by Magda Szabo
Her own letters. Prospectuses, brochures advertising foreign towns, package holidays. A run of magazines: Popular Physics. Picture postcards from foreign places. He collected them though he never travelled anywhere; by the time he was ready to do so he wasn’t well enough. Family documents, Iza’s papers, baptismal certificates.
Here’s the notice sacking him and here, on top of it, his rehabilitation document. Regarding the terms of article 9590/1945 M.E. . . .
‘If you leave that man you can come back and all will be forgotten,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘What a disaster he is! But I warned you. What kind of man is it that can be brushed aside like that, as if he were a thieving servant? And him a county judge! Come home, I’m very lonely and you are familiar with my needs.’ (Aranka, who succeeded her at Aunt Emma’s, had just run off with Pista Vitáry.)
Aunt Emma sipped at her coffee and explained. ‘I mean he wasn’t mad, he knew very well what verdict he was supposed to bring in. He gets a cushy job, him, a boy raised on beggar’s alms by that teacher who kept him financially, year by year, and then he does this. He knew he should have found them guilty, everybody knew that, but there he goes, letting off those four worthless peasants, excusing them in the name of the Sacred Crown of Hungary, the idiot. And when his colleagues try to repair the damage and offer him an opportunity to put things right, or at least retire quietly, he carries on bleating about justice – and refuses. Now he can see what justice means: it’s been served on him. Your poor mother would turn in her grave if I deserted you now, so you can come back, dear, and live with me just as before, even though you left me in such an ungrateful way. I am willing to take you back if you like, but not with him. And you’ll get no money, you needn’t ask for that, I have no money myself and even if I had I wouldn’t let your husband have it. Extraordinary! I hope he moves out of town. He can’t stay here, that’s impossible.’
After that she didn’t go straight home but took a walk to the cemetery. It was summer, early summer, the roses were blooming on Endrus’s grave. He’d been dead precisely eight years. She sat on a bench and gazed at his gravestone, overrun by roses, at the lush grass and the slow dense clouds. Nature was so calm, not indifferent, just calm. Bees were flitting around the graves. She felt deeply disappointed, gazing at the red roses and the blue sky. Why should a cemetery be so beautiful and so peaceful, so full of birdsong and scuffling in the branches when it wasn’t reality? Reality was mortality and the sense of dread waiting for her at home.
She sat and sat. Then a pebble squeaked behind her. Startled, she turned round. It was Vince. He sat down beside her on the bench and stroked Endrus’s grave as he did each time he came. ‘I guessed you’d come here,’ said Vince. She bent her head, ashamed that her first act had been to run to Aunt Emma for money and to complain, and how could she have spent a minute with Aunt Emma when she knew that she never liked Vince, that she was secretly glad how things turned out because she remembered the dike-keeper, their first conversations and was proud that her instincts had been proved correct when she disapproved of the marriage twelve years before.
It was so strange during the night to think that though Vince was always beside her while he lived, and healthy too, there was something that could have so embittered her. How she cried, how heart-rendingly when, after having been sacked, Vince explained that he was right, not the people who had sacked him, and of course she believed her husband but was unhappy because of money, because of all kinds of silly things, unhappy because acquaintances deserted them, because the family avoided them, because she was no longer greeted with as deep a bow as before. She felt ashamed now to recall what hurt her then, how cowardly she was, how humiliating her cowardice, how some of Aunt Emma’s warnings took root in her. One night she tried to persuade Vince that they should move elsewhere. Anywhere, to Gyüd if he liked. Vince loved Gyüd. Each summer he would return there to stay with the teacher and his family and go on about what a lovely village it was, how the herbs were so fragrant by the river, how deep the whirlpools of the Karikás were and how the islands were a primeval forest of reeds. But Vince didn’t want to move, which would be another reason to cry, because she thought moving was a wonderful idea, because they wouldn’t be bumping into their town acquaintances, and because life was cheaper in villages and they could live on her widow’s pension (Vince received nothing, but the generosity of the Ministry of Justice allowed her to draw such a pension, it being deemed possible to be the widow of a living man). No, said Vince, his face clouding over, he wouldn’t go, he wasn’t guilty, and there was no need for him to hide from people. Then he turned away and didn’t want to talk about it any more.
Before his rehabilitation she could never persuade him to visit Gyüd and in November 1946, when the letter arrived, trembling, lips twitching, he took his small suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and started packing. She didn’t need to ask him where he was going, she could see it from his face, the way he was shaking. She asked Iza to see him down there but she shook her head, pointed to her books and was interested in nothing but her approaching university exams. She wanted to talk her father out of the trip too, and spent the evening explaining to him that there were no hotels in Gyüd, that he had practically no living acquaintances there, that the teacher was long dead and that the Dávid children were all gone, working in one place or another. Those who were still there would stare at him as if he were some kind of curiosity. ‘What do you want to see in Gyüd?’ she asked her father. Vince stubbornly continued to pack his bag and answered, ‘The dike!’ ‘Excuse me but I have not the least interest in the dike,’ said Iza, lovingly stroking her father’s arm. ‘I’m afraid you can’t pass on memories as if they were a kind of inheritance.’ Vince just looked at her, his hand still above the suitcase, his face suddenly thinner, thinner and sadder. In the end he didn’t go, since that was the time she got that awful flu and he didn’t want to leave her while she was ill, and, besides, the weather was worse than usual, nor did he ever make the journey. He never saw his birthplace again, didn’t even mention it much; he grew older and weaker, and rarely left the house. He was past sixty-six when they rehabilitated him, his movement was limited on account of rheumatism and his stomach was already troubling him; it was just that no one suspected what it would turn out to be.
