Iza's Ballad (3 page)

‘At least leave your baggage behind,’ Antal begged her.

‘Why leave it, it isn’t heavy.’ The doctor still did not want to let her go so she just set off without saying goodbye. She knew it was churlish and rude but she also knew that if she didn’t start she’d have no strength left. Antal shouted something after her, something about telephoning, but she didn’t catch it. Couldn’t he just leave her alone for God’s sake!

The park looked exposed, almost angry, as if it were being dragooned into spring against its will; a few mounds of snow remained dotted about the grass. Birches had been planted. The trees bent their thin pale bodies with the wind. The grass at the lake’s edge had begun to sprout but this was no sweet March, it was severe, the sky clouded over, edgy and dark, with something of Easter about it, the buds on the twigs not dreamy but threatening, a kind of purplish green, like rotting flesh. At the top of the hill stood three threadbare old firs, their flaking trunks so thick only the branches registered the movement of the air; some of last year’s cones were still nestling in the boughs. A thin membrane of ice lay over the water, washing away footprints along the path.

There was a bridge to the island in the middle of the artificial lake and she hesitated a moment when she reached it, but she walked across anyway. From here the chimneys of the clinic were clearly visible, smoke billowing from them, blinding, supernaturally white and fat against the steely sky. The triangular roof was also clear in view and she could see the pigeons roosting between the strangely bent mythological figures that served as statuary. She sat down on a bench and gazed at the water.

The fringes of the lake were still iced up but the water was alive now. She couldn’t see the fish and could only trace their movements as they suddenly formed rings in one or other part of the lake and broke the surface. The lake was full of brown, ever-hungry carp. A long time ago, when Iza was still a little girl, they’d come down here in summer and feed them, entertained by the way they fought over scraps. You couldn’t see the bottom of the lake and the banks were bare, last year’s grass blown tensely down the gentle slope. The fern was restless, continually moving. ‘What will I do all by myself?’ the old woman wondered.

Children clattered along the bridge, playing there for a while, yelling, throwing stones, then clattered off again, running towards the open-air theatre on the far shore. The amphitheatre seats were still in storage and the concrete blocks that in summer were topped by red wooden benches poked stiff thumbs into the afternoon; they looked like a set of clumsy hand-hewn gravestones. As soon as she noticed this she rose and turned her back on the hill with the amphitheatre. Her string bag seemed heavier now, unbearably, comically heavy. She reached into it for a handkerchief, wiped her eyes with one and stuffed it in her pocket. The full-bellied lemons were swelling out the bag: she took out all three, gazed at them, turned them in her hands, then threw them into the lake.

If you set out into town on foot the shortest way was through the new estate.

Last year, when building started and they knocked down the old sty-like wooden shacks and bitumen-roofed buildings of Salétrom Square and those around Balzsamárok, she wept over the loss of the old quarter. She and Vince had even gone for a walk to bid farewell to the streets where they had seen out their youth, their shoes sinking into the soil of the loose sandy lane that people in the area, for some incomprehensible reason, referred to as the
Gázló
, the ford. Iza happened to be home then and she didn’t want to tell her where they’d been, but Vince could never keep a secret and as soon as they were back in the hall he told her. Iza gave a wave, stretching her lovely long waist as she leaned backwards. ‘So there you go, turning back the wheel of time,’ she said, ‘two old sentimentalists.’ There was no severity in her voice, but the words were not a kind of joke: Iza always said exactly what she really thought. Vince felt ashamed and muttered something about Balzsamárok and the artesian well there. ‘Balzsamárok,’ scoffed Iza as though the very word was repugnant. ‘Balzsamárok! What about the chemists, why not mention that? Balzsamárok! Look at the statistics, nearly everyone suffered from tuberculosis there.’

