Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabo

  Iza was always right. That was the strange thing about her: she had been right about everything, ever since she was born. When she was told off or accused of something as a child, it always turned out, sooner or later, that no one had any reason to be cross with her: Iza simply knew something that they, the adults, did not and when they apologised to her they did not even have the satisfaction of seeing her sulk or pull faces or so much as complain. Iza simply looked at them in a matter-of-fact way and declared in her thin little voice, ‘You see!’ And she was right now, too, to preserve the memory of her father’s laughing face from that previous day rather than the one with the silvery glaze this afternoon.

  Antal lit a cigarette and played with the match a while. His expression was blank, empty of everything including understanding. When he looked up again it was at the old woman, not at Iza.

  ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘you are likely to be very much alone from now. If you like I can move back in.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ answered Iza, her voice not mocking but full of gratitude. ‘You really are very kind, but we’ve already found a solution. Mama will come to Pest with me.’

  It was the first time they had looked each other in the eye. Antal’s look was enquiring, Iza gazed back. The old woman understood neither the question nor the answer. When she was a child and her parents were alive, it was her mother and father who ruled; it was as if she were a child among adults again – hopeful yet afraid.

  ‘That would work too,’ Antal answered. He tapped the ash off the cigarette.

  The old woman mumbled something, clambered to her feet and took a step towards Antal, feeling that she should understand, embrace him, or at least say something to him – it was a big thing, his offer. But she couldn’t say anything because Iza gripped her arm and the movement confused her, prevented her from speaking. She didn’t understand what they wanted of her, what she should do, and was afraid that if she became too emotional, too nice, Iza might get cross.

  Antal did not repeat the invitation. He smiled, bade her goodbye and was already heading for the door. Iza reached for the shawl and wrapped it about herself to see him out and close the gate after him.

  Antal was halfway through it when he stopped again. ‘Give me the picture of the mill, mama. Papa said that if he died Lidia should have it. I’ll take it to her.’

  Iza opened her mouth to say something but shrugged and went to the bedroom. The old woman took hold of the chair back because once again she felt her legs giving way. If he died . . . What did he mean, ‘if he died’? Vince’s understanding was that he had a bad heart and that he should build himself up, that’s why he went to the clinic, the injections were there to give him strength as he slept. Vince had no idea he was dying. How could he think such a thing? And why should he give Lidia the picture of the mill, that bad photograph of the village he was born in, with the river, the Karikás, running through it, the riverbank with some old mill in the background. That picture had always hung above Vince’s bed, next to the picture of the angel that watched over his dreams. Why did he give it to Lidia? When?

  Iza fetched the black-framed picture and now that she was under the light she took a last look at it, as if it were the first time. The photograph was of a river with something like a lock, a tiny waterfall with a wooden building crouched over it. In the foreground there were bushes and a few barefoot children. Unidentifiable faces, a faded early century photograph. The river was the colour of coffee. She wrapped it in newspaper and handed it to Antal.

  The old woman started weeping. She felt this new weight was heavier than the rest of the day put together. She stood helpless, pulling at the bottom of her cardigan. It was the second time that day Lidia had crossed her path, this meeting more mysterious, more bitter than the last. Feeling this helped decide whether to kiss Antal or not: she didn’t have the strength. Captain was sniffing around the top of the table, standing on two legs as if he understood what was happening.

  She heard the door open and close, looked at the carpet and wiped her eyes. Iza returned quickly and that too seemed somehow unnatural because before Antal married her he could barely leave the house: sometimes they’d have to wait for as long as half an hour for Iza to come back in. Now it seemed they had nothing more to say to each other. The girl picked up Captain and put him out in the yard, then turned the key in the hall door and came over to her. As if aware that she needed consolation, she put her hand on her head in the way priests did, as a form of blessing. Then she went over to the window and drew the curtains as had been her habit all those years when she was still living at home, and closed the shutters. The rain was pouring now, they could hear it loud against the glass. She didn’t go over to the old woman again but stopped at the big chair. Her mother could see she was weeping, her expression tender, childish and angry under the flowing tears.

  4

  IZA LEFT THE light burning that night.

  The objects in the room, those beyond the circle of yellow light, were just about glimmering and she couldn’t see the picture above the bed, only the gilded underside of its frame. But she could see it with her inner eye, in her thoughts and memories. The picture, lacking its companion, was merely a remnant. The mill was missing.

  Iza fell asleep before she did. The old woman had cheated her.

  They had gone to bed at the same time and she had not been answering Iza’s questions for a while, breathing regularly so her daughter would think she was drowsing. The girl kept tossing and turning for a long time, it wouldn’t have been an easy night for her even if her father had not died that day. She hadn’t slept here ever since she had moved to Pest. The bed she was sleeping in was her father’s, not the old sofa of her married years. Once she had left the house it had returned to much as it was before. The second-hand office came for their joint furniture and she bought whatever she needed new in Budapest. Nobody finds it easy sleeping in their childhood home, of course.

  Iza didn’t want to leave her mother alone on this night, which was why she didn’t check into a hotel as she had always done to avoid staying with her parents. It must have been the supreme sacrifice for her. The girl took a long time getting to sleep and kept turning and sighing, looking over at the old woman, then suddenly got up and took something, which was also unusual as she never took sleeping pills and looked down on people who reached for drugs at the least excuse. But this time, just this once, she did take one and it succeeded in putting her to sleep. The old woman lay there with her daughter next to her, so close she could feel her breath on her face as she had done when the girl was a child. She had never seen anyone sleep as beautifully as Iza did, her head laid on her elbow, with that black arc of her eyelashes. She didn’t dare kiss her and kissed the hem of the pillow instead as she slipped out of bed and through the door.

  The sitting room was the same as it had been in the afternoon, the morning, or any other day, and yet, somehow, it was different. It was as if it had grown and the walls were higher and wider too. Iza’s note remained on the table and she scanned it again. Ever since she was a child Iza had written down things to do the next day and couldn’t go to sleep unless she’d done so. ‘Estate agent,’ she read. ‘Clinic, undertakers, medical panel, packing.’

  The last word on the list: that’s why she’d got up. Tomorrow would be the reading through of documents and Iza would decide what they should take back to Pest, and tomorrow they’d have to open the drawers of Vince’s little writing desk.

  No one else had ever looked inside it and even after forty-nine years of marriage she had no idea what he kept in there bar official papers about the family and so forth. The house rule was that no one would disturb anyone else’s things. Aunt Emma, in whose house she grew up, would always be waiting for the postman outside the house and she didn’t baulk at tearing up letters to other members of the family right there in the street. She didn’t want to be like Aunt Emma.

  If Antal hadn’t turned up with that strange request she’d be lying next t
o Iza, allowing herself to fall asleep. But her son-in-law had disturbed her, much as the nurse had disturbed her at the clinic and, for the first time, she was beginning to wonder whether she knew everything about Vince. This bad feeling led her to think about the writing desk and what would happen if Iza should stumble across something she wasn’t supposed to see, some secret of Vince’s that was his alone and which he should have taken with him because it was nothing to do with those still living. He was thirty-one when he married, which is not that young after all, and why should Iza go through the God-knows-what souvenirs of his youth? She herself couldn’t say what exactly these might be or what she was afraid of, but it was a panicky feeling: Vince had given a present to Lidia but she – his wife – had no idea of how that came about or what it meant, since she had always believed that Vince kept the picture of the mill above his bed out of habit, nothing else, and if this wasn’t the case there was something she didn’t know about Vince and she should be the one to discover it.

  It wasn’t an easy task she had given herself and she didn’t feel free to cry. Iza must have suspected something in her sleep: she could hear her through the open door, moving, sighing and turning from one side to the other. She pulled the first drawer open but she didn’t touch anything for a while, she simply closed her eyes so she couldn’t see, all her deepest, most commanding instincts being against what she was about to do, which was a breach of trust, as if she were robbing and humiliating Vince who was lying helpless in the clinic and could no longer stop her. At the same time she felt closer to him than ever these last few afternoons; the drawers brought to mind a living Vince, it was the real Vince who was looking back at her, everything she came across, alive, speaking, full of energy.

  The contents of the writing desk were in perfect order, as Vince’s things always were. Order was as characteristic of her husband as it was of Iza, just as relative, unfeminine mess was characteristic of her. In the topmost drawer were tins and all kinds of official papers tied round with ribbons in the red-white-and-green national colours. The tins ranged from the tiny to a normal size, like treasures on a child’s toy shelf.

  In the first she opened there was a lock of Endrus’s hair. She hadn’t realised that he too had cut off a lock: there were two strands of hair either side of his medal, under glass, one from each child. Endrus’s was soft and dark. How clearly it brought him back, this soft little snippet, that small cheerful face so like his mother’s you could see it at a glance, so early lost that they had not so much as a photograph of him. Had he lived he would be forty-eight years old now. Oh, God, dear God!

  She twisted the shiny lock of dark hair this way and that. Now he’d be together with his father. Endrus would have made a clumsy angel since he was a clumsy toddler too, dropping things all the time, his arm so weak.

  What could it be like in heaven?

  Certificates. Vince had shown her these once. The stream of distinctions from the village school in Karikásgyüd and the local gimnázium. Student name: Vince Szőcs; religion: protestant; born: 11 January 1880; birthplace: Karikásgyüd; father’s name: Máté Szőcs; occupation: dike-keeper.

  How furious Aunt Emma was, slamming down her coffee cup so hard it cracked. Dike-keeper! What’s a dike-keeper? She was not easily calmed down, to be told it didn’t matter, he had been dead a very long time and that it was Gergely Dávid who had brought Vince up. ‘The teacher in Karikásgyüd?’ asked Aunt Emma. ‘Wonderful! Does he think a law degree makes him one of the gentry now? Dike-keeper! And they sent him to school, on public taxes, because he was so clever. Typical of this ridiculously liberal country!’

  She was sipping her coffee in the arbour, the lilac bent towards her greying blonde hair, so she looked like a faded bridesmaid with her dry, painted face and all those heavy slack rings on her fingers. She thought how Aunt Emma went around telling everyone, ‘She is my goddaughter,’ while she was working in the kitchen and that she’d only be allowed into the parlour when there were guests. ‘She’s the orphan of my poor departed Margit.’ To them she was a servant one moment and a member of the family the next. Of course, if she married Vince, who would read to Aunt Emma in the evenings, and who would get up and keep her company when she had a fit of asthma? She didn’t allow servants in her room: their place was in the cellar because all kinds of criminal acts are committed at night and a servant might steal or even murder a person.

  She took the empty cup but she didn’t run off into the kitchen with it, she ran to the gate instead. Vince was waiting for her on the small bench outside, his hat in his hands turning it over and round, and he laughed when he saw how she was out of breath from running, and there in her hand was Aunt Emma’s coffee cup. ‘Are you bringing that to me?’ he asked and she just stood there not knowing whether to laugh or to cry because she had a fancy to do both. She answered, ‘Ask her!’

  The university handbook: Vol. 1 of the Gaius Institution. One hour per week. Hungarian History and Constitution. Two hours a week. Two picture postcards from Szentmáté that she sent to him when Aunt Emma took her there as a companion. Bills. Ilona Dávid’s Certificate of Merit from the Girls’ Finishing School, academic year 1904–5. Gergely Dávid, teacher’s nursing expenses at the hospital in Békéscsaba 4–27 November 1907. Receipt for the payment of costs of gravestone for Gergely Dávid, teacher, erected Karikásgyüd, 22 April 1909.

  Gergely Dávid.

  ‘You don’t know what he was like,’ said Vince. ‘Six foot six, thin as a rake, always smiling, though he was so poor he could hardly feed his children. When the river burst its banks everyone headed for cemetery hill, which was the highest point in the village. It was night and they were ringing bells. Two of my aunts ran after my mother towards the dike and I followed them but I fell and the people running behind me trampled over me. The two biggest terrors of our lives were Karikás, the river, and the dike. It was the teacher who found me, picked me up and carried me up the hill. I clung on to his neck and cried. I never saw any members of my family after that, my father’s body was never even found. I’m really scared of water, Ettie.’

  Two pebbles, clearly from Endrus’s grave or from the teacher’s, two smooth snow-white pebbles. One broken ivory paperknife, one unaddressed plain envelope, green, with a wax-paper patch in the middle, an ivory cigarette holder, also broken.

  This ribbon was the one she wore in her hair. She never sat down in the Lion Ballroom, not for a moment, but kept spinning and twirling while the chandeliers danced in the mirror. It was a night to make her forget poor Aunt Emma and that she’d been an orphan since she was eight. She was waltzing with Ernő Szekeres, with Aunt Emma looking on, her knot of hair full of sparkling flame-like feathers, like an ageing parrot. Her gaze was disapproving because Ernő Szekeres was not one of us, with nothing to his name except a few more names. ‘There’s a lad there who never dances.’ She pricked up her ears when they had completed God-knows-how-many circles of the hall. ‘Vince Szőcs,’ said Szekeres. ‘A court clerk. He can’t dance.’ She almost missed her step, astonished that a young man should not know how to dance and simply stand there under the mirror watching other people dancing. She stared at Vince Szőcs in an insensitive, unbecoming manner. He in the meantime had just waved at Szekeres and made eye contact with him.

  Here was Aunt Emma’s obituary notice in which her name did not appear. Klári, the next poor relation in the line, whom Aunt Emma took in after Aranka, had sent it to them. And there was some earth in a box, and an empty piggy bank. Press cuttings dating to back to 1907. South Hungary News, 18 March. ‘It’s twenty years today since the Karikás flooded and burst the dike at Karikásrév, destroying five villages overnight, killing almost 200 people. The worst affected were Karikásrév and Karikásgyüd.’

  A. P. Weisz’s letter from America.

  Good heavens, Weisz the chemist! How deathly cold he was in the attic: they brought him an eiderdown but he was still shivering under it, his hands and feet frozen as he sat on a mattress in the
corner, weeping over his family. Vince had snatched him from the crowd in the air-raid darkness as he was standing in the queue in front of their house in Darabont Street. Vince just took a step out, the sky being pitch black, and tugged the nearest figure through the gap in the fence. The sirens were sounding by then and the guards were watching the sky, not those about to be marched off to forced labour. Weisz, the first tenant of the cellar, was in a panic, reciting psalms in an obsessive accusing voice. Haven’t they had enough? Can’t people respect his need for silence? Are those people still dropping bombs? Is God deaf? Can’t people hear that he is praying? He had no great regard for Szőcs’s family. The first time a respectful look flickered across his face was later, in the thick of the bombing, when at last they too took shelter in the cellar. You might very well be a scoundrel who was sacked from his job all those years ago – and what kind of people are you if the university rejects your daughter when you’re not even Jewish? – but credit where it’s due, you’re not cowards. It wasn’t that Vince wasn’t frightened: his feet and hands were trembling with worry about Weisz, and the bombs.

  No, she must stop, it was too painful. Suddenly it all seemed so recent, the voices, the very words, Iza whispering: ‘Why hide him?’ ‘Because I had the chance to,’ her father whispering back. Iza falling silent, folding her hands, clearly thinking it over. ‘You’re always doing good, but not in the best way,’ she had said when she looked up. ‘You’re too naive.’ ‘I may be naive but I do know some things,’ Vince had answered, his face twitching because a bomb had just fallen and he was terrified.

  There were some photographs in the lower drawer, pictures of himself and Iza. Iza looked grumpy in her degree-award photo, her hair cropped, her eyes sullen, like a boy. Here were Vince’s slides too. There was a time he was keen on photography, then in 1923 he sold the camera. She held the slides up to the light and tried to guess the subjects. There were shadows, black and white, unknown faces, men with moustaches and bowler hats, women with feathered hats and skirts that reached the ground. Who were they? Why did he take the pictures? There was a wood of some kind too, if that’s what it was, and some rural buildings. She recognised the last: it was a negative of the picture he had given to Lidia. She put the box down as though she had burned herself.