The Door (24 page)

When I arrived home my hands were so rigid with terror and guilt I was incapable of turning the key in the lock. I had to ring. My husband opened the door. He had never scolded me for anything, and he didn't then. He shook his head like a man who had no words for what had taken place, and went off to make tea, while Viola crawled towards me, cowering. As I sipped my drink, my teeth chattered against the cup. I asked no questions — the key to Emerence's flat lay on the table. Nothing was said about my television appearance. My husband waited for me to force the tea down my throat, then he called a taxi and we set off, still without speaking, for the hospital. The first time we spoke to one another was when we learned that although the doctor had assigned her to a ward, where she was known about and expected, she hadn't yet appeared. How was that possible? Hadn't they taken her there? "They are bringing her," the sister said, "she just hasn't arrived. First they took her to be decontaminated. In the state she was in when they found her, it wasn't possible to put her in a bed."

I didn't at first understand what she was saying; I stared at her stupidly, and slowly sank to the ground. We were surrounded by helpful members of the nursing staff. Could they get me anything? — I was looking terrible — some medicine, or would I like a cup of coffee? I wanted nothing. We sat and waited. By that stage it had become impossible not to ask my husband for details. He told me what he had witnessed.

By the time he reached Emerence's flat, the doctor had managed to seize her arm. She was fighting him off but was unable to offer much resistance because, as the doctor and the ambulance man discovered, she had suffered a mild stroke. The brain haemorrhage had been largely reabsorbed, but she was barely able to use her left arm, and the left leg not at all. She must have been totally paralysed for days, but her amazing constitution had already begun to fight back. She had managed to snatch her arm free, yank the door shut and bolt it. She refused to answer any questions. By then everyone in the neighbourhood who had any time to spare was out on the porch. For a while she remained mute, ignoring their pleadings, but when the doctor threatened to call in the authorities she shouted out that if they didn't leave her in peace she would kill the first person who touched her door. Respect for her was so great that no-one was prepared to resort to violence. A total stranger passing along the street, drawn by all the shouting and discovering what was going on, did make an attempt to force the door open. But just as the lock began to move a plank was smashed open, not from the outside as might have been expected but from within, and through the gap, as in a horror film, an axe shot out and flailed about in all directions. After that, no-one dared go anywhere near the door — not least because of the stench that came billowing out.

For about a week following the stroke she had been totally unable to walk. She had lain there, propping herself up on her elbows. Somehow she had to resolve her desperate situation without moving out of the flat, and she must have reasoned with herself that if she didn't let anyone know how helpless she was, no-one would discover the truth, no doctor or ambulance would come, and there would be no hospital. Faced with the two horrors, she preferred the one she had previously decided on. If the cats could see to their own needs then she wouldn't have to drag herself on all fours on to the porch, and her secret would be kept. If she recovered from the illness she would make everything right again as soon as she could move. And if she died, none of it would matter. She would no longer know about anything. She had proclaimed often enough that, among many other things, she did not believe in the afterlife. Meanwhile the animal and human excrement lay rotting. Between and around it the piles of food, raw and cooked, had also disintegrated, and were either fermenting or covered in mildew.

They finally managed to bring her under control when the stranger squatted down at the bottom of the door and used the handyman's axe to hit the lock so hard that it burst apart. Trying to defend herself, Emerence fell out on to the porch at their feet. The catastrophe could no longer be concealed. Even the dress she'd worn for God knows how long bore witness to what had been happening — with bits of dried filth swirling down around legs that had always known immaculately clean underwear. Mr Brodarics telephoned for an ambulance, which came immediately. By then Emerence was unconscious. She had passed out the moment she got out into the fresh air. The two doctors — the neighbour and the one from the ambulance — conferred and she was given an injection, but the ambulance did not take her away, as her condition wasn't considered life-threatening. She would have to go to hospital, but first he would send for the decontamination squad. It wasn't just the patient, the flat too needed immediate attention.

The squad arrived. First they scattered some sort of powder around, then they sprayed everything with a liquid. They bundled Emerence up and took her off to the decontamination unit, saying that once they'd dealt with her she could go on to the hospital, but first they would have to clean her from top to toe or they wouldn't be able to put her in the ambulance. As the men were spraying and spreading insecticide around the scraps of stinking food, all sorts of creatures had leapt out and fled through the door, including some huge cats. The Health Department would have to decide what to do about the flat; it couldn't remain as it was, if only out of consideration for the other tenants. It wasn't possible to close it up, and anyway there would be no point. No-one would break in with the rotten food stinking the place out; the door would be boarded up as soon as the team had completed their work.

Now this was what was missing from my life, this image of the old woman lying in her own filth, surrounded by rotten meat and fermenting soup, recovering slowly from paralysis but not yet capable of walking. Józsi's boy, sitting with us on the bench and looking anxious, aroused a very real concern in me that there might be thieves whose stomachs were quite equal to Emerence's Empire. The passbooks had become easy pickings and would have to be recovered. I said I'd wait for Emerence up at the hospital if he'd go in and have a good look for the wretched things. In fact the young man found them immediately. The moment he began to search, there they were, both of them, pushed deep into a gap in the upholstery at the side of the filthy lovers' seat. He'd remembered it had been his father's usual hiding place — the gap you could feel with your fingers between the padding.

