Iza's Ballad (34 page)

Then one night she got into conversation with the judge.

She thought he was in pain or needed something, but she saw she was mistaken. Vince gave a smile, tried to stretch a little and in a voice that was fully awake said, ‘It has been years since I last dreamt, Lidia, and now, half asleep, I have been dreaming again. Just imagine it, I was at home. At home!’

A nurse must be willing to listen at times like this.

She adjusted Vince’s pillow and blanket. She was happy to touch him, pleased to do what was necessary. The judge was a clean, quiet, refined little old man, gentle in manner and courageous. ‘You’ll be out dancing soon,’ Dekker used to say when he looked in. ‘My father-in-law is already much better,’ grunted Antal, who was a hopeless liar. When the old man was expecting his wife he’d ask for a double dose of painkillers so she shouldn’t worry about him. When she asked how he was he might perhaps complain that he didn’t feel quite
fresh
enough. ‘Give me some painkiller, Lidia,’ he would say. His small eyes were intelligent and wise. Lidia would turn away at such moments and fuss about on the table so he shouldn’t see her face. It’s not easy when a patient suspects that he is not likely to live long.

Lidia loved Vince, not because of Antal or Iza, but entirely for himself, for undertaking his heroic role in the usual comedy enacted around those who are incurable. He understood that Iza thought he knew nothing and was wanting to amuse him, so he played cards with her while his strength lasted. He knew what the old woman was hoping to see, so he kept smiling and waving at her with his thin hands that were worn to a shadow. When left alone his body stiffened and he tried to look stronger than his medication allowed. He asked for a radio and for newspapers as long as he could hold them. He joked with visitors. He slept better when Lidia was on the night shift near him and he would pay her compliments when he woke: your complexion is like wild roses, he would say.

He would usually have to be half asleep before he spoke directly of his feelings, only once the painkillers they stuffed him with started working and his snow-white fingers could move across the blanket. He whispered, but not in a flat voice, rather dreamily: like someone preparing to go to sleep, his words articulated into syllables, like a child with a secret who finally gets around to talking about it.

Lidia listened to him.

Sometimes he spoke about Iza as a child, about her lisping, her pinafore, her pigtails and bunches, about the old woman’s younger body, about her first evening dress which was pale blue, and the crown of forget-me-nots she wore in her blonde hair when it was pinned up. There were times she found him crying, wanting to talk about his feelings of shame on being drummed out of his post like some common criminal. She even heard him whispering about how the old woman once cursed him because he lost his job. However often she asked him to forgive her for it Vince could not forget it to this day.

She discovered a great deal about Antal too.

The cardboard figure of Antal became a firmly rounded man in the old man’s conversation. It shook Lidia to discover how good he was to live with. ‘Why did he leave her?’ he fretted. ‘Such a decent boy and she loved him so. Why did he leave her, Ettie, have you any idea?’

Lidia had plenty of opportunity to think why Antal might have left Iza. No one at the clinic had a clue. Nurses who had worked with him for years said no one had ever caught Antal being unfaithful while he was married and he always got on well with his wife. Everyone knew Iza had only ever been interested in Antal. They knew how they fought together to establish Dorozs, they knew Iza’s extraordinary capacity for work and the shy smile she saved for Antal alone.

But now the truth was out. Vince knew no more than anyone what had happened between them.

That night, when the judge started speaking unexpectedly, Lidia leaned close to him. The old woman had stayed longer than usual that day and it was hard for him to sleep after such a visit. The world pressing in from outside and the world within, the world he was well accustomed to, did not quite match: his spirit resented the health surrounding him and undermined the interests of his body.

‘Where were you born, Mr Szo
̋
cs?’ the nurse asked.

The judge smiled and his weak wrist shook a little as if he wanted to make some kind of gesture. For a few days now he had been incapable of completing a movement without help. ‘Far away,’ he said. ‘Out in the country.’

‘In a village?’ asked Lidia.

‘Rural’ in rural speech means anything that is neither the capital nor the speaker’s home. Kázna, Dorozs, Okolács, Kusu . . .

