by Magda Szabo
“What kind of engagement party is this?” Blanka sobbed. “The poor Helds, I loved them so much, but if they were going to take them away, if they really had to, it should have been some other time. Not at Irén’s engagement party.”
Bálint turned to her and slapped her cheeks, both right and left. It was such an unexpected, frightening thing to do that my mother screamed. My father lowered his eyes. Mrs. Temes went to the kitchen without saying a word. I stared at Bálint, only at Bálint. I had no idea what was going on in his head. By then Blanka was no longer in the room.
WHEN THE moment did finally arrive, it came neither at the time nor in the manner she had anticipated and was altogether less dramatic. That it would come she had been sure, even if no one ever spoke about it. She was simply amazed that none of the others could see it coming as clearly as she did—not the Major, who was so wise and clever, or Bálint, who loved her so much, or the ever-sensible Mrs. Temes. They all seemed blind to anything that couldn’t be seen or touched, things that were accessible only to the feelings. She often wondered too, if she was with any of them and they were talking to her, getting her to eat, trying to cheer her up and reassure her, why it was that they couldn’t see that what was coming wasn’t really important, wasn’t worth the enormous risk the Major was taking, and that the precise manner of her removal from this world would be trivial compared to the fact itself. How could they not understand that she was in effect already dead?
She never put these questions to the Major, or Bálint, or Mrs. Temes. She could see what a source of comfort and reassurance her silence was to them, how little suspicion it aroused, and she remained exactly as they had always known her, gently submissive and amenable to instruction. Nor did she trouble them with questions about that mysterious place in the country where she had not been allowed to go with her parents when they left with their good friend so much sooner than expected, or to the place where they were waiting for her, in complete safety, until she too could safely leave the city, and it was really just a matter of a few days before she would be with them again.
“If you like, you could write to them,” the Major had assured her just before he returned to the front. “Bálint will make sure it gets there.” She thanked him and told him she didn’t really want to.
During the previous two weeks, after exploring all the possibilities, the Helds had finally settled on a password that, if they were separated, would tell the family member receiving it that they were alive and safe, or at least that the sender was. The Major had not once used that word, he clearly wasn’t aware of it, so Henriette knew that her parents had been arrested. She felt truly sorry for Bálint, at his wits’ end trying to find ways to distract her and having to leave her with Mrs. Temes when he failed or when his work kept him at the hospital overnight. Mrs. Temes couldn’t always be with her either: shopping was difficult, and she often had to wait in line for hours. Henriette was forbidden to go into the garden, and there was only one situation in which she should ever leave the house. Before he left, the Major had been very precise in his instructions as to what those circumstances might be.
She was never bored. In fact it seemed to her that time was racing by. Every so often she would glance anxiously at her watch. It always told her that it was later than she had thought—no sooner had morning arrived than it was evening. If Bálint was at home the two of them would play cards, talk about this and that, and listen to the radio. He would play the piano, or they would rummage through their boxes of games to see what there was for two people to play, three if Mrs. Temes was around. When Bálint wasn’t there, Mrs. Temes got her to cook lunch or bake cakes. She played or worked according to their wishes, but none of these activities brought her the same sense of peace as when she was truly on her own, without other people trying to make her life easier by their presence. She could certainly think of greater sources of comfort than the exaggerated reassurances of Mrs. Temes, or even the foreign-language broadcasts which she could understand but to which she listened as if they had nothing to do with her, though they gave her more hope than Bálint did. When he was physically present she was incapable of thinking about anything other than what he wanted, but it was also important for her to set aside time every day to think about those things that did bring her strength and peace of mind: her various deaths.
It was a comfort to know that she had died at least one natural death, one that every other young girl before her must have experienced, and not just the one that was clearly going to happen when she was sixteen. So whenever her parents talked about their chances of escape and survival she went and sat with them and looked back over her memories, always returning to the one in which she saw herself breathing her last in the garden, the Elekeses’ garden, where she had died on her feet, like a soldier, without flinching, as do the brave. “Bálint is going to marry Irén,” Blanka had said, dancing from side to side. Henriette looked at her and said nothing. She was holding her watch—she had just started to wind it—but the action was frozen in midair, and she stood there as still as a painting of herself holding a watch. What astonished her most was her own astonishment, when it had been so obvious that one day this would happen, as was the fact that she was the only one who really loved Bálint and that Bálint didn’t love her. Well of course he did, but not in the same way, not in the way that would make it enough for her to want to stay among the living. “My life is over,” she reflected in wonderment. She considered it at length, how simply it had occurred, quite unconnected with all those wartime announcements or the new laws and restrictions that were being passed by the authorities every day. Her father had put his trust in his medals from the Great War and her mother had talked about God. How she would have loved to comfort them, to tell them that when the day came when neither prayers nor military honors would save them, at least they wouldn’t have to mourn for her as well because she would already be long dead.
