by Magda Szabo
Lidia’s brief life amounted to practically nothing in comparison with the judge’s. It was enough for her to act as a kind of living gauge by which to register the changes the judge was so desperately keen to hear about. But her story was only typical to herself; the judge listened to it as he might to a fairy tale. Her father had been a pastor, who didn’t survive the war. He disappeared from the sheep meadows of Gyüd the way Máté Szőcs disappeared from the dike. Once she had finished primary school she was put on a train to a boarding school where she matriculated and went on nurse training while her widowed mother supported herself by working in a cooperative retail shop. Lidia didn’t get her diploma through a public grant, by receiving a school bursary or because a teacher insisted she should. No one offered her their pittance so that she might buy books; she saved her own money and bought them for herself. She grew up with as much security as if both parents were alive and maybe more. People took greater care of her because she was half an orphan.
They travelled a long way together those three nights before he died. Lidia had a clearer idea of the village as it used to be than she ever had from her mother’s simple memories or her schoolteachers’ poor lessons; the judge could follow Lidia down new streets that he could not have remembered or ever have walked, roads down which he would have liked to walk with Iza. ‘The mill’ – he laughed – ‘well of course it wouldn’t be there, it’s just the way I see it. There’s an electric mill instead . . .’ He stopped and contemplated what the shore might be like now; he had taken so many photographs of it when he was a lawyer.
If over those three days he responded to everything as if he were healthy, it was because he was, at last, talking about Gyüd.
The old woman’s life, he explained, started roughly when they met. As for Iza, she hated sad stories as a child. There was one particular ballad, a beautiful ballad from his student days, that he could never sing to her because she would burst into tears and plead for the dead character to be brought to life again. She never heard the end of the song. Mrs Szőcs wasn’t interested in seeing the village and Iza loathed both Gyüd and the Karikás because it brought her father so much suffering. The fact was she couldn’t bear him to talk about the past at all, and each time he did she would turn her serious eyes on him over the steaming plates at supper and insist that the future should turn out differently. He had to promise her. ‘I can’t tell you how good Iza was to me,’ said the sick man and his surprisingly healthy face lit up with the joy of the memory. ‘Nobody has ever been nicer to me.’
As he spoke Lidia could see the schoolgirl Iza discussing the future with her father. She saw her as her father described her, as a pint-sized redeemer spreading out her school atlas and examining the map of Budapest because she wanted to see a major city, a really big city, and trying to work out where in City Park the statue of the historian Anonymous might stand. Iza loved the look of that hooded faceless figure. She saw it once when she was a young woman visiting Budapest with their petition for the sanatorium, then again as an adult when she was no longer alone but had Antal and other young people at her side. The idea of ‘the village’ became more attractive to her, not Gyüd of course, but the general idea of villages as a problem or concept: how to solve the issue of rural health care. Listening to her father Lidia saw how carefully Iza examined a newspaper, pointed out a line, faultlessly pronouncing some politician’s name, leaning her pretty head against the judge’s shoulder. ‘She became more sophisticated than anyone I have ever known,’ he boasted. ‘So clever! Isn’t that so, Lidia? How clever! It’s just that she never explains things, but when would she have the time to do so? It is like not knowing how the sputnik works. I read about it in the general science magazine but I still don’t know. What is that miraculous field at Gyüd called?’
‘The electric field,’ answered Lidia. ‘There’s a memorial statue on it, a lawn, some benches and a children’s playground.’
‘Good heavens,’ she thought as he was speaking. ‘That girl has done everything for him. She could have done no more than if the situation were reversed, if he were the daughter and she the father. She has kept him alive beyond his eightieth year and though she knows his constitution is weak, the poor little man, as soon as she leaves his room she is close to tears. She barely has the strength to stumble over to the window. She loves him. She has spent her life surrounding him like a living defensive wall. But why did she never go to Gyüd with him? Is it possible that she didn’t let him relate to things, that she never explained anything.’
The judge’s face was as ruddy as if he had been healthy.
‘Listen, Mr Szőcs,’ said Lidia, unaware that she was shouting. ‘There’s a memorial statue in the square to the victims of the flood, it’s of a young man. He is shading his brow and is looking towards the river as if watching to see which way the foam is running.’
The door of the room, the walls and even the house plants were expanding. The plants were whispering like willows and the hot tap that they had tried vainly to repair that morning started running again, reminding them of water, of rivers and the unusually low March stars that swung above the waters of the Karikás.
For three days the lowland village held the forces of decay at bay.
Propped on pillows, half dead already, the judge took his last imagined walk through the village where he was born. His legs felt sturdy. At one point he started singing. Antal came in astonished, the old man’s voice drifting into the corridor like the humming of an innocent, half-conscious, happy child. The judge was sitting up and Lidia was leaning forward listening to the strange song. Antal knew what he was singing, because he too had sung it on the headmaster’s name day, strange as it was that Cato should have chosen it instead of a happier song. He had never known that his father-in-law remembered it. Vince would often sing at home but Antal had never heard him sing this before; it was an old tune with words by József Bajza:
Up in the castle chamber
torches blaze and glow
laments resound and echo
through the house below.
