Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabo

  Iza was a good child, she kept thinking, good, loyal, clever and hard-working. She understood things about the world her mother never could. She had been sickly when young and they had had to spend a lot of time looking after her when she was at primary school. She was slow to start reading for some reason. How many afternoons did they spend practising together until she got into grammar school! The nights she spent stitching her old clothes so they would still fit her and she’d look smart though poor. Once – she was at university by that time – she got her fingers caught in the doors of the tram and she and Vince spent weeks writing up the dissection notes that had to be returned to the person she borrowed them from, horrible notes that frightened her. She recalled Iza who thought of them even when she got married, awkwardly happy, reluctantly radiant, and Iza silent too, when she went up to Pest, and Iza who reclaimed their pension for them, and the considerable sums she sent home even when they didn’t need it. She recalled the Iza who visited every fourth Sunday and helped them through every difficulty, right down to the last one, Vince’s merciful death.

  She thought about Iza every day, Iza who did not abandon her in their last house, who arranged everything for her, who relieved her of work and responsibility, who was looking after her and richly providing for her. And, having thought that, she would feel helpless and break down in tears of shame.

  4

  IZA TENDED TO stay longer at the clinic now after the day’s work was over.

  Nobody really wondered at it. Iza liked her work and set about it with greater ambition than any of her colleagues. She listened right through to all her patients and while she was with them made notes not just about the pain in the hands or feet or aching joints, but about the person and their sense of the world. Iza believed it was necessary to know the whole body in order to deal with a problem, and she was equally sure that body and nervous condition worked together to influence the course of a disease. Every patient represented an exciting new potential solution for her and no one left her with the feeling that they were part of a production line or that in two more minutes an invisible force would carry them away with a prescription in their hands for a course of injections, a medicinal bath or to lie under a great electric machine. When people came to Iza they immediately felt this doctor cared for them as much as if they had been a wealthy private patient. The director said she was an outstanding diagnostician, it was just that she dilly-dallied a little, and it was true she saw fewer patients than others in the various wards, but she cured more people too. Patients relaxed in her presence and there were those who poured out their private griefs to her, but Iza sent no one away without hearing them out. The youngest doctor, Bárdi, once made up a teasing song about her for a party, and he drew her too, with ten pairs of ears and a vast number of arms like some white-overalled Buddha. Bárdi liked Iza and only tortured her with his jokes because he was ashamed of respecting her so much.

  Iza received more bonuses than the other doctors, which didn’t surprise her since, despite the will of some of the authorities, she had been given many scholarships as a student. In view of her success they simply had to agree. She was a natural student who never let people down. She had no off days or wasted afternoons, she prepared systematically for all her examinations, everything about her suggesting a rigorous, precise order. Her mother was often amused when she came home from university exhausted and instead of eating then lying down, she started tidying things. ‘Haven’t you had enough for today?’ asked her mother, laughing. ‘I can’t lie down, not when you haven’t turned off the tap properly and left your shoes in the bathroom,’ Iza complained. If she ever promised anything, even as a child, you could be sure she would do it. You couldn’t say that about Vince.

  Vince had often promised Iza something, then forgotten it or lacked the money to make it happen. At such times the old woman would find Iza in the pantry tucked in by the shelves, having a lonely cry, and each time she had the uncomfortable feeling that what upset her wasn’t the loss of the present she might have had but the offence to her moral sense, the fact that someone hadn’t kept a promise. Bárdi was always in despair when, having just caught up with something he should have done six months before, he saw Iza’s statistics with their beautiful graphs and charts on the director’s table and heard that Szőcs’s were the first to arrive again.

  She was never late but it wasn’t like her to stay so long at work. When she finished and she wasn’t too tired, she’d have coffee or a beer with her colleagues if someone asked her, or she’d invite someone to go for a walk with her, usually a divorced woman or a young girl. Iza didn’t like listening to happy mothers or women with good marriages – the memory of Antal was still too raw.

