Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabo

  Of course, she was only pretending that she didn’t need the money and that she could make a living out of stitching cloaks as she could before the war; the locals tended to wear the cloaks they inherited so the only work she got was when some church anniversary was being celebrated and the faithful congregation was ready to sacrifice some of its hard-earned cash on a new one. Gica was all too happy that her life was manageable and that she had some daily occupation, that she could mix with the labourers and see how the Szőcses’ old furniture was being replaced by new, how everything was becoming more comfortable, more practical, and how they turned on the new electrical appliances. Gica enjoyed her work but whenever Antal happened to drop in and surprise her, she gave him a nasty look because while he was after all her employer, his treatment of the family should not be too easily forgotten. In fact, Gica didn’t like it that the house had come into Antal’s possession – what was it to a tankardman’s son and why would he marry again after Iza?

  It was not only Gica who came with the house, not just the newsagent, but Kolman too.

  Every time Antal got home, before he could even step through the door, he had to stop because the grocer was gesturing to him and sometimes ran over with a string bag. Shopping had become more complicated since he lived here rather than at the clinic. Gica claimed that Kolman had insulted her and that she wouldn’t do her daily shopping there, while Kolman was upset that at the start, before Antal knew he was upsetting him, he did all his shopping at the clinic buffet and brought it home in his briefcase. One day Kolman stopped him in the street and told him how much he was hurt by his lack of patronage. Antal didn’t want to offend him. ‘I’m such an idiot,’ thought Antal each morning on his way to work when he gave Kolman his shopping list, which was always the same – milk, bread, butter, occasionally some sugar, salt, fruit and green peppers – and which he would pick up. But he was not really angry. Kolman beamed goodwill but it wasn’t so much him Antal didn’t want to offend as Vince. Maybe, come summer, he, like Vince, would offer cuttings and rosebuds to the girls behind the counter.

  He accepted the full string bag, the uglier of the old woman’s pair, an awkward, lumpy thing, with a design of orphan children, that she had stitched together from an old coat, its lining made of waxed canvas. With his briefcase under one arm and the string bag on the other it was difficult opening the gate and no easier shutting it, so he put the things down as quickly as he could on the basketwork table inside the entrance. Now, at twilight, the air was thick with the scent of Vince’s roses, sweet as honey, the whole garden luminous in the dying light. Gica looked after the flowers: that was clear from the freshly dug earth and the traces of recent watering. Captain huffed and puffed his way out of the woodshed, old and clumsy now. At the bottom of the string bag lay shreds of cabbage – a secret treat for Captain, but he could take his turn.

  Nowadays, after a good while, whenever he went in and closed the door behind him he felt an undefinable sense of well-being: it was what he had hoped for when he bought the house. Nothing disturbed him behind those old walls. There was no longer the heartache of missing Vince’s familiar figure, instead it was as if he were still present and strangely alive in the rose bushes outside, his personality and his solid good humour preserved in the high brick walls overrun with ivy. When he first moved here the raw healthy smell of fresh plaster and paint filled the rooms, and he was often troubled by memories even though the house was quite different from when he and Iza lived in it, its character having changed, the old furniture having been cut up and used to make sensible, lightweight tables and chairs, everything more modern, more up to date, with less of the pleasant sense of timelessness of the Szőcs family home.

  Iza’s ghost was more stubbornly persistent than that of her dead father, or the old woman who had left with such a hopeful look on her face, clutching Iza’s hand and hanging on to her skirt. At first he regretted tidying away so many years of struggle with money he could have spent on a new freehold flat in Balzsamárok without any memories attached and significantly closer to the clinic than this town house. He kept walking up and down the refurbished rooms without quite feeling at home. A strange double vision troubled him: there was the old furniture that Iza sold him for next to nothing, furniture that had long been rebuilt into something new that fitted into its new setting, the walls covered in bookcases – yet it took weeks for him to get used to it as his own home, weeks before he could open a wall cupboard and not think that piece of wood was from the chest of drawers where Iza kept her underwear. The girl had been too close to him to forget her now. The building work, the carpenter and the upholsterer, all took longer than planned and lasted till midsummer, even though every workman he hired had once been his patient and tried to work as fast as possible to please him, so it was the end of June before he could move in and August before Iza had become memory rather than presence, or at least no more a presence than the old woman with her kindly enquiring look and clever busy fingers, or Vince with his wise small eyes and peaked caps.

  There was no such image of Iza, nothing as tender and charming; Iza remained a rather sombre memory, that is when he thought of her once he was in bed. It was a word here, a phrase there, he suddenly recalled.

  But then she too faded away like so many things, like everything, in fact.

  Captain panted after him up the two steps that led into the house. His mail was always addressed to the clinic, the only mail he ever found at home being the occasional business card and there was nothing today. Antal was tired, he had had a hard day. He was intrigued by the way his nervous system could adapt itself to such strange games: if Lidia were not on the night shift he wouldn’t feel at all tired, they’d wander the streets together or sit in the woodland café and chat as they did on all their free evenings right into dawn. But Lidia was going to be working tonight and suddenly he felt drawn to the bed as he never did when there was something more important to occupy him, such as a new patient, a death, a particularly important meeting, an article that needed writing and could only be written at night for lack of time. Such things kept him going, but Lidia first and foremost. Above all, Lidia.

  He bathed and changed his clothes. On the top shelf of the built-in wardrobe was a pile of old boxes that had belonged to Iza’s mother, which Iza had given him for nothing. He smiled as he did each time he opened the wardrobe. Mama’s odds and ends, Vince’s stuff, his stamp collection, his glasses. It should all have been thrown out but he didn’t like the thought of it. Such things brought him closer to those who were now far away and there was a lot of room in the wardrobe, so everything could be accommodated and it was only the ugly old paintings he consigned to the attic. Iza had also left him a complete kitchen set, old-fashioned, well-looked-after items that he and Gica arranged neatly in a cupboard. For decades Antal had possessed so few things that he was sometimes amused by the highly personal clutter that came with the house: a watering can, a block for chopping wood on, a pipe filter, a small axe. He left the pipe filter out because it had a heavenly smell, hanging it on a nail in the hall next to two of Vince’s meerschaum pipes arranged in a cross, and Vince’s cherrywood walking stick. When he grew older he might perhaps smoke a churchwarden pipe. The mixture of old and new gave the house an amiably quaint look, so cosy that when his colleagues came to visit they’d clap their hands as they entered, and Sanyi Vári gave a whistle and wondered why he had bought a bachelor flat on the fifth floor of a tenement block. The price he had paid for it would have covered the cost of Antal’s house and everything in it. There was a welcoming air to the new place, something nice and intimate.

  Captain wanted feeding so he put something out for him in the kitchen where mama used to, then he too ate, enjoying his yoghurt and happily munching away at the loaf Kolman had put aside for him. It was natural to have a ring on his finger by now, though he found it strange when they first got engaged, his eye constantly catching on the bright circle of it. It was distracting and felt uncomfortable when he
was washing his hands, but he didn’t want to upset Lidia by removing it. ‘I like other people who look at you to know that you are already spoken for,’ she said. Iza disliked symbols and never wanted an engagement ring but Lidia would have proclaimed her status as bride-to-be on public posters if she could. She was possessive in a way Iza would simply not have recognised, jealous for no reason other than the fact that Antal had been alive in the years before she met him. Sometimes she’d lose her temper with him but not for long and then she’d glow with happiness, a radiance she never lost because at last she had an object for her passion. Antal knew that if his life were at stake, Lidia was willing to kill for him, or, even while trembling with fear, would offer up her own life for his sake. He had never known anything like Lidia’s love, a love so vulnerable it had no self-defence mechanism, and he responded to her devotion just as unconditionally, just as innocently.

  In the first few weeks of their relationship, after she was given the painting of the mill and following Iza’s attempt to offer her money, it was like trying to penetrate a layer of disciplined reserve and to overcome her shyness. But when the real Lidia emerged with her background in poor villages like Gyüd and Csordarét, with the kind of intense, all-pervading passion that he loved, he felt like someone in a foreign country who was finally being addressed in his own language. He answered her call immediately, body and soul.

  The engagement party was held in the house. Women whooped when Antal produced two rings and placed them on the sideboard. Although everyone had known that, once the relationship between Iza and Antal had been established, the pair were bound to get married, no one had the least idea of the developing relationship between doctor and nurse. Antal was always going out with someone. So this time it’s Lidia, they thought. As he was opening the champagne it occurred to him how little the previous owners of the house would have been bothered by this wild behaviour; Vince would have loved the dancing and cheering, and would happily have gone round the guests offering them his home-made walnut brandy, while mama would have been overjoyed to see so many people in the house, just as it used to be in Aunt Emma’s day when she was still a girl with a mass of hair, young and full of blushes.

  Iza would have been the only one to think it all – the engagement itself, the exchange of rings and so on – a waste of time, a lot of fuss about nothing. That night he hardly left Lidia’s side and felt closer to her than ever. When the party was in full swing, when everyone was drinking and Sanyi Vári took out his guitar and sang the words of ‘There’s a Small House by the Mighty Danube’ to a different tune, he took a walk in the garden with her. The house, the only real home he had ever known, was being given new life, not at Iza’s instigation this time but at his own, the revived house being the fruit of his own labours, the product of nights mulling over a thousand details. He desired a house, this particular house complete with Vince’s cherrywood walking stick and Captain who was hiding from the guests in the wood store, wheezing asthmatically as he always did when he felt hurt. Lidia was walking silently beside him letting him collect his thoughts. Iza was a soldier by comparison, a comrade who had marched along with him a while. It was not the same with Lidia. As soon as he began to love her he realised she would never walk either beside or behind him: Lidia was, in essence, part of him, was him, not as the result of some agreement but because they moved instinctively together.

  Now he was preparing things. He had always liked this kind of mindless activity, opening tins, laying the table, doing this and that, the kind of things Iza dismissed but which were the joys of everyday living for him, something that assured him he had food to eat and that what he was eating was something he had himself bought, not what others gave him. He opened a drawer or two, then pushed them shut again. He never left the washing-up to Gica thinking it would be a shame when he had hot water on tap. It had long been his dream to have a home with a made-up bed and a table with a tablecloth on it, and when he entered on his internship he would often plan his house, should he ever acquire one, in great detail. Antal had been so poor he had only two ways of reacting to his early poverty: he could forget any dreams from those days and get on with life or bring those dreams to pass as thoroughly as he could. When he got engaged to Iza he felt that Vince’s house was everything he was looking for. He was deliriously happy, almost lost for words when the old woman handed him the keys.

  Back in spring when he first told Iza that he would like to buy the house, he noticed a gently mocking smile hovering about her lips. It was as if she were saying: I don’t want to spoil your mood. No doubt you enjoy paying a mortgage and there is probably something wonderful about the fact that the first real house you actually lived in now turns out to be yours to keep with no strings attached, and of course you will be pleased you won’t have to whisper when talking or keep your voice down while making love in your room so the old folk shouldn’t hear anything. Iza’s self-confidence was such that he sometimes felt warm clothes and heated rooms were wasted on him, that her spirit and willpower were sufficient. She was his defence, his shelter from cold weather. Normal ideas of polite behaviour were made for people weaker than she was. Antal was always sincerely happy to see her succeed.

  Dorozs, the place where he was born, was an insignificant village. He was born close to the hot springs, in a sweaty hovel smelling of sulphur. Antal had no memory of his mother who had simply disappeared at some stage. ‘She’s gone up to town,’ ventured his grandmother with no sense of certainty. Later, once he was grown up, Antal had some ideas about why she would have gone to town, to meet what fate, other girls from the village having met a similar fate.

