Iza's Ballad (2 page)

Neither of them touched their coffees in the Presso, they just stared at them, turning the small glasses in their hands. Iza looked pale. ‘He has about three months,’ she said. ‘Antal will bring him medication. I’ll leave you some money. Buy him anything he wants, however foolish. Don’t spare the cash.’

Music was playing and the old woman suddenly felt that she and Iza were like two executioners, planning something terrible right here, in the shade of the red curtain. Knowing that Vince would be gone in three months’ time, and being aware that she knew
now
that he would no longer be
then
, had such a powerful effect on her that she imagined Vince a prisoner, one of the condemned, and that she had just been informed of the moment of his execution. She did not dare ask if Dekker’s diagnosis was reliable: she knew from both Iza and Antal that Dekker was never wrong. The music grew louder, lovers were gazing at each other, the waitress was asking if she would like some cream in her coffee. Iza answered for her, saying yes.

The cream was stiff and too sweet. She dropped it while she was putting it in the coffee and scraped it off the table in confusion, feeling guilty. ‘Try to pull yourself together,’ said her daughter. ‘Let me tell you what you can expect.’ She had to force herself to listen at first as she was again informed that Vince had at most ninety days to live but suddenly she wasn’t understanding anything, her tears blurring the great red curtain before her. ‘Listen,’ said Iza, ‘we have very little time and we have to discuss things!’

Iza always spoke in this serious, calm manner when there was something important to settle. She felt like screaming and knocking away the cream but she didn’t, of course; she hadn’t the strength and wouldn’t have dared in any case, it was just for a moment that she wanted to: an old woman does not indulge in hysterics or make scenes. She simply asked, ‘Are you coming home?’ It was as much a plea as a question; inside she was praying, beseeching God in inchoate, ungrammatical sentences, insisting that she should come home, that her daughter should be with them and not leave her alone to cope with the dying. Iza was a doctor, Iza was her child and had always helped them through. The younger woman took a deep, violent gulp as if the coffee she was raising to her lips at last were solid rather than liquid, and said, ‘I can’t.’

She comprehended the thought behind it and supposed it to be right. If the girl took a vacation that would mean only that she might visit a little more often than usual and then Vince would guess something was up, would look for the reason and discover it, and that simply must not happen. Iza always came at the regular prearranged time, once a month, and on occasions like birthdays, name days and wedding anniversaries. She couldn’t come this time, well of course she couldn’t, so the old woman would have to deal with Vince by herself as well as with the terrible secret that Vince was going to die. Iza’s promise that Antal would be with them to help was of little consolation. Antal wasn’t Iza.

Her tears began to flow and she felt rather than saw that the people at the next table were watching her. Iza didn’t try to calm her but simply held her hand. She hung on to the girl’s cold, ringless fingers.

The taxi was taking them past bare plane trees down Sándor Street, where a huge, billowing advertisement invited people to a night of dancing. Antal heard a great sigh and looked back from the front passenger seat. The old woman did not respond to his gaze, but coughed and turned aside, watching the street and the swirl of rooks past the wayside trees. Antal was good to her, just as he had been good to Vince, and once upon a time they had loved Antal very much. But Antal had left Iza and that could be neither forgotten nor forgiven.

The radiators down the corridor were pouring out heat. The air was dry and smelled of dishcloths. The porter opened the lift door for them but even at this dreadful time she was cheered because the porter’s smile seemed like a form of defence. She sat down in the small waiting room at the turn of the corridor and while Antal went to fetch the professor – it was Dekker’s last year at the clinic – she took the handkerchiefs and lemons out of her string bag and put them back in again. She was terrified of the thought of talking things over with a stranger but took strength in recalling that the meeting was not about her but about Vince. The politeness with which she was greeted at the clinic was a mark of respect for Iza.

She didn’t really believe Antal when he said it was the end. But when Dekker appeared in the corridor and walked towards her, the string bag in her hand felt much heavier. It was as if she were carrying lead rather than lemons. Dekker was a
professor
and she could tell by his face that her poor tremulous questions would be answered directly.

