by Magda Szabo
For Henriette “home” was effectively all three houses, and her visits always took in both of the neighbors. She knew that, properly speaking, she ought to go back out into the street and enter by the front door or not at all, but she also remembered those strict instructions not to use that route, only the one behind the hedge at the bottom of the gardens. She knew that at the far end, behind the bushes, there was a place where the nails had been removed from some planks in each of the fences that separated their house from the others. The planks would move at a mere touch to create an opening, almost as if someone were waiting on the other side to receive her.
First she would push aside the boards at the bottom of the Birós’ garden and slip through. There, Bálint was always waiting for her. She never, on these occasions, had to tell him how strange it was for her to see him looking so surreal, so very old, with his prematurely rounded back, and so thin—that troubling thought never occurred to her because, although the Bálint she was familiar with in her present life was almost fifty, on these trips home it was always the real one standing there, the one aged twenty-two. He accompanied her in silence as she carried out her round of inspection.
In the garden, nothing ever changed. The bronze fish still glinted in the sun, the water flashed, the fir trees stood darkly to attention, more black than green. Bálint never seemed surprised that she should want to take it all in. The governess, Mrs. Temes, was also aware of this habit, and even the Major had grown accustomed to it.
The moment she stepped inside and into the entrance hall she was struck by the characteristic smells of leather, turpentine, and mothballs. Seeing Mrs. Temes standing at the foot of the stairs, nodding and laughing, filled her with a longing to see the Major himself—the Major, that is, who used to live here, as he had been. That Major controlled everything around him with a glance, and Mrs. Temes would tremble in fear and wring her hands if she burned anything. But in his transformed state his behavior was unbearable. The moment he caught sight of his parents he would throw himself to the ground and become a child, cursing and blaspheming; his hands shrank to the size of a child’s fist, smaller even than Henriette’s, and he would shake them in fury at his father for forcing him to become a soldier. But here it was always the real Major, even when she found him dozing on the leather sofa, rigid in his slumbers, so unlike a civilian. “Only a soldier could sleep like that,” she thought. She gently touched him too—face, lips, eyes, and eyelids, all warm to the fingertips.
Bálint followed her patiently everywhere while she carried out her tour of the house. In the dining room she found the nine chairs all present and correct, with the same pictures embroidered on their backs of young women carrying baskets from which spilled huge bunches of grapes. Mrs. Temes was the only woman in the house because the Major’s wife had died soon after Henriette moved into the street. Whenever she went into the wife’s room, Henriette always hesitated a moment, looked at Bálint, wondered whether to say something to him, and decided not to. He would never understand.
She passed straight through the salon. It was not a room she liked. No guests were ever entertained there, the windows were never opened, and the air was stale. She dwelt rather longer in Bálint’s room, among the sheet music and the medical textbooks. One of its walls, the narrowest, was almost entirely taken up by a portrait of the Major’s late wife, shown as a slim, smiling young woman standing on a patch of grass before an unnaturally large expanse of sky, with the child Bálint on her knee, snuggled up against her.
On the landing where the wooden staircase turned she found the bowl of fruit that was always left there for her when she came back, and greedily ate the handful of cherries. Then, assured at last that nothing here had changed, she breathed a sigh of happiness and continued on her way to the Elekes house. She went back the way she had come. Mrs. Temes watched her, shaking her head in disapproval: it wasn’t right to go come and go by way of the fence. But she said nothing. It was what the Major wished, and the Major always knew best. Bálint went with the girl. It was part of the order of things that he should accompany her, and then wait for her in her own garden until she had finished her inspection of the Elekes house and returned, bringing Irén and Blanka with her. Running to the gap in the fence between the houses she once again caught the unvarying hum of her father’s drill.
Here the opening was much larger, ten times the size of the first. At the mere touch of her little finger half of it slid down and there stood the Elekeses’ house and garden. On the other side of the fence Blanka was waiting for her, and she was immediately assailed by the almost brutal scent of the flowers. Blanka was in tears, but that was no surprise: Blanka was always in tears; something was always happening to upset her. Now she followed Henriette just as Bálint had done in the previous garden, floundering along behind her in her clumsy wooden clogs. Henriette was all too familiar with the unreal Blanka—she had spent quite enough time with her on that clifftop, with the sea churning and foaming below—but she had no desire at this moment to think of the island where that version of her friend now lived.
The two girls went first into the study. There Uncle Elekes was in his usual place in front of the bookshelves, correcting children’s homework beneath the bust of Cicero, the skin on top of his marble-like head gleaming softly. He didn’t look up. Henriette was always delighted when she found him writing or reading, absorbed in words on a page. In the morning room she found Auntie Elekes, sewing her cushions as usual—Lord knows how many!—with scissors and reels of cotton spread all around her and her thimble lying abandoned. There was another Auntie Elekes, one who took the unreal Uncle Elekes out for walks and was thin as a wisp of thread herself, but this was the real one, the cushion-maker, plump as one of her own creations. The chaos in the room was appalling, with every seat and chair buried out of sight under random odds and ends.
