by Magda Szabo
She was in the kitchen, struggling. I went and relieved her of the work. She was holding her left hand against the bandage and could neither wash nor dry things properly. Thinking of her terrified face that morning and the way she had held out her purse for me to take suddenly made me laugh. My good angel was standing behind me, whispering gentle words in my ear, and I offered her my cheek. She understood at once that I was no longer angry with her, hugged and kissed me and put her arms around my neck, then she grabbed the footstool and sat down on it. Her face was radiant. While I had been out on my course, both in the morning and the afternoon, and even during her breaks from revising, everything had been left for her to do, and she was overjoyed not to have to do any more that night. She smiled at me, cosseted her bandaged hand, and the words began to flow.
She told me what a good girl she had been, how hard she had studied, and she had also cooked the supper and tidied the rooms: see how clean it was everywhere! And then she had another surprise for me, because I had scolded her so harshly that morning and told her how lazy and untidy she was.
Blanka’s surprises! I took a fresh tea towel and carried on working in silence. She unpicked the bandage with her free fingers and showed me her hand. It was revolting. There was a deep, ugly wound ripped into the flesh: not the sort of injury you would come by in a kitchen.
“I did the garden as well,” she beamed. “You were angry about the drying line so I took it down. I worked like a slave the whole afternoon, while you were out on your course. I cut the grass; I tidied up behind the hedge. I even swept it. It’s really tidy now.”
“About time too,” I said, and carried on working.
“I also hammered the nails in,” she went on, and pointed to her hand once again. “That’s what did this. But I hammered them all back in.”
“Which nails?” I asked. I wasn’t in the least bit interested. I was chatting with her simply out of politeness and a sense of guilt because I had given the poor girl such an earful that morning.
“The loose ones in the fence,” she replied, and gazed at me with the expression of a puppy yearning for praise. “I nailed them all back.”
The dish fell from my hand, and the crash mingled with the shouting outside, and the two gunshots that followed immediately after.
THE CLANG of the doorbell made her start, and the now familiar sense of despair flooded over her once again. There was no one she could rely on: only herself. In this family of four people she lived like an orphan, entirely alone. When anything went wrong she could never behave as naturally as she would want. There was always someone in a bad mood, someone needing to be nursed or comforted. From this not even her father was exempt. So deeply ingrained had been his conviction that his life’s work was based on an unshakable moral foundation and that the truth, after however many trials and tribulations, must eventually triumph, that he was now in a state of collapse. Week after week his ideas and ideals were undermined—statesmen reneged on agreements made only the day before, citizens lost their rights from one day to the next, fully grown adults hurled incendiary bombs into hospitals for mewling babies at the breast. When the Helds were deported it was almost more than he could bear, but after the killing of Henriette—though he never could understand how she came to be in her old garden—he completely lost his balance. Irén watched him searching for a tranquilizer, then standing for ages staring at the tablet in his hand, both hand and tablet shaking as in an earthquake.
Irén’s mind reacted to Henriette’s death as if one of her limbs had been anesthetized: the thought had sliced through her like a scalpel, but she felt the pain only later. After Mrs. Temes left, Blanka had taken to following Irén around with a tear-streaked face, explaining over and over again the very circumstances she most wanted to forget. Now Irén had sent her off to their bedroom and her little sister was lying there, dabbing her eyes with a towel, blowing her nose and using her one free hand to torment her childhood teddy bear, which even at this age she still kept on the table beside her bed. Irén desperately wanted to be alone, to lock herself in the bathroom, so that no one could make her feelings even more painful by talking about their own. But Blanka was forever wanting something from her or asking her questions. At one point she felt she could stand it no longer and was on the point of screaming at her, “Quiet, you murderer!”
Once again her mother was proving the least of her problems. In exceptional circumstances she always produced exceptional behavior, as on the day of the engagement when she had worn those tight shoes because they looked so pretty, had eaten so beautifully at breakfast, and generally attempted to conduct herself in a dignified manner. On this occasion she had wept for a few minutes, then quite impartially and almost without emotion, but in the most obscene language imaginable, heaped curses on those responsible. Her husband blanched and fled to his study, fighting down his nausea: in his house even such innocent words as “shucks” or “damn” were forbidden, and hearing his wife uttering these obscenities, picked up from God knows where and stored inside her head for just this occasion, made him almost physically sick. She then took herself off to bed at her usual hour and promptly fell asleep. She was the only member of the family who never had difficulty sleeping. She would go to bed even when it was almost certain that there would be another air raid. She had been formed by nature for long, sleep-filled nights, and when she was woken up to be taken to the shelter she would be furious: how dare they involve her in their brainless military escapades and pluck her from her warm bed to go down to the cellar! She was so incensed she forgot to be afraid.
Irén looked for things to do. She tidied up. She wrapped things up into parcels, not quite knowing why. There was no question of going to bed—to end the day as if it had been just like any other was unthinkable.
