The Door (31 page)

A crowd of mourners in black darkened the square where the bier stood. I didn't see it for myself, but I was told afterwards that every self-employed person in the neighbourhood had shut up shop for the funeral — the shoemaker, the woman who decorated scarves, the soda-water vendor, the tailor, the invisible mender, the waffle maker, the podiatrist, the furrier and of course Sutu. On the door of every one of their shops was a sign with variations on the same text:
Closed until two for family reasons. Attending a funeral.
The shoemaker put it more concisely. All he wrote next to his opening hours was
E.M.E.R.E.N.C.E.
Mournful music played in the distance. The urn was surrounded by countless tiny bouquets, but I couldn't bear to look at it. Józsi's boy and the Lieutenant Colonel led me to the family pews. I was worried that the minister might not come. He and I had spent a painful half hour in deep discussion. It was so like a dialogue from the time of the early church fathers, brought up to date by a contemporary problem, that it could have been published in a theological journal. The priest's position was this: how could anyone lay claim to a church funeral who had, at every step of the way, made it clear that she had turned her back on Heaven, who never visited the house of God, and who systematically outraged the faithful with her pronouncements? When I tried to make him understand what sort of person Emerence was, he looked at me coldly and replied that he had to consider the point of view of both God and the Church regarding a request for ecclesiastical services from an individual who did not practise their faith, was actively obstructive towards members of the religious community, lived an irregular life, and never took communion. "She's not asking for it," I replied. "I am. And so is every well-disposed person. It is appropriate, as a form of homage. She may have heaped expletives on the Church as an institution, but I've known few devout believers who were as good Christians as this old woman. What she said about predestination was that she didn't believe God was a lesser person than herself. When Viola did wrong she always took into consideration that he wasn't human, and didn't punish him for all eternity, so how could the Lord have been so unjust as to damn her before he had judged what she had done with her life? This woman wasn't one to practise Christianity in church between nine and ten on Sunday mornings, but she had lived by it all her life, in her own neighbourhood, with a pure love of humanity such as you find in the Bible, and if he didn't believe that he must be blind, because he'd seen enough of it himself. She'd been all around the neighbourhood with her christening bowl. The learned and rather severe young man neither consented nor refused. He asked when the funeral would take place and escorted me to the door very politely, but without any show of sympathy. As he did so, he let me know that it was a pity Emerence had never given him the opportunity to get to know her better qualities.

So when his gowned figure actually appeared, I was deeply moved. His address was intelligent and based on crystal-clear logic. He acknowledged the valuable contribution made by those who worked with their hands, but he also warned the congregation not to think only of the bread by which we all lived, and not to imagine that religion was a personal matter between ourselves and God, or that the life of faith could be lived in private, unconnected with the Mother Church. In an icily correct but effective speech he bade farewell to the old woman. His words were so utterly devoid of feeling it was impossible to reconstruct the real Emerence from them. As I listened I felt a dull numbness, like the effect of chloroform, rather than the primal, anarchic agony you usually feel when you encounter someone you have loved now turned to dust, in some object like a little bowl, and you are required to believe that it is still the same person who once smiled at you.

The crowd of mourners was now so great you would have thought Emerence had had twelve children, each of whom had a similar number of their own, and had worked all her life in somewhere large, such as a factory. The main thoroughfare and side streets were darkened by the flood of her "followers". Some stood near the priest, clinging to the words of his correct eulogy and its message of consolation, others had placed themselves further away and were luckier, in that they could weep. We made our way slowly towards the columbarium, where I placed a small bunch of flowers from our garden next to the urn. A prayer was intoned, then they cemented a plate over the opening. Sutu was choking on her tears, Adélka was all stiff attention. She had her eyes fixed on Sutu, not on Emerence in her urn.

