Iza's Ballad (16 page)

One morning she arrived with an empty shopping bag, clearly not from the market but straight from home. She called in on the old woman, who turned away in terror when she opened the door, muttering something, then immediately stood up thinking that, unusually, Teréz intended to start the cleaning in her room. At such times she would go through to Iza’s room and was about to do that.

‘I had no time to do the shopping this morning,’ said Teréz. ‘If you fancy it, why not go down to the covered market and buy the necessaries. I’ve made a list.’

She was surprised by the enthusiasm with which the offer was accepted. The old woman’s face lit up. She put on her glasses so that she’d be able to read Teréz’s list in the market and stepped lightly down the stairs without holding on to the banisters. It was as if she had discovered a secret store of energy in herself and never mind the stairs. Teréz turned on the radio and went about her business, shaking her head from time to time. What a fool she was to leave the shopping to the old woman. She’d finish later than usual now. She had usually finished cooking by the time the old woman got home from her walk.

She had just finished the rooms when the old woman returned having bought everything on the list. Teréz thanked her, ran her eyes over the things on the table, and in her grudging good-hearted way went so far as to ask whether the bags were not too heavy for her before getting straight up and starting to cook. The old woman stood behind her at the open door, her face beaming. Teréz didn’t have the heart to tell her to go away though it always made her nervous to have someone watch her cooking and there were times she had cut herself or grated her skin. If only the miserly old thing had bought fresh goods instead of the cheapest and the worst! The meat was streaky, all bones, fit only for a dog. But she said nothing, didn’t even mutter. The old woman stood there for a while, watching her spellbound as the raw material was slowly transformed into food, then returned to her room. She was utterly exhausted and deliriously happy.

Teréz left the shopping to her after this, though her purchases sometimes annoyed her and there were times she quickly had to substitute one ingredient for another: the box of cocoa she left at the market, the mustard that fell out of her bag. She never criticised her for anything. There were other times she marvelled at how good she was and thinking so made her reflect somewhat sentimentally on her own condition. Why should she herself be a widow, and a childless widow at that? Just looking at the old woman could bring it on, this uncertain, mild regret. Teréz liked weeping; she delighted in watching films whose endings she never saw because she was too weepy. On the other hand she felt she was even with the old woman and was feeling pretty pleased with herself.

On 1 July, Teréz’s birthday, next to Iza’s usual envelope full of money on the kitchen table she found an old-fashioned silver brooch with the coral motif of a severed hand in the centre. Teréz turned it over and over in confusion; she didn’t particularly like the pin but it moved her to receive it. She hesitated a moment before shyly pinning it on.

She had sent the old woman out shopping but it was the caretaker who brought up the full bag, saying she had gone for a walk. When she didn’t arrive in time for lunch Teréz became so anxious that she left the food on a low flame and went down to look in the streets, running round the block. She found her by the Corvin cinema, sitting on the steps with her eyes shut. When Teréz called her name she sat up in surprise and obediently set out after her back to the flat. Teréz wanted to tell her off for making her worry like that but she couldn’t bear to, guessing that the old woman had been hiding from her to avoid the embarrassment of being thanked. The old woman deserved some respect for that. Who could have guessed she was such a sensitive soul? She gave her lunch and while serving it out, still with her back to her, feeling suddenly confused and shy, she thanked her for the gift. The old woman whispered something, her face and neck glowing with happiness.

*

After the first few weeks of disorientation, Iza too was beginning to adjust.

Surprisingly enough, Domokos played a part in this readjustment. One day, in the middle of a play, he turned to her and asked what she was going to do with granny. The question sounded flippant coming from him because she thought he wasn’t really interested in anything beyond the form of his own utterances and had never detected signs of particularly charitable concern in him.

Domokos continued gently but firmly as Iza hesitated, watching the stage. ‘Because if we leave her out of occasions like this you might as well have left her in the country and she’d be no less lonely.’

