Iza's Ballad (21 page)

Antal rarely felt obliged to take any particular action but, when he did, he followed his instincts. It had been just this kind of instinct that prompted him to knock on Cato’s study in childhood and to offer his own work rather than Bérczes’s deal as the basis of his scholarship. It was the same instinct that led him to lowering his defences in the third year of his studies when Professor Dekker brewed him coffee in his office for the first time, and he understood what the professor expected of him and what kind of opinions he actually held. Now the same voice told him to go and join the Szo
̋
cses. The girl, that strange girl with the long eyes and the bearing of a junior cadet, was clearly the judge’s daughter, the judge who, year after year, gave him twelve
pengő
to spend on books. Surely Cato must have told Szo
̋
cs who was getting those books?

Dekker stopped him. He said goodbye to Antal, telling him they’d meet at the clinic, because he had something to discuss with a friend. He stepped back and took Vince Szo
̋
cs by the arm. He never even looked at the girl. The minister had started on his funeral song. Dekker took no notice whatsoever but was explaining something to the judge whose face went ever redder as he listened and the sudden change of expression conjured in Antal a sense of what his face might have been like in happier, more confident days. Antal imagined him in his youth, with a rakish smile, right here in the same place when the cemetery was just a wood, at a picnic perhaps, lying under the oak, swigging from a flask and passing it on to Cato, laughing, red in the face, his expression full of hope.

The headmaster’s burial took place without either the judge or Dekker noticing it. The girl turned her head towards the grave but did not join in the prayers, her face stiff as a mask, as if she and the priest were citizens of different countries, but she didn’t want to insult the priest who, in her eyes, was a diplomat representing a different political system with which she did not agree but which she felt obliged to respect even while maintaining her own opinions. Dekker and Szo
̋
cs continued talking together after the burial, discussing something near a crypt, a little apart from the others. It wasn’t a situation on which he could intrude and be introduced to the girl.

Antal returned to the university in a temper and bolted down his food in the canteen. He wasn’t due to give private coaching till the afternoon so he hung around the noticeboard on the mezzanine. It always amused him that here they were in the middle of the semester and all his friends received letters but no one ever wrote to him. He glanced at the table of repeat examinations, the rector’s announcements and ran his eyes over the names of the incoming students. They had already accepted enough applicants to overfill the faculty, so the graduates would have to be sent out to territories recovered under the Second Treaty of Vienna: to Transylvania, to the Czechs, to the Serbian town of Nagykikinda or to the Ruthenians, as if people didn’t know that a posting like that would last only a couple of years until the territories passed to someone else again. There was a single name in the right-hand column of candidates not admitted, a rare event because it was extremely rare for someone who had got this far to be rejected. The faculty had turned down the application of Izabella Szo
̋
cs.

He entirely failed to concentrate on what he was supposed to be teaching that afternoon. He knew it was Dekker’s habit to call in on his ward last thing at night to check over the most serious cases and he knew he could catch him at the main door. He was counting how many hours were left before he could see the professor and discover whether the connection between Izabella Szo
̋
cs, Vince Szo
̋
cs and the conversation at the funeral earlier in the day was what he thought it was. ‘You’re not alone, young soldier,’ thought Antal. ‘If you get here Dekker will support you and, believe it or not, I will too, not just for your father’s sake but for the strange look in your long eyes and for that extraordinary authority you seem to radiate, an authority not often found in young women.’

Once Dekker arrived he told Antal everything without being asked, how the next day he would talk to the rector and tell him he wanted to accept the daughter of an old classmate of his, someone the institution was too scared to admit for fear she would be a bad influence. If her father is such an honest man, why does she need a diploma?

