by Magda Szabo
*
The summer was unbearably hot.
It was hard for the old woman and she had nowhere to hide from the heatwave. It was almost dark before she dared open the shutters. She stumbled about blindly in the flat and instead of the rural scents of summer behind cool Venetian blinds she had to put up with the unforgiving heat. Iza did not suffer very much but her mother was struggling for breath. When Teréz saw how pale she was and recalled how she had been gasping since the morning, she didn’t let her do the shopping, telling her it would be bad for her to be carrying things and that they’d have to tell madam-the-doctor. She took the string bag herself, pushed the old woman into the dark room, left her with a cool wet cloth on her forehead and ran off.
The old woman was for once grateful to her. She felt hot and weak, weighed down by her thoughts. She wanted to order a permanent memorial to Vince in time for All Souls’ Day, the day of the dead, and closed her eyes trying to visualise the best possible stone and inscription. She had corresponded with Gica about it: the cloak-maker was a person of taste.
The heatwave lasted for weeks. It was possible to open windows in the evening but the fresh air didn’t do much to cool the baking walls. Iza too lost weight and was planning a holiday. She first thought of going to Czechoslovakia to be in the Tátra mountains but then changed her mind. ‘We won’t go to the Tátra this time,’ said Domokos. ‘Let’s stay in the country, rent a room somewhere along the Danube Bend, and take the old girl with us, she looks utterly washed out.’ Domokos was careful not to use too many poetic metaphors when he talked to her.
So they planned ahead, the old woman most keenly, with one small regret, because she had no memory of ever going away except in her youth and she felt awkward about planning holidays now Vince was dead. At the same time, in her own modest way, she was happy to take a break from the unbearable oven the city had become. The time between Teréz leaving and Iza returning went all the quicker for the thought and she imagined how great it would be to spend the whole day with Iza and that mad writer of hers, who always greeted her, coming or going, with ‘Your servant, ma’am.’ For some reason she couldn’t explain even to herself, she liked Domokos, though she often reflected on the irregular and quite wrong relationship between him and her daughter.
Teréz regularly finished an hour or two earlier now she did the shopping herself.
One afternoon, when Teréz went off having left a bowlful of apricots by her armchair, the old woman wondered how Teréz could get away so early and still be doing the shopping. Could it be that she had shopped on the way here? But then she thought how it was the same even when Teréz nipped out to the shops in the middle of the job. How could that be? She started nibbling at an apricot but it didn’t taste like the ones back home used to, not quite ripe, a little bitter despite all the sun. Suddenly she stopped chewing. She realised why Teréz tended to finish so early nowadays.
It was shocking, in fact monstrous, for her to realise that she wasn’t helping Teréz by doing the shopping but rather slowing her. The blinds were drawn, the temperature in the room stifling; the old woman was having one of those rare moments of perception when everything seems blindingly clear. All of a sudden she felt terribly ashamed of the way she had misjudged Teréz. Teréz was strong, thought the old woman as slow bitter tears crept down her cheek. Teréz only seemed stern and loud, in reality she was gentle and sensitive. The image of Teréz as a stern loudmouth was replaced by that of a tender young woman, transformed into an abstract idea of pure virtue, who had taken pity on her and was, as an act of sheer grace, sacrificing her own valuable time in order to help her occupy her idle hours. Teréz must clearly be doing a better job of shopping: being better acquainted with the covered market, while she was still working through the stalls without having fixed on any particular butcher or greengrocer, there being so many of them that she felt she had to try them all. She was more of a hindrance than a help to Teréz. If it weren’t for the heatwave, and if Teréz hadn’t been so prepared to take the task back, she would never have realised it. Never.
She didn’t dare look Teréz in the eye the next day, though they had got into the habit of chatting by then, Teréz being happy to talk about herself and her dead husband while the old woman reminisced about Vince. There might have been twenty years or so between them but they shared their widowhood and that gave them some common ground. Teréz didn’t understand why the old woman had become so morose and reserved. Once she even felt her brow to check she wasn’t ill. She couldn’t persuade the old woman to do the shopping, not even once the heatwave was over, and while this was a great relief to her she couldn’t help but be curious. She felt offended, as if her kindness had been rejected, and paid no more attention to the old woman who was back to crouching in her armchair and to wandering about the streets, thinking how to let Teréz know that she felt she had no right to accept her kindness and that she would rather die than go on in the knowledge that she was hindering rather than helping anyone.
Then she started worrying about the same thing with Iza.
Iza continued faithfully visiting her in the early evenings, though she was tired, bleary-eyed and ever thinner in the face. On one occasion she caught a summer flu and sat further away from her, croaking and holding a handkerchief before her mouth, but she still came and made conversation. The old woman kept a beady eye on her in the half-light. Iza was always cheerful and never complained, the news from the clinic was invariably good, all going well, with the hope of a trip abroad. But later in the evening, when Iza thought she was asleep, the old woman crept to the door and listened as she rang Domokos. ‘No, don’t come now, I can hardly speak, I’m going to lie down. You must understand I have to be by myself, I can’t go on like this. I’m like everyone else, I need a couple of hours to myself alone when I just lie there and look at the ceiling.’
Hearing this, the night that followed was like the night Vince died – long, too bright, unreal.
*
The city traffic died down but hadn’t quite faded; it was never completely quiet on the József Ring, there was always some noise as if the heavy breathing of daytime work had given way to a light snoring sleep in the dark. The old woman did not take off her clothes when Iza left her, she remained fully clothed in the big chair, clenching and unclenching her fingers. Her mind was full of naive childhood prayers: ‘Watch over me, dear guardian angel, prevent me from going astray, guard my every step, let me grow in the fear of God.’ She had a Catholic wet nurse in infancy through whom she learned to love the angels. God was far off and male, the guardian angel was closer, more comprehensible, more tangible. ‘My guardian angel,’ thought the old woman. It was such a strange thought since the angel had neither age nor gender while she herself was very old; that guardian angel must be pretty tired by now – the guardian angels of the aged would have lost their own agelessness and hers would be gasping for breath, scuttling along with ever slower steps behind her. Iza had Domokos to complain to, that is if she ever told anyone what bothered her, but she wouldn’t be able to help Iza, she might simply shed a few tears with her and stroke her hair as she did when Iza was a child, but Iza was grown up and what could she do to lighten her load now? Iza was tired, she was working hard, her mornings and afternoons were dedicated to the sick and what little time she had left she was giving to her, her mother, so there was only a tiny part of the day left for herself. She was having to slice up her days the way you slice bread. Vince was dead, Endrus was dead, the old town had gone, everything was gone. Even Vince’s illness, with all the horribly demanding tasks it entailed, with all its dreadful obligations and the constant gnawing fear that filled her days, seemed something to envy now. Her helpless fingers trembled with the pain of thinking of it. Teréz would get on better without her. Iza could never relax when she was around. There was no Captain, no Gica, no Kolman, nobody who really depended on her for kindness or even conversation.
Maybe she was already dead and hadn’t noticed? Could a perso
n die without being aware of it?
Outside she could hear the clatter of a late tram. The old woman started calculating how long she might have to live. Her parents had died early, so that was no clue; some naive instinct in her told her she would live to be Vince’s age, approaching eighty-one. But how much better not to have to get that far! Iza could go and enjoy a holiday by herself and needn’t tire herself out entertaining her mother in the evenings.
The next day when Iza dropped in she waited for her in bed and said she’d already had supper, that she was exhausted and would rather sleep than talk. Iza took her pulse, made her sit up and looked at her very hard. Her mother’s face looked tired though she had days when she looked remarkably fresh too. Now she looked precisely her age, maybe even older than seventy-five. Her pulse was as slow as it always had been, maybe a little stronger but still regular. She didn’t seem ill. ‘Maybe she’s bored with me?’ wondered Iza as she took her leave and returned to her own room, humming to herself, opening and closing a few drawers and starting to dress. ‘Maybe she is bored with these conversations every evening, maybe she wants to sleep? Maybe she has got used to life here and doesn’t need me so much?’
She picked up the phone. The old woman could hear her dialling. She didn’t get out of bed this time, she didn’t listen or wonder whom she was talking to and what about. The lilt of the voice, the cheerful melody of it might as well have been scored on a stave: she could hear it as clearly as if she had been at the door. Iza was discussing something with someone and soon there was the sound of water running into the bath. Then the door opened a crack. She stayed stock still, pretending to be asleep. She could smell the cool scent of Iza’s cologne. Iza stood listening for a moment while the old woman tried to breathe regularly as though she were gently snoring, then she closed the door. The front door needed to be closed very firmly and she heard the small thunder of it as Iza went out. She hung about by the open shutters looking down at the street as Iza passed in her white dress, her hair let down so she looked like a schoolgirl. She was running through the gate and jumped on to a passing tram.
After that she let Iza in only for a few minutes at a time.
*
Iza observed her with some suspicion at first but since she always found her asleep in the evening she slowly got used to doing other things. She wrote articles, had Domokos round, invited friends from work and went out more often. For a long time she only saw her mother on Sundays: the old woman was becoming strangely gaunt and hard-faced. Iza felt there was no love in her eyes and complained to Domokos about how distant and alien she had become, that she hardly ever spoke to Teréz, that she avoided her, that she did nothing but sit around and that when Teréz arrived she would immediately leave the flat and not return till lunchtime. Where on earth did she go and what’s got into her to grow away from her like that? Domokos didn’t know and said one would have to see her more often and talk more to her to understand. One Sunday when they were dining together at Iza’s he went out of his way to be nice to the old woman, unusually nice, like a little boy, which wasn’t hard because he liked her. He didn’t know what to make of her though: she didn’t respond to his jokes, she had little appetite and hardly touched her food but soon left them, saying she was tired and was going to bed. ‘It may just be part of the ageing process,’ said Domokos. ‘While she was back in the village she was obliged to stay young to cope with all her troubles but now you have brought her up to town she is letting herself go. The world has shrunk around her. There are such cases. We will grow old too.’
