Iza's Ballad (10 page)

She wanted to pick twigs that were exactly similar, perfect twigs not rotten ones wasted under snow, so it was no easy task. She spent four days walking slowly, delicately along the forest path, four full mornings collecting enough for a bundle. She spent the four afternoons sleeping and dreaming, occasionally weeping, thinking of Vince and the people at home, wondering whether they’d consider her letters boastful or flashy with the glossy print of the sanatorium on the letterhead. Perhaps not. After all, they knew her.

On Thursday a uniformed driver took her to the railway station, explaining on the way that it was the usual practice to fetch the chief medical officer – meaning her daughter – when she arrived. The train was precisely on time. Iza was no longer in black and was calmer, almost cheerful. She didn’t complain of tiredness; on the contrary she took delight in explaining that she had done all she had intended to do. Antal had actually gone and bought the house, all the furniture had been moved and the money received for the property and the effects was safely stowed in a savings account. And her mother looked very well, so she was really happy. It hadn’t been an easy week, of course. How could it have been?

After the meal, while she was washing her hands and stuffing her overnight things next to the twigs in the suitcase, she caught herself smiling and humming some old tune. Tonight she’d light a fire and she’d have a home again. She blushed in alarm – it was as if she’d committed an act of infidelity. How could she feel so good without Vince?

Iza went to the desk to pay.

She gazed at her daughter, watching her taking her leave and paying the bill, thinking how clever she was, how charming, how polite, how well she knew what to say, when and to whom. She had often thought she should take a husband again because life consisted of such things as well as her medical work, but now she was glad there wouldn’t be a stranger waiting for them. The old woman felt light-hearted and strong this afternoon: she thought of the twigs in the suitcase and that Iza would never guess that it was not she taking her mother home, but the other way round because she would light the fire for her, the first real fire in the place.

The uniformed man took her baggage on to the express and put it on the rack but Iza adjusted it a little. She always had to be doing something, it just couldn’t be helped.

‘Did you buy any salt in Dorozs?’ she asked.

She didn’t answer but smiled and gazed through the window.

The train both scared and bewitched her. It was a long time since she last travelled by the express, and the worm-like green of the locomotive and its carriages with their strong lights and almost silent running cast a spell on her. They took supper in the dining car and it saddened her a little that she couldn’t cut up her meat in the shaking carriage. Iza sliced up the fried ribs and poured a beer for her. It also upset her to think they were going so extraordinarily fast she couldn’t see out though it was still light. When Iza told her they were nearing Pest, she smiled and even felt a little moved. When she last came this way forty-nine years ago, Vince was wearing a black cape with a wide collar, a travelling cap, and a wild-pigeon-coloured suit. Behind the newspapers and bags of sweets they kept reaching for each other’s hands. Old Pest was like a coloured balloon floating over reality, closer to heaven than to earth.

She saw nothing of the suburbs; the express clattered through Greater Budapest, and once they arrived at the terminal she felt quite lost. Iza was annoyed. There wasn’t a porter nearby and she had to carry the luggage herself, constantly stopping and changing hands. The old woman didn’t dare ask her if she had remembered to bring the firewood as well as the furniture from home, not wishing to irritate her, though it had just occurred to her how useful it would have been had Iza not forgotten it. The girl was bent over sideways with the weight of the case, running towards a taxi while the old woman was being swept along by the crowd.

She recognised nothing in town even though Iza was constantly keeping her informed as to where they were, but she recalled having once been to the National Theatre to see the classic,
Bánk Bán
. The big ring road was quite different from how she remembered it and she felt ashamed for having imagined it the way she had seen it before, since it was obvious this was just another road full of cars, buses and trams – horses were uncommon even back home by then. But all the same. The crowds were overwhelming, as were the neon signs flashing on the buildings. Pest was much bigger than she remembered – it was an alarming metropolis.

They stopped in front of a house. She stared at it. Iza paid the driver and by the time she turned round she no longer looked annoyed. She smiled at her, stroked her shoulders and pointed to their new home.

