by Magda Szabo
Iza didn’t feel like entertaining her mother with the thrilling events of her day. She arrived home tired and longed for some quiet. She herself was surprised to discover how much she resisted conversation at such times, or what an irrational temper she’d get into when the old woman shuffled after her just as she was about to go out, suggesting a coat or a mac or a cardigan to wear on top – or under – her clothes, telling her what bad weather it was outside and that she would get soaked or catch a cold, the old woman’s face etched with disappointment when she failed to convince her at least to take an umbrella.
She sat looking at the dense dusk, wondering how to occupy her mother. The old woman’s selfless, ever-anxious, incomprehensibly youthful energy had been so completely directed towards Vince that she herself had failed to notice it. There could be no question of introducing her mother to her few friends because her political naivety and country manner of asking direct questions would simply frighten them away. She couldn’t give her jobs to do because, even if she didn’t know how much that ancient body could cope with, her day would be disturbed by the constant bustle. ‘How frenetic her love is!’ she thought in horror. ‘How unrelenting! Does everyone love like she does, demanding every moment of the day?’
The spectre of Antal’s disappearing figure rose before her, the way he turned his head against the irreversible tide of time and looked at her. She couldn’t think of him with as much indifference as she would have liked to, shrugging her shoulders, dismissing him with a wave of her hand as if to say, ‘You were just another thing in my life and now it’s over.’ She felt humiliated every time she thought of him. No one could have been a better wife than she was, so why did he go? If they hadn’t divorced she could have asked him directly what to do about her mother, but the Antal to whom she could have taken her problems and disappointments, especially after he had offered to move back into the old house so the old woman could stay at home, was gone. Perhaps he already suspected something.
She couldn’t tell Domokos that she found her own home stifling and that it was like being a bee on the lip of a jar of honey, her mother’s fingers always dipping her into the sticky heavy mass, her mouth and nose blocked by the golden sweetness. She couldn’t tell Domokos such things because he’d write them down and make a story of them. Everything was a subject for some story to him. She shocked herself by admitting how repelled she was by Domokos’s art.
Out in the corridor an open window slams shut. A gusty shower. Once again she hasn’t thought of anything but has simply decided that the way they were going was all but intolerable and precisely the opposite of what she had imagined. At home, with Vince, when Iza was a child, maybe even when she was Antal’s wife, the old woman was an angel, a good-natured, sensitive angel, her attention warm and welcome. ‘I’m getting older,’ thought Iza and shuddered, not because it was true, but because it was her own diagnosis. ‘I was still young when I lived with her and in many ways depended on her, even as a woman; she cooked and cleaned for us, she patched Antal’s clothes. But now she can’t see that I have fully grown up and don’t need to be mothered. She has aged and grown weak, she needs support and advice. If I want her to be happy with me I have to pretend to be a child. That way she’d be satisfied nannying me during the day and she’d be tired by the evening. I brought her here. I invited her because I wanted her to live a long time and to be happy. The trouble is that now I have to behave in a way she understands. I don’t want displays of feeling, don’t need help. When I’m tired I just want to be quiet. Will she be able to cope with that? Will I? How is it going to work?’
A clap of thunder rang out. She thought she should wait until the storm was over but she didn’t dare. She decided to call a taxi and rush home, providing she could get a cab. The old woman was always worrying that she might have had an accident and whenever she was late became quite overwrought with anxiety wondering where she was. Iza hated being worried about. During the war, while still at university, she regularly carried a gun and sheaves of subversive leaflets in Vince’s old briefcase, and when any policeman asked for her papers she gave him such a contemptuous look he immediately let her go. If Antal did ever worry about her he didn’t show it, however late she arrived at university, though there was plenty to worry about. It was a risky business rushing about under the cover of some air-raid blackout pressing sticky-backed leaflets to walls. And when she did appear at the evening seminar, usually at the last moment, out of breath, Antal would tease her about what a fine doctor she would make being so untidy and so unpunctual. He was particularly cold and rude to her before strangers.
She stepped over to the window and looked down. The traffic was heavy and the city seemed to be cowering before the oncoming storm, the hour offices finished work but before theatres and cinemas opened, the whole city swarming, a rolling mass of people moving towards bus stops and tram stops, so many you could hardly see the road for them. If she didn’t get a taxi it would take an hour to get home and she’d be soaked through to the skin by then. The old woman had been pleading with her to take her plastic mac when she set out at noon. But it was sunny then.
She called a taxi and, wonder of wonders, the rank actually had one. She gathered her things together and ran down the stairs so she’d be there when it arrived. She took a look into the street and saw a taxi swing in from the square. Her heart lurched at what she saw.