Irén she would always find in the dining room, laying the table. With her, putting out even the most commonplace spread of snacks took on the quality of a ritual, as for an important birthday celebration. She never looked at Henriette or even greeted her. Until they had gone together back to the Helds’ neither of them would greet the other or speak. Irén was wearing an apron, and not a hair on her head was out of place, even though she was leaning over her work. She was the only one whose unreal form was anything like her real one, even at this age. At forty-four she still came hurrying home with the same rapid steps, the same immaculate hair. The university lecture notes on her desk in the girls’ shared bedroom were stacked neatly together. Beside Blanka’s bed lay scattered piles of schoolbooks and an upturned inkwell. Everything in the kitchen, the entrance hall, and the bedroom was exactly as it had been. Reassured that nothing had changed, Henriette felt that life could begin again.
Irén and Blanka followed her through the gap in the fence, as Bálint had done earlier. He would always be standing exactly where he had left her. Again, nothing was said, not even an exchange of greetings, but everyone knew what Henriette wanted. The three girls took up positions at the corners of a triangle, with Bálint in the center as dictated by the rules of the game. “The cherry tree leans over / Casting a long dark shadow / Where the dark little girl / Sits below . . .” The circle they made around him by stretching out their arms was a tight one, difficult to turn inside. “She is the one I love, / She is the one I choose.” Only Henriette and Blanka sang, Henriette’s voice soft and faint, Blanka’s strong and firm. The humming of the drill accompanied the song but did not drown it out. “Take her now, dear heart, / Take up the one you love, / Whirl her away. . .” Bálint reached out and drew Henriette to him. The two other girls were not enough to sustain the circle, and their arms fell. They stood watching Bálint and Henriette spinning around together—Irén in silence, Blanka continuing to sing. The sun always shone when Blanka was at home.
MOMENTS AND EPISODES
1934
HENRIETTE always insisted that she had a perfectly clear memory of the day they moved into Katalin Str
eet, but that could hardly have been true. If by “remember” she meant things she could recall directly herself, then that extended only to the general upheaval and excitement, the train going over the bridges, and the faces of one or two people who would play important roles later on in her life. Everything else had been told her by her parents, by the Elekes family, or by Bálint, who was the oldest of the four children and the one with the clearest recollection of events. Likewise, with the exception of a single sentence, her “recollection” of what had been said on that day had also come down to her, in all its detail, through her parents or the other children. She had, after all, been just six years old when they moved from the country.
The excitement of moving and the general disarray that led up to it had stayed with her because it was all so unlike what usually prevailed in their house. The fact that she was leaving her grandparents behind—grandparents with whom she had had such frequent contact—did not really register with her. She could see that it was something that gave her parents real concern, and she heard them promising each other that they would visit the old people regularly and have them to stay, but she had no idea what separation really meant. Nor did the idea of moving to Budapest mean much to her. She had been born there, but she knew very little about it.
Henriette had always been a rather solemn child, but it surprised her parents to see quite how upset she became once the move began. They themselves had both been rather happy as children and they thought that young people always rather enjoyed it when their home was turned upside down. But when the men started taking their belongings out, Henriette stood watching them, helpless, disconsolate, and increasingly distressed, and her mother had to stop what she was doing and sit with her, pressing the mutely protesting little body to her side. One after another the larger items of furniture were uprooted from their familiar places, left standing for a few minutes by the front door, then hoisted swiftly into the van; or they appeared one by one from all directions, made their way through the clutter in the room, out into the street, and up to the top of the stack already on board. Meanwhile, in the middle of every room, huge trunks and plump wickerwork baskets filled to overflowing with smaller items stood waiting their turn. Henriette knew that they were going away and would have to take all their possessions with them, but seeing it happen horrified her. Her father had too many other things to deal with to be able to spend time with her, so the task of coping with this unexpected reaction fell to her mother. Mrs. Held was filled with concern about what sort of life there might be in Pest for a child who was so comfortably settled where she was, who really loved her home, her friends in the street, and the whole neighborhood: a child, in short, who was so happy in that town. But her fears proved groundless. Henriette quickly stopped thinking about her old home, and when, as a much older child, she saw images of it in a film, she could identify the principal buildings and prominent statues only by her parents’ animated response.
Once their possessions had gone, her mother traveled on ahead, leaving her to spend a few days with her father in a local hotel. The separation from her mother had also faded from her memory, no doubt because she rarely spent as much time with her father as she did with her mother, and when she did, the joy of being with him cast a radiance, even a sense of being “at home,” over the strangeness of the hotel and the dining room where they ate.
They told her that she had enjoyed the train journey, and she could well imagine that. Train journeys always begin with little presents, the sort of trifles sold only in stations, and on this occasion her father had made her drop some money into the side of a machine shaped like an iron hen and pull out a drawer containing a metal egg filled with sweets. Her toys at home were all of the well-made, improving variety, so this frivolous and grotesque piece of commercial flummery came as a thrilling novelty.
What she did remember was crossing the bridges. The first time they went over one, on the way to Budapest, she was terrified. It was the first long journey she had ever made, the first time she had traveled over a river, and she lived the experience with all the intensity of childhood: to be traveling over water, in a train! She had first seen the river in the distance, then suddenly they were roaring across the bridge, clattering and banging between iron girders that kept racing toward them. She screamed and began to sob. It wasn’t that she was afraid of the water. She wasn’t thinking that the bridge might collapse. It was the noise that terrified her, this sudden clattering and banging that had not been there before they reached the bridge and then stopped the moment they left it.
Before they reached the next one her father made her lie down on the seat and covered her ears with his hands. That shut out most of the uproar, but the rest of her little face peered out between his palms in terror, and the tears kept coming. When they got to Pest and had to cross over the Danube to reach the Watertown district and their new home, he blocked her ears once again as a precaution. But this time their carriage ran much more quietly.
Henriette was reminded of this last detail some years later, when she was much older. She ran straight to the mirror to see what she looked like with her ears covered and immediately pulled her hands away. There was something grotesque, terrifying even, in what she had seen. “How horrible,” she thought. “A face with its ears torn off by fear.”
How and where she first heard mention of the Biró family was beyond her recall, but she had always thought of the name as having a special significance. Probably her father had talked about them when the idea of moving to Pest was first mooted. The term “Great War” meant nothing to her at the time, though she did know that her father had been in the army. It was only much later that she came to understand his relationship with the Major. At this stage she knew only that a good friend of her father’s would be a neighbor, and how delightful it was that they had been able to buy the house next door to him. It took several more years for her to piece the details together.
Immediately on graduating Mr. Held had volunteered for the front, where his exceptional aptitude and courage brought him to the Major’s attention. Until the 1940s none of this, or the various honors he had won, had meant much to Henriette. Only in time did she realize that his gold medal for bravery had become a symbol, a steel bolt in the fabric of their existence, a thing on which their lives and safety depended. Once that bolt was removed, everything else would come crashing down.
Her father’s friendship with the Major had been kept up after the war, and when they decided to move to the capital, he had found the house for them and told them who their other neighbors would be, adding how pleased he was that they would be living in such close proximity. The Elekes family had never been talked about much in Henriette’s old home because her father knew very little about them, only what the Major had told him.
Again, none of this was what Henriette remembered, only what she was told later. But she did recall the car turning into Katalin Street. She had seen the church and the statue in front of it—a woman standing on a wheel—and there was a narrow little street with houses on one side but no buildings along the other, only an avenue of short lime trees with thick trunks and the Danube glittering between them. The houses—tall, narrow edifices standing at the foot of Castle Hill—were very different from the ones she was used to. Of the Castle itself she knew nothing. It was a source of awe and wonder, like an illustration from her book of fairy tales. At the far end of the street was a strange little construction whose nature and purpose she could not begin to imagine. Where she had lived before she had never seen a European-style well, let alone a Turkish one. It must have been early summer, because there were blossoms on the lime trees and she had noticed the scent.
At the door of her new home she found her mother waiting for her, with Margaret at her side. Her father let go of her hand and she ran to Mrs. Held. She was so overcome with joy that she didn’t tell her about the bridge crossings, though the experience was still very much with her. The sheer wonder of having a home again, even more beautif
ul and spacious than the old one, with Margaret there too, and being close to her mother again, thrilled her beyond words. There her memories faded and wandered elsewhere within that first day. Now her mother was standing in the arched entrance hall, not with Margaret this time but with a woman she did not know. This in itself was no surprise. Strangers were always coming and going at the Helds’. What was surprising was the woman’s slatternly appearance. Instinctively tidy herself, Henriette could only stare at the sagging folds in the stockings and at the dress, which was not very clean and seemed to have been thrown on in a hurry. What astonished her even more was that when she went back into the house two girls came out of her bedroom—her bedroom! One was dark-haired, the other fair. They stood in the doorway, looking much more at home than she did—she whose actual home it was—each clutching one of her toys. Their faces and what they were wearing were printed on her memory in every detail. “These are your new friends!” her mother announced. Henriette just stood, staring at these “friends” of whose existence she had been so completely unaware. But the fact of their existence, and their obvious acceptance of her, filled her with comfort and contentment.
Both were older than she was. The taller one was dark-haired, a quiet, slow-moving, gracious girl; the younger seemed altogether more vivacious and bore a striking resemblance to the woman in the wrinkled stockings. The house, which had all this time been spinning dizzily around her under the torrent of new impressions, came suddenly to rest, supported now, as on two caryatids, on the shoulders of these two girls, the dark one and the fair. The former seemed almost as solemn a person as Henriette herself. The fair-haired one was in constant movement, wriggling like an eel. Never in her life had Henriette seen anyone quite so restless.