Ivan
The small desk holds empty wine glasses and ringed teacups, unopened mail, pairs of glasses, and a few burnt down candles. The final candle has just sputtered out, leaving only the pale-yellow ring of light from the timeworn desk lamp to compete with the hypnotic blue glow of the monitor. After years of darkness in which he dreamt of light, his tired eyes can no longer stand brightness.
The hunched man sits in silence, staring at the screen that holds his words, words that represent the story of his life—his interrupted life. For long moments he writes nothing, as his mind meanders back through memories so vivid that they keep him as if in a trance until brought back by the groan of Torkas as he rolls over on his bed.
“My fat old mutt,” he says affectionately, rubbing the dog’s belly with his outstretched foot.
Torkas keeps one dark eye half open, his pretense of maintaining his lookout, but he is clearly relaxing into another snooze. Ivan envies his carefree sleepiness.
With the mesmerizing pull of the past broken, Ivan’s mind returns to the modern world, to this room, to his life now. He quickly pounds out the thoughts that he has just moments ago been engrossed in. They flow out of him as if they had been waiting to burst free given the tiniest opportunity.
He has to force himself to slow down. He wants to write an autobiographical opus that can be nonetheless labeled as fiction, not a manifesto on the wrongs of the Soviets. People will read fiction, even if it is barely disguised memoir; they will not read a history lesson. Ivan looks back at the text he has written. He lets out a quiet huffing breath then deletes two of the paragraphs. He wants to tell his story directly, to tell the truth, but he knows that it will have more impact if he fashions it more artfully. He must layer his text with clues that are subtle yet still apparent.
István, he recognizes, is a thinly veiled name for his hero, but he thinks the reader will grant him some leeway. Barely concealed autobiography is a solid tradition; he need only make the token gesture. Will they think it too self-promoting, he wonders, since István was the first king of Hungary and so means ‘crown’ in Hungarian. But he cannot resist giving himself that name because he had so longed to have remained king of the realm even when he was yoked like a slave. He changes the name of the labor camp and moves its location within Ukraine, a little closer to Hungary, no problem there. The tricky part is to name his nemesis. He should tread lightly, but the implication must be clear once he reveals the truth. The condemnation has to ring out from the page.
He has considered names such as Farkas, meaning ‘wolf,’ or Bakó, meaning ‘axman,’ each of which he thinks appropriate for his two-faced betrayer. But he rejects both, given his resolution of restraint. Mátyás Kiss, he decides. The moniker appears ostensibly generous, for Mátyás means ‘gift of God.’ Yet it has a sting in the tail, since kiss means ‘little,’ which not only acts as a qualifier, but also subtly references ‘little work,’ the term for the deportation of Hungarians into Soviet work camps. Thus, his very name will encapsulate his role in sealing Ivan’s fate.
He follows the Western name order that the real MK himself adopted in the U.S. Ivan had been tempted to designate him Mátyás Kádár, combining the names of the two communist leaders who towered over postwar Hungary’s history of subjugation, Mátyás Rákosi and János Kádár. But that appellation is too unsubtle, clumsy in its obvious condemnation, its reliance on public outrage. No, a flank attack will be more effective, he thinks, and slowly he types the name, hoping his meaning remains clear.
The one thing that Ivan cannot change though, the element that he is utterly incapable of denying through amendment, however small, is the location of his pain. He knew many prisoners who had injuries to the hands and wrists, either from the work itself—slips of the ax or ricochets of the saw—or from the cruelty of the guards—tight wire bracelets worn for days as punishments—and he felt he understood the extent of their anguish. He had thought that a book about a writer and his suffering would be best symbolized by immobilization of the hands, that his betrayal could be perfectly captured by such an act of professional castration. He had thoroughly researched wrist ailments: the burning pain from overuse, the fine tracks through which tendons need to glide, narrowed by inflammation, tightening around the nerves, the gradual curling of mistreated fingers. The loss of quick instinctive dexterity, of not having to think about how to tie shoelaces; replaced by feebleness when reaching for a pen, carrying a bag, or even offering a caress. Such restrictions perfectly capture the nature of loss, of having had a basic element of humanity stripped away. But each time he sits at his computer, the ache in his back refuses to be denied. His spasmed hunch throws him forward over the keys, propelling him to write, just as the initial failing of his back had forced him, in desperation, to write, in order to save his own life.
