The Door

by Magda Szabo

  Emerence had vanished from our lives, but she paralysed everything around us. She was like a character in an epic poem who dissolves into thin air. We never ran into her. She knew the pattern of our lives and obviously took care that whenever we were out, or might go out, she stayed out of sight as much as she could. When I was forced to turn down a third literary commission for lack of time, my husband, after a criminally unsuccessful dinner, announced, in his calm, undramatic way, that the dog with the chipped ear was costing us more than a few words of propitiation were worth. There was no point in denying that we couldn’t manage without Emerence. We’d have to put the statue in some conspicuous place, and hide it when guests came. Unfinished novels shouldn’t have to wait around for a thing like that. We couldn’t get on with our work, myself even less than him, because the flat was my responsibility. We would have to submit to Emerence’s terms.

  I didn’t take Viola with me to the Papal Palace, nor did he wish to come. The paralysing spell must have still been in force; he didn’t stand up, he just glanced at me with that utterly human expression, as if wondering whether I really had the courage to go, and pondering the real reason behind my decision. Was I looking to secure conditions of creative calm for us, or did I feel that I owed it to Emerence’s dignity as a human being?

  She wasn’t out on the porch; those days she never was. First, I knocked on the door, without result, then I went round the side and tapped on the shutters.

  “Emerence, will you come out? We need to talk.”

  I thought she might be putting off the moment, but she had already opened the door, and was standing in front of it. Her mood was serious, almost sombre.

  “Have you come to apologise?” she asked. There was no trace of anger in her voice.

  Once again, this was too much. I had to choose my words very carefully, so that we could both keep within the bounds of reason.

  “No. Our tastes are different, but that doesn’t matter. We didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. If you wish, the plaster dog can stay. But we can’t manage without you. Will you come back?”

  “You’ll keep the plaster dog?”

  There was a confident certainty in her voice. It was that of a statesman laying out his terms.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Where will you put him?”

  “Wherever you like.”

  “Even in the master’s study?”

  “As I said, wherever you like.”

  And so we set out.

  Viola showed absolutely no response; not until Emerence reached the bottom of the stairwell and softly spoke his name. Then I thought he was going to break the door down. She wished my husband a polite “good evening”, and once again offered him her hand, as if enlisting for the second time. She petted Viola, who by now was delirious with joy, then glanced around. The little dog was on the kitchen table. The door was ajar and she spotted it straight away. Seeing it, she looked at us, then at the statue again, then back at us; and her face lit up with one of those unforgettable smiles she reserved for very special occasions. She picked up the little dog, dusted it carefully, and hurled it to the floor. Nobody spoke. No word or sound would have fitted the moment. She stood there among the fragments, like a queen.

  And for years we lived, not just in peace and calm, but joyously, in Odessa.

  POLETT

  My husband and Emerence put up with each other, but gradually, and somewhat to their mutual surprise, this turned to liking. At first this was because they shared a devotion both to Viola and me from which they had no hope of ever being free; later they gained an understanding of each other’s signals. My husband mastered the semantics of Emerence’s non-verbal communication, and she came to accept as normal things which had once defied comprehension, such as an idle existence in which we might go half a day in silence, with one of us staring at the poplars at the bottom of the garden, doing nothing that the eye could see, while maintaining that this was work. Yet I believe we three lived in real harmony, truly glad to be alive. Strangers visiting for the first time thought that Emerence, pottering about in the kitchen, was my aunt or godmother. I let that pass, because it was impossible to explain the precise nature of our relationship, or its sheer intensity; how, though she was so different from either of our mothers, she was like a new-found mother to us both. The old woman never cross-examined either of us, nor we her. She told us as much about herself as she saw fit, but generally she said little, like a real mother whose past has become immaterial in her total concern for the future of her children.

