Iza's Ballad Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Magda Szabó

  Title Page

  Part I: Earth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II: Fire

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part III: Water

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part IV: Air

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Copyright

  About the Book

  When Ettie’s husband dies, her daughter Iza insists that she give up the family house in the countryside and move to Budapest. Displaced from her community and her home, Ettie tries to find her place in this new life.

  Iza’s Ballad is the story of a woman who loses her life’s companion and a mother trying to get close to a daughter whom she has never truly known. It is about the meeting of the old-fashioned and the modern worlds and the beliefs we construct over a lifetime. Beautifully translated by poet George Szirtes, this is a profoundly moving novel with the unforgettable power of Szabó’s award-winning The Door.

  About the Author

  MAGDA SZABÓ was born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary. She began her literary career as a poet. In the 1950s she disappeared from the publishing scene for political reasons and made her living by teaching and translating from French and English. She began writing novels, and in 1978 she was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary. Her novel The Door was an international sensation, winning France’s Prix Femina Étranger and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and was made into a film starring Helen Mirren. Magda Szabó died in 2007.

  GEORGE SZIRTES is a T. S. Eliot Prizewinning poet and has recently won the Best Translated Book Award in the USA.

  Also by Magda Szabó in English translation

  The Door

  Iza’s Ballad

  Magda Szabó

  Translated from The Hungarian by George Szirtes

  I

  EARTH

  1

  THE NEWS ARRIVED just as she was toasting bread.

  Three years earlier Iza had sent them a clever little machine that plugged into the wall and made the bread come out a pale pink; she’d turned the contraption this way and that, examined it for a while, then stowed it on the bottom shelf of the kitchen cupboard, never to use it again. She didn’t trust machines, but then she didn’t trust things as basic as electricity. If there was a prolonged power cut or if lightning had disabled the circuit, she would take down the branched copper candelabrum from the top of the sideboard where the candles were always ready in case the lights went out, and would carry the delicate flame-tipped ornament through the kitchen and into the hall, raising it high above her head the way a tame old stag carries its tines. She couldn’t even get used to the idea of an electric toaster: she would have missed crouching by the fire, the fire itself and the strange noise of the embers so like the panting of a live being. The constantly changing colour of the cinders lent the room a peculiar life; when the fire was lit she didn’t feel she was alone, not even when the house was empty.

  There she was now, squatting on the stool beside the open stove, and when Antal rang the bell she suddenly didn’t know what to do with the miniature toasting fork so she took the thing with her, a piece of toast still stuck on the end of it. Antal stared at her at first, then took her arm and the clumsy gesture told her what he didn’t want to say. The old woman immediately welled up, but the tears refused to run and remained stubbornly balanced in the corners of her eyes. Her instinctive reaction was, however, governed by her more properly functioning good manners, which were a mixture of instinct and sound training. They even enabled her to force out a ‘Thank you, dear’.

  Of the two smaller rooms at her disposal, she only heated the back one. When they entered it and the old woman had lowered herself to the stool again, Antal warmed his hands on the side of the stove. They didn’t speak but understood each other perfectly. ‘I need to gather my strength,’ said the old woman’s thoughts. ‘I loved him very much.’ ‘Take your time, we’re in no hurry,’ Antal replied silently. ‘In any case there is no use you coming out, there’s no one there now. At least you wouldn’t know anyone who arrived after dawn. But I’ll take you out there, because you have a right to see them too, those people you wouldn’t know.’

  When they finally set off the old woman took along her string bag. She always took it to the clinic; it was what she carried Vince’s stuff in, what he asked for or what she thought it good for him to have: handkerchiefs, biscuits, the lemons he liked. The yellow globes shone jovially through the mesh of the bag. ‘She’s trying to work magic,’ thought the doctor. ‘She wants to work magic with three miserable lemons. She thinks if she shows death she is not frightened of it, it will run away. She thinks if she turns up at the old man’s bedside with lemons she will find him still alive.’