*
On arriving at the camp, he was struck by its ashen grimness, the monotony of the grime. The dimly-lit, barren dormitories were barely distinguishable from the color of the dirt. The rusted metal of the beds combined the brown and the gray of the floor and the walls. Everywhere he looked, there was the unrelenting sameness. The prisoners’ work clothes were shades of dust, their scratchy woolen blankets a muddy hue; even their faces were leaked of color, despite the flush of the cold.
This visual bleakness offered no sanctuary for the mind after an exhaustingly long day of work, its own monochrome tedium interrupted only by peaks of physical pain and mental anguish. The work was mindless but difficult; Ivan learned quickly, through lashes of the whip, to absorb the particularities of the thankless trade. He watched the other workers in his labor crew and copied them. Their job was to log the forest surrounding the camp. This consisted of felling trees, sawing them into logs, dragging the dismembered arboreal corpses, and heaving them into wagons. With gloves, the work would have been strenuous but manageable; without them, Ivan’s hands were quickly shredded.
Like most of the political prisoners, Ivan had never been a strong or athletic man. Though young and healthy, his life had been one of intellect, exercised through writing and arguing, debating and creating, not physical exertion. But labor camps were organized not according to comparative advantage, rather by maximum suffering. Prisoners were relegated to their jobs seemingly in inverse proportion to their physical capacity, with intellectuals always being assigned the hardest physical labor.
Such perversity was common to communist regimes—it was such a depraved sense of justice that inspired envious Soviet leaders to put the most grimy, polluting industries in the center of beautiful, historic Krakow. Those choices were not a product of caprice, but rather of malice, aimed at teaching its ‘bourgeois’ inhabitants the value of hard work and the decadence of physical beauty. And in Hungary, the Kádár regime had triweekly ‘social purges’ of non-party members, involving midnight raids, imprisonments of thousands, and even executions. The bureaucracy of that program had required almost one million Hungarians to be employed, while the economy around it shriveled. It was absurd, but the regime was unashamed of its absurdity, because capriciousness kept the population fearful, and thus obedient.
So, too, it was in the camps. The work was made to be as physically punishing to the political prisoners as possible. Their resulting incompetence was part of the design, a careful plan of created inability. Their unavoidable failure justified further punishment—typically consisting of beatings with batons—but the humiliation of failure was also part of the punishment. It emphasized the impotence of ideas, of intellectual challenge to an all-powerful regime. The absence of gloves was not a result of a shortage of supplies.
His red and raw palms were a rare splash of color in the gray. At night he used only his fingertips, carefully picking up the chipped metal cups from which they drank water, holding more firmly—gripping between thumb and forefinger—the valuable plate of sparse food. Gradually, the flesh that was stripped away from his palms returned, thickened and coarse. The lesson of the camp—of his own physical weakness—was carved into his hands, and he became like the other prisoners, wearing their uniform of striped skin.
But as his hands hardened and adapted to the work, his back grew bent. He tried to avoid giving the guards reason to punish him but the stocky Ukrainian peasants naturally despised the political prisoners—not so much for their ideology as for their intellectualism—and found excuses to beat them. The combination of hacking, hauling, bending, and dragging the wood beneath him, combined with hard wooden sticks upbraiding his back from above, proved too much for a spine used to sitting, holding up a head once heavy only with contemplation.
Each day he awoke from sleep made deep with exhaustion and his first sensation was of pain. With difficulty, he cautiously pushed himself up with his left hand as he reached around with his right to feel the swelling down that side of his torso. The right side of his back was more bulbous with each passing day, further twisted with each stroke of the ax.
Until one day, Ivan swung the ax and his legs gave out under him.
Gregor, the prisoner closest to him in the work line, bent over him, hissing “You must get up . . . they will beat you for this.”
Ivan tried, but could only scramble on the ground, his limbs struggling to turn him, like a mangled dog desperately trying to crawl to safety when its legs have been crushed by a passing car.
Two guards approached and Gregor tried to help Ivan to his feet, but he collapsed almost immediately. The guards shouted at them, and his fellow prisoner tried again, to no avail. One guard ordered Gregor to kick Ivan. Gregor whispered a hasty apology and kicked him in the legs, but the guard was unsatisfied and came over and kicked Ivan more convincingly. The first blow landed on his shoulder and he yelped in pain, but when the guard kicked him in the back, he gratefully passed out.
