The Fawn Read online

  MAGDA SZABÓ (1917–2007) was born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary’s “Calvinist Rome,” on the eastern side 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 Baumgarten Prize in 1949. The ruling Hungarian Communist Party immediately repealed the prize and banned her from publishing, and Szabó turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, Freskó (Fresco), came out in 1958, followed closely by Az őz (The Fawn). In 1959 she won the József Attila Prize, after which she went on to write many more novels, among them Pilátus (Iza’s Ballad, 1963), Katalin utca (Katalin Street, 1969), Ókút (The Ancient Well, 1970), Régimódi történet (An Old­Fashioned 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 who died in 1982. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and a warden of the Calvinist Theological Seminary in Debrecen, Szabó died in the city in which she was born, a book in her hand.

  LEN RIX has won many prizes and nominations for his translations of Magda Szabó’s novels. They include the 2005 Oxford­Weidenfeld Prize for The Door and the 2018 PEN Translation Prize for Katalin Street. The Fawn is his fourth translation of a work by Magda Szabó to be published by NYRB Classics. His other translations include works by Sándor Márai, Tamás Kabdebó, Miklós Bánffy, and seven by Antal Szerb (of which Journey by Moonlight is available as an NYRB Classic). In 2021 he was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit for his services to Hungarian literature.

  OTHER BOOKS BY MAGDA SZABÓ

  PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  Abigail

  Translated by Len Rix

  The Door

  Translated by Len Rix

  Introduction by Ali Smith

  Iza’s Ballad

  Translated by George Szirtes

  Katalin Street

  Translated by Len Rix

  THE FAWN

  MAGDA SZABÓ

  Translated from the Hungarian by

  LEN RIX

  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 © 1959 by Éditions Viviane Hamy and the Estate of Magda Szabó

  Translation copyright © 2023 by Len Rix

  All rights reserved.

  First published in the Hungarian language in 1959 as Az őz by Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó.

  First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2023.

  Cover image: József Pécsi, Fashion (Mrs. Pécsi), 1932; photograph © the estate of József Pécsi and the Hungarian Museum of Photography

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging­in­Publication Data

  Names: Szabó, Magda, 1917–2007, author. | Rix, L. B. (Len B.), translator.

  Title: The fawn / by Magda Szabó ; translated by Len Rix.

  Other titles: Őz. English

  Description: [New York City] : New York Review Books, [2023] | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022040795 (print) | LCCN 2022040796 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681377377 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681377384 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PH3351.S592 O913 2023 (print) | LCC PH3351.S592 (ebook) | DDC 894/.51133—dc23/eng/20220824

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040795

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040796

  ISBN 978-1-68137-738-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Other Books by Magda Szabó

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Translator's Foreword

  Dramatis Personae

  THE FAWN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  17

  18

  19

  20

  TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

  “I wanted to be with you sooner, but I had to wait for Gyurica and you know he’s always late . . .” the novel begins, and it ends with the cry, “Wait for me, I’m coming.” But who is the speaker of those opening words, who is she addressing, and where and in what circumstances will they be reunited? The reader must wait until the final chapter before the last of these questions is answered. The journey will take her less than a day, from mid-morning to nightfall, yet in those few short hours we will have travelled through a lifetime spanning three decades of major social and political upheaval.

  The story begins with Eszter’s growing-up in ultra-conservative inter-war Hungary: private schools and religious institutions are permitted and professional and wealthy people like the Graffs and her aristocratic relations the Martons thrive. In March 1944 the country is annexed by Hitler; in August that year Eszter stars in a university student production of Goethe’s Iphigenia at Tauris chosen specifically to please the occupying forces; her final exam takes place just before Christmas, under the non-stop Allied bombardment that reduces Budapest to rubble, and by January 1945 the Soviets are in control. They install a puppet regime and impose the full apparatus of dogmatic Marxism, but because she works in a state cooperative theatre Eszter is allowed not only to become famous but is sufficiently well paid to buy her own house in a leafy suburb. Her real problems are personal. They arise from the degrading circumstances of her childhood, her unresolved feelings of anger and resentment and a desperate need to be accepted for the person she feels she really is. We learn much about the way she sees herself from the roles with which she most closely identifies: Goethe’s Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father at Aulis, Shaw’s rebellious commoner Joan, Shakespeare’s tragic Ophelia, and Shakespeare’s irresponsibly mischievous Puck.

