by Magda Szabo
Timidly, as if she, not they, were the visitor in the house, she shot a glance past the two girls into her room. The dark girl immediately stepped aside, put down the toy she was holding, took the second one from the fair-haired girl and set that down too. Henriette passed between them into the room, and they immediately followed. She picked up the metal egg she had been given at the station and started to shake it, making it rattle. She had not yet taken any of the contents out: she had neither opened it nor wanted to. That was the source of its magic—laid by an iron hen, who could say what else might be hidden inside? The younger girl snatched it out of her hand and immediately began taking it apart with her deft little fingers. Sweets of all colors tumbled out into her palm. She picked one up to eat it, but then, as if suddenly realizing that something was due to Henriette, pushed a piece into the newcomer’s mouth and passed the egg to the darker girl. The dark girl refused the sweet. She pushed the two metal halves of the egg back together, returned it to Henriette, and sternly told the younger one, “It’s hers.”
They often retold this story as being so typical of all three girls, adding that the grown-ups, who had been watching them from the other room, had burst out laughing. They had been joined by a balding man with a mustache, the husband of the sloppily dressed woman. Mrs. Held immediately began to compliment the dark-haired girl—such a well brought up little person. The girl listened without altering the expression on her face, but the fair-haired one gave a bright smile, as if she were the one being praised. Mrs. Held then opened the egg again, spread the contents onto a plate, and gave it to Henriette to offer around. Henriette did not much like sugary things, or anything in fact that was very sweet. What she really liked about the egg was that it didn’t have to be thought of simply as a source of nice things to eat. With the lump of acidic sweetness in her mouth that the fair-haired girl had forced on her, she began doing the rounds with the plate. Her mother had not told her who to offer them to, so she thought that the adults should be included. No sooner had she begun when the doorbell rang. Margaret went to open it, and a man came in: a man in uniform. With him were an elegant, red-haired woman and a boy, visibly older than the other children. Borne along by her mother’s instruction, Henriette offered the sweets to them too.
By now the room was full of people, and everyone seemed to know everyone else. Mr. Held and the uniformed man embraced. The smartly dressed woman with the red hair was called Mrs. Temes. Neither this first meeting nor the moment when she had offered them sweets were actual memories: they too were things she had been told about. What she did recall directly was that the boy and the two girls suddenly disappeared, almost before her eyes, through some exit that she was still unaware of, not yet having had the chance to explore the house. Margaret put out some brandy glasses on the sideboard, and the adults sat down to chat. Henriette remained standing, but no one paid her any attention. After a while Margaret took her outside, told her to go and play with the other children, who would certainly be expecting her, and showed her the way into the garden. That was her first sight of it, teeming with roses.
The three children, the dark girl, the fair-haired one, and the boy, were standing motionless in the center, between the beds of flowers, as if waiting for something to happen. She knew at once that it wasn’t her that they were waiting for, but as she made her way timidly toward them she sensed they might at least be prepared to accept her. The fair-haired girl took her by the arm and gave it a tug, not unkindly but in friendship. The dark-haired one asked her what she was called, and how old she was, and Henriette introduced herself.
“I’m Irén,” the dark-haired girl replied. The little fair-haired one said nothing but just smiled. Eventually she said she didn’t have a name. Henriette believed her, though she thought it very strange.
“She’s called Blanka,” the boy said. “She’s daft.”
Henriette looked at her in trepidation. Blanka was spinning around and laughing as if she had just been paid a compliment. Then she pointed to the boy and sang out, “Bálint.”
“All right, that’s enough now,” said the boy. “Shall we play or go back inside?”
Henriette stood beside the water tap and watched as they scattered like butterflies. They were playing a complicated form of tag. Henriette had never been able to run very fast: she was too unsure of herself, too clumsy. The little fair-haired girl was quick as the devil, and saucy with it. When the boy caught up with her, she tripped him and he fell, grazing his knee. He stood up and cuffed her firmly round the head, and she gave a loud scream. The dark-haired girl ran swiftly and gracefully: Henriette could only stand and watch, thinking that no one would ever catch her. What she was feeling all this time, she couldn’t explain. Only much later would she manage to find words for it. But by then she was no longer alive.
The game came to an end as abruptly as it had begun. Everyone stopped in full flight, as when a sudden thought strikes the mind. The boy was the first to stop, and, having no one to chase, the girls halted in their turn.
“She must play too,” he declared, looking at Henriette. “It’s their garden.”
“We can go back to ours,” said the fair-haired girl. The dark-haired one stayed silent.
“No,” said the boy. “We aren’t going anywhere. Our parents are here. Henriette will play with us. Don’t you have another name? Henriette is a terrible name.”
Mortified, she whispered her denial. That moment stayed with her too, that feeling of utter shame. She would experience it once again, in the distant future, but in reverse: everything eventually comes round again, the living experience and the old memory sitting neatly side by side, just as a glass placed against a mirror behaves like a mirror. The name she was known by on that later occasion was Mária Kis.
“All right. Never mind. Come and join in.”