Later Iza asked her what she and the professor had said to each other. She tried to put it together in her mind but she couldn’t. She could only remember Dekker touching her on the shoulder because she had shaken off the well-intentioned fingers, as if a sudden fierce bitterness had taken possession of her, more an irritation, a deep antipathy, so she felt that Dekker, who had spent three months moving heaven and earth to help Vince and would have given his soul to save him, was a murderer and, what was more, a murderer of the same age as her husband. What right had he to be so
healthy
?

She stopped in the doorway.

Antal said Vince had been unconscious since sunrise and would probably not recover consciousness but slip into death as he slept. Yes, but if she walked in he might wake; it couldn’t be that forty-nine years of physical and spiritual union should prove weaker than death. But what would happen if he should sense her closeness and start speaking in that gentle, childish voice of his, and ask her to account for all that was happening, for his pain and for his ebbing life? What would happen if today, on this his last day, he were suddenly to became aware of the threshold on which he was standing and burst into helpless tears again, sobbing as he did when he lost his job back in the Twenties when he stood beside her bed in his nightshirt, dropping tears, begging, ‘Help me, Ettie!’ What if he asked her to help him now when he already knew there was no hope yet still begged for his life, for what was impossible. Vince loved life; never mind being a pauper, unemployed, or sick, he still thought merely being alive, simply being on earth, the fact that he could wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, that he could be in a place where the wind blew, where the sun shone and where the rain pattered quietly or poured down, was wonderful. She would have to lie to him as she had been lying continuously for months now. She was afraid that Vince would leave her without a word, that he might cast his terrified conscious eyes on her one last time and, after having dozed off with pain or with the assistance of drugs, his thoughts might turn to silent accusation or complaint.

Antal threw his coat on a chair as he entered. It was only now the old woman noticed he was not wearing a white surgical gown. He didn’t look like a doctor without it, just a member of the family, something he hadn’t been for a good few years now.

The first person she spotted in the room was Lidia. The nurse turned her way when the door opened and stood up from the chair by the bed, smoothing her apron. She didn’t greet the old woman in words, just nodded, the only natural thing to do in these unnatural circumstances. She adjusted Vince’s blanket a little, then went straight out, not even casting a glance back at the bed. ‘How strange,’ the old woman thought. ‘She has been at his bedside for weeks and she leaves like that, her eyes quite dry, without any sense that she was part of this. Can people get used to death?’

Vince wasn’t conscious but he didn’t look detached from the world either, more as though he were simply asleep, the skin on his brow tight and silvery. His nose had grown since yesterday and there was no trace of the little red moon on its bridge where his glasses used to sit. She looked again and realised it was not a matter of his nose growing but of his face falling back. ‘He has left me,’ thought the old woman. ‘He didn’t wait for me. For forty-nine years I have known his every thought. Now I don’t know what he has taken with him. He has left me behind.’

She sank down on the bed and gazed at him.

She had been nursing him for months, day and night, to the point of exhaustion, but now she didn’t feel the least bit tired and could start the whole process afresh if only she could take him home, even as he was, in his sad open nightshirt from which his ribcage emerged, higher up than she expected. Seeing what had become of his body she might even be able to hold him in her lap. She should never have let him out of her sight. Iza meant well in bringing him out here, meant well for them both, but she still shouldn’t have allowed it. Perhaps if it were she herself who had been beside him these last few weeks he might have lived a little longer, but it was Lidia who had nursed him, Lidia who changed his bed every day, Lidia who did everything. Lidia was precise, patient and kind, but could she tease him and get some more food into him; could she mock him the way Iza did, telling him there was nothing wrong with him, that he was simply old? Could Lidia hush his choked words of complaint? ‘I shouldn’t have let him enter the clinic,’ thought the old woman. ‘Because he has left me like this now, unaware of my presence, without a word of goodbye!’ She bent down and kissed him. Vince’s brow was dry and smelled of medication. She sat down beside him and held his hand.

About noon Dekker looked in and Lidia returned. Antal was no longer in the room; she hadn’t even noticed him going. Dekker was there only for a moment and she thought Lidia had gone with him but the girl hadn’t moved. She was by the window, level with the bed, watching them from there. It bothered her having a strange pair of eyes on her so she turned her back, but then, not seeing her any more, she immediately forgot there was someone else there. By that time only Vince’s hair was still alive, a few stubborn locks of his white mane. She felt neither tired nor hungry and was unaware of the passage of time. She straightened her back. It hurt having constantly to be leaning over.