There was a tram stop opposite the clinic. One had just arrived with the usual rush-hour crowd hanging on to it, dripping from it like a bunch of grapes, the bunch suddenly shaken as if by a supernatural force under the high thong-like lamp posts. The crowd opened up and from their midst lurched a figure in black who, having landed awkwardly on the traffic island, quickly adjusted her crooked hat. Iza trembled as she watched her mother looking around in confusion, the storm lifting her open coat. A stranger took her by the arm and led her across the road, the old woman hardly daring to step in front of braking cars. The man kept explaining something to her until they got to the other side. Iza rushed across, slapping her keys down at the porter’s lodge, the porter just gazing after her because she had never passed him without shaking his hand. Her taxi arrived in front of the building just as the old woman walked through the door, her face bright, extending a string bag with Iza’s shining purple mac in it.
Suddenly the shower hit them. Iza hesitated for a second in the downpour before pushing her mother into the taxi. The old woman sat stiff-backed, her eyes closed. When she first appeared her face had a glow to it that had disappeared by now.
Iza took the string bag from her and threw it on the taxi floor. ‘You do look after me, darling,’ she said courteously. ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful, but you really shouldn’t have bothered.’
The old woman didn’t reply, just gazed at the driver’s back. The sky was rumbling. ‘She travels by taxi,’ thought the old woman. ‘How simple it all is. When the weather is bad she calls a taxi.’ She was aware her heart was beating unusually fast, a little irregularly even, and she felt as though she was drowning. It had been a horrible journey in the crowded tram – she had never been on the street so late, in the terrifying neon-flashing dark. And all the time the fear, the helpless feeling, what if the girl was caught in the storm?
Iza was pale and in a bad mood. ‘She travels by taxi,’ the old woman thought again and looked at her string bag. It was a very ugly string bag.
5
WITHOUT TELLING EACH other both Teréz and Iza tried to help the old woman. Teréz, who had taken the job because she felt restless not having enough housework to do, was suspicious at first, feeling the old woman was a hostile new presence in the flat, someone who was always following her around, doubting her honesty. She wanted to put her in her place and show what she thought of her. Iza did that for her: the old woman stopped harassing her. But now that she wasn’t always following her, messing up the kitchen, now that she was no longer dripping coffee on the freshly scrubbed floorboards and had retreated to her armchair
, simply sitting there, looking out at the ring road which couldn’t have been of any interest to her, Teréz took no joy in her victory, in fact it rather worried her. She was an intelligent person and quickly realised that she had failed to do certain things in those first few weeks. She understood how an old woman rapidly heading towards eighty, who had spent all her life on firm ground, coping with straightforward problems, would now feel as though her life were hanging by a thread, and she also understood the bitterness she must be feeling, a bitterness she had never articulated in words that must have been there all the time: she was, after all, an old but still active woman, and she was in mourning. Having established the nature of their relationship, Teréz wanted to show her some tenderness without endangering her own importance and position.
One morning she arrived with an empty shopping bag, clearly not from the market but straight from home. She called in on the old woman, who turned away in terror when she opened the door, muttering something, then immediately stood up thinking that, unusually, Teréz intended to start the cleaning in her room. At such times she would go through to Iza’s room and was about to do that.
‘I had no time to do the shopping this morning,’ said Teréz. ‘If you fancy it, why not go down to the covered market and buy the necessaries. I’ve made a list.’
She was surprised by the enthusiasm with which the offer was accepted. The old woman’s face lit up. She put on her glasses so that she’d be able to read Teréz’s list in the market and stepped lightly down the stairs without holding on to the banisters. It was as if she had discovered a secret store of energy in herself and never mind the stairs. Teréz turned on the radio and went about her business, shaking her head from time to time. What a fool she was to leave the shopping to the old woman. She’d finish later than usual now. She had usually finished cooking by the time the old woman got home from her walk.
She had just finished the rooms when the old woman returned having bought everything on the list. Teréz thanked her, ran her eyes over the things on the table, and in her grudging good-hearted way went so far as to ask whether the bags were not too heavy for her before getting straight up and starting to cook. The old woman stood behind her at the open door, her face beaming. Teréz didn’t have the heart to tell her to go away though it always made her nervous to have someone watch her cooking and there were times she had cut herself or grated her skin. If only the miserly old thing had bought fresh goods instead of the cheapest and the worst! The meat was streaky, all bones, fit only for a dog. But she said nothing, didn’t even mutter. The old woman stood there for a while, watching her spellbound as the raw material was slowly transformed into food, then returned to her room. She was utterly exhausted and deliriously happy.
Teréz left the shopping to her after this, though her purchases sometimes annoyed her and there were times she quickly had to substitute one ingredient for another: the box of cocoa she left at the market, the mustard that fell out of her bag. She never criticised her for anything. There were other times she marvelled at how good she was and thinking so made her reflect somewhat sentimentally on her own condition. Why should she herself be a widow, and a childless widow at that? Just looking at the old woman could bring it on, this uncertain, mild regret. Teréz liked weeping; she delighted in watching films whose endings she never saw because she was too weepy. On the other hand she felt she was even with the old woman and was feeling pretty pleased with herself.
On 1 July, Teréz’s birthday, next to Iza’s usual envelope full of money on the kitchen table she found an old-fashioned silver brooch with the coral motif of a severed hand in the centre. Teréz turned it over and over in confusion; she didn’t particularly like the pin but it moved her to receive it. She hesitated a moment before shyly pinning it on.