*
Ivan’s sleep was fitful yet long. He woke periodically from his own cries of pain before quickly slipping back into a groggy haze that must have been aided by a narcotic, a supply so rare and valuable that it was usually only parsed out to ease dying patients into oblivion. It was not strong enough to stop the fire running up and down the side of his spine, as he discovered when he shifted his body and knives of agony twisted in his back. But it was strong enough pull him under again into sleep. When his heavy eyelids opened late the next morning, a complex beehive pattern mesmerized his drug-addled mind for some minutes. When his mental fog gradually cleared, he realized he was staring at the rust holes of an unfamiliar wireframe bed. He looked around and saw walls that were stained but scrubbed clean. He understood that he was in the infirmary.
The infirmary was known as ‘purgatory’ by the prisoners, as it was a pause between the known hell of the camp and the unknown abyss of death. The death rate in the camps was much lower by the late 1960s. In the 1950s, when Stalin was alive, the prisoners were generally worked to death or subject to the whims of the guards, whose infamous catchphrase was “we don’t have to account for the prisoners.” Yet even after the ‘Khrushchev Thaw,’ prisoners’ rations were based on productivity, and so entry into the infirmary could easily constitute a pit stop on the way to the grave.
The lone overseer of the infirmary was Dr. László Gondor, a man of about sixty. His gray and black speckled hair was carefully combed and pressed neatly down on his large pate, but the man could do nothing to control his furiously thick eyebrows—their long wiry hairs sprouted in random directions. Below them, his thick glasses magnified his eyes, making him appear continually alert and constantly astonished. Gondor was known to do all that he could for his patients with the few tools that were made available to him. Ivan’s back was cold and moist; tentatively reaching around to feel it, his fingers found chunks of ice. The doctor must have taken snow from the fields and packed it into a block, which was pressed against Ivan’s inflamed back.
Ivan was used to sordid privation, and he felt that somehow there was a quiet dignity in Gondor’s attempts at keeping order in the small infirmary. The few medical texts were lined carefully in a row, the instruments were clean and well ordered, and the blankets were laid with care across the two other patients in the narrow cots across from him.
He saw the doctor shuffling between the beds, making notes and checking the men’s pulses. Ivan cleared his throat to get the doctor’s attention. When he approached, Gondor gently prodded Ivan’s back, shaking his head and sucking air between his teeth, as Ivan moaned.
Ivan asked “How bad is it?”
Gondor’s rueful face held as much information as his terse answer. He said simply: “It is bad. Physical labor will be all but impossible for you.”
They both knew the import of that sentence.
The lines and folds in the doctor’s face creased a degree deeper as he asked gently “Can I bring you anything? Some water perhaps, an extra pillow?”
Ivan asked “Do you have anything to read?”
Reading material in the camp was scant and precious, Ivan knew, but his life had been devoted to the written word. He wanted to spend as much of what were potentially his last days reading, carrying his mind away from his broken body.
The doctor said “I am afraid that everything is in Russian. In a camp full of Hungarians and Ukrainians, the Soviets still insist that everything must be in Russian. It is absurd, even the Russians who are here mostly speak dialects and can’t understand formal Russian. But what can you do?”
Normally Ivan would join in this implicit critique of the Soviets, but he just wanted to read in peace, and he enjoyed reading Russian, so he said simply, “Oh that is fine, I’ll take what you have in Russian.”
Gondor looked up quickly, asking “You know Russian?”
“My accent is poor, but I can read fluently” Ivan replied.
“And you write? You can write well in Russian?”
“Yes,” Ivan responded.
The doctor gave a small smile, saying lightly, “Perhaps we should not write you off quite yet.”
Ivan blinked in surprise, and only managed an “um” of confusion. He felt groggy and muddled.
Gondor gave a gentle smile and explained: “Most of the guards here, they are uneducated, writing their own name stretches their limits. Many of the prisoners can write well and they parcel out administrative jobs to useful prisoners who are literate, as well as to informants. But camps are ultimately part of an enormous bureaucracy, and all information runs back to the Soviets—so Russian is key. Of course, the Hungarians and the Polish-Ukrainians are mostly useless in Russian, but even the Russian-Ukrainians and the Russians are not much better. Very few of them can write an acceptable letter to an apparatchik in Moscow. An educated writer of Russian can be very useful to an ambitious administrator—perhaps we can convince them that you are worth keeping.”