In the afternoon Vince spoke.

She thought her heart had stopped. It had been so silent till then, so infinitely silent it seemed she was surrounded by a solemn impregnable wall of silence that would permit no voice. His body trembled as he spoke, even his eyelashes trembled. She leaned to his mouth to catch whatever he was whispering. Lidia was there, also listening, and on seeing the face of the younger woman beside her she suddenly felt angry and downright hostile. She hated Lidia now, felt she was pushing in, that she was soulless. You see, Antal has gone and Dekker too. They are sensitive people. What do you think you are gawping it? Are you deaf? Can’t you hear the sick man is calling for water? Why don’t you move? She just stands there gawping at Vince without moving at all. She should be leaping up, getting a glass of water from the bedside table that had been totally cleared by someone; Vince’s glasses were gone as well as his cup and his little pencil stub. But somewhere inside she was rejoicing because the nurse didn’t know what to do and it was only she who could hear Vince’s words, she who knew what he wanted, she who could get him something to drink – even now, she could still do something for him. She poured water into the glass and raised Vince’s head, putting the glass to his lips.

The mouth wouldn’t open and a look of something like disgust, something distinctly unpleasant, flickered across his face. Vince did not drink.

‘He’s not thirsty,’ whispered Lidia. ‘Don’t try making him drink.’

She could have hit the nurse for saying that. Who was she to look down on her like some kind of god, to be giving her instructions and taking the glass from her hand? And in the meantime that voice again, that strange hoarse breathing. But why won’t he drink if it’s water he wants?

‘I’m here,’ said Lidia aloud.

At first she thought the nurse was addressing her and that made her even angrier. But then she saw that Lidia was looking at Vince, not her, and that Vincent’s mouth was trembling again in a way that reminded her of how he used to smile, and how it lit up his face for a moment before immediately fading again. Lidia crouched down by the bed and held Vince’s hand.

The old woman felt she no longer existed, that she had been ignored, cut out, cheated. She glared at Lidia. Lidia was a complete stranger, someone she’d never met before, whose face was packed with a meaning she didn’t recognise, and she felt a peculiarly fierce hatred for her; it was as if, for the first time in her life, her eyes had finally been opened and she could see. Thief, cheat; she was stealing the last moments of her husband’s life. It was Antal who had chosen this nurse! Antal had selected her to attend on the sick man. Iza wouldn’t have done that. Now there she is, crouching by the bed, holding Vince’s hand. A nobody. A stranger.

‘Go on, sleep,’ said Lidia. ‘I’m here.’

The old woman sank back on to the bed. She was so angry that she felt no pain at all. She snatched at Vince’s other hand, the tender body lying held up by the pair of them. Vince didn’t speak again, his breathing was barely audible. Lidia was still crouching beside him. Her face was no longer visible as she had bent her brow over Vince’s hand.

Outside, the March light had frozen between the trees. The old woman closed her eyes and stiffened at the waist. When she looked again, Lidia was standing. Vince lay precisely as before but was quieter still.

‘He’s gone,’ said Lidia. ‘It wasn’t water he wanted, it was his daughter, Iza. I’ll get Dr Antal.’

2

A CAR STOOD
waiting outside the door. Antal led her to it. It took her some time to understand that Dekker had arranged to have her taken home in his car. She shook her head in terror, no, certainly not, out of the question. It was incomprehensible to her that she should get into a car now and be driven home as if it were a wedding. She’d cut across the small copse of trees in the park to where the rails ran and get a tram home. Or better still, she’d go on foot. She wanted to walk, to move. Antal took a long look back at the porter’s cabin where the porter’s cape was hanging on a hook. It was as though he wanted to put it on while seeing her home. Don’t follow, leave me alone! She just wanted to be left alone. She wouldn’t feel ill, why should she, it’s fine, just let her go. And she was very grateful for everything, grateful to him and to Dekker.