  As the years went by Viola became more serious, but his performing skills also blossomed. He could open the door using the handle and bring newspapers or slippers to order; and he now congratulated my husband as well as me on birthdays and name days. Emerence laid down the rules for each of us. The master was given the greatest degree of personal freedom, next came Viola, and lastly me. I was often summoned to coffee, when some need arose in her circle of devotees. Adélka in particular liked to discuss her problems with me. She was the sort of woman who, having been given advice, would then talk it over with three or four other friends. When she did this, Emerence came close to beating her. Sutu and Polett had less to say. Polett in particular became more and more taciturn. She was rapidly losing weight; and then suddenly she stepped out of our lives.

  Sutu came running over with the news of the suicide. She bought her merchandise in the market at daybreak, and so she was up before everyone else in the street except Emerence. She couldn’t have appeared at a worse time. I opened the door reluctantly, and her news made me sad and upset. By then I had come to know Polett well. Emerence’s coffee meetings had brought us together, and I felt that we all had a part in her death. There must have been hints of what she intended, which we had failed to notice. Sutu wanted to know how she should tell Emerence. They had lunched together only the day before. Emerence was closer than anyone to Polett, and knew things about her that she would never have revealed to Sutu. No, she couldn’t tell her. I would have to do it. She had to be there when the police arrived, because unluckily for her, she had been the one who found the poor woman. Look how considerate Polett had been, even in the way she ended it all! She didn’t make things more difficult by disappearing. She didn’t even go inside, she hanged herself in the garden, from the walnut tree, so we wouldn’t have to break down the door. The most interesting thing was that she had pulled a hat over her head, obviously not wanting to give anyone a fright; but she was still a horrible sight, hanging there, with her Sunday hat on (we’d seen it thousands of times, the one with the pretty brass buttons) pulled down to her neck. Adélka already had the news, it had made her ill; but now Sutu had to rush off, she couldn’t keep her stall shut all this time. I should get over to Emerence quickly. If the old woman didn’t find out in good time she’d be permanently offended; and as I might have discovered, when she was angry, it was terrible.

  Tell Emerence anything? Bring her news? She knew everything.

  When I got there she was out on her porch, shelling peas. Once again her face was like a mirror, turned towards the bowl, totally impassive and yet paler than usual, though she couldn’t have ever been rosy-cheeked, even as a girl. Had I come about Polett? From her tone she might have been inquiring whether Viola had been for a walk. She’d seen her at dawn, when the dog gave the sign. She went out when she heard it. Had it not woken us? No. My husband was asleep, but I had pricked up my ears, because Viola was making a real racket — he’d howled for a while after midnight, and I had marvelled at the number of different noises this dog could make. Viola had been announcing a death, the old woman went on, in the same colourless voice, so she thought she’d go and look for the dead person. She scoured the neighbourhood; somewhere a light in a window would tell the sad story. She suspected old Mrs Böőor — for weeks she’d been like a woman whose grave had already been measured up — but there were no lights on anywhere. So she looked in the garden. It was pure chance that she found Polett. If
she hadn’t left the front door of her little house open, Emerence wouldn’t have gone in. Polett was always nervous in that shack of a home, and never slept with the door ajar, so she immediately thought something had happened to her. But the house was empty. She switched on the light and saw there was no-one on the divan and the blankets hadn’t been disturbed. She set off again to look for her. And then she saw her in the garden, under the tree. In the moonlight, the brown hat on her head appeared jet black.

  I stared at Emerence, unable to speak. It wasn’t her lack of sadness, it was her display of complete unconcern with which she had taken the news. “We never actually discussed the hat,” she went on, as she rolled the peas in her fingers. “She didn’t tell me she would wear it. All we agreed on was the dress, and how she would be buried. She didn’t have a black slip, so I gave her one. She looked rather odd with that hat pulled down to her neck. Her shoes had fallen off. Did they find them?”

  I felt compelled to ask, all the same. “So you knew what she was going to do?”

