Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabo

  But, having heard this, she had to call in Iza now.

  Iza smelled of fish and oil, and this made her unrecognisable in some way. Iza was always so clean, so cool, it was as if she wanted to distance her body from the grime and grease of housekeeping, so she was quite shocked to see her flushed with cooking. There was something in Iza that didn’t resist this time: she was about more important business so she let the kitchen get the better of her. ‘It’s a matter of care and necessity,’ the girl had explained once. ‘A person can be in possession of herself, even in a kitchen.’ She was not in possession now: cooking and its ingredients had overcome her composure. Iza was less bothered with herself this evening. What was she bothered with?

  She stood and listened to the reason for his visit. Later the old woman would be puzzled to explain the peculiar look on her face. For some reason she did not seem to welcome Antal’s offer. She was inwardly praying that her daughter, whatever her reasons, would not reject it. If they couldn’t be here at least let Antal remain. She didn’t dare say anything since all her life it was someone else who arranged things, but deep inside her she would have been willing to let the house go at any price Antal offered, provided the dragon spout was looked after and Antal was conscientious about watering Vince’s flowers. Antal had always helped Vince chop wood and knew that the trunk they used to cut on had its own pet name, Dagi.

  ‘Do you really want to settle here?’ asked Iza.

  Her voice was calm and so controlled that even the old woman noticed it was costing her a great deal of effort to hold something back, that there was an unspoken question lurking somewhere in the background. Antal didn’t answer but looked for his cigarettes while Iza just stood there. The old woman muttered something, feeling Iza wouldn’t mind if on this one occasion she broke the agreement not to leave them together by themselves. Yesterday, or the day before yesterday, they had after all been obliged to speak to each other when Iza was at the clinic thanking Dekker and that nurse for their kindness. She whispered something about supper and sneaked out. The oil was simmering on the cooker though Iza had taken the pan off the flame. Suddenly she felt she couldn’t eat a mouthful: the oily half of the fish was glimmering as if it were alive.

  She sat out there a good while till eventually Iza raised her voice to tell her Antal was leaving.

  ‘Have you agreed?’ she asked in hope.

  He was setting off but the old woman didn’t want to let him go out unescorted so she saw him out. Antal hesitated in the doorway for a moment, as though he wanted to say something conciliatory or reassuring but said nothing in the end, simply kissed her, turned up his collar and went off into the rain. She gazed after him until he was gone, though it wasn’t Antal she wanted to see but the image, to hold on to it as long as possible, the gentle curve of the street, the lights in the windows, Kolman’s crude but proudly lit shop display. People squelched their way through the water, the tops of their umbrellas flashing in the light. The wind was southerly again, the clouds, the moonless sky, squatting on the low roofs. It was the first time in her life she felt the earth was round, not flat; that it was slowly but unmistakably turning under her feet. How could Vince’s tiny and ever more wasted body represent such security for her? She stood there, leaning against the gatepost that hadn’t seemed quite real to her for days, as if Vince had taken the reality of the stones and planks away with him and left only a ball of white noise, a mere fog behind. Under the teeming March evening and the cloudburst sky she felt once more, as for the last time, the close physical presence of Vince, his grey hair floating around the street lamp at the bend of the road. Fog was settling, a spring mist, and in the distance she could hear the swish of wheels cutting through standing water in the rain-drenched main road.

  They were driven to the funeral in Dekker’s car. The professor was sensitive and ordered a taxi for himself so as to leave Iza and the old woman alone. Mrs Szőcs had wanted to set out long before the ceremony started but Iza wouldn’t let her, which seriously upset her; she wanted a few minutes alone with the coffin before it was surrounded by strangers. ‘You are my only relative,’ said Iza, keeping her lovely, serious eyes on her. ‘I am both your daughter and your doctor, mum. It’s not just the dead that need to rest, the living do too. I don’t want you to have cried your eyes out: your heart is old, you are no longer young. I have to take care of you.’