  Latterly, while tidying things, putting her notes into order, making strong coffee, leafing through the papers or just sitting scribbling, she found herself doing what the old woman was doing: in her own way, with due respect to her own circumstances, in the brief moments left to her she thought about her life.

  She was thinking particularly hard about the problem of her mother.

  Iza loved her parents, not just the way a child might, but in a comradely fashion, as fellow sufferers, quickly understanding why their lives were not like the lives of her acquaintances, and was fully convinced – more fully convinced than her mother – that being Vince’s daughter was not a matter of shame but of pride, and that any wife of Vince should be happy to have a husband like him. Material difficulties didn’t bother her, it rather pleased her that, though a child, she could help her mother sort out a really knotty problem. Iza was convinced that her whole outlook – including her entirely instinctive political attitudes based on purely human reflexes – was down to the example of Vince and that the fact she got through university and emerged with qualifications was attributable to her mother’s practical mind in getting over the complications of poverty. Iza set about her obligations to them whenever and however she could, in the most natural way without ever being asked or called upon.

  Each payday Bárdi would complain about the pittance left to him of his half-monthly salary after he had shared it with ‘the old woman’ back in Szalka but Iza never told anyone she was supporting her parents or that she had a family at all. When it came to the childlessness tax or when paying into the obligatory state bonds she never argued that she was looking after her mother and father. Her rural self was familiar only to the simple, none too clever people of her home town, denizens of the old woman’s and Vince’s world. When she asked for time off because her father was dying and that after the funeral she’d like her mother to move in with her, Bárdi, who took over her work, felt very bad and didn’t go to offer his condolences – what in heaven’s name can a man say at such a time? He was thinking that he wouldn’t want his old woman to move in with him, he’d rather give her three-quarters of his pay and walk the wards.

  Antal’s message was shocking precisely because it was no different in lacking any show of emotion.

  Lack of emotion characterised their relationship even at its most passionate. One day they were walking through the copse together discussing some film or other when Antal carelessly asked, almost by way of a passing remark, whether she would marry him and she replied, of course. There was a monument to a local poet along the woodland path, a clumsy bronze head on a twisted column, the only poetic thing about it being the eyes that looked as though they might have meant something to someone. They stopped by it, fell silent in the middle of a sentence, and it was there Antal kissed her. It was early afternoon on a bright day and it was only when Dekker, who always walked that way to his villa, approached that they leapt apart. ‘Nice to see you,’ said Dekker when Antal started to explain and he immediately walked on. He already knew, as Iza didn’t, that the matter of the girl’s position had been sorted out.

  Antal’s message was to say that her father was expected to die that day and it would be good if she were there. Looking down from the plane, the clouds looked leaden with an occas
ional unreal white patch, rising in woollen towers like a flock of dim sheep. It was because of the old woman that she caught the first flight; she already knew she would not see her father alive. Iza didn’t want another emotional crisis, there had been one in her life and that was enough, now she needed all her strength. She had already said goodbye to her father once when Dekker first showed her Vince’s test results. She had kept staring at his desk, noticing how like a child’s desk it was, so unfit for a great scientist, the writing desk of a simpleton, littered with erasers and coloured crayons as if he spent every free minute drawing pictures of houses, hussars and snowmen on his writing pad, and her eyes filled with tears as she bent over the pens and bright little notebooks.

  She was never in any doubt that she would have to take the old woman home with her.

  When Iza first received the drawings for her flat Vince was still relatively healthy, the only unusual thing about him was that he looked prematurely aged. She took a pencil and redrew the walls, diminishing the size of her own two rooms so that there should be space for a third. One of the old folk was bound to die sooner or later, as she thought at the time, and the other could not live alone down there. It was impossible.