  She is certainly no moral exemplar. Playful and quick-witted she may be, but she is capable of saying and doing wicked, even horrifying, things. She is strangely aroused by the idea of destruction; she revels in the winds and the driving snow; extreme cold, a city aflame under the bombs, the obliteration of her childhood home – nothing can daunt her spirit; and yet, though entirely ` hypersensitive about her one physical defect, the deformed foot that symbolises her humiliating past. She has an instinctive sympathy for stray animals and small children, but her sense of having been neglected and exploited as a child has made her scornful of everything she considers soft, pampered or meekly conformist. That this should extend to her former classmate, the beautiful and virtuous Angéla, is predictable; that her hatred and envy should become all-consuming when she discovers that this despised paragon is the wife of the man she loves is a recipe for disaster – and disaster is what she duly delivers. Yet somehow she never quite forfeits our sympathy, and the manner of her ending, appalling as it is, touches on the sublime.

  Len Rix, February 2022

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Principal characters

  Eszter Encsy, actress, narrator

  Eszter’s father, non-practising lawyer

  Eszter’s mother, piano teacher

  The Martons, Eszter’s aristocratic relatives on her mother’s side

  Auntie Irma, Eszter’s widowed aunt on her mother’s side

  Kárász néni, Eszter’s next-door neighbour

  Kárász Béla, neighbour’s son

  Ambrus, Eszter’s other next-door neighbour

  Károly, younger brother of Ambrus

  Gizi, affectionately “Gizike”, Eszter’s friend

  Józsi and Juszti, Gizi’s parents, who run the Three Hussars

  Gyurica, Eszter’s doctor

  Juli, Eszter’s maid

  Angéla Graff, Eszter’s fellow pupil

  “Uncle” Domi and “Auntie” Ilu, Angéla’s parents

  Emil, Angéla’s brother

  Elza, housekeeper to the Graff family

  Péter, Angéla’s pet bird

  Lőrinc, university lecturer and translator

  Pipi, Eszter’s fellow actor

  Hella, Eszter’s fellow actor

  Árvai, Eszter’s fellow actor

  Ványa, Party-appointed theatre director

  Ramocsay, sculptor

  Note

  néni (Auntie) and bácsi (Uncle) are used familiarly for non-relatives

  “a” (as in “Graff”, “Marton”) is pronounced like the English “salt”, “Baltic”

  “c” (as in “Gyurica”) is pronounced like “ts”

  “cs” as in “Ramocsay” is pronounced like the English “ch”

  “g” (as in “Gizi”) is always hard, as in “good”

  “j” (as in “Juli”) is pronounced like the “y” in “you”

  “s” (as in “Ambrus”) is pronounced as “sh” in English

  “sz” (as in “Eszter”) is pronounced like the “s” in English”

  Dates and places

/>   Eszter is born c.1928 in the city of Szolnok in central Hungary

  The Germans occupy Hungary in March 1944

  Budapest is besieged by the Allies in the winter of 1944/45

  In 1948 the Russians impose a puppet Communist regime

  The action of the novel takes place in Budapest in 1954

  THE FAWN

  1

  I wanted to be here sooner, but I had to wait for Gyurica and you know he’s always late; he said he’d be with me by nine but it was well after eleven when I saw him stepping through the door. Everyone thinks he’s a Party education worker or a person delivering Party leaflets, though he always has his doctor’s bag with him. He stopped in the middle of the courtyard, blinked several times, looked around for the number he had been called to, number 39; as soon as he spotted it the women left the gallery, shut their doors and went back into their kitchens; when he finally got inside he took a deep breath, mopped his brow and asked Gizi for a glass of water. As for my foot, it’s nothing serious, I just need to avoid walking on it and keep applying the cold compresses; the swelling won’t go for another twenty-four hours yet and no-one is going to ask me to jump down from a tree between now and then. As Puck says: “Up and down, up and down, / I shall lead them up and down.”

  He didn’t mention you, not for reasons of tact, I think, but because he had nothing more to say – and what is there to say? He stared at Gizi, sitting at the table bolt upright with her hands on her knees, very much the mistress of the house. When he stood up she unfolded a fresh towel and handed it to him. The bed had been made but my bag and gloves were still there; he must have realised that I had spent the night there. Józsi’s walking stick and plastic raincoat were on the hanger, and his shaving brush and stick of soap were in full view on the shelf over the washstand. I was wearing Gizi’s dressing gown, the one with the huge flowers; she was already in her black dress, she’d been ironing her apron when he arrived. While he was examining my foot the cat, her enormous three-coloured tabby, came in from the corridor, padded over to him and rubbed its hair all over his trousers. When he left, Gizi scrubbed the bowl out as if it were infectious.

  My first idea had been to spend the night on Margaret Island. I was alone all afternoon – Juli had gone off to church. I wrote her a note to say I was going to the Grand Hotel for the night, packed my bags and called a taxi. I stopped and paid the driver in Szabad Tér. I could hear music playing inside the hotel and I was just about to go in when they started folding up two of the awnings over the tables; it was sundown, they were cranking the long handles and the blue cloth was slowly folding up as the metal frames collapsed and closed shut. I caught a brief glimpse of the patch we had watched the upholsterer stitch on and I caught a sudden whiff of the storm that had torn it; I also saw the big glass window of the restaurant where we sat looking on in wonder as the rain rattled and crashed against the pane.

  I turned round and went back into town. When I got to the flat I found Gizi sitting on the front steps with her dress pulled tightly down over her knees. She was waiting for me. It was her day off and she had come to ask if I would spend the night with her – we weren’t in the habit of explaining things to one another. She lives in one of these horrible Budapest blocks where every flat on the same floor opens out onto a central gallery – hers is number 39, but there’s also a 60, next to the steps going up to the attic; there’s a cage on a hook outside nearly every door, children screaming down in the courtyard, cooking smells coming out of the windows and the toilet doors in the communal washroom never close properly.

  As I went into the building I stumbled against the waste bin and half an hour later my ankle had swollen again. I had supper lying in bed; Gizi had cooked some lángos – lángos with sour cream. There are two beds in her room, but she had made up only hers for us to sleep in. Juszti’s wedding photograph is on the wall above it, a very young-looking bride with her eyes lowered, holding a tiny spray of myrtle in her hand. I don’t know where she had sent Józsi, I didn’t want to ask.

  Neither of us slept well – my foot was throbbing and Gizi kept getting up to change the compress. In the morning she went down to the grocery store and phoned for the doctor; the rest you know. After Gyurica had gone she called a taxi for me. She came with me to the square – it was only a hundred metres from the Swan. The flower sellers were sitting outside the gate; they called out to me but then left me alone. Once again I had lost my hairpins so I bought a dozen at a stall. As I was about to leave the square by the main gate I spotted a flowering tree leaning over the wall and stopped. I hadn’t noticed it there the day before, or hadn’t looked at it properly. I now realised that it was a bignonia.

  Do you know what a bignonia is?

  Father would have been able to give you its botanical name. I used to know it myself, it’ll come back to me soon. If you have ever been in Köves Street you would know what it looks like: a tall, twisted shrub, very aggressive, growing on a trellis, with flowers like hunting horns. The first time I went there to see Angéla she was standing on the fence, clinging on to the lattice-work with a red bignonia flower between her teeth.

  Anyway I didn’t go in, I carried on towards the chapel. I was hobbling a bit now, I was wearing Gizi’s shoes, her feet are bigger than mine, but even so they were pinching and my big toe had started to throb. I took them off as soon as I got inside and tucked my feet under the kneeling board; the stone floor was nice and cool.

  There was one other person in there, an old fellow, kneeling before the statue of St Antony. His lips were moving and his hands were clasped in prayer, the way Pipi did it in Joan of Arc, the perfect image of ardent devotion. When he had finished he tossed a coin into the purse, a twenty fillér piece; as soon as I got outside I burst into tears. Ványa was so fond of my “melodious sobbings”, he should have heard these strangled gaspings and heavings. I have no idea what I was crying about, I don’t think it was about you, or because it had been so dark in the chapel – I don’t know when I was last inside one. The red glow of the light in the sanctuary, the great floppy yellow roses on the altar to Mary – it was absolutely wonderful to be in there, unspeakably good. If I believed in God – if I believed in anything at all – it wouldn’t have been the same. I would have instantly leaped up and started pleading with the Heavens, I would have whined and whimpered and lamented and begged and pleaded and promised to do anything in return, and wept uncontrollably; but I knew there was no help to be had, and I didn’t want any anyway, so there was no point in asking: even if I could have brought myself to beg for it, it would still have been no good, I could never have undertaken to be a good girl and never to tell lies, I would simply have offloaded all my burdens onto Heaven, gone away with a shining face full of tears, and it would have cost me nothing; I would have been able to let myself go for a moment – and everything would have been even harder than before. So I really can’t explain why it was so unbelievably good just to be in there.

  When I decided to leave I could barely stand the pain of trying to force Gizi’s shoe on the foot again; I couldn’t do up the laces – but I needn’t have worried, the swelling was so tight that it fell off. I got to the front gate but I didn’t want to go past the bignonia again, so I came in through the side gate. I hope nobody calls round, nobody who knows me. I’ve taken the shoes off now and I’m sitting here on the floor in my bare feet. There’s a slight breeze, just enough to stir the leaves on the trees outside, and there’s a beetle crawling along beside me, and now he’s reached my toes – a lovely slim-bodied beetle with blue wings. Father would identify him as Calosoma sycophanta and lift out of his way a peach pip that someone had spat out, and solemnly tell him, “Go in peace, little traveller.”

  You really would have loved my father. I’ve never talked about him much. If I haven’t done so it’s because I never say much about anything, not about you or anyone else; as a child I was so quiet I never learned to talk very well. What it says on my CV is a pack of lies, the things people say about me are all lies, I lie so easily I could have made a career out of it. I have come to realise that if I can’t bear to speak the truth even to you then I am beyond all help.