She pushed the drawers shut. There was nothing unexpected here, which is to say no more than everything associated with fifty years of shared life. But there were no secrets among these common things, no photographs of women, no pressed flowers, no secret letters, nothing that did not pertain to Vince’s childhood or family life. She felt ashamed of herself for ever having doubted him, even for a moment – she should have known Vince better. It was the effect of Antal and Lidia. By the time they got there, Dekker told them Vince was no longer conscious and he remained unconscious when she sat down beside him. Maybe he never told Antal to give the picture to Lidia but simply happened to whisper something and Antal misunderstood him. He was constantly whispering, poor thing, whispering time after time when he got the injections. And why would he have talked about dying? Vince knew nothing of that, never suspected.
She went into the hall, opened the door and looked out at the yard. The rain was still pouring down but it felt milder than in the afternoon. Captain spotted her and leapt up the steps. Ten years before he had done just the same, just as cheekily, when he skipped through their open door for the first time. It was 1 May and they were standing on the threshold, watching the flowers strewn from aeroplanes and the flight of doves that signalled the end of the day’s festivities in the main square, as promised by the papers. Suddenly there was a knocking sound at the gate and a creature rather like a black rabbit, no bigger than someone’s fist, slipped in. ‘Here’s the dove,’ said Vince, laughing, ‘strutting like a captain. It’s just that it’s black.’
The memory was so fresh, so hauntingly alive that she couldn’t bear to bend down to the animal but turned round into the hall. The neighbour’s cockerel crowed and
slowly people woke. The sky was black, a single dark mass. ‘Dawn,’ thought the old woman. ‘I wonder if he can see it?’
It was warm in the bedroom, too warm after the damp dawn breeze on the doorstep. She threw off the dressing gown and prepared to lie down next to Iza again. The girl turned but didn’t wake: fast asleep and dreaming, her very breath a form of sadness. Now that she was facing the wall she could clearly see the picture, the painting above her bed that watched over her dreams. There goes the little girl, her basket on her arm, treading a rickety old footbridge, under the bridge a foaming mountain stream, her basket full of strawberries. You could practically hear the water beating at the rocks below, almost sucking her in, sweeping away the little aproned figure, and yet you wouldn’t worry for her, because an angel was hovering over her, its sandal-shod feet steady in the air above the loose planks, its two arms extended in protection round the child who is carefree, chasing a butterfly over the rocky depths and the small, severe river.
5
THE ORDER OF the next few days was determined by rural funeral customs. The mourners who came home with her were not too fussed about proprieties and stayed longer than the generally approved fifteen minutes though the old woman didn’t mind: she liked talking about Vince. She served liqueur to her guests because the weather was unusually cold again, as if March were at war with itself, bringing hard winter days to frustrate the promise of spring. Iza said it was a barbaric custom having crowds round before a burial. She hated guests and was never at home. But there was no alternative and there was so much to do. Iza spent one morning at the clinic with Dekker, arranging things with the trade union social services, organised the funeral and was constantly negotiating at the estate office since it was no simple matter selling the house.
Apart from one unexpected local council member and a young clerk of court who was a total stranger, there was no one who failed to speak of Iza as well as Vince. Iza’s reputation, her important job and the money she sent monthly, the regular supply of fuel she ordered for her parents, how she took them to the shoe shop, to the tailor’s and to the doctor, was a matter of constant street gossip. The idea that she was moving her mother to Budapest was no surprise to anyone. Iza couldn’t have done anything else; that was just the way she was. She was not only a brilliant doctor, a properly grateful child, but a good person. Mrs Szőcs must be so pleased with her. Old Vince had gone, of course, poor thing, but here was his daughter to take his place as protector. What delight it must be to move to Budapest, to leave sad memories behind and to enjoy a happy old age in new circumstances: it was not just to be free of cares and worries but to avoid loneliness at seventy-five and to give oneself over to peaceful reflection! Iza would look after her, she’d have nothing to worry about for the rest of her life.
Iza really did do everything for her mother, even tiny, insignificant-looking things. She cooked for her, made sure she ate, and when the doorbell rang and she happened to be at home she ran to answer it to make sure her mother didn’t have to rush. Her great head of hair floated after her as she made speed. Vince hadn’t been the same for ages and had to be excused various duties so all the responsibility was on the old woman’s shoulders, right down to apparently small and insignificant tasks like opening the gate, which could be a serious problem when it rained in the winter because of the mud. Now it was Iza who would run to answer in the heavy downpour in her black skirt and pullover, looking as young as she had when she lived in the house as a girl, or as a bride of two days.
There was plenty for her to do and not much time for crying or thinking.