  She saves sex for the end of the month, thought Bárdi, noting how every fourth Saturday Iza turned up with a suitcase and ordered a taxi for the station once noon surgery was finished. Later, when it turned out that the girl was visiting her parents, he felt ashamed of himself. Iza, like her father, was instinctively attentive, kept a note of her colleagues’ name days and promotions, and it wasn’t too difficult to imagine her at the end of each month, appearing somewhere out in the country, laden with presents, chatting and giggling like a girl, stuffing silly little gifts into the pockets of housecoats and dressing gowns.

  Iza’s sex life was quite different from that imagined by Bárdi or indeed by anyone.

  It took years for the memory of Antal to heal but the girl wasn’t vain; she didn’t feel she needed the attentions of a man – any man – to assure her that her husband was a fool to leave her. In the first few months of moving into the new flat in Pest she took every opportunity to spend time at the clinic; she started no new lasting relationship, she went out with her colleagues but they were all married and those who weren’t were all younger than she was. The company she kept at the time was fun but impersonal.

  There were occasionally particularly interesting men among her patients, including well-known public figures with a national reputation. Hardly anyone at Iza’s clinic had personal patients: in all serious cases the course of treatment involved the whole staff. She would visit her notable patients, form a diagnosis, then forget them. It was impossible to have private feelings about them: they were simply ill. Men hung their heads and sucked in their breath while being examined. Famous artists shyly admitted their real age, trembled at the thought of treatment and lamented – their voices strangely thin, almost feminine – the fact that they were due a course of medical massage or the weight baths. It never occurred to her that one of them might pick up the telephone one day and ask her for a date after surgery hours.

  Nevertheless this did happen, just once, with Domokos.

  It was the Writers Union that rang to tell her about Domokos and a problem with his elbow. As usual she looked carefully into his eyes in the course of the examination, the condition of the eyes and the hair being as much a sign of sickness as anything to do with the body. In examining him she noticed that Domokos was returning her gaze as a man, as if assuming a different kind of eye contact. It didn’t embarrass her, it made her angry. She told Domokos not to stare at her but to submit to the examination and, contrary to her usual practice, she prescribed electric treatment for him before sending him on his way. Electrotherapy was in a new wing of the clinic, an extension of her own department, the first modern department of its kind, and Domokos would have to undergo treatment there. It was where she herself worked, though they entered by different doors. After each appointment he would look in on her to ‘report in’ as he called it, letting her know how much his condition had improved. She wouldn’t look into his eyes now and behaved coldly to him, treating him worse than she did others. This amused Domokos as it was impossible not to notice it, and he sent her a bunch of flowers after each appointment, a gift she didn’t know what to do with and which, from the first time on, she regularly handed over to the janitor’s wife. She wouldn’t mention the flowers to him, never thanked him and hoped that he would simply give up but, when Domokos called in for the fifth time to show her how he could now bend his elbow without pain, she sent her administrator out to fetch some new boxes and told him whatever his purpose in sending her the flowers he should stop sending them.

  Domokos answered that he had no purpose. It was simple courtesy. In any case it was not unusual for a man to send flowers to an attractive young woman, especially one to whom he feels some sort of tie, and maybe she should consult someone herself since she seemed unduly agitated. Hearing this she simply opened the door, ushered him out and called in the next patient. That night Domokos rang her for the first time.

  Their relationship developed relatively quickly, Iza allowing herself passively, a little suspiciously, to be seduced by Domokos’s half-teasing, half-touching ardour. When Vince was in hospital and she met Antal at her father’s bedside for the first time, she blushed and felt sick as though she had something to hide, as if she owed him something, a kind of honesty or fidelity – who knows what? Domokos was full of fun, full of ideas, always accommodating. He put up with her earlier moods and helped cheer her when she was tired but Iza never felt – not even in their most passionate moments – quite as certain as she had with Antal while she was still married to him, that Domokos was the man for her. That was partly because of Domokos’s profession and partly because of Antal. After all this time, after everything that had happened, Antal was still the measure of things: Antal gave himself over completely to acts of love, his eyes closed, fierce yet tender; with Domokos she always felt he was awake and watching, observing an experience that he would later put into words and look to use somehow. It wasn’t a nice thought but life with Domokos was simple and easy. There was something essentially cheerful about him, as there had been about Vince.

