The Door

by Magda Szabo

  * * *

  She was responsible for clearing the snow from eleven different buildings. On the job she was unrecognisable, her meticulously groomed person disguised as a sort of giant rag doll, toiling away in heavy rubber boots rather than her usual gleaming shoes. In a particularly severe winter you could imagine her permanently on the streets and never at home, and think that, unlike other mortals, she did not rest. This was indeed more or less the case. Emerence never actually lay down. After washing, she merely changed her clothes — her furniture did not include a bed. Instead she took short naps on a tiny couch, a so-called “lovers’ seat”. She claimed that the moment she lay down she became weak. Sitting gave her proper support for her aching back. Lying down, she felt dizzy. No, she didn’t need a bed.

  Of course, in the real snow storms she even went without the nap on the lovers’ seat. By the time she’d finished at the fourth property, the driveway to the first was again thickly covered. She ran from one house to another in her huge boots, with a birch broom that was even bigger than she was. We became used to the fact that on days like these she wouldn’t look in on us at all. I never raised this with her. Her unstated reasons were perfectly clear: we had a roof over our heads; she cleaned for us on a reasonably regular basis; we could wait until she had time again, when she would make it up to us. And anyway, a little bending and stretching would do me no harm at all.

  Once the snow had finished asserting its authority, Emerence would reappear and impose miraculous order on the apartment. And without saying a word, she would leave a sweet pastry or pan of honey cakes on the kitchen table. These smuggled gifts of food carried the same message as the first we had received, the sliced chicken that followed her incomprehensible rudeness. “You have been good,” the dish announced, as if we were schoolchildren (and not both on a diet!), “and good little boys and girls get their due reward.”

  I still don’t know how she fitted so much living into one life. She almost never sat down. If she wasn’t wielding a broom she would be bustling about somewhere with the christening bowl, or tracing the owner of some abandoned animal, or, if she failed in this quest, attempting to foist the poor waif on someone else. Mostly she succeeded, but if not, then the creature vanished from the neighbourhood, as if it had never nosed hungrily around the rubbish bins.

  She worked long hours in a great many places, earning extremely well, but she refused to take tips in any form. Somehow I could understand that, but why she refused to accept presents was beyond me. The old woman was interested only in giving, and if anyone tried to surprise her with something, she never smiled, she flew into a rage. Over the years I tried, again and again, to make her gifts of various kinds, thinking that from me at least she might accept one. I never succeeded. She would inform me rudely that there was no extra charge for whatever she had done. Cut to the quick, I would put the envelope aside. My husband laughed at me. He told me to stop buttering her up and trying to change the way things were. She suited him very well, this fleeting shadow who, despite her ridiculous sense of timing and total disregard for normality, saw to all our needs, and wouldn’t accept even a cup of coffee. Emerence was the ideal home help. If what she did wasn’t enough, and if I had to have a deeply meaningful relationship with everyone I met, well, that was my problem. It wasn’t easy for me to accept that, as with everyone else at that time, Emerence was determined keep us too at arm’s length.

  CHRIST’S BROTHERS AND SISTERS

  The truth is, for many years we mattered very little to her. This changed suddenly, when my husband became ill, so ill that his life was in danger. Since the old woman had appeared to show no interest whatever in what happened to us, I was convinced that if I told her the full, terrifying truth it would impinge on her emotional life to the extent of a consolatory plate of food, at most. So I took my husband off to his operation for a pulmonary abscess without a word to her. No-one in our building or the wider neighbourhood knew where we were going, and this included Emerence. The pre-operative visits had all been made without her knowledge and she had no idea what was afoot.

  When I finally arrived home, she was sitting in the armchair cleaning silver, with a tangled pile of teaspoons in her apron. The operation had lasted nearly six hours. Anyone who has sat staring at the emergency light over the door of a surgical theatre, knowing that the patient might never regain consciousness, will understand the state I was in when I stepped into the apartment. Emerence began by telling me that she’d been left out of the single most important event of my life; that I shared only transitory things with her, in the most general way. She was positively glaring at me. I’d shut her out, like a stranger, from all my terror of an operation that might well have proved fatal. No, she wasn’t offended, she was furious. I replied that I’d never before known her show the slightest interest in us, so how was I supposed to guess that what was happening now would affect her in any way? Meanwhile, no offence intended, but would she kindly leave me alone? I wanted an early night; it had been a difficult day and things weren’t over yet.

  She left immediately. I thought I had offended her so deeply that she was gone for ever. But about half an hour later I was startled out of a shallow, troubled dream by the sound of her moving about the flat, and then she appeared with a steaming goblet. It was a real work of art, made of thick, royal-blue glass, borne on an iron tray. A pair of hands were carved around it in the shape of an oval garland. On the woman’s wrist was a bracelet, on the man’s, lace trimming. Together they held a gold plaque inscribed TOUJOURS, in blue enamel lettering. I lifted it off its base and held it up to the light. It contained a dark, fuming liquid, smelling of cloves.

  “Drink it!” she commanded.

  I didn’t want to drink. All I wanted was some peace and quiet.

  “Drink,” she repeated, as to a badly brought up, half-witted child. Then, when she saw me putting the cup down and refusing to open my mouth, she seized it and splashed some of the scalding mulled wine down my front. I screamed. She grabbed my hand and rapped the mug against my teeth. If I didn’t want her to tip it all over me, I had to swallow it. And, despite being unbearably hot, it was wonderful. Five minutes later the trembling had gone. For the first time in her life, Emerence sat down beside me on the sofa, took the empty cup from my hands and waited for me to speak, to talk those unknown six hours, and whatever was still to come, out of my system.

  But I couldn’t talk, or begin to explain what I had been through, or in any way convey the horrors that had led up to it. Also, the wine was having an effect: I had downed it in a single gulp. I know I fell asleep because at one stage I woke suddenly to find the light on, as it had been when I returned home, but with the clock now reading two a.m. She must have uncovered our bed, because I was lying under a light blanket which she could only have taken from it. In her usual calm, everyday voice she stated that there was no point spending the night brooding about things. I should stop worrying. Everything would be fine — she could always sense death. None of the neighbourhood dogs had given any sign. No glass had been broken, either in her kitchen or in mine. If I didn’t believe her, that was my right. Perhaps I’d rather turn to the Church? In that case she’d bring me a Bible. There was no obligation to speak to her at all.

  At that moment I wasn’t thinking of the mulled wine, or even her long vigil beside me. All I could feel was her mockery. Once again, her words had stung me. Wasn’t it enough that every Sunday I went a roundabout way to church to avoid her comments? How, when she showed no desire to understand, could I explain to her what the act of worship meant to me; or how many unseen presences thronged the pews around me, who down the centuries had all shared my beliefs and prayed as I did; or how those sixty minutes of the service constituted the one hour when I could be sure of communing with my late father and mother? Emerence understood nothing of this. She rejected it. Like the leader of some primitive tribe she flew her standard — a sequinned evening dress — against the banner of the Lamb of God.

 
The old woman opposed the church with an almost sixteenth-century fanaticism; not only the priesthood, but God himself and all the biblical characters, with the single exception of Joseph, whom she revered for his occupation: her own father had been a carpenter. I once saw the house where she was born. From behind a hedge its warm glow radiated a simple dignity. The sturdy pillars of the veranda, under the twin-peaked roof, made you think at once of a baroque peasant dwelling and a Far-Eastern pagoda. Its design no doubt reflected the taste and personality of the late József Szeredás. The cow-trees, as Emerence called the now portly sycamores that surrounded the house, had put out huge branches and there was a flower garden in full bloom. At the time of my visit it was still the finest house in Nádori, the office and workshop of the carpenters’ co-operative. Emerence’s Voltairean anti-clericism didn’t make sense. It was years before I understood its source. The problem troubled me deeply until I fitted all the pieces together with the help of another of her friends, Sutu the greengrocer, and the whole story fell into place.

  Emerence’s religious objections weren’t the result of living through the years of siege that followed the ending of the Great War and the first peace, nor did they amount to a philosophical position taken amid the ashes of a world again reduced to rubble. They arose from a primitive desire for revenge over an aid parcel from Sweden. Her co-religionists had received a consignment from one of the churches in Scandinavia. Until then no-one had shown much interest in Emerence’s beliefs, nor had they seen her at any of the services. She was always working, especially in her earlier years, when she regularly took in washing and dealt with the bulk of it on Sundays. While others went to pray, she fired up her little boiler and started soaping. The news duly reached her that fellow Christians abroad had sent gifts for the congregation. Her friend Polett had run straight to her with the news. When the distribution began in the chapel Emerence, having never shown her face in church before, suddenly appeared in her black Sunday best and stood waiting for her name to be called. People from the immediate neighbourhood knew who she was, but none of them thought for a moment that she was counting on receiving anything. The ladies in charge, who had acted as translators for the visiting Swedish mission, looked on in embarrassment at the gaunt figure standing there, blank-faced, waiting. They realised that even if she didn’t attend church she was still a member of the congregation, but by then all the woollen and cotton garments had been shared out. All that remained at the bottom of the basket were some evening dresses, which some kind Swedish woman, weeding out her unwanted bits and pieces without considering the real situation here, had thought fit to include. They didn’t want to send her away empty-handed. As it later emerged, they hoped she might be able to sell the garment at a theatre or community arts centre, or perhaps exchange it for something to eat. In no way did they intend the mockery Emerence felt, as she hurled the dress at the feet of their leader. From that day on, not work but a private vow kept her from church, even on those rare occasions when she did have an hour free. Henceforth, both God and the Church were identified in her mind with those charitable ladies, and she never passed over an opportunity to take a dig at the worshipping classes. She didn’t spare me either, whenever she caught me leaving the house half an hour before the Sunday service with the book of psalms in my hands.

