Katalin Rayman
Circles of Hell

According to his death certificate, my father-in-law, Dr Miklós B., professor and senior consultant at the White Cross Hospital, was shot dead by two communist guards on the Danube embankment in Pest on July 6, 1919. His son, also Miklós, who also became a doctor (and my husband in 1943), was eleven years old at the time. He had loved his father very much, and would never talk about his death. I had to rely on all sorts of gossip. A mutual acquaintance had this to say about what had happened: "That mad professor, he went down to the Danube in a good winter coat, so they shot him." Of course, this is not how it happened, people don’t go around in winter coats in July. A second version was that Dr B. was on his way to visit a patient in Buda via the Chain Bridge, when those Danube Flottilla monitors arrived on the river to bombard the Soviet House, the then headquarters of the Communist Party; Dr B. wanted to let the boats know that he was not on the bridge as an armed belligerent and took out a white handkerchief to wave to them. The communist guards took this as a counter-revolutionary provocation, dragged Dr B. off the bridge, shot him, and threw his body into the Danube. The third variant was presented by the guards themselves before the tribunal when they were arrested after the fall of the Soviet Republic: a man was walking along the street towards the Party head- quarters, they called on him to stop, he broke into a run, so they shot him. That, I couldn’t believe. No way. A war veteran will not break into a run when a gun is trained on him. Dr Miklós B. had spent several years in the fighting line as senior surgeon of a field hospital, his war diaries have even been published. (They included the story of the Russians who, in my father-in-law’s absence, occupied the dressing station filled with the sick and wounded. When my father-in-law returned and saw what was happening, he jumped on his horse, drew his sword, and sent the Russian soldiers packing. A few tired infantrymen, no doubt, who were taken by surprise at the unexpected apparition of a horsed St George with sword in hand. In any event, it must have been quite a scene, and true, too. Dr B. did not exaggerate, and he did not prevaricate, at most he tended to be "a bit exuberant", as my husband said with condoning love.)

Only some considerable time later, many years later did I hear a family version of the story, which explained almost everything. Dr B.’s marriage was not harmonious, and on that day a more serious dispute than any before broke out between himself and his wife, a loud altercation, in the course of which he grabbed whatever money was on hand, shoving it into his pocket, and stormed off. The family was living on the former Eskü tér, somewhere near the Mátyás Cellar restaurant. Dr B. rushed along the Danube embankment, perhaps meaning to stay the night in a hotel. In his agitated state he probably did not hear the guards’ shouts, who rightly thought that the man, rushing along, was behaving suspiciously. He most probably did not "break into a run" when they called to him, but was in a great hurry to begin with. It was the lawyer friends of the family who later gave the story a political colouring.

The story has another interesting aspect as well, one I heard from the poet István Vas at a much later date. For some reason, during the last days of the Soviet Republic, the philosopher György Lukács was put in charge of security at the Soviet House. Lukács issued an order that anyone approaching Party headquarters with aggressive intent should be shot on the spot. The two guards reported what happened to Dr B.; after all, they knew his name, because they had searched him. My father-in-law and György Lukács belonged to the same social class, the well-to-do haute bourgeoisie of Budapest, and they knew each other. According to Vas, Lukács was saddened by Dr B.’s death. "I did not issue that order," he said, "so as to have the doctors of Pest shot."

Something else happened as well, but this time it happened to me. In 1944 I worked with a Social Democrat working man by the name of Kálmán Matkovics, who devoted all his time and energy to saving the persecuted. I met him in Balázs Lengyel’s home. (Lengyel was a literary critic, later editor of an important journal and the husband of Ágnes Nemes Nagy, the poet. The Lengyel family had transformed their large apartment on the Belgrád Embankment into a hideout.) There they pampered an absent-minded English art historian who was wandering around the Acropolis when he realized that the Germans had occupied Greece, and managed to get as far as Budapest somehow, where with the help of the Lengyel family he hid out until the Russians came. The bathroom was the domain of Balázs’s twin sister Piroska, an industrial chemist, who was able to remove any kind of ink from paper without trace, and in this way produced an abundance of documents for the benefit of those in hiding. Kálmán Matkovics, whose name deserves recording, would accept just enough payment to allow him to survive. He was engaged to a woman with a slight limp. The fact that Kálmán chose a woman with a slight physical defect for his mate and the fact that he devoted his life to helping those in trouble was somehow connected in his soul, as the aura of love for his fellows, which radiated around him, and which made people feel as if he had just stepped out of the Holy Writ.

One day in November, 1944, Kálmán Matkovics went to see my husband in the hospital, saying that a working man’s family had to leave their home urgently, but they had no money. My husband pressed some notes in his hand, and a couple of hours later Kálmán returned with a look of astonishment on his face. Apparently, he had given the money to the family, telling them who it was from. "Dr Miklós B.?" one of them exclaimed, "That’s the same name. He must be the son of the doctor we shot on the Danube bank!" Then they showed Kálmán Matkovics Professor B’s silver fob watch. After twenty-one years, they still had it. But the point is that this working class family, who had a communist past in which the shooting of Dr Miklós B. played a major role, had to flee their home now that the Arrow Cross had taken over. For a moment my husband stood mute, wrestling with his anger, then turned on Kálmán saying, "I did not give you permission to tell who the money came from." And with that he stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

[...]