Years before, when they were still children, they had played a great many games—their parents thought it would be good for them, at least those that could be confined to a garden or an enclosed yard. She always asked for the Cherry Tree, even years after she ought to have been just a little ashamed to do so. It exerted a powerful and inexplicable charm over her. Bálint hated the game, but he did sometimes consent to take part. He was always the one in the middle, and he always chose Irén as his partner, while she and Blanka stood on either side and clapped their hands as the pair went spinning round and round between them. Henriette knew that everything that had happened to her, and perhaps was still waiting to happen, flowed, perhaps even before the coming of Hitler, from that game in the garden, the Cherry Tree game, in which Bálint always chose Irén.
The second time she experienced a death she again did so silently and without any visible reaction, and this made her feel that perhaps the final one wasn’t too greatly to be feared either. The Major had taken her to his house and gone through the motions of telephoning someone before announcing that, owing to some misunderstanding, her parents had traveled on ahead and that she would have to stay with him for the time being, until the next car was due to leave. She loved and missed her parents intensely, but she knew at once that they had been arrested and that she would never see them again. What she felt then was something no tears could assuage. “They will be killed,” she thought, when the Major finally left her alone in the room. “They will know no more fear, and nothing can harm them again; and I have died with them, because they alone knew what I am like when I let myself be as I really am. Irén and Blanka have never seen anything of my true self, because I have never had the courage to reveal it to them: I always had the feeling that, however much they were part of my life, they were inside a closed circle and I was on the outside. And there was something the Major and Bálint couldn’t see either: that I always made a special effort when I was with them because I so wanted to belong, to be part of their safe and confident world. I was like a homeless puppy, offering myself to them, in my own quiet way, because I lov
ed Bálint so unutterably.”
So she went along with the idea of her parents’ departure, the fiction that they really had traveled to some place where she would soon follow them. Sometimes when they had gone on a family holiday to Lake Balaton her mother would indeed travel on ahead to sort out the accommodation. “So, yes,” she said to herself, “they really are waiting for me.” And she spent hours daydreaming about when and how it would be when they did meet again.
Strangely enough, it was only the third death that provoked her tears. It was the least meaningful of the three. It changed nothing, it taught her nothing new, but it upset her more because the way it happened was so childish and for that reason all the more shocking. The Major had explained to her very carefully what she should do if they heard the bell ring and Mrs. Temes opened the door to anyone. If Mrs. Temes then went into the garden and stood beside the fountain and complained loudly about the difficulty of finding provisions, Henriette should go quickly and at once up to the attic above his late wife’s bedroom, where they had put her, because it meant that the visitor wanted to see something in one of the rooms; if Mrs. Temes complained about the slowness of the mail or the frequency of the bombing, she was to go down to the cellar, where there was a hiding place behind a stack of coal; and if Mrs. Temes talked about a pharmacy or referred to an illness, then she should go out into the garden, go round behind the hedge, which was now tall and thickly overgrown, and make her way to the tall fence between the Biró garden and her own. Bálint had removed enough nails from some of the panels to make a gap wide enough for her to slip through, and he had done the same on the Elekes side as well; so if she heard Mrs. Temes mention a pharmacy or an illness, she should pass along behind that second hedge—it was just as dense and overgrown as in the other gardens—and make her way as quickly as she could behind her old garden and down into the cellar in the Elekes house.
She had been at the Major’s for just a week when the doorbell rang. Mrs. Temes went outside and stood beside the fountain, talking to two strangers, a man and a woman. From behind the curtain she could see them clearly and could hear what they were saying: they were looking for rooms to accommodate people whose homes had been bombed. Mrs. Temes said something about the terrible difficulty of finding rations, and told them that the Major’s house had been exempt from the new controls. The woman replied they would still have to register it in case there was an emergency and it became absolutely necessary to put people in there. Henriette ran from the room and up the wooden staircase, and had reached the secret place behind the huge traveling trunks when she suddenly stopped. She stood stock-still, forgetting her instructions: from up there in the attic she could see out into her garden. She had a good view of her back door, which led down onto the grass, and there on the steps were the bottle for pickling cucumbers, some cucumbers sliced in half, and some bread her mother had put out to dry in the sun. At the far end, her swing moved gently in the wind. Otherwise the garden was empty. The flowers hadn’t been watered and were bone-dry.
She stood and wept so bitterly that she thought she must have been heard down below and she struggled desperately to pull herself together; but the sight of those cucumbers, the watering can, and the swing kept the tears flowing. They stood for everything that had happened. She had no house, no home, no family; even her name was no longer her own: if anyone asked she was to say she was Mária Kis, her father was Antal Kis and her mother Nora Müller. On the two previous occasions, first when she had finally grasped that Bálint was to be engaged to Irén, and then when she realized that she would never see either her father or her mother again, and what that meant, the emotion had been just too brutal, something that tears could never express. But now, in the minutes preceding her third death, she finally understood the mute power of physical objects and everything they could stand for.