  Today, as on other days, she stayed behind and sat down to examine a set of files, but she wasn’t really reading, she smoked instead and made a call. She tried to ring Domokos but he wasn’t there. She didn’t mind: the act of dialling and waiting for someone to pick up the phone was just a way of delaying things, a defence against enquiring glances and having to give explanations. It showed that she had an official reason for still being here after others had left, that she had work to do, someone important to speak to. Once everyone had gone and she heard the door at the end of corridor close, she stopped trying the telephone. She leaned back and looked at the sky through the window, the clouds dark and dense, scampering towards the city. ‘There’ll be a storm,’ she thought. ‘The first real storm of the year.’

  She was deeply concerned that the old woman’s constant presence was getting on her nerves.

  Iza loved her mother no less than she did her father, but she loved her differently and for different reasons. She hadn’t slept at home for seven years, not even as a guest; whenever she visited she booked a room at the clinic or at the hotel. It was only once her mother was up at Pest that she got to know her as she was in old age. Her early memories of her mother were of a jolly, courageous, sensitive, somewhat frightened, bustling, good-hearted figure, someone waving at her from the past, someone who, despite her amusing hare-brained nature, was loved by everyone for her charm and sweetness, and for her gift for making people feel at home. Before she brought her to Pest there was something disarming about the old woman’s utter ignorance of all the changes in the country; it was only Vince who used to keep track of them, relying on the evening news bulletin to build up a picture of the present, that was when he didn’t feel too tired to listen.

/>   From such a distance it was possible to smile at the old woman’s instinctive feudalism, at the naive way she addressed everyone younger than her, or, as she saw it, of the servant class – woodyard workers, charwomen – by the familiar te form of ‘you’, the way she learned from Aunt Emma, but up close it was impossible. Iza had lived alone for years in Pest – the last time she lived with anyone was in the house with the dragon-shaped spout where she and Antal had only to knock at the door on their return from work to sit down to a ready supper, hungry and pleased, eating up everything with great relish, Iza warming her cold hands against the white ceramic stove through whose glazed door the fire her mother had made glowed and danced. Her mother made good fires. She had only to poke it and the flames shot up. This was the home she wanted around her now; she yearned for the harmony of those happy days but knew, just a few weeks after her mother had moved in with her, that there was no point in hoping.

  Nor any sense in beating around the bush: the old woman irritated her.

  In the first few days it truly astonished her to sense the extraordinary energy in her mother’s old body, the never-flagging insistence that she play a part in her daughter’s life. Her constant presence, the way she kept opening doors, always wanting something to happen at precisely the times Iza was exhausted and wanted rest and quiet, a space where nothing happened, saddened her and forced her to spend ever less time at home, only as much as was absolutely necessary. For a while Teréz was the solution to all her problems, but now she felt Teréz too was under threat, and when she was away she felt such anxiety thinking of the flat, it was as if she had left an unruly child behind, and you never knew when this child would somehow find some matches and set fire to the curtains. Her stomach had by now adapted to big city tastes and she found her mother’s cooking too heavy and too greasy. Over the years she had got used to the melancholy freedom of the lonely, to not having to give an account of herself to anyone, to not having to tell people where she was going and when, and when she’d be back. She didn’t really understand why it was so irritating to have to tell her mother where she was preparing to go – there was nothing secret about her excursions and, apart from her well-established habits and her need for silence, there was no reason she should not be happy to have someone home waiting for her – or why it so depressed her to hear someone shuffling into the hallway while she was turning the key in the lock, or showering her with questions as she was removing her gloves: where have you been, what did you do, whom did you meet?