Before she left Pest she had taken a few days out of those due for her summer vacation and wanted to settle everything in that time – the funeral, discussions about the inheritance, the sale of now useless possessions, the moving and even the matter of the house. ‘I don’t want you to be involved in the removals,’ she told her mother, ‘you wouldn’t be able to stop helping me and you won’t be in top condition after the funeral. You’re going to take a couple of days off in Dorozs, mama, I’ll phone the sanatorium this evening. There you can relax, have a lie-in, look at the trees, read, sleep and buy a couple of sessions at the baths because it looks as though your bones need it. Once I’ve arranged everything I’ll come to fetch you. Dekker is going to Pest on the eleventh and can give us both a lift in his car.’
Dorozs was a nearby town some fifteen kilometres away and had a sulphur-iodine spa whose hot waters had been described three hundred years ago, though the spa-sanatorium in the park was only six years old. It was a place they had longed to go to and had several times decided to take a trip there but, though there was an hourly bus, something always got in the way so they never went, just as they had never made it to the seaside, or to a good many other places in the world that they had talked about and prepared for. The old woman looked down into her lap as she listened to Iza’s offer, then felt around for her handkerchief. It made her so happy to think how much Iza loved her and took care of her, but she had never been so sad in her life as when she finally went to Dorozs.
It was an enormous relief to her that she wouldn’t have to live by herself in a house bereft of Vince, but it was terrifying not to be present while Iza packed up ready for the removal men. ‘You’d only torture yourself,’ retorted Iza, ‘you have spent enough time crying. I know my flat, know where I am taking you, I know where things will fit and what will look best. I want you to be happy from now on.’ The thought that she would be looked after, that someone else would do her thinking for her, moved her again: her eyes filled with tears of gratitude. Iza was right, of course, she always was, it really would be awful if she herself had to pack Vince’s belongings, it might be quite beyond her to fold away his familiar old-fashioned clothes and his brightly coloured caps. Ever since he got older, Vince had refused to wear proper hats and always wore caps with visors. Let Iza get on with packing those, once they are up in Pest and she feels better, she can put them into some order and stow them in the wardrobe. It will be as though both of them had moved up to live with Iza and maybe she would even talk to Vince’s walking stick sometimes, or his heavy glass, his tin can, the one he used to warm shaving water in on the stove when the winter was extra cold. She secretly hoped that they could take everything to the city with them. Iza hadn’t received a proper trousseau when she got married and Vince in particular felt very ashamed that it was only their own belongings they could share. Now she could happily make a gift of the lot, let it all go to Pest. She watched the girl’s face in hope that she might like the idea of the gift but Iza shook her head and told her not to worry about things like that but to leave the job of moving to her. She calmly accepted: Iza always knew everything better than she did and no doubt she knew better now. Pity it seemed she couldn’t take everything. Well, no doubt the girl would choose what she thought they would need in the big city, and as for the rest . . .
It does no good to think about that, she thought, so she turned her mind elsewhere.
She had spent a lifetime with this furniture that had grown old and tired along with her, every piece with a history of its own. It hurt that she couldn’t take it all. It hurt that she couldn’t take the entire house and carry it with her to Budapest, because the house was only frightening if she had to be alone in it; if her daughter could be with her it would the most desirable of residences. But Iza had a freehold flat, why should they continue to pay tax on the house – if she wants to sell it, that’s what she should do. And who would buy it? Anyone – she wished them well of it. But it was a shame about the little things that would have to be left behind. Never mind, there was no way round it. When Vince was alive he arranged everything for her, now it would be Iza. Wasn’t it great that she wouldn’t have to negotiate with the property office!
The night before the funeral, on that wholly unexpected evening, just as Iza was struggling to prepare a fish in the unheated kitchen, Antal appeared again. It was she, for once, who let him in. Iza was frying fish in
breadcrumbs and she shouted to her to open the gate as she had to attend to the meal. It was raining, as it had done constantly for days. Antal was bareheaded, and his hair and brow were dripping. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him in a hat; in winter his head was always covered in snow. Hearing his steps, Iza looked out of the kitchen. Seeing it was him, her face immediately froze into a polite smile. She excused herself, said she was cooking and asked if he fancied supper with them because there was enough. Antal thanked her and said he had already eaten. That clearly wasn’t true but it wasn’t something you could argue with.
Antal didn’t beat about the bush. He asked how much it was for the house. Last time Iza was at the clinic she mentioned it was for sale. He himself was looking to move and would be pleased to buy it if they could agree a price.
She stared at Antal in astonishment. She hadn’t thought of him as someone who would ever buy a house.
‘If you cared to leave some furniture behind, mama,’ said Antal, ‘I would be happy to take that off your hands too.’
She looked so delighted, she hadn’t felt as happy since just before Dekker’s diagnosis three months before. She still didn’t know what Iza wanted to keep or sell, but she was already sorry for such items as fell into other hands; it was as if they were endowed with life, with voices and feelings, that they were beings who, having enjoyed long-term security, were now obliged to go into exile and spend the night in strange people’s houses, sighing for home. Antal, it is true, had abandoned them, but in some ways he did belong here.
