Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabo

  It didn’t take Antal long to orientate himself. In October, when he was asked to join the fascist student movement, he declined, saying he had too much to do, as most certainly he did: he had to look after himself now and couldn’t rely on cheap sales clothes or college charity. Dorozs was slipping away into the past: his grandparents were no longer alive and he didn’t have to support them, but the spartan mentality was his own and had little to do with having or not having a family to consider. Antal liked responsibility and though his relationship with his grandparents was functional rather than emotional, he still missed having a proper family.

  Dekker’s words at the enrolment ceremony made full sense to him in December when he stopped to allow the dean to pass him at a corner, raising his soft hat to him. They were in the university building, Dekker in his official garments, plenis coloribus, hastening to a meeting because, being head of every organisation within the university, he was obliged to attend such things. He saluted back by putting two fingers to the golden ribbon of his professorial cap and stopped. The corridor was lined with palms, the glass roof white with snow. Only the wall lights were on and the marble panelling glowed pale as butter. They could hear the shuffling in the great ceremonial hall beneath. They were alone.

  ‘You’re in everyday clothes,’ Dekker remarked, looking at his hat. ‘Are you not coming?’

  He gazed in polite indifference at the professor’s glittering outfit. ‘I’m not a member of the movement,’ he answered.

  Dekker removed his cap and ran his fingers through his dense unruly hair. ‘I’m pleased you listened to me,’ he said and set off towards the stairs.

  Dekker could never walk at an even pace, he either sauntered or rushed. At that point he was rushing. Antal watched him and felt he liked him. Later, in 1945, when Antal was the president of the committee examining Dekker’s papers and a member argued that Dekker should not remain in his professorial chair, and that his activities before the war should count against him, Antal did not cut the man off but, once he was finished, revealed Dekker’s work behind the scenes, and how golden ribbons and dominus caps were a cover for his faultless organising ability, his intelligent treatment of the fascist movement and his brilliant acts of clinical sabotage when the town was evacuated. Dekker for his part cursed softly and dismissed it all as nonsense. He hated being praised.

  Antal’s love life was very simple. Suddenly, what had been very difficult at boarding school became very easy in the medical faculty. He had great fun with provincial female medics who, in 1935, the year Antal entered university, were still a little drunk on their own courage in taking up such a daring career rather than spending their time in quiet university libraries and were all too keen to prove how unrepressed they were. They wanted to show that nothing about nature and the body scared them.

  Antal took from them what they were willing to offer and responded with whatever courtesy seemed due; he danced with them, he helped them in class discussions or when they were in trouble, and patiently heard them through whenever they bawled their eyes out or complained. The university was located among centuries-old oaks and was comprised of four faculties, and the students’ rooms were mixed up, not organised by faculty. Antal got on with all his room-mates but chose his friends carefully. The leaders of the youth movement left him alone. Dekker’s patronage protected him from the loudmouths and his excellent marks, combined with his fierce independence, excused him from taking part in fascist activities. On one occasion when he was accused of something, the leader of the movement spoke in his defence, asking how in heaven’s name could he be a member and take a full part in it when he was earning his living by teaching Jewish children, and receiving his fees from all those rich lawyers and doctors who wouldn’t hire him if he were member of a well-known anti-Semitic organisation. Antal’s taste and judgement were formed in his boyhood. He and his friends watched the Hungary of the Thirties and the rise to power of Hitler like circus lions who knew they’d have to jump through the flaming hoops before long, and that they’d need all their strength for the moment. At the funeral of his old headmaster he sang the hymns of mourning along with the rest, and tears ran down his cheeks as he stood by the bier and saw for the last time the simple champion of Roman virtues who felt more at home in the ancient world than among the children of his contemporaries.

  It was at this funeral he met Vince Szőcs.

