[THREE]
St. Gertrud’s Municipal Prison
There was just barely room enough for the Tatra diesel dump truck to pass through the tunnel to the courtyard of St. Gertrud’s. Scrape marks on the granite walls of the tunnel and on the fenders of the truck testified that the drivers didn’t always make it through on the first try.
The Tatra pulled into the courtyard and, with a great clashing of gears and bursts of sooty diesel exhaust, backed up to within ten feet of an interior door.
The heavy wooden door opened inward and three guards came out. They were middle-aged men in gray uniforms and black boots. Carrying billy clubs and small.32-caliber automatic pistols in closed-top holsters, two of them took up positions facing each other between the truck and the door. The third, holding a clipboard in gray woolen gloved hands, stood to one side by the door. As the prisoners came out of the door and started to climb onto the truck, he checked their names off on a roster.
The prisoners, of various ages and sizes, wore loose-fitting black duck jackets and trousers over whatever clothing they had been wearing when they were arrested. On their heads were black cotton caps with brims, universally too large. These covered their ears as well as the tops of their heads. There were more than thirty of them, more than the Tatra’s dump body could comfortably accommodate sitting down. It was necessary for them to line the three walls of the truck bed (the rear wall of the dump truck was slanted) standing up and hanging on to the wall and each other.
It was just after six in the morning, and they had just been fed. Breakfast had been a hunk of dark bread and a veal, potato, and cabbage soup. It was hearty fare and tasty. The intention of the prison authorities was obviously to provide adequate nutrition for the prisoners. There would be a second meal, bread and lard, and a third at night, always a gulyas (stew). This sometimes had paprika, making the traditional Hungarian stew, and sometimes just chunks of meat floating in a rich broth with potatoes and cabbage.
When all the prisoners had climbed onto the Tatra truck, the guard with the clipboard went back inside the prison. The other two guards went to a small BMW motorcycle, kicked it into life, and waited for the truck to leave the courtyard.
Then they followed it, ten or fifteen yards behind, making a series of slow turns on the cobblestones so they would not catch up with it and have to stop.
St. Gertrud’s prison was on the edge of Pecs. Three minutes after leaving the prison, the truck was groaning in low gear as it climbed a narrow and winding cobblestone street. The motorcycle had to come to a stop three times to wait for the truck to get ahead.
The truck climbed to the top of a hill, then started down the other side, equally steep and winding. The truck moved very slowly, in low gear, for it had snowed the night before, and there was a layer of slush over the cobblestones.
When the road was clear, the truck went down the hill at a terrifying rate.
When it had almost reached the bottom of the hill, the truck turned off onto a road that appeared to be paved with coal. There was a dirt road under the coal, but coal falling from trucks had then been crushed under other trucks, so that there was in fact a three-inch-deep layer of coal paving the road.
When the truck reached the mine head and stopped, the prisoners, without being told what to do, got off the truck and walked to the shaft head.
There, suspended from an enormous wheel, like a monstrous water bucket over a well, was a steel-framed elevator. The prisoners filed onto it until they closely packed it.
Then the basket descended into the mine.
Fifty feet from the surface, it began to get dark. At one hundred feet, they could see nothing at all; it was like being blind. By three hundred feet, however, their pupils had reacted to the absence of light and dilated to the point where some sight returned.