Mr. Elekes had also stayed up, long after he had taken his pill, sitting under the bust of Cicero, paging through some old exercise books. He had personally taught the Held girl in one of the elementary classes and had kept some of her work in his special collection. Irén couldn’t bear to watch him searching through those meticulously bound exercise books as if looking for a reason why she had to be shot at the age of sixteen. In due course the tranquilizer overcame him, and when the doorbell rang he was slumped over the desk with his head resting on Henriette’s homework.
She tried to shake him awake, without success. He looked up briefly and promptly shut his eyes again. She could hear her mother’s snores coming from the bedroom. Blanka was still up and fully dressed, but she could expect nothing from her. Ever since the start of the war and the raids, Blanka had been so filled with fear once night fell that whenever the doorbell rang she would try to hide, and in the most stupid of places, the bathroom or the larder. Irén went quickly to the front door and stood waiting and listening before she slid the bolt. She breathed a jumbled, wordless prayer, addressed not to God but, for some strange reason, to Henriette, pleading that whoever stood on the other side of the door might not be Bálint. Anyone but Bálint.
The harsh clang sounded again. Otherwise the silence outside was total. No clink of jostled weaponry, no muttering voices: not a raid, then. Another hope—a naïve one, but she clung to it—if not a raid, let it be a passing drunk. Or a child, someone trying to frighten them or drive them away. Why should people not want to play practical jokes even in 1944?
She knew of course that it was Bálint. Not just because he hadn’t taken his finger off the button, and that sort of impatience and display of urgency was so typical of him, but because it would be so much in keeping with the rest of her day. She called out to ask who was there, and when there was no reply she opened the door.
He must have come straight from home, having seen Mrs. Temes: she could see from his face that he knew what had happened. For a while they stood there, face-to-face, like two actors the director has told not to step either toward each other or back but to stand close enough to feel each other’s breath. Then he closed the door and pulled Irén to him. For the firs
t few seconds his touch wasn’t that of a grown man. In their childhood they had often stood thus when one of them was upset or cold and the other wanted to comfort or to warm them. This contact was as if they weren’t sexual beings but simply seeking warmth, as they had done so many years before. Then, as if their intertwined bodies had suddenly remembered that they were now a man and a woman, they were overcome by a blind mutual desire. In those moments they were not conscious of themselves or each other but of Henriette and her death. They clung to each other and kissed as if a chasm had opened up before them and they were clinging to one another to stop the other person from plunging into the void. She realized later that at that moment, there in the doorway, she should have told Bálint everything—the air warden’s course, the boards that had been nailed back, and the part she and Blanka had played in Henriette’s death. Then perhaps everything would have turned out differently. But she said nothing. She was too afraid. Later again she realized that there was only one person who would have had the courage to tell the truth, had she known it, and that person was Blanka.
They went into the house. Nothing was said; there was nothing to say. From the account Mrs. Temes had given her of Henriette’s death she could guess what he believed had happened: that in spite of all those instructions and the promises she had made, Henriette had obviously wanted to bid farewell to her former home, had run across their garden, and the guard on duty had seen her and shot her before she could reach the Elekeses’ fence. Bálint began walking around the house. Irén knew this habit of his of going from room to room, but she noticed that it wasn’t with the casual familiarity of someone who had known the place from childhood. At first she was puzzled by the difference from his usual way of moving about. This was a man who never pulled out drawers or barged into a room without knocking: now he was sauntering around. He took one glance at Mr. Elekes, who was completely unconscious, casually brushed some papers from the desk with his elbow, and went into the darkened bedroom where Mrs. Elekes’s snufflings could be heard. There was something altogether inhuman and bewildering in this wandering. He even went into the girls’ room, but he didn’t find Blanka, only her made-up bed. Irén knew no more than he did where she was hiding—perhaps behind the curtain or under the bed itself. Even if Blanka had realized it was Bálint she would never have dared to come out. She would have been too embarrassed to be seen in her nightdress.
Irén had no idea what he was looking for, but he was certainly looking for something. She was tense, unhappy, and very tired, and she would have loved to go to bed at last, or simply get away. But it was impossible: Bálint was not making anything easy for her. He looked in the larder. Thinking he might be hungry she reached out for some bread, but he shook his head. In a corner behind the tub of pickled cabbage he found the siphon for drawing wine and took it with him as a sort of walking stick. She stared at him in amazement as he went, a man in uniform with an empty glass siphon under his arm. Seeing that he was determined to press on, she went and stood in front of him. He pushed her back—not as a lover might but almost roughly. There was no suggestion in his movements now of gentleness or desire. On he went, wine siphon in hand, moving from room to room, until at last he opened the door into the garden and went out into the courtyard. She followed him, once again racking her brains to think what he might be after. When he opened the door that led down to the network of cellars she felt momentarily reassured. She particularly loved the shelter they had made at the far end of it: cut deep into the rock of the Castle walls, it gave her a real sense of security. At least down there they might enjoy a few minutes of private conversation. She knew it would have to be brief: even though they were engaged her father would never allow her to be in there alone with him. But she followed him all the same.
