by Magda Szabo
The family looked on with a mixture of interest, curiosity, and bafflement at the way she walked too—shoulders pulled back, knees stiff, body as straight as a ramrod. They had no way of knowing that this was how the officer class of a certain period had once held and carried themselves.
Blanka even learned to play the island’s musical instruments. When visitors came, and the old lady wanted to show off her gentle, amenable daughter-in-law—not like the local wenches, all of them so uppity and self-willed, dolling themselves up in the fashions of the distant capital and pouring scorn on their elders—to the other old ladies, she was always happy to oblige. She would breathe soft airs on her pipe, much admired; and the songs she gave them—taught to her by Mrs. Held, who had loved playing pentatonic melodies on her piano—were pronounced the strangest in the world.
On these occasions Henriette, listening in the brightly lit, incense-laden salon, with the servants bringing a steady supply of coffee and refreshments, felt her own mother’s presence far more strongly than anywhere else. The sinuous, faltering, childlike tunes seemed to echo from the walls of the house in Katalin Street. Blanka’s stories about the past brought back a sense of her father too. The Greek husband had built up a fine library during his student days in Paris: it included a collection of foreign-language books, and since arriving on the island Blanka had taken to reading. “Why don’t you ever read proper literature?” Mr. Held had often asked, urging the classics upon her. She had always fled, laughing, before turning around and shouting, “Because they’re boring! I’m not interested.” Blanka’s father found this a source of deep shame, but what point could there be in trying to get her to read when no one else in the family, apart from Irén, ever did? Now, all Mr. Held’s favorite books were there in front of her, in French translation . . . and there too, moving among them, was Henriette’s father himself, nodding approval and smiling. She watched as his hand reached out to take one down from a shelf and place it on the table. They used the same system of classification here that had been followed at home, and the great works were aligned on the shelves in the old familiar order.
Henriette was deeply moved to discover how persistently Blanka’s thoughts turned to her. For example, in the course of his studies abroad the husband had observed the peculiar fondness that people over there had for animals, but his mother, who had been born on the island and had left it only once to visit a monastery on the mainland, had not. So she looked on in some astonishment when Blanka began tending to the local strays. There were packs of them, all over the island, with not a soul to care for or show the slightest concern for them, alive or dead. If Blanka came across a mule or a donkey tormented by flies or bleeding from the mouth, she would immediately order the servants, “Get her something to drink, clean her up, and let her out of that harness.” This behavior was yet another source of pride to her husband, even if his mother couldn’t possibly understand. He knew that this was how foreigners were; it showed that she was a true Westerner. He accepted her attitude without reservation and seldom showed irritation, even when he could barely make his way into his own house through a pack of strays looking for food, or move easily about his garden through the horde of Blanka’s cats. However, whenever Henriette heard Blanka call to them, it was always by the same name: hers. Every stray, every hungry or diseased creature that she took in and tried to nurse was a Henriette. At the sound of that name thirsty, heat-exhausted cats and dogs with heart-melting eyes would raise their heads, and Blanka would run to them with water and make sure they drank, while her mother-in-law and the servants gazed on, at once dumbfounded and transported with admiration. A maid pointing out a dog that had been hit by a vehicle and left prostrate in the dust would use just one word: “Henriette.” And Blanka would take it, in her own car, to the island’s hospital where, because of the large number of foreigners who arrived in the summer, almost all bringing their pets with them, a vet from the capital was always on duty.
Blanka never played at being Bálint or Irén, but she did talk about them: in fact they were the only ones she ever spoke about much. Her mother-in-law loved the stories and never tired of hearing them, but Henriette listened in mounting astonishment to the transformations made in Blanka’s life, the circumstances in which she had left the country, and the entire history of her family. She even had the Major as her father. As a regular visitor to the island, Henriette was not altogether surprised by this. A teacher had little standing there. A man like Blanka’s husband would never defer to the headmaster of the local school but he would regularly entertain the commander of the town garrison. So in these tales Mr. Elekes and the Major became one and the same person. And since she could hardly avoid talking about her mother, to whom it was difficult to attribute much in the way of kindliness or charm, not to mention her total incapacity to maintain domestic order, Blanka had created a personage that Henriette instantly recognized as her own mother. So Mrs. Held assumed a double role on the island: Blanka would play her favorite songs, and describe in detail her person, her character, and her gentle innocence. But of Henriette and the Held family as a whole, and of Mrs. Temes, she said not a word. It was all Bálint and Irén, the young Bálint being passed off as her brother. That was much simpler than explaining what he had been in reality. On the island, to say that a girl had a boy as a friend could mean only one thing.
As for Bálint: Blanka’s mother-in-law was a tough old lady, hardened by experience, who never complained about anything, but like most people of her age she suffered from various ailments. So she loved to dream of this great doctor, a professor no less, living in a faraway country, before whom no illness or condition could prevail. On the other hand, since neither she nor Blanka’s husband thought it suitable that a woman should go out and earn her living, Irén, who had never done anything else, became a volunteer devoted to charitable work. She was also made out to be religious—far more so than ever in real life—in fact verging on bigotry. In a word, she became so perfect that the old lady wondered if perhaps they should help her to leave her homeland to come and marry her favorite nephew. She was already well pleased with Blanka, and this Irén seemed to be even more remarkable and irreproachable.