‘Sort of,’ said the judge. ‘A place called Karikásgyüd.’

Lidia stared at him. She too was born in Karikásgyüd.

The naming of the place established an intimate connection between them, drawing them closer together. ‘It’s nice there,’ said the judge. ‘The shore is red before spring and sulphur-yellow after. In my dream I was standing on the dike, not afraid of the river. The water was gurgling under the mill wheel.’

‘The old dike is gone,’ said Lidia, shaking her head. ‘We have a concrete dike now. The river has been regulated.’

This conversation marked the beginning of a strange period when the judge seemed to be getting better. It was a mystery from a medical point of view, an inexplicable three days during which Antal couldn’t be certain of his patient’s condition. Dekker shrugged and Antal rang Iza in the middle of the night. Lidia was passing his office and heard what he was saying: ‘Papa is suddenly well, he feels no pain, I have no idea why.’ Lidia hurried on, her feet silent down the corridor.

They carried on talking eagerly to each other.

Lidia had seen the flood memorial in the square at Villánytelep, inscribed:
To those who died in the Gyüd flood
, and had learned in school about the disaster that hit the village in 1887. She knew the row of willows and the old dike that the judge’s father was guarding, the one at the bend of the river that she later helped break up one summer when a concrete dike was erected in its place. Everything the judge remembered had vanished: the mill, the old dike and the small thatched houses, all gone. They discussed each street, lane, passage and meadow. Vince told Lidia about the Gyüd that was still a part of his inner life; the nurse told him about Gyüd as it was now with its enormous cooperative farms, its health centre, the machine stores, and the peasants roaring up and down side roads on their motorbikes. There were times they found it hard to understand each other because Lidia called streets and alleys by their new names whereas the judge used the old names. Parts of Gyüd had entirely changed and the nurse would have to draw maps of the village so they eventually realised that either they were talking about the same place with two different names or that these were parts of the village that had not existed at all the last time the judge visited home. Vince tried to prop himself on his elbows and his constantly pale face glowed a little. They talked about the mill where Lidia used to play, which was demolished and replaced by an electric one. Lidia said she was born near the old wooden building and the first thing she would hear on waking was the fresh sound of water as it bubbled through the lock. The judge knew nothing about later developments. The papers had written about the channelling of the river and the building works in the summer of 1953 but it was the only period in Vince’s life when he neither listened to the radio nor bothered with the papers: it was the time the divorce was going through.

They talked about each other’s private lives too.

The judge had lived a long time and Lidia listened how, as he spoke, the village where she lived just a few years ago came to life again. She met the judge’s father, the biological one, and the other, real father: the River Karikás, teeming with fish and crab, that actually supported them financially, who got into a temper one day, rose and killed one-third of the village population. She got to know his terrors, how the child Vince listened through his two blue windows at dawn trying to gauge the mood of the river, imagining how things were at the dike. She heard about Dávid, the teacher at the
gimnázium
, about law school, about Aunt Emma, about Darabont Street and even about Captain.

Lidia’s brief life amounted to practically nothing in comparison with the judge’s. It was enough for her to act as a kind of living gauge by which to register the changes the judge was so desperately keen to hear about. But her story was only typical to herself; the judge listened to it as he might to a fairy tale. Her father had been a pastor, who didn’t survive the war. He disappeared from the sheep meadows of Gyüd the way Máté Szo
̋
cs disappeared from the dike. Once she had finished primary school she was put on a train to a boarding school where she matriculated and went on nurse training while her widowed mother supported herself by working in a cooperative retail shop. Lidia didn’t get her diploma through a public grant, by receiving a school bursary or because a teacher insisted she should. No one offered her their pittance so that she might buy books; she saved her own money and bought them for herself. She grew up with as much security as if both parents were alive and maybe more. People took greater care of her because she was half an orphan.