If someone stabs you in the heart with a sharp knife you don't collapse immediately, and we all realised that the loss of Emerence hadn't yet made itself felt inside us, that it would hit us only later, that only later would we be struck down. That wouldn't happen here, where she was still to be found, if only in the impossible form of an urn. It would more likely take place in our street, where she would never sweep again, or in the garden, where injured cats with their velvet paws and stray dogs would prowl in vain, with no-one now to throw them scraps of food. Emerence took with her a part of all our lives. The Lieutenant Colonel held himself through to the end of the service as if called to be guard of honour; Józsi's boy and his wife were weeping heartfelt tears; but as for me, I cannot cry where people can see me, nor did I feel that this was the time for tears. That would come later; they weren't to be given so easily.

When everything was over, most of the mourners stayed on. Since Emerence's death Adélka had become louder, more assertive and somehow more shrill, as if Emerence's forceful personality had restrained her and kept her in the background. Now she was popping up all over the place, apparently arranging some sort of post-burial get-together, perhaps over tea or a glass of beer, and her clientele continued to stand around chatting. Sutu remained an isolated figure and soon left. She'd been blacklisted from the moment she made her offer.

We made our way home. The Lieutenant Colonel had asked the nephew if he wished to be present when he opened up the inner room for me. His team was coming that afternoon, we'd be clearing out the flat and he was going to check the inventory he'd promised the Health Department. Józsi's boy said he preferred to go straight home, since this part of Emerence's will didn't concern him. We should give the keys to the flat back to the tenants' committee, and I could take home whatever I could use and give away what I couldn't. His wife obviously wanted to come, if only to see what I had inherited, but he told her not to be so nosy. If anything had been meant for them, Emerence would have seen to it. What they had was quite enough, and for it they were inexpressibly grateful to the old woman. They went off home in their own car. The Lieutenant Colonel drove us back, as he had brought us. My husband got out at our apartment and we went on to Emerence's. The street was empty. I had read Adélka's mind well. She'd obviously organised a funeral meal somewhere near the cemetery.

The axe was still there on the porch, propped up in the corner, and with it the Lieutenant Colonel prised off the boarding his plain-clothes men had nailed over both the outer door and the inner one that had lost its key. He asked if I wanted him to go in with me. "Please do," I replied. Emerence was a mythological being and my inheritance might be anything. There was no priest now to wash away my tension with words of calm reason.

"What are you afraid of?" he asked. "Emerence loved you. Nothing bad could ever come to you from her hands. I went in once before, and everything was covered in sheets. She had a full set of furniture in there, and a very fine mirror. So come on.

We stepped in together. It was pitch black inside and at first we could make nothing out. Of course — the shutters. The Lieutenant Colonel felt along the wall. Near the door, some of the disinfectant smell had seeped through, the place hadn't been aired for God knows how long, and we began to cough in the choking fumes. Finally he located the switch. The instant the light came on he thrust me back into the outer room, the one now fully restored to order. He'd glimpsed me struggling with nausea, as if poisoned by gas. Only when he'd thrown every window open did he let me back in. But I'd already seen all I needed of Emerence's bequest.

You see this kind of thing in films, but even then the eye has difficulty believing. Dust inches deep covers the furniture; spiders' webs fly into the actors' faces and hair with every move they make. If she had once protected her things with sheets, they must have been taken off immediately after the police inspection, because they were nowhere to be seen. I stood in the most beautifully furnished room I had ever seen. I brushed the side of my hand along one of the armchairs, and a pale-pink velvet glowed in its gilded rococo frame. I was standing in a salon of the late-eighteenth century, a museum treasure, the
chef d'oeuvre
of some craftsman who supplied the aristocracy. For the house I had never bought I now possessed a drawing-room table with porcelain inlays on which shepherds chased after lambs, and a little couch with tiny gilded legs as slender as those of young kittens. As I patted the upholstery the dust billowed up and then drifted down again. But the blow had split the fabric, which tore as if killed by unkindness. A console mirror rose all the way to the ceiling. On a small table stood two porcelain figurines, and, between them, something at last alive, a perpetual clock, showing the days, the phases of the moon and revolutions of the stars. It was still working. I went to dust it off, but the Lieutenant Colonel stopped me.

"Don't touch anything," he warned. "It's dangerous to move anything. The covers have perished, the furniture's dead. Everything here is dead, except the clock. Let me lift it down."

