Iza's Ballad (29 page)

Vince was here, so clearly here that she didn’t need to talk to him. She couldn’t see him but felt his presence and it was as if this was the very opportunity her confused thoughts were waiting for. Slowly the darkness in her mind lifted. She didn’t tell Vince how hard it had been waiting for him, and how impossible it was to describe the dreadful emptiness of life without him because Vince knew all that, and he wasn’t going to say where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Strange how quickly he had become part of the new estate. There was nothing frightening or disturbing about him; everything was as natural as it had been throughout their lives together; it was just that he had turned into a house, a set of buildings, a light bulb. The strange thing was how easy it was to assemble him from such tiny fragments. How could a man turn into a building? What material might he be made of? It was a pity he couldn’t speak and tell her what she wanted to know. Now she would have to discover it for herself and, if she had time, she might yet do that. He had offered her this happy opportunity of doing something for herself, of working something out. He just set her on the road to it and once she got there his small bright eyes would be laughing and sparkling with joy that she had managed it all by herself.

‘How dreadful,’ the old woman said to herself as she turned the wheel and watched the water run, white as a long goose neck. ‘It’s so hard living with me, I am such a burden, I don’t know what to do.’

The Iza that lived inside her furrowed her brow. ‘I am tired,’ she said in a high, sharp voice.

‘That’s another thing, the way I tire her out,’ the old woman explained to Vince, ‘though she is such a good girl and she works so hard. And if you knew how much money she gave me, my bedside table is full of hundreds. I am so ashamed to be doing nothing for it.’

Vince had vanished.

He had disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared the moment before. It was as if the estate itself had vanished, the buildings dissolved into soft blurs. Now she was angry and it didn’t help. She suddenly felt cold, her bare hands were sparkling and had gone numb with the water. The fog looked dense again and angrier. The dog was howling.

Voices were approaching up Rákoczi Street, boys and girls arm in arm. ‘Young people,’ thought the old woman. ‘Young people don’t see the fog. They’re walking towards the university, laughing, laughing just like Antal did when he was young, like Iza used to. I’m so stupid. Vince is not answering.’

She sat and stared at the ground. The mud round the well looked deeper, so she cleaned her black shoes. Their edges were shining in the dark. She wasn’t tired but felt a strange tension as if she could see and hear more clearly. Someone was shouting, a door was being slammed, the low bells of the bar could be heard here too. Something was squelching in the distance, coming closer. The dog was quiet but that scared her more than when it was howling.

‘Are you going to sleep here?’ asked the nightwatchman, if only to pass the time. If people wanted to sleep by the well that was up to them.

Someone was squelching their way towards them singing a melancholy song. ‘A white dove flutters over the village,’ he sang. The old woman imagined the dove but the one she saw was silver, not white, and the way it flew was more like an aeroplane than a bird, somehow unnatural, in a straight steady surge. The walls of the village were all alike too: all had tiled roofs, all with verandas as on the news.

‘Hey,’ she heard the nightwatchman call. ‘Not that way! Straight on! Rákoczi Street is that way. Where do you think you are going?’

She had always been scared of drunks. Her feet had gone a little numb now so she had to lean against something for a moment, and when she stood up again the waterwheel made a splashing sound. She gave the nightwatchman a guilty look but he was occupied with the young man who was explaining something to him in the middle of the road, pointing towards one of the buildings. He cut a clumsy, awkward figure in the fog, like a starving bear.

‘I should be on my way,’ she thought. Nothing worked the way she wanted it to, not nowadays, absolutely nothing. The figure of Vince was retreating into the far distance. The nightwatchman was telling the young man that he wasn’t allowed to go near the buildings, and the drunk was bellowing something about having been allotted a flat here and that no one had the right to stop him going to see how the building was getting on. Something creaked, a board somewhere. It startled her and she set off in fright towards the buildings.

‘Get moving, young man,’ said the nightwatchman. ‘Get on or I’ll set the dog on you.’