They led us into the office first and dumped the contents of the suitcase out on the desk. For a while they rummaged through the papers, then swept them on the floor. I was horrified when I realized that we were walking on sheets of paper we had used to try out counterfeit stamps. The Arrow Cross people didn’t look on the floor, they were more interested in the names of the "sick" people my husband had admitted to his ward.

One "brother" took and searched my handbag. Because of the frequent demands to inspect papers, I had the documents with me to prove my racial descent. "I see you’re pure Aryan." "Yes," I said, "but as you can see in his papers, my husband is only a quarter Jew." "Scribbles make no difference to us," the man said, "we will decide who is a Jew and who is not."

The District leader was called László Szelepcsényi. He was standing in the middle of the room when the two of us were ushered into the "office", and he crooked his finger at my husband like a facetious teacher at a naughty schoolboy, all the while with a frightening and sneering smile. He acted like a very bad actor overplaying the sadist. An evil man is naturally and unconsciously evil, as the river flows, as the rain falls. Why should he play a role other than himself? No director would allow anyone, on stage or on the screen, to portray evil so ridiculously, so cheaply.

László Szelepcsényi was a big, heavily built man, and he slammed his fist into Miklós’s face, who reeled and fell against a typewriter. He had ulcers and was very thin at the time. When he got to his feet, Szelepcsényi took aim and punched him again with such force that Miklós was sent clear into the adjacent room, where he fell flat on the floor. Somebody closed the door. "The interrogation room," the second in command said jovially. "The Jews have kicked everything apart during interrogations, the coat hangers and stove door included."

Szelepcsényi wanted my husband to give him the names of all those Jews and communists who were patients in his ward. His yelling could be heard from next door. "The names! I want the names!" A hit, a crash. "Get up!" A hit, a crash. Not once did I hear Miklós’s voice.

Szelepcsényi came back from the interrogation room with a slip of paper. "I only managed to get one name out of him," he raged, and showed me the slip. "You know this man?" I said I didn’t. But I did. It was the name of the leader of the hospital’s Arrow Cross organization.

It is typical of those times that when Miklós and I first discussed our future together, I felt I had to tell him of my fear that should they beat me, I would give them the names of my friends. "It’s not a question of morals," Miklós said. "A man who is beaten half senseless is not the same man any more." Well, to the end he remained the man he was.

One night Szelepcsényi flew into a temper and started screaming, "Down in that basement, they are all doctors!" But it wasn’t true. They were not medical doctors, not even intellectuals, and his outrage told less about the professions of those down in the basement than about Szelepcsényi’s own mentality: he expressed the impotent rage of the common man against everyone who had made it, the bitterness of a man who had failed. Now the time had come to get his own back. But on whom? On anyone and everyone whom fate put into his hands. Then he turned to me. "We will now bring him in here, and you will tell him to his face you don’t love him!" I was horribly frightened. What would I see? I felt as if the light of my eyes were riveted to the floor. A scream, "Tell him to his face you don’t love him!" After a while I had to look up, and when I did, I thought the strangest thing. "They will never let this man out of here alive." Just like this, in the third person. Miklós stood in front of me, and he had no face. Just a horribly, unevenly swollen mass of bleeding flesh. He held his hat up to his face to catch the blood tricking down into it. I don’t know whether his right eye was intact or not, but he still had his left eye. He looked at me and smiled. I know it sounds incredible, but I swear he was smiling; what’s more, he was smiling to encourage me.