They’ll admit her on the second round, said Dekker, and clinked his cup down next to the toy elephant. Dekker wouldn’t have a skull on his desk like some of the others and whenever he found one on someone else’s he would pick it up and sniff it as if he suspected it of being newly dead, giving the owner a few anxious minutes in the meantime. Antal knew that what he promised would be carried out: it was 1941, the country was now firmly involved in the war and people tended to shout a little louder but everyone was in awe of Dekker who wore his academic cap upside down on formal occasions and whenever the Germans won a major battle would go around singing ‘Another war, yet more disaster, down the chute and ever faster’, and when the rector took him up on this he would reply with a straight face, saying, ‘I was drunk.’ It was common knowledge that Dekker only drank milk or fruit juice if he could help it and that, when young, he had received a grant to study in Scandinavia where his friends got him used to such drinks rather than alcohol.

Two weeks later he saw Iza coming up the steps with a very old, much battered briefcase under her arm. She was wearing the same short coat she had worn at the funeral. He sat in the finance office and waited for the girl to complete the forms and pay; there was no bursary of any kind for her. His heart ached for her when he saw her measure out the hundred and four
pengő
and the enrolment fee. Vince Szo
̋
cs had been forced into retirement, yet he brought twelve
pengő
each year as a book prize! What had they sold to afford this? Or maybe they were not eating or heating the house this month?

When the girl stood up he followed and called to her in the corridor. ‘Hello, fresher!’ he said. ‘I am your official class mentor. Introduce yourself to your senior.’

Iza looked him up and down but did not answer. She took a glance at the signs by the stairs and set off towards the medical wing. Antal went with her. Iza pretended she didn’t see him. It happened to be a break between lectures, the lecture hall doors were open and second-year students had just ended their theory session when Ulla, Ulla Deák, winked at Antal. Seeing the lechery in her sleepy eyes, a lechery based on memories of the previous summer, he was so cross he hardly acknowledged her. Iza simply carried on, glancing at the doors with the professors’ names on. She stopped in front of Dekker’s office.

Antal was right behind her. Dekker hadn’t come in yet. He was expounding something in Room 26, the great hall, whose doors were still closed. Once he was in the swing of things Dekker took no notice of bells and carried on despite the noise of the corridor, too absorbed in his teaching.

Iza knocked.

Antal took Dekker’s key from his pocket. He was free to come and go, to tidy Dekker’s papers. He opened the door to Iza. ‘Do come in,’ he said.

The girl did not step in but stared at the stone floor as if trying to decipher some secret message there. Antal closed the door again and stood beside her. Although there were only five centimetres between them so they were almost touching, Iza’s tense refusal to engage in conversation made it seem as if they were miles apart. Later, years after, even once Iza was no longer his wife, he knew this was the moment he fell in love with her and that he wanted to live with her.

Dekker arrived at last. When he opened the door to the girl he invited Antal in too. Iza blinked and gave him a cold, formal nod but did not extend her hand.

‘Antal will be ready to help you in everything. Listen to his advice and learn from him. No need for thanks, just go to your lecture.’

He lit a cigarette and addressed Antal through the smoke as they were leaving: ‘Look after her, young man.’

Any other girl would have laughed but Iza’s face remained cold and hostile. There was nothing he could ask her, she was impossible to speak to.

They walked past the girls’ room and Ulla’s face flashed by again as she looked through the open door. She noted Iza’s ill-fitting coat and the old briefcase, but she didn’t look happy. Ulla too had noticed Iza’s long eyes and bright lips, and marked the awkward, nervous way Antal was following her, desperately hoping for encouragement. The stone floor was loud under their heels, the halls were finally empty and the buffet was filling up. Antal knew the girl would have no money but he also knew it was pointless offering her a drink since she wouldn’t accept it. The thought stung him terribly, yet he was proud of her.

They had to stop by the great hall. The blue booklet with the first-year timetable was open in her hand: Iza was preparing for her first class with such calm assurance she might have been in her old school not at her first university lecture. There were only two minutes before the bell. Iza’s lip trembled. Now she would say goodbye and close the door behind her.

‘I know your father,’ said Antal.

She turned to him. The blank face was gone. The soldier turned into a smiling girl.

‘For years he would bring me books at Christmas. Did you know?’

