by Magda Szabo
The old woman left the task of negotiating Vince’s headstone to Gica, the cloak-maker, who was almost bursting with pride at being entrusted with the task and because she was the only one with whom she was in regular correspondence, exchanging drawings, bills and ideas for inscriptions.
She wrote to Kolman just twice, as she did also to the teacher and the newsagent, but not once to Antal, nor did she answer any letters, except to Gica. It was as if she had suddenly grown tired of letter writing or had nothing to report.
If they do instal a headstone, thought Antal, Iza is unlikely to come down but the old woman is sure to be here. In fact, he could have written to her and offered her a room for the night but she was bound to reject his offer. He picked up a magazine since he liked reading in bed. He had the walls freshly painted when he moved in, the bunches of flowers disappeared, as well as the golden medusa-shaped patches, everything boldly replastered. The rooms somehow grew around him, but Antal spent ever less time comparing and recalling: the house was his, he had discussed the furniture and its arrangement with Lidia and it was Lidia who took flowers from the garden into the clinic. Antal’s memory of the hot spring was of a bubbling inferno, a steaming, heaving mass of mud. He was a qualified doctor by the time he first saw a mountain stream. He knelt down beside it and let the ice-cold water run through his fingers. He could have wept at the sheer beauty of it. His fingers grew numb in the miraculous childlike gurgling of water as it thrust onward. The stones at the bottom of the spring were bearded, a bush bent towards it, an unsuspecting bird perched on its branches. Whenever he thought of Lidia he pictured her beside water, ever supple, full of life, and heard the throbbing of the millstream in that frozen image of the old photograph.
The evening was unusually quiet, with the promise of rain. Captain was snuffling around in the garden. The old woman had always taken pity on Captain and let him in. ‘A rabbity old dog you are and rabbit stew is what you’re fit for, pickle and all,’ Iza would say, laugh and lift Captain by the ears, Captain’s paws waving in panic as her fingers held him gently but firmly. She never hurt him. Everyone looked away because Iza was right, of course, rabbit-dogs didn’t belong in the house, even when they are clean and relatively intelligent. It was just that . . .
Rabbit stew with paprika or with pickle, people here or there, the Dorozs sanatorium, Vince’s headstone, the old woman in the Budapest flat. Iza took care of everyone and if she ever left anyone out it was most likely to be herself. Someone in the canteen yesterday had stopped in mid-sentence while talking about Domokos and Iza, and Antal was astonished how little he himself cared about her and the way she organised her life. Instead he thought of Domokos and was shocked: he had read his books and admired that clear, promising prose he had often seen in books and in the papers. ‘He’s not going to marry her?’ he had worried the day before. ‘For God’s sake, he’s not going to marry her, is he?’
Captain was scraping at the door. The scent of Vince’s sweet william and night-scented stock wafted through the open window. Iza no longer lived in the house but Vince’s spirit still hung around the place, as did the old woman’s. Antal got out of bed and, cursing all the while, looked for his slippers to let Captain in as the old woman would have done. The house was empty now, there was no need to go on tiptoe.
4
SHE NO LONGER received letters from home though that didn’t surprise her because the only letters she answered were Gica’s. She often thought that the Kolmans must be puzzled by her silence and she imagined she knew how they’d explain it since she couldn’t explain it any other way herself. They must think she was too comfortable, too lazy, enjoying the good life. ‘Iza would have written,’ the newsagent must be thinking. ‘Iza was never too proud.’ And Iza would in fact write, letters would come and go, there’s no obligation. Iza would never leave loose threads.
What could she write to them?
How could she explain to old friends how she lived and what went on around her? Should she talk about Teréz, the sameness of day after day, about the enormous trams that slipped through the streets of the city? Should she write about Domokos who was calling in more frequently now, even when Iza was away, and would sit and chat with her? If she wrote half the truth it would seem like bragging, but if she wrote the other half, about the feelings behind those of comfort and security, she wouldn’t be able to face herself.
It was impossible to correspond with people back home. Opening the window into the light shaft she could see the same frosted glass in the window of the flat opposite. When the neighbour, the bus conductor’s wife, was airing the opposite flat, she always said hello back and asked what they were having for dinner that day. The conductor’s wife was blonde and chubby, fond of singing and would switch her domestic appliance on and off, machines very similar to the ones in Iza’s flat.
The old woman, who was frightened of all machines, found a curious way of making the acquaintance of the refrigerator. She discovered that the fridge made a sort of animal noise, a low purr. It startled her at first, but then she imagined having a conversation with it and would sit beside it, feeling she was not alone. The noise reminded her of some kind of cat but since her last pet had been Captain, a dog, a soft thing as far as she was concerned, it represented a clumsy white version of Captain. On one occasion she spilled cherry soup in it and tried to wash it up because she was afraid of being told off. Iza went quite pale when she saw it, because of course she hadn’t turned the electricity off first. ‘Look, my dear,’ said the girl. ‘This is not a block of ice. Never even think of cleaning it with a wet rag. Never mind if it leaves a stain.’ She pulled out the plug of the fridge and the purring stopped.
