Iza's Ballad (30 page)

Her legs gave way and she slumped down on the chair beside the phone in the hall. She couldn’t believe what she had heard, it was impossible to take it in without any explanation. She thought Antal might have been weeping as he spoke and that he had put the phone down because he hadn’t the strength to hold it. As if by instinct after several years of medical practice, she bent her head back and gently massaged her neck with cold, almost straight fingers. She had never in her life been so close to fainting. She breathed deeply and eventually stood up. She couldn’t begin to analyse what she felt, she was struggling just to stop being sick. Her tears began to flow and she was astonished, not so much to find herself weeping, but at how she wept, with what screams and howls. She stumbled over to the medicine cabinet. Iza was prepared for all kinds of practical illness at home and between the kalmopyrin and the diacilin lay a sealed packet of tranquillisers that she had some difficulty opening. She took one pill, then returned to her room and lay down again.

She was already aware that she was feeling shock and despair as well as sadness. Her screams had been not quite human. She was like a wild animal that had climbed a tree in a forest thinking it had escaped the hunters, then suddenly heard them closing in again and had to run for its life once more. But where to run – Iza shuddered – where can you go where the hunter can’t find you? She covered her tear-swollen face with her hands. Some time back in her youth she had been immensely proud and would never admit that she was depressed or suffering in any way. Being entirely by herself in the empty flat, there were no such constraints; every old wound inside her, every scar that she thought had healed over, suddenly opened up; she was back in the house with the dragon-shaped spout waiting for Antal to finish packing; she was hearing Dekker’s voice telling her, ‘Vince has cancer, Iza. If you love him wish him a quick death.’ How alive that medical report felt in her fingers now!

She tried in vain to conjure up her mother’s face. It was as if someone had stolen it, snatched it from her grasp, leaving only an outline, her bent shoulders and the angle of her neck that had changed so much in the last three months. The old woman was always looking down recently, never looking up at the sky. The sense of being alone crushed her: it was as if a heavy stone had fallen on her. Being alone was no longer a pleasure. Now it was good to know that Domokos was in some specific place, that she might be able to reach him, share her grief and ask him to travel home with her. She washed her face, tidied her hair and got dressed. The pill she took was taking effect. How useful, she thought, hating herself. A person feels she is falling apart, then one pill and it’s already better. The panic that had seized her subsided. She rang the director of the clinic – she was perfectly calm by that time – she wrote a note for Teréz and packed her things for the journey. She did what had to be done. The flat seemed very spacious all of a sudden, as if the knowledge that the old woman would never again sit silently in her room and would never again be clumsy with the blinds and pull them right off had somehow increased the size of the rooms. It was very strange realising that she had neither mother nor father now. It felt new and raw, like drawing her fingers along both edges of a knife.

She slipped on her coat. Domokos had told her where he was going today; it was just that she hadn’t been listening because she wasn’t interested. She was too happy thinking of the free Sunday before her and didn’t want to hear. But if she thought very hard, she would remember what he said and where he was going. She did indeed remember.

She called a taxi and they soon arrived at the conference. There were a lot of people in the factory culture hall, everyone in good humour, all in Sunday best. There were no tickets and no one on the door, it was a free event. Domokos, who was normally quiet, was showing an entirely new side of his personality here, almost too happy and talkative. He was leaning against a table, waving his arms around, telling stories about his childhood, incidents he had never mentioned to Iza. People smiled at him and asked him questions as he went on. The door creaked when Iza entered. Domokos raised his head but did not register her appearance at first, but when he saw who it was his expression changed, he lost his easy unselfconscious flow, and was clearly startled and confused. The audience, who had turned round at the unexpected opening of the door, also grew more solemn and couldn’t understand his confusion. After all, it was just a woman coming in, someone who might have been from anywhere, from the Central Library or the Writers Union. She closed the door quietly and sat down in the back row.

