by Magda Szabo
Irén had always wanted to be his, his alone and no one else’s. But not like this, not at such a time, not in the air-raid shelter, and certainly not simply because he was filled with grief at the loss of Henriette. It was so evident that she did not want him at that moment that his hand suddenly stopped moving and let her go. Their engagement rings flashed simultaneously in the lamplight. Irén got up and straightened her clothes, gasping for breath.
“Irén Elekes,” he said, as one addresses a pupil at school. “Irén Elekes, daughter of Abel Elekes. Go. Take yourself off. Leave me. I shall amuse myself here on my own. Go to bed like a good little girl.”
He turned his back on her, poured himself another full glass, then let it fall. It rolled across the floor, slowly spilling the wine. “A drunk,” Irén said to herself. She could take no more. She would have to go and shout it out in a voice to wake the entire household: “There’s a drunken soldier on the property, looting the shelter.”
She made for the door but stopped before she got there. She had heard Bálint cursing and sobbing once again. She knew he wasn’t weeping for her, or even for the two of them, and she ran on up the stairs. At the gate into the garden she bumped into Blanka. Blanka was standing there, with Irén’s dressing gown pulled over her nightdress, leaning forward in the attitude of a listener. Amid the fragrant shrubbery she looked like a figure in a painting.
“Why did you leave him?” she asked, so softly that her lips barely moved. “Why have you come up here?”
Irén made no reply. Her little sister’s eyes took in the disheveled hair, the state of her clothes, the missing top button.
“What’s he doing down there?” she whispered. Irén had the strange feeling that she knew everything that had gone on in the shelter.
“He’s drinking and sobbing.”
Later she seemed to remember Blanka murmuring, “The poor man.” The younger sister pushed her gently aside and, with a movement of her chin, pointed her toward the garden gate.
“Go to bed.”
Later on she realized that she was the one who should have gone back down into the cellar and sent Blanka off to bed. But she didn’t. Blanka took a deep breath, like someone about to immerse herself in cold water, and went in through the little door. Irén heard her lock it from the inside.
When Irén became Bálint’s wife, they didn’t wait for night to fall. He took her straight to the bedroom. In the middle of their embrace she suddenly had the feeling that he was in a hurry, that he just wanted to get it over with. Her own feelings weren’t much different; she had a vague feeling that it would have been better with Pali. It was a sunny afternoon, around a quarter to three. As soon as she let him go he reached across to the edge of the sofa and, naked as he was, began to read the newspaper.
1952
BÁLINT had been taken prisoner here in Budapest, transported out of the country, and was among the last to return. Compared to most, he returned in a relatively good physical state, having spent his last years of captivity working in a hospital. I knew nothing of what had happened to him: not a single message from him had reached us, though we later discovered he had sent several. After years had passed without news of him, despite other prisoners having long since returned, my parents and Mrs. Temes became convinced that he was no longer alive. I was the only one who still believed he really would come back, I and Blanka. She was always optimistic, and I simply couldn’t accept that life would deprive me of something I wanted so very much. For the old people it seemed somehow natural that he should have disappeared, along with everything else. The Biró household no longer existed, the Major had died in the war, and in the years after Bálint had been taken prisoner their house had been expropriated. Mrs. Temes had managed to save a few of his possessions, in two large trunks, by fraudulently claiming that they had belonged to her late husband. In the chaos after the war she too had had to leave the house. Even if Bálint had been there at the time it would have been difficult for him to explain what sort of person his father had been, the people he had helped, and his role in the lives of so many others. His circle of friends, those he had tried to protect but had been unable to save for lack of time, had been killed off one by one. People who hadn’t known him personally knew nothing of his work, only that he had died at the front, and by then it was no longer safe even to mention his name.
So the Birós’ house was taken over by the state and the furniture distributed among people dispossessed in the bombing. Mrs. Temes moved out and came to live with us—our house had been classified as too large for our needs and we were required to take in a lodger. In fact her arrival made little difference. We didn’t think of it as having a stranger in our midst, because indeed she wasn’t one. In fact, having her with us proved a great help. Blanka now had a job, in an office in the hospital where Bálint worked. She had secured it through the Major’s influence immediately after passing her last exams, half a year before Bálint was taken prisoner. To our surprise she enjoyed the work, even though she typed atrociously, scattered filing cards everywhere and often lost them. Every so often she received commendations when the families of patients wrote to say what a great help she had been with her few words of comfort, her perennial optimism, and her cheerful smile as she told them not to worry because the patients there always got better.
There were now three of us earning a living, and somehow we managed to get by. In the first school in which I worked the atmosphere felt as natural to me as if I had been born there. My father was delighted when it became apparent that I had inherited his gift for passing on knowledge and ideas and that, despite some initial problems due to inexperience, I was proving to be an excellent teacher. I immersed myself in the life of the school, taking to it as a duck takes to water. I was kept very busy, but I didn’t mind: I loved the work, and the good thing was it left me little time to spend wondering where Bálint was, what he was doing, when he would come back, and what shape our lives would take thereafter.
