by Magda Szabo
That whole evening with Emerence seems far away now, horribly far away. What I felt when I got home that night was that I had done something that in the end wasn’t right, something demeaning. I should never have allowed Emerence to invite a stranger into our home. It had been wrong to help her cultivate the impression, in anybody, that she lived with family and not alone, thus helping to deepen the impenetrable mystery that surrounded her. But once I had done so, it was quite wrong to throw back in her face something she didn’t want to see, and had made us a gift of. What stupid pride takes us over at times like that! Perhaps she might have got through this crisis — though I had no idea what it was really about — more easily if she could feel that at least something useful had come from all her work. The dishes she had prepared were such as you seldom saw, even on the menus of great hotels. It had been quite wrong to throw things back in her face. That day someone had badly hurt the old woman, with reason or not I couldn’t say. Perhaps it all had a simple, logical explanation. Emerence didn’t view things as I did. There were many things she grasped in a flash which others could never see, but just as many that she didn’t understand. So why had I, too, hit out at her? When I thought about the way she beat Viola, and yet the dog hadn’t taken it badly. That animal understood everything. It absorbed information through so many secret antennae, so many mysterious channels.
We were lying in bed, and my husband had been asleep for some time. I was in a bad mood, unable to relax or doze off, so I got dressed again. Viola, who was in the third room, by my mother’s bed, gave a low grunt as I started to move, but didn’t whine. He scratched quietly at the door, as if not wanting to wake my husband. Good. Let’s go together, my boy, I thought. I know it isn’t far, but I don’t like wandering around at night on my own.
And off we went, like the heroes of my childhood adventures in the Aeneid, indeed like the youthful pius pater Aeneas himself, in Book Six. Perhaps this was the moment in our relationship — and our lives — when things finally came to a head. Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram / perque domos Ditis vacuas. In the pitch blackness we moved very slowly, Viola and I. The gate was shut. I rang Emerence’s bell, and waited for her to appear. It was long past midnight, but I could see that the porch light was still on, and Emerence wouldn’t retire before putting it out. She came out almost immediately, and we stood on either side of the bars. Panting heavily, Viola placed his foot on the stone step.
“Is the master ill?” she asked. Her voice was business-like, dry, politely subdued. The house lay sleeping.
“He’s fine. I’d like to come in.”
She let me through and shut the gate behind us. She had come out of her flat but, even at this hour, the door had been carefully closed. Viola hunched down on the doorstep, sniffing for the cat through the narrow gap around the architrave. I wanted to say something fine and conciliatory, such as that I had no idea what was happening, or had happened earlier, but I was truly sorry that, when she was so upset that afternoon, I hadn’t been more understanding; and that, even though I had no idea what had so distressed her, I did feel for her. But nothing came to mind. I only know what I have to do on paper. In real life, I have difficulty finding the right words.
“I’m hungry,” I said at last. “Have you anything left to eat?”
The smile that — against every logical expectation — lit up her face, was like the sun breaking through steel-grey clouds. It occurred to me, for the first time, how rarely she did smile. First, she disappeared into the bathroom, and I heard the splashing of water as she washed her hands (she never touched food without doing so), then she flung open the pantry door. It seemed she kept not only food on its shelves but also linen. Viola would have followed her but I caught hold of the leash, and the old woman ordered him to stay where he was, so he lay down again. She returned with a yellow damask tablecloth, plates, cutlery and, not the remains of the joint from which she had laden the visitor’s tray, but a quite different roast, steeped in strong spices.
