The Door Read online

  MAGDA SZABÓ (1917–2007) was born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary’s “Calvinist Rome,” in the midst of the great Hungarian plain. Szabó, whose father taught her to converse with him in Latin, German, English, and French, attended the University of Debrecen, studying Latin and Hungarian, and went on to work as a teacher throughout the German and Soviet occupations of Hungary in 1944 and 1945. In 1947, she published two volumes of poetry, Bárány (The Lamb), and Vissza az emberig (Return to Man), for which she received the Baumgartner Prize in 1949. Under Communist rule, this early critical success became a liability, and Szabó turned to writing fiction: her first novel, Freskó (Fresco), came out in 1958, followed closely by Az oz (The Fawn). In 1959 she won the József Attila Prize, after which she went on to write many more novels, among them Katalin utca (Katalin Street, 1969), Ókút (The Ancient Well, 1970), Régimódi történet (An Old-Fashioned Tale, 1971), and Az ajtó (The Door, 1987). Szabó also wrote verse for children, plays, short stories, and nonfiction, including a tribute to her husband, Tibor Szobotka, a writer and translator of Tolkien and Galsworthy who died in 1982. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and a warden of the Calvinist Theological Seminary in Debrecen, Magda Szabó died in the town in which she was born, a book in her hand. In 2017 NYRB Classics will publish Iza’s Ballad (1963).

  LEN RIX is a poet, critic, and former literature professor who has translated five books by Antal Szerb, including the novel Journey by Moonlight (available as an NYRB Classic) and, most recently, the travel memoir The Third Tower. In 2006 he was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his translation of The Door.

  ALI SMITH was born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her latest novel is How to Be Both.

  THE DOOR

  MAGDA SZABÓ

  Translated from the Hungarian by

  LEN RIX

  Introduction by

  ALI SMITH

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1987 by Magda Szabó, copyright © 2007 by the Estate of Magda Szabó

  Translation copyright © 2005 by Len Rix

  Introduction copyright © 2005 by Ali Smith

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Hungarian in 1987 as Az ajtó by Magvető. This translation first published in Great Britain in 2005 by Harvill Secker.

  Cover: Eva Hesse, Accession, 1968; courtesy of the Eva Hesse Estate and Hauser and Wirth

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Szabó, Magda, 1917–2007.

  [Ajtó. English]

  The door/Magda Szabo; [translated by] Len Rix; [introduction by] Ali Smith.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-801-0 () — ISBN 978-1-59017-771-6 (pbk.)

  1. Women—Hungary—Fiction. 2. Hungary—Politics and government—1945–1989—Fiction. I. Rix, L. B. (Len B.), translator. II. Title.

  PH3351.S592

  894'.51133—dc23

  2014039607

  ISBN 978-1-59017-801-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  THE DOOR

  The Door

  The Contract

  Christ’s Brothers and Sisters

  Viola

  Friends and Neighbours

  The Murano Mirror

  Junk Clearance

  Polett

  Politics

  Nádori-Csabadul

  Filming

  The Moment

  Lent

  Christmas Surprise

  Action

  Without Her Headscarf

  The Ceremony

  Amnesia

  Sutu

  Finale

  Inheritance

  The Solution

  The Door

  INTRODUCTION

  The proportion of books published in the English-speaking world that are translations, from all languages (and including best-selling crime novels), is currently about three percent.

  A result of this is that, unless we read other languages, we miss out on superlative novels like The Door by Magda Szabó. This American edition comes nearly thirty years after its original publication, and very little by Szabó, one of Hungary’s most eminent novelists, is available in English. But The Door is so full-blooded and stately a book that it clearly belongs with a shelf of equally fully made creations by the (now elderly) Szabó, every one of which the reader will want to find after finishing this compelling, funny, and horrifying novel, translated by Len Rix in a rich and calm tone.

  In modern postwar Hungary, an old woman who is now a famous author recalls a nightmare: herself as a young woman. The novel begins after she has passed through a “politically frozen” time and started to be able to write again and to be publicly lauded for it. She and her husband move up a step on the social ladder. They hire an old woman, Emerence, as a servant. Or is it the other way round? “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty linen,” Emerence says, coming to see their flat in her “ceremonial” headscarf and taking her time deciding whether they will suit her before she takes over the household, turns up for work whenever she feels like it, and bonds with the dog in a way no one else can.

  Emerence is primitive, demanding, and without religion in a way that makes her somehow full of God’s wrath. There is “something superhuman” about the way she can work. She feeds all the neighbourhood sick, sweeps all doorsteps; nothing human and in need is alien to this woman who has hidden refugees across the board from Fascist to Communist. Nothing animal is alien to her either. She has a belief in animal purity (“They can’t inform on us, or tell lies about us”) as well as an ability to beat animals into near-senseless submission. The novel’s narrator, the young writer, tries to be charmed by what she chooses to see as an embodiment of the old country. She wants intimacy. Emerence rebuffs all attempts at closeness and nostalgia and lives in a flat where nobody but herself (and the won-over dog) can get beyond the entrance. Rumors abound about what is behind the door and a smell of disinfectant seeps out under it.