  There had been a light frost overnight and the stairs were slippery because the old woman hadn’t salted them since the previous evening. He took her arm and led her down. The door of the outhouse was open, with a layer of muddy snow on the threshold, and behind it, as if ensconced in a fortress, Captain was peeking out. You could tell by the way he was digging in the straw that he had messed up his bed again. The old woman looked away; her arm stiffened and her breath came faster. ‘She has noticed Captain,’ the doctor thought, ‘but she’s pretending not to have seen him. Captain is black. One is not supposed to see anything black on a day like this, only white.’

  Kolman, the shopkeeper, gazed after them from behind the glass door of the state grocer’s as they closed the gate and set off towards the taxi rank. It has only just gone seven, it seems the old man is approaching the end. Shame, he was a quiet little thing, patient, always willing to let people, children or adults, go in front of him as he waited for his can of milk. The girls loved him because he’d always bring them flowers from his garden in the summer, and when it was winter he’d bring them tea and bits of roast marrow. Well, poor old boy, time for him to go now. His daughter will have a good cry. She sent them money each month from Pest, the postman told us. What was Antal thinking of, divorcing her like that, though he’s decent enough himself and his patients speak well of him.

  The old woman too was thinking of Iza as they got into the taxi in front of the cake shop. Dad has cancer, Iza had said in a strangely cold voice, some three months after she had unexpectedly rung from the capital to arrange an examination for him. Iza was scrubbing her hands in the bathroom with slow deliberate movements the way doctors did, the way she got used to in medical school. The old woman herself sank down on the edge of the tub, grabbing at the bath tap because everything had gone dark, then sprang to her feet again and rushed into the hall because she had heard Vince’s voice. ‘What are you doing, hiding in there?’ asked Vince in ill temper, but she just stared at him in repulsion and terror as one might look at an already decomposing body. She couldn’t answer, couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Iza saved her, having stepped out of the bathroom behind her, raising her strong white fingers. ‘Not everyone is as dirty as you, old man,’ she said and Vince’s thin face began to glow. ‘Old man’ was what Iza used to call him; a younger, loud, shiny-nosed Iza. ‘Other people wash their hands several times a day, like me,’ said the girl. ‘Now get back into the room before you catch a cold. If I had as little salt in
my stomach as you do, I’d not be rushing about so much. I’d take some pepsin.’

  The old woman knew Vince suspected something. Ever since the uncontrollable agonising pains began and he started losing weight, he had become suspicious and was constantly listening out in case he caught a snippet of some conversation that might tell him why he was growing ever weaker, something that might explain the burning pain that he felt ever more frequently. ‘I couldn’t possibly shout at him like that,’ the old woman thought, and even in her current state of distress was bursting with pride that Iza could.

  ‘Come along, mama, let’s go down to the Presso for a coffee. Are you coming too?’

  Vince smiled at that, proudly surveying his spindly legs: they must still look strong enough to make it down to the Presso. He wagged his head to say no and Iza shrugged, saying she didn’t care since he’d only be eyeing the women there. She grabbed her coat and gently bumped her forehead against his own beautifully shaped brow on her way out as she had done since she was a child. ‘Now be sure not to cheat on mama while we’re out!’ Vince just kept wagging his head with a sly look on his face, and his eyes, that for weeks now had looked unfamiliar, so unfamiliar that she found herself gazing at them, puzzling why they should seem both smaller and, at the same time, wider and duller than before, suddenly flickered and came to life. His conversations with Iza always had an element of flirtation, not at all like the ones you usually hear between father and daughter. They were more like friends, or accomplices – heaven knows in what!

  Neither of them touched their coffees in the Presso, they just stared at them, turning the small glasses in their hands. Iza looked pale. ‘He has about three months,’ she said. ‘Antal will bring him medication. I’ll leave you some money. Buy him anything he wants, however foolish. Don’t spare the cash.’