Iza leaned forward. A character was speaking a monologue on stage. Theatre was the art form Iza had always liked least. If ever she got the time she read sober works of realism and novels with sensible plots. It was only because of Domokos that she went to the theatre at all and the actress’s long monologue irritated her. People talking to themselves were pathological, she thought. She didn’t answer the question, which made it look as though it was not worth answering, but she simply didn’t know what to say. She had been pondering the question for weeks. She didn’t know the answer.

‘Keep thinking,’ said Domokos. He leaned back and said the actress had poor diction.

It was on that occasion that she first seriously thought that, given all the circumstances, she could actually live with Domokos. Domokos – and no one who had only passing knowledge of him would have imagined it – had been suggesting marriage for a while. Iza was reluctant to entertain the idea. She was in two minds because behind all her objections there was always the memory of Antal’s hair blowing in the breeze and the trees in the copse bending with the wind as Dekker passed. ‘I hope he doesn’t write about this,’ she thought suddenly and looked away from the stage to get his reassurance. ‘You won’t write about me, will you, Peter?’ she whispered. Domokos’s face clouded over: he looked older, much older. He shook his head.

Once she got home that evening she decided to write down how she spent her time.

It was like being a student preparing for exams again. She took a piece of paper and divided the day into hours. Morning: rise, prepare, dash into work; home by late afternoon. She was usually tired after the journey then and not up to spending time with her mother. Certainly not up to taking her out somewhere. But by about seven, if there was nothing special she had to do, she could perhaps try sitting with her till supper time. After supper the evening would be her own since the old woman would go to bed then. She couldn’t do this if she were on the afternoon shift, of course. She needed mornings free then to make notes, to work, or to write the odd article. She felt a degree of stage fright telling her mother this, worrying that she might not understand that it was the only way she could be fitted into the day, but she need not have worried: the old woman understood perfectly and responded to Iza’s plans with such happiness and gratitude the girl really didn’t know what to say.

Having put the plan into effect she was with her mother four times a week, visiting her as if she were a guest. The old woman always welcomed her into a tidy room and offered her something delicious that ruined her appetite but which she didn’t have the heart to refuse. Her mother had put on a little weight and started to look more like her old, rural self. The two highlights of the day – running errands for Teréz and Iza’s visits to tell her about life at the clinic – seemed to be enough for her to take new courage and gather strength. Iza’s heart almost broke with pity to see how hard her mother worked to try to understand what she told her, how she strove to memorise the names and how proud she was of being able to refer back to a previous conversation. ‘Is that the colleague of yours who got married in China?’ Or, ‘Did you find the book that vanished from your table while you were in surgery?’ Iza never felt at her best in the hour or so she spent with her mother but she always pretended to be. Her plans for the late evening had generally to be postponed or cancelled – she only got out with friends or went to the cinema on a Sunday afternoon, though she hated going out in the early afternoon. As far as Iza was concerned late evening, after supper, was the right time for company or concerts. She might have been willing to give up company but she couldn’t do without the concerts, especially on the days her season ticket was valid, so she put the old woman off on those evenings, but she felt so guilty seeing her ever more worn, disappointed face that she always made up for it the next day: it was like catching up with homework. Domokos, when he came, now tended to arrive after ten, once Iza had finished her work and the house was quiet. The old woman occupied the time between her two daily highlights one way or another and slowly got to know the other inhabitants of the block, at least those on their floor, always stopping to talk to mothers with children. The women were fond of her. The great city of her honeymoon had shrunk to one small part of a single postal district, but one that was growing intimate, village fashion. Teréz extended her brief to cover household goods. People all over the area were getting to know the old woman, the dairy shop even providing a chair for her to sit on when she had to wait.

*

The summer was unbearably hot.

It was hard for the old woman and she had nowhere to hide from the heatwave. It was almost dark before she dared open the shutters. She stumbled about blindly in the flat and instead of the rural scents of summer behind cool Venetian blinds she had to put up with the unforgiving heat. Iza did not suffer very much but her mother was struggling for breath. When Teréz saw how pale she was and recalled how she had been gasping since the morning, she didn’t let her do the shopping, telling her it would be bad for her to be carrying things and that they’d have to tell madam-the-doctor. She took the string bag herself, pushed the old woman into the dark room, left her with a cool wet cloth on her forehead and ran off.

