Iza's Ballad

by Magda Szabo

  *

  Oddly enough, Antal was recalling exactly the same moment. Lidia was standing exactly like that now, in this corridor, by a radiator and there was a slip of paper in her hands now too. It was the summons to appear. He had searched for her for ages that day in March but she was no longer on duty and no one in class could tell him where she had run off to. He found her in the pharmacy when he happened to look in for something. She was behind the counter helping a chemist friend out of sheer goodwill. He went over to her and without saying anything put his hand on her shoulder. He could only see the back of her neck as she leaned forward, rinsing glass containers in the sink without a cap.

  There must have been a good reason for Vince to have left the painting of the mill to her.

  Antal was bothered by the thought that the girl might be feeling that it was a simple financial transaction, that the family was offering her five hundred forints to compensate for her sleepless nights and patient attendance at Vince’s bed. Their fate was more or less decided at the point when the girl turned round and looked at him, her eyes filled with tears. Lidia was the first person to whom Antal had tried to explain Iza, the first to whom he could show sympathy and more by addressing her wounded feelings, by breaking the silence. Lidia had to know that he wanted to do something real for her, not in terms of money but by offering her something she could accept with a brief thank you.

  They went home together, their first non-professional conversation being long and occasionally halting, and, as they crossed the wood and walked along the main road leading into town, Lidia’s tears were still running. The road smelled of earth and roots, the boughs above them nervously shuddering.

  There were eight of them here now: Antal, Domokos, Gica, the nurse, a shaggy old man wearing a woollen jacket and a shepherd’s cap with a shining raincoat thrown over his shoulders – clearly the nightwatchman – and a leather-coated, freshly shaved, thin young man who stared at Iza, then muttered something, his lips trembling. ‘The drunk,’ thought Iza. Now she was in full mental control, in startlingly clear control. The sleepy medic in charge of the ambulance the previous night stood next to her.

  The officer who received them was sensitive, friendly and clearly full of sympathy. He said something about his own mother, what a blow it was for him to lose her, what it meant to his children, and he took a long time shaking Iza’s hand. He frowned but thought it perfectly natural that Iza should not be alone but be accompanied by Domokos. The girl in uniform sitting by the small writing desk stood up. She too shook Iza’s hand. Iza’s expression froze: it was awful all these strangers being a part of her grief. They should ask her what they had to ask, then let her go; they shouldn’t feel sorry for her or look at her with such sad eyes. It was bad enough without that. Lidia didn’t shake hands with anyone, she merely nodded at Iza. Domokos was counting flowers on the windowsill and examining the small water sprayer. Who looked after these plants so carefully, the man or the woman?

  What on earth was Lidia doing here?

  Gica was the only one who could see that the nurse’s presence did not feel entirely natural for either Iza or Domokos. ‘Antal’s little fiancée,’ she whispered in Iza’s ear. ‘She is going to live in that nice new house.’

  Lidia did not look as though she had won a prize. There was nothing radiant about her, nor did she stand close to Antal. She stood where she was and kept her eyes down. So, thought Iza, this was the explanation of that odd ‘we’ yesterday. She had heard of the thick fog that night, a deep yellow fog, and could imagine Antal and Lidia going from door to door, ringing at every house, anywhere that might conceivably have taken the old woman in. When Antal had left the old woman after supper it would have been to fetch Lidia. They would have come home together. Having sorted the facts into a reasonable story, Iza looked at Lidia with different eyes, not as when she had first come in this morning, nor as in the past, when she tried to give her that money.

  It was the second time fate had brought her into direct contact with the girl. Fate seemed to have drawn a tight circle round the pair of them and she couldn’t step out of it. That in itself was not the problem: her own anger was. It was like being cut to the quick by a thorn. Antal loved the girl, she could see that in his eyes, he showed it in the way his face flushed and how his voice changed when he greeted her. His thickset manly frame relaxed a little, it was as if a light were shining through him. What could Lidia give him that she couldn’t? As they sat down, Domokos took her hand. His were warm and reassuring. She collected herself and stiffened her lips, willing them not to tremble.