  The narrator starts to wonder if Emerence is insane. She becomes so preoccupied with the slivers of autobiography Emerence feeds her that she forgets her husband’s grave illness. “The things she said were impossible, folk ballads in prose.” Their relationship transforms into one full of the barbed hostilities of love.

  Emerence treats her employers like children and fills their arty house with found junk, denting the writer’s pride at every turn. “She glanced at our books for only as long as it took to dust them.” The Door is also a commentary on the writing process, the snobberies of art, the uses and barters of creativity, and the ways in which stories and life conspire against the artist’s attempts to control them.

  The novel’s images are of actual doors to actual houses in the same way as its metaphors of paralysis are at home in a novel about unspoken ills and illness. Behind this novel’s own doors is a history of a “dull sort of shame,” casual brutality, and suspicion. Is Emerence’s flat full of goods stolen from the Jews, or goods given to her by a Jewish family she helped? At the center of this self-conscious narrative of a clash between high and low cultures is a story of such savagery that it demands both silence and truth. “I understood our recent history as I
never had before,” the writer says, after meeting Emerence head-on in yet another battle to the near-death between what is true and what is fiction.

  Questions of whether Emerence is the embodiment of monstrosity, the embodiment of Old Hungary, or the embodiment of dignity give way to a view of her as the embodiment of the human. This revelation, and the human brokenness of those to whom it is revealed, somehow allows for mythological status. The novel’s end is a sweeping and bathetic dismissal of material legacy. “Emerence was a mythological being and my inheritance might be anything,” the writer says, finally opening the door on what really does survive of us. Magda Szabó’s novel is a study of survival tactics, of finding voice out of silence, and of the ways in which authenticity dismisses fakery at every turn not just in art and culture but in a life truly lived, and truly ended.

  —ALI SMITH

  THE DOOR

  THE DOOR

  I seldom dream. When I do, I wake with a start, bathed in sweat. Then I lie back, waiting for my frantic heart to slow, and reflect on the overwhelming power of night’s spell. As a child and young woman, I had no dreams, either good or bad, but in old age I am confronted repeatedly with horrors from my past, all the more dismaying because compressed and compacted, and more terrible than anything I have lived through. In fact nothing has ever happened to me of the kind that now drags me screaming from my sleep.

  My dreams are always the same, down to the finest detail, a vision that returns again and again. In this never-changing dream I am standing in our entrance hall at the foot of the stairs, facing the steel frame and reinforced shatterproof window of the outer door, and I am struggling to turn the lock. Outside in the street is an ambulance. Through the glass I can make out the shimmering silhouettes of the paramedics, distorted to unnatural size, their swollen faces haloed like moons. The key turns, but my efforts are in vain: I cannot open the door. But I must let the rescuers in, or they’ll be too late to save my patient. The lock refuses to budge, the door stands solid, as if welded to its steel frame. I shout for help, but none of the residents of our three-storey building responds; and they cannot because — I am suddenly aware — I’m mouthing vacantly, like a fish, and the horror of the dream reaches new depths as I realise that not only am I unable to open the door to the rescuers but I have also lost the power of speech.

  It is at this point that I am woken by my own screaming. I switch on the light and try to control the desperate gasping for air which always seizes me after the dream. Around me stands the familiar furniture of our bedroom, and, over the bed itself, the family portraits, ikons in their high starched collars and braided coats, Hungarian Baroque and Beidermeier, my all-seeing, all-knowing ancestors. They alone are witness to the number of times I have raced down during the night to open the door to the rescuers and the ambulance; and they alone know how often I have stood there listening to the rustle of branches and the cries of prowling cats that fill the air, instead of the usual heavy rumble of the now silent streets, imagining what would happen if my struggle with the key proved in vain, and the lock failed to turn.

  The portraits know everything, above all the thing I try hardest to forget. It is no dream. Once, just once in my life, not in the cerebral anaemia of sleep but in reality, a door did stand before me. That door opened. It was opened by someone who defended her solitude and impotent misery so fiercely that she would have kept that door shut though a flaming roof crackled over her head. I alone had the power to make her open that lock. In turning the key she put more trust in me than she ever did in God, and in that fateful moment I believed I was godlike — all-wise, judicious, benevolent and rational. We were both wrong: she who put her faith in me, and I who thought too well of myself.

  Now, of course, none of that matters, because what happened is beyond remedy. So let them enter my dreams, the Kindly Ones, whenever they choose, with their high-heeled emergency-service buskins and tragic-mask faces beneath their safety helmets, to stand like a chorus with double-edged swords round my bed. Every night I turn out the light to wait for them, for the bell of this nameless horror to clang in my sleeping ear, for its ringing tones to lead me towards that dream-door that never opens.

