The Door (4 page)

As she delivered this tirade about Christ as victim of political machinations and a trumped-up criminal charge, who finally stepped out of the life of his poor Virgin Mother after all her sleepless nights of heartbreak and worry, I fairly expected a bolt from above to strike her dead. She knew she had upset me, and she was glad. I held my head high and set off in the direction of the church. She followed me with a wicked stare. For the first time, I saw what a remarkable creature she was. She claimed no interest in politics and yet, by some mysterious everyday process, she had managed to absorb something of what we had all been through during those years after the war. And I thought too, someone should seek out the sort of priest who could reawaken in her what clearly was once there. Then I realised, she would only hurl insults at him. Emerence was a Christian, but the minister who might convince her of the fact didn't exist. Not one spangle remained of that evening dress, but the glitter of sequins was burned into her consciousness.

That night, of course, she only wanted to provoke me. But strangely, it calmed me down. If she sensed real trouble she wouldn't be teasing me, I thought, but, thank God, she was. She was having a bit of fun at my expense. I tried to get up, but she forbade it. If I was good, she would tell me a story, but I would have to stop wriggling and close my eyes. I nestled down. Emerence remained standing, leaning against the heater. I knew so little about her, only the rather shadowy picture I'd managed to piece together over the years from isolated scraps of information. It was practically nothing. On this most surreal of nights, with life and death waiting hand in hand in the wintry dawn, Emerence sought to quell my terrified thoughts by finally introducing herself.

'"You are Christ's sisters and brothers,' my mother used to say, because my father was a carpenter — a carpenter and cabinetmaker. His younger brother, my godfather, was a foreman-builder, but he died soon after my christening. He too was good with his hands, like all the Szeredás family. Our father was very knowledgeable, and a fine figure of a man. As for my mother, she was a fairy princess. Her golden hair trailed behind her on the floor; she could actually step on it. My grandfather was very proud of her. He wouldn't let her marry a peasant, and resented even a craftsman. He'd sent her to school and made my father promise he would never put her out to work. And he didn't. While my father was alive she just read books. But that didn't last very long, because, you see, when I was barely three the poor man died. It's strange, but my grandfather took violently against him for having the nerve to die, as if he'd deliberately wished it on himself to spite him.

"The coming of the war made everything a lot more difficult. I don't think Mother was in love with the foreman in the workshop at the start, but she couldn't run the place on her own, so she married him. My stepfather didn't care very much for books, but that wasn't the main problem. They were calling everyone up into the army, and the poor man was terrified that his turn would come. But he got on well with my mother, and he put up with us as well. He wasn't a bad man, although he made me leave school, and the headmaster was very upset about it, but I was needed to cook for the harvesters because Mother wasn't up to it, and I also looked after the twins. Our stepfather wasn't unkind to them, but this wasn't surprising. If you've ever seen two fairy-tale children, that's what they were. They were the living image of Mother. My little brother Józsi — you know his son, the one who comes to visit me — doesn't look like any of us. I never saw much of Józsi, because when my father died our grandfather Divék — Mother's father — made him go and live with him. He spent more time in Csabadul than with us in Nádori. My mother's remaining family live there to this day.

"When they took me out of school the headmaster made a terrible fuss. He said it was a dreadful shame, an utter waste. Stepfather told him that anyone who stuck his nose into another family's business was a troublemaker, and he'd better not try to turn me against the idea or he'd bash his head in. He'd married a widow with four children, and he might be called up at any moment: the woman couldn't cope with the work on her own. Did he think he was pleased that I'd also have to work? What was he supposed to do? He had no-one to help in the workshop, or, for that matter, on the land. There was a constant demand for farm produce, but now there wasn't even enough for the animals. Well, he said his piece to the headmaster and set me to work. He wasn't evil — you mustn't think that — just frightened. You must have seen what people are like, what they're capable of when they're afraid. I don't bear him any grudges, though he beat me often enough, because at first I wasn't much good. We had some land, but until then it had never been any concern of mine. I'd gone out to play, not to work. All the time, my stepfather was shaking and swearing, because call-up letters were flying around like birds.

"One evening, after I'd put the twins to bed and the house was at last quiet — Józsi was no longer at home but with my grandfather — Mother told him not to keep speaking of his fears because it would make them come true. In his terror he gabbled away: he feared the worst because he'd dreamed that if he was called up he would never see us again. And he didn't. He was the first conscript from Nádori to be killed.

"Mother had no idea where to begin with the workshop. There was a ban on the sale of wood, so there was no building going on and the men had disappeared. But in the early days she thought we'd be able to get by without a man — she was a farmer's daughter, she understood the land, somehow she would manage on her own. You should have seen how she struggled. I did all I possibly could to help — I wasn't a stupid child — but we were going nowhere. At nine years old I cooked for everyone and looked after the twins. When the news came of my stepfather's death I realised she truly had loved him. Now she was in mourning for two men, my father and my stepfather, though my stepfather didn't even have a grave. She started to find life unbearable. Don't think it's only your sort who have feelings.

"She was weak, helpless, and very young. One day, when the little ones were being particularly difficult, something got into me too. I mean, I was still a child myself. She had hit me because I had spent my time playing instead of doing the chores she had given me, and I thought, 'I'll run away. I'll go and be with Józsi in Csabadul. Grandfather always looks after him so well. Even if he does give him things to do, it's not very much.' And I would take the twins with me. Mother could do what she liked, but we were clearing off. I could get there on foot, I thought. I knew which way it was; it was only the next village, after all.

"So off we went, early one fine morning, all three of us, me with a blond child on either hand. But we'd got only as far as the threshing yard when the twins wanted to sit down and eat, and then they demanded water. So I ran to the farmyard well with the tin mug I always wore on a string round my neck. I had found that small children are always wanting to drink, and I never went out without the mug, and certainly not if it was any distance. The well was close by, but not that close: what does a child know about near and far? Just as I got there a storm began. I'd never seen one break so quickly; we'd never had such thunder, or such a hurricane, in our part of the country. In seconds the sky was transformed. It wasn't black, as I'd seen it before, it was violet, and ablaze from end to end, as if fires had been lit between the clouds. Thunder rolled across, the noise almost burst my eardrums, but I filled the mug and ran back to where they had been, looking for those little blond heads, because when I'd looked back I hadn't seen them, only the lightning as it struck the tree beside them.

"By the time I had staggered over to where they were, smoke was pouring out everywhere. By then they were both dead, but I didn't realise it, because they looked like nothing you would consider human. Then the storm broke. The downpour clung to me like sweat. I stood there beside my little brother and sister, staring at the two black stumps. If they looked like anything at all it was charred logs of firewood, only smaller and more gnarled. I stood there stupidly, turning my face this way and that. Where were the little blond heads? Those strange things in front of me couldn't possibly be my siblings.

"So, are you surprised that my mother threw herself down the well? It was all she needed, a sight like this, and my hysterical screaming. I was screaming so loud that when the storm stopped I could be heard as far away as the main road, and of course the house. Mother ran out, barefoot and still in her nightgown. She hurled herself at me, and beat me. She had no idea I'd been running away from her tears and bad temper, her endless worrying and complaining. She didn't know what she was doing. In her despair, she wanted to hit out and destroy, to strike the nearest living thing as a way of striking at life itself. Then she saw the twins and realised why I had called her. For a second her face blazed, then she flashed past me and sped away in the rain, her wild hair trailing along the ground behind her, screeching like a bird.

"I saw what she was going to do, but I couldn't move. I stood there, next to the tree and the corpses. The thunder and lightning had stopped. If I'd run for help at that moment they might have saved her. Our house was right by the main road — the threshing yard was just beyond the garden — but I stood there as if bewitched, my mind blank. My brow was dripping wet, but my brain had gone numb. No-one could love the way I loved those two little ones. I stared at the stumps. I still couldn't make myself believe I had anything to do with them. I didn't cry for help. I stood there gaping, and then began to wonder vaguely what my mother was doing all that time at the bottom of the well. What was she up to? What could she possibly be doing? The poor woman had fled from me, from the terrible sight, from her fate. She'd had enough of everything. It's like that, sometimes. Suddenly you want to end it all.