Listening to these stories, Henriette was astonished that no one, neither the old lady nor her son, seemed to realize that there was, or even might be, anything seriously wrong with Blanka. One incident particularly shocked her. She was back with them once again, the servants were sitting, as they so often did, at the old lady’s feet on the stairs at the front of the house, and her son had just returned from his office in the town. He was still in the dark suit that he wore when conducting a trial. In the paralyzing heat the palm tree barely stirred, and the Henriettes had flopped down with their eyes closed, scarcely able to breathe. Blanka pressed her cheek against the trunk of the cactus tree and suddenly cried, “Hó! Jég!” (“Snow! Ice!”) These were easy words to catch, and the servants took up the refrain and tossed it about among themselves, like an orange. The old lady caught it too, laughed, and shouted the words “Hó!” “Jég!” like someone cheering on a sports team. Then Blanka leaned over the seawall and screamed at the waves, “Katalin utca! Katalin utca!” (“Katalin Street! Katalin Street!”) This was more difficult, but for just that reason they soon mastered it. “Katalin utca! Katalin utca!” cried her husband, as he too laughed, gazing in pride and delight that even on such a torrid afternoon his wife could entertain them with something so charming and playful. He thought she was amused by the bizarre sounds of her own mother tongue—those ridiculous words that meant nothing to anyone—and that was why the tears were streaming down her face.
HENRIETTE visited her old home regularly, and it made a lot of people envious. Not everyone was able to do this, and it left them very angry to see others free to come and go at will. At first she tried to justify herself, explaining how happy she had been at home, how even as a child she had deliberately stored up memories of the three houses and the way they had all lived there. But her
arguments convinced no one, and she had given up trying. She had the impression that some of her companions saw her in much the same way as the Soldier had, by the blue light of his electric torch. What made the thought all the more disturbing was that he had arrived in that place not long after she had, and he seemed to be always hovering close at hand. She found this almost unbearable at first, and it never really ceased to make her nervous. The first time they met she had been so terrified she started to run. Only after some time did she realize that there was nothing more he could do to her now, and besides, he clearly had no hostile intentions.
They met frequently. She came to understand why he stared at her all the time and followed her around. He had forgotten everything. Her face was the only thing that had stayed with him, this one face that so frightened and disturbed him but also—in his unbearable loneliness—drew him irresistibly to it, the face of the only person he knew.
He spoke to her often. He would lie down in front of her, his chin resting on his hands. Gazing up at her from this position he would beg her to tell him how he could get back to his lost family. She, who was always going back and forth, who spent time both in her old home and visiting her friends, surely she would know how it was done? Henriette never answered. She simply fled to avoid seeing him. She was the only one who could point him on his way, but she never did, however much he begged her.
No one oversaw the amount of time she spent away. Not even her parents asked where she was going. From the moment she arrived she had been left to work out the rules and customs of the place entirely by herself. This was a miserable experience, because all her life Mr. and Mrs. Held had helped her find her way around. The discovery that nothing here was as she had imagined depressed her for a long time. Her first meeting with her parents—that moment she had so often looked forward to in her thoughts—had been truly dreadful. They made no attempt to explain what sort of world it was that she would henceforth be living in. It was the first time since her childhood that they had failed to give her advice, or, rather, had failed even to consider that she might need any. They had been expecting her, but she had the feeling that her arrival had simply been an embarrassment to them, and a painful one at that. They were no longer together. They had separated, and both were now living with their own parents. When Henriette presented herself, Mrs. Held became childish and frivolous, and Mr. Held sniffled and whimpered about some ridiculous trifle. In fact she hadn’t recognized them: it was they who greeted her. Between the joy of seeing her again and the feeling of distress at their altered state, neither parent thought that some sort of explanation might be due to her.
The constant transformation that both her parents were capable of was so bizarre and so disconcerting that it made her want never again to be with them, or at least not as often as before, and after a few further attempts she gave up seeking their company.
When they spoke to her, they did so as the parents she had known, but if their own parents came looking for them, or if they wanted to be with their parents, they would instantly change and become noisy and boisterous. Mr. Held, once so quiet and reserved in his speech, would begin to grizzle and fret, or shriek with laughter and gabble nonsense; upon which her grandfather, whom Henriette would in normal circumstances have been delighted to see, would seize him by the wrists and swing him around until he squealed with joy. Whenever Mrs. Held saw her own parents approaching she would immediately push Henriette away and start to yell “Mummy, Mummy!” clapping her hands and spinning around. Sometimes she would squat down, cover her face with her hands, and peer up at them through her fingers, giggling all the while at her own cleverness.
Everyone who arrived in this place as mature adults—as married couples and the parents of children—was subject to these changes of form that Henriette found so unbearable. She knew she was being unjust but she found them hard to forgive. She also noticed that her mother’s visits when homesick were not always to Katalin Street but often to the house she had grown up in; and that likewise her father visited his own childhood home, in a different town, calling on people she had never met, and this made her very sad, in fact jealous. She got over it in time, and instead of seeking them out she simply withdrew. She had noticed that of all the adults she knew only the Soldier was childless, and his appearance never changed: his face and his personality, unlike those of everyone else, were always the same. So she avoided him, her own parents, and the other adults, preferring to visit her old home instead.