Ivan never knew whether the doctor had simply passed this information along or whether he had used up a valuable favor in order to get Ivan his plum administrative job. But it was Ivan’s salvation, and it opened the door to a life of relative ease within the camp. It also gave him access to ink, paper, and reading material. He stole supplies whenever possible, and scratched out stories in miniscule text, giving his mind small moments of freedom. When he could, he snuck some of these resources back to the doctor, along with any other goods he thought could help Gondor in his largely hopeless vocation.
It was in his role as bookkeeper, years after the doctor had saved him, as Ivan logged details of prisoners coming and going from the camp, that he saw among the deaths the name László Gondor. Ivan gasped a quick intake of breath, then felt as if his lungs had ceased to function. The tightness of unshed tears remained in his chest for years to come.
After his release from the camp, still suffering constant pain, he went to a hospital. There, doctors x-rayed his back and found multiple fractures along his spine. The camp had literally broken his back. Ivan knew that the mortality rate in the camp’s forests had been high; his back giving out had forged for him a life of physical torment, but it may have ultimately saved him. He spent twenty-two years in the camp and was unlikely to have survived that long working in the forests.
This understanding forged an unbreakable link for Ivan between survival and pain. And so, now, he cannot now deny his back its rightful place in his prose. Gradually, his consciousness comes back to his darkened room, to his life now, to his dog, and to the unfilled pages.
*
Sitting now at his desk, he sips his cup of tea. He has lost track of how many cups he has had today, but this one is too strong. He had become distracted while brewing it, had neglected it and now it is bitter. He decides that he will eat his slice of flódni, the sweet pastry filled with layers of jam, walnuts, poppy seeds, and apple, that Ági, his elderly neighbor, had brought over for him that afternoon. It will balance out the bitterness and provide a helpful boost of energy, he rationalizes. But when he gets up from his desk and shuffles over to the kitchen, the pastry is not where he had left it by the brandy, ready to have with his late-night nip. He is momentarily confused, looking around the kitchen. Then he sees a plate in the sink with pastry crumbs.
He shakes his head, puzzling at how he can be so absent-minded. This is not the first time something like this has happened. It usually occurs when he is writing: he gets so caught up in the other world that roils away in his mind that the real world barely registers. His cups of tea turn cold, he forgets to eat, or as in this case, apparently, he eats without noticing. He thinks that the problem is that he is doing the same thing every day, the repetition makes everything blur. He cannot remember what day it is because yesterday was the same as today.
And yet he was looking forward to that tasty treat—it seems strange that he cannot remember enjoying it. It makes him worry that his mind is going. He tells himself with dark humor that he has to get his book written before his mind goes completely. But even though he is talking only to himself, the joke falls flat, as it treads too close to his greatest fear. With his body betraying him, his mind is all that he has, and if he is to be the witness that calls another to account, he must be reliable. But then he remembers that he took some strong pain medication earlier in the afternoon. He tries not to take it often as it makes him bleary and slow in his thinking. But today was a hard day, and he needed some relief. Perhaps he need not worry then, it is just the drugs working. He sighs; everything always comes back to the pain.
Ivan had previously tried to write about his pain, as the central character in a story, for that is how he envisions its role in his life now. But nobody wanted to hear it. The story was of a man with terrible back pain—he described in excruciating detail the details of the excruciating. The man falls in love with his physical therapist, for she lays her hands on him and eases his pain for a short but blissful time of relief, and what greater love can there be than between one who has pain and one who lessens it? What greater sensory pleasure can one person give to another than such sweet release? Gradually, she comes to love him back, as she is a lonely woman whose life centers around caring for her ailing father, and the man’s devotion to her is so tender. The man becomes ill with influenza, and he knows he should stay away from her. But the pain has mounted during his convalescence; it has become so unbearable that he longs to be with her with a fervor that he cannot control. That longing is not only physical—she has come to represent his one emotional solace in life, too. He hides the extent of his illness so that he can see her and be in her soothing presence. But in doing so, he infects her, and through her, her vulnerable father, who dies, drowning in fluid. She is devastated and he is heartbroken. Guilt and heartbreak abound.
