Iza's Ballad (33 page)

Domokos, whose trade was words, who lived by words, who was a master of precise articulation, began to suspect what had happened to the old woman. It was like standing Gica’s fulsome speech on its head and revealing the reality. He gave a great gulp.

The policeman said he was glad at least one issue was clear since today’s procedure was to settle any possibility that Mrs Szo
̋
cs did not die as the result of an accident but had taken her own life. The drunk and the nightwatchman were watching anxiously as he spoke, the old man’s skin stretched tight across his face in suspense and hope. Domokos gazed at them; he had never seen such transparent desire in human faces. ‘Please God, let her have committed suicide,’ prayed the drunk. ‘Let them decide that she killed herself,’ prayed the nightwatchman.

Now it was their turn, and as they spoke yesterday’s fog lifted and cleared. With Gica’s and Antal’s help they described the route the old woman would have taken and how she might have arrived in Balzsamárok on foot or by tram. It was almost certainly by tram as she was coming from the Rákoczi Street direction. The nightwatchman mumbled on. Now they could see the well as she tottered along beside it and hear the trickling of water. The drunk kept sniffling and feeling ashamed of himself, saying he remembered nothing, not even the old woman, in fact, only the nightwatchman. He had made a kind of confession in the bar about a matter that weighed on his heart, but once he left the bar his head was full of nonsense. He remembered setting off home by way of Balzsamárok and not much else, except that the mud was unusually deep and the fog was brown and sticky. There was something magical, almost hypnotic, about the way the nightwatchman kept mumbling to himself, ‘Let it not be an accident. Let it not be an accident!’ Balzsamárok wasn’t a pretty country walk, he muttered angrily. ‘The only people who go that way are those who have some business there and that’s always by day, never by night.’

The sentence was left dangling like some weightless object. People looked at each other. It was Iza’s turn now. Her voice was low but sharp and Domokos shuddered to hear the secrets of two dead people turning into data, mere items in an official report. The girl at the desk was even noting down the fact that once in this town there lived a young man and a young woman who would kiss among the trees, and that, for the old woman if no one else, Balzsamárok might have been a rational place to take a walk, particularly the night after her husband’s headstone had been installed. All the statements had been taken and every small detail had found its place, but the writer felt sick. Here, according to the account, was a happy, well-looked-after, satisfied, sweet old woman in a fur-lined coat, walking along, her sorrow still fresh in her mind, her thoughts – apart from those about the dear departed – chiefly focused on how lucky she was to have such a good child and what a blessed, happy, peaceful old age awaited her. But because she was timid and easily frightened, as most people of her age were, and because she was short-sighted, poor thing, and too vain to put on her glasses even on a foggy evening, she was so confused by the argument between the nightwatchman and the other person that she got lost in the fog and fell to her death, the fall robbing her of a future that promised her such happiness and security.

Domokos wanted to scream.

‘Thank you for your recollections,’ said the officer. ‘She was old, the poor creature. Everything seems much clearer now.’

‘They weren’t modern people,’ said Iza quietly, moved by a genuine regret. ‘Neither my father nor my mother, poor thing, was a modern person.’

‘That is all, I think,’ said the officer. ‘Please accept my condolences.’

He shook hands with Iza. The drunk just had to look at his hand to burst into loud, bitter sobs. For the first time he realised that he had inadvertently killed someone. The nightwatchman mumbled as if he were talking to his dog. The doctor vanished, Gica smoothed down her coat, sniggering and shrugging, then realised she was being looked at, felt ashamed and pulled a more appropriate face. Iza was simply tired and sad. She had tried to build a life and had just seen it fall apart, brick by brick.

Domokos looked on as, crestfallen, faced with the wreck of her good intentions, she turned to him with a half-smile and thanked him for his support at this difficult time. He saw Gica’s broad and scrubbed face, behind whose silly words about a new coat, a mohair scarf and a lot of five-hundred-forint notes there glimmered a truth, a truth to which he had been an unconscious witness in Pest, the flickers of which, much against his own will, he was even now reconstructing into a truth as solemn and blinding as the sun. ‘So that’s decided,’ thought Domokos. ‘Settled once and for all.’