She reconstructed it piece by piece. Then, because they had both been an integral part of her life since the age of six, she did the same to the Elekes and Biró family homes, and on to the entire street from the church to the site of the old Turkish well that had been destroyed by a bomb during the war and was now a long-distance coach stop. The Elekeses’ and the Birós’ houses, like hers, had been joined together to create a social housing block and the three gardens merged to form a little park with benches and wide umbrellas for the old people to sit in the shade beneath—a sight that came as a shock to Henriette on her first visit. The separate gardens were now a continuous lawn around which beds of drought-resistant flowers stared blankly. The faces of the old people looked equally dried out, but at least they were alert. Almost all were focused on a window in one of the rooms at the back of the block, where a nurse was leaning out, gazing at the sky, and completely ignoring them. “This isn’t right,” she told herself. “Something’s wrong here. Why does no one tell them?” She stood there for a while, waiting. Perhaps the nurse would see her and call down to the elderly residents: “Look! Once there were young people living here, and joy and health and good cheer!” But of course nothing of the kind happened.
Sitting on one of the benches was Mrs. Temes, mumbling unintelligibly to herself. Henriette watched her suddenly draw her body up and slyly help herself to a biscuit from the open tin belonging to the person beside her, whose eyes were fixed on the nurse at the window. Henriette was so horrified that she fled the scene. This time she created her own Katalin Street. There was no coach stop and, in the space between the Turkish well and the church, the social housing block was replaced by three open gates, side by side: the Elekeses’, her own, and the Birós’. She passed through the one in the middle, and found herself, at long last, standing in front of the home she had been pining for.
The moment she arrived inside the house she would hear the sound of her father’s drill. It had never frightened her: she knew it was the source of their livelihood. She had always thought of it as a kind of pet animal that was there on guard to let everyone know the family was at home. She passed through the entrance hall and the waiting area, greeting the patients as she went, and on into the surgery. She wasn’t allowed in there when her father was working, but she opened the door so quietly that neither he nor the person he was treating was aware of her presence. She stood there watching him, as he leaned over the patient with a mirror and promised him, “Now this won’t hurt.” She never spoke to him. She simply wanted to reassure herself that he really was there. Then she closed the door and went to look for her mother.
Sometimes she would find her in the kitchen, leaning over bottles of sugar and jam and enveloped in a sweet fragrance. Or she would be in the salon, reading or singing, accompanying herself on the piano, or ironing her husband’s white shirts. With her too Henriette spent only a few moments on these visits, just long enough to reassure herself that her mother really was there and was still unaware that any other form of life might be possible. Each time she gently touched her face, her hair, or her hand, then pushed her away and gazed for ages at her own fingers, still warm from the body they had caressed. “You really shouldn’t do that, Henriette,” her mother would say, and then laugh.
Comforted, she would leave her and continue on through the rooms she hadn’t yet seen. In the bedroom she would open the wardrobe to make sure nothing was missing, take out a few towels, then put them back. In the morning room she made sure her mother’s sewing table was st
ill in place. In her father’s office she restored the works of classical literature to an upright position and arranged them in the correct order. In the salon she always looked for the footstool tucked beneath the sofa: she seemed to think it might not be there, which for some reason always bothered her, and when she found it, with its gold-framed Gobelin-style tapestry depicting a shepherd and shepherdess standing on opposite banks of the stream—he with cap in hand to greet her, she with a jug and a beribboned stick in her hand—Henriette was all nodding approval.
In the kitchen she peeped into the sideboard. It always gratified her to see the number of saucepans they had—though why did they need so many? Once she had assured herself that everything was in order she moved on to her bedroom to start her homework: she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to go to the Elekeses or the Birós until she had finished it.
She had almost reached the end when Mr. Held, his last patient having left, came to see how far she had got. She showed him her vocabulary list and he corrected it without recourse to a dictionary. “He always comes to my rescue,” she thought. “He knows everything. He always knows how to do things. What would happen to me if one day he wasn’t here?” She stood up and pressed herself against him. This signified the end of the first part of her homecoming ritual. She touched him gently: his forehead, his hand, his chest. He laughed and said exactly what her mother had: “You really shouldn’t do that, Henriette!” Again she gazed at her fingers, still warm from the brief contact, laughed, and ran out into the garden.
The façade of their house, like those of their immediate neighbors, looked directly onto the street. The gardens of all three went back as far as the walls of the Castle—long rectangular plots separated by wooden fences higher than most people (including the Major, who was taller and lankier than anyone) could see over. The Helds’ teemed with roses, nothing but roses, with large glass balls glinting on poles between them. The Elekeses’ grew carefully tended and heavily scented petunias, violets, and mother-of-the-evening. The Major’s was mostly flowering bulbs, with long-established conifers standing guard around a little pond, at the center of which a bronze fish gasped openmouthed, as if suffocating for the lack of water flowing through it.