I was on my way home after school, late one afternoon in 1949, and turning down by the church into Katalin Street, when I spotted him in the distance, walking along the road. He was carrying a parcel, not by the string it was wrapped in but squeezed under his arm. Having recognized him from the back I began to run. I caught up with him just as he stopped. A woman was asking him something, presumably for news of her husband or son. I literally tore him away from her, though she tagged along with us for a while, seeming unable to understand that he had no news to give her and that the two of us were in some way connected. She danced along beside us, tugging at his sleeve and shouting something, I can’t remember what.
We didn’t kiss. We just walked on. I clung to his free left arm and gripped his hand, tears streaming down my face. His features never moved. He too was overjoyed, but somehow he managed to be much more self-controlled than I was. He was heading for his old house and wanted me to go there with him, so the first words he heard from me, apart from shouting out his name and a few stammered words, were not “So you’ve come home; I love you so much” but the revelation that the house was no longer theirs and he would now be living with us. By then we were standing outside his front door. For some minutes he stared at the handle in silence, then turned away and went on with me toward our house.
He could not have hoped for a warmer welcome than the one he received. Mrs. Temes, shrewd, sensible, and reserved as she was, hugged him and kissed him, probably for the first time since he had become a man, and even my mother’s childish giggles had something restrained about them. She neither threw herself at him nor swamped him with silly questions or dark tales of disaster. My father’s delight was betrayed only by the way he pottered about in silence. I was the least relaxed of all of us, because Bálint was showing the same degree of reserve towards me. When Blanka arrived home from the cinema he tried to lift her off her feet the way he once did, but he failed. He said she weighed a ton, and his muscles weren’t what they had been. I stayed aloof from all of this, both em
barrassed and on my guard. Whenever I finally got something I had wanted very badly, it always took a while before I could behave naturally again.
Bálint’s case passed quickly through the review and normalization process, he returned to his job in the hospital, and life resumed its course. Every morning the four of us would set off to work, Bálint and Blanka to the hospital and my father and I to our respective schools. When we pressed Bálint with questions about his time as a prisoner he simply responded with amusing anecdotes. I never once heard him complain. But the months went by and he still was not his old self. He almost never kissed me, and when he did it was on my hair or my cheek; occasionally he would squeeze my hand or stroke my shoulder—as if a mere gentle touch were sufficient substitute for proper physical contact.
As time went by I found that increasingly unsatisfactory. Once I had gotten over the stress of thinking I would never see him again and had grown used to the fact that he really was back, my body began to crave what it had been so abruptly denied on the evening of Henriette’s death. I was now twenty-five and had still not experienced lovemaking. We were living under the same roof, we were officially engaged to each other, and whenever we found ourselves together without other company I kept waiting for him to touch me the way he had on that previous occasion. Instead we lived like brother and sister. He gave most of his salary to my father for his board and lodging, and it was accepted, because even with our own three salaries just getting by was difficult. Had it not been for Mrs. Temes’s ingenuity we would have eaten even less well than we did. He lived with us, among us, alongside us, but never once talked of marriage.
I still had my engagement ring, but he no longer had his. Initially I was reluctant to raise the subject, then too embarrassed, and in the end I just didn’t dare. I sat and discussed the problem with Blanka, my parents, and Mrs. Temes in an attempt to fathom his behavior. My father took the view that it would be indelicate to sound him out directly, and he forbade Blanka from saying anything to him about it. In the end Mrs. Temes went to speak to him. She returned as soon as their conversation was over, whereupon Bálint immediately left the house, no doubt guessing that we would be picking over what he had told her. He had said that his future in the hospital was uncertain. He was being sidelined and deliberately underemployed, whereas my life was moving in the opposite direction and was clearly on the rise. I had somehow managed to gain acceptance and had landed on my feet, but he had no idea how his own future would turn out—probably he wouldn’t have one. He needed to know more about where he stood, and whether he was going to be left alone despite the fact of who his father had been. So we would just have to wait. At the moment he wasn’t in a position to resume where we had left off. If this was too much for my father to bear, or if I were to be presented with a better prospect, we should feel free to show him the door and he wouldn’t hold it against us.
I couldn’t look anyone in the face. I stared down at my lap, as if amazed that I should possess such things as hands and knees. My mother was beside herself, calling him every name under the sun, and Blanka shrieked that he was a coward. My father and Mrs. Temes were more reserved. My father, as a man, probably had a better insight into what Bálint was feeling, while Mrs. Temes made no bones about taking his side. She thought that, as far as it was possible, we should let him be. He was like his father, he had a proud nature, and it must be very hard for him to swallow the fact that rather than taking a wife he was now being taken in as a husband-to-be, and that instead of carrying Irén off to live with him in his father’s house, here he was, a mere lodger with her family.
When he finally arrived home that evening, and we had all had supper, I went with him into the garden. He told me, which I already knew, that Mrs. Temes had been putting her nose into our affairs and it was time for us to talk about things, for us to stand together. I told him I was in no hurry (I was in a desperate hurry but I was too proud to say so) and I would wait, if that was what he wanted. And he wasn’t to trouble himself about the fact that he was living with us. Things were fine as they were.