  The hearing did not last long.

  For the first time Iza heard about the ambulance and the police medical report, which sadly confirmed the evidence of the two last competent officials to examine her. Internal injuries, fracture of the skull. Death occurred two hours after the ambulance was alerted. The injured party did not speak, apart from a few inarticulate sounds.

  The story of the old woman’s last day was being assembled.

  Gica’s testimony, which was characterised by occasional sobbing, was colourful, dramatic and wide-ranging. Those present could clearly visualise Mrs Szőcs arriving with a highly elegant pigskin suitcase and a black string bag, the way she drew close to the fire, carefully trying to fit the unfinished cloak – intended for the preacher at Árcs – around her shoulders. They saw her at the stonemason’s being thrilled by the magnificent headstone, a headstone ‘she liked so much she went quite pale when she saw it’. They saw her cutting up the chicken, eating a couple of spoonfuls of soup, then, because the events of the morning had been exhausting, squatting in the chair next to the stove, lost in her thoughts, and, lastly, making her way over to her old house when Antal suggested it.

  ‘She just stood up and went,’ Gica lamented. ‘If she had stayed with me she’d still be alive.’

  That was true, of course, and Antal bent his head. Iza simply gawped at him when it came to his turn to speak. That her mother gave in to this man so easily and followed him without a word, volunteering to spend the night in that house, was in itself odd even though Iza knew better than anyone how fond the old woman had been of Antal; but that she ate a hearty meal there then washed up, that astounded her. She went to take a bath. By herself? She never dared turn on the boiler in Pest! Everything she heard sounded as incredible as the fact that her mother was no longer alive.

  From here on they could only guess at what happened.

  Antal said that it never occurred to him that the old woman would go out when he left the house. It was so foggy and so late, and in any case he had locked the gate. But she had a bunch of keys that no one knew about, that had been found on her when the medics undressed her. It was in her coat pocket attached to a piece of blue velvet. ‘She had keys?’ thought Iza bitterly. ‘She never said she had any keys. She tricked me. Why did she keep them? What was she hoping for? Why would anyone hide an old set of keys?’

  The police officer wasn’t interested in where Antal went in the evening and why he returned with Lidia. Whatever he was thinking was far from the truth, which was that Antal had wanted to introduce his fiancée to the old woman. Antal explained what he had had in mind and what he wanted to offer her. Domokos sat and stared as he heard it. Iza stared too, then immediately lowered her eyes and looked at the pattern on her handbag instead. Gica coughed, half amused, half annoyed by what she heard. What an idiot Antal must be! He had warned her that once he got married he’d no longer need her. That was just talk. What a stupid idea inviting the old woman to look after the house when she lived such a cushy life up in Pest. Oh, yes, she’d come running all right. He wanted everything, this cheapskate: the house, the garden and now Ettie too. Well, let him try to fetch her now.

  Iza felt she could stand this no longer.

  She put her head in her gloved hands and the tears started. This was the point at which Antal – the man who used to be Antal and from whom she was now divorced, the man who left the house with two suitca
ses and didn’t look back, who went away whistling as if to show that everything would be all right and maybe even for the best, Antal the husband-to-be of Lidia, the owner of their old house – disappeared from her life, disappeared with such finality, so certainly as if he had gone up in smoke or sunk under the ground. Not even memory tied her to this man. Antal’s plan offended everyone: her father who used to trundle through the snow with his small change so that Antal might have some money for books at school; her mother whom Antal wanted to turn into some kind of housekeeper in her old age; but most of all herself because he had the nerve to create a new home under the roof where they once lived together and that – as a special treat for his new wife – he would entice her mother, her mother, to live with them.