‘You never will,’ said Iza, shaking her head. ‘You are too irresponsible to grow old.’
That was what she said but what she thought was: ‘You have less sense of responsibility than Antal.’ She hated herself for always relating everything to Antal.
Domokos, who had no regular hours of work and who went to the café opposite Iza’s block to write, promised to keep an eye on the old woman’s secret comings and goings in the hours between Teréz’s arrival and lunch, about which the old woman refused to speak. ‘I just like walking’ was all she’d ever say when asked, though they didn’t believe her because it clearly wasn’t true: the hours she chose were far from the best time for walking.
Iza simply stared at him when he told her that the old woman spent hours on the tram.
‘She gets on the number 6 in front of the house, goes as far as Moszkva Square, then changes to the 59, goes all the way to the end of the line, then gets on another tram, travelling from one terminus to another and that’s all she does for hours on end.’ Domokos himself felt puzzled recounting this, just as he felt anxious following her at a distance seeing that she never once spotted him, never looked round when she was on a tram, not even at a stop. The old woman didn’t speak to anyone, she had an empty string bag on her arm and stared at the streets without any expression on her face, utterly absorbed as though she wanted to ask the unfamiliar houses some questions.
‘It’s a harmless way of passing the time,’ said Domokos, chiefly in order to reassure Iza who was clearly shocked and saddened. ‘Cheer up! She’s getting to know the town.’
Iza did not cheer up because she didn’t understand. The old woman had never mentioned her journeys, it was as though she were guarding some state secret – in fact, she hardly ever said anything about anything nowadays. Teréz grew morose, unnerved by the great silence. Teréz wanted either friendship or war; the state of silence between them was unfamiliar territory and she didn’t like her disappearing for hours. When Iza’s holiday came round and the three rooms at Zebegény had been booked, the old woman announced that she wasn’t going anywhere and would prefer to stay in town because the strange new environment would only exhaust her. Iza pleaded with her for two days, then realised that her mind was made up and felt ashamed that her joy at the news was greater than her anxiety and agitation. Two weeks by the Danube! Two free weeks!
She rang home every afternoon from Zebegény and received the same news each time: I’m fine. Teréz was on holiday too so the old woman did the cleaning and cooking for herself. By the time Iza got home she had lost more weight but seemed calm. She complimented her daughter on her appearance and returned to her room. It was a Sunday morning and Iza was really looking forward to telling her about things, feeling fresh, energetic and rested, smelling of sunlight. She swept up the post and went through to her mother’s room.
The old woman was just preparing to go out. She said she’d hear her news the next time as she had to be off now. Iza stared at her in disbelief. Her mother picked up the empty string bag and left. Iza leant on the windowsill and watched her in a panic. It was no longer suffocatingly hot. Her mother was in the street, less scared of the traffic now because she crossed the narrow route to the traffic island without any help and got on to the number 6 tram.
III
WATER
1
THE MAN AT the news-stall in the distance was waving copies of Popular Physics and the comic weekly, Ludas Matyi.
Antal dipped his hands into his pocket feeling for loose change. He read the papers and the scientific journals at the clinic, and he didn’t like comics: he had a quiet, private sense of humour and occasionally found a joke funny but was bored by too many jokes all at once. But he didn’t have it in him to ignore the newsagent whom he regarded as an extension of Vince for, having seen Antal using his own new keys to open the gate of the house with the dragon-shaped spout, the man waved energetically from the corner and it was as if Antal were the soul of a younger Vince, his hands on the handle, while the man was beaming away, brandishing Vince’s favourite papers.
Antal’s first thought was to subscribe to the papers because he could afford to. When Vince was forced into early retirement he had got used to buying directly from the stall. Antal never told the newsagent that he was paying double: the man had liked the old judge.
It took some time for the house to accustom itself to his ways, it just seemed a burden to begin with.
While the masons and carpenters were working on it, he constantly had to take trips out of the clinic to check that the work was going according to plan, nor was it easy to come to an agreement with Gica, who looked to preserve her apparent impartiality and heroically starved herself while carrying on with her strange form of industry. Gica had to be persuaded, practically forced, to eat something more nourishing than poor-man’s soup. Antal had to beg her, to remind her of the old times, practically to court her before she’d agree to clean the place and do the occasional bit of cooking. Persuading her wasn’t easy because Gica, like everyone else in the street, could never forgive Antal for leaving Iza and always pulled a face when accepting her monthly payment as if she were only taking over stewardship of the Szőcs domain as a favour, an act of grace, and that otherwise she would never serve people who were capable of deserting a girl like Iza Szőcs.