa who first read Schopenhauer’s famous essay on indeterminism. At two o’clock in the morning he rushed round to my house and woke me up with the horrifying news that there is no free will. By six o’clock he had convinced me and together we discussed the consequences of our terrible discovery. Our whole world seemed about to collapse about our ears. But after a good breakfast I found two ways out of our dilemma: first, I suggested that though from the perspective of absolute truth everything might be determined by the chain of causation, in everyday life there is free will nevertheless; and secondly, only art and literature count anyway.

We were both just seventeen when we decided that we were potential geniuses, and spent much time looking through the histories of science, literature, music and the fine arts to find people who definitely became geniuses by the time they were eighteen. At this time we called ourselves ‘philosopher-athletes’, and before long we had decided that if a genius is to develop his faculties to the full he must remain chaste; for the creative minority, we felt, sex is the great troublemaker, love a dangerous obsession. Now we searched history for proofs of the talent-destroying effect of sex and love. My pet mot was that most great writers should have dedicated their books to their wives or sweethearts thus: ‘To So-and-so, without whom this book would have been written much sooner and better.’ We pledged eternal chastity, were very intensive in our athletic training and smiled indulgently on the adolescent frolics of our fellow-students, those good average people, as they fell in and out of love. But after three or four months being a chaste philosopher-athlete seemed rather dull, even a shade ridiculous. Pippa fell in love with a bosomy bar-girl and I wrote a play about some students of both sexes who formed a society of ‘Pure Ones’ and subsequently became Pan-worshippers. Needless to say it was a very bad play, and before the third act was written I fell in love with a nice local girl with plenty of soul.

The College of Sarospatak was not a college in the usual sense of the word; it consisted of a ‘gymnasium’, or secondary school for classical studies, and a theological seminary. In the gymnasium we were taught Latin, and later on, Greek, as well as Hungarian and world history, German language and literature, and a fair amount of mathematics and physics. As Latin, Greek and German were compulsory we soon got the knack of studying languages. In addition to these compulsory subjects most of us took tutoring in French or English and I chose English as my first private language. Having learned German from my governesses, I was able to spend most of my German classes preparing for the English ones.

Though Sarospatak was a Calvinist institution, one of the strongholds of the Hungarian Reformed Church, there was very little religious indoctrination. Calvinism, as practiced at the college, was a Weltanschauung, a world-view blessedly free from the intolerance of closed systems of thought. Most of us grew up in Calvinist households, taking for granted the basic tenet of Calvinism: predestination. For us students this was not a cruelly fatalistic belief; all our thoughts, attitudes, and feelings were permeated by the comfortable feeling that as long as we do our duty, everything in our life was wisely foreordained. If fate seemed to be unkind to us we could be sure our adversity was well-deserved. Predestination made us feel that we were entirely responsible for ourselves; it was a simple, gentle philosophy of life, easy to embrace and next to impossible to escape from. Of all this we were barely conscious.

Sarospatak was one of the few Calvinist colleges to retain the old institution of legatio, of sending out students as legates of the Church. There tended to be more churches than there were pastors, so during Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, when two daily services were held, students from the gymnasium and the seminary helped out.

I was sixteen when I volunteered to go on my first legatio