On the day it happened Bálint wasn’t with her. He had been able only to promise that he would be back from the hospital some time that evening. Mrs. Temes had been instructed by the Major to carry on with her life as if things were perfectly normal, and she had been out shopping with her ration vouchers. Henriette had tried to read and had listened to the radio. Mrs. Temes came back rather late and in a bad mood, and for a while bustled about in silence. Henriette knew what this meant. When Mrs. Temes moved about the house without saying a word it meant she was worried and upset about something. She saw her trying to telephone Bálint—she actually got through to the hospital but was unable to reach him. Henriette heard her try three times, but she was now hearing other noises too, very close to hand, a dull, heavy thudding, as if objects of some size were being dumped on the ground somewhere. Finally Mrs. Temes came into the room and told her what she had seen while she was out. The army or some such organization had commandeered the Held house and were taking out the furniture, throwing everything into the garden; she had asked the sentry standing at the door what they were going to do with the building and he had told her it was to be a first-aid center and an emergency hospital: the city was full of people injured in the bombing and in desperate need of attention.
Henriette looked at her in astonishment. How could this woman, who had known her since the age of six, be so incapable of imagining what was going on in her head, and how could two people react to things so very differently? It was now clear to her that if she ever needed to leave the house they would have to devise a new plan, because, if her former home was to be turned into a first-aid center, from the next morning onwards it would no longer be possible in an emergency to get to the Elekes house by way of her old garden. Did that really matter? Bálint would decide: he had already told her that they wouldn’t be keeping her in the house for very long.
Mrs. Temes was equally puzzled: didn’t the girl understand what had happened, or was she so indifferent to everything that was going on that she hadn’t been paying attention? Bálint would have to take her away that very night. If there were a full-scale aerial or artillery attack they would have to vacate the house, and everyone in the street knew Henriette. Even though the Major was away at the front he would be in serious trouble.
Henriette left the room. When she got to the wooden staircase she took her shoes off so that Mrs. Temes wouldn’t hear where she was going, slipped into the attic, as she had done earlier that day, and looked out. The garden down below was swarming with soldiers. All their furniture—beds, tables, the sideboard, chairs, the contents of drawers, books, and even underwear—had been taken out, dumped in heaps among the roses, and was in the process of being sorted. She could see her dresses, her school satchel, all the familiar objects of her life in full view, out there in the garden. Her father’s white shirts were strewn over an armchair. But none of his instruments seemed to be there, so the surgery must have been left untouched.
She stood there motionless, looking at what was left of her past. Every item there had its own history, though the soldiers moving between them knew none of it: objects have nothing to say to strangers. The soldiers worked quickly, almost professionally. Nothing was slipped into pockets, everything was being sorted into appropriate categories, chairs with chairs, pictures with pictures, smaller items into baskets, bedding, underwear, and bed linen into a separate pile. Henriette thought of the different smells, the fragrance of the pillows, the white coats fresh from the laundry or smelling of starch—and the towels, the soft touch of the towels. Everything was falling apart, the house was disintegrating before her eyes, reverting to its component parts; for her, whose home it had been, everything that had ever happened to those objects lived on in that jumbled pile of things that meant nothing to the people handling them.
Mrs. Temes wouldn’t come looking for her, she was sure. She would be reading a book or preparing supper. So she stayed where she was until the last soldier had gone. It was getting dark and the lights in the house were on when she finally went down to supper.
They were about to start on the stewed fruit when the doorbell rang twice and then twice again, the famil
y code. One of Mrs. Temes’s relatives.
“Go to your room,” Mrs. Temes ordered. “Take your bowl of fruit with you. Be quick!”
She obeyed and went out, spilling some juice as she climbed the stairs. At the bend she paused before going into her room, to hear who had come. It was Mrs. Temes’s niece. She always stayed for ages, talking nonstop—Henriette had known her ever since she lived in the street. She put her bowl down on the little sideboard on the landing and continued on her way up to the attic. The moon was high in the sky, but from up there she could see very little now.
“Those laundry smells,” she said to herself. “Among the pillows, on the bedspread, on our clothes—the only memorial to Nagy Anna and Lajos Held.” And that barely perceptible indentation on the sofa where she and her father had always sat together reading . . . and a tangle of towels, her head bent forward with her hair falling in front of her, her mother rubbing briskly to make it dry faster, laughing as she rubbed. Henriette was already dead, but even in her hour of death she wanted to see it again, the place where she had once lived. She ran down the stairs and out through the back door into the garden.
The Major’s house was in complete darkness. There was no light coming through the shutters, so she knew that neither Mrs. Temes or her niece would see her as she ran down the gravel path and past the fountain with the bronze fish toward the hedge. The sky stretched wide above her head; pale moonlight picked out the trees and the ragged outline of the hedge. Reaching the hedge, she slipped through, ran along to the fence and located the loosened boards. She undid them and slid past. And there, in her own garden at last, in the shadow of its trees and surrounded by the heady scent of its flowers, she sat down on the grass and buried her head in her hands.
“Those fragrances,” she thought. “Just this once more, for the last time, and never again . . . from deep inside the pillows, as in a dream.” She stood up and went over to the stacks of furniture, to the pile she was looking for—the white coats, the pillows, and the towels—then knelt on the ground in front of them, nestled her head against the pillows, and inhaled deeply, as if panting for breath.