She did. She got caught every time. Soon she was so upset she burst into tears. The boy stopped in mid-chase and stood deep in thought. The dark-haired girl studied her with the polite bemusement of a doctor attending to a patient he feels he can no longer help. Seeking to comfort her, the little one surprised her by putting an arm around her neck, but the arm was sweaty and rough, the contact painful, and the attempt was not a success.
“We should play something she can manage,” the boy said. “She’s only little and not very sporty.”
“The Cherry Tree?” asked the fair-haired girl.
“The stupid Cherry Tree?”
This game was one she didn’t know, so they taught it to her. She loved it. She picked up the tune at once, and though her voice was very soft she sang it perfectly. The fair-haired girl sang loudly and with gusto; the dark-haired one and the boy stayed silent. Round and round they went, for as long as they could keep it up. Whenever she was in the middle she chose Bálint, but he always chose the girl with the dark hair.
Suddenly they became aware that they were not alone. As in the final scene at the opera when all the dramatis personae are brought together onstage, everyone was there, standing at the gate—the man in uniform, the smartly dressed woman with red hair, Henriette’s father, the slovenly woman, the bald man with spectacles, and Mrs. Held. Mrs. Held came toward them, then suddenly stopped, leaned over to inhale the scent of a crimson rose, and declared, “We shall live here till the day we die.”
That was the one sentence spoken on that day that had stayed in Henriette’s memory. She had no idea what it meant. She had no idea what life was, or death.
SO WHAT do you really know about us? Or about her? Her?
Nothing.
What you do know is fragmentary and superficial, and even where it is true things aren’t quite as you imagine them to be. The witnesses, the people who could say what really happened, are all either dead or keep their silence. Bálint, for example, knows the truth, but he doesn’t talk about it, either to you or to me. Blanka also knows: she knows everything, apart from one particular detail. But she is farther away now than the stars, and Mr. and Mrs. Held, Henriette,
and the Major are all dead. Drifting on a current of her own making, Mrs. Temes floats in a sea of forgetting, her huge cakes and pastries bobbing on the rolling waves before her, because she never gets enough sweetness in the old people’s home. Mrs. Temes no longer knows who she is, never mind who the rest of us are now.
But she must have seen as much as any of us, and she wasn’t stupid. She obviously worked out what she didn’t know directly and drew her own conclusions; either that, or she simply asked Bálint. She would have had no difficulty in forming an opinion of the people in our house, even when she no longer lived among us—and not just because we were neighbors but because we were so easy to characterize, or at least appeared to be: my mother so beautiful and so stunningly untidy; my father so earnest, a real stickler; Blanka so wayward and impetuous; and I so orderly and so perfectly well-behaved.
“Irén, you never cause me a moment’s concern!” she once said to me when I stopped her at the front door and showed her my school report. I just stared at her. I never felt I received enough recognition, let alone praise. I stood there waiting for her to say something nice about me, or to stroke my arm. I couldn’t imagine that there might be anyone on earth who could get by without other people’s care and concern.
So why did she not add, “But I do worry about your father, I worry about your mother, and I am really concerned about your sister”? She must have heard my mother’s shrieks and screams coming through the fence, the shrill protests and complaints when she and my father had their rows, and my father’s attempts to reason with her and calm her down. I once asked them why they had married. I was desperately embarrassed, but every bit as polite and respectful as I always was when I addressed them. Young as I was, I did realize how improper it was to ask one’s parents such a thing. I have no idea what sort of answer I was expecting. I was looking for an explanation as to how such utterly different people could have come together and managed to produce two children from their union. I was completely taken aback when they replied, in chorus, “Because we loved each other.” Love, that blind, unreasoning force that drives people into one another’s arms and entangles their lives together, had never seemed as believable to me in books as it was in their marriage, their unswerving loyalty to one another, and when I learned later on about the sly little god of antiquity who shoots an arrow through the hearts of incompatible mortals and wings his way laughing into the distance, I found him a very real figure. I lived with this couple, and I observed them. I registered their differences through sound—my mother’s endless prattle, her chortling laughter and loud shrieks, and my father’s slow, considered, beautifully phrased speech. But none of these differences, however revealing, made the least difference. Nor did the suffering they inflicted on one another, whether consciously or not. The sad couple were in love.
But even as a child it never ceased to astonish me how little either of them understood me. My hard work, my desire to get on, my strict sense of duty, and my self-discipline meant to them merely that I was a success, that I was perfect, the one child they could hold up as their achievement, both to the world and to themselves after one of their painful scenes: “See, everyone, this is Irén, who combines the very best of her parents—hardworking and punctilious like her father, promising to become every bit as attractive as her mother, without the social awkwardness of the one or the fecklessness of the other!” My achievements, my praiseworthy efforts, my unremitting application were taken simply as evidence that I wanted to please them, to make their difficult lives a little easier. Sitting at the supper table, I would look on in constant amazement at Blanka’s regularly tear-strewn face (because the evening was the only time my father had for administering the daily discipline); at my mother, in a grubby housedress just a shade too frivolous for the wife of a headmaster; at my father, in his meticulously correct suit, fixing everyone with his eye from behind his plate as if from behind his desk. Did it never occur to them that it was for myself that I wanted to succeed, without the least consideration for whether it made them happy or not?