She was in the kitchen buttering bread for the sandwiches and she too felt ashamed for having mourned Balzsamárok. Vince came out to join her and mumbled a few words. They avoided each other’s eyes. He started singing a tune; his sweet, mellifluous voice had lost nothing of its old quality. It was some chorus of his long-gone school days. ‘
Her cheeks and breast / Like hills under a shroud . . .
’ They burst into laughter because Iza had always taken song lyrics seriously as a child: you couldn’t sing anything sad to her and certainly not this, as she would tearfully beg that the maiden should not die but be restored to health. Vince kissed her face as she bent over the sandwiches. A long time ago, when they first got engaged, it was to Balzsamárok they went courting and kissing. They’d never meet anyone they knew there. Iza opened the kitchen door and they sprang apart. ‘Well, well,’ cried Iza and laughed. ‘I’ll knock before I enter next time.’

This time, when she reached the corner of what had been Salétrom Square, she felt a great wave of gratitude. It was six months since the old woman had last been there and she had to find a track across the freshly dug soil where the new buildings were to be constructed. The place looked so different from what it had been and, without the huts, it looked even more like a lowland estate than it had before. Only the well remained but there were trucks labouring around it and some long-necked machine was hissing away in the background. The labourers were just finishing for the day, a bell was ringing and someone shouted. She stumbled between the mounds of earth. Someone took her arm and helped her across an unsteady plank. ‘Why didn’t you go round?’ asked a young man. ‘Didn’t you see the notice, “Building in Progress”?’ She mumbled something to the effect that she didn’t see it. She started walking faster.

At the next turning her eyes were struck by the plump green ivy bubbling through the fence of her home.

When Vince was rehabilitated and received the twenty-three years’ worth of wages he was owed, they didn’t speak about it, but both of them knew that it was the end of their life at Darabont Street. The money came in winter, the winter of 1946, and Iza had gone off to university so there were just the two of them at home when the letter informing them arrived. Vince didn’t say anything, just offered the postman a cigarette, then went out into the yard in his jacket, without even a scarf or hat. She took his cap out to him but she didn’t dare go up to him and stopped at the top of the steps because Vince had ambled over to the neighbour’s pigsty, leaned on the fence and looked in as if there were something to see in the trough or the pans full of water. She could guess what he was feeling and didn’t want to disturb him, so continued watching from the threshold as he bent awkwardly over the wooden fence and it occurred to her that Vince had grown a stoop in recent years, that he was more hunched than he should be at his age. It started snowing, the flakes settling in Vince’s great mane of hair. The first tenant trundled across the yard with the rubbish, quite ready to offer a greeting now. Vince turned round, took a glance across the bare yard, past the neighbour’s sties, past the chicken run, past their own solitary patch of ground where no flower ever grew because the first tenant’s chickens kept scratching the soil away and, as he looked up, his glance showed that he had the
house
in mind.

He saw that she was standing on the steps, gazing at him, so he blew on his hands to show that he had just realised he was cold, then hurried to her side where they embraced. When she had disentangled herself she saw Vince’s innocent eyes were filled with tears.

Iza was late coming home that evening and Vince didn’t mention it to her, though Iza was thinking of the rehabilitation and it was Iza who had put in the request for it. They put the letter granting it under her plate. Iza read it through twice, nodded, smiled, then said to her father, ‘There you are!’ and Vince repeated, ‘There you are!’ while she just looked at them there-you-are-ing at each other, because under the silly words there lay twenty-three years of humiliation, of acquaintances turning away on meeting, pawnbrokers, a wardrobe made up of flea-market bargains, the flat on Darabont Street.

‘They are building a big block on the Nyíres,’ said Iza, swallowing her roast potato. ‘Centrally heated, permanent lease.’

Vince smiled, shook his head, remained silent for a while, then declared, ‘I want to go home.’

‘Fine,’ said Iza, putting down her fork, ‘buy yourselves a little cave and furnish it with bearskin. God, what a hopeless old fool you are!’

Home, in Vince’s language, meant his own home, a house where there was space to grow some flowers and a garden with trees where you could keep an animal, somewhere the attic would belong exclusively to them. Vince was born in a village and, having only moved to town to attend the
gimnázium
, or grammar school, he declared that water from the village well tasted better than from a tap. For three weeks they walked round town until they finally found such a house. They were stood outside his old home looking at the windows and its high fence when Vince squeezed her arm and said, ‘This is the one.’ It happened to be the time of thaw, everything dripping, the gutter by the brown gate pouring with melted snow. The gutter had a broad dragon-shaped spout at the top and it was from here the water crashed down. There were three small rooms in the house, one bigger than the other two, while outside there was a red-brick-paved path with plane trees either side that led through the yard to the woodshed, the passage vaulted, closed on three sides like a room with an open fourth wall. When the house was requisitioned by the government in 1923 Vince had gone out into the woodshed to weep so no one should have to comfort him. How good now, after all this time, to have reached the age when it could be his again, though he was no longer in the best of health. ‘You old capitalist.’ Iza laughed. ‘Never satisfied till your name is on the deeds.’ But that was then. Iza didn’t like the house now because she had spent the four years of her marriage in the big room with Antal. She had never stayed over on a visit since the divorce. She gave no reason, but they knew that, for Iza, the big room would always be associated with the memory of Antal and that Iza didn’t like remembering.

How could this be ‘home’ now?

The house was so much associated with Vince that she had never really regarded it as a joint property though it was registered in both their names. But they had bought it with Vince’s rehabilitation money, at the price of Vince’s humiliation over several terrible years. It was Vince who had really suffered for it and it meant everything to him: the house justified his whole life and was his greatest source of pride, apart from Iza. Really, that is where Vince should be buried: in the garden. What would she do with this house all by herself? She couldn’t go on living here with just Captain for company. Iza would make fewer visits home now, there would be no reason to come down for her father’s birthday or name day or for wedding anniversaries. Should she take a lodger? What would it be like having a lodger? Would they be like that first tenant in Darabont Street? Or would it be some old woman, as simple and dull as she was? But it would be just as much of a burden if she tried to be friendly. What to do?

None of this had been discussed with Iza.

It was three weeks ago that she had arrived unannounced and asked Antal to take her father down to the clinic; Iza had wanted to talk it over with her but she ran away into the pantry, locking the door after her, because she was superstitious that way. She had learned in Auntie Emma’s house that one shouldn’t say any bad thing out loud, or indeed name anything at all that threatened one’s well-being because there were angels behind one, listening, two white ones and one black, and the one in black wasn’t well disposed. Should that one hear what people were most frightened of, should it suspect what caused the fear, it would bring on precisely that which they had put so carelessly into words. ‘I’ve never come across anything as malicious as Christian mythology,’ said Iza once when her mother had warned her not to talk about failing her exams. Iza never failed, she just liked giving herself a fright.

But there must have been something to that story of the angel, the bad angel. Because she had also heard Vince, when he first fell ill, at a moment of respite between the pains, cracking his bones and starting to laugh. ‘I’ve got cancer,’ he said and she put her hand to her mouth in horror, but Vince just laughed so she didn’t think he had stumbled on the truth. ‘My stomach feels too full,’ he said later. ‘Give me a laxative.’

She had shut herself away in the kitchen for the last three weeks and wouldn’t let Iza say anything about Vince’s impending death. Iza didn’t force the issue; she heard the old woman moving about, listened for a while, then went out and left her alone. The old woman knew she meant well, that she wanted to sort out the future so there would be no terrible surprises if what was forecast to happen should happen; she wanted to discuss with her what was to be done about the house and about her life. But it isn’t proper to speak about what should happen after someone’s death while he’s still alive. Until Antal arrived, until Lidia finally rose from her position beside the bed, however unconscious Vince was, there was still hope.

Offices were just closing for the night and the street filled up. She walked a little faster because she didn’t want to meet anyone. She gazed at passers-by as they headed home. There was something determined about their expressions, a kind of frozen gaiety. No one ambled or meandered, all were rushing to get home. The shops were full, children were crying, the traffic was heavier. Car indicators were flashing. She envied them their hurry in some way; she had never consciously thought about how someone was
waiting
for them. No one was waiting for her, only the dog, Captain.