They travelled a long way together those three nights before he died. Lidia had a clearer idea of the village as it used to be than she ever had from her mother’s simple memories or her schoolteachers’ poor lessons; the judge could follow Lidia down new streets that he could not have remembered or ever have walked, roads down which he would have liked to walk with Iza. ‘The mill’ – he laughed – ‘well of course it wouldn’t be there, it’s just the way I see it. There’s an electric mill instead . . .’ He stopped and contemplated what the shore might be like now; he had taken so many photographs of it when he was a lawyer.

If over those three days he responded to everything as if he were healthy, it was because he was, at last, talking about Gyüd.

The old woman’s life, he explained, started roughly when they met. As for Iza, she hated sad stories as a child. There was one particular ballad, a beautiful ballad from his student days, that he could never sing to her because she would burst into tears and plead for the dead character to be brought to life again. She never heard the end of the song. Mrs Szo
̋
cs wasn’t interested in seeing the village and Iza loathed both Gyüd and the Karikás because it brought her father so much suffering. The fact was she couldn’t bear him to talk about the past at all, and each time he did she would turn her serious eyes on him over the steaming plates at supper and insist that the future should turn out differently. He had to promise her. ‘I can’t tell you how good Iza was to me,’ said the sick man and his surprisingly healthy face lit up with the joy of the memory. ‘Nobody has ever been nicer to me.’

As he spoke Lidia could see the schoolgirl Iza discussing the future with her father. She saw her as her father described her, as a pint-sized redeemer spreading out her school atlas and examining the map of Budapest because she wanted to see a major city, a really big city, and trying to work out where in City Park the statue of the historian Anonymous might stand. Iza loved the look of that hooded faceless figure. She saw it once when she was a young woman visiting Budapest with their petition for the sanatorium, then again as an adult when she was no longer alone but had Antal and other young people at her side. The idea of ‘the village’ became more attractive to her, not Gyüd of course, but the general idea of villages as a problem or concept: how to solve the issue of rural health care. Listening to her father Lidia saw how carefully Iza examined a newspaper, pointed out a line, faultlessly pronouncing some politician’s name, leaning her pretty head against the judge’s shoulder. ‘She became more sophisticated than anyone I have ever known,’ he boasted. ‘So clever! Isn’t that so, Lidia? How clever! It’s just that she never explains things, but when would she have the time to do so? It is like not knowing how the sputnik works. I read about it in the general science magazine but I still don’t know. What is that miraculous field at Gyüd called?’

‘The electric field,’ answered Lidia. ‘There’s a memorial statue on it, a lawn, some benches and a children’s playground.’

‘Good heavens,’ she thought as he was speaking. ‘That girl has done everything for him. She could have done no more than if the situation were reversed, if he were the daughter and she the father. She has kept him alive beyond his eightieth year and though she knows his constitution is weak, the poor little man, as soon as she leaves his room she is close to tears. She barely has the strength to stumble over to the window. She loves him. She has spent her life surrounding him like a living defensive wall. But why did she never go to Gyüd with him? Is it possible that she didn’t let him
relate
to things, that she never explained anything.’

The judge’s face was as ruddy as if he had been healthy.

‘Listen, Mr Szo
̋
cs,’ said Lidia, unaware that she was shouting. ‘There’s a memorial statue in the square to the victims of the flood, it’s of a young man. He is shading his brow and is looking towards the river as if watching to see which way the foam is running.’

The door of the room, the walls and even the house plants were expanding. The plants were whispering like willows and the hot tap that they had tried vainly to repair that morning started running again, reminding them of water, of rivers and the unusually low March stars that swung above the waters of the Karikás.

For three days the lowland village held the forces of decay at bay.

Propped on pillows, half dead already, the judge took his last imagined walk through the village where he was born. His legs felt sturdy. At one point he started singing. Antal came in astonished, the old man’s voice drifting into the corridor like the humming of an innocent, half-conscious, happy child. The judge was sitting up and Lidia was leaning forward listening to the strange song. Antal knew what he was singing, because he too had sung it on the headmaster’s name day, strange as it was that Cato should have chosen it instead of a happier song. He had never known that his father-in-law remembered it. Vince would often sing at home but Antal had never heard him sing this before; it was an old tune with words by József Bajza: