Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabo

  The institution in which he became a boarder was a five-hundred-year-old Church school to whose governors Dániel Bérczes agreed to supply a vast amount of hot water in lieu of Antal’s fees. In the first two years his teachers thought it a poor bargain because the boy knew next to nothing, was stubborn, rude, got into fights and was nothing like the idyllic image of the gentle, shy peasant lad he should have turned out to be. He hated study and would sneak out through the back door and wander around town – and whenever he saw one of Bérczes’s carts entering the great arched gate with its statues of early Church fathers, Transylvanian princes and paintings of long-dead illustrious bishops, he burst into a stream of foul language that surprised even him, since the boarding school was a veritable paradise compared with Dorozs, and he had put on some weight and grown strong on account of those carts and that steaming water.

  Antal spent the first two years of school just making up for what he had missed, but he did grow to like learning. He still waited each day for the Dorozs cart to arrive so he could swear at it, but he wasn’t swearing at the driver or the tankardman, both of whom he greeted with greater respect than he did the masters at school. His classmates never laughed at him for this. Antal had great respect among them because he was an orphan. He swore and fought, responding neither to kindness nor to punishment, which was unexpected in a student whose fees were being paid not in money but in water and whose father had died in such dreadful circumstances. No other half-orphaned pupil could compete with him.

  Bérczes took no interest in the child and never sent him a penny. Though the boy was provided with bed, board and tuition he remained alone in the building at Christmas and Easter. The servants all liked him because he was so bored he was ready to help them without being asked and because, when he was alone and the school did not want to keep the heating on just for him, he’d go down to the kitchen to sleep. In the summer holidays he’d hop on any cart that would take him home to Dorozs. At the end of the first year when he turned up with a dreadful report, dressed in the half-city, half-country-style clothes provided by the school, and glared at the strange dog lurking around the bathing area, his grandmother clapped her hands and wondered what to feed him since he had turned into a real giant on school meals. But he hadn’t become a gentleman; he immediately kicked off his shoes, changed his clothes and ran out to the mud in just his pants to carry on with his old job. He brought home whatever he earned and they were genuinely sorry to see him go away again.

  He was in his third year of school and aged thirteen when he really developed a taste for learning.

  By that time he had caught up with his classmates and, as it turned out, he had an iron will to work and a remarkably good mind. He wasn’t keen on literature, but geography and biology interested him, and he had a fondness for mathematics as well as for languages, which was unusual for the class; in fact, for anything that required logic. This sudden awakening of interest was part of a moment of enlightenment. It was as if a dark curtain had been rent open and he saw his mother, whose face he could barely remember, his father and grandparents, and Dániel Bérczes with his carts, just as they were in life, or might have been. Whenever the pre-ordered water carts from Dorozs arrived during the school’s quiet hour he asked to be allowed to help with the tankard work. It was a dangerous occupation and the young teacher who gave him permission had no idea of the risk involved, thinking it was merely a strange game. Antal’s entire life had centred on the hot spring, and the tankardman and driver both continued to believe that the little boy was rushing downstairs to meet them because the water was calling him, and that he would soon return to pick up where his father had left off – for why should he want to do anything else? Bérczes would surely get bored with his remarkable philanthropy and return the boy to the low station from which he had raised him, so it wouldn’t do him any harm to get used to it now, since it was what he would do till his dying day.

  A year later he asked for an appointment with the headmaster.

  The headmaster was astonished. It was he who called the students in to see him and it wasn’t his habit to grant them interviews just because they suddenly thought of something. But he knew Antal very well: collegues talked of him with a certain quiet irony at first but he had gained a growing respect. Besides, the school had never had a pupil who paid his fees in water and many of the resident staff were able to relieve their rheumatic limbs because he was there.

  The head examined Antal as he entered and saw a thickset fourteen-year-old peasant boy of distinctly protestant look wearing ill-fitting clothes made of cheap but decent material.

  Antal Antal, fourth-year student, was requesting that the board of the gimnázium give him the opportunity to continue his education by letting him pay his fees either by teaching younger students or through working as a member of the in-school service staff, rather than by having Dániel Bérczes pay them in lieu of a supply of hot spring water.

  The head was a classicist, a passionate researcher into antiquity, someone who adored the heroic cast of mind and the high ideal of manliness symbolised by the classical world. His office did not oblige him to teach but out of sheer passion for the subject he taught an annual class or two and solemnly believed that the great figures of Athens and Rome continued to provide the perfect model for the younger generation. Antal was excellent at Latin, his all-consuming mind and his ever readiness to engage in analytical thought helping him to overcome any difficulties in learning the language. ‘A sterling product of our education,’ the headmaster thought. The headmaster saw the Capitol rise before him, the seven hills, and the never seen yet a thousand times imagined face of Romulus. Meanwhile the boy was seeing the body of his father with shredded muscles hanging off his arm. The name Dorozs, the place of hot springs, was fundamentally non-Latin but had its origins in the languages of the Danube basin, languages the headmaster couldn’t identify. Antal had no idea why the headmaster seemed to be moved, but he felt his request was being warmly received and that made him happy.

  The head thought of the director of the newly opened school in the next street and felt a certain pity for him that he could have no such experience. He stood up, patted the round head before him, quoted something from Horace and promised to have a word with Mr Bérczes, and that he would argue the boy’s case before the board of governors. The child clicked his heels as his teachers had taught him. The headmaster felt moved as Antal left: the boy was a miniature civis Romanus.

  As soon as he was outside the door Antal said something truly terrible about Mr Bérczes, the kind of thing his father was screaming on his deathbed, then leaned against the iron railings that ran alongside the wooden steps in exactly the same way as they had done a good century and a half ago when the school was first rebuilt after the fire, and kissed it as though it were a living creature with a mouth.

  The head walked up and down his room, still in a state of high emotion, vowing to look after Antal’s interests as long as he himself was alive. The head misunderstood the boy in regarding him purely as the product of his liberal but highly puritan education, or indeed as the embodiment of his own classical ideals with the result that when he died, during Antal’s university years, he died not quite knowing who it was he had been teaching.

  Bérczes was absolutely delighted not to have to think about Antal any more; the tankardman’s accident had long been forgotten in Budapest and, being a businessman, he preferred to sell his water for a price. The gimnázium board was happy to see Antal through as many scholarships as necessary to top up his paid work. ‘Sub pondere crescit palma,’ thought the head, who had been referred to as Cato ever since his student days at the school, as he watched the boy set out for his daily job, showing his special exeat at the door. Antal made a great impression on all his classmates, he hung on to his free tuition right through to matriculation while in receipt of a regular supply of underwear from the Women’s Voluntary Corps. He no longer went home for the summer, the head assigning him to teach a class
of failing students from the countryside, the sons of landowners and village registrars, so that when he arrived home in autumn he looked tanned and strong, every student of his having passed the repeat examinations. Mothers didn’t like him because when one of his students didn’t want to learn and would not be persuaded he would beat the boy, beating him without anger, with all the detachment of a doctor administering nasty medicine for the greater good of the patient.

  He could never afford books: they lay beyond the limits of his working salary. Newspapers, on the other hand, were affordable. Papers cost a few farthings and one could learn a great deal from them, particularly about politics. The head walked into the dormitory one bright day just as he was lost in the news, reading the foreign correspondent’s report with great care.

  The head didn’t like his students reading newspapers.

  His school was not of the old hidebound kind but a relatively free-thinking institution whose broad views sometimes featured too prominently, as a result of which it received far less state support than it might have done had it been less liberal. At one time it had suffered considerable trouble with the authorities and the headmaster’s immediate predecessor had been sacked in 1920. This head was more cautious in his approach to progress and was terrified that this boy, whom he had liked so much, might be taking the first steps down a dangerous road.

  Antal defended his hunger for knowledge and choice of reading with perfectly reasonable arguments and wouldn’t relent even when the head extended to him the same rights in using materials from the great and famous library as the masters enjoyed. Antal replied that the great library was chiefly for classical literature and he’d also like to read living authors writing about modern things.

  He’s young, of course, thought Cato, only sixteen. Maybe he wants to read some of those contemporary love poems, verses so obscure that no one can understand them, the writers themselves being snotty brats, people who read with their nerves rather than their brains. But the boy wants his own library and that is a worthy ambition. He thought of the infinitely many scrolls of Cicero at the bottom of the scrinium and of Cicero’s freedman, Tiro. Yes, it was a fine ambition and a pity to stand in the boy’s way. The Mitasi lad is already chasing skirt and smoking cigarettes. This one wants books, so let him have the books. What time did Vince Szőcs tend to call in?

  He knew the judge, they had been fellow students in this very school, it was just that Szőcs had studied law afterwards whereas he trained as a teacher. Szőcs was a quiet little chap, someone who was not too keen on Latin but did well enough on Roman Law at university. It was, again, one of the teachers who had taken him under his wing, the boy being an orphan. Once he qualified he became a clerk at court while the head started as an assistant master. One day, around Christmas, he appeared at school, swinging his walking stick, running up the wooden stairs, having returned because he liked the school, even the smell of it. From then on, until he was dismissed from his position, he always tried to drop in when passing, or to call on the head at the boarding house so he could take a look around. He was a loyal son of the school, always willing to donate something, a little shyly, whenever an unusually gifted student needed help. He said he didn’t have a father himself and that others had brought him up, and that though he couldn’t afford very much he would like to give a little something every Christmas as a present for the kind of penniless child he used to be. There was always an envelope in his hand that he would leave on the table before rushing off. Then the round little man would be gone before he could be called back.

  So he appeared every Christmas, nor was it a negligible sum he brought with him. He liked to be told whom the money went to and was happy when the child was pointed out through the window, but would bolt if they wanted to introduce the child to him. When, in 1923, the head learned that Vince had been dismissed from his job, he thought he’d never see him again, but he appeared at Christmas as usual, in the evening this time, as if he didn’t want to be seen by day, thinner, somehow older and more mature, as if it were only now that he had attained to proper manhood. He hadn’t really seemed an adult before, not quite, maybe because he was generous in a way that didn’t quite befit a grown man. The head was doubly pleased to see him this time because he now knew that Vince Szőcs was a man of principle, that the word of the law was sacred to him and that his sense of justice was not to be trifled with. He only regretted not having visited Szőcs when the man was first put on a pension; he would surely have appreciated it.

  Szőcs didn’t stay long and the sum was indeed trivial compared with what he used to bring. He apologised and said the money would be enough only for one or two books but there must be some students who loved reading. Then he immediately stood to leave. He was wearing a tattered coat and the headmaster felt he shouldn’t have accepted money from him. But he did accept it and continued to do so each year. After the introduction of the pengő as currency in 1927, it was always the sum of twelve pengő, neither more nor less.

  When the judge’s envelope appeared as usual in 1933, the head called Antal. The boy didn’t want to accept any money, not even when it was explained to him that it was for books alone, the kind of books that might form the basis of a developing personal library. Antal replied that he could only accept money he had worked for.

  The head looked at him with increased respect and pointed through the window. The boy followed the direction of his finger to a grey little man in a shabby coat carefully skirting the mounds behind the column dedicated to the Dutch benefactor. ‘That’s the man who donated the money. That man there by the memorial column was a village boy like you who paid no fees because the village supported him,’ said the headmaster. ‘Ever since he earned a salary he has given something to the school. In 1923 they sacked him, so now he can afford only enough to pay for a few books.’

  ‘They sacked him?’ asked the boy.

  The tone of the comment was indifferent, apparently unconcerned. The question didn’t sound much like a question, it was simply the repetition of a phrase as if he thought it would be discourteous to doubt the fact.

  ‘He used to be a county judge,’ said the headmaster and offered the boy the envelope again. It would be awful if the boy thought Szőcs was a thief or a murderer and that the school was willing to accept gifts from criminals. ‘They say it was on account of some particular judgment he made when there was a harvesters’ strike in the county,’ he added.

  Antal Antal bowed and said he would be happy to accept the gift. The head gazed tenderly after him, as tenderly as if the boy were his own son. It was only after he had left, closing the door quietly behind him as he had been taught, that the head felt some unease, though he would have laughed off any suggestion that he had been scared by a look in Antal’s eyes, a passionate look so different from the neutral expression normally worn by that adolescent face, which was only just now developing a bone structure. It was a gleam that went out as if by command, suddenly, according to some order emanating from deep inside him, from a place so deep a man might wonder whether the gleam had really been there or not.

  2

  ANTAL MATRICULATED, BUT only with a Merit, because his result in Hungarian Literature let him down; he never could write a literary essay. The organisation of material into a three-part format bored him and he had absolutely no interest in the nineteenth-century epic’s treatment of ancient national religions. Nevertheless the president of the exam board, one Professor Dekker – it being part of the school’s tradition to invite previously outstanding students to be president of the exam board – read everybody’s papers with a childlike intensity and picked out Antal’s as the only one to give a complete picture of the literary treatment of ancient national religions, albeit in the form of an index or academic bibliography. In the oral part of the exam he noted the student’s carefully measured, rather stiff manner of speaking, his sure grasp of every scientifically verifiable detail of the subject, and his reserved but polite reluctance either to ente
r into sentimental explanations or to paint vivid word pictures of historical tableaux. Antal hardly looked at him, having been absorbed by the preparation required and being preoccupied by other issues such as whether he would be admitted to the university, how much reduction he might expect in his student fees and whether Cato would succeed in securing him some much sought after university accommodation. It was a nice surprise to him, then, that after the results had been announced he was told that the president of the exam board had promised to support him. Dekker had heard the story of the tankard boy from the headmaster and also happened to be dean of the university that year, so when Antal appeared before him at the ceremonial welcome to new students, after the usual handshake he asked the boy to remain behind.

  ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t get involved in politics,’ said Dekker, examining his hands. He had unusually short fingers. They weren’t doctor’s hands, more the hands of a wrestler.

  Antal looked him in the eye, then immediately looked away. Antal had a passionate interest in politics and knew nothing about Dekker yet.

  ‘Study and think,’ Dekker continued. ‘That’s not an order, it’s just a personal plea.’

  Back at school, boarders were always discussing world affairs, including the subject of the local socialist youth movement. Antal thought the professor meant that he should not get involved in left-wing politics, so he simply stood there and looked at him without saying yes or no. Dekker told him he could go.