  But something else was happening at this terrible naked moment, just as she was sobbing and trembling, and the whole fabric of her body was falling apart. The old woman, despite being cold and dead, had been very much alive and very close. After all, it was less than two days ago that she had boarded the train, dragging her baggage along, waving her hankie from the window. And now, just when life was full of personal memories all busily chattering away like birds, the old woman finally folded her arms and, however restless, incomprehensible and troubled she had been before, was silent and calm, terminally lifeless. At that moment Iza recognised, not only intellectually but instinctively, that her mother no longer existed and, having at last absorbed the knowledge, the loss seemed less painful. Immediately, without realising it, she started forgetting and healing. She snatched her hands away from her face and was able to look up again. The officer couldn’t quite understand the situation. What he saw was a rather complicated family scene: an ex-wife and two new couples yet to be established. Iza’s expression was a particular puzzle to him because, despite her copious tears and genuine sorrow, what she chiefly radiated was a sense of outrage.

  Iza knew the old woman would have left her if Antal called. She had always been very close to Antal and would leave immediately on any excuse, such as that Captain had developed asthma and that he needed proper feeding, or that she had to put her old things – the stuff that Antal kept in the attic – in order. Mama would have come, if only to take possession of some clumsy old cups and to potter around in the old woodshed again. ‘She was ungrateful,’ thought Iza. ‘How ungrateful she was, the poor creature. She’d have swapped me for a cherrywood walking stick and a tobacco filter. I have always done everything I could for her and strained every nerve to do still more. I shared my life with her, something I could never do fully with a man, but she loved that clutter more than she did me.’

  For one last time in Iza’s life the old woman forgot her dignified stillness and turned her two enormous questioning blue eyes on her. She stood there for a moment, then vanished in a puff of smoke and became exactly like every other dead person. Iza leaned back, looked for a cigarette and wiped her face. So Antal, Lidia and the old woman were to live in the family house from which only Vince would be missing – and that was just because he’d been carried off by the disease – a house that used to be a personal citadel but which now seemed to be becoming a town. But of course the scheme had collapsed now the old woman was dead and Antal, clever as he was, couldn’t now exclude her from everything in which she had a share. ‘So you are dead, mother,’ thought Iza with the same impersonal pity someone might show twenty years after the death of a loved one while leaning on the railings of the cemetery – ‘dead because Balzsamárok, Antal and a few stupid objects proved to be stronger than the love I felt for you. You are dead, poor darling. I tried to do everything I could for you but you didn’t know what to do with that love. Well, it’s not my fault.’

  The ugly yellow chair on which Domokos was sitting gave a creak as he turned towards Antal and Lidia. He could only see Antal in profile. The nurse, whose role in the family was a mystery, sat facing him. ‘She is the precise opposite of Iza,’ thought Domokos. ‘She has an expressive, sensitive, constantly changing face, all feeling and passion. She’s not the kind to let a man get on with his work, not if she felt there was something really important to say. Oh, no! She’ll gesticulate and shout until he listens.’

  Gica was quietly chuckling throughout Antal’s testimony, hoping to draw attention back to herself. It was impossible not to notice her, she just had to speak. Iza leaned back, breathing deeply as she listened to Gica’s dramatic and sarcastic performance. The cloak-maker was gesticulating and raising her voice, talking about Kolman whom she hated, about the newsagent, about the teacher lady, indeed about anyone in the street and the people at the clinic too who knew Iza, including, if you please, the Kossuth Prize-winning Professor Dekker. Anyone could tell you that Antal’s idea was ridiculous. After all, everyone knew what a wonderful life the dear lady – bless her – enjoyed with her daughter who kept her constantly supplied with money, enough for seven such lives as hers, poor thing. She could never repay Izzy for all she did for her. No parent ever had a child like Izzy. As soon as her father died she took her mother with her to Pest to live in style, in a nice modern flat, and hired a servant for her, and even now when the poor woman – bless her – had just come to visit, she was wearing such a beautiful new coat and a mohair scarf and a new hat. There can’t have been a happier mother. No, she didn’t say much when she was with her but that was because she was tired and people aren’t what they were after seventy after all, but she had nothing to complain about. Her daughter looked after her and was so good to her, was so loving and self-sacrificing. It was Eden on earth in Pest. Why would she leave Iza and return to a living hell?