  He recognised him immediately, though he looked thinner and more exhausted than he had that winter when he was shuffling in ordinary shoes past the column with its statue of the Dutch donor. He stood at the very back, more outside the funeral hall than in, as if he feared that his appearance might cast a bad light on his late friend, and once the procession started took care to walk at the back of that too, constantly looking round as if ready to scuttle off among the graves at the first awkward moment. No one took any notice of him and when anyone did his face betrayed nothing except the obligatory normal signs of mourning.

  Szőcs was not alone; he was accompanied by a girl of unusual slenderness. She was taller than him and Antal couldn’t work out her age. She was too thin, her waist was far too long, her legs were like the legs of a thirteen-year-old as were her clothes, her gloves far too big so they slopped about on her hands as if they had been borrowed, and her black handbag was creased. Her brow, her entire face, but most particularly her look threw him into confusion: it was the face of a young soldier on sentry duty, it was how she moved beside Vince, unblinking, her gaze moving around the mourners. She moved as though she were escorting a seriously ill patient, watching the time and keeping an eye on her surroundings, the road and the place generally, worried in case the air was too chill for someone who had hardly recovered. Later, when he tried to conjure Iza’s face it was this young, timeless face he kept recalling, that military look, Iza as the line of defence, Iza with the floppy gloves and unusually white lips, walking side by side with Vince.

  Antal was with Dekker who, by this time – in view of Antal having reached the final year of qualification – had started addressing him as te, the familiar form of you. It was clear by now that he wanted to train him up as his assistant and they had various passionate conversations about politics. Dekker didn’t look up but stared at the ground, finding the whole affair boring and painful, his view being that death was a purely personal matter and that any ritual associated with it was a form of superstition meant to make people feel better, a sort of communal sport. Nevertheless he came along because he liked the old Calvinist citizen of Rome and because they were once classmates who went to the same inns and bawled the same drinking songs. He trod through the autumnal slush muttering to himself: why didn’t they simply do as old Cato might have wished and burn him on a pyre according to Roman custom in Donor’s Square where a toga-clad histrion wearing a Calvin mask might imitate his familiar gestures in the authentic way? It was Antal, not the professor, who noticed that Vince Szőcs wanted to speak to him.

  It was impossible not to notice. From the moment his shy glance fell on Dekker it had not shifted. Szőcs was whispering something to his daughter who had been standing straight enough before but now stood even straighter. She was like a tall exotic flower growing before his eyes. Antal slowed until they were almost beside them and Dekker slowed his own steps to please him. It wasn’t proper to say anything and, fortunately, there was no need to since the professor finally noticed the judge and greeted him warmly. A look of uncertain pleasure, a kind of hope, flashed across Szőcs’s face. The girl took an appraising look at the professor, the way one looks at goods in a shop: what was he worth?

  Antal rarely felt obliged to take any particular action but, when he did, he followed his instincts. It had been just this kind of instinct that prompted him to knock on Cato’s study in childhood and to offer his own work rather than Bérczes’s deal as the basis of his scholarship. It was the same instinct that led him to lowering his defences in the third year of his studies when Professor Dekker brewed him coffee
in his office for the first time, and he understood what the professor expected of him and what kind of opinions he actually held. Now the same voice told him to go and join the Szőcses. The girl, that strange girl with the long eyes and the bearing of a junior cadet, was clearly the judge’s daughter, the judge who, year after year, gave him twelve pengő to spend on books. Surely Cato must have told Szőcs who was getting those books?

  Dekker stopped him. He said goodbye to Antal, telling him they’d meet at the clinic, because he had something to discuss with a friend. He stepped back and took Vince Szőcs by the arm. He never even looked at the girl. The minister had started on his funeral song. Dekker took no notice whatsoever but was explaining something to the judge whose face went ever redder as he listened and the sudden change of expression conjured in Antal a sense of what his face might have been like in happier, more confident days. Antal imagined him in his youth, with a rakish smile, right here in the same place when the cemetery was just a wood, at a picnic perhaps, lying under the oak, swigging from a flask and passing it on to Cato, laughing, red in the face, his expression full of hope.