But nobody wanted to publish the story because, Ivan surmises, it was about pain. This curse that comes to fall on the head of every person, eventually, is studiously ignored, as if avoiding the topic will keep at bay the crippling inevitability of physical deterioration. He eventually rewrote the story, centering it on passion as the theme that keeps drawing the man back, rather than pain, and Ivan used pain merely as a plot device to get the man in the room with the woman. The story placed well enough in a respected journal, but Ivan was unsatisfied. For a time, he stopped writing—how could he write his story without recognizing the agony that resulted from the torture he had suffered? But eventually he realized that the publishers were right to reject that story, not because of its truth but because of its falseness. He needs to write about pain not through a fictional story of love and betrayal but through a true story of betrayal and the hate that it creates, that festers, that even now he willingly cultivates within himself.
*
As the Soviet empire crumbled, the labor camps gradually closed. Ivan was released shortly before Hungary regained its freedom in 1989, and he returned to Budapest. He experienced the thrill of the transformation he had so long ago fought for. In the thirteenth century, just seven years after the English Magna Carta was written, Hungary had produced the world’s second document of human rights; finally, seven hundred years later, after suffering under multiple occupiers, it was achieving those rights. As traumatized as Ivan was by more than two decades in the camp, he had no trouble reveling in that victory, in joining his countrymen in that time of rejoicing. But then the rapture had faded and people had returned to their ordinary lives, working and raising families. It was then, as Ivan had attempted to be an ordinary person again in an ordinary country, that he had struggled.
In the decade since then, he has found great comfort in his small group of friends, all men made old before their time by incarceration and brutality. Ivan’s mother had died while he was in the camp, and these men are his only family now. They meet regularly to smoke, drink coffee, sip beer and whiskey, play chess, and argue at Thália Café. A mix between a bar and a café, with only space for two rows of small tables, it is cramped but cozy. One corner is taken up by the tight spiral staircase that Ivan sits at the base of. It leads up to a tiny second level that is cantilevered out over one side, giving the area below an even more cave-like atmosphere. Ivan’s group habitually gathers in that alcove, sometimes joined by one or another of the two dour owners, while the other inevitably grumbles about doing all the work.
Ivan perches himself on the third step of the stairs. Here he does not need to choose between sitting on the lumpy-cushioned benches that run along each wall or the rickety wooden chairs that sit opposite them, which he frequently imagines collapsing under the weight of some of the stouter patrons. With his feet on the floor, he can half sit, half lean, stretching his back and relieving his mind of constant thoughts of its ache. His perch also allows him to look out over the café. No one ever tries to dislodge Ivan from his post in order to go up to the second floor. Ivan has never ventured up there himself, but he imagines it could be a fun place to sit and look down on the old men, the timeworn photographs on the walls, the dark, polished wood of the bar, and the surprisingly bright green, thin band of painted wood encircling the room at shoulder height. That green ribbon mirrors the strip of decorative stone that is commonly featured two thirds of the way up the façade of many Budapest buildings.
Looking at that green line on the wall across from him, Ivan remembers, as a boy, running his hands along the ridges in the stones of the buildings as he skipped along beside his mother, wishing that he could reach up to trace those lines high above on the buildings. He thinks now that those lines that horizontally bisect the buildings are not merely decorative: they represent a continuing, a paralleling of the road and of the path of the people below. The city has changed since he was twenty-two, the last time he had seen it for another twenty-two years. It now has neon signs, and so many shops, and streams of tourists. But that line shows that it is the same city. He can trace those lines through the city and through time, and know it is still his home. He had imagined the city so many times over the many years of his captivity, visualizing it in intricate detail, but had he thought about the lines along the buildings in that time? He cannot remember—he can neither remember remembering nor forgetting them. But details matter, he has to keep clear the difference between what he knew then and what he sees now.
Ivan is half-listening to the old men—his friends—talk about freedom and oppression, the theme they always return to, inevitably, obsessively. The conversations go around and around, but their shared understanding softens the grind of the repetition. He tells them his own story again and again, in different ways, and they listen, although they have heard it before.
His friend Gyuri is telling a story about his daughter and how hard it is to understand her.
“She has so much freedom, but she feels so restrained, because she does not have everything. Now she wants a tattoo, of all things,” Gyuri says with a noisy intake of breath through his nose that is just short of a snort of derision.
Gyuri, too, was in a camp for many years. He missed so much of his daughter’s childhood that now he is in constant bewilderment about the young woman she has become.
“I don’t want to constantly tell her how good she has it compared to me. I want her to live a normal life. No, more than that, I want her to have everything that I did not have.”