  “How could I not have known?” she answered, as she gave the peas a stir, and considered whether she had done enough for everyone. “We even agreed that she wouldn’t use poison. When I worked for that detective inspector, the one who always did the suicide cases, he told me most of the ones who poisoned themselves were found outside their front doors, as if they’d had second thoughts. The moment they began to choke, they wanted out. It’s a very painful way to die, poisoning, except of course for the rich. They’ve other means at their disposal, which the local doctor won’t prescribe. But there’s nothing better than a hanging. It’s simple and straightforward. I’ve seen enough of them here in Pest,” she went on. “When the Whites were in power, it was the Whites doing it, and when it was the Reds’ turn, they did the same, and the speeches they made before killing them were the same, and the legs of the victims kicked out in exactly the same way, no matter which colour had strung them up. Hanging’s not bad. It’s more pleasant than a bullet. Shooting doesn’t always work, and then you watch each time they take aim, however many times it takes, and in the end, if you don’t die straightaway, they have to come over and beat you to death or shoot you in the back of the head. I know those executions. I’ve seen enough of them.”

  The last time I had felt as I did on that June day, was at Mycenae, at the grave of Agamemnon.

  As Emerence ran her gnarled fingers through the peas, my thoughts went back not just across time, but over place and into history. I saw Emerence the child before the death of her father; her water nymph of a mother; the stepfather who never returned from Galicia; the twins who turned into charred logs in that wild circle of land beside the well. I saw the young girl who had become (from what I’d just heard) maidservant to a detective inspector, and probably to more than one, since the employer who strung up Reds was probably not the same one who arrested the Whites.

  I asked: once she realised what Polett had in mind, had she tried to talk her out of it?

  “The thought never occurred to me,” she said. “Won’t you sit down? Sit and help me shell the peas. There aren’t enough for the four of us. If people want to go, then let them. Why should they linger? We made sure she had enough to eat; nobody tried to burgle her home; they let her live in that little pigsty for nothing; I even arranged for her to have company. But obviously we weren’t enough, not Sutu, not Adélka, not me. We listened sympathetically to all her nonsense, even if we couldn’t understand because she spoke French. We knew that, most of the time — even in a foreign language — her cackling amounted to the same old thing. She was lonely. Who isn’t lonely, I’d like to know? And that includes people who do have someone but just haven’t noticed.

  “I brought her a kitten — they were allowed in her building — but she got in a rage, saying it wasn’t company. I don’t know what would have been good enough for her if neither we nor the animal were. One of its eyes was blue and the other green, and it could look at you with those two odd eyes in such a way, it didn’t even have to miaow, you knew what it wanted. But that wasn’t enough for Polett. It wasn’t human — as if we aren’t animals too, only less perfect. They can’t inform on us, or tell lies about us, and if they steal it’s for a reason, because they can’t go into a shop or a restaurant. I begged her to take it in. I mean, even if it wasn’t the answer to her loneliness, it was an orphan — some horrible person had thrown it out. On its own, with nowhere to live, it would have died. And it was so tiny. But no, no, no. She needed a human being. Fine, I told her, then go and buy one in the market; around here there’s only us and the cat.

  “Well, now she’s found a friend, she’s got a hoe handle for company, she isn’t alone. Was it Sutu who sent you here? Or that bird-brained Adélka? They were so stupid, the two of them. Neither of them noticed that she was heading this way. It’s true she never told them, but she didn’t have to tell me, or Viola. We just knew. I didn’t take her hat off; I didn’t see her face. You might take a look for me, to see whether she had an easy death. I’m not going. I still haven’t forgiven her. She’s welcome to hang herself. We three made a real fuss of her. Viola liked her too. We sat and listened to her wailing. I took her a pet, she refused it. Well, if she wanted to go, why shouldn’t she? There was nothing for her here. She always had a sore stomach. She couldn’t take work in any more — though she ironed better than any of us — you should have seen what she could do at an ironing board. Right, that’s the peas done. Are you going or staying? If you see Sutu, send her over. Tell her that as soon as she closes up she’s to come and help me. Today I’m bottling cherries for the winter.”

  The two lions on the gate of Mycenae stirred; each grew a living eye, one green, one blue, and they began quietly to miaow. I rose unsteadily to leave, praying that I wouldn’t meet Sutu. I began to turn over in my mind what I should say to her. Emerence wouldn’t hide from her the things she had told me. I would have to try and persuade her, at the very least, not to mention it to the police. What would they think, if it got out that Emerence had let Polett go to her death, had even given the poor woman practical advice, knowing what she intended?