  She didn’t cry at first, not because of the medicine Iza made her take, but because her grief was tinged with a kind of awkward joy: it was days since she had seen Vince and now that she knew she would see him one more time she would be free to kiss him and adjust his tie. She did not look out from the car window but kept her eyes fixed on her lap, thinking of what she would say to him when she saw him. He must know that Iza had decided to take her back to Pest but he might not have caught up with Antal’s offer yet. She would promise him to eat more from now on, and apologise to him for not giving him enough painkillers but she had very much wanted him to live, to live at least as long as possible. She was preparing to talk to him as though he were alive, the only problem being that time was limited.

  All the same, she was trembling before they arrived at the mortuary. The velvet-covered doors and the bare ornamental trees in their plant stands frightened her. The first person she saw on opening the door was Kolman, who was wearing a black tie – she liked that – and then the bier. She stopped on the threshhold and burst into tears. The coffin lid was closed.

  That hurt her more than the last four days with all their sorrows had. Iza took her arm and led her to the bench. She sat down, the tears escaping through her gloved hands. Iza said nothing, just sat beside her, her back straight, absolutely still. She knew Iza was acting for the best, that it was wiser to behave like this, that Iza was protecting her, that she was acting as a barrier between her and death, but still it hurt that she could not see his face which even four days ago had begun to look like that of a stranger. She listened to the service, weeping throughout, feeling it was not addressed to her or anything to do with her; she couldn’t follow the prayer either and felt further from the peace of the grave and the thought of resurrection than she had ever done. She sobbed stubbornly like a child, and was not in the least comforted by the promise that the grave represented calm after a life of tribulation and that it would be followed by eternal light. She clung to Vince’s body as she had done in the first terrifying, passionate months of their marriage. Heaven was a long way off and offered no recompense.

  When the funeral procession set off she followed the coffin, leaning on Iza’s arm, not seeing who came after them, feeling simply that there were more people than she expected. The carriage left deep tracks in the mud, the dripping damp soaked into their coats. No one put up an umbrella: no one felt it was appropriate. Vince had never ridden in such a vehicle before, such a dignified, black, glazed car, and no one had ever paid as much respect to him as these people from the undertaker’s. Everything she was going to say remained unsaid and she couldn’t even string sentences together as they trooped along. There was nothing of Vince on show, just the lid of the coffin that covered him. The priest looked a little offended at the graveside, possibly annoyed at having wasted his time promising eternal joy to people who didn’t appreciate it, but she carried on sobbing as the earth was shovelled in. Vince’s grave was small, somehow much smaller than she had imagined it would be. She didn’t care how many people were looking; she knelt down and kissed the wooden headpost.

  As she was bending down, wiping away the tears, she spotted Lidia. She was in a black coat that she must have borrowed because it didn’t fit her, with black gloves and hat. She had never liked this girl, and was pained by the sad look in her eyes and the movement with which she laid a small bouquet on the mound.

  When they reached town the car stopped in the central square without turning down their street. She stared ahead. There was the yellowish glow of the hotel where they had sat just three months before in the café with the red curta
ins discussing Vince’s impending death, and next to it, in the downpour, the travel and airline offices, with a bus, and in the yard next to it a long-distance coach, its heavy blue bulk washed with rain.

  Iza got out; they were looking for something at the back of the car and emerged with a suitcase. It was Iza’s brown travelling case, the light luggage she had arrived with. Iza shook the driver’s hand and the car drove off.

  ‘Now you are to drink some coffee and then you’re off.’

  She didn’t understand at first and simply stared.

  ‘You need coffee because you’re frozen through, then you are getting on the bus. It leaves in ten minutes for Dorozs. Here’s your case.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now,’ Iza answered. ‘You’ve shed enough tears. If you went back to the house now you’d only go round and round the rooms and get yourself worked up again. I’ll arrange everything here and once I’ve finished I’ll follow you. There are books and medicine in the case, and I have asked the hotel to get the desk clerk to help you fill in the official papers relating to your arrival.’

  She followed her obediently, in silence. There were just three people in there. They immediately brought the coffee. She stared at the brown surface of the liquid, stirring it. It was very dreamlike. Here she was, a small child again with a bag on her arm, led by her mother, an adult Iza – Iza in black, looking pale. Iza’s hand was strong, as was her voice telling her, ‘No crying!’

