The Door (5 page)

I went into the kitchen, suddenly no longer hungry, and began to warm up my lunch. Logic told me that I had no right to what I expected from the old woman, but logic can't screen out everything, certainly not such unexpected feelings of loss and sheer disappointment. She didn't clean for us at all that day. I found the blanket lying rumpled on the sofa, just as it had been when I had crawled out from under it. I tidied up the apartment. I even washed the floor. Then I went off to the hospital again, to even better news.

I returned with my confidence boosted, resolved that when I saw her again I would tell her nothing of what the doctors had said. I wasn't going to bore her with my private affairs. She obviously wasn't interested. And how could I even be sure she'd been telling the truth, on that evening of the mulled wine? I mean, the things she said were impossible, folk ballads in prose. Why on earth was I so obsessed with Emerence? Was I insane?

She finally looked in late that evening, and announced that more snow was promised, so she might not have time to clean tomorrow either, but she'd make it up to us when she could. Oh, and the master was better now, wasn't he? I wasn't interested in either her announcement or her inquiry. I made a show of leafing casually through my book, and said that my husband was as well as could be expected and she should feel free to go. Whereupon she did, wishing me a good and restful night. She didn't so much as clear up the empty yoghurt container I had forgotten to put in the rubbish bin, though she must have seen it. She didn't even bother to make up the fire. And she didn't come back later that night. There was no mulled wine, no fairy tale. It was two days before she appeared again. She cleaned thoroughly, and showed no further interest in the master. Obviously she knew by instinct that his condition was improving. She certainly wasn't one for needless conversation.

After this, she spent even less time at our place. Our lives were dictated by different things, mine by the hospital, hers by the snow. I had no visitors, and spent very little time in the apartment. Finally, towards Christmas, I brought my husband home. Emerence greeted him politely and wished him a full recovery. Such was her nature, we now qualified for the convalescent's free meal. I'd not been able to get my hands on the christening bowl when we met in the street: now was my chance to take a good look. Like the mulled wine goblet, it was a real work of art. Plumply-rounded, with two handles, it perched on its own little circular stand; the ceramic, lid carried a flamboyantly executed Hungarian flag inscribed with the name and portrait of the great Kossuth. She had brought us a glistening chicken soup. She'd noticed me admiring the bowl the first time I'd seen it, she said: it was a very handy thing to have. She had been given it by one of her employers, Mrs Grossman, when the Jewish laws were in force. It wasn't used for christenings then but for seeds, but it would be a shame to use it as a flowerpot. And she had masses of porcelain and glass. The piece she'd brought the mulled wine in was also a legacy from Mrs Grossman.

A charming legacy too, I thought with disgust. I was already irritated by her return to her earlier, formal attitude, and the one thing I didn't need was the thought of her helping herself to the contents of someone's shattered and abandoned home. During those years leading up to the Second World War I had moved in privileged political circles, mixing with people who were substantially better informed than my Hungarian neighbours about what was going on around us. If I do finally write the history of that part of my life, my earliest years — the years people don't talk about very much — the subject will not be short of interest. I knew perfectly well what was inside those cattle trains, exactly who was being taken where and for what purpose. I would happily have returned the christening bowl, but couldn't have done so without stating my reasons, and I didn't want to upset my husband. At the time I was allowing him only carefully monitored doses of reality. The thought of being fed from some knick-knack that had belonged to a destitute stranger bound for the gas chamber would have made him leap out of bed, half-dead as he was. Emerence had obviously thought, like so many others at that time, if I don't take it, I'm giving it to someone else. So I allowed her to spoon the soup out, to the very last drop, and took my revenge by not mentioning that this was the first time he'd eaten anything with real appetite.