If, for some psychologically obscure reason, they had taken up the ridiculous notion that it would make them happy if I stopped studying or became a wastrel, I would have carried on working just as hard as ever, because I was preparing myself for adulthood and independence, as for a particular career. I was determined that one day I would live according to my own inclinations. And even as a young girl I knew what those inclinations would be. I wasn’t looking for a perpetual funfair, a life of idleness in a heaven-size sweetshop. I wanted Bálint. Bálint and the Biró house, and the silence that seemed to envelope him when he played with us, even when he had to shout things out as part of the game—that inner silence for which, as a child, I had no name but for which I deeply longed. If I was good, and clever, and studied hard, and if my behavior was always beyond reproach, then obviously the Major would be delighted when his son chose to marry me, and I would make the perfect wife for Bálint, who was to become a great doctor when he grew up. And of course, if everyone was always so pleased with me, then perhaps the Major and Mrs. Temes might be prepared to overlook the fact that our house was constantly filled with quarreling, that my mother was as she was, and that Blanka was forever wailing and getting herself smacked. Being a child, I imagined that everyone who mattered to me would stay exactly as they were, would be there to see how well Bálint and I fitted in together, and would follow us on our passage through life the way Blanka and Henriette would walk behind us carrying the long train of my dress at our wedding (no doubt the nearest they would ever get to seeing one up close—no one would want to marry either of them, despite the Helds’ belief that Henriette was the center of the universe and the fact that my mother loved Blanka so much more than she did me).
I had no difficulty noticing my mother’s preference for Blanka. But when she lost her temper with her, there was something frenzied and indiscriminate about the way she pummeled her. It wasn’t the way you would smack a child to discipline her; it was more like an attack on another adult, a sister rather than a daughter. But I was never jealous of Blanka. I had adored her from the moment she was first lifted up for me to see, and my mind dwelt constantly on the once unimaginable idea of having a sister born. She was an ideal companion. My father went through torments to make her learn her lessons and reach the minimum grades to pass in all her subjects, and the contrast made me stand out all the more for my application and industry. I was the role model held out to her time after time. And yet when she looked at me, her eyes shone with that inexplicable expression of fidelity and joy that only dogs are capable of, when their eyes light on the person they acknowledge as mistress but who never pays them enough attention. My father was immensely proud of me, and so too was my mother—though in her case the feeling was qualified by the fear that the girl who was being so strictly brought up might one day apply some of the same discipline to her. But no one was ever as proud of me as Blanka.
My father was a wonderful teacher. In all my experience of schools, whether as a pupil or as a member of the staff, I never met a teacher as passionate as he was. If ever there was a hero of the profession, it was he. He was a hundred times more authoritative than I was, and had far greater integrity. I was hardworking, irreproachable, well trained, and thorough, but I would have been much the same in any other walk of life. For my father, school wasn’t a place of work, it was a temple; the source not of his daily bread but of the very breath of life. Whenever mundane reality contradicted the great truths to which he so passionately subscribed, or revealed his simple, naïve verities to be false—the rabbit is not by nature timid, the fox not always cunning—his would be a face of thunder. And it was only later, after I became a teacher myself, that I suddenly understood why he was so patient in his marriage. The pedagogue in him was always on the qui vive. It relished the challenge of trying to drive something of substance into my mother’s trifling brain: for example, by encouraging her, the way you would a primary-school child, not just to scre
w her hair up in a bun but also to wash it from time to time, and not to go out in shoes that hadn’t been polished.
But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about: it was the commendation cards. At this stage Blanka and I still slept in our parents’ bedroom; it was only later that we had a room of our own. One night I woke with a start and watched my father, in the glow cast by the little lamp on the bedside chest, as he made his way around the room, pulling out drawers. The chaos in my mother’s drawers had to be seen to be believed—it was only Blanka and I who knew where anything was. We loved opening them. We always found something strange and unexpected, at whose purpose we could only guess. Knowing that my father hated it when she left things lying around, the moment she heard his footsteps approaching she simply threw whatever was there into the first drawer or onto the first shelf that came to hand—never back in its proper place. She then immediately forgot where she had put it, and when she needed it again of course she couldn’t find it. So she emptied everything onto the floor and left us to wade through heaps of discarded clothing, often when they were just about to go out somewhere. My father would complain, admonish, and plead with her, while the two of us tiptoed around them like mice. If my mother could have reacted the way my father’s pupils did, or even like Blanka on those occasions when she showed remorse and admitted that he was right, he would have instantly calmed down. But she couldn’t bear his schoolmasterly attitude. She would laugh in his face and remind him that she was an adult. If he didn’t like the way she ran the house, he should hire someone a bit more efficient than Rose. Look at the Major’s house, where Mrs. Temes saw to everything, and what a wonderful help Margaret was to Mrs. Held! Or she would yell at him that his mania for order made him utterly impossible. This led to the scene where the characters murder each other, one of them screaming and waving her arms, the other arguing and protesting, while we, the silent chorus, stood by and watched.