  Would she never see this town again, nor the house where she had lived with Vince?

  Iza rose and paid.

  The bus smelled of petrol. There were hardly any passengers on board: a woman with a stick was clambering on before them. Iza put the case on the luggage rack. She must have packed it at night, while she was asleep, and when would she have had time to talk to the hotel?

  The bus set off so soon they didn’t even have time for a proper goodbye. Iza simply took a step back and the conductor slammed the door. The rain was so dense it was almost impossible to see through it and she could only guess at her daughter’s shape as she stood in the hotel entrance. ‘To Dorozs?’ asked the conductor. The word suggested summer, the scent of flowers, and Vince was present, somewhere behind the words, but suddenly it was as if a force had seized him: he was sliding away, vanishing. The bus was passing through the railway workers’ quarter, over the big bridge. She could see the white board of the railway station, trains were puffing under the bridge. The rain fell in sheets.

  ‘To Dorozs,’ the old woman confirmed.

  The windscreen wiper was moving up and down the windscreen.

  II

  FIRE

  1

  THOUGH SHE HAD seen more than one photograph of the town, Dorozs didn’t look as she had imagined it.

  Once, as a young girl, she had escorted Aunt Emma to the spa at Szentmáté and it was the picture of the town that remained with her: the sound of bells in the main square, musicians in the open air at lunchtime, drinking fountains in the shade of the plane trees, an awkward-looking restaurant with shutters and a large coach entrance at the foot of rolling hills, the lake shore, the lido, the violet-coloured, grass-green, steel-grey, sometimes dark-red waves, the juddering white teeth of the foam when the wind blew. The village of Szentmáté was high up the hill, the streets climbing the slope as if the whole settlement were on a race to the top. When they went for a walk in the village they would be greeted by thin grumpy men drying nets rather than by mugs and tankards on racks, long-eyed, dark-skinned women, and barefoot children scampering after chickens or watching the guests at the spa. The houses were thatched, on the thatch there were storks and above the village the hard, cold sky, with tiny tree-capped peaks of volcanoes in the far distance; the window of the village store displayed flypaper and yellow sugar for sale.

  There was no post office in the village, just the one at the spa. It was the same with the chemists and the surgery, though the funeral parlour was in the main street of the village, its light-blue and dark coffee-coloured coffins on show next to the shoe shop. Kammerman’s coffins would have been out of place at the spa.

  Dorozs was a lowland village, built on sand surrounded by a dark ring of forests and was nothing like Szentmáté; in fact it was like no village she remembered from her childhood. Looking through the bus window she saw a pastry shop, a cinema, a sports pitch, the doctor’s surgery, and they passed a big building where a programme was posted on the gate as on a theatre entrance. The goods in the butcher’s tiled shop were glowing pink with an extensive choice of pork chops and she turned her head away because the sight of fresh meat upset her though she couldn’t have said why. There were large greenhouses dense with early peppers and lettuce. Antennae – some of them TV antennae – had replaced the storks on top of the roofs and in the general store there were plastic tablecloths, various kinds of spray, nylon stockings, washing machines and buckets. The little yard in front of the school was loud with children, the girls in neat shiny aprons with embroidered pockets over blue tracksuits, their ponytails tied round with wide silk ribbons. Somehow she imagined children wearing everyday boots but most of the little boys had ski boots or cross-laced maroon hiking shoes. The children were chubby, clean and well behaved, chattering away, waiting for noon when they could go home. A mother was pushing a pram, a deep, rose-coloured, streamlined pram. None of the younger people looked like a peasant, thought the old woman, and this very much surprised her.

  As if ashamed of themselves, the clouds broke and bare trees began to tremble in the intensely bright unexpected sunlight: they looked as though they were gasping for air or exhausted after a furious dash. The sun rested on the water gathered in the ditch, now dipping, now rising. Cars were battling through the mud and commercial vehicles were chugging towards approach roads. The sky was still grey on either side but blue in the middle, and the individual colours above the village were constantly changing, as though searchlights were sweeping the sky above the street and between the houses, now faintly smoke-coloured, now a kind of yellow. The road turned off into the forest and, a stone’s throw from the last house in the main street, the spa hotel rose like a tower before her. It was Iza’s tower.