After that she no longer tried to make friends with the refrigerator and directed her desperate efforts to understanding how it worked, so that she might prove herself capable of operating it. The trouble was that Iza never had the time to explain and she was reluctant to ask the conductor’s wife. She took much more care touching it now and would simply sit beside it, comforted by its benign hum.
She did not dare ask Iza about Domokos and marriage. She wasn’t even sure of her own feelings about it yet, whether she would be happy if they did get married. At the beginning, when she first became aware of the writer’s visits, she’d have been pleased if they did, it was after all a sinful and illicit relationship, but because there was no one from her old circle of friends to remark on it she did not feel too bad about it in the end; people seemed to regard these things differently in Budapest. Domokos liked her and, if she didn’t feel uneasy about his profession, she would have been readier to return his signs of affection, but Aunt Emma had told her that writers drank and, though they seemed all right at first, sooner or later they came to a bad end; besides, she found it unnatural that he didn’t have regular hours and a regular place of work, which meant that Iza might have to earn a living for them both. She didn’t share these thoughts, of course, and nobody asked her opinion or advice. One day the conductor’s wife shouted across the light shaft wanting to know if she had a good recipe for pastry, one that didn’t use too many eggs, and that made her feel good for the first time in a long while, because she still remembered one of Vince’s favourite cakes, the cake that Iza stared at with such longing when she was a child – how cheap it was to make, how delicious and how easy it was to convince those who tasted it that they were eating a real delicacy.
She felt happy each time she saw her neighbour’s cheerful face. She only regretted that the young woman was also a conductor and had little enough time to spend in the kitchen. If she were around more she could ask her for news of the world. Since Vince had died she was no longer able to follow events. Not that she was particularly interested in politics, though Vince often read the paper to her, but somehow she felt at home in it even when she didn’t fully understand everything and only skated over things. Now she desperately yearned for information; ever since she had moved to the capital, to the industrial hub of the whole country
, she had been aware that there was something vital missing in her field of vision, that there were people here of a kind she had never personally encountered.
Insofar as the old woman had ever really known anyone, it was individuals such as shop assistants, conductors, postmen and small traders. She had never really encountered class or spoken to blue-collar men apart from those working on her house to fix the wiring, but even they were born on the outskirts of this or that town and spoke just like local peasants. Workers in the pharmaceutical factory, the recent and only genuinely industrial building in the area, never came round their way. It was terribly difficult in Pest to tell who were the workers because everyone dressed much the same. When she was off on one of those circular tram journeys and the tram rattled past a factory during a change of shift, she had no idea what they were manufacturing inside, she just looked back from the tram window as long as she could and thought she ought to ask someone what they were producing there and who lived in the area, but the tram swept on and she immediately felt ashamed of thinking such a thing. Iza had no time for her, let alone for strangers, and who would understand why she was interested in this or that particular matter?
After a time she stopped looking out of tram windows and stopped thinking about anything at all except herself and her memories. Domokos’s visits were starting to irritate her because when the writer did drop in to see her he brought her cakes as if he were dealing with a greedy child and would pull up the footstool next to her, which irritated her even more, because that was where the child Iza used to sit, right next to her, with such a longing look, the Iza who was interested in everything and who was getting to know the world, whose questions were inexhaustible and impossible to answer. And the writer kept asking her things, always about the past and she was always having to answer him, not ask questions of her own. She hated his questions, the peaches he brought, which were the size of fists, and those slices of melon sprinkled with rum. She was angry and bitter every time they spoke of the past because the past was the past, it was gone, vanished along with Vince. Vince was still alive then and Iza depended on him for so much. When Domokos asked her about the town’s past political affairs it struck the old woman that answering questions was regarded as her way of earning her keep, but she felt ashamed thinking that and blushed bright red.
It was on her seventy-sixth birthday that she really got to hate the writer once and for all, on an evening Iza had promised the three of them would spend together. They’d play board games for proper prizes and they asked her to go and get some prizes to play for because she was the one who had most time to spare. When Iza was a child she used to like playing board games. She’d sit down happily with the pair of them, and she and Vince would cheat so that Iza might win – because Iza didn’t like losing and would go quite pale and cry when she did. Miraculously, in view of all that moving, the board game had been brought to Pest and the old woman got fully absorbed in shopping around tobacconists and bazaars for all the silly little things they could use as prizes.
It was the big day. Teréz brought flowers and Iza greeted her with the old children’s greeting. The old woman had wanted to thank the well-wishers in the most appropriate way so, the day before, she went over to the conductor’s wife and baked some sweet pastries so as not to upset Teréz or mess up the kitchen. The young woman watched silently as she went to work. She taught her how to use the oven and when her visitor asked how much she owed for the electricity she burst into laughter, then suddenly grew serious, grabbed her round the neck and gave her a big kiss. The old woman looked at her and saw her kind eyes fill with tears. She was so flustered that she tried to open the door with her elbow but was so clumsy she dropped the prettiest, reddest bits of pastry on the floor.
Domokos came over in the evening to offer his congratulations and what should have followed was the offering round of the pastries and the board game, a nice family gathering to remind her of old times. But Domokos arrived out of breath and started whispering to Iza while holding a large parcel wrapped in tissue paper under his arm, a strange, frightening-looking package. Iza came into her room and announced that Domokos had managed to get tickets to the Margaret Island open-air concert with Feltrini conducting, just when it seemed impossible to get any. Some friend of his had worked a miracle and now they really had three tickets so they should quickly get dressed. The old woman would come with them, it would make a wonderful night.
The party had to be cancelled, of course, which was a real shame but at least she wouldn’t have to keep bending over and tiring herself out. Yes, the pastries looked delicious! And look, Domokos had bought her a present to make up for the games. She must hurry and get dressed because the taxi will soon be here, and they have to leave immediately.
Iza was already in a rush, not waiting for an answer, changing her clothes. Domokos came in, peeled away the tissue paper wrapping from whatever it was he had brought her and revealed his present: it was a cage with a bored-looking cynical-eyed bird in it. Domokos would never forget the terrified look on the old woman’s face as she saw it. Not knowing how to react, he gave a shrug and left the room to smoke a cigarette.
The old woman carefully covered the pastries with a tablecloth so that no fly should get at them. (There were no flies in Pest, not one, but the old woman was used to flies in summer and from June onwards she always put up a long strip of sticky-backed flypaper that hung on the lamp above her head.) She took out her black outfit. ‘We’re not leaving you alone tonight,’ said Iza, looking radiant. ‘Of course we’re not leaving you behind, dear! I’m taking you to a concert. I want to show off my beautiful blue-eyed mother!’
There lay the deserted pastry, her wrists still aching from mixing the dough, and nobody wanted it. She thought the bird was giving her the evil eye. ‘This bird is supposed to be company for me,’ thought the old woman as she wriggled into her clothes and squeezed her feet into the black dress shoes she had last worn at Vince’s funeral. She immediately felt weepy at the sight of them. ‘This bird is to be my companion. I am supposed to talk to it.’ Iza was slamming doors. Domokos’s breathless voice was urging them to hurry, so they were all breathless by the time they got to the taxi.
There was a great crowd at the island venue and the old woman felt colder than she had expected to. She didn’t really like classical music and there was no Vince to whisper in her ear and tell her what was beautiful about it. His descriptions were so clear. Handel was all scarlet ostrich feathers and silk ribbons fluttering in the wind, great silver trays blazing with candlelight. Wagner was trees creaking and snapping in the storm, foam running up the foot of a cliff, waves sweeping round rocks, black peaks reaching to the sky. Vince was no longer there, it was only the music with no introduction and no commentary. She heard it but didn’t listen or think anything, she only saw Domokos holding Iza’s hand, Iza gazing at the conductor, her mind entirely on the music, both of them enjoying the concert, every so often glancing at her, she being the person for whose sake they had arranged this wonderful night. They were treating her like they would a child with a present. Why wouldn’t they just let her be?
The old woman was thinking of her pastries, of the liqueur she had bought specially from the grocer and the little glasses she purchased to replace those they had given as a gift to Antal so he wouldn’t have to use Iza’s heavy cut glass. This was all because she wanted to offer them something of her own, the things that were now covered with the tablecloth. It was useless now. Domokos saw she was cold, took off his jacket and wrapped it round her. Those who noticed him doing it smiled, while she, for the first time, noticed how bright Iza’s eyes were when she glanced at Domokos. It was a look she had once reserved for Antal alone. ‘I see you are just as good,’ said Iza’s eyes. Domokos straightened up, his strong, broad-shouldered body snug in his immaculate shirt. Those who looked on didn’t mind him being in shirtsleeves. This writer fellow must be a decent man, they thought. He is giving up his jacket to help a shivering old woman. Ev
eryone was happy and satisfied.
The orchestra struck up and the music swirled among the trees like flocks of birds. It was a Beethoven evening, but all the old woman kept thinking was that it was too loud. She raised her head in fright, as if she were in pain; there was no Vince to tell her what to hear. ‘Listen, Ettie, can you hear how earth, heaven and God himself are being called to answer?’
After the concert Domokos ran ahead, his white shirt blazing in the distance. Iza’s face had taken on a tender look, her lips were swollen. She was always moved by music and followed the arcs of melody as keenly as her father had done. Domokos rushed back triumphant, having succeeded in finding a taxi again. He seated the old woman next to Iza and climbed in beside the driver.
The old woman wondered what would happen if she suddenly had to get out of the taxi and find her own way home. She had never been on the island and because of all the bright advertisements could not even tell which way the taxi was going. She really wouldn’t know which way to go, she thought. ‘I could do with some coffee,’ said Iza contemplatively. Hearing this, the old woman’s tiredness suddenly disappeared because she felt everything might be all right again once they got home. Never mind about the board games, it was too late for that, but perhaps they could still eat the pastries and she could brew them some coffee. Then Domokos suggested they could go for coffee at The Palm and she slumped again. They took her home and kissed her goodnight. Domokos escorted her up in the lift because there were times the old woman was a little clumsy with her fingers and couldn’t open the front door. He even put the light on for her and gave her another kiss. He told her the bird’s name was Elemér, then rushed off.