In the middle of the chamber
raised high up on her bier
a lovely virgin bride
lies dead and cannot hear.
Her cheeks and breasts are pale
like hills in a white shroud
her beautiful eyes closed
like stars behind a cloud.
Lidia was singing along with the sick man, evidently having learned the song, and didn’t notice him as he opened the door. The nurse’s voice was quiet but clear.
Ah would it were that I
lay on that bier instead,
not you, my lovely flower,
bright virgin of my bed.
The girl glanced up at Antal – was there ever such a meaningful look? Then she quickly turned her back and shook her head as if to say she had no need for help, the patient was quiet and, however strange it might sound, he actually felt well. Deep inside him Antal heard that strange, unexpectedly happy and innocent voice, half sighing, half out of breath, aware that it was impossible to get to the source of that gentle crooning.
Her cheeks and breasts are pale
like hills in a white shroud . . .
For the first time Lidia knew that if Antal ever asked her to take the place of Iza she could do so and would not, as she had always thought, continually have to be compared with her. The joy this brought was quickly succeeded by a vague sense of regret as if it had suddenly transpired that Dr Szőcs had been born with one leg but somehow nobody had noticed. The lovely virgin whose sad history Iza never wanted to hear was palely glowing on her bier as far as Lidia was concerned, but had also become an idea, a curious symbol. ‘Good Lord,’ thought Lidia, ‘how exhausted she must be with that constant self-discipline, that need to save not only her family but the whole world. How hard to live with the hardness of heart that dares not indulge itself by grieving over dead virgins! The poor woman believes that old people’s pasts are the e
nemy. She has failed to notice how those pasts are explanations and values, the key to the present.’
While Vince was dying and imagined his daughter was sitting beside him, Lidia talked to him as if she were Iza. But when he died and Iza tried to give her money, she felt Iza had been lying to her in some way, that she had cheated on her feelings and that she hadn’t deserved such adulation. Now that Lidia had taken her place at her father’s deathbed, Iza’s offer of money was positively insulting to her. Here at the police station, looking at Iza’s tired face, she felt, for the first time, indifferent to her. She was over both adulation and loathing: there was no more jealousy or pity. She was so indifferent to her now that she could wish her well without any personal ill feeling; all she hoped was that, just once in her life, she might be obliged to listen to the ballad of the virgin the way that everyone heard it or would hear it in this or that form, that, like the knight, she might tread the hall in torchlight, look into the dead bride’s face and gaze at her white breast.
Iza’s mother, whom they wanted to adopt because Antal said she had become a shadow of herself, someone frightened of everything and quite without resources in Budapest, had not called on Iza in her last moments. Lidia knelt beside her the way she had knelt by Vince in March. The old woman suffered and was thirsty, and kept saying, ‘Water.’ What had Iza done to her, Lidia wondered as she gazed impassively at Iza’s tortured face. What could Iza have done to make the old woman forget her name down the narrow path that lead to her death?
5
THE DRUNK AND the nightwatchman had to stay behind, the rest could go. The nightwatchman was waving his hands about trying to explain something, the drunk paid no attention to him. His eyes were searching for Iza. He made his awkward way over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Iza started back. It wasn’t because there was alcohol on his breath; in fact, he had an unnaturally clean smell as though he had spent the morning scrubbing himself in readiness for the police. His eyes were full of tears as he stroked Iza’s back and muttered something. Iza retreated from him in disgust. She hated unwanted physical closeness and loathed it when people offered excuses. Cheap emotions were there to be controlled.
Domokos stood between them and gazed at the drunk’s silly frightened face. Here was the unwitting clumsy instrument of death. The nightwatchman was still explaining things to the policeman. Domokos took the drunk’s hand and shook it. Iza was astounded when she saw him sympathising with the man, saying comforting words. Why was he spending his time with that good-for-nothing sniveller who stank of shaving lotion? ‘There was nothing you could do,’ Domokos was saying, ‘and it’s too late now anyway. Don’t blame yourself.’ Domokos’s words hurt her but she didn’t want to show it. Why console a stranger, the very man whose fault it all was?
When the group split up it was like breaking the links of a chain.
Lidia was first to leave, saying a brief goodbye as she got into the car. Antal shook everyone’s hand and said he too had to go and that they could meet in the afternoon. Iza could arrange where they were to dine, whether at home or elsewhere. Gica could put on the heating and arrange everything. Gica gave him an evil look as he sat in the car next to Lidia and the vehicle started towards the clinic. ‘How easily he has learned to sit in big cars and have things on tap,’ Gica raged. ‘His father used to run about wearing trousers tucked up to his knees and never shaved.’ She remembered him – he had brought hot water to their yard also.
Then she too was sitting in a car next to Domokos and she really enjoyed it. She’d have liked to prepare a first-class dinner to impress ‘the visitors from Pest’, but both Domokos and Iza turned down her offer, saying she should go to no trouble at all and that she should cook only for Antal as usual. They would eat at the tavern. The last thing they wanted was to waste her time.