It was a six-storey house, a cube faced in smooth masonry with a balustrade running round the top of it and fully glazed rooms facing the street. There was a mosaic next to the entrance and a young overweight mother was sitting on the steps breastfeeding her baby. The old woman tried to imagine she was arriving home but it was impossible. She just kept staring.

Iza went ahead and rang for the lift. There were a great many names on the board in the hall: vast numbers of people lived here. She pulled herself together so her expression should not give her away. She couldn’t help it, the poor girl, that she could only afford something in a house like this. She musn’t depress her with her own disappointment. And in any case, once they stepped through the door they’d be back in the old house until they had to go downstairs; they could forget where they were. What wonderful luck that they could bring everything they could with them, what wonderful God-given luck!

She felt able to smile again.

The lift stopped on the third floor and not even the door to the flat looked like any other door: it was as though someone had used a plane to cut a narrow channel into a piece of wood. Iza put down the case and the door opened.

‘Welcome, dear guest,’ said Iza. Her voice was solemn and loving.

She walked into blinding light, with a peculiar-shaped lamp on the ceiling, and nothing on the walls of the hall bar a couple of odd iron hooks for coats. Where did the girl put the old coat stand? There was a parquet floor and Captain knew how to behave, but what would happen if he ever . . . Where was Captain?

The flat was nothing like the one she imagined in Dorozs. There were two big intercommunicating rooms opening on the street side, both full of furniture. Blue, yellow, purple and black chairs were ranged in a row and the walls were coloured too. There were no lace curtains but a kind of thick, green and lilac striped canvas.

Could Iza have put all the home furniture into her room? Might her room be big enough to accommodate it all?

‘And where is my room?’ she asked. Her tongue felt dry in her mouth, as if she had a fever.

Iza opened the hall door smiling exactly as she had done when she let her into the flat, a smile that seemed even brighter than before, and opened another door, one of two practically identical doors, and reached for the light switch. ‘Here, mama.’

Once again light, light, light. It was a small square room with her old bed in the corner, and a strange new lamp by the bedside in the shape of some black bird with a sulphur-yellow umbrella in its mouth. There was a cupboard on the right and a big chair that might have been Vince’s but re-covered, her little sewing table in front of it and a tiny writing table by the window with its own chair.

There was a new bookcase and shelves on the wall, the shelves full of all kinds of strange objects. Her bureau. Nothing else. The carpet was new too, the old worn one having vanished: she was standing on a fine, deep-blue Persian carpet.

Her savings book was on the writing desk.

She needed to do something, to gain time, so that she’d know what to say. She made her way over to the writing table, picked up the savings book and leafed through it. Without her glasses she couldn’t make out the balance but she looked at it anyway as if she could read it. Her hand was shaking so much that the thin sheets trembled against her fingers.

Iza gave her a hug.

‘The other things had to stay behind, darling. What we have here has been repaired by the upholsterer and the furniture man. Isn’t it perfect and lovely? What do you think of the lamp? Is it right, do you think? Do you like it? And the carpet? Pretty, isn’t it?’

She made no answer.

‘You’re home. Look at me! Aren’t you pleased?’

‘Where’s Captain?’ asked the old woman.

‘With Antal. You didn’t want to bring the old rabbity dog too?’

She didn’t ask about the house plants, about Vince’s peaked caps or his cherrywood stick. She undid the top buttons of her coat because she felt she might suffocate. It was hot here, too hot, and she glanced here and there looking for the stove. There was no stove in the room, only a red-coloured radiator, its controls shaped like slices of lemon, like a kind of laughing red mouth.

The telephone rang in the hall. Iza ran out and the old woman sank into the armchair. She used to be able to feel every spring of it – now it was smooth, comfortable, soft. Then she stood up again in alarm and while Iza was on the phone she knelt down on the carpet and opened her suitcase. She pulled out the bottom drawer of the bureau and threw in the dry twigs so the girl shouldn’t see what she had brought with her from Dorozs.

2

SHE FELT AS
if some elemental blow had destroyed everything around her and that only now did she really know what it was to be a widow, someone absolutely abandoned.