Sometimes I still get annoyed when a character in a play or a film doesn’t act rationally in a crisis. The hero knows perfectly well that he’s been reported to the police, the black automobile has already turned the corner (of course, he doesn’t see this), he knows that they will come for him sooner or later, and what does he do? Instead of grabbing his coat and dashing down the back stairs, he sits down to write a letter and looks at old photographs. Yet now I know that one’s soul has depths which have precious little do with the rational. In this extreme situation, what should I have been thinking of? Of the consequences for both of us of saying I loved my husband, or of saying I did not. And I should have considered what, if anything, Miklós could make of all this in his terrible condition, and how he would react if I said no. The expression in his left eye seemed to indicate that he understood what was happening around him, but he could not have understood the complexity of the situation. For the sake of one’s safety it would have been ill-advised of me to say yes, while for Miklós’s sake, it would have been equally ill-advised for me to say no. But none of this entered my mind. Needless to say, I never, for a moment, felt obliged to give this man screaming at me an honest answer, I even forgot he was there. I loved my husband deeply and sincerely. Whenever he received the least insult during his work at the hospital, I thought my heart would break. Had I now reacted to his beaten face in proportion to the horror, my heart should have been broken for good. Instead, there I sat, thinking about how we had met. Before he was given his position at the Rókus, Miklós worked with a friend of mine at a research institute, whose staff went on outings together. My friend talked to me about Miklós many times. She said that Miklós had a brilliant mind. What a shame he was so ugly! I imagined him as short and squat, with a protruding beer belly. Once I went to collect my friend at the institute and I rang the bell. Miklós came to the door. He introduced himself, and I was surprised to see that he was not the least bit squat, in fact he was rather thin. He had thick, wavy hair, a pair of sparkling black eyes, and a prominent nose. "Is this what she calls ugly?" I thought, and my fate was sealed. Szelepcsényi was still shouting "Tell him to his face you don’t love him!" It was only later that I thought, what did that madman want? He probably felt that Miklós hadn’t been worked over sufficiently. He was probably right; Miklós was not broken in spirit. "I love him," I said and felt a sense of relief that I was over the hard part. Later I reflected again and again on my strange train of thought, and I tend to believe that some subconscious strength made me ignore László Szelepcsényi’s mad screaming and saved me from having to wrestle with a problem that had no solution.

He slapped me so hard, I fell over with my chair. When I got to my feet and sat down again, he grabbed my shoulder and pressed his knee into me. "We can talk differently!" he said, hinting that up till then they had been civil with me. Then he kept slapping me, and after a while I thought, it’s no good that I’m so passive, I’m not defending myself, I’m not giving any indication that he’s hurting me, which is probably making him more angry, so I began raising my hand to my face, feeling all the while how awkwardly and without conviction I was acting. The truth is that the slaps didn’t hurt at all. Nothing that they did to my body in the Arrow Cross house hurt. Several weeks after my release, an acquaintance stopped me in the street and asked what the blue and yellow blotches were on my face. I had hardly noticed. Then weeks later I suddenly realized that there were smells and odours in the world. That’s when the effect of the shock must have worn off. Inside the Arrow Cross house, my nervous system must have put itself on hold: it would take only so much, and no more. Perhaps it was this lucky biological condition that helped me survive the most gruelling periods of my life. I saw, I heard and I registered what was happening, but I understood it only on the most superficial level, and kept myself removed from what was happening to me.

I don’t know how the slapping stopped. It is a black hole in my memory.

But when I consider everything, every little thing, all the circumstances, I feel

I had made the right choice after all. "I love him." These were the last words exchanged between us.

[...]

In September, 1950 I married again. That is another story, here I will only tell as much as links up with my first husband’s story. One Tuesday evening, in the spring of 1951, my second husband, György K., said to me, "I will never admit to crimes I did not commit, nor will I implicate others. If they should force me to do such things, by way of appeal (his odd and accurate expression) I will always find an open window." He was arrested the next Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning he jumped out of a sixth-floor window of the Deák Square police headquarters. They rang me at 3 a.m. late Saturday night (call it Sunday morning), and ordered me to be at Deák Square at 9 a.m. They told me that my husband had taken his own life. "If you hurry, you can make it to the funeral." I took a cab. A clerk from the cemetery office was waiting at the gate. "The henchmen are gone," he said, then told me where to go. The road was horribly long, all the way through the cemetery, indeed beyond it. Near the edge of a small plot two men with spades and hoes were waiting for me. I gave them some money, and next thing I knew, I was standing there alone by the fresh mound of earth. Some time later something stirred inside my brain. Where am I? What’s going on? I started wandering among the graves. On a grey marble cross by a brick wall I spotted a name, Elemér Komlós. The name of my first husband’s murderer. I think this was the worst moment of my life. I must have made a scene, because a woman came over to see what was wrong. Later on, I found two other familiar names—of the three Vígh brothers, two were buried here. So this was the plot for the executed, including Arrow Cross and war criminals. But there came another surprise. The newly placed crosses had no names on them. I did not think of checking when they stopped putting names on the crosses, but stop they did. It wasn’t that one grave had a name and another didn’t. It wasn’t done gradually; for a while the names were there, then suddenly they were not. Not a single one. Period. I found just one small sign. It was hanging askew on a cross, and it said in tiny letters, "Lacikánk"—our Laci. Perhaps it is László Rajk’s grave, I thought, but later I learnt that he was buried elsewhere. The Arrow Cross mass murderers were named, but those executed on trumped up charges had no name. It seemed like a chart mapping a bad conscience.

Translated by Judith Sollosy

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Katalin Rayman was Deputy Editor of Nagyvilág, a journal which publishes foreign literature in translation, after a long career as a teacher of French and German, and working in radio and publishing. She has translated works by Simone de Beauvoir, Heinrich Böll, Marguerite Duras, Eugčne Ionesco, Thomas Mann, Nathalie Sarraute, Jorge Semprun, and Marguerite Yourcenar.