The Door (9 page)

By now I was convinced that what had taken place over my mother's table that afternoon had indeed been a murder. Emerence had used the feast to symbolically settle her account with the guest. Some years later I actually got to know the sacrificial victim, a slim, attractive young woman stumbling along beside me in that tumultuous All Souls' Day procession. She may have known how to cope with greater challenges than visiting Emerence's last resting place, but she could hardly have picked a more inconvenient time to conduct her business in Budapest, or indeed to visit the cemetery. She laid her bouquet in the fairy-tale crypt, quite unaware (only I ever knew) that it would make no difference — that very night, the long-stemmed roses in their cellophane wrapping would be stolen. She told me she was sorry she wasn't able to come that day. She could have got to see Emerence, but she was a businesswoman, and since her father and uncle who lived abroad had retired she'd been running the factory, and her promised visit had happened when the European deals which would have brought her to Budapest were put on hold. There was no point in coming just to visit the old woman. That would have to wait for another time, when she could deal with the business meeting and the visit to Emerence both at once. New York wasn't exactly a stone's throw away.

She was having dinner with us. It was only what I found in the fridge, not quite Emerence's festive outlay, with candles admiring their reflections in the Murano mirror. I told her how deeply the old woman had been upset by her failure to arrive. It surprised her. She didn't understand how a mere change of date could cause so much pain. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time in business. But earlier, at the cemetery, I had noticed a kind of damp, unpleasant chill blowing around us. It was as if the old woman were refusing to accept the candle she'd lit for her. As she reached the grave the wind gusted, the birches shook the drops from their branches on to her neck, and every candle flame died the moment it flared into life, as if Emerence were blowing it back in her face with the full force of her lungs. And on countless other occasions after her death it was as if Emerence turned on her ghostly heel and put two fingers up at our guilty consciences, and our attempts to approach her. Each time it was as if yet another undisclosed facet of her million secrets glittered before us.

The most distressing thing of all was that, if they had managed to meet, Emerence might well have both understood and accepted her visitor's explanation, that she hadn't meant to hurt or insult; that she wasn't some immature adolescent who set all those feverish preparations at nothing. She was no longer an infant, but a full-grown businesswoman striking a balance between her commercial and personal life; someone who, as an adult, could accurately reconstruct the feelings once aroused by her total dependence on Emerence, and who realised how much she and her family were indebted to their one-time servant.

But there were no tearful reminiscences, as she shared our low-calorie supper. She was sorry that she never met the old woman. It would have been like seeing her for the first time, because Emerence, for her, had been a faceless person. She was very small at the time, and however fond she might have been, she had quite forgotten her. I wondered what this well-disposed young person would have said were she told that Emerence, her common sense dethroned for fifteen minutes by blind rage at the rejection of her love, had figuratively killed her, by throwing the meat — symbolising her, the child she had once saved, now found utterly unworthy — to the dog, and ordering him to eat it.

That whole evening with Emerence seems far away now, horribly far away. What I felt when I got home that night was that I had done something that in the end wasn't right, something demeaning. I should never have allowed Emerence to invite a stranger into our home. It had been wrong to help her cultivate the impression, in anybody, that she lived with family and not alone, thus helping to deepen the impenetrable mystery that surrounded her. But once I had done so, it was quite wrong to throw back in her face something she didn't want to see, and had made us a gift of. What stupid pride takes us over at times like that! Perhaps she might have got through this crisis — though I had no idea what it was really about — more easily if she could feel that at least something useful had come from all her work. The dishes she had prepared were such as you seldom saw, even on the menus of great hotels. It had been quite wrong to throw things back in her face. That day someone had badly hurt the old woman, with reason or not I couldn't say. Perhaps it all had a simple, logical explanation. Emerence didn't view things as I did. There were many things she grasped in a flash which others could never see, but just as many that she didn't understand. So why had I, too, hit out at her? When I thought about the way she beat Viola, and yet the dog hadn't taken it badly. That animal understood everything. It absorbed information through so many secret antennae, so many mysterious channels.