I wanted to take the figurines in my hands, or look to see what, if anything, there was in the console, and I didn't listen. I grasped the handle of a drawer. It didn't respond. I would have to play with it, to learn the special secret movement to which it would yield, which only the family would have known. What followed was very different. Suddenly everything around me became a vision out of Kafka, or a horror film: the console collapsed. Not with a brutal swiftness but gently, gradually, it began to disintegrate into a river of golden sawdust. The figurines tumbled down, along with the clock. The frame of the console and its table crumbled into nothing; the drawers and legs were no more than dust.

"Woodworm," the Lieutenant Colonel said. "You won't be able to take anything from here. It's all finished. Emerence hasn't opened the door since she let me in for the inspection. So, this was her reward for saving Eva Grossman. As it was, it would have been worth a fortune, but you can see it's ruined. Look."

He pressed the palm of his hand into an armchair and it too collapsed. I don't know why — it was an insane association of ideas — but images of the tank battle on the Hortobágy filled my mind. The chairs went down, the velvet splitting into strips and bursting from the wooden frames. The legs were turning to powder before our eyes, as if some secret chemical preparation had kept them alive only so long as they remained unseen by human eye. And I saw once again what I had seen as a girl, a herd of cattle machine-gunned by the Germans, the sky seemingly impaled on their horns, and the chair-covers, like the hides of those beasts, shredded into nothing.

"There's nothing here you could use," the Lieutenant Colonel said. "I'll have it cleared away. Will you take the clock? It's still ticking. The figurines, I'm sorry to say, were broken."

I didn't want the clock. It stayed there on the floor. I didn't want anything. I didn't even look back — that's how I left Emerence's home, still incapable of tears. The Lieutenant Colonel took his leave, but didn't bother to shut the door behind him. Adélka told me that when the team of cleaners arrived and looked in, neither the shattered porcelain nor the clock were there. There was nothing, only the pulverised furniture. But I was no longer interested.

Back home, I found Viola passive, almost indifferent. I took him for a walk. We went past Emerence's door, where one of the tenants was doing duty sweeping the pavement, and we greeted one another warmly. I also saw Sutu, sitting in her stand again, not seeming in the least discouraged or sad about the fact that no-one was buying from her. She was eating some of her own fruit, and she greeted me politely. It was very quiet in the street; very few houses had the television on. Not quite knowing what to do with myself, I called on the priest to pay for the service. There was no-one in the office, but I found him out in the garden, reading, and he took the money for it. I offered him my thanks for his kindness, but he declined to accept them, rather stiffly. It was merely his duty, he told me. At this point we came closer to one another than at any time of our lives. He looked at me as if he'd suddenly noticed something that had escaped his attention all day, and said, "So few people are watching television."

"They're in mourning," I replied. "There are a lot of country people in Pest. This silence is a country custom. It's like Good Friday — it's considered wrong to listen to music."

"But she had only one relative, and he doesn't even live here. So who are these mourners?"

"Everyone. Catholics. Jews. Everyone owed her something."

I would never have thought him capable of this, but he accompanied me to the corner of our street, from where Emerence's former home could be seen. The lady engineer was silently sweeping the street. The priest looked at me again. This time he had no more questions.

On the Sunday following the funeral I went to church as usual. The congregation had never been so large. There were people there who never attended. The local greengrocer Elemér, from whose mouth you heard nothing but blasphemy, was there in black, along with the Evangelical doctor, the Catholic professor, the Jewish dry cleaner, the Unitarian furrier. The service was like an Ecumenical requiem; it would have been shameful to have stayed away. Only the handyman — who never missed his Evangelical meetings — was absent. But there had been a wild wind the previous night, leaves lay scattered everywhere and it was his turn to sweep the street. As he placed the wafer on my tongue, the priest looked me in the eye, and though I should have been keeping my eyes fixed on my three fingers that symbolised the Trinity, I returned his gaze, and he knew I was honouring him for his gesture of respect, paid to the people of the street at Emerence's funeral.