  It was the first time she had actually seen it.

  Ever since childhood Iza had been interested in the wagons arriving from Dorozs, and was particularly fascinated by Dániel Bérczes’s scruffy little horses, so much so she couldn’t be drawn away until she had watched them taking thermal water to whichever house had ordered it, her little face transformed in the steam, mysterious, almost expressionless. Her father had explained to her why local people ordered the waters from Dorozs and told how, when he was a child, the peasants would sit round the spring with their trousers rolled up, soaking their feet in the clay basins at the spring edge, drawing in their breath on account of the heat. The last two years of Iza’s and Antal’s engagement were dedicated to the fight for the spa, their ideas for the hotel, the chemical analyses of the waters, the conferences and the discussions. By the time the spa opened, Iza and Antal had separated, Vince’s health had begun to decline and it was only in the press that they read of the ceremony whereby the building was handed over to the village. The girl should have been there at the opening but she just sent a telegram and didn’t go; Antal went by himself.

  Iza’s involvement with the spa was so close it was almost as if she were part of the brickwork, said Dekker on one occasion.

  Now there it stood in front of her, the five-storey concrete-and-glass hotel-sanatorium, a monument to her daughter’s will and care, in the middle of enormous grounds that looked like nothing she had ever seen, that didn’t even remind her of the drinking fountain and shuttered hotel at Szentmáté. Iza had shown her architect’s drawings and photographs of the whole site on completion, but she was no good at visualising plans and the press photo didn’t really give an idea of scale. Now she stood in awe, swallowing deeply and staring at the façade with its enormous lettering.

  The woma
n with the stick, who had got on the bus before her, now got off. She moved with difficulty and the driver handed down her luggage separately.

  A man in a uniform stepped over from the stop, looked through the door and asked if she was Mrs Szőcs because, if she was, he had come to meet her. She babbled something and stretched up to get her case but the uniformed man sprang up and lifted it off for her. He helped her get off too and, taking her arm, escorted her into the entrance hall that smelled of sulphur and was steamy, but somehow quite dry and warm at the same time. There were palms in maiolica pots standing in a circle and, under them, small yellow tables. She had no idea where to go so the uniformed man led her to the carpeted part. The checkered stone floor had been polished to a blinding gloss and was slippery.

  The clerks at the reception desk had prepared the necessary papers for her and she just had to sign them. The uniformed man took her to the lift – it was her one anxious moment because she didn’t like lifts – and took her up to the fourth floor. The door he opened for her led into a hall, where the uniformed man deposited her luggage in front of the built-in wardrobe and left through the inner door. The old woman looked after him in confusion because she felt she ought to have tipped him, he being so nice, but she calmed down when she remembered hearing or reading somewhere that nowadays people didn’t give tips.

  She had never stayed in a hotel by herself before and she felt a little frightened.

  She’d like to have known whether there were people staying either side of her, and whether she could leave everything safely in the wardrobe when she went out because there might be thieves in such places too. She consoled herself with the thought that, because of Iza, they would take special care of her, so eventually she started looking around. She opened every door, including the cupboard doors, thinking they might lead to a sitting room or a parlour, and she inspected the bathroom and the cupboards inside it. She found it all strange, uncomfortable and cold. She dragged her finger along the arms of the chair and felt confused and disappointed: the furniture was ugly. The colours, the patterns, the vases, the ashtrays – everything – was somehow comical, frightening, almost grotesque. She was sorry that Iza’s fine plans had been so much ignored, that they had ruined her dreams. There was a picture on the wall, nothing but a mass of blotches that might perhaps represent a landscape – she had done some drawing in her youth and thought she understood art – and immediately concluded that the thing couldn’t be worth much. There wasn’t any pattern she could pick out on the carpet either, though later she spotted an image of some kind of bird in the blue material, a bird with broken wings. Poor little creature.