My husband was buried in his book — he always had one with him. I sat there, massaging my fingers — it felt as if my left arm was dead. When the old woman finally arrived, we barely recognised her without her usual clothes. She remained mute, letting them do whatever they wanted to her. Her eyes were closed and the muscles around her mouth twitched spasmodically. She was barely conscious. They connected her up to a drip and covered her up. I felt so weakened by shame and grief I would gladly have got in beside her, but the doctor told us to go home. There was nothing we could do, we were only using up her air and anyway, because she was in shock, she wouldn't recognise us. More generally, he didn't know what reassurance he could give us at this stage. The paralysing clot was continuing to be reabsorbed, an X-ray had established that she was largely over her pneumonia, but her heart was so worn out it was impossible to say how much more it could endure, or — he hesitated a moment — how much longer she wanted it to. It was by no means clear that getting better would solve her problems, because her illness, and the circumstances in which she had been brought here, might well have humiliated her in the extreme. Medical science had performed many miracles, but in this case it would have its work cut out. He'd very rarely examined a heart that had been so desperately overworked.

Now for the first time, the very first since we'd stepped into one another's lives, I saw Emerence without her headscarf. In her lightly-fragranced, freshly-washed hair, aged to a snowy white, I glimpsed her mother's glorious, radiant mane, and from the contours of her head I was able to reconstruct the perfect proportions of that other one that had crumbled away so long ago. Emerence, closer to death than to life, had without knowing it been transformed into her own mother. If at our first encounter, our very first, among the roses, when I wondered what sort of flower she might be, someone had told me she was a white camellia, a white oleander or an Easter hyacinth, I would have laughed. But now her secret was out, exposed as she lay before us, with nothing to cover her rounded, intelligent forehead, her beauty radiant even in careworn old age. The body lying in the bed wasn't so much undressed or half-dressed, it was above and beyond every form of costume. The simple, rational garb of terminal illness had translated her into an aristocrat. A truly great lady lay there before us, pure as the stars.

It was then that I realised what I had done in deserting her. Had I been there, I might have been able to use the new-found fame I had already misused to persuade the doctor to leave well alone and to let her stay with us, and that I would look after her — there'd be no need for decontamination, Sutu and Adélka would help, I would bathe her and get her straight. The TV could make their programmes without me. It was more important that I ward off the shame of strangers ravaging her home, whose real nature I alone had seen. When I stood there in Parliament and received my medal, everyone would think I was a success. Only I would know that I had failed at the first hurdle. Now, in the final phase at least, down the last straight, I would have to try to make things right or I would lose her for ever. I would have to work genuine magic, to rise above myself and persuade her that what had happened that afternoon was nothing more than a dream, it had all been simply a dream.

I telephoned twice that night. Emerence's condition hadn't changed, for better or worse. Arriving home, I sliced a few mouthfuls of meat on to a plate and made my way back to the dreaded flat. The doctor had said the animals had scattered, but they might make their way back, since they knew no other home. It was now night, and all was quiet; even if they'd been scared to death, they might have returned by now. I looked behind and beneath everything, the stench almost choking me, but the flat was empty, there wasn't the tiniest sound to be heard. At dawn, when I ran over again, the plate of meat hadn't been touched. For all my hoping, not a single cat had come during the night. And yet I knew it was better for them that they had vanished, that they were no longer there. I was beyond thinking practically or realistically, or even of my own interests. I breathed a silent prayer that one or two at least would turn up, so that when I'd cleaned and restored everything to order, and Emerence was allowed back, some of her loved ones might be with her. But like the decontamination people, I failed to find a single one, alive or dead. When the door came flying in they must have felt as if the whole world was exploding around them. They had fled back into the unpredictability, danger and death from which Emerence had saved them. Never again did a cat prowl around the flat — it was as if some secret signal had scared them off. Viola, who knew the way better than anyone, refused to go anywhere near the wreck of her home. After her death, the flat was refurbished and soon found a new owner, but the dog wasn't interested. The light on the porch shone as before, without the slightest attraction for him, and every summer her lilacs bloomed in vain. He looked for her in all the places they had walked together, but never at her home. He recognised the field where the battle had been fought and lost, even though he hadn't witnessed it himself. On that first morning the street was eerily silent, as when a head of state is grievously ill and the distressed populace mourn in anticipation; a silence not directed from above but genuinely heartfelt. The dog lay on his mat as if his throat had been cut. He uttered not a whimper. When I took him out for his walk, he didn't once raise his head, even to glance at other dogs.

In my youth I took a lot of photographs, with a rudimentary camera and no talent whatsoever. Now, when I think back to the day they gave me the prize, it seems to live in my memory like a replica of an old snap I took in which, by some optical illusion, the subject appears to be moving in opposite directions at the same moment. I had taken a picture of my mother, and when I brought the developed roll of film back from the shop, I couldn't believe what I saw. The person I had sought to immortalise was both coming and going, her image progressively increasing and diminishing in size in a double and contrary series of movements. My family would show visitors this ghostly apparition of someone behaving in self-contradictory ways at the same point in space and time. This was how I too must have been on the day they awarded me the prize. During those hours, every thought and every action had its reverse image, within, behind and around me, as in a mirror.

It was a busy day. It began at dawn, when I checked the plate of meat and looked for the strayed cats. From Emerence's flat I dashed off to the hospital. I wasn't alone. Sutu had got there before me, as had Adélka. The three of us together faced an Emerence who was fully conscious, but making it plain by her silence that she was not to be appeased, not prepared even to consider forgiveness. Sutu kept jumping up with a thermos flask, but Emerence didn't want any coffee; or a cool drink. Nothing. In addition to her own christening bowl, Adélka's carrier bag held two other gifts, sent as tokens of friendship. The handyman's wife had prepared some chicken soup, and Mrs Brodarics a bowl of
îles flottantes.
Emerence didn't even glance at them. She wasn't interested, either in the gifts or the message they conveyed. The nurse told us later that visitors had been pestering her the whole day, morning and afternoon. It was the start of a national holiday weekend, and people wanted to get the visit over. But no matter who called, their journey proved fruitless. The neighbours went away rather offended that the old woman hadn't even looked at them.