She didn’t cry while Iza was in the room, just looked pale and was more quiet than usual, but she tried to say something nice, however awkward, about the practicality of the arrangement and Iza’s helpfulness and kindness. She opened the bottom of the wardrobe and found some clothes there, mostly linen, but only a fraction of the amount she’d had at the house – all the patched jumpers, all the stitched and tacked remnants, all the thriftily squirrelled-away towels and sheets had vanished. Iza had only saved things that were in perfect order. There were no dishes, no china: Iza said the pots and pans were beyond repair since they had lost some of their enamel and it was a miracle they hadn’t all got appendicitis ages ago, besides which she had her dinner set from Jena so why should she bring along damaged stuff with handles missing when they have proper things here. The pastry board? There was the plastic worktop on the kitchen cupboard for that, it’s heatproof and doesn’t mind water, and as for the mincer, why bring that heavy thing along when there was an electric grinder here. Antal had inherited the dust catcher for the vitrine, the little porcelain shoe and the mouse without a tail, but she had brought the three undamaged Old Vienna pieces, which would look nice on the little shelf. The china shepherd wasn’t here – it had a broken neck and was dreadful to look at, so sad that one really shouldn’t keep it.

When Iza finally left her alone and wished her great happiness in the flat, the old woman struggled over to Vince’s old armchair whose cover she had always taken such care to patch and sat down. It was only the lovely shape of the chair that reminded her of its old condition, rejuvenated as it was in its new blue-and-grey stripes, looking a touch brash. All reminders of an earlier poverty that witnessed to her craft and skill, her inexhaustible invention in so lightly and imaginatively fending off the perils of the times, had vanished. The room was nice and when she thought about it she had to admit she really didn’t need any more than it contained, and Iza had replaced whatever she had thrown out: a brand-new set of towels made a multicoloured pile on the shelf and there was new linen in a nylon bag. It was a terrible experience.

She spent the first night counting the missing items. She had her old bed, it was just not the same forty-nine-year-old pillowslip, carefully patched and worn down to the consistency of a cobweb, over her pillow but a new one – and Iza had changed the eiderdown too. She went to the trouble of finding a pencil so she could make a list of everything that had
not
come to Pest with her. While hunting for a sheet of paper she came across the headed sheet from Dorozs where she had drawn a plan of their new home: she gazed at the clumsy oblongs and semicircles and wept.

Vince’s house plants would not have survived here of course. No flower, except a cactus perhaps, could survive in the murderous heat of the radiator. They should have brought them all the same – it would have been a useful distraction looking after the sickly things, putting them here or there, finding a place for them. And Captain! Captain was the last living breathing creature that could make Vince laugh the day they took him to the clinic. Captain, who for some mysterious reason had stolen one of his handkerchiefs and was playing with it in the yard.

Iza had bought her handkerchiefs too, two dozen of them. The old ones had disappeared – nearly all of them had had some minor blemish.

She sat in the armchair and tried to cry silently, afraid that Iza would hear her through the thin walls and come in and accuse her of being ungrateful. As indeed she was. The girl had told her she would sell the house and anything inessential, and it was her fault for not thinking it through, not including everything that would make a dwelling look harmonious, comfortable and attractive. Iza had always teased them that their house was like a furniture warehouse and why, for example, did they have a tobacco bowl when neither of them smoked a pipe. She was right, she was always right, it was just that old people grow fond of things that mean much more to them than to the young.

She tried to think about how much money she had suddenly come into but instead of joy she felt a flush of shame: this was how Judas must have felt when he received his thirty pieces of silver. It was like selling your dependants, your best friends. What would she do with all that money?

She kept weeping and writing, noting the bill of loss and what now belonged to someone else. There were one or two things she remembered later and others she thought lost, so she had to remove them from the list; she almost cried out in relief when she saw that the silk-lined box for handkerchiefs was still here and she tapped it to make sure. The alarm clock was here too – henceforth it would tell Budapest time – and there was the picture of the little girl with the basket. Iza had hung it over the bed. Everything required for comfort was present and correct but she still felt as though she had been robbed.