  Emerence had turned her attention to the cherries, and was hauling out the same cauldron in which she had been boiling sheets the day we first met. I stopped where I was.

  “Emerence,” I began cautiously, “shouldn’t we discuss what we’re going to tell the police? Sutu might blurt out something silly.”

  “Now you’re being silly,” she waved away my concerns. “You don’t think anyone’s going to waste breath on Polett? Who is interested in an old woman who hangs herself, and even tells us why she did it in a letter? Do you think I didn’t make her write a suicide note? Everything has to be done properly, even death. I talked through everything with her — her clothes, the letter. I’m only sorry I can’t stop her being pawed by those animals at the post-mortem. No man ever saw her. The first will be that chief dissectionist. Her virgin body won’t be anything new to him. He knows all about dead bodies. I used to work for one of them myself.”

  Agamemnon’s grave deepened. She’d never mentioned the dissectionist.

  “People who don’t know you wouldn’t believe how clueless you are,” she continued, “though I tell you again and again. You think life goes on for ever, and that it would be worth having if it did. You think there’ll always be someone to cook and clean for you, a plate full of food, paper to scribble on, the master to love you; and everyone will live for eternity, like a fairy tale; and the only problem you might encounter is bad things written about you in the papers, which I’m sure is a terrible disgrace, but then why did you choose such a low trade, where any bandit can pour shit over you? God knows how you got yourself a name. You’re not very bright, and you know nothing about people. Not even Polett, you see; and yet how often did you drink coffee with her? I’m the one who understands people.”

  The stream of cherries tumbled into the cauldron. By now we were in the world of myth — the pitted cherries
separating out, the juice beginning to flow like blood from a wound, and Emerence, calmness personified, standing over the cauldron in her black apron, her eyes in shadow under the hooded headscarf.

  “I loved Polett. How could you not have seen that? But it wasn’t enough. Sutu did too, but it still wasn’t enough. And even that stupid Adélka respected her. We three loved her. Compared with her, we’re pretty well off, we’ve got jobs — in Adélka’s case a pension — and we all chipped in, so she wouldn’t be short when she wasn’t earning. She got food, firewood, dinners. We looked after her. But she wanted something else, something more, I don’t know what. She didn’t even want the kitten, although I would have fed it too. That was the limit. Why did she never stop whining? If someone can’t be helped, then they don’t want help. If she’d had enough of life, no-one had the right to hold her back. I told her exactly what she should write for the police and she copied it down: ‘I, Polett Dobri, spinster, because of sickness, old age and above all loneliness, have of my own free will ended my life. I leave my belongings to be disposed of by my friends Etel “Sutu” Vámos; Adél, widow of András Kürt; and Emerence Szeredás.’ It was all quite clear. I brought her iron back with me the same night, so we wouldn’t argue over it. After that, what could they ask about?”

  The Polett business, like every other difficulty involving Emerence and her circle, was taken care of by the Lieutenant Colonel. He told me the computer files later revealed that Paulette Hortense D’Aubry had been born in Budapest in 1908. Her father was a legal translator; her mother, Katalin Kemenes, a woman of no formal education whose last occupation had been ironing. No religious affiliation was recorded, though Emerence swore she was Reform. The reverend minister was less than delighted when asked to preside at the burial. He said that Polett, like Emerence, had never once called on him, and God was not pleased when people decided for themselves when their hour had come. Fortunately he didn’t hear Emerence’s comments. The old woman recalled her own experience with the charitable ladies. Polett had also been present at the distribution, but had got even less than Emerence, with her sequinned evening dress. The ladies had it in for her, she was too high-flown and besides, like Emerence, they never saw her at worship. This was true, because while they were at prayer, Polett was doing their ironing, Sundays and every other day. She used a coal-heated iron, because in those days the electricity in the area wasn’t working fully — they provided current only at certain times — and Polett’s head was almost lifted off by the steam. No doubt that was what they meant when they described her mental state as “high-flown”.