She called out to him. He mumbled something indistinct, more like a snarl, and walked on. He yanked open the door to the wine cellar, switched on the light, and carried on down the long passageway so quickly she had to run to keep up. As she drew alongside him, she noticed not just the uniformed figure but the strange expression on his face, the unfamiliar gestures and movements, the odd-looking close-cut hair on the back of his neck, and she suddenly realized that the man she had let into the house was not Bálint but a soldier. He had known her since birth, he knew everyone in the family, the house itself and every item of furniture in it, and here he was, pulling drawers open, poking around in their larder, and barging into their wine cellar the moment he felt thirsty. She stood behind him, watching in horror as he filled the siphon from the barrel and ran it into her father’s best decanter.
She began to be really afraid of him, afraid in a way that she had never been of anyone before or since. Now for the very first time she understood something that had been obvious to both him and the Major—something she had been too proud ever to ask about but was so self-evident that the two men had taken it as not needing explanation—that Henriette was Bálint’s child. Relationships depend not on age but on something quite different. And because he had lost his child, the soldier who had come to her house and kissed her with such passion in the doorway was at that moment capable of anything.
He swung round, still holding the siphon. He must have seen something in her face because he smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. She turned her face away: the moment she got back to the house she would have to wake her father, whatever the consequences. He kept on walking, toward the air-raid shelter. When he finally got there he switched the light on, stood the siphon on a table, and looked along the shelf. It was one she had put up herself when they were fitting the place out. He’s looking for a glass, she thought: now to leave him there and run. But she couldn’t. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her down on the bench beside him. He poured a glass of wine for himself, put another in her hand, and drank his in one go. She didn’t drink but stayed where she was beside him. Then he turned away and burst into tears.
The shelter had been fitted out by Mr. Elekes and it showed all the signs of his thoughtful execution. On the table was a book of prayers; in the corner a wide range of tools and utensils, including an ax and a spade; flashlights on the shelf; tins of food, an unopened box of biscuits, and a first-aid kit on a ledge next to the faucet; a crucifix on the wall and three sleeping bunks made up with blankets and pillows alongside it. The sight of these humble devices for saving human life finally opened the floodgates to the mortal grief inside him. He started to speak, but his voice was mangled by the pressure of emotion and the only word she could make out was “Henriette.” Irén was shocked by how, just a few days earlier, that name had so riven her heart, and that she could have been so jealous of the child. She too burst into tears, and the two of them sat there holding a wake for Henriette. Finally she drank the glass of wine he had poured for her.
They had rarely talked about love. They had loved each other too long for that. To analyze their relationship or theorize about it would have been pointless, like commenting every morning that the sun had risen. Their parents had seen, and known, what was happening between them, had made an assessment of their mutual feelings and realized long before they themselves did where it would end. Even when they made the decision that they would eventually marry without waiting for the war to end before announcing their engagement, Bálint hadn’t told Irén that he loved her. When he did propose, it was in his usual everyday same tone. He simply said, between two other observations, “I shall marry you, Irén.” The announcement, for which she had been waiting for so many years, had surprised her so little that it failed to strike her that he hadn’t expressed it more romantically—or given any reason for declaring himself at that moment. She knew that he loved her. To spell it out would have been superfluous.
Now, for the very first time, he said the words: “Irén, I love you.”
She put her glass down, somewhat shocked that in such a sad moment—on the night of Henriette’s death—she could experience such an intense feeling of sweet happiness, such guiltless joy. She offered no rep
ly, just sat there and watched him as he drank. She was struck by the urgency of his need. Bálint rarely drank, and then very little. She knew why he was drinking now, with something verging on revulsion at what he was doing, the way you take a bitter medicine. He was drinking for oblivion, for a few minutes of mindless stupor. She turned her head away. Though she loathed the smell of alcohol she had no wish, on that night of nights, to lecture or reproach him. He put his arm around her neck, pulled her toward him, and kissed her again. But she no longer wanted his kisses, not only because his manner was so brutal and he smelled of wine but because the mouth he proffered had suddenly become that of a stranger. She felt again what she had felt earlier when they had sat together weeping for Henriette, that the person beside her was not Bálint but someone else. She struggled to get away from him. He resisted for a while, then let her go. She stood up at once. She no longer felt safe in the shelter. She wanted to run up the stairs to the garden and get back to the house that way; but he stood up too.
“I love you,” he repeated.
She nodded her response: she had heard him the first time. She was now desperate to get outside, but he grabbed her again and barred the way. She was very afraid. He shook her shoulders and looked into her eyes. She had no idea what he saw there, but her fear continued to mount. She tried to break free from his embrace, but he wouldn’t let her. She placed her hand on his chest and pushed as hard as she could, but he was stronger than she was, and he pulled her down on the bed.
“I thought you loved me,” he said, his voice full of surprise, as if he had missed something, as if there was something he couldn’t see that was somehow obvious to her. They were now lying on the bed—it was the one on which her mother slept—with his body half alongside hers. She began to weep; she scratched and fought. He endured it with surprising coolness, trying all the while to remove her clothes with great care, as if wishing to avoid causing her pain while permitting no resistance.