Domokos, who had lost his thread between two interconnected sentences, announced that he had answered almost all the questions, took a quick bow, shook hands with the people to the right and left of him on the platform, accepted a small bouquet offered by a frightened little girl and went over to Iza, took her by the arm and looked into her face. Iza’s eyes immediately filled with tears. The audience looked at them as if they had been forced to witness some shameful event. Before Iza arrived their mood had been sunny and confident, a mood that defied autumn, but now it was as if everything had clouded over. The barely finished speech was no longer part of a pleasant morning’s entertainment. ‘That was not very nice,’ thought the librarian. ‘That sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed to happen.’ It was disappointing, frightening and incomprehensible. She felt sad and tired.

Domokos’s car was parked in front of the factory, on the left of the square – he had bought it only two days before and they hadn’t yet had the opportunity to sit in it together. He drew Iza to him and pushed away her hair as he might have a child’s. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Where would you like me to take you?’

It felt good to be with him, inexpressibly good. Antal seemed far away again. Antal was different, more impulsive and more difficult at the same time.

‘Home. Not back to the flat.
Home
.’

She had never referred to her birthplace in those terms but Domokos understood. He sincerely had no idea what could have happened to upset her so much and when he discovered it his hands simply flew off the steering wheel. He listened, let Iza cry, then stopped off at his own place first and left her for five minutes so he could pick up some necessary things, then they drove over to Iza’s and rang for the janitor so they might use the lift. ‘He understands,’ thought Iza. ‘He understands how I couldn’t bear to go up for my bags alone, that I can’t bear to be in the flat now. How strange. How does he know? Because he’s a writer? Or because he loves me?’

The lowland journey wasn’t particularly autumnal.

Every season was a visual experience for Domokos. Whenever he left the capital the winter seemed to him a drawing in chalk, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn an etching or a linocut. But he had never seen an autumn landscape like this before. This was autumn in oils, the land summery, the sky a deep blue with some leaves left on the trees, not yellow but obstinately green, the ploughed earth a cheerful brown, no wind and the sun burning through the windscreen, the field of golden marrows brilliant, ready for roasting.

The writer sat up front, Iza behind, huddled in a corner. Domokos took an occasional look at her in the mirror. He felt he hardly knew her face, let alone her being. Who was this woman? She looked younger today than before, as if she were twenty-four or so, awkward, childlike. ‘Who is she?’ thought Domokos. ‘Who is this Izabella Szo
̋
cs? And what happened to the old woman? ‘Mama’s dead. Come at once.’ Then Antal put the phone down. How did she die? In what way? Why? She had had her check-up just three weeks before, Iza had showed him the report: she had an old person’s heart, an old person’s lungs, her blood pressure was appropriate for her age, but otherwise everything was fine. Had she got overexcited by the headstone and suddenly felt unwell? Had she been hit by some vehicle, the poor thing was after all quite clumsy so it wouldn’t be out of the question. He could see half of Iza’s face in the mirror, her lips open as she wept. He quickly looked away, he was so sorry for her. ‘Will ours be a good marriage?’ Domokos wondered. ‘Will this woman make me a good wife? One thing is certain, she is dedicated to her work, she’d leave me in peace and she wouldn’t nag me about wanting to go to the opera or demand to have friends round when I was working. Is that enough?’

They stopped halfway to have some lunch.

Domokos, who normally had a healthy appetite, ate a couple of cabbage pancakes, then pushed the plate aside while Iza made do with soup but drank thirstily, finishing off an almost full bottle of soda water. The Tisza was green, an oil-green river with thin waves wrinkling its surface between brown reed banks. Domokos had never been here and felt he might have enjoyed it more another time; now he only knew that this sparse landscape was strange and moving.

What could have happened?

Iza had always talked perfectly calmly about Antal. There was never any hint of passion when he came into the conversation. Now she was explaining how Antal had to get involved in everything that happened in the street. It was small-town mentality. Domokos wouldn’t understand it. The fact was, whatever had happened, Gica could only rush over to Antal and tell him because only he and Kolman owned a phone.