  Music was playing and the old woman suddenly felt that she and Iza were like two executioners, planning something terrible right here, in the shade of the red curtain. Knowing that Vince would be gone in three months’ time, and being aware that she knew now that he would no longer be then, had such a powerful effect on her that she imagined Vince a prisoner, one of the condemned, and that she had just been informed of the moment of his execution. She did not dare ask if Dekker’s diagnosis was reliable: she knew from both Iza and Antal that Dekker was never wrong. The music grew louder, lovers were gazing at each other, the waitress was asking if she would like some cream in her coffee. Iza answered for her, saying yes.

  The cream was stiff and too sweet. She dropped it while she was putting it in the coffee and scraped it off the table in confusion, feeling guilty. ‘Try to pull yourself together,’ said her daughter. ‘Let me tell you what you can expect.’ She had to force herself to listen at first as she was again informed that Vince had at most ninety days to live but suddenly she wasn’t understanding anything, her tears blurring the great red curtain before her. ‘Listen,’ said Iza, ‘we have very little time and we have to discuss things!’

  Iza always spoke in this serious, calm manner when there was something important to settle. She felt like screaming and knocking away the cream but she didn’t, of course; she hadn’t the strength and wouldn’t have dared in any case, it was just for a moment that she wanted to: an old woman does not indulge in hysterics or make scenes. She simply asked, ‘Are you coming home?’ It was as much a plea as a question; inside she was praying, beseeching God in inchoate, ungrammatical sentences, insisting that she should come home, that her daughter should be with them and not leave her alone to cope with the dying. Iza was a doctor, Iza was her child and had always helped them through. The younger woman took a deep, violent gulp as if the coffee she was raising to her lips at last were solid rather than liquid, and said, ‘I can’t.’

  She comprehended the thought behind it and supposed it to be right. If the girl took a vacation that would mean only that she might visit a little more often than usual and then Vince would guess something was up, would look for the reason and discover it, and that simply must not happen. Iza always came at the regular prearranged time, once a month, and on occasions like birthdays, name days and wedding anniversaries. She couldn’t come this time, well of course she couldn’t, so the old woman would have to deal with Vince by herself as well as with the terrible secret that Vince was going to die. Iza’s promise that Antal would be with them to help was of little consolation. Antal wasn’t Iza.

  Her tears began to flow and she felt rather than saw that the people at the next table were watching her. Iza didn’t try to calm her but simply held her hand. She hung on to the girl’s cold, ringless fingers.

  The taxi was taking them past bare plane trees down Sándor Street, where a huge, billowing advertisement invited people to a night of dancing. Antal heard a great sigh and looked back from the front passenger seat. The old woman did not respond to his gaze, but coughed and turned aside, watching the street and the swirl of rooks past the wayside trees. Antal was good to her, just as he had been good to Vince, and once upon a time they had loved Antal very much. But Antal had left Iza and that could be neither forgotten nor forgiven.

  The radiators down the corridor were pouring out heat. The air was dry and smelled of dishcloths. The porter opened the lift door for them but even at this dreadful time she was cheered because the porter’s smile seemed like a form of defence. She sat down in the small waiting room at the turn of the corridor and while Antal went to fetch the professor – it was Dekker’s last year at the clinic – she took the handkerchiefs and lemons out of her string bag and put them back in again. She was terrified of the thought of talking things over with a stranger but took strength in recalling that the meeting was not about her but about Vince. The politeness with which she was greeted at the clinic was a mark of respect for Iza.

  She didn’t really believe Antal when he said it was the end. But when Dekker appeared in the corridor and walked towards her, the string bag in her hand felt much heavier. It was as if she were carrying lead rather than lemons. Dekker was a professor and she could tell by his face that her poor tremulous questions would be answered directly.