The old woman was for once grateful to her. She felt hot and weak, weighed down by her thoughts. She wanted to order a permanent memorial to Vince in time for All Souls’ Day, the day of the dead, and closed her eyes trying to visualise the best possible stone and inscription. She had corresponded with Gica about it: the cloak-maker was a person of taste.

The heatwave lasted for weeks. It was possible to open windows in the evening but the fresh air didn’t do much to cool the baking walls. Iza too lost weight and was planning a holiday. She first thought of going to Czechoslovakia to be in the Tátra mountains but then changed her mind. ‘We won’t go to the Tátra this time,’ said Domokos. ‘Let’s stay in the country, rent a room somewhere along the Danube Bend, and take the old girl with us, she looks utterly washed out.’ Domokos was careful not to use too many poetic metaphors when he talked to her.

So they planned ahead, the old woman most keenly, with one small regret, because she had no memory of ever going away except in her youth and she felt awkward about planning holidays now Vince was dead. At the same time, in her own modest way, she was happy to take a break from the unbearable oven the city had become. The time between Teréz leaving and Iza returning went all the quicker for the thought and she imagined how great it would be to spend the whole day with Iza and that mad writer of hers, who always greeted her, coming or going, with ‘Your servant, ma’am.’ For some reason she couldn’t explain even to herself, she liked Domokos, though she often reflected on the irregular and quite wrong relationship between him and her daughter.

Teréz regularly finished an hour or two earlier now she did the shopping herself.

One afternoon, when Teréz went off having left a bowlful of apricots by her armchair, the old woman wondered how Teréz could get away so early and still be doing the shopping. Could it be that she had shopped on the way here? But then she thought how it was the same even when Teréz nipped out to the shops in the middle of the job. How could that be? She started nibbling at an apricot but it didn’t taste like the ones back home used to, not quite ripe, a little bitter despite all the sun. Suddenly she stopped chewing. She realised why Teréz tended to finish so early nowadays.

It was shocking, in fact monstrous, for her to realise that she wasn’t helping Teréz by doing the shopping but rather slowing her. The blinds were drawn, the temperature in the room stifling; the old woman was having one of those rare moments of perception when everything seems blindingly clear. All of a sudden she felt terribly ashamed of the way she had misjudged Teréz. Teréz was strong, thought the old woman as slow bitter tears crept down her cheek. Teréz only seemed stern and loud, in reality she was gentle and sensitive. The image of Teréz as a stern loudmouth was replaced by that of a tender young woman, transformed into an abstract idea of pure virtue, who had taken pity on her and was, as an act of sheer grace, sacrificing her own valuable time in order to help her occupy her idle hours. Teréz must clearly be doing a better job of shopping: being better acquainted with the covered market, while she was still working through the stalls without having fixed on any particular butcher or greengrocer, there being so many of them that she felt she had to try them all. She was more of a hindrance than a help to Teréz. If it weren’t for the heatwave, and if Teréz hadn’t been so prepared to take the task back, she would never have realised it. Never.

She didn’t dare look Teréz in the eye the next day, though they had got into the habit of chatting by then, Teréz being happy to talk about herself and her dead husband while the old woman reminisced about Vince. There might have been twenty years or so between them but they shared their widowhood and that gave them some common ground. Teréz didn’t understand why the old woman had become so morose and reserved. Once she even felt her brow to check she wasn’t ill. She couldn’t persuade the old woman to do the shopping, not even once the heatwave was over, and while this was a great relief to her she couldn’t help but be curious. She felt offended, as if her kindness had been rejected, and paid no more attention to the old woman who was back to crouching in her armchair and to wandering about the streets, thinking how to let Teréz know that she felt she had no right to accept her kindness and that she would rather die than go on in the knowledge that she was hindering rather than helping anyone.