Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabo

  ‘Silly boy,’ said Lidia, full of affection. ‘Dumbo. Come here!’

  Antal knocked at the third room. There was no answer. He knocked again, still nothing.

  ‘Don’t disturb her,’ said Lidia. ‘She must have fallen asleep. It can wait till morning.’

  ‘You didn’t see her face,’ said Antal. ‘Wait, I’ll wake her up.’

  He opened the door. The bed was covered with Aunt Emma’s brilliantly snow-white sheet, the bed itself unmade. Iza’s suitcase unpacked. The old woman wasn’t in the room.

  IV

  AIR

  1

  SHE HADN’T HAD an accident while taking a bath.

  She took a long time and much pleasure in soaking herself. When she was finished she did not lie down but got dressed again and examined every part of the house once more, even looking into the pantry, opening the refrigerator and raising the lids of the pans. Back in Pest she found it hard to sleep when Iza was away and stayed awake until she got back. It was as if some terrifying monster were waiting to pounce on her in the busy and secure tenement block. But she felt no fear here even though she was alone. Antal hadn’t told her where he was going and Gica never ventured out after dark, so she wasn’t expecting her to call to see what she was doing. Captain, who had grown fatter and kept looking at her, stretching his fat neck as if trying very hard to draw memory from an almost exhausted well, was not a credible guardian of the house, but she wasn’t afraid. It might have been the walls or the standing clock that had been left behind, the one that was bound to remain here as Iza didn’t like it. She had hated it even as a child and would cry in anger whenever she heard it, point at it and hide when it was ringing. The old woman discussed it with Vince. It was unlike the child to be afraid of a clock. Endrus and every other child would clap to hear it, not Iza.

  The ticking that to anyone else meant ‘Life is passing’ said something else to the old woman: it said time had stopped. After all these months the world seemed real again and the shifting soil that so often gave way under her was suddenly firm. The old woman started thinking.

  It had been weeks since she had thought anything at all; at most she had remembered events.

  The recognition that she was still capable of desiring things and that she could feel an emotion other than sadness shook her. She lowered herself into the rocking chair and rocked to and fro. If she did talk to anyone these last few weeks it had been to Vince, but now she began talking to herself. What she had to say in herself and to herself caused her so little pain she was surprised how easy it was.

  She picked up her coat and the string bag that seemed startlingly light now the roast chicken and the pastries were gone. She took her handbag too, not because she thought for a moment that she would need identification papers to walk down the street, but because that was what she had got used to with Aunt Emma. Handbags were always to be carried. She put on her hat, adjusted it in the mirror and, for the first time since her arrival, decided to wear her glasses. Captain grumbled and ran after her, so she bent down to him once more and lifted him into her arms. She could hardly hold him, he had grown so fat. Gica was hopeless with animals and overfed him. She gave the dog a kiss between the ears, startling Captain who snatched his head away and snuffled, his eyes wild.

  She hesitated at the top of the steps.

  She had failed to anticipate the fog. She thought the moon would be shining. She had no idea why but it was the moon she longed for, so intensely now that she could only blink in disappointment at the brown half-light. The garden seemed to be moving in the rolling mist and the tower of the nearby church was quite invisible but for a faint circle of light. ‘Oh, heavens, I am so ashamed of myself,’ said the old woman to the Iza inside her, ‘if only you knew how ashamed, Izzy!’

  The key turned easily in the lock as though months hadn’t passed since she last used it. The street looked unreal. She couldn’t see Kolman’s shop: it was like walking by a river without a further shore, only seeing people once one actually bumped into them, a head, a coat or a hat suddenly emerging out of the fog. ‘Sorry,’ the old woman kept saying at every encounter, ‘I beg your pardon!’ The pavement was wet and black, the lamp posts ghostly presences.