He looked at me and placed his hand on my knee. Where now was the soldier who had pressed those burning kisses on me, who had pulled me down beside him on the camp bed that evening in the shelter? He was handling me as if I were a child, a child close to him, a child he loved. I trembled under his touch and waited for him to tell me more than he had Mrs. Temes. He must surely have sensed how unhappy I was, how humiliated, and that the reasons he had given had not convinced me. Mrs. Temes might understand why he was looking for a way out but I certainly didn’t, because now that he was my fiancé he had absolutely nothing to fear. While his fingers lingered on my knee I was ready for everything. I was waiting for him to speak to me the way he had spoken to Henriette that night, to start telling me stories—that as soon as he felt more secure in his place of work he would take me to Salzburg or Rome, and seeing me would make the pope sad because he was not allowed to marry. But he said nothing. More precisely, what he did say left me stunned: “You are such a strong person, Irén, always so sure of everything.”
My father had raised me always to face up to things, to stand on my own two feet and not bellow like Blanka or shout and scream like my mother. Bálint did not elaborate on his remarks, but I knew what he was unable to say, what he was holding back: that he, in contrast, was weak and unsure of himself, and that he was for some reason deeply troubled precisely by what I considered the greatest of my virtues. Inside my head I was hearing something I really didn’t want to: that in the situation he found himself in, having lost his father and his home, and feeling so insecure in his job, he needed someone rather different, someone who could show him more understanding, someone like Henriette, perhaps. The two of them would have been able to share their doubts and confide their fears to each other—fears both for themselves and of something else as well, something I had no fear of because I didn’t know what it was or that it was lying in wait for me too. They would share the same awareness of the dead: she because she was no longer alive, and he because he had seen too much of death and had learned something in the prison camp that I knew nothing of but Henriette did, because she too had been a prisoner, if only briefly, in his father’s house.
We sat there in silence, like a well brought up brother and sister. It was the first time in my life that I had an inkling that the dead are not dead but continue living in this world, in one form or another, indestructibly. It occurred to me that if the Helds and the Major and Henriette had still been with us, then one day Bálint would kiss me again the way he had before. On the other hand, if those who had died had taken something fundamental away from him in their dying, then I would probably never be able to give that back to him, not because I didn’t love him, or because I wasn’t trying hard enough, but because there was no way in which I conceivably could. It was simply impossible.
So there we sat. I had only ever seen the Major’s wife in a painting, the one in which she held a tiny Bálint on her lap, being dandled close to her. And here he was, sitting beside me, and I knew I could do nothing more for him than let him lean on my shoulder and offer him a few minutes’ support, and that he would want nothing more. I still loved him, even though I had guessed some time before what had been made so clear that evening, both about him and the others. But I still wanted to marry him, even though I knew it would be rather like Lenore’s marriage to Wilhelm in the German ballad. Bálint, like Wilhelm, had died in his own Battle of Prague, and if he did ever become mine, I too would have a very strange husband indeed, in a relationship every bit as bizarre, unreal, and terrifying as the girl finds in the legend. He asks her, Graut’s Liebchen auch? (Are you frightened too, my dear?) No, I wasn’t afraid, not at all. I wanted him, even though I knew that it would bring me endless pain and trouble. I felt the same way years later when he told me at the exhibition, without any preamble, that he would marry me—even though by then I was married to Pali, Kinga had been born, and it was a long time since I had las
t loved him.
In the years that followed my father had good reason to be proud of me. I was promoted to the role of deputy head at an incredibly early age, moving into the top rank of my profession. He felt that all his own thwarted ambitions were being realized in me, and he was happy. My mother understood little of my working life, but her face lit up every time she looked at me, and each time I came home and recounted the day’s doings and my triumphs therein she listened with open mouth. She was in fact so happy and so proud of me that she made an effort to be more disciplined herself. Neighbors and colleagues from the school often came to the apartment to talk about things and discuss concerns of mutual interest over a cup of coffee, and when anyone arrived she would rush out of the room to adjust her permanently wrinkled stockings and then make a real effort to say something intelligent. But even if I had been a more outgoing person I would never have been able to share my burden with any of these people. My one confidante was Blanka.
My little sister had often been in love during this period, only to be disillusioned time after time. We all suspected that she was leading a rather freer sort of life than we imagined, but the subject was never mentioned: a chatterbox she might be, but she also knew how to stay silent when she wanted. Her childish boisterousness was now much softened, and when I woke her abruptly from her dreams because I needed to talk about things I had been too ashamed to mention during the day, she always listened attentively and sympathetically. At first she reassured me, saying that one day the lunatic would come to his senses, but as time passed she became less certain and eventually stopped offering these consolations altogether. When my expressions of unhappiness and concern were met only with silence, I realized that something was going on that Bálint wasn’t telling me. I continued to wait for an explanation. It took some time, but in the end it came.