  The headmaster’s burial took place without either the judge or Dekker noticing it. The girl turned her head towards the grave but did not join in the prayers, her face stiff as a mask, as if she and the priest were citizens of different countries, but she didn’t want to insult the priest who, in her eyes, was a diplomat representing a different political system with which she did not agree but which she felt obliged to respect even while maintaining her own opinions. Dekker and Szőcs continued talking together after the burial, discussing something near a crypt, a little apart from the others. It wasn’t a situation on which he could intrude and be introduced to the girl.

  Antal returned to the university in a temper and bolted down his food in the canteen. He wasn’t due to give private coaching till the afternoon so he hung around the noticeboard on the mezzanine. It always amused him that here they were in the middle of the semester and all his friends received letters but no one ever wrote to him. He glanced at the table of repeat examinations, the rector’s announcements and ran his eyes over the names of the incoming students. They had already accepted enough applicants to overfill the faculty, so the graduates would have to be sent out to territories recovered under the Second Treaty of Vienna: to Transylvania, to the Czechs, to the Serbian town of Nagykikinda or to the Ruthenians, as if people didn’t know that a posting like that would last only a couple of years until the territories passed to someone else again. There was a single name in the right-hand column of candidates not admitted, a rare event because it was extremely rare for someone who had got this far to be rejected. The faculty had turned down the application of Izabella Szőcs.

  He entirely failed to concentrate on what he was supposed to be teaching that afternoon. He knew it was Dekker’s habit to call in on his ward last thing at night to check over the most serious cases and he knew he could catch him at the main door. He was counting how many hours were left before he could see the professor and discover whether the connection between Izabella Szőcs, Vince Szőcs and the conversation at the funeral earlier in the day was what he thought it was. ‘You’re not alone, young soldier,’ thought Antal. ‘If you get here Dekker will support you and, believe it or not, I will too, not just for your father’s sake but for the strange look in your long eyes and for that extraordinary authority you seem to radiate, an authority not often found in young women.’

  Once Dekker arrived he told Antal everything without being asked, how the next day he would talk to the rector and tell him he wanted to accept the daughter of an old classmate of his, someone the institution was too scared to admit for fear she would be a bad influence. If her father is such an honest man, why does she need a diploma?

  They’ll admit her on the second round, said Dekker, and clinked his cup down next to the toy elephant. Dekker wouldn’t have a skull on his desk like some of the others and whenever he found one on someone else’s he would pick it up and sniff it as if he suspected it of being newly dead, giving the owner a few anxious minutes in the meantime. Antal knew that what he promised would be carried out: it was 1941, the country was now firmly involved in the war and people tended to shout a little louder but everyone was in awe of Dekker who wore his academic cap upside down on formal occasions and whenever the Germans won a major battle would go around singing ‘Another war, yet more disaster, down the chute and ever faster’, and when the rector took him up on this he would reply with a straight face, saying, ‘I was drunk.’ It was common knowledge that Dekker only drank milk or fruit juice if he could help it and that, when young, he had received a grant to study in Scandinavia where his friends got him used to such drinks rather than alcohol.

  Two weeks later he saw Iza coming up the steps with a very old, much battered briefcase under her arm. She was wearing the same short coat she had worn at the funeral. He sat in the finance office and waited for the girl to complete the forms and pay; there was no bursary of any kind for her. His heart ached for her when he saw her measure out the hundred and four pengő and the enrolment fee. Vince Szőcs had been forced into retirement, yet he brought twelve pengő each year as a book prize! What had they sold to afford this? Or maybe they were not eating or heating the house this month?

  When the girl stood up he followed and called to her in the corridor. ‘Hello, fresher!’ he said. ‘I am your official class mentor. Introduce yourself to your senior.’