  He did know his father though, in fact he saw him die. Like most men in Dorozs he went round town in one of Dániel Bérczes’s carts, but he wasn’t a carter, he was what the villagers called a kupás, or tankardman, someone who escorted the cart loaded with hot water, measured the desired quantity into a tankard and delivered it to the carter’s clients. Dániel Bérczes rented the spring from the village council and had a hundred and fifty water carts to cover the locality. It took a lot of skill and courage letting the water out: the water was boiling hot and it did you no good just being near it, but the really dangerous task was to pull out the spigot and to stuff it back in again, then to carry the water to bathhouses or people’s tubs without spilling any. Bérczes took no care of his carts and one or two were rickety, starting to rot. Antal’s father died one day when, before setting off, he squatted under the cart to check the tap and the bottom of the cart split open, drenching him in boiling water. They carried him home where, strangely enough, he said nothing, but screamed obscenities for two hours before he died.

  Antal’s grandparents had too many problems of their own, so couldn’t afford to spend days weeping and mourning, but sat up till dawn discussing how they might turn the tragedy to their advantage. Bérczes’s lawyer forestalled them by paying for the funeral and a little extra, persuading the elderly couple not to make a fuss because it would only anger Bérczes, while this way he was well disposed and willing to address their interests. Antal’s grandfather had already called on Bérczes that spring to enquire about a post as a park-keeper but wasn’t taken on; now he received a message that he could start immediately and that there was a job at the hot spring for the child too. Antal carried mud into the mudbath but they didn’t let him into the bathing area proper because there were a couple of cabins close by the spring. Even then the eight-year-old boy knew that it wasn’t because he was a child or because it was a more complicated business standing guard over property than opening a cabin door. It was because they thought he might steal, because a very poor person is unfit to do jobs requiring security, because anyone who rents a cabin rather than spends time squatting on the muddy slopes of a spring must have valuables worth removing and therefore stealing. The old man was park-keeper, the child the mud carrier, both being paid positions, a situation envied by more than one water-bearing family in the Dorozs community.

  T
he story of Antal’s father eventually came to the notice of a left-wing newspaper in the capital and the matter was even discussed in parliament. Bérczes’s lawyer turned up again and this time brought a journalist with him, one on a government-supporting paper. He took statements from the old couple and frightened them so much by noting down their stuttering attempts to speak that they left everything to the lawyer, who then reminded them that Dániel Bérczes was not only looking after the aged parents of the unfortunate victim: since the tankardman’s son appeared to be quite intelligent he was also willing to pay for the boy’s education and he could attend the famous grammar school in the nearby city as a boarder.

  His grandfather listened and would have preferred some ready cash, while his grandmother just wept, though she tended to weep at anything. She was always frightened something bad would happen and indeed, there was reason enough to fear. She didn’t know what it was but behind the timidity and despair there was something she couldn’t name, a tremor no more tangible or defined than the shadow on the ground of a bird in flight. Antal didn’t want to go. He screamed and protested, being only too happy as a lark, but the tears dried up in his grandmother’s eyes: it was as if a thought had travelled a very long way to flash through her mind and she was the only one privileged to think it. She did something she had never done: she spoke before her husband had a chance to and said that the head of the household could remain as park-keeper and that they did in fact want to send the boy to school, so there was no need to make any complaint against Mr Bérczes, nor did they want anything else of him.

  Antal kicked and carried on kicking when they deposited him in the cart. Bérczes’s lawyer drove him into town, though he had to stop twice because the boy leapt off and, like a puppy, made for home. There was no package to accompany him because they didn’t have anything apart from a certificate from his school to say he had done well in his four classes, a certificate that consisted of the teacher at Dorozs reflecting on Antal’s none too visible virtues, since he could barely read or write and had none of the basic school requirements because he attended school for only a couple of weeks in late autumn and late spring, which was when he could afford the time and the shoes. The note omitted to mention Antal’s minimal attendance because if the teacher had done so he would have been in trouble with the authorities.