Iza's Ballad (15 page)

Domokos answered that he had no purpose. It was simple courtesy. In any case it was not unusual for a man to send flowers to an attractive young woman, especially one to whom he feels some sort of tie, and maybe she should consult someone herself since she seemed unduly agitated. Hearing this she simply opened the door, ushered him out and called in the next patient. That night Domokos rang her for the first time.

Their relationship developed relatively quickly, Iza allowing herself passively, a little suspiciously, to be seduced by Domokos’s half-teasing, half-touching ardour. When Vince was in hospital and she met Antal at her father’s bedside for the first time, she blushed and felt sick as though she had something to hide, as if she owed him something, a kind of honesty or fidelity – who knows what? Domokos was full of fun, full of ideas, always accommodating. He put up with her earlier moods and helped cheer her when she was tired but Iza never felt – not even in their most passionate moments – quite as certain as she had with Antal while she was still married to him, that Domokos was the man for her. That was partly because of Domokos’s profession and partly because of Antal. After all this time, after everything that had happened, Antal was still the measure of things: Antal gave himself over completely to acts of love, his eyes closed, fierce yet tender; with Domokos she always felt he was awake and watching, observing an experience that he would later put into words and look to use somehow. It wasn’t a nice thought but life with Domokos was simple and easy. There was something essentially cheerful about him, as there had been about Vince.

Today, as on other days, she stayed behind and sat down to examine a set of files, but she wasn’t really reading, she smoked instead and made a call. She tried to ring Domokos but he wasn’t there. She didn’t mind: the act of dialling and waiting for someone to pick up the phone was just a way of delaying things, a defence against enquiring glances and having to give explanations. It showed that she had an official reason for still being here after others had left, that she had work to do, someone important to speak to. Once everyone had gone and she heard the door at the end of corridor close, she stopped trying the telephone. She leaned back and looked at the sky through the window, the clouds dark and dense, scampering towards the city. ‘There’ll be a storm,’ she thought. ‘The first real storm of the year.’

She was deeply concerned that the old woman’s constant presence was getting on her nerves.

Iza loved her mother no less than she did her father, but she loved her differently and for different reasons. She hadn’t slept at home for seven years, not even as a guest; whenever she visited she booked a room at the clinic or at the hotel. It was only once her mother was up at Pest that she got to know her as she was in old age. Her early memories of her mother were of a jolly, courageous, sensitive, somewhat frightened, bustling, good-hearted figure, someone waving at her from the past, someone who, despite her amusing hare-brained nature, was loved by everyone for her charm and sweetness, and for her gift for making people feel at home. Before she brought her to Pest there was something disarming about the old woman’s utter ignorance of all the changes in the country; it was only Vince who used to keep track of them, relying on the evening news bulletin to build up a picture of the present, that was when he didn’t feel too tired to listen.

From such a distance it was possible to smile at the old woman’s instinctive feudalism, at the naive way she addressed everyone younger than her, or, as she saw it, of the servant class – woodyard workers, charwomen – by the familiar
te
form of ‘you’, the way she learned from Aunt Emma, but up close it was impossible. Iza had lived alone for years in Pest – the last time she lived with anyone was in the house with the dragon-shaped spout where she and Antal had only to knock at the door on their return from work to sit down to a ready supper, hungry and pleased, eating up everything with great relish, Iza warming her cold hands against the white ceramic stove through whose glazed door the fire her mother had made glowed and danced. Her mother made good fires. She had only to poke it and the flames shot up. This was the home she wanted around her now; she yearned for the harmony of those happy days but knew, just a few weeks after her mother had moved in with her, that there was no point in hoping.

Nor any sense in beating around the bush: the old woman irritated her.

In the first few days it truly astonished her to sense the extraordinary energy in her mother’s old body, the never-flagging insistence that she play a part in her daughter’s life. Her constant presence, the way she kept opening doors, always wanting something to
happen
at precisely the times Iza was exhausted and wanted rest and quiet, a space where nothing happened, saddened her and forced her to spend ever less time at home, only as much as was absolutely necessary. For a while Teréz was the solution to all her problems, but now she felt Teréz too was under threat, and when she was away she felt such anxiety thinking of the flat, it was as if she had left an unruly child behind, and you never knew when this child would somehow find some matches and set fire to the curtains. Her stomach had by now adapted to big city tastes and she found her mother’s cooking too heavy and too greasy. Over the years she had got used to the melancholy freedom of the lonely, to not having to give an account of herself to anyone, to not having to tell people where she was going and when, and when she’d be back. She didn’t really understand why it was so irritating to have to tell her mother where she was preparing to go – there was nothing secret about her excursions and, apart from her well-established habits and her need for silence, there was no reason she should not be happy to have someone home waiting for her – or why it so depressed her to hear someone shuffling into the hallway while she was turning the key in the lock, or showering her with questions as she was removing her gloves: where have you been, what did you do, whom did you meet?

Iza didn’t feel like entertaining her mother with the thrilling events of her day. She arrived home tired and longed for some quiet. She herself was surprised to discover how much she resisted conversation at such times, or what an irrational temper she’d get into when the old woman shuffled after her just as she was about to go out, suggesting a coat or a mac or a cardigan to wear on top – or under – her clothes, telling her what bad weather it was outside and that she would get soaked or catch a cold, the old woman’s face etched with disappointment when she failed to convince her at least to take an umbrella.

She sat looking at the dense dusk, wondering how to occupy her mother. The old woman’s selfless, ever-anxious, incomprehensibly youthful energy had been so completely directed towards Vince that she herself had failed to notice it. There could be no question of introducing her mother to her few friends because her political naivety and country manner of asking direct questions would simply frighten them away. She couldn’t give her jobs to do because, even if she didn’t know how much that ancient body could cope with, her day would be disturbed by the constant bustle. ‘How frenetic her love is!’ she thought in horror. ‘How unrelenting! Does everyone love like she does, demanding every moment of the day?’

The spectre of Antal’s disappearing figure rose before her, the way he turned his head against the irreversible tide of time and looked at her. She couldn’t think of him with as much indifference as she would have liked to, shrugging her shoulders, dismissing him with a wave of her hand as if to say, ‘You were just another thing in my life and now it’s over.’ She felt humiliated every time she thought of him. No one could have been a better wife than she was, so why did he go? If they hadn’t divorced she could have asked him directly what to do about her mother, but the Antal to whom she could have taken her problems and disappointments, especially after he had offered to move back into the old house so the old woman could stay at home, was gone. Perhaps he already suspected something.

She couldn’t tell Domokos that she found her own home stifling and that it was like being a bee on the lip of a jar of honey, her mother’s fingers always dipping her into the sticky heavy mass, her mouth and nose blocked by the golden sweetness. She couldn’t tell Domokos such things because he’d write them down and make a story of them. Everything was a subject for some story to him. She shocked herself by admitting how repelled she was by Domokos’s art.

Out in the corridor an open window slams shut. A gusty shower. Once again she hasn’t thought of anything but has simply decided that the way they were going was all but intolerable and precisely the opposite of what she had imagined. At home, with Vince, when Iza was a child, maybe even when she was Antal’s wife, the old woman was an angel, a good-natured, sensitive angel, her attention warm and welcome. ‘I’m getting older,’ thought Iza and shuddered, not because it was true, but because it was her own diagnosis. ‘I was still young when I lived with her and in many ways depended on her, even as a woman; she cooked and cleaned for us, she patched Antal’s clothes. But now she can’t see that I have fully grown up and don’t need to be mothered. She has aged and grown weak, she needs support and advice. If I want her to be happy with me I have to pretend to be a child. That way she’d be satisfied nannying me during the day and she’d be tired by the evening. I brought her here. I invited her because I wanted her to live a long time and to be happy. The trouble is that now I have to behave in a way she understands. I don’t want displays of feeling, don’t need help. When I’m tired I just want to be quiet. Will she be able to cope with that? Will I? How is it going to work?’