Emerence pottered about in the kitchen for ages. Though she had always rejected my acknowledgement in the past, I sensed that this time she did expect something. But I didn't even thank her. I set the empty bowl down before her and went back to the bedroom. I could feel her eyes on my back, and it pleased me that at last she was the one who couldn't understand why I was offended. I was triumphant, aloof, rather contemptuous. I was sure I had discovered the reason no-one was allowed into her home. The handyman's suspicions were justified. Behind that locked door there might well be objects of real value, treasures looted from those under sentence of death. It would certainly be a bad idea to show them off. What if someone were to recognise something — then she'd see where it all led, the pointlessness of all that busy looting back then. She couldn't even sell her plunder without risk of discovery. What a picture! The poor Grossmans didn't even have a grave and she was saving up for the Taj Mahal! And she didn't open the door because she was keeping a cat in there! She would even keep an animal prisoner for an alibi. Not bad thinking — all that was missing from the story was any mention of the Grossman dowry.

She had more pride than I did. If she was in any way surprised, she didn't once ask why the air around us had so suddenly cooled. As I have mentioned, my husband was rather reserved, especially with her, and even though he had never said as much, the old woman's presence had, for years, made him visibly uncomfortable. Emerence vibrated like a new element that might be harnessed for good or bad. It was simply not possible to shut her out of our married life. But at least she no longer brought us gifts. I no longer felt, as I had before, that she was in charge. I believed I had discovered her secret. I didn't even think she was particularly clever because, if she'd had any intelligence, and used it, after '45 she would have been given every opportunity to educate herself. If she'd made the effort to study after the war she could have been an ambassador by now, or a government minister. But she had no use for culture. All she thought about was how much she could hoard, while doling out charity from a stolen christening bowl, and stupefy me, in the small hours of an anxious morning, with the sort of tale she must have heard from a fairground entertainer or found in a trashy novel in her grandfather's attic. Storms and lightning, a well, all those crashing discords — it was too much. Now her political indifference and her hatred of the Church made better sense — much wiser to steer clear of all groups. Budapest was a large place: there may well have been surviving Grossman relatives; anyone might hear the story of the permanently locked apartment, and start to think, and put two and two together, as I had. And why would such a person go to church anyway? What sort of thing would they believe in?

It was a hard winter. Emerence was inundated with work. My husband's illness filled my every waking minute. The old woman and I seldom bumped into each other. Was it surprising that we almost never embarked on a real conversation?

Then I found a dog.

My husband was now able to go out again, and was starting to be his old self, though he still needed my constant care. It wasn't the first time in our thirty-five years of marriage that he'd miraculously clawed his way out of the jaws of death, emerging rejuvenated and victorious — and at the very last moment. In all aspects of his life, winning was supremely important to him.

It was Christmas day, and the two of us had been to the clinic to collect a prescription, and were making our slow way home in a twilight thick with drizzle, when we noticed a puppy buried up to his neck in snow under the line of trees. It was a form of execution you saw in war films about prison camps in the Far East. The victim would be buried up to his ears, with sand covering his mouth so he could communicate only through his nose. He couldn't cry out, so he whimpered. This dog was whimpering too. Whoever had counted on someone coming to his rescue was a clever psychologist. Who could pass by a living creature in the jaws of death, on the night of Christ's birth? It was one of those moments against whose power my animal-hating husband was defenceless. He certainly did not want a stranger in our home, least of all a dog, which would demand not only food but also affection; and yet he helped me dig it out of the freezing snow. We had no plan to keep it; we imagined someone else would probably give it a home. The creature promised nothing but trouble. But it couldn't stay where it was. It would be dead by the morning. It wasn't in need so much of food as a vet.

"Well, there's an unusual present for you," said my husband, as I buttoned the little dog inside my coat. The terrified black face peered out from under my fur collar, sniffing the air as we went, while from under the coat itself came a steady trickle of melting snow from its legs and belly. "You don't often get a real Christmas surprise."

Emerence meanwhile had completed a major clean of our apartment, and every room was sparkling. Strolling back with the puppy, we had been debating where he should be housed, and had decided on my late mother's room, with its beautiful antique furniture, a room we didn't even bother to heat. "I hope he likes the eighteenth century," my husband said. "Dogs only chew things until they're about two. After that, they stop all by themselves." I made no reply. He was right, but what else could we do, even if the poor creature snuggling into my neck was likely to destroy the whole lot? And thus we made our way, like some mysterious and very minor religious sect on its Christmas Eve procession, its one black relic borne on my neck.