"I gazed around for a short while, looking at this and that, then walked away at a calm, leisurely pace. There was no-one in the house, so no point in going there. I stood beside the main road and called out to the first person who passed by, to come and speak to my mother, because she'd gone into the well, and my brother and sister — the ones with the yellow hair — had disappeared from under the tree, and there was something black there instead. The neighbour had been strolling by, and now he ran to her, and in the end he sorted everything out. They left me with the headmaster while someone went for my grandfather. Grandfather took me away, but he didn't let me stay with him, only my little brother Józsi; and when the gentlemen came from Budapest looking for a maidservant, he handed me over at once. They took me away as soon as the funeral was over. I didn't understand a thing about the funeral, though I did see my loved ones again, because both coffins were open, my mother in one and the twins in the other. The sight of my mother there was just as puzzling as that of the twins. Their golden hair seemed to have melted away — there was nothing on their heads, in fact their heads were no longer there. They were so unlike actual children I couldn't cry or mourn for them. It was all too much. I could no longer take anything in.

"Do you know what I am saving up for? For a crypt. It'll be as big as the whole world, and there won't be another as beautiful anywhere. Every window will have different-coloured glass, and there'll be shelves in it, and a coffin on every shelf — my father, my mother, the twins, me, and, if Józsi's boy stays true to me, the other two places could be his. I started saving up for it even before the war, but then I needed the money for something else. They asked for it, for a good cause, so I gave it, it didn't matter. I saved up again. It was stolen, but I started again. I've always got money coming in. A certain person sends it to me from abroad. And then I've never in all my life been a day without work. There's enough now for the crypt. Every time I go to a funeral I look to see if there's a building like the one I'm planning; but there never is. Mine will be different from all the rest. You'll see, when the sun rises and sets, what wonderful bands of light it will throw through the coloured windows on to the coffins. My heirs will be able to build a crypt that everyone will stop and stand before. Do you believe me?"

It has always been important to me to lead a full emotional life: to have those who are closely connected to me show pleasure when we meet. Emerence's perfect indifference the next morning didn't exactly wound my pride, but was a disappointment after that surreal night, when she had stayed by my side and revealed her childhood self to me. I had slept free from care and anxiety, and by dawn I felt the world was a sane place after all. Not for a minute did I doubt that the operation would be a success, so completely had her words dissolved my fear. Before that night, her headscarf had concealed every important detail of her life; now she had become the central figure in a wild rural landscape, with the blazing sky behind her, charred corpses before her, and sheet lightning over the sweep of the farmyard well. I truly believed that at last something had been resolved between us, that Emerence would no longer be a stranger but a friend: my friend.

She was nowhere to be seen, either in the apartment when I awoke, or in the street when I set off for the hospital; but there was evidence of her handiwork in the section of pavement outside the front door swept clean of snow. Obviously, I told myself in the car, she was making her rounds of the other houses. I wasn't distressed, or heartbroken. I felt that only good news awaited me at the hospital, as indeed it did. I was out until lunchtime. Arriving home, rather hungry, I was sure she'd be sitting there in the apartment, awaiting my return. I was wrong. I was faced with the disconcerting experience of walking into my own home, bearing news of life and death, and no-one to share it with. Our Neanderthal ancestor learned to weep the first time he stood in triumph over the bison he had dragged in and found no-one to tell of his adventures, or show his spoils to, or even his wounds. The apartment stood empty. I went into one room after another, looking for her, even calling out her name. I didn't want to believe that, on this of all days, when she didn't even know if my patient was alive or dead, she could be somewhere else. The snow had stopped falling. There could be nothing in the street requiring her attention. And yet she was nowhere to be found.