  My religion has no place for the sort of personal confession where we acknowledge through the mouth of a priest that we are sinners, that we deserve damnation for breaking the Commandments in every possible way, and are then granted absolution without need for explanation or details.

  I shall provide that explanation, those details.

  This book is written not for God, who knows the secrets of my heart, nor for the shades of the all-seeing dead who witness both my waking life and my dreams. I write for other people. Thus far I have lived my life with courage, and I hope to die that way, bravely and without lies. But for that to be, I must speak out. I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.

  THE CONTRACT

  When we first met, I very much wanted to see her face, and it troubled me that she gave me no opportunity to do so. She stood before me like a statue, very still, not stiffly to attention but rather a little defeated-looking. Of her forehead I could see almost nothing. I didn’t know then that the only time I would ever see her without a headscarf would be on her deathbed. Until that moment arrived she always went about veiled, like a devout Catholic or Jewess sitting shiva, someone whose faith forbade her from venturing too near the Lord with an uncovered head.

  It was a summer’s day, but by no means one to call for or even suggest any special need for protection, as we stood together in the garden, under a twilight sky tinged with violet. Among the roses, she seemed thoroughly out of place. One can tell instinctively what sort of flower a person would be if born a plant, and her genus certainly wasn’t the rose, with its shameless carmine unfolding — the rose is no innocent. I felt immediately that Emerence could never be one, though I still knew nothing about her, or what she would one day become.

  Her scarf projected forward, casting a shadow over her eyes, and it was only later that I discovered that their irises were blue. I would have liked to know the colour of her hair, but she kept it covered, as she would for as long as it remained synonymous with her inner self.

  During that first early evening we lived through some important moments. We each had to decide whether we could live and work together. My husband and I had been in our new home for only a couple of weeks. It was substantially larger than the previous one-room apartment which I had managed without help, not least because for ten years my writing career had been politically frozen. Now it was picking up again and here, in this new setting, I had become a full-time writer, with increased opportunities and countless responsibilities which either tied me to my desk or took me away from home. So here I stood in the garden, face to face with this silent old woman, since it had become clear that if someone didn’t take over the housekeeping there would be little chance of my publishing the work I’d produced in my years of silence, or finding a voice for anything new I might have to say.

  I had begun enquiring about domestic help the moment we finished moving our library-sized collection of books and our rickety old furniture. I pestered everyone I knew in the neighbourhood until finally a former classmate solved our problem. She told us there was an old woman who had worked for her brother for more years than she could remember, and whom she recommended wholeheartedly, assuming the person could find the time. She’d be better than a younger woman, being guaranteed not to set fire to the house with a cigarette, have boyfriend problems or steal; in fact she was more likely to bring us things if she took a liking to us, as she was a relentless giver of gifts. She had never had a husband or children, but a nephew visited her regularly, as did a police officer, and everyone in the neighbourhood liked her. My former classmate spoke of her with warmth and respect, and added that Emerence was a caretaker, someone with a bit of authority; she hoped the woman would take us on, because frankly, if she didn’t warm to us, no amount of m
oney would induce her to accept the job.

  Things got off to a less than encouraging start. Emerence had been rather brusque when asked to call round for a chat, so I tracked her down in the courtyard of the villa where she was caretaker. It was close by — so close I could see her flat from our balcony. She was washing a mountain of laundry with the most antiquated equipment, boiling bedlinen in a cauldron over a naked flame, in the already agonising heat, and lifting the sheets out with an immense wooden spoon. Fire glowed all around her. She was tall, big-boned, powerfully built for a person of her age, muscular rather than fat, and she radiated strength like a Valkyrie. Even the scarf on her head seemed to jut forward like a warrior’s helmet. She had agreed to call, and so now we were standing here, in the garden in that twilight.

  She listened in silence while I explained what her duties would be. Even as I spoke I was thinking that I had never believed those nineteenth-century novelists who compared a character’s face to a lake. Now, as so often before, I felt ashamed to have dared question the classics. Emerence’s face resembled nothing so much as a calm, unruffled, early-morning mirror of water. I had no idea how interested she might be in my offer. Her demeanour made it quite clear that she needed neither the job nor the money. However desperate I might be to employ her, that mirror-lake face, in the shadow of its ceremonial scarf, gave nothing away. I waited for what seemed ages. When she did finally respond, she didn’t even raise her head. Her words were that perhaps we could talk about this later. One of her places of work was proving a disappointment. Both husband and wife were drinking too much, and the grown-up son was going to the dogs, so she wasn’t going to keep them on. Assuming that someone could vouch for us, and assure her that neither of us were likely to brawl or get drunk, we might perhaps discuss the matter again. I stood there dumbfounded. This was the first time anyone had required references from us. “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty linen,” she said.