by Magda Szabo
Iza put her blue book into the briefcase and walked along with him as he suggested. She was tall, a touch taller than he was, and wore no hat – her hair was brown, brown as a schoolgirl’s, a child’s, without any hint of gold, like a Biedermeier painting.
They ate a slice of cake and Iza asked for sparkling water, sipping it with great pleasure as though it were fine wine. She refused a cigarette but was happy to accept a stick of chocolate and carried on chewing it when they went out to the university woods.
The wet weather of the funeral had been followed by a minor heatwave. The sky was blue and no breeze shook the dying leaves. It was mild weather: birches and firs looked hazy and uncertain between sturdy oaks. There were benches on the hill and a brook at the bottom of it, both artificial of course, on a bed of lowland sand. Iza sat on the railings of the little bridge dangling her legs, leaving her briefcase on the ground beside her. There were carp in the pond, plump brown carp, and she threw a few clods of earth at them.
‘I’ll come to visit you on Sunday,’ said Antal.
Iza said fine.
‘You won’t forget that Dekker said I was to look after you?’
‘No.’
Her skin and hair were gently scented with a little-girlish smell of soap.
‘Dekker is a good man. Listen to him. About everything.’
The older ones would tease her, call her fresher and give her every kind of nickname, he thought. He was more concerned for her than he had ever been for himself. How to look after her? What could he do for her? How to shield her from all the likely dangers? It would be awful if some fascist in the youth movement were to pin a crane feather in her hair and declaim how Hungary was just about to win the war and reclaim all the territories lost in 1919, from the Carpathians through to the Adriatic. He took the hand with the chocolate in it. She didn’t mind.
‘Don’t get too involved with politics.’
The girl immediately vanished; it was the young soldier who stared back. The chocolate in its silver foil hovered between them in the air. She didn’t eat any more but snatched her wrist from Antal’s grasp and threw the chocolate to the fish in the pond. She leapt off the bridge railings, picked up her briefcase and set off for the main building. She didn’t say a word until they reached the edge of the wood, then stopped and looked at him again and spoke very clearly as if she wanted to emphasise every word to him. ‘Politics will be my life as long as I live,’ she said.
He knew it was crazy but at that moment he was sure he would marry her.
3
HE MARRIED HER on a sparkling wind-blown day in the autumn of 1948. There was something deeply moving in being fully aware of the character of the girl he was marrying, that, in the seven years he had known her, he had seen her study, pass exams and move among the sick and dying. He had danced with her and had provided her with leaflets that informed people of the true state of the war, leaflets that she would slip between notices advertising canaries or reliable guard dogs. It was good to know that he wasn’t marrying her just because he had fallen blindly in love with her or because he physically desired her, but because they were intellectually matched, because Iza was a person you could respect, someone from whom you could learn.
And of course it was good that he could marry her at last without any further complications.
He did in fact feel a fierce physical desire for her right from the start and tried to tame the desire so it might become a less passionate, more brotherly, protective relationship, which shouldn’t have been too difficult since her waist was so thin and her limbs so childlike he felt ashamed even to have noticed that adolescent body. But once he got over that he was surprised how passionately Iza responded to his kisses and how womanly her body became once she was in his arms. He was never in any doubt that he would marry her as soon as he could, but he also knew that he wanted to live with her till then. Iza was not Ulla. He couldn’t imagine taking her down into the club room and making love to her on the billiard table or under a tree in the wood.
It was hard not having a home. They lost weight and felt on edge. Dekker’s office, where the girl often called to see the professor, offered a solution. Not that Dekker noticed. He had long been a widower; his personal life had more or less finished with the sudden death of his young wife and he devoted himself entirely to his work, to saving his students from the pointless war and to ensuring that as many young people as possible could see the situation of the country for what it was. Dekker would turn up at the clinic at the most impossible hours and was to be found in his office only after he had finished teaching. He never noticed what went on there and he thought of his two young protégés merely in terms of their respective specialisations: Antal, once he was qualified, became his assistant and Dekker regarded him as a highly promising surgeon; as for the girl, she was clearly interested in rheumatological therapy.
When he saw them kissing by the statue of the local poet he was genuinely happy that matters had taken this turn and that he could give Iza, now in her last year, an appropriate wedding present; he had already taken steps to ensure the girl’s position and once the wedding day arrived she had a post at the clinic too. He was their witness and wanted to take them for a meal after the register office, but Antal said they couldn’t deprive the old couple of their proud day, so they all dined at home. Vince, now rehabilitated, was the head of the house and seemed to have grown half a head taller. He was wearing his new blue suit, offering them drinks, while the old woman, now laughing, now crying, rushed around in a tizzy. Dekker left immediately after the meal saying he didn’t want to see them at the clinic for at least a week.
It was most unusual, almost incomprehensible to others that, now they finally had some money and when the doctors’ trade union had offered them rooms in one of its holiday flats in the mountains, they should turn down the offer. Iza declared that honeymoons were a stupid bourgeois tradition and Antal echoed her saying they’d be stupid to go away now when, for the first time, he had a proper father and mother.
The old woman shook her head and didn’t dare say that she was a little embarrassed to be with them now. The physical aspect of the relationship to be conducted under their roof made her nervous. Vince thought of Pest and his own inordinate pride on knowing his way around the streets while his wife pottered along next to him, giggling and confused; how satisfying to feel expert and knowledgeable about the world, to point out the famous sights, to take his wife’s arm solicitously at crossroads and to escort her to the other side. He would have liked Antal to take Iza away somewhere, to lead her to places, to direct her attention to things she might not otherwise notice, but he soon lost confidence in the idea. Iza wasn’t the kind of person who could be led anywhere and was certain to know her way around Pest better than Antal. She was unusually happy and beautiful on the day of the wedding, her face radiant with love and satisfied ambition. Vince watched her as she moved about the room, brought in something or took something out; he admired the certainty of her movements, the way she sparkled with good cheer, a cheer that hung around her like some portable effulgence wherever she went. She had never been shy: she was a young woman fully confident in her own being. Vince laughed at himself. No use expecting her to be naive; young people who had lived through the Second World War would not be fazed by something as ordinary as a wedding – nor, if by some chance they were born female, would they blush just because they were marrying a man. He couldn’t understand his own confused state of feelings but would have liked Iza, on this special day, to look just a little overcome.
Later, on just another such bright, blowy morning when the three of them were left alone, Antal took the two suitcases that contained all his belongings and Iza closed the door behind him, hanging up the now unnecessary fourth set of keys on the hook beside the three others, and went about her business with the same straight face though he would have preferred to see her crying. But Iza did not cry. She put on an apron, tied back her hair and set to tidying, rearranging
the room that used to be theirs, carefully wiping the wardrobe that had been Antal’s just a few moments before. Vince followed her, carrying the dustpan behind her just so he could be with her. Right now he was watching her squatting down, rolling up the rug at the foot of the bed. Vince was shorter than Iza and felt unnatural looking down on his daughter as though she were a child now. He simply felt a peculiar, quite inexplicable desire to see tears in her eyes again.
As a little girl Iza was just like any other, that is insofar as he remembered the girls from his own childhood: she laughed when she had cause to, she cried when she took a fall, when she broke a cup and when she was afraid. What had happened to that little girl? Of course, it was much nicer for everyone that there were no scenes at Antal’s departure and that the atmosphere in the house had hardly changed or that, at most, it had cooled a little, as if someone had left the windows open when airing the room so the walls and furniture felt the winter chill wafting in. But Vince would have given years of his life – even those precious much-loved years following his rehabilitation – to see Iza in tears as she rolled up the rug. Antal was not short of tears when he left, weeping, kissing their hands and faces. His shoulders sagged as he was carrying his cases: they seemed burdened with a greater weight. His lips trembled and he was gulping as he looked back at Iza. If the divorce had been Iza’s idea Vince might have understood their contrary behaviour, but it was Antal who was filing for divorce, Iza had merely agreed to it.
*
Antal soon realised he was born for domesticity and that he would prefer to live with Iza in a proper family home rather than continue in their previous romantic circumstances. He felt his attachment to Iza would grow ever deeper once they conducted their lives in a regular manner and was therefore more than happy to receive her family in lieu of a wedding gift. He could talk about a great many things with his fellow boarders and about practically everything with his closest friends, but it was only with Iza that he could talk about Dorozs.
Dorozs was a secret, a project so important he couldn’t set about it soon enough. Antal was preparing himself to meet Dániel Bérczes and to discuss the hot springs where he was born. The idea had never been to surprise old man Bérczes in his garden and stick a knife in him, even to start belated proceedings against him. Bérczes, if he thought of him at all, was just the symbol of an unsustainable form of being, a living mechanism for transporting hot spa water by horse-drawn wagon rather than by proper engineering. And yet the idea that the spring might be confiscated from Bérczes and that the strength and intelligence of his servants might be better employed, to a more humane end, was quite dizzying to him. If they could not bring the dead to life or compensate them for those terrible years of their lives, at least the future of Dorozs might be ensured. He knew his own passion would not be enough to see him through the campaign to save his village. Now that he could discuss it with his new wife he was happy beyond measure.
Once a week Iza went with him to Dorozs and looked up those of Antal’s acquaintance who were still living. She explored every nook and cranny of the bathhouse and took samples of the water to analyse in town. As concerns the tankardmen, it was mostly their sons doing the work now. Men didn’t tend to live long in Dorozs.
Antal felt more inhibited visiting the tankardmen’s houses than Iza who was visiting them for the first time. He had clear memories of Vince’s house at night, of Iza bending over a crude map of Dorozs, the arc of her neck, the angle of her head, her eyes focused on papers listing social organisations, checking through documents required by the ministry, the text of which he had had to write. Dorozs would be his life work. It would be what his life was about, the sum of all he had achieved. It was his hopes for the future. Dorozs might be saved from the likes of Bérczes. The village might be restored to itself, people in their thousands might be cured by its waters. He would far sooner the record of such cures became his father’s memorial than a few useless wreaths.
It was the map of Dorozs and the profile of Iza as she studied the analytical results of water samples that appeared before him that night. He had woken with a start beside her and had just released her from his arms that felt cool even after love-making. It was that face he saw confronting him in the darkness as he heard a suppressed cry rise within him, warning him: you must leave this woman. It was like stumbling across a second self inside him: one self embraced Iza and shared his thoughts and feelings with her, the other was watching them both suspiciously, its eyes never flinching.
Iza was never so cheerful as when they were fighting the battle for Dorozs. She was like a bird full of joy, he had never heard her sing so much. When the old woman dropped a beautifully made pancake she was tossing with a single flick of the wrist, Iza consoled her by telling her of the wonderful sanatorium that would cure her incipient gout. Iza was brilliant in the evenings. It was as if she had received a wonderful present as she rushed along beside him, or by herself, to organisations, offices, even up to Pest, rousing the villagers of Dorozs while convincing experts and politicians in the capital. By the time nationalisation came along there was no social or health organisation that hadn’t heard of Dorozs, and the order authorising the conversion of the bathing area was the first act of the government.
They were already married by the time they started building the sanatorium. The night before work began Iza went to bed at eight and slept like a child till ten in the morning. ‘See how strong I am?’ she asked with closed eyes as she woke and reached for Antal as usual to draw his hand to her face. ‘See me, how strong I am?’ She tensed her body and stretched out. She still looked remarkably fragile and it was hard to imagine her setting forth to battle for Dorozs with hands as thin and a body weighing under fifty kilos. Suddenly he felt frightened analysing her words so intently, so suspiciously.
The old woman knocked at the door and asked whether she should bring them breakfast in bed on this special occasion. She had seen in the paper that the bathing pool in Dorozs was to be replaced by a sanatorium fit for international visitors and that work on the country’s most modern project had begun. She was full of laughter and congratulations, and remembered the hotel at Szentmáté with Aunt Emma and how cold the stone flagging was even in summer. Iza sat up, rested the tray on her lap: there was fried bacon on it, her favourite. ‘Enough congratulations,’ she said to her mother. ‘Hurry to the kitchen and get rid of the bacon. Vince has a weak stomach but he can’t resist bacon and it’s very bad for him.’ The old woman obediently trotted out and could be heard arguing with her husband about the bacon. Iza meanwhile cut the bread into slices and carefully dipped it into the fat. ‘Do you love me,’ Antal asked her, almost unwillingly. She smiled at him by way of answer with guileless bright eyes. He sensed the danger like a storm about to break, he could feel the wind rising before it. Yes, Iza loved him. It would be so much easier if she didn’t. But he loved all three of them: Iza, Vince and the old woman too. When one night he finally told himself he was leaving, his heart beat so he thought he would choke.
For years the four of them had lived together with only a wall between them. The old couple had seen them exhausted, distant, nervous at times and in bad moods, for neither Dr Antal, Professor Dekker’s assistant, nor Dr Iza, the rheumatologist, found it easy when a patient died or proved incurable. They had seen Iza and Antal arm in arm by the Christmas tree; they saw how they watched over them when they unwrapped presents Iza and Antal had spent half the night wrapping. They had heard them singing together, preparing for this or that conference, one interrogating the other, and even heard their occasional arguments, Iza putting her case calmly, politely and intelligently, Antal beating on the table, but it was always clear that it was some idea, some topic or other that was the cause. It was this, not Iza, that annoyed Antal. They never saw them fight in the ordinary sense. Neither was jealous or ill-tempered: they trusted each other completely. The judge and the old woman, happy in their own marriage, lived in the atmosphere of another good marriage. It was like
a double line of defence.
In the period preceding the divorce the old couple spent a long time wondering whether they should try to make peace between them, but they left them to it. Iza never asked for advice, not even when she was a little girl, not once she had taken over the family’s affairs. Of course, they couldn’t hide the fact that they were sad. Once Antal disappeared from the house, both of them felt it was the end of something, the end for ever – maybe it was the child Iza who had died, a child who remained a child for them when she got married, because she was living with them under one roof and they could see her in her nightgown with her hair pinned up for a bath, running here and there in her slippers before bedtime. No one was really surprised when she told them that she was changing jobs; the old couple never even exchanged glances when she announced it since they had often whispered about it in bed. She’s off to Pest, ah, well, she’s off to Pest, it’s probably for the best. Of course it was hard watching her get into the taxi and drive away. They hugged each other, hoping to feel less desolate about her going if they clung together. ‘Life too will take leave of us one day,’ thought Vince. ‘As suddenly as this, not looking back. I’d prefer it if I didn’t notice it and was unaware of the hour.’
*
Now, lying down in roughly the place where the old couple’s beds used to be, Antal no longer thought of Iza but of the old woman. He felt the same sense of panic as he did every time the thought occurred to him. ‘Has she discovered it?’ he wondered. ‘Does she know, and if she does, how is she taking it?’ Antal had no memory of his mother’s face; in his grandmother’s wrinkles he read unhappiness, suspicion and fear; it was only in albums and museums that he saw the much admired image of happy, smiling mothers, and now here she was, radiant, before him for the first time. How strange it was tracing elements of Iza in his mother-in-law, to detect behind her uneducated exterior her natural intelligence, her good temper, her unstinting appetite for work, all aspects of Iza too. What restless hands, what a complicated, clever little mind, what heaps of goodwill, what endless curiosity and constant readiness to help! How good it would be to speak to her, thought Antal, but the old woman needed neither his company nor his help.