She took great fright at that. What if the dog didn’t know it was the drunk it had to follow and bit her instead? The old woman started running towards the identical houses. There used to be an unpaved crossroads here, maybe they had laid a better path and if she crossed here she might arrive at the tracks and back on the main road. She could wait there until it was all quiet again before returning. She tapped at the walls of the new houses, the walls as cool and damp to the touch as Vince’s face when he died. Even the light resembled the light on Vince’s brow.

‘Go to hell!’ she heard the nightwatchman bawl. ‘I wouldn’t show you round at this time of night, not if you were the angel Gabriel.’

‘An angel?’

She slowed down. There was a plank laid over the mud and she walked along it, astonished at how clever she was, watching her feet with innocent delight as they avoided any contact with the mud. Wearing her glasses made her feel more confident. The builders must use this plank to push barrows along on the way to the last, unfinished building. She kept on walking to get away from the loud voices, getting an awful scare one moment when she seemed to pass very close to the dog. She saw it and stopped in terror but the dog for some reason fell silent at her appearance and just looked at her with dull eyes, almost frightened. Then it made a noise at her, as if wanting to say something, but it sounded nothing like Captain. She switched her string bag to the other arm.

‘Go to hell,’ she heard again. ‘Where has the old woman gone? You haven’t frightened her away, have you?’

‘Don’t be angry at me,’ said the old woman to her inner Iza. ‘It’s just that I haven’t found out anything. Papa exists, but not the way I imagined. Papa has turned into a house, and a road, and concrete, and won’t answer.’

She went on trying to think how to do something for her daughter who, now that she was inside her, in the fog, was a child again, a child with curly locks, in an apron, with a runny nose, her mouth open and bitterly complaining. ‘You’re such a nuisance,’ said the child in a thin little voice. ‘I don’t get a moment’s rest because I spend all my time worrying about what to do with you. I have a job to do, you know!’ It was so odd the way this image and this voice failed to match, the laced-up boots, the lisping voice of Iza and words like ‘nuisance’ and ‘job’. ‘I have no life of my own. You are so clumsy. Clumsy. You have ruined my life.’

‘My darling,’ thought the old woman. ‘Poor Izzy.’

The nightwatchman and the drunk were still talking to each other when she arrived at the fourth building and saw, to her disappointment, that there was no way out on that side. They had put up a wire fence. She had to retrace her steps, back past the dog. She was scared.

The plank divided into two in a V shape. The end that lay on the flat soil led back over the mud – the part she had walked on before – the other was at a slope into the unfinished building that still lacked stairs. There was scaffolding there now, forming a kind of ladder. If she were younger she could run up that ladder. She used to love running along planks with her arms stretched out.

Vince was back again, angry with her about something and she couldn’t understand why. There were so many things she couldn’t understand. It hurt her that he should be angry and her eyes filled with tears. How could she possibly know what to do if he didn’t tell her? It was obvious that she couldn’t do it alone! Vince should remember that she wasn’t very clever.

The nightwatchman’s voice was very loud and angry now. He was almost shouting.

‘Go break your neck at home if you want, but not here where I am responsible for everything. Get lost or I’ll ring the police! Filthy drunken pig!’

The words were swallowed by the fog and swirled about in the half-light. Vince was suddenly gentler and the Iza inside her also grew nicer, her round eyes bright and full of longing as they were when she was small, asking for something, for quince, or honey with nuts.

‘You have a guardian angel, Ettie,’ Vince once told her, ‘an angel who goes around with you. And you know what? You are the only person in the twentieth century who still has a guardian angel.’ Now she could see the picture that used to hang over her bed, the face of the little girl gathering strawberries, a face whose Old German sweetness vanished, replaced by a wreath of wheat-coloured hair from under which her own wrinkled face looked out, and she saw that, in place of the little basket the running girl had carried, there was now her own black string bag. At that moment she realised what she could do for Iza, the Iza that lived inside her, not the stranger rushing about in taxis or the one who talks in whispers to Teréz and looks up from her books with such a stern gaze. Vince was no longer at her side but this time she didn’t call him. This was a moment when she had to be perfectly alone.

‘Go,’ said the old woman to her guardian angel, the angel in the picture. The angel looked back at her and swept off. The plank was bare, utterly bare, the end that led upwards vanished into the mist. The old woman took off her glasses, folded the pink arms and put them into her handbag, then started up the slope.

For the first time in her life her guardian angel was no longer looking after her.

2

IZA WOKE AT
nine the next day, cheerful and satisfied. She had never liked Sundays when she was a girl and was soon bored without the weekend bustle of the town. Once she got a job, though, she learned to appreciate those lazy twenty-four hours with their unstructured freedom and to take pleasure in a break that had once been unwelcome. This particular Sunday, when Teréz wasn’t due to come in, when her mother was elsewhere and Domokos was at some reader-writer conference, felt like an unexpected gift to her. She lay in bed, not even raising the blinds, watching the light filter in between the slats, and adjusted her head on the small pillow. She took a simple pleasure in being alone, in not having anyone requiring her company, especially in not having to put up with someone else’s melancholy, unwavering attention in the next room radiating towards her just as she was trying to relax. She was delighted to see how utterly restful it was without the old woman shifting and stirring, shyly opening the bathroom door and tiptoeing around the bath, then the inevitable clatter, because the more care she took with her movements the more likely she was to knock something off. It was almost frightening to feel how much better it was to be alone.

She had put aside this time to think the matter through without interruptions. The medical report that had been sent directly to her after her mother’s check-up was reassuring and she genuinely believed that the cooperative work she was offered would bear fruit eventually. There was also the hope that her mother would return from her visit to the country refreshed by the change of scene and more cheerful. Domokos’s absence did not concern her. She was used by now to his irregular hours and to the fact that he didn’t always need to be with her as Antal once did.

She planned not to dress, just to laze about till the afternoon, flip through journals and magazines, listen to some music, then, after dinner, go for a walk somewhere, in Óbuda perhaps, the most ancient district of the city and a subject of endless interest. She took her time enjoying breakfast, feeling light-hearted and self-confident as though she had succeeded in outwitting some hostile power that had never really let her rest. Her mother was living with her and was safe. She didn’t need to worry about her any more and, with a bit of luck, everything else would sort itself out, including the kind of life she might live with Domokos.

She was just making tea when the telephone rang to indicate a long-distance call.

At first she thought it must be a mistake. There was no reason to expect such a call, but then she turned the gas down under the water and ran into the hall. Maybe she had misunderstood something and Domokos was not in Pest but somewhere in the country. He might be ringing her from there. It must be him, who else could it be? It was only twenty-four hours since she had last talked to the old woman, it couldn’t be her. Her good spirits vanished. She hated long-distance calls and her heart always beat a little faster when she heard that broken ringing pattern. That was the way she heard about the death of her father. The old woman had rung her often enough wanting advice, about what she should do because the coal was mostly powder, because someone had undone the ties holding the trees, because someone had stolen a saw or an axe, because Vince wasn’t well, because there was a new postman and she didn’t want to leave the pension money with Kolman.

She wasn’t worried so much as annoyed because Domokos should know, even if they hadn’t discussed it, not to call her on Sunday, though at the same time one might feel stupidly pleased since one was, you know, important enough to the man to make him ring after all.

When the operator said it was her hometown on the phone she felt cheated. There she goes, ringing from home again, the same obstinate old woman with no respect for her privacy or her Sunday rest. Angry tears gathered in her eyes as she tried to work out what her mother had forgotten, what she had immediately to send, what had been left out of those two heavy bits of luggage? Her umbrella?

She could hardly hear Antal’s voice. They both had to shout in order to understand each other.

They had to try the call again.

The reception was good this time, relatively clear. It was as if Antal were in the next room. Antal spoke just two sentences in a choked voice then, before she could enquire further, he put the phone down. The operator was surprised at the brevity of the call and asked if they had finished the conversation. Iza put the phone down without replying and it continued to ring on and off, as if the operator couldn’t believe that someone would make a long-distance call for just two sentences.