The girl shook her head. He put his left hand to his throat as if not trusting himself to say the right thing, worried he might be talking about things of which it was wiser not to speak.

‘He gave twelve
pengő
to the school each year; and every year after year six the headmaster gave it to me. Did he not tell you?’

The girl’s eyes told him he hadn’t.

‘One time he came I saw him. He was younger and more mobile then. He ran among the snow drifts on Donor’s Square as if he were afraid that someone would stop him and thank him. Are you still not talking to me?’

The young soldier’s face softened a little, creasing like a child’s. ‘Every month he got three
pengő
pocket money from mama,’ she said. ‘One he gave to me, one he used to buy a newspaper on Sunday because he really liked reading the papers but I didn’t know what he did with the third. Was he saving it for you?’ She was using the
te
form to him now as naturally as if he had been her brother.

‘Let’s go to the cafeteria,’ said Antal.

She’d only just enrolled and was already late on the course so it wouldn’t matter as long as she attended her first class at noon, he said. They could go to the cafeteria, have coffee, smoke a cigarette, even eat something, then go for a walk in the wood. As long as she attended the physics class from twelve till one that would be enough for today. He’d go with her, he thought. He’d go with her everywhere. He’d be the first to take her to the dissection room with its cadavers.

Iza put her blue book into the briefcase and walked along with him as he suggested. She was tall, a touch taller than he was, and wore no hat – her hair was brown, brown as a schoolgirl’s, a child’s, without any hint of gold, like a Biedermeier painting.

They ate a slice of cake and Iza asked for sparkling water, sipping it with great pleasure as though it were fine wine. She refused a cigarette but was happy to accept a stick of chocolate and carried on chewing it when they went out to the university woods.

The wet weather of the funeral had been followed by a minor heatwave. The sky was blue and no breeze shook the dying leaves. It was mild weather: birches and firs looked hazy and uncertain between sturdy oaks. There were benches on the hill and a brook at the bottom of it, both artificial of course, on a bed of lowland sand. Iza sat on the railings of the little bridge dangling her legs, leaving her briefcase on the ground beside her. There were carp in the pond, plump brown carp, and she threw a few clods of earth at them.

‘I’ll come to visit you on Sunday,’ said Antal.

Iza said fine.

‘You won’t forget that Dekker said I was to look after you?’

‘No.’

Her skin and hair were gently scented with a little-girlish smell of soap.

‘Dekker is a good man. Listen to him. About everything.’

The older ones would tease her, call her fresher and give her every kind of nickname, he thought. He was more concerned for her than he had ever been for himself. How to look after her? What could he do for her? How to shield her from all the likely dangers? It would be awful if some fascist in the youth movement were to pin a crane feather in her hair and declaim how Hungary was just about to win the war and reclaim all the territories lost in 1919, from the Carpathians through to the Adriatic. He took the hand with the chocolate in it. She didn’t mind.

‘Don’t get too involved with politics.’

The girl immediately vanished; it was the young soldier who stared back. The chocolate in its silver foil hovered between them in the air. She didn’t eat any more but snatched her wrist from Antal’s grasp and threw the chocolate to the fish in the pond. She leapt off the bridge railings, picked up her briefcase and set off for the main building. She didn’t say a word until they reached the edge of the wood, then stopped and looked at him again and spoke very clearly as if she wanted to emphasise every word to him. ‘Politics will be my life as long as I live,’ she said.

He knew it was crazy but at that moment he was sure he would marry her.

3

HE MARRIED HER
on a sparkling wind-blown day in the autumn of 1948. There was something deeply moving in being fully aware of the character of the girl he was marrying, that, in the seven years he had known her, he had seen her study, pass exams and move among the sick and dying. He had danced with her and had provided her with leaflets that informed people of the true state of the war, leaflets that she would slip between notices advertising canaries or reliable guard dogs. It was good to know that he wasn’t marrying her just because he had fallen blindly in love with her or because he physically desired her, but because they were intellectually matched, because Iza was a person you could respect, someone from whom you could learn.