  Iza looked him up and down but did not answer. She took a glance at the signs by the stairs and set off towards the medical wing. Antal went with her. Iza pretended she didn’t see him. It happened to be a break between lectures, the lecture hall doors were open and second-year students had just ended their theory session when Ulla, Ulla Deák, winked at Antal. Seeing the lechery in her sleepy eyes, a lechery based on memories of the previous summer, he was so cross he hardly acknowledged her. Iza simply carried on, glancing at the doors with the professors’ names on. She stopped in front of Dekker’s office.

  Antal was right behind her. Dekker hadn’t come in yet. He was expounding something in Room 26, the great hall, whose doors were still closed. Once he was in the swing of things Dekker took no notice of bells and carried on despite the noise of the corridor, too absorbed in his teaching.

  Iza knocked.

  Antal took Dekker’s key from his pocket. He was free to come and go, to tidy Dekker’s papers. He opened the door to Iza. ‘Do come in,’ he said.

  The girl did not step in but stared at the stone floor as if trying to decipher some secret message there. Antal closed the door again and stood beside her. Although there were only five centimetres between them so they were almost touching, Iza’s tense refusal to engage in conversation made it seem as if they were miles apart. Later, years after, even once Iza was no longer his wife, he knew this was the moment he fell in love with her and that he wanted to live with her.

  Dekker arrived at last. When he opened the door to the girl he invited Antal in too. Iza blinked and gave him a cold, formal nod but did not extend her hand.

  ‘Antal will be ready to help you in everything. Listen to his advice and learn from him. No need for thanks, just go to your lecture.’

  He lit a cigarette and addressed Antal through the smoke as they were leaving: ‘Look after her, young man.’

  Any other girl would have laughed but Iza’s face remained cold and hostile. There was nothing he could ask her, she was impossible to speak to.

  They walked past the girls’ room and Ulla’s face flashed by again as she looked through the open door. She noted Iza’s ill-fitting coat and the old briefcase, but she didn’t look happy. Ulla too had noticed Iza’s long eyes and bright lips, and marked the awkward, nervous way Antal was following her, desperately hoping for encouragement. The stone floor was loud under their heels, the halls were finally empty and the buffet was filling up. Antal knew the girl would have no money but he also knew it was pointless offering her a dr
ink since she wouldn’t accept it. The thought stung him terribly, yet he was proud of her.

  They had to stop by the great hall. The blue booklet with the first-year timetable was open in her hand: Iza was preparing for her first class with such calm assurance she might have been in her old school not at her first university lecture. There were only two minutes before the bell. Iza’s lip trembled. Now she would say goodbye and close the door behind her.

  ‘I know your father,’ said Antal.

  She turned to him. The blank face was gone. The soldier turned into a smiling girl.

  ‘For years he would bring me books at Christmas. Did you know?’

  The girl shook her head. He put his left hand to his throat as if not trusting himself to say the right thing, worried he might be talking about things of which it was wiser not to speak.

  ‘He gave twelve pengő to the school each year; and every year after year six the headmaster gave it to me. Did he not tell you?’

  The girl’s eyes told him he hadn’t.

  ‘One time he came I saw him. He was younger and more mobile then. He ran among the snow drifts on Donor’s Square as if he were afraid that someone would stop him and thank him. Are you still not talking to me?’

  The young soldier’s face softened a little, creasing like a child’s. ‘Every month he got three pengő pocket money from mama,’ she said. ‘One he gave to me, one he used to buy a newspaper on Sunday because he really liked reading the papers but I didn’t know what he did with the third. Was he saving it for you?’ She was using the te form to him now as naturally as if he had been her brother.

  ‘Let’s go to the cafeteria,’ said Antal.

  She’d only just enrolled and was already late on the course so it wouldn’t matter as long as she attended her first class at noon, he said. They could go to the cafeteria, have coffee, smoke a cigarette, even eat something, then go for a walk in the wood. As long as she attended the physics class from twelve till one that would be enough for today. He’d go with her, he thought. He’d go with her everywhere. He’d be the first to take her to the dissection room with its cadavers.