  When we first met, not knowing the story of the evening dress, I had invited her, in my well-intentioned ignorance, to go with me. She was not, she told me bluntly, one of your great ladies who trot along to church to parade themselves in green and blue paint. She wouldn’t go even if she had no driveways to sweep. I stared at her in wonder, because from the very first it was apparent to me that she had a sister in the Scriptures, the biblical Martha. Her life too had been a ceaseless round of hard work and giving help to others. But what had made Emerence so like the saint? When I did finally learn the cause — the evening dress — I was profoundly shocked and demanded an explanation. She laughed in my face, which was most unlike her. Neither tears nor happy laughter had much part in her world.

  She told me that she needed neither priest nor Church, and she never contributed. She’d seen enough of God’s handiwork during the war. She had no quarrel with the carpenter and his son: they were ordinary working people. The son was taken in by politicians’ lies. The moment he started to make trouble for the leaders, they had to get him involved in something, so that he would be executed. The person she felt most sorry for was his mother. She couldn’t have had a single happy day. The strangest thing was, the first time she got a proper night’s sleep must have been on Good Friday. Up till then she’d had nothing but worry over her son.

  As she delivered this tirade about Christ as victim of political machinations and a trumped-up criminal charge, who finally stepped out of the life of his poor Virgin Mother after all her sleepless nights of heartbreak and worry, I fairly expected a bolt from above to strike her dead. She knew she had upset me, and she was glad. I held my head high and set off in the direction of the church. She followed me with a wicked stare. For the first time, I saw what a remarkable creature she was. She claimed no interest in politics and yet, by some mysterious everyday process, she had managed to absorb something of what we had all been through during those years after the war. And I thought too, someone should seek out the sort of priest who could reawaken in her what clearly was once there. Then I realised, she would only hurl insults at him. Emerence was a Christian, but the minister who might convince her of the fact didn’t exist. Not one spangle remained of that evening dress, but the glitter of sequins was burned into her consciousness.

  * * *

  That night, of course, she only wanted to provoke me. But strangely, it calmed me down. If she sensed real trouble she wouldn’t be teasing me, I thought, but, thank God, she was. She was having a bit of fun at my expense. I tried to get up, but she forbade it. If I was good, she would tell me a story, but I would have to stop wriggling and close my eyes. I nestled down. Emerence remained standing, leaning against the heater. I knew so little about her, only the rather shadowy picture I’d managed to piece together over the years from isolated scraps of information. It was practically nothing. On this most surreal of nights, with life and death waiting hand in hand in the wintry dawn, Emerence sought to quell my terrified thoughts by finally introducing herself.

  “‘You are Christ’s sisters and brothers,’ my mother used to say, because my father was a carpenter — a carpenter and cabinetmaker. His younger brother, my godfather, was a foreman-builder, but he died soon after my christening. He too was good with his hands, like all the Szeredás family. Our father was very knowledgeable, and a fine figure of a man. As for my mother, she was a fairy princess. Her golden hair trailed behind her on the floor; she could actually step on it. My grandfather was very proud of her. He wouldn’t let her marry a peasant, and resented even a craftsman. He’d sent her to school and made my father promise he would never put her out to work. And he didn’t. While my father was alive she just read books. But that didn’t last very long, because, you see, when I was barely three the poor man died. It’s strange, but my grandfather took violently against him for having the nerve to die, as if he’d deliberately wished it on himself to spite him.

  “The coming of the war made everything a lot more difficult. I don’t think Mother was in love with the foreman in the workshop at the start, but she couldn’t run the place on her own, so she married him. My stepfather didn’t care very much for books, but that wasn’t the main problem. They were calling everyone up into the army, and the poor man was terrified that his turn would come. But he got on well with my mother, and he put up with us as well. He wasn’t a bad man, although he made me leave school, and the headmaster was very upset about it, but I was needed to cook for the harvesters because Mother wasn’t up to it, and I also looked after the twins. Our stepfather wasn’t unkind to them, but this wasn’t surprising. If you’ve ever seen two fairy-tale children, that’s what they were. They were the living image of Mother.
My little brother Józsi — you know his son, the one who comes to visit me — doesn’t look like any of us. I never saw much of Józsi, because when my father died our grandfather Divék — Mother’s father — made him go and live with him. He spent more time in Csabadul than with us in Nádori. My mother’s remaining family live there to this day.

  “When they took me out of school the headmaster made a terrible fuss. He said it was a dreadful shame, an utter waste. Stepfather told him that anyone who stuck his nose into another family’s business was a troublemaker, and he’d better not try to turn me against the idea or he’d bash his head in. He’d married a widow with four children, and he might be called up at any moment: the woman couldn’t cope with the work on her own. Did he think he was pleased that I’d also have to work? What was he supposed to do? He had no-one to help in the workshop, or, for that matter, on the land. There was a constant demand for farm produce, but now there wasn’t even enough for the animals. Well, he said his piece to the headmaster and set me to work. He wasn’t evil — you mustn’t think that — just frightened. You must have seen what people are like, what they’re capable of when they’re afraid. I don’t bear him any grudges, though he beat me often enough, because at first I wasn’t much good. We had some land, but until then it had never been any concern of mine. I’d gone out to play, not to work. All the time, my stepfather was shaking and swearing, because call-up letters were flying around like birds.