Their rejection both delighted and offended Gica. At least they knew not to order her about, not like this tankardman’s son. They’d not order dinner from her as though she were a cook in a canteen, but at the same time she was jealous and nervous because she felt left out of something and guessed that she might increasingly be left out of things as characters from her early life gradually disappeared. Vince was gone and Ettie too. Iza would be a very rare visitor now, that is if she visited at all, and the nurse didn’t look particularly friendly. As for Antal, she never did like him. She realised that sheer penury would eventually force her to revive her friendship with Kolman, though she had sworn never to deal with him again, not since he had obliged her to put her hand-picked potatoes back into the bag seven years ago. At least Kolman remembered what the town was like in their youth and was chatty with everyone who used his shop. Gica suddenly felt like crying though she couldn’t have explained why. She took in Domokos’s dog-like eyes and ginger mane and thought, ‘He’s not an ugly man.’ They took her home and she stepped proudly from the car, glancing round to see if anyone was watching.
*
Domokos was lost in his own thoughts.
It was a new experience for him to examine himself rather than others and it felt strange. Ever since childhood Domokos had loved looking at things and he could make his way among people. Being neither vain nor lyrical, he wasn’t greatly interested in himself. Before, he would have committed the hall of The Lamb to visual memory, noting those fittings so tasteful yet tasteless at the same time, those glass cabinets with local items such as the clay pipe, the glazed honey cake and the fancy needlework. He would have noted the agronomists with their briefcases and hotel bills, as they slapped down their enormous room keys on the reception counter. He would have mentally photographed the dining room. Not this time. Though the menu offered some dishes he had never heard of, specialities of the town, he didn’t linger over it but ordered a simple wiener schnitzel.
‘This is a life-changing moment,’ thought Domokos. ‘I must make a decision the way I did at the outbreak of war. It is exactly as when I am writing. I must not only decide what to write, but know why I am writing it. It’s like being at the edge of a cliff. One wrong step and I fall. I must take the right step. I’m pretty sure I want to live. I don’t know it for certain but I think so.’
Iza ate slowly, without appetite, then pulled herself together and the colour returned to her cheeks though she still looked tired and sad. From time to time she glanced up from her plate. Their chairs were close together. They were more intimate now, she thought, than at any time in Budapest, however passionate. She resolved to cut all contact with the town and to bring the matter of Antal to a close too.
Domokos didn’t know how the morning had affected her but felt there was a space behind that stiff, all-comprehending façade, a void he might fill if he wanted to. Iza looked gentle, quiet and graceful. ‘Help me,’ said the arc of her neck, said her silence, said all her calm tired movements. ‘I trust you. Heal me! I am in great pain! I dearly loved my mama.’
They walked home slowly, Domokos leaving his car in front of The Lamb. He didn’t look at the shop displays but took the odd glance at the leaden autumn sky and at the dignified yellow mass of the church. Iza occasionally nodded to someone and Domokos too bent his head as they went by. He was pale, tense and unhappy. They were already at the gate when the writer said he wouldn’t go in because he had to lie down quietly by himself for a while. The day had not been easy for him either.
‘Stay,’ said Iza. ‘Why go back to Dekker’s just because you’re tired? There’s room enough here.’
Domokos said he’d sooner rest at the clinic.
Iza looked away quickly. She was rarely wrong in her diagnoses and could read symptoms, even hidden ones, because she was insistent, careful and patient. But she was mistaken this time, though she didn’t know it, in thinking about why Domokos didn’t want to rest precisely here in her old family home. ‘Shall I come with you?’ she asked uncertainly. She was afraid he’d say yes. She would have hated to have been anywhere near her mother’s poor broken body.
Domokos shook his head. Iza ha
d to relax too, he shouldn’t deprive her of her rest. He’d ring tomorrow, and they’d arrange a time and place to meet. There were crowds of people at the clinic and she must have had enough talking for tonight; they should both get some sleep. Iza agreed, though she would have preferred not to be left alone and feared letting him go too far out of her sight. She couldn’t have said why it frightened her that he wasn’t going to stay, it just did.
Domokos knew that she was begging him to stay though she hadn’t actually said anything; she simply stood at the gate, her hands clutched together, pleading with her eyes. ‘One wrong step and I fall,’ thought Domokos. ‘I’ll fall the way the old woman fell. When I was in my teens I had a statue of justice on the shelf above my bed and twice a day I prayed to it. I pray to it now. God help her, the poor thing!’
He kissed her: a long, thirsty, compassionate kiss. Iza felt how hot his face was and how his kiss was different, sadder, somehow despairing. It was not the way he used to kiss her. His expression was unusual, so flushed, so unhappy. The guardian angel that had flitted from the old woman’s side when she chased her away at Balzsamárok appeared for a moment, hovered behind Iza and whispered in her ear that she shouldn’t let Domokos go, that she should run after him, weep, plead, clutch at him. But Iza stood silently and watched as the man vanished down Budenz Alley, passing through the narrow, almost touching walls, and she did not hear what the angel said because only the old woman had ever been able to hear it after all.