Never before then, or later, when she would have given her very life for me, did I witness such an outpouring of maternal passion from Emerence as when she saw what, or rather who, we'd brought home. We found her tidying up in the kitchen and laying out the Christmas pastries on a platter. She immediately threw down the knife and snatched the dog from my hands. She seized a duster, gave the puppy a thorough rubbing down, then placed it gently on the worktop to see if it could walk. The animal flopped down helplessly on its skinny backside. It was still frozen stiff from the snow and, in its fright, instantly made a mess. Emerence threw a sheet of newspaper over the evidence, and then searched with me in the built-in cupboard for the smallest of our fluffy bath towels. Until that moment I hadn't realised she had any idea where our things were kept — she'd always insisted that I put them away myself, so terrified was she of taking something that wasn't hers. But she obviously knew where these things at least were in our cupboards. She might not touch anything, but she made a note, double-checked, and remembered. Other people were not allowed secrets.

I gave her the terry towel, she wrapped the puppy with great care, as if it were a baby, and walked up and down the hall, murmuring in its ear. I went in to use the telephone. There was no time to waste if we were to save the animal's life. The television was on, and everything was Christmas. The lights, music and smells of the season filled the air. I had put almost everything of my past behind me, but the Stardust atmosphere of Christmas lingered on, made manifest in the child in glory in the arms of the Virgin. To all this, Emerence was blind and deaf. She walked up and down the hall with the little dog, wheezing out some old song in her rasping voice, in her own cock-eyed, upside-down, and intensely moving celebration of Christ's birth. With the tightly swaddled black puppy in her arms, she rocked back and forth, a caricature of motherhood, an absurd Madonna.

God knows how long this would have gone on, if someone from the house next door hadn't rung the bell to call her back immediately. A pipe had burst and had to be dealt with. Mr Brodarics had already phoned the workmen, but she had to get back quickly and turn off the mains. With a face of thunder she pushed the dog into my arms and set off to wrestle with the tap and mop up water. But every fifteen minutes she came back to check how the animal was doing. Meanwhile, our friend the vet had been wheedled away from the sparklers and had taken charge of the dog. Emerence listened to his diagnosis with visible scepticism. She considered every kind of doctor foolish and ignorant. She couldn't stand them. She didn't believe in their medicines or their inoculations. Injections, she maintained, were given only to make money, and stories of rabid foxes and cats were spread so that doctors could earn more.

The struggle to save the dog's life went on for weeks. The old woman cleaned up the traces of diarrhoea without comment. When I was out, contrary to all her most passionate convictions, she pushed medicines into the dog and held it while they gave it antibiotic injections. Meanwhile, we offered it to all and sundry, but no-one wanted it. We gave it a fine French name, which Emerence uttered not once, and which the dog ignored. But day by day it grew, and as it gained health it began to reveal, like all mongrels, every charming and agreeable quality. And at last it was completely well. It proved to be far more intelligent than any of the pedigree dogs owned by our friends. It wasn't very pretty — too many breeds had gone into its making — but everyone who saw it, and noted the extraordinary light in its dark eyes, sensed immediately that its level of intelligence was almost human. By the time we had at last accepted that nobody would take it, we had come to love it. We bought all the usual paraphernalia, including a sleeping basket which it chewed to pieces within a fortnight, scattering shreds of wickerwork all over the apartment. When it did feel like sleeping, it ignored the blankets and pillows, and lay down in the doorway on its ever thickening coat of gently curling hair. It rapidly acquired a vocabulary for everything it needed, and became a member of the family who could be left out of nothing, an individual in its own right. My husband tolerated it, even fondled it if it did anything unusually clever or funny; I loved it; Emerence adored it.