It was unbelievably tasty. I tucked in heartily, and Viola got the bone. She also offered me wine, not commercially bottled but straight from the demijohn, and I drank that too. I don’t much like alcohol, but on that night of all nights I had to accept whatever I was given, or my visit would be pointless. I had no idea who I represented at the table, but I knew that I was standing in for someone else, for the visitor who had failed to come, the person for whom she had gone to so much trouble. I did my best to personify a stranger of whom I knew nothing. Together we massaged Viola’s ears and played with his paws, and, when I was ready to leave, Emerence escorted me home, as if we were going all the way to Kőbánya on foot, in slippers and dressing gown. We spoke only about the dog, as if he were the most important thing — his bearing, his handsome build, his quick understanding. Neither of us mentioned the failed guest. When we reached our apartment, Emerence handed me the leash, waited while I stepped into the garden, then slowly, with precise enunciation, as if she were taking a vow, whispered after me — on this Virgilian night, with its mixture of real and surreal elements — that she would never forget what I had done.
My husband didn’t stir as I slipped into bed beside him, but I had much difficulty getting Viola to go back to his place, so excited was he by all that had happened that day. At last he too fell asleep, not in my mother’s room but in the bathroom doorway. I knew when he had finally calmed down, because he snored like a man.
JUNK CLEARANCE
I believe it was from this moment that Emerence truly loved me, loved me without reservation, gravely almost, like someone deeply conscious of the obligations of love, who knows it to be a dangerous passion, fraught with risk. Early in the morning of Mother’s Day that year, she burst into our bedroom. My startled husband had difficulty rousing himself from his drugged sleep, so I got up, and gazed in amazement at her standing in the fresh light flooding in through the open window. She was again in her best clothes, leading Viola to my bed on his leash. On his head was a cheap felt hat with a curving rim; it was jet-black, with a newly cut rose blazing in its band; his collar was interwoven with a garland of flowers. And from then on she appeared at dawn each Mother’s Day with the dog, singing the old holiday greeting on his behalf:
Thank you, Lord, for I am loved,
and fed and have a downy bed;
and thank you Teachers, Mum and Dad:
God grant good harvest in the field.
This little verse, which she would have recited on public occasions to her teachers in a rudimentary school, sometime between the 1905 Russian Revolution and the outbreak of the First World War, rang out in her unwavering voice beside our bed, year after year. Viola always did his best to rub himself free of the little hat from God knows where, but this wasn’t permitted. And each year the old woman finished with the same coda: I, the boy-child, thank you for everything. The rose in my hat is for my lady mistress.
There was indeed a rose in his hat every Mother’s Day. Ever since, I have been unable to see a black felt hat without calling up this memory of the two of them: it is dawn, the air is fresh and fragrant; Emerence is in all her finery, our dog has a garland around his neck, and his ears are flattened down under the rim of the hat. In Bluebeard’s Castle, the parts of the day were clearly defined; and Emerence too had claimed her eternal time of day on Earth. Every dawn is hers, with its special light, and gentle mists rising from the lawn.
This ritual got on my husband’s nerves so intensely that on the eve of Mother’s Day he avoided going to bed. He either dozed in the armchair, in his dressing gown, or took himself off to my mother’s room, closing the door behind him. What made the dawn visit intolerable for him was being caught still in bed, undressed. But I also think it irked him that Emerence had so much affection for me, and expressed it in such an eccentric way.
For there was nothing offhand or casual in the way Emerence loved me. It was as if she’d learned it from the Bible, which she’d never held in her hands, or had drawn closer to t
he Apostles during her three years of schooling. Emerence didn’t know the words of St Paul, but she lived them. I don’t believe there was anyone — apart from those four pillars supporting the arch of my life, my two parents, my husband and my foster-brother Agancsos — capable of giving me such unqualified and unconditional love. Her feelings made me think of Viola, wandering so forlornly through the labyrinth of his private emotions, except that Viola wasn’t my dog, but hers. No matter where she was working, if it occurred to her that I might need anything she would instantly drop whatever she was doing, and relax only when she was satisfied that I wanted for nothing; at which point she would rush off again. Every evening she prepared dishes she knew I would enjoy, and she appeared with other things as well, gifts that were both unexpected and undeserved.