  It wasn’t even eight yet but there was hardly any traffic. Cars nosed carefully forward in the fog, the trams kept ringing their bells. There was something liberating about not having to watch out for everything, feeling no fear as she turned down Könyök Street, passing the enormous shadow mass of the church, then crossing the square in a chaos of flashing lights, ringing and car horns. She advanced calmly and gently, the slow-moving vehicles swimming through the fog now behind, now ahead of her. She found her way back to the safety of the pavement, but then was lost in the swirl of people leaving the cinema. She sensed the pulsation of the crowd but could only guess why people were rolling in such droves from the concrete gateway of the Hunnia. She never walked like this in Pest. She drank in the damp brown fog, opening her mouth wide as if she were choking. She had rarely felt as fresh as she did now. She bit the fog as she had done in childhood, when she tried to catch the falling snow between her sparkling teeth.

  Where was Vince?

  He couldn’t be in the cemetery under that ugly headstone. But he must be somewhere, she had already felt his presence when the train entered the county. He was floating around her, his laughter blown this way and that by the wind. He must be here somewhere, hiding in the fog. She had felt close to him in the house too, Antal’s house, but he was not quite close enough, just out of reach. It was her own self she discovered in Antal’s house, not Vince.

  While Iza was growing up, other little girls would come round to play, hiding things. ‘You’re getting warm, no, colder,’ and when the object was close to being found, the little girls would cry, ‘Very warm! Hot! Hot!’

  Back in the house it was only ‘warm’ or ‘lukewarm’. Not ‘cold’ because his cherrywood stick was still hanging on the wall and Captain was there too, and the rose bushes and the tulip onions deep in their pots. But there must be somewhere warmer and one place that was the warmest of all. Not in the cemetery, oh, no! And not in the house.

  At the terminal there was the usual tram waiting to leave for the woods and she got on. She had no small change, only notes, and the conductress grumbled when giving her change. The old woman gazed at her affectionately, hearing the extended consonants of her birthplace. They didn’t talk like this in Pest. She clung to her handbag and looked out through the window, reciting to herself the street names and tram stops that she couldn’t see except as a vague change of light behind the glass. Now they were rattling by the post office, there was the Calvinist church, the old county hall, the town hall, the grammar school, the Kazinczy statue, the war memorial and the hospital. That shadow was the baths. If it were possible to see anything, she would have been able to see the mill too, the steam mill behind which there was an overwhelming scent of flowers every summer when the wind was from Balzsamárok.

  The conductress called her for the first time since she got on. They were at the end now and were were about to turn round. Why didn’t she pay attention? She would have liked to tell the conductress that this was where she had wanted to be from the start, but she didn’t think of it because she was old and tired, and had got out of the way of thinking. The tram vanished, the passengers dispersed, somewhere dogs were barking.

  She was feeling closer to Vince now but it wasn’t because she felt familiar soil under her feet: the old track had vanished and had been properly surfaced. There was a bar with lights on along the road and she tried to look through the window but couldn’t see much, just some backs and shoulders, almost everyone in some kind of leather coat. ‘Poor thing,’ she spoke to the Iza inside her. ‘How dreadful it must have been for you. How awful.’

  Balzsamárok no longer smelled of flowers but the old woman remembered past summers when it was heady with scent. She hadn’t yet entered the denser fog hanging around between the gardens an
d southern edge of town but Vince was already there, not quite next to her but very close. The last time she was here was the day he died, when they were laying the foundations for the new estate. The houses will have been built by now.

  Someone slipped by her, a big man in uniform.

  ‘Is this a good place to cross?’ she shyly asked.

  ‘If you’re crazy,’ the stranger answered gruffly. ‘It’s mud up to the knees there.’

  She wasn’t worried about the mud, it was just the entrance to the estate that bothered her; the last time she had walked that way there were two bollards in the way but they were nowhere to be seen now. The road was indeed muddy but she did not lose her footing. Blindingly bright lamps lit the road; not enough to light the whole estate but she could see perfectly well where she was going.

