The Hungarian Student, 1958 (3. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)
1958-10-01 / 1. szám
up the mountain? This is why they put our arms in splints. It is also why I get a pair of goggles with wire netting to protect my eyes from the splinters; so that tomorrow I can aim my blows. A blind man cannot break stones either. This is why I would have to go to jail if I took off my goggles. But I don’t take them off. My goggles project cross-bars on the rocks in front of my eyes and I can’t get tired of looking at them. Of course, I know them well enough; I was married to them a long time ago, and the wedlock seems to be lasting forever. The end of my chain must be locked to a rock deep down in the mountains, somewhere among the fresh blue stones. They must be like the ones I am about to break. The rocks are not really identical; both their shapes and colors are different. Sometimes one even finds beads of silicic acid or a knot of graphite imbedded in them. Their veins are interesting too. And their sound! I know the stones by their sound as soon as I throw them down in front of my feet. I don’t even have to look at them. If they clang then it will be easy to break them; if they give a muffled sound they will remain in one piece forever. Then even Kreybig will not be able to crush them, although he insists that no stone is unbreakable. But the ones I am breaking now are splitting easily. If I could still enjoy something, I could be pleased with them. But here under the dark mountain no one finds pleasure any longer. Not even the AVH guards laugh; wrapped in fur coats, they just guffaw wildly like beasts when they talk about their Saturday night adventures. The guards do not pay much attention to us. Why should they, when they have Kreybig here, who himself is a convict just as I am or the others are, but who does not break stones with us. He lives in a separate barrack and eats as much as he can bear. He is the brigade leader and watches us more closely than the AVH guards would. He can keep his coat on too, not like the rest of us who must even take off our jackets on his orders. Yes, this is why he can eat his fill; this is why he does not have to huddle with the others at night on a space two spans wide; this is why he isn’t cold. He just stands there on top of a pile of stones and watches to see whether we hold the hammer right and whether we stop to rest for a minute. And if any of us fiddles too long with the binding on his hammer, he comes shouting and then the AVH guards are upon us, beating. I break the stones in neat piles. I am satisfied because I got good stones. Würzburger and Tamás Perczel brought them, escaping the vigilance of Kreybig, who wants the good stones brought to the ones he likes, the ones who break more stones than I do. If I could get such stones all day then I could finish twenty-one cubic feet easily by evening. How late can it be? We began to work at six o’clock in the morning. The sun is still reaching us down in the valley, but she won’t be much longer. She is preparing to hide behind the mountain; soon, we won’t see her. We are on the north slope. It is the middle of March and so it is cold, and when the sun hides behind the mountain it becomes colder than ever. It might be nine o’clock now. It would be fine to have fourteen cubic feet ready by noon. Then I could leave the rest for the afternoon, because I need time for piling the stones in a pyramid, which is a hard job in itself. There are at least three hours left before noon, before lunch. I wonder what we will get for lunch. In the morning not even the cooks knew what it was going to be; the water carriers hadn’t heard anything either. It will be a poor lunch, that much is certain, because on Wednesdays they never give us a good lunch. When do they give us a good lunch? Never. We will be given a thin soup, certainly, and some vegetables, but hardly enough. Let’s see; what is the famous doctrine of one’s needs? According to the biologists a human being in the state of idleness needs one calory of food every hour for every two pounds of his or her own weight. At present my weight must be 115 pounds, certainly not more. One hundred and fifteen times twelve are thirteen hundred and eighty. So I need thirteen hundred eighty calories to live without working. For a worker in a quarry another twenty-five hundred calories are needed in addition to the thirteen hundred-odd calories. Yesterday we were given about one thousand calories. Two days ago twelve hundred. Today, perhaps, we will get even less. Yet I am breaking stones. My arms lift steadily, my hammer strikes the pieces of andesite in front of me with a regular rhythm. The pile of stones grows visibly. There must be an error somewhere, either in the calculations of the biologists or perhaps in ourselves. Do we make a mockery out of science or does science make fun of us? There must be a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding, because we are alive and I am breaking stones. I have been breaking them since this morning, since many months ago, since eternity. It seems to me that I started breaking them when the lava of the mountain had not yet hardened. October 1958 23
