by Magda Szabo
“Yes,” I said.
“I wanted you to see it, because I often see it in my dreams, just as it was when a pet of mine jumped off the train after me. We had a heifer. It was sandy-brown. I had raised it from a calf. After the two little ones it was for me the third child. Its coat was every bit as silky as the twins’ hair, its nose was pink and soft, and it smelled of milk, just like them. People laughed because it followed me everywhere. But then we had to sell it. They locked me in the attic so I couldn’t run after them. In those days hysterics weren’t tolerated in the village. Children were given a good smack and told what to do, and if you still didn’t understand, they hit you on the head. Maybe things are different now, and they are more tolerant down there, I don’t know. Anyway they beat me round the head and shut the door on me, but I managed to get out. I knew that if they sold the heifer they’d take it to the station, so I ran to the platform, but by the time I got there they’d already bundled it into the wagon with all the animals the other farmers had sold. It was mooing away pitifully, up there in the van, and I screamed out its name. They hadn’t yet closed the door, and when it heard me it jumped down from that great height. Children are stupid; I didn’t know what I was doing when I called out to it. It landed on its front legs and broke them both.
“They sent for the gypsy to hit it over the head. My grandfather was cursing and swearing. It would have been better if I had died, rather than valuable livestock — I was such a useless good-for-nothing.
“They butchered it and weighed it. I had to stand there watching while they killed it and cut it up into pieces. Don’t ask what I was feeling, but let this teach you not to love anyone to death because you’ll suffer for it, if not sooner then later. It is better not to love anyone, because then no-one you care about will get butchered, and you won’t end up jumping out of wagons. Now you must go. We’ve both said quite enough and the dog’s exhausted. Take him home. Come on, Viola! Oh yes, the heifer was also called Viola. My mother called it that. Off you go, now. This dog’s half asleep.”
The dog, not I who’d been working all day; not Emerence, who’d been rushing around cleaning and sweeping. The pressing image of Viola. Viola on the goods platform, Viola running down our street, in the shape of a dog.
I went home, as she wished. I sensed that she wanted to be alone with the memories I had stirred. At that moment, I could see, it was all around her — the Grossmans and the factory owner who wasn’t an evil man; the empty villa where at first she lived entirely alone, before witnessing an ever-changing series of tenants; first a flood of Germans; then Hungarian soldiers, who disappeared and were replaced by the Arrow Cross; and then when the Arrow Cross left the Russians moved in. Emerence had cooked for them, and washed for them, before the villa fell under state ownership and became an apartment block, as I knew it. And at the heart of all these events, beneath and behind them, lay the primal wounds — the baker torn apart by the mob, the barber who robbed her, little Éva Grossman who brought shame on her in Csabadul, the heifer, the cat strung up on the door handle, and the one great love of her life.
Was the cat, I wondered, also called Viola?
FILMING
In my student days, I detested Schopenhauer. Only later did I come to acknowledge the force of his idea that every relationship involving personal feeling laid one open to attack, and the more people I allowed to become close to me, the greater the number of ways in which I was vulnerable. It wasn’t easy to accept that from now on I would always have to consider Emerence. Her life had become an integral part of my own. This led to the dreadful thought that one day I would lose her, that if I survived her there would be yet another addition to those ubiquitous, indefinable shadow-presences that wrack me and drive me to despair.
This realisation wasn’t helped by her behaviour, which was so unpredictable. Sometimes she was so offhand, and so rude to me that any stranger would have wondered why I put up with her. But it didn’t matter, because I had long ago learned to ignore the shifting tectonic plates under the surface of her being. She had probably made a similar discovery — like Captain Butler, she had no wish to put her heart on the line a second time, but she didn’t know how to protect herself against the threat of dependence on me. If I was sick, she nursed me until my husband returned from work, but I could never reply in kind because Emerence was never sick. She didn’t even think it worth bringing to my attention that she had suffered an injury in the kitchen or during the course of her work. If she burned her foot with sizzling fat, or sliced her hand on the carving knife, she didn’t comment, but treated herself with household remedies. Emerence had a low opinion of people who complained.
With time, she felt able to drop in for no particular reason, and indeed no explanation was necessary. It was understood that she and I liked being together. When we were alone in the apartment, and we both had the time, we chatted. It remained impossible to persuade her to read any of my books, but it did now affect her when they were unfavourably reviewed. She understood the personal nature of the waves of politically motivated attacks on me, and she would fly into a rage of exasperation. She once asked me if she should report a critic to the Lieutenant Colonel. I tried in vain to calm her down. At such times she was possessed by anger and hatred. By now, without ever acknowledging its full worth, she no longer fought against the view that my work represented some sort of achievement, and she constructed an elaborate theory to avoid having to reject us. Writing was an occupation comparable with play. The child took it seriously, and carried it out with great care, and though it was only play, and nothing depended on it, it was tiring. She was forever putting questions to me that no writer, journalist or reader can answer: how did a novel come into existence out of nothing, from mere words? I couldn’t explain to her the familiar, everyday magic of creation. There was no way of expressing how and from where the letters arrived on the empty page. I thought the process of film-making might be easier for her to understand, so when she began to take an interest in what was happening in the studio or on location, what it actually meant to make a film, I hoped I might draw her into my world, or at least its periphery.
An opportunity arose. We were making another film. Every morning the film crew’s car would arrive for me and we raced off to the studio. When I got home she would pester me mercilessly about what had gone on — who had been there, how the day went, what we had done. So one day I announced I would take her the next morning.
In fact I didn’t think she’d come. Other than to the cemetery, she never went that far from home. But early the next day she was waiting for the car at the gate, dressed in her best clothes, with a spotless headscarf and clutching a sprig of marjoram. With her there, I experienced real shame at every cynical remark that was made, and the way we all snapped at each other, or worse, let our rancour hibernate until the right moment came to put the knife in, because time was flying by and every second spent filming cost money. And there she was, dressed in her Sunday best, waiting to see something happen and taking it all in with deadly seriousness.
No-one bothered to ask who she was, or what she was doing there. The people on the gate assumed she was an extra. She strolled around with all the natural composure of a writer or actor, sat in the place assigned to her, kept perfectly quiet, remained fully alert without ever moving, and bothered no-one. The next scene was a difficult one, needing above all to seem spontaneous. The usual running around ensued; the familiar preparatory steps were gone through — make-up, checking the script, lighting, measuring distances, taking up positions, ready, clapper boards. Then we all set off to continue the work on Margit Island. Emerence gazed out of the car in awe. I think it must have been decades since she’d been past the Grand Hotel, if indeed she’d ever seen it. We were filming the outside scenes in front of it, with a second cameraman working from a helicopter. Emerence’s eyes went back and forth between him and the operator on the crane. Here, the machines were as much a part of the show as the actors in their big love scene. With
the trees, the earth, the whole world soaring around them, and the forest bending to embrace them, the man and woman were to seem dizzy with waves of passion. We played it back on the monitor. Every frame was brilliantly successful, much more so than usual.
We stopped to eat. Emerence refused to go inside the Grand Hotel. She had become hostile, unfriendly, no longer looking around her in wonder. I was familiar with her various faces and knew she’d seen enough, so I suggested we go home. I felt there must be something wrong, but as usual, I didn’t know what it was. I thought she would tell me once we got back. Luckily my rôle was over, so I took my leave and we set off. In the car she immediately undid the top two buttons of her dress, as if they were choking her. I had rarely heard such bitterness in her voice as she revealed what had been upsetting her.
We were liars, cheats, she began — none of it was real. The trees had been made to move by a trick, it was only the branches. Someone was filming from a helicopter, circling around. The poplars hadn’t moved at all, but the viewer would think they were leaping about dancing, that the whole forest was spinning round. This was sheer deception; it was disgusting.
I defended myself. “You’re quite wrong,” I said. “The tree really was dancing because that is how the viewer will experience it. What matters was the effect we achieved, not whether the tree moved or if a technician created the idea of movement. Did you think the forest could walk around, when the trees are held by their roots? Don’t you think it’s a function of art to create the illusion of reality?”
“Art,” she repeated bitterly. “If that’s what you were — artists — then everything would be real, even the dance, because you would know how to make the leaves move to your words, not to a wind machine or whatever it was. But you people can’t do anything like that — not you, or the others. You’re all clowns, and more contemptible than clowns. You’re worse than con men.”
I stared at her in astonishment. It was as if she were descending, before my very eyes, into the depths of an underworld I had never imagined; like someone fallen in a well, from which the only sounds to be heard were curses and a desperate gasping for breath. By the time she’d finished she was barely whispering. “Yes, there are such moments, moments when a technician wouldn’t have had to lift a finger, when no helicopter was needed. The world of living, growing things could dance all by itself.” Lord God, I thought. What had that one Faustian moment in her life been like, when she cried out for time to stop because the trees were swirling all around her? I shall never know, but it is there, somewhere in her past.
Once, after she’d been introduced to the tape recorder in our apartment and told that you could play back a text or a piece of music, she talked about what it would be like if someone’s life were recorded and put on tape, to be rewound, stopped and replayed at will. She said she’d accept her own life the way it was; or rather, as it would be up to her death, but with the proviso that she might rewind it to any point she chose. I didn’t dare ask where she would stop the machine, and still less, why there. I didn’t think she’d tell me anyway.
THE MOMENT
However, she did tell me. Not when it might have seemed reasonable or logical to do so, but when she felt the moment had come. If Emerence believed in any sort of force, it was time. In her private mythology, Time was like a miller, grinding his corn in an eternal mill, funnelling the events of your life into your personal sack when your turn came. According to her, no-one was excluded. She believed, without being able to explain it, that the miller would grind the grain of the dead too, and pour it out into sacks, only it was different people who carried it off to make their bread. My own sack had its turn some three years later, when the white heat of her feelings had reached the point not only of love but of absolute trust.
Everyone trusted Emerence, but she trusted no-one; or, to be more precise, she doled out crumbs of trust to a chosen few — the Lieutenant Colonel, me, Polett while she was alive, Józsi’s boy — and stray morsels to a few others. She would tell Adélka what she judged suitable and likely to be understood, but she would say quite different things to the Lieutenant Colonel, Sutu or the handyman. For example, she revealed to me quite early on how the twins had died, but only much later did it transpire that she hadn’t told her nephew; he thought she’d had only one sibling, his father. It was as if she wanted to vex us all, even from beyond the grave. She gave none of us the full picture of herself. Once among the dead, she must have enjoyed a quiet smile at our expense as we struggled to work out the full story, as each of us tried to match his own allotted pieces of information with those granted to others. At least three vital facts went with her to the grave, and it must have been a source of satisfaction to her to look back and see that we still didn’t have a full account of her actions, and never would.
The day her mythological miller finally filled my sack is fixed precisely in my mind, because it was Palm Sunday. I was not pleased at being stopped on my way to church. I was afraid I’d be late. I go a fair distance to talk to my God, in the much-loved chapel of my girlhood, further down the avenue. It still holds memories of my uncertainty and joyous hopes on my arrival in Budapest. Emerence was sweeping right outside our door. I knew this was intended as a statement. Once again, she had arranged her cleaning rota so that I’d find her here just before the service, and be reminded of her eternal message: how easy it was to be pious when your lunch would be ready and waiting when you arrived home from church. She remarked that when I was cleansed of my sins I should look in on her after lunch, she had some business with me. I was less than enchanted by the idea, not least because Palm Sunday is an especially precious festival to me, and also because ever since my mother was consigned to the dust in Farkasrét cemetery, my Sunday afternoons had their own fixed routine. I was to come over at four o’clock. At three, I answered. She shook her head. A friend of hers and her nephew were coming at three. Two o’clock, then. It couldn’t be two, because she was giving lunch to Sutu and Adélka, and to fit in with them, I had to come at four. And that was that. I didn’t take communion that Sunday, because I lacked the inner quiet needed for confession and absolution. Emerence had rattled me, and I went home strained and tense rather than calm. On arriving, I was told that Viola wasn’t there. The old lady had taken him with her, having announced that she had invited him for lunch along with the others.
Emerence was capable of arousing the finest feelings in me, and also the most base. Because I loved her, I could become so furious with her that sometimes I was shocked by my own response. By now I should have been used to the fact that the dog was at my disposal only within certain limits. If it wasn’t for this last absurdity, of his being invited for lunch, I might have kept my self control. But the thing so enraged me that, dressed as I was for church, I ran straight over to her. There was once an occasion when a writers’ union meeting fell on the same evening as a dinner with a Western diplomat. We were nearly an hour late, and they never asked us again, snubbing us even on national holidays. But the diplomat’s wife’s behaviour after that meal was a warm, friendly hug compared to the icy superiority with which Emerence received me when I appeared uninvited before her as she sat, at a richly laid-out table on her porch, deep in conversation with Sutu and Adélka. When I rattled the garden gate Viola dashed towards me and leapt up on my dress. Emerence didn’t even stand. She just glanced up and began to ladle out the chicken soup. Sutu moved over to make a place for me, but the old woman directed her with her eyes not to, as I wasn’t staying. She asked me why I had come. I was so angry I couldn’t formulate all the many reasons in my head. All I said was, “I’m taking the dog home.”
“As you wish. But you’d better feed him. He hasn’t had his dinner yet.”
Viola jumped up beside the table, wagging his tail. An inviting aroma of chicken soup filled the air, overpowering the smell of chlorine and air freshener.
“Come on!” I said to him.
Emerence carried on serving. I thought all was well, because Vi
ola obediently set off, without even looking back. But he came with me only as far as the gate, where he stopped and wagged his tail again, as if to say, “Don’t waste any more of my time, I want my dinner.” I didn’t humiliate myself by giving him any more commands. Emerence knew how to programme him with her mind, like a video recorder. He didn’t even pause; he turned his behind on me and shot off back to Emerence’s table. His behaviour upset me so much that when I got home I couldn’t even swallow my soup. I lay out on the balcony with a book, unable to follow a single sentence. From my elevated position I could see Emerence’s porch. I had no intention of looking that way, as I turned the pages, but even without wishing to I could see what was going on. Sutu and the others were eating and putting their heads together in earnest conversation; then the two women left, but only when Józsi’s boy arrived, followed by the Lieutenant Colonel. They weren’t served any of the meal, but Emerence placed wine on the table and something on a platter, obviously pastries. The nephew leant forward over a piece of paper and began to study it with the Lieutenant Colonel. What happened after that I don’t know, because I came in from the balcony once and for all. I had decided that even though she had asked me to go over at four, I wouldn’t. She wasn’t going to amuse herself at my expense.
Four o’clock came and went. Then four-fifteen and four-thirty. I didn’t look to see what she was doing. At a quarter to five the bell rang. My husband went to the door. Our neighbour from along the corridor told him that Viola was lying on the pavement outside, refusing to budge. His collar was missing and he had no muzzle on. As it was a Sunday, there were unlikely to be officials about, but it would still be wiser to bring him up.