It was the first time Domokos had heard anything about Iza’s background and it was startling, not to say frightening. He had heard Dekker’s name before, knew everything about Dekker, but not about Kolman, the newsagent and the cloak-maker . . . ‘I don’t like meeting Antal,’ said Iza, and that struck him, though Domokos was not a jealous man in the normal sense of the word and had no strong feeling of possession either in terms of people or things, thinking that people had the right to be wrong, to have shameful memories, even to cultivate their obsessions. He had never minded Iza mentioning Antal but didn’t like it that she was afraid of meeting him. Why would it be bad to meet him? It’s not unpleasant meeting most ordinary people, just boring. What kind of man was Antal and why did he want to be involved in everything? Was it just that he was a small-town person? Antal was the doctor who had tended Iza’s father. Antal informed Iza of her mother’s death. Antal bought Iza’s family house. Is that what being involved meant? He’d have to take a trip to some small provincial town else he’d never be able to imagine how such people lived.

Passing through Dorozs, Iza averted her eyes and was silent. Domokos drove down the main roads and took a long look at the unusually beautiful sanatorium, wondering why no one had told him about it. Dorozs was doubly painful for Iza, because of Antal but also because of her mother. The old woman had stood here, her face younger and smoother, her skin more glowing, her gentle features ever young, her eyes always bright, waving and rushing to her when she came to meet her! No more now – it was the end of that. ‘Where do the dead go?’ Iza wondered. ‘Where has my father gone? Where’s my mother?’ She felt ashamed asking such naive questions. She knew too well what a frail structure, what cheap deteriorating fabric it was she worked with day after day. Where do the dead go? Precisely nowhere. The hot springs of Dorozs were now in their red stone caves surrounded by a ring of concrete on which visitors could stand and peek in towards the source. Antal had been a child here, his silly little feet sinking into the mud that burned his soles.

Iza’s birthplace wasn’t like the image Domokos had formed of it from her descriptions. The high street was exactly like any other busy city road with precisely the same shops as you find in Pest. Billboard after billboard announced the national conference of agronomists.

‘Which way now?’ asked Domokos when they reached Kossuth Square. It felt strange to her saying turn right, turn left, as they swept down the streets of her youth. The town that had changed a great deal since she was a child yet was exactly as she remembered it. Domokos saw how her lips began to tremble as they passed a big school and turned down Budenz Alley where the street they were looking for suddenly appeared. He glanced at the gate of number 20, Iza’s old house, but Iza got out at 22 and began tearing at the bell cord. No one answered; the gate was locked. The moments he spent standing beside her, reading the name:
Margit Horn, cloak-maker
, and listening to the ridiculous tinkling that sounded quite profane, far from the mood that seized them both, would be etched on his memory. Years later when he thought back to Iza, it was that face he always saw, that hollow, scared, intently listening face as she reached up for the bell pull, the way children do when reaching for anything just a little too high, and kept tearing at that piece of simple wire, quite without hope, as though she were ringing an alarm.

Gica wasn’t home. They had to try Antal’s.

The gate was open. ‘Now we’ll meet,’ thought Domokos. ‘What will he be like? What effect will he have on me? Will I hate him?’

He took to him immediately. He liked the confidence radiating from the compact body, the thick eyebrows and the wide mouth. It was almost a pretty face but there was something good about it, something clearly, unmistakably decent. It was just that Antal looked more careworn than Iza. There were shadows under his eyes, and he looked exhausted as though he hadn’t slept.

‘I wasn’t expecting two of you,’ he said, without any animosity in his voice, nothing as if to say, ‘Oh, I see you are together, I know what’s going on.’ ‘The hotel is no good. I’ve already rung, there is an agronomical conference going on and the ministry has taken all the rooms. On the other hand Dekker has offered a room so one of you can go there, the other can stay with me. Mama . . .’

Iza was looking at him as though she couldn’t hear him. Antal broke off.

It was the first time in many years that Domokos listened to anyone without direct literary interest. Normally he studied everything, processed the information and stored it away in his imagination. He made no mental note now, did not try to register it in his memory. He looked at Antal not as a writer might but as another human being.