She had sent the old woman out shopping but it was the caretaker who brought up the full bag, saying she had gone for a walk. When she didn’t arrive in time for lunch Teréz became so anxious that she left the food on a low flame and went down to look in the streets, running round the block. She found her by the Corvin cinema, sitting on the steps with her eyes shut. When Teréz called her name she sat up in surprise and obediently set out after her back to the flat. Teréz wanted to tell her off for making her worry like that but she couldn’t bear to, guessing that the old woman had been hiding from her to avoid the embarrassment of being thanked. The old woman deserved some respect for that. Who could have guessed she was such a sensitive soul? She gave her lunch and while serving it out, still with her back to her, feeling suddenly confused and shy, she thanked her for the gift. The old woman whispered something, her face and neck glowing with happiness.
*
After the first few weeks of disorientation, Iza too was beginning to adjust.
Surprisingly enough, Domokos played a part in this readjustment. One day, in the middle of a play, he turned to her and asked what she was going to do with granny. The question sounded flippant coming from him because she thought he wasn’t really interested in anything beyond the form of his own utterances and had never detected signs of particularly charitable concern in him.
Domokos continued gently but firmly as Iza hesitated, watching the stage. ‘Because if we leave her out of occasions like this you might as well have left her in the country and she’d be no less lonely.’
Iza leaned forward. A character was speaking a monologue on stage. Theatre was the art form Iza had always liked least. If ever she got the time she read sober works of realism and novels with sensible plots. It was only because of Domokos that she went to the theatre at all and the actress’s long monologue irritated her. People talking to themselves were pathological, she thought. She didn’t answer the question, which made it look as though it was not worth answering, but she simply didn’t know what to say. She had been pondering the question for weeks. She didn’t know the answer.
‘Keep thinking,’ said Domokos. He leaned back and said the actress had poor diction.
It was on that occasion that she first seriously thought that, given all the circumstances, she could actually live with Domokos. Domokos – and no one who had only passing knowledge of him would have imagined it – had been suggesting marriage for a while. Iza was reluctant to entertain the idea. She was in two minds because behind all her objections there was always the memory of Antal’s hair blowing in the breeze and the trees in the copse bending with the wind as Dekker passed. ‘I hope he doesn’t write about this,’ she thought suddenly and looked away from the stage to get his reassurance. ‘You won’t write about me, will you, Peter?’ she whispered. Domokos’s face clouded over: he looked older, much older. He shook his head.
Once she got home that evening she decided to write down how she spent her time.
It was like being a student preparing for exams again. She took a piece of paper and divided the day into hours. Morning: rise, prepare, dash into work; home by late afternoon. She was usually tired after the journey then and not up to spending time with her mother. Certainly not up to taking her out somewhere. But by about seven, if there was nothing special she had to do, she could perhaps try sitting with her till supper time. After supper the evening would be her own since the old woman would go to bed then. She couldn’t do this if she were on the afternoon shift, of course. She needed mornings free then to make notes, to work, or to write the odd article. She felt a degree of stage fright telling her mother this, worrying that she might not understand that it was the only way she could be fitted into the day, but she need not have worried: the old woman understood perfectly and responded to Iza’s plans with such happiness and gratitude the girl really didn’t know what to say.
Having put the plan into effect she was with her mother four times a week, visiting her as if she were a guest. The old woman always welcomed her into a tidy room and offered her something delicious that ruined her appetite but which she didn’t have the heart to refuse. Her mother had put on a little weight and started to look more like her old, rural self. The two h
ighlights of the day – running errands for Teréz and Iza’s visits to tell her about life at the clinic – seemed to be enough for her to take new courage and gather strength. Iza’s heart almost broke with pity to see how hard her mother worked to try to understand what she told her, how she strove to memorise the names and how proud she was of being able to refer back to a previous conversation. ‘Is that the colleague of yours who got married in China?’ Or, ‘Did you find the book that vanished from your table while you were in surgery?’ Iza never felt at her best in the hour or so she spent with her mother but she always pretended to be. Her plans for the late evening had generally to be postponed or cancelled – she only got out with friends or went to the cinema on a Sunday afternoon, though she hated going out in the early afternoon. As far as Iza was concerned late evening, after supper, was the right time for company or concerts. She might have been willing to give up company but she couldn’t do without the concerts, especially on the days her season ticket was valid, so she put the old woman off on those evenings, but she felt so guilty seeing her ever more worn, disappointed face that she always made up for it the next day: it was like catching up with homework. Domokos, when he came, now tended to arrive after ten, once Iza had finished her work and the house was quiet. The old woman occupied the time between her two daily highlights one way or another and slowly got to know the other inhabitants of the block, at least those on their floor, always stopping to talk to mothers with children. The women were fond of her. The great city of her honeymoon had shrunk to one small part of a single postal district, but one that was growing intimate, village fashion. Teréz extended her brief to cover household goods. People all over the area were getting to know the old woman, the dairy shop even providing a chair for her to sit on when she had to wait.