Antal and Lidia found themselves next to each other, their shoulders almost touching. Antal’s pagan-god face looked grief-stricken. Lidia was standing with her back to the windowsill, the flowerpots, the flowering cacti and house plants framing her like some ungainly autumnal bridal costume. You might as well have stuck a feather or a sprig of myrrh in her hair, it was that inappropriate. The only accessories that would have suited her at that moment would have been a set of scales in her fine, strong left hand and a bright sword in the more tremulous right one.

They registered their particulars, the place names, the dates, everything necessary. Domokos could feel Iza tug at his arm when she heard the nurse’s details: Lidia Takács, born 5 October 1932 in Karikásgyüd.

4

IT WAS THE
first time, in all the time she knew her, that Lidia saw Iza for what she was.

When she first saw her she had been only a few months at the clinic. She felt in awe of her each time she appeared down the corridor. At that time, of course, she felt in awe of every doctor because doctors could tell her what needed to be done and how to save people’s lives, but Iza was more than that. People still talked of this remarkable woman who had moved to Pest, the older nurses often mentioning her. One day when Iza dropped in looking for Professor Dekker as usual, someone introduced her to Lidia. Lidia, this is Dr Szo
̋
cs who used to work here in the rheumatology department. So this was Professor Dekker’s favourite, Iza, the ex-wife of Antal Antal.

Every month she came. Lidia was wild about her and imagined her at the spa with thick glass walls behind her next to a hot bubbling spring. How brave she had been in the war, helping to sabotage the clinic. How she worked alongside the men when it was rebuilt. Everyone she worked with was full of praise for her hard work, quick intelligence and decisiveness. Beyond that, they stressed what a really good person she was, and what a good child she was to her mother and father.

Iza was Lidia’s role model.

The porter would tremble with joy whenever she arrived from Pest. ‘Dr Szo
̋
cs is here,’ he’d announce as he rang the upper floor and Lidia would hang around the lift so she could be the first to welcome her. Simply being close to her would improve Lidia in some way, even if it was no more than Iza remarking, ‘What do you do with your plants to make them grow so beautifully?’

Then she fell in love with Antal and her feelings towards Iza became more complex.

Everyone at the clinic knew who had divorced whom: those who worked there knew a great deal, not only about colleagues but about patients and even members of their families, nor had Iza made any secret of what had happened. It clearly hadn’t occurred to her that the truth could be unflattering to herself. Her friends who, at one or other moment of confidence on the night shift, had asked her about it always received the same answer: ‘It’s the way Antal wanted it.’ Dekker swore, people wagged their heads and for a while Antal was subject to a certain level of hostility, his colleagues giving him a frosty reception. Somebody put it like this, that if Szo
̋
cs wasn’t good enough for Antal how, for heaven’s sake, were simple mortals to relate to him?

When Iza went away to Pest, somehow everything had returned to normal. Antal hadn’t remarried and people at the clinic understood that increasingly he preferred to be alone, that he was becoming some kind of lone wolf figure. ‘The problem,’ his friends said with some sympathy now and the older ones nodded, ‘is that an awful lot can happen in a marriage that makes living together difficult. No one knows what Szo
̋
cs is like as a woman, none of us has any experience of her in a relationship and she’s been with Antal since her fresher year. God knows really – it doesn’t matter.’

They forgave Antal, even Dekker did.

Lidia was in despair because she had fallen in love with the kind of man that could have married Iza.

Iza talked to everyone sincerely and without reserve, while Lidia could only talk to the patients, best of all to seriously ill patients; her own reserve tended to break down with those who most required her, she was not really a chatty person otherwise. Nothing exciting had happened in her life, her diploma results were good but not outstanding, she was just a child during the war so couldn’t run around bearing arms or delivering illegal leaflets the way Iza did. One summer she had some voluntary work helping to regulate the river but every young person in the village helped in that, as did others from round about Dorozs. Out of uniform she disliked her blonde hair and grey eyes: Iza was dark, with blue eyes.

She knew that, if she very much wanted to, she could become part of the group that occasionally went around with Antal but somehow she didn’t want to do that. Antal’s relationships with women tended to be brief even by the standards of the clinic and they always aroused the unpleasant suspicion that their nature was essentially biological. Lidia wanted more than that: she was interested in Antal’s cares and problems; she’d have like to see him bad-tempered and depressed, then to cheer and comfort him, to feed him when he was hungry and help him in his work if she could. She would have liked to talk to Antal, to get closer to him in more than the physical sense, to talk to him about flowers, about the way some patient suddenly got better, even about what clothes she should wear and what she should read apart from textbooks. Lidia was vulnerably and innocently in love with Antal, and once she became aware of that she looked at Dr Szo
̋
cs with different eyes.

She gazed at Iza with longing now and adored her even more. Iza’s all round personal excellence was now rendered even more excellent by the secret power that had bound Antal to her and possessed him body and soul. Under normal circumstances the thought of inheriting another woman’s husband would not have bothered her so much, but it would be impossible even to think that she should follow Iza in Antal’s bed. Once someone had lived with Iza they could never forget her, thought Lidia, and even if they pretended to, she, Lidia, would always be compared to the other woman. Who could possibly compete with the memory of Iza? And if Antal could be dissatisfied with Iza, why should he even notice her?

She tried to rid herself of this plainly hopeless infatuation the way one might cure some childhood ailment, the kind treated through minimal medical intervention and a little physiotherapy. Her long hard hours of duty didn’t rule out opportunities for meeting other young people. There was a lively group of young people working at the clinic. Lidia laughed and danced with young men, went to movies with them, ran along the beach in the summer and went tobogganing with them on the pine hills in the winter. She pelted them with snowballs and kissed a few by the bust of the local poet the way all young people did. But then Csere from the finance office made overtures to her, at which point she stopped for a while, frightened to do anything. She feared she had led on Csere without meaning to.

It was not easy weaning herself off Antal because she saw him regularly and talked to him all the time, but that was only about impersonal things, about things that mattered deeply to patients but not to the two of them. Lidia would see him in the buffet or in front of the clinic with whatever woman he had in tow at the time, and that upset her and she felt faintly angry, thinking, ‘What does he see in her? In what way is she different from me?’ The only time she was truly jealous – and even then the jealousy was mixed with pride and love – was when Iza appeared in the corridor and knocked at the door of some room looking for Antal while he was down in the cafeteria leaning a little too close to some woman or running hand in hand with another through the boxwood meadow. When he did meet Iza he would discuss matters as he would with a man and the professor was always there with them.

Lidia almost wept for shame when she realised for the first time that she was jealous of someone who had not lived with her husband for years. It was a comic but heartbreakingly childish state of mind. She suffered every time she saw Iza with Antal, but was at the same time happy because she could at least be in the same building as Dr Szo
̋
cs. Lidia’s years of faithful infatuation took on an extra dimension because of this strange new feeling.

There was a time when she completely forgot she loved her but saw that her attraction – because of Antal – was not unambiguous. It was when Iza brought her father to the clinic and Antal asked her and Eszter Gál to look after him. Lidia watched Dr Szo
̋
cs teasing the patient, saw how she helped feed him, what patience she showed and how she’d cover the bed with silly gifts, hoping to amuse him, but she also saw how, sometimes after a visit, she’d step out into the corridor and rest her head against the window and look down over the wood as if the trees could respond, as if the wood could tell her why those we love have to die. But whenever the old woman appeared, tapping awkwardly across the stone floor, Iza’s handkerchief disappeared and she smiled at her mother, saying, ‘He seems to be a little better today, my dear, so don’t go weeping at his bedside.’ It was what she always said. Every time.

Tending Vince Szo
̋
cs had a calming effect on her. By concentrating on him she could forget Antal. A person can forget everything when her mind is on something else, even such things as never were. Her devotion to Antal was ridiculous, ridiculous and superfluous. Iza was once again what she had been before: an adolescent crush. ‘She’s such a good person’ were the first words she heard about her before she got to know her. And she really was, and it was odd now to think that at one time she regarded Iza as an invincible rival. Lidia felt ashamed of herself.