He shakes his head. “Yet I cannot help but be appalled by how much she takes for granted, how much she demands.”
“She takes after her father, then, always demanding more,” teases Robi, one of the owners who has joined them for a drink. “Isn’t that how you ended up in prison?”
Gyuri laughs. It is true: he was imprisoned for leading a workers’ protest demanding more pay and rations. It had not been quite a strike—that was a logical impossibility, since communism was the “workers’ utopia.” The protest was within the bounds of permissible expression, but when violence erupted as a result of the regime’s heavy-handed treatment of the protesters, Gyuri had been held responsible. He had been made an example of, a personification of the dangers of asking for too much.
This is how it goes for the group at Thália Café. Stories of the current day are inevitably intertwined with stories from the past. The present is invisibly entangled with how these men—and many absent women—had their lives disrupted and damaged for their beliefs. Now they have to make sense of the freedoms they were so long denied.
Ivan believes that much of the cause of their complaints is not so much their aching bones and the mysteries of the younger generation, but rather that they are all somewhat at sea. Under the communists, especially for political dissidents, every choice had great significance because it proffered such danger. In the present, for ordinary people everything feels meaningful because the details of everybody’s lives feel important to them; but from the perspective of those who have given up so much, it all seems so trivial. Nothing can compare to the weighty burden of the past. The vividness of their experiences and the terrible price they paid make it very hard to relate to those who did not sacrifice for it. But it is not just the shadow of the past, it is also the strangeness of the present that confounds them. They are disoriented by the totality of the triumph of the quest for which so many of them lost large parts of their lives. With communism gone, the enemy that they had fought against and defined themselves in opposition to has been so thoroughly vanquished that they now feel adrift. They come together not only because they share political views and life experiences, but because those views and experiences seem to have become largely irrelevant for everyone else now that the Iron Curtain has fallen.
Listening to the conversation, Ivan thinks, not for the first time, that it is to fight against that sense of lost relevance, of the sense that everything that happened to him is old history, that he must write his book. It was with this group of men that he was catalyzed to begin to write. They had discovered a shared love of Western movies and had begun going regularly to the cinema. At first, they had watched some of the many documentaries and films about totalitarianism and the communist regime. But like Ivan, his friends felt that they had little to learn from hours spent in the dark remembering the past. They soon switched their focus to exploring the many Western movies that had been unavailable in the past decades.
In a strange circus of warped history worthy of the communist regime, the Western movies most readily available initially were the most recent, since the cinema houses wanted to show the hot, brash, new blockbusters, turning only later to the older movies. And so, Ivan and his friends learned the cultural history of the West by experiencing it backwards. They began with the lurid colors of the consumerism of the early 1990s, and time gradually folded backward into black-and-white westerns. Kisses became closed-mouthed, language became more formal, and sexual and racial roles grew more clearly defined and constricted.
It was thus not until later in the 1990’s that Ivan’s by then committed group of cinephiles reached the mid-1960s classic films. One day, Ivan went with Gyuri to a cinema to watch Cool Hand Luke. For once, it was just the two of them, for which Ivan was later grateful. Ivan was enjoying the film, darkly appreciating the absurdity of Luke’s imprisonment in a chain gang for destroying parking meters. When Luke was captured after yet another escape, he was beaten and locked in a box for days. Then he was forced to dig a ditch of dirt by one guard, and told to refill it by another, to dig it and then to refill it, to dig and refill. Eventually, the strong-willed, charismatic Luke was reduced to a weeping wreck, kneeling in the ditch, gripping the feet of the guard looming over him, begging him “Please don’t beat me no more, boss, please don’t make me dig no more, boss.”
Ivan began to cry, to shudder, to curl silently in on himself. Gyuri, used to old men leaking angry, regretful tears, patted him on the back and waited for it to pass. But Ivan could not stop. After years of the tightness in his chest mirroring the cramps in his back, he finally wept. He gave in to the desperate longing to release the pressure that had been within him for so long, and he sobbed unrelentingly. He cried for kindly László, dying in that wretched camp. He cried for the crushing, unyielding pain in his back, which sometimes made him wish he, too, had died there. He cried for the man who had lain on a rickety hospital bed, thinking he was going to die in that hopeless infirmary, just as hopeless as Luke. He cried for his friends who had died in the camp, and he cried for those who had not been his friends, even for those whom he had disliked, none of whom had deserved that nightmarish fate.
The next day he began to write his book.