A clap of thunder rang out. She thought she should wait until the storm was over but she didn’t dare. She decided to call a taxi and rush home, providing she could get a cab. The old woman was always worrying that she might have had an accident and whenever she was late became quite overwrought with anxiety wondering where she was. Iza hated being worried about. During the war, while still at university, she regularly carried a gun and sheaves of subversive leaflets in Vince’s old briefcase, and when any policeman asked for her papers she gave him such a contemptuous look he immediately let her go. If Antal did ever worry about her he didn’t show it, however late she arrived at university, though there was plenty to worry about. It was a risky business rushing about under the cover of some air-raid blackout pressing sticky-backed leaflets to walls. And when she did appear at the evening seminar, usually at the last moment, out of breath, Antal would tease her about what a fine doctor she would make being so untidy and so unpunctual. He was particularly cold and rude to her before strangers.

She stepped over to the window and looked down. The traffic was heavy and the city seemed to be cowering before the oncoming storm, the hour offices finished work but before theatres and cinemas opened, the whole city swarming, a rolling mass of people moving towards bus stops and tram stops, so many you could hardly see the road for them. If she didn’t get a taxi it would take an hour to get home and she’d be soaked through to the skin by then. The old woman had been pleading with her to take her plastic mac when she set out at noon. But it was sunny then.

She called a taxi and, wonder of wonders, the rank actually had one. She gathered her things together and ran down the stairs so she’d be there when it arrived. She took a look into the street and saw a taxi swing in from the square. Her heart lurched at what she saw.

There was a tram stop opposite the clinic. One had just arrived with the usual rush-hour crowd hanging on to it, dripping from it like a bunch of grapes, the bunch suddenly shaken as if by a supernatural force under the high thong-like lamp posts. The crowd opened up and from their midst lurched a figure in black who, having landed awkwardly on the traffic island, quickly adjusted her crooked hat. Iza trembled as she watched her mother looking around in confusion, the storm lifting her open coat. A stranger took her by the arm and led her across the road, the old woman hardly daring to step in front of braking cars. The man kept explaining something to her until they got to the other side. Iza rushed across, slapping her keys down at the porter’s lodge, the porter just gazing after her because she had never passed him without shaking his hand. Her taxi arrived in front of the building just as the old woman walked through the door, her face bright, extending a string bag with Iza’s shining purple mac in it.

Suddenly the shower hit them. Iza hesitated for a second in the downpour before pushing her mother into the taxi. The old woman sat stiff-backed, her eyes closed. When she first appeared her face had a glow to it that had disappeared by now.

Iza took the string bag from her and threw it on the taxi floor. ‘You do look after me, darling,’ she said courteously. ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful, but you really shouldn’t have bothered.’

The old woman didn’t reply, just gazed at the driver’s back. The sky was rumbling. ‘She travels by taxi,’ thought the old woman. ‘How simple it all is. When the weather is bad she calls a taxi.’ She was aware her heart was beating unusually fast, a little irregularly even, and she felt as though she was drowning. It had been a horrible journey in the crowded tram – she had never been on the street so late, in the terrifying neon-flashing dark. And all the time the fear, the helpless feeling, what if the girl was caught in the storm?

Iza was pale and in a bad mood. ‘She travels by taxi,’ the old woman thought again and looked at her string bag. It was a very ugly string bag.

5

WITHOUT TELLING EACH
other both Teréz and Iza tried to help the old woman. Teréz, who had taken the job because she felt restless not having enough housework to do, was suspicious at first, feeling the old woman was a hostile new presence in the flat, someone who was always following her around, doubting her honesty. She wanted to put her in her place and show what she thought of her. Iza did that for her: the old woman stopped harassing her. But now that she wasn’t always following her, messing up the kitchen, now that she was no longer dripping coffee on the freshly scrubbed floorboards and had retreated to her armchair, simply sitting there, looking out at the ring road which couldn’t have been of any interest to her, Teréz took no joy in her victory, in fact it rather worried her. She was an intelligent person and quickly realised that she had failed to do certain things in those first few weeks. She understood how an old woman rapidly heading towards eighty, who had spent all her life on firm ground, coping with straightforward problems, would now feel as though her life were hanging by a thread, and she also understood the bitterness she must be feeling, a bitterness she had never articulated in words that must have been there all the time: she was, after all, an old but still active woman, and she was in mourning. Having established the nature of their relationship, Teréz wanted to show her some tenderness without endangering her own importance and position.