We were lying in bed, and my husband had been asleep for some time. I was in a bad mood, unable to relax or doze off, so I got dressed again. Viola, who was in the third room, by my mother's bed, gave a low grunt as I started to move, but didn't whine. He scratched quietly at the door, as if not wanting to wake my husband. Good. Let's go together, my boy, I thought. I know it isn't far, but I don't like wandering around at night on my own.

And off we went, like the heroes of my childhood adventures in the
Aeneid,
indeed like the youthful
pius pater Aeneas
himself, in
Book Six.
Perhaps this was the moment in our relationship — and our lives — when things finally came to a head.
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram / perque domos Ditis vacuas.
In the pitch blackness we moved very slowly, Viola and I. The gate was shut. I rang Emerence's bell, and waited for her to appear. It was long past midnight, but I could see that the porch light was still on, and Emerence wouldn't retire before putting it out. She came out almost immediately, and we stood on either side of the bars. Panting heavily, Viola placed his foot on the stone step.

"Is the master ill?" she asked. Her voice was business-like, dry, politely subdued. The house lay sleeping.

"He's fine. I'd like to come in."

She let me through and shut the gate behind us. She had come out of her flat but, even at this hour, the door had been carefully closed. Viola hunched down on the doorstep, sniffing for the cat through the narrow gap around the architrave. I wanted to say something fine and conciliatory, such as that I had no idea what was happening, or had happened earlier, but I was truly sorry that, when she was so upset that afternoon, I hadn't been more understanding; and that, even though I had no idea what had so distressed her, I did feel for her. But nothing came to mind. I only know what I have to do on paper. In real life, I have difficulty finding the right words.

"I'm hungry," I said at last. "Have you anything left to eat?"

The smile that — against every logical expectation — lit up her face, was like the sun breaking through steel-grey clouds. It occurred to me, for the first time, how rarely she did smile. First, she disappeared into the bathroom, and I heard the splashing of water as she washed her hands (she never touched food without doing so), then she flung open the pantry door. It seemed she kept not only food on its shelves but also linen. Viola would have followed her but I caught hold of the leash, and the old woman ordered him to stay where he was, so he lay down again. She returned with a yellow damask tablecloth, plates, cutlery and, not the remains of the joint from which she had laden the visitor's tray, but a quite different roast, steeped in strong spices.

It was unbelievably tasty. I tucked in heartily, and Viola got the bone. She also offered me wine, not commercially bottled but straight from the demijohn, and I drank that too. I don't much like alcohol, but on that night of all nights I had to accept whatever I was given, or my visit would be pointless. I had no idea who I represented at the table, but I knew that I was standing in for someone else, for the visitor who had failed to come, the person for whom she had gone to so much trouble. I did my best to personify a stranger of whom I knew nothing. Together we massaged Viola's ears and played with his paws, and, when I was ready to leave, Emerence escorted me home, as if we were going all the way to Köbánya on foot, in slippers and dressing gown. We spoke only about the dog, as if he were the most important thing — his bearing, his handsome build, his quick understanding. Neither of us mentioned the failed guest. When we reached our apartment, Emerence handed me the leash, waited while I stepped into the garden, then slowly, with precise enunciation, as if she were taking a vow, whispered after me — on this Virgilian night, with its mixture of real and surreal elements — that she would never forget what I had done.

My husband didn't stir as I slipped into bed beside him, but I had much difficulty getting Viola to go back to his place, so excited was he by all that had happened that day. At last he too fell asleep, not in my mother's room but in the bathroom doorway. I knew when he had finally calmed down, because he snored like a man.

I believe it was from this moment that Emerence truly loved me, loved me without reservation, gravely almost, like someone deeply conscious of the obligations of love, who knows it to be a dangerous passion, fraught with risk