  The drunk was horribly nervous and kept blowing his nose. The nightwatchman coughed. Antal blushed at the ridiculous performance. For the first time since arriving, Lidia looked up at Gica as though she wanted to say something, but then thought better of it. Iza was breathing more evenly now; she felt she was growing to like Gica.

  Domokos, whose trade was words, who lived by words, who was a master of precise articulation, began to suspect what had happened to the old woman. It was like standing Gica’s fulsome speech on its head and revealing the reality. He gave a great gulp.

  The policeman said he was glad at least one issue was clear since today’s procedure was to settle any possibility that Mrs Szőcs did not die as the result of an accident but had taken her own life. The drunk and the nightwatchman were watching anxiously as he spoke, the old man’s skin stretched tight across his face in suspense and hope. Domokos gazed at them; he had never seen such transparent desire in human faces. ‘Please God, let her have committed suicide,’ prayed the drunk. ‘Let them decide that she killed herself,’ prayed the nightwatchman.

  Now it was their turn, and as they spoke yesterday’s fog lifted and cleared. With Gica’s and Antal’s help they described the route the old woman would have taken and how she might have arrived in Balzsamárok on foot or by tram. It was almost certainly by tram as she was coming from the Rákoczi Street direction. The nightwatchman mumbled on. Now they could see the well as she tottered along beside it and hear the trickling of water. The drunk kept sniffling and feeling ashamed of himself, saying he remembered nothing, not even the old woman, in fact, only the nightwatchman. He had made a kind of confession in the bar about a matter that weighed on his heart, but once he left the bar his head was full of nonsense. He remembered setting off home by way of Balzsamárok and not much else, except that the mud was unusually deep and the fog was brown and sticky. There was something magical, almost hypnotic, about the way the nightwatchman kept mumbling to himself, ‘Let it not be an accident. Let it not be an accident!’ Balzsamárok wasn’t a pretty country walk, he muttered angrily. ‘The only people who go that way are those who have some business there and that’s always by day, never by night.’

  The sentence was left dangling like some weightless object. People looked at each other. It was Iza’s turn now. Her voice was low but sharp and Domokos shuddered to hear the secrets of two dead people turning into data, mere
items in an official report. The girl at the desk was even noting down the fact that once in this town there lived a young man and a young woman who would kiss among the trees, and that, for the old woman if no one else, Balzsamárok might have been a rational place to take a walk, particularly the night after her husband’s headstone had been installed. All the statements had been taken and every small detail had found its place, but the writer felt sick. Here, according to the account, was a happy, well-looked-after, satisfied, sweet old woman in a fur-lined coat, walking along, her sorrow still fresh in her mind, her thoughts – apart from those about the dear departed – chiefly focused on how lucky she was to have such a good child and what a blessed, happy, peaceful old age awaited her. But because she was timid and easily frightened, as most people of her age were, and because she was short-sighted, poor thing, and too vain to put on her glasses even on a foggy evening, she was so confused by the argument between the nightwatchman and the other person that she got lost in the fog and fell to her death, the fall robbing her of a future that promised her such happiness and security.

  Domokos wanted to scream.

  ‘Thank you for your recollections,’ said the officer. ‘She was old, the poor creature. Everything seems much clearer now.’

  ‘They weren’t modern people,’ said Iza quietly, moved by a genuine regret. ‘Neither my father nor my mother, poor thing, was a modern person.’

  ‘That is all, I think,’ said the officer. ‘Please accept my condolences.’

  He shook hands with Iza. The drunk just had to look at his hand to burst into loud, bitter sobs. For the first time he realised that he had inadvertently killed someone. The nightwatchman mumbled as if he were talking to his dog. The doctor vanished, Gica smoothed down her coat, sniggering and shrugging, then realised she was being looked at, felt ashamed and pulled a more appropriate face. Iza was simply tired and sad. She had tried to build a life and had just seen it fall apart, brick by brick.