  A dog started barking and she was frightened for a moment, then took courage again; the sound grew louder but no nearer. There had been a nightwatchman here ever since they started building and the dog was tied up. But there was something dreadful about the sound, something unreal and overlong, not quite animal but something mechanical, like a machine continually howling.

  The nightwatchman appeared to see what the dog was howling at. He looked up at the old woman and greeted her. He was smoking a pipe and was bored and cold. Any company would do. ‘He won’t harm you,’ he said. ‘He’s just a lot of noise. He’s all right.’

  The old woman returned his greeting and stopped. There was an enormous electric light shining above his head and the nightwatchman could see how carefully she was looking around.

  The buildings were all ready bar one. They were just lacking windows, none of them being glazed, the last building being complete to the fourth floor. A group of identical accommodation blocks squatted over the levelled fields of Balzsamárok, four to the left and four to the right. The old woman gazed at them in amazement. The roof of the fourth on the left was lower than the rest and somehow different, as you could see even in the fog that was thinning somewhat now: it looked unfinished, rather dented. The sky too looked crooked as though weighed down by the fog; it seemed to hang between the walls. The old well was where it had been, it was the only thing that hadn’t changed apart from the sky. She knelt down beside it and admired its nice red stone rim, shiny and damp from years of water washing over it.

  ‘Fancy a drink?’ asked the nightwatchman. ‘I have a spare mug.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ The old woman turned the wheel and it moved as smoothly as it had ever done. The water rushed on, white and sparkling, eternally young. She said she didn’t want a drink, she just wanted to see the well.

  A woman walked past and greeted them as people in the country do even on deserted streets. She was pushing a bicycle, then vanished down another street leading out of Balzsamárok, down Rákoczi Street. The dog started barking again and this time it would not stop.

  ‘May I sit down here?’ the old woman asked.

  She felt the presence of Vince so intensely that she was sure that if the nightwatchman went away, returned to his cabin or simply turned round, Vince would immediately appear beside her and tell her what to do.

  ‘Doesn’t bother me,’ said the nightwatchman.

  He turned away. There was nothing to steal except a few bricks and an old woman like her would hardly be able to carry those off in her black string bag. Everything else was safely locked in the store and there was the dog to guard that. Why on earth an old woman should want to sit by the well in this fog was beyond him, but maybe she was going to live here and it made her happy to be thinking about it.

  He returned to his dog and adjusted its leash. It was listless and would not respond to his touch, though it was normally pleased to be patted. Night somehow brought them together; they were the only two beings in the world because they had this special role and responsibility. Day would split them up again. By day the animal would be just an ordinary animal, and he merely a man who slept, ate and lay in bed until it was time to start working again. But at night such distinctions were swept away and it was good to know he was not alone. The dog was restless, no longer howling but whimpering. He gave it a slap on the head to try to make it shut up.

  Vince was here, so clearly here that she didn’t need to talk to him. She couldn’t see him but felt his presence and it was as if this was the very opportunity her confused thoughts were waiting for. Slowly the darkness in her mind lifted. She didn’t tell Vince how hard it had been waiting for him, and how impossible it was to describe the dreadful emptiness of life without him because Vince knew all that, and he wasn’t going to say where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Strange how quickly he had become part of the new estate. There was nothing frightening or disturbing about him; everything was as natural as it had been throughout their lives together; it was just that he had turned into a house, a set of buildings, a light bulb. The strange thing was how easy it was to assemble him from such tiny fragments. How could a man turn into a building? What material might he be made of? It was a pity he couldn’t speak and tell her what she wanted to know. Now she would have to discover it for herself and, if she had time, she might yet do that. He had offered her this happy opportunity of doing something for herself, of working something out. He just set her on the road to it and once she got there his small bright eyes would be laughing and sparkling with joy that she had managed it all by herself.

  ‘How dreadful,’ the old woman said to herself as she turned the wheel and watched the water run, white as a long goose neck. ‘It’s so hard living with me, I am such a burden, I don’t know what to do.’

  The Iza that lived inside her furrowed her brow. ‘I am tired,’ she said in a high, sharp voice.

  ‘That’s another thing, the way I tire her out,’ the old woman explained to Vince, ‘though she is such a good girl and she works so hard. And if you knew how much money she gave me, my bedside table is full of hundreds. I am so ashamed to be doing nothing for it.’

  Vince had vanished.

  He had disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared the moment before. It was as if the estate itself had vanished, the buildings dissolved into soft blurs. Now she was angry and it didn’t help. She suddenly felt cold, her bare hands were sparkling and had gone numb with the water. The fog looked dense again and angrier. The dog was howling.

  Voices were approaching up Rákoczi Street, boys and girls arm in arm. ‘Young people,’ thought the old woman. ‘Young people don’t see the fog. They’re walking towards the university, laughing, laughing just like Antal did when he was young, like Iza used to. I’m so stupid. Vince is not answering.’

  She sat and stared at the ground. The mud round the well looked deeper, so she cleaned her black shoes. Their edges were shining in the dark. She wasn’t tired but felt a strange tension as if she could see and hear more clearly. Someone was shouting, a door was being slammed, the low bells of the bar could be heard here too. Something was squelching in the distance, coming closer. The dog was quiet but that scared her more than when it was howling.

  ‘Are you going to sleep here?’ asked the nightwatchman, if only to pass the time. If people wanted to sleep by the well that was up to them.

  Someone was squelching their way towards them singing a melancholy song. ‘A white dove flutters over the village,’ he sang. The old woman imagined the dove but the one she saw was silver, not white, and the way it flew was more like an aeroplane than a bird, somehow unnatural, in a straight steady surge. The walls of the village were all alike too: all had tiled roofs, all with verandas as on the news.

  ‘Hey,’ she heard the nightwatchman call. ‘Not that way! Straight on! Rákoczi Street is that way. Where do you think you are going?’

  She had always been scared of drunks. Her feet had gone a little numb now so she had to lean against something for a moment, and when she stood up again the waterwheel made a splashing sound. She gave the nightwatchman a guilty look but he was occupied with the young man who was explaining something to him in the
middle of the road, pointing towards one of the buildings. He cut a clumsy, awkward figure in the fog, like a starving bear.

  ‘I should be on my way,’ she thought. Nothing worked the way she wanted it to, not nowadays, absolutely nothing. The figure of Vince was retreating into the far distance. The nightwatchman was telling the young man that he wasn’t allowed to go near the buildings, and the drunk was bellowing something about having been allotted a flat here and that no one had the right to stop him going to see how the building was getting on. Something creaked, a board somewhere. It startled her and she set off in fright towards the buildings.

  ‘Get moving, young man,’ said the nightwatchman. ‘Get on or I’ll set the dog on you.’

  She took great fright at that. What if the dog didn’t know it was the drunk it had to follow and bit her instead? The old woman started running towards the identical houses. There used to be an unpaved crossroads here, maybe they had laid a better path and if she crossed here she might arrive at the tracks and back on the main road. She could wait there until it was all quiet again before returning. She tapped at the walls of the new houses, the walls as cool and damp to the touch as Vince’s face when he died. Even the light resembled the light on Vince’s brow.

  ‘Go to hell!’ she heard the nightwatchman bawl. ‘I wouldn’t show you round at this time of night, not if you were the angel Gabriel.’

  ‘An angel?’

  She slowed down. There was a plank laid over the mud and she walked along it, astonished at how clever she was, watching her feet with innocent delight as they avoided any contact with the mud. Wearing her glasses made her feel more confident. The builders must use this plank to push barrows along on the way to the last, unfinished building. She kept on walking to get away from the loud voices, getting an awful scare one moment when she seemed to pass very close to the dog. She saw it and stopped in terror but the dog for some reason fell silent at her appearance and just looked at her with dull eyes, almost frightened. Then it made a noise at her, as if wanting to say something, but it sounded nothing like Captain. She switched her string bag to the other arm.