  Later Iza asked her what she and the professor had said to each other. She tried to put it together in her mind but she couldn’t. She could only remember Dekker touching her on the shoulder because she had shaken off the well-intentioned fingers, as if a sudden fierce bitterness had taken possession of her, more an irritation, a deep antipathy, so she felt that Dekker, who had spent three months moving heaven and earth to help Vince and would have given his soul to save him, was a murderer and, what was more, a murderer of the same age as her husband. What right had he to be so healthy?

  She stopped in the doorway.

  Antal said Vince had been unconscious since sunrise and would probably not recover consciousness but slip into death as he slept. Yes, but if she walked in he might wake; it couldn’t be that forty-nine years of physical and spiritual union should prove weaker than death. But what would happen if he should sense her closeness and start speaking in that gentle, childish voice of his, and ask her to account for all that was happening, for his pain and for his ebbing life? What would happen if today, on this his last day, he were suddenly to became aware of the threshold on which he was standing and burst into helpless tears again, sobbing as he did when he lost his job back in the Twenties when he stood beside her bed in his nightshirt, dropping tears, begging, ‘Help me, Ettie!’ What if he asked her to help him now when he already knew there was no hope yet still begged for his life, for what was impossible. Vince loved life; never mind being a pauper, unemployed, or sick, he still thought merely being alive, simply being on earth, the fact that he could wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, that he could be in a place where the wind blew, where the sun shone and where the rain pattered quietly or poured down, was wonderful. She would have to lie to him as she had been lying continuously for months now. She was afraid that Vince would leave her without a word, that he might cast his terrified conscious eyes o
n her one last time and, after having dozed off with pain or with the assistance of drugs, his thoughts might turn to silent accusation or complaint.

  Antal threw his coat on a chair as he entered. It was only now the old woman noticed he was not wearing a white surgical gown. He didn’t look like a doctor without it, just a member of the family, something he hadn’t been for a good few years now.

  The first person she spotted in the room was Lidia. The nurse turned her way when the door opened and stood up from the chair by the bed, smoothing her apron. She didn’t greet the old woman in words, just nodded, the only natural thing to do in these unnatural circumstances. She adjusted Vince’s blanket a little, then went straight out, not even casting a glance back at the bed. ‘How strange,’ the old woman thought. ‘She has been at his bedside for weeks and she leaves like that, her eyes quite dry, without any sense that she was part of this. Can people get used to death?’

  Vince wasn’t conscious but he didn’t look detached from the world either, more as though he were simply asleep, the skin on his brow tight and silvery. His nose had grown since yesterday and there was no trace of the little red moon on its bridge where his glasses used to sit. She looked again and realised it was not a matter of his nose growing but of his face falling back. ‘He has left me,’ thought the old woman. ‘He didn’t wait for me. For forty-nine years I have known his every thought. Now I don’t know what he has taken with him. He has left me behind.’

  She sank down on the bed and gazed at him.

  She had been nursing him for months, day and night, to the point of exhaustion, but now she didn’t feel the least bit tired and could start the whole process afresh if only she could take him home, even as he was, in his sad open nightshirt from which his ribcage emerged, higher up than she expected. Seeing what had become of his body she might even be able to hold him in her lap. She should never have let him out of her sight. Iza meant well in bringing him out here, meant well for them both, but she still shouldn’t have allowed it. Perhaps if it were she herself who had been beside him these last few weeks he might have lived a little longer, but it was Lidia who had nursed him, Lidia who changed his bed every day, Lidia who did everything. Lidia was precise, patient and kind, but could she tease him and get some more food into him; could she mock him the way Iza did, telling him there was nothing wrong with him, that he was simply old? Could Lidia hush his choked words of complaint? ‘I shouldn’t have let him enter the clinic,’ thought the old woman. ‘Because he has left me like this now, unaware of my presence, without a word of goodbye!’ She bent down and kissed him. Vince’s brow was dry and smelled of medication. She sat down beside him and held his hand.