Then one day they organised a general clearance of household junk in our district. Emerence systematically scoured the streets, picking up everything that was either of interest or designed for some unusual purpose. She washed her booty carefully, repaired it and smuggled it into our home. This was before the wave of nostalgia hit the nation; but Emerence, with the surest of touches, was going about collecting items which later came to be considered of value. One morning I found in the library: a painting in a damaged frame, later discovered to be of some worth; one half of a pair of patent-leather boots; a stuffed falcon clinging to a branch; a pot for heating water adorned with a ducal coronet; and the make-up box of a former actress — we’d been woken by the heavy perfume emanating from it. It was a traumatic start to the day. Viola was howling — he had done the rounds rummaging with Emerence and had a good sniff of everything, but when they’d got back he’d been shut up in my mother’s room so he wouldn’t be a nuisance while the collection, planned as a surprise, was prepared, cleaned yet again, and put in place. It also included a garden gnome and the somewhat tattered statue of a brown dog. It was Viola’s restlessness that finally got us out of bed that morning. What made the scene really explosive was that it was my husband, and not me, who was first out of the bedroom. The dog was yelping outside the door, wanting to come in. Emerence, with her well-bred delicacy over the giving of gifts, had laid out the treasures and disappeared. My husband had an absolute fit when he went into his study (which was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling) and found the garden gnome, next to the single boot, leering at him from the rug in front of his collection of English classics. Emerence had pushed Ulysses back on the shelf to make way for the crowned water heater, which she had filled with plastic flowers. The falcon was perched over the fireplace.
Hearing his (for once) unmodulated tones, I rushed in. Never before had I heard my husband express himself with such force, or realised what blind fury lay hibernating beneath his habitual calm. He did not confine himself to an analysis of what might reasonably wake a man in his own house. The argument assumed a wider philosophical scope. What was the point of living if such things were possible — if a godless garden gnome could take over his rug, next to half of a pair of cavalry boots with spurs shaped like eagle’s wings? In his rage he leaped from one topic to another. It was a dreadful morning. I didn’t know what to do. I tried in vain to explain to him that the old woman expressed herself through means determined by her own interests. Everything there — he had to accept — was motivated by love. This was her peculiar way of demonstrating her feelings. Her choices were an expression of her individual point of view. There was no need to jump around from topic to topic, and no need to shout! It was horrible to listen to. I would sort it all out myself.
My husband dashed out of the house. In truth, I felt sorry for him. I had never before, not once, seen him quite so upset, or so entirely at a loss. Later, when he was at last able to make nervous jokes about it, he told me that Emerence had been outside, sweeping the street. She greeted him, and as he shot past her, she smiled at him as if he were a badly brought-up child who, at his age, ought to know how to say hello nicely, but if he didn’t, well, so be it. One had to remember that he would learn in time. Generally, Emerence regarded our relationship as a complete mystery. She didn’t understand why I had involved myself in it, but since that was how things were, she accepted it, just as I had accepted that she would never open her door. If that’s how the master was, what was one to do? There was no such thing as a sane man.
Among the gifts there was only one intended for him, which I had failed to notice at first among all the junk. It was a truly beautiful leather-bound edition of Torquato Tasso. I hid it among the rest of the books. I couldn’t at first think what to do with the other things: the gnome, for example, who carried a lamp and sported a tattered green apron and a tassel on the peak of his cap. I had arranged our kitchen rather idiosyncratically, with bits and pieces inherited from my great-grandmother. It had everything: a flour tin, a tool for shaping pasta into snails, a sausage-making machine, a hanging scale with some old weights, and a Peugeot coffee grinder, by then a listed industrial relic. The dwarf fitted snugly into a space under the sink. I fished out the ducal water heater (its little bucket would be just the thing for my scouring powder) and into the actress’s make-up box I stuffed my own cosmetics.
But there remained the unresolved problems of the painting, the riding boot and the falcon. The falcon I entrusted to Viola, with excellent results. Within minutes of my letting him out of my mother’s room the dog had gnawed it to pieces, leaving only fragments. I hoped the embalming chemicals wouldn’t harm him, but the bird looked so very old that the poison can have been doing little for it. It had shed half its feathers, and some rodent had taken a bite out of it, so its wooden perch instantly broke off. I tapped the painting out of its frame. On its stretcher a ravaged-looking young woman stood beside a seething black ocean, staring at the foam with morbid intent. Behind her stood a mansion, and a row of cypresses plunging down a steep slope. I hung the painting on the inside of the translucent window in the kitchen door and stood the boot in the entrance hall. We had no umbrella stand, and I thought it would do as one, since Emerence had polished it so beautifully. The madwoman on the kitchen door, the antique coffee-grinder, the garden gnome by the sink next to the tub of lard, inscribed, in huge letters, She who loves her husband cooks with lard, which had bedecked my aunt’s kitchen — so extreme was the overall impression created by the apartment that our visitors reacted in one of two ways. Either they were paralysed with amazement, or they were overcome with laughter. Even the walls of our kitchen were something else. Instead of wallpaper or paint, we had oilcloth covered in squirrels, geese and other poultry. Most of our visitors were artists. For them, the place was a familiar world of gentle lunacy. My ultra-correct relatives, with no fantasy life of their own, I had written off long ago. The only real opposition I might have encountered would have been from Emerence. It would have been quite reasonable for her to resist my having turned the kitchen and entrance hall into a madhouse. But from the first she took pleasure in being able to move around among the décor and props of this eccentric private theatre. She had a real feeling for the strange world of E.T.A. Hoffman. Emerence loved anything out of the ordinary. She considered it among the great events of her life when she asked for, and was given, an old-fashioned dressmaker’s dummy left me by my mother. She carried it home in triumph, like a sacred relic. I tried in vain to understand why she filled her house with such fantastically useless objects, and then never opened her door to anyone. In any case I was stunned by the honour she had done me by asking for something. As I said, Emerence as a rule never accepted anything. Later, only very much later, in one of the most surreal moments I have ever experienced, I wandered amidst the ruins of Emerence’s life, and discovered, there in her garden, standing on the lawn, the faceless dressmaker’s dummy designed for my mother’s exquisite figure. Just before they sprinkled it with petrol and set fire to it, I caught sight of Emerence’s ikonostasis. We were all there, pinned to the fabric over the doll’s ribcage: the Grossman family, my husband, Viola, the Lieutenant Colonel, the nephew, the
baker, the lawyer’s son, and herself, the young Emerence, with radiant golden hair, in her maid’s uniform and little crested cap, holding a baby in her arms.
* * *
Emerence’s passion for strange objects wasn’t anything new. What surprised me that morning was that she had been collecting not for herself but for me. I didn’t dare offend her, nor did I wish to, but with the dog with the chipped ear, there was nowhere to begin. It was a desperate sight, an error of judgement perpetrated by a dilettante with a disturbed view of the world. I stowed it away behind the pestle and mortar. I knew that if my husband found it he would throw it in the bin. That little dog was a step too far.
By the time Emerence arrived, I was already sitting at work by my typewriter, alone.
“Did you see what those idiots threw away?” she asked. “I took the lot. There wasn’t a thing left for anyone else. Weren’t you thrilled?”
How could I not have been thrilled? I’d rarely known such a harmonious morning! I made no reply, but carried on banging at the typewriter, stunted embryos of meaningless sentences emerging under my exasperated fingers. She went through all the rooms, one by one, to see where I had placed everything. She objected to the gnome and the painting being assigned to the kitchen. Why hide such rare things away? She hit Viola on the head for destroying the falcon — the poor thing couldn’t tell her that I had put its tempting corpse right under his nose. So far I had got off lightly, but what most interested her was where I had put her beautiful little dog. I told her I had hidden it because it wasn’t fit to be seen. She stood on the other side of my desk and shouted at me: