The Door

by Magda Szabo

  I spun on my heel and dashed back home to the phone. I’d been told it was once again possible to contact the Lieutenant Colonel, back on duty for the public holiday after his break. I couldn’t speak to him because he was already on his way to the flat — we arrived at almost the same moment. The officials had already begun, and all six were hard at work, wearing rubber gloves, aprons and masks. They shovelled up the putrid slush and dumped it in a decontamination tanker reeking of chlorine, washed everything down very thoroughly with a spray of chemical solution, scrubbed all the furniture and then took it out into the garden, on to Emerence’s beloved lawn, where the slime-covered chairs, fouled lovers’ seat and wardrobe were left to sprawl. Items that were relatively unscathed or had already been treated were moved a short distance away. And there, against Emerence’s lilac bushes, I saw my mother’s mannequin, stuck all over with faces, like something in a vision. Pieces of paper, stinking books and scraps of fouled clothing that had fallen into the dirt were piled on to the lovers’ seat, along with old calendars, newspapers, boxes and copies of my own works, inscribed to Emerence, which she had insisted on having but had never even opened. When everything was finally outside, and some pieces of furniture and other objects had been separated out from those selected and officially recorded as being for destruction, they sprayed the lovers’ seat and chairs with petrol, and set them on fire. As I stood watching the flames I thought of Viola. This was where he had grown up, on this sofa; this was where the old woman had always rested; it had been her bed. And here too the cats — the sometime, never again, eternal cats — had sat, like birds on a telephone wire. Into the conflagration went Emerence’s shoes, stockings and headscarves.

  Now, for the first time, the Lieutenant Colonel assumed the rôle of policeman and investigator. Before consenting to the destruction of each item, he examined it carefully, and if it was to escape the bonfire, put it to one side. He even emptied out the drawers. There was now only one thing left in the kitchen. They had disinfected it and scrubbed down all the walls. Out on the lawn, the old furniture looked thoroughly ashamed of itself; everything else was in flames. Passers-by would spot the blaze, stare into the garden and have to be chased away.

  By now the only thing left in the kitchen was the safe that blocked the entrance to the inner room. A metal plate announced that it had been made in the older Imre Grossman’s steelworks. Its door had been forced open once before, during the Arrow Cross period. This time it contained nothing but the ceramic mugs that had already been removed: if Emerence had had any jewellery or cash, it had vanished in the blaze. We found nothing in the drawers; neither of us bothered to poke around in the corners of the upholstered chairs, which Józsi’s boy had already gone through anyway. Towards lunchtime, the men decided they had dealt with everything that had been contaminated; next after the kitchen they would make a start on the inner room. But here the Lieutenant Colonel took charge. The men accepted his argument that its contents weren’t a hazard either to the occupant or the neighbours because the safe would have denied Emerence access, and neither animals nor parasites would have been able to squeeze through behind the huge object that had kept the room sealed off. The fact that it was the start of a long weekend focused the brigade’s minds on the good and useful work they had accomplished, and the superfluity of attempting anything more. After all, the Lieutenant Colonel served in the local police, he knew the owner, and it was his view that the inner room should be left untouched. They had incinerated most of her kitchen and personal effects — it was quite enough for the old lady to take in. He would personally take charge of whatever else remained to do, and if further sanitation measures were necessary, he would contact the department. If they didn’t hear from him, it would mean that he’d found everything in order. Meanwhile he would put his signature (alongside mine) to indicate that he took responsibility in the name of the local police. Everyone was pleased. The squad leader decided that he saw no further source of risk, and that the Lieutenant Colonel’s suggestions had merit. But they carried out one final task. With enormous effort, they moved the safe back from the door, so they could say in all conscience that they hadn’t neglected anything. There was no key in the door, and they were reluctant to break it down. The condition of the wood, the snow-white, undamaged paintwork showed that Emerence hadn’t pulled the safe away, and couldn’t have gone into the inner room since the time of the Lieutenant Colonel’s visit as a junior officer. They were free to go. There couldn’t possibly be any food or insects in there. No-one had been in there for decades. They took their leave and made off.

  Meanwhile Józsi’s boy had arrived from the hospital, and was staring in horror at the bonfire. He reported that Emerence’s condition hadn’t changed. The greatest cause for concern was now not her heart but her total passivity. She was giving no help to the doctors, and making it clear that she didn’t care what happened to her. My message from Parliament had reached her, and the doctor on the case was concerned, because though she had evidently understood what she was told, she had made not a single comment. She wasn’t interested.

  My message from Parliament? I had to think what it might be. It was difficult to concentrate, standing on the porch of a wrecked home that stank of disinfectant, while a short distance away Emerence’s past life went up in smoke. On to the fire they had thrown pillows, wooden spoons and simple, old-fashioned housekeeping implements, objects that must have held countless memories. I realised with a start that I didn’t even know whether I had brought home the box containing the prize, so dazed had I been during the ceremony. Now I remembered that after the photographs were taken, an even more surreal moment had followed. I’d been seated in a separate room with a colleague, and a TV person was grilling me about what I thought and who I had to thank for helping me get where I was. I had named Emerence, as an example of someone who had taken care of everything around me that might have kept me from writing — behind every public achievement there was some unseen person without whom there would be no life’s work. The sisters in the hospital had heard the report, the nephew said, and one of them had dashed over to the old woman to tell her they were talking about her, and put a little radio against her ear so she could catch the end. Emerence showed total indifference and said nothing. She was on all sorts of medication, and that might have been the reason for her silence. I knew better. Emerence had understood perfectly well, but she didn’t give a damn. She had loathed publicity and polished phrases all her life. I should have been with her in the lion’s jaws, at her Golgotha, and I wasn’t, and she had had to stand alone and bear what was done to her. So now she had no interest in my chatter, my cheap phrases — I’d spend my time lying on the bier at my funeral service, looking around to see how many people had come. She knew me like the back of her hand. She knew that no shock to my nervous system could ever be so great as to stop me finding the right words.

  Józsi’s boy took his leave and rushed off home to his family. Before he left he commiserated with me, with a kind of gauche sympathy, over the damage to the kitchen and what I stood to inherit. What they had burned, he said, was a real loss. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me, and despite my depression I burst out laughing. There goes half my inheritance — hard luck! The Lieutenant Colonel and I sat for a while on the bench, with the handyman’s pretty young wife, who was always so kind and attentive to everyone and had brought us coffee. But neither of us drank. We just stirred it and stared into the distance.

  “So how did it come to this?” the Lieutenant Colonel finally asked.

  My God, because of me, I told him. I failed her. It was a relief to pour out all the details of what had happened while he had been walking in the woods near Visegrad. If I had got through to him, so many things might never have happened, or at least not this way. Even if I had left Emerence in the lurch, he would surely have shared the fateful hour with her, the one hour in her life when she really did need help. He made no comment. He was sufficiently sensitive neither to blame me n
or to offer consolation. He asked me what I planned to do. Nothing. If she survived, I would bring the old woman to live with us and abandon our trip abroad. We were due to leave in three days for Athens, as members of the Hungarian delegation to an international peace conference organised by the Greek writers’ union, and we’d planned to stay on for a few days by the sea. It was to have been a real rest, but events had swept it all away. Never again would I fail her the way I had — not even if I never saw Athens again. Not even then.

  He became angry, and raised his voice. I’d made quite enough mistakes already, did I want to cause even more trouble? Those foreign officials wouldn’t be pleased if a delegate failed to arrive. They’d think of every possible reason, including that we’d been banned from travelling. I had no right to involve the country in my private business, so would I please go? There was no point in my staying. If the old woman died the next day there’d be nothing for me to save her from. If she lived — and the doctor was quite certain she would — she could wait for my return. One short week was nothing. During that time he would take care of everything. The door would have to be replaced, and he’d get the money from the council for what had been destroyed. There was no question of Emerence being prosecuted. If a paralysed body couldn’t move, and a paralysed hand couldn’t put things in order, that was unfortunate, but it wasn’t a crime. The old woman hadn’t endangered the public health for fun. He’d get her some furniture, better-looking and more comfortable than her old things. He’d go to the state warehouse, where they stored things from the liquidated homes of people who died intestate. There was no point in arguing with him. International relations were important. He would remain on duty beside Emerence, and my husband and I should go ahead with what was both a professional obligation and what the nation expected of us. By the time we got back Emerence’s constitution would have come to its own decision. If she was capable of getting better she’d be on her feet by then; if not, they’d delay the burial. There’d be time for us to open up the other room once I got back. He’d have her empty doorway boarded up that day. When the public holiday was over he’d send someone round from the station to unpick the lock on the inner door and board that up as well. Once we were in, we’d be able to see if any more serious degree of cleaning was necessary. But he didn’t think it would. Emerence had never used that room.

  Back at home at last, I tore the dress off my back as if it were on fire. I hadn’t even had lunch. I wanted to feed the dog, but my husband had already tried and failed. Viola had begun his hunger strike. When we took him out, he dragged himself along beside us; as soon as he had finished marking the trees, he wanted to go home; he didn’t bark, he wouldn’t drink. The crisis was at its height and there was nothing we could do — he was responding in his own way to what had happened. I couldn’t eat either. At the Parliament they had piled my plate high, but there too I had been unable to swallow a morsel, and kept giving meaningless answers to questions I hadn’t understood. I lay down for a few moments on the balcony, then leapt up, convinced that if I weren’t there to care for Emerence, she would die. I alone could protect her from the horror that had engulfed us both. I rushed over to the hospital ward. Emerence was fully conscious and the doctor was smiling. He told me she was quite a lot stronger and had started to talk. She’d told the nurse to cover her up and make her decent, she couldn’t bear nakedness. Later, she demanded a headscarf, and they’d given her a surgeon’s cap. She painted a singular picture in it, but it had calmed her down. He thought she was beginning to haul herself out of the pit. In any case we ought to bring her some night clothes and other necessities, as she had arrived with nothing.

  While he was talking to me I hardly dared look at her — not just because of what had happened, but because of what she was. She was an incredible sight in her surgeon’s cap, not because it didn’t sit well on her head but because it did. I saw her as a great professor finally revealing his true, perversely unused, talents. I listened to him in silence. What could I have said? It was of no concern to the doctor that she no longer possessed any towels, night dresses, or any of the things she had once kept in her wardrobe, or that what remained lay sodden with disinfectant, giving off fumes on her lawn. If I brought in my own underwear, which she would have branded indecent, she would become suspicious; she’d recognise my towels. My things weren’t linen, like hers. Well, I’d have to think of something.

  The moment she saw me enter the room she pulled a hand towel over her face, just as ancient kings, following royal tradition, veiled the spectacle of their death agonies from the eyes of the court. But this wasn’t a question of dying — she seemed livelier than she had that morning. It was rather that she no longer wished to see me. Oh well, so be it, I thought. I trudged off homewards, first looking in on Sutu’s stall. I asked her, if she intended a visit, to take Emerence whatever she thought appropriate in the way of supplies — towels and toiletries — and to make up some story about why she hadn’t brought Emerence’s own. Sutu had company. The neighbours were trying to plan who should visit when, and what they should cook for the sick woman. I went off home again, to watch out for the Lieutenant Colonel’s men coming to board up the kitchen door. I knew that I would have to wait until he came himself, whenever that was, to see at least that task through with honour. I was close to the limit of what I could bear. Circles and waving lines were dancing before my eyes. I would have given my soul’s salvation for someone to shake me and say, “there’s no need to weep and wail. You’ve had a bad dream.” I felt more and more that what was happening to us couldn’t be real. It seemed impossible that so many terrible things could rain down on one person.

  The plain-clothes policemen arrived quite promptly with the boards. These days, coffins are no longer nailed shut but sealed with clamps; but as they reinforced the two half-doors with four upright and four horizontal planks it felt, for me, like the nailing down of a coffin. The hammering proclaimed a multiple burial: the death of a human life, the end of a home, the final chapter in the saga of Emerence.

  It was time to set off for the festivities in Parliament, but I didn’t feel at all like dressing. It was as if I had been ground in a mortar. First I called in at the hospital. Her condition had again slightly improved. They told me they’d given her a powerful tranquilliser and she was sleeping. She was also taking antibiotics, so there was cause for hope. But when she was awake she was saying very little, and when visitors approached her bed she would cover her face with the hand towel. There were a lot of them, rather too many in fact. They kept shaking her drip.

  Emerence was alive and getting better; so I could prepare myself for the most wonderful and glittering night of my life! Well, the dress would pass muster, but no make-up expert could have done anything for my face that day. When I told the first acquaintance I met in the Parliament building that I was sorry but I wasn’t feeling up to the occasion, I didn’t need to explain. She understood immediately. No-one was at all surprised when I disappeared from the great hall, which that evening was more like a starry summer sky. The glitter of medals and jewellery was all around me, and from all sides the flashing lights of the chandelier danced back off the mirror-polished floor. This was how it must have been in the ballrooms of old. But all I wanted to do was go, get home as quickly as I could and, once there, to crawl into bed. Next morning, I would know with more certainty to what I was sentenced. If she died, there would be no escape. If she lived, then the power that had so far never let me down would, yet again, pluck me back, perhaps for the very last time, from the abyss over which I trembled.

  AMNESIA

  I had a troubled night, mercifully free from dreams, but I kept waking with a start, thinking I could hear the telephone ringing. I had asked the nursing staff to keep me aware at all times of any change. But the receiver stayed silent. In the morning I took the apathetic Viola for his walk — he was still refusing to eat — then dashed off to the hospital.

  Emerence was now visibly improved. They had just fin
ished washing her and a sister was bringing her breakfast in on a little trolley. The moment she caught sight of me through the open door she started to fumble around and clapped the hand towel over her face. With bitterness in my heart, I knocked on the door of the duty nurse who had been with her during the night. There was only good news. If she continued to recover at this rate we could go abroad without any real concern. The old woman was going to pull through, and even be well again. But I wouldn’t be able to take her home, not for some weeks, and then only under certain conditions: for instance, there was no possibility of her working. Did she have a home, where she could be cared for? “Of course she does,” I thought. “If only she could see it.” I replied that we had agreed she could live with us until she was fully herself again, physically and mentally.

  Now it really did look as if we were going, and my husband was rushing around sorting out travel documents; but I felt little enthusiasm for the journey. I packed in a sort of reluctant dither, clinging to the ridiculous hope that at the last minute the hosts would withdraw the invitation and the conference would be cancelled. During my last hospital visit I had spoken to the doctor. As far as Emerence’s physical condition was concerned, he could let us go with a full guarantee, but what was going on in her mind, he added, was the domain of the neurologist. The embolism, which was now almost fully reabsorbed, hadn’t affected the speech centres. It was still hampering her movement, and one leg remained paralysed, but the cause of her silence was psychological. I thought back to the moment when I arrived at the ward and she again covered her face with the wretched bit of towel so that she wouldn’t have to see me. Well, I wasn’t going to irritate her any further. Anyway, Viola was the only one she wouldn’t hide her face from, or look on with hatred. I turned to go, without even wishing her goodbye. As I slowly made my way home I noticed two of the neighbours walking up the hill, carrying casserole dishes. Back home, the dog was maintaining his hunger strike, but by now that didn’t interest me either — I was so bitter, so wracked with guilt, and so very tired that nothing mattered. I gathered his things together, his pillow, bowls and cans of dog food, took them over to Sutu and asked her to look after him for a few days while we carried out our mission abroad. He flopped down in her little home with complete passivity, and didn’t even look up when I left. It was as if he wasn’t our dog. I continued packing. By now I was like a machine, without feelings. I think the only thing I did grasp was that nothing mattered, not even myself. After dinner I phoned the hospital once again, but didn’t go. Why should I? Emerence was well, and eating normally. I wished her a speedy recovery, I said politely, and sent her all our greetings. By now my message was as formal as an official communiqué. There was no need for her to worry about her work, I told her via the nurse. Everything was in perfect order. Her friend the Lieutenant Colonel had taken over, and her flat was for her, in exactly the state she would wish, and spotlessly clean. Everything necessary was being done. I was thinking that there would be time for her to find out what had really happened after she had been discharged. I added that she shouldn’t expect me (expect? she hadn’t even looked at me!) for a few days. I didn’t tell her we were going abroad, but I phoned Józsi’s boy so he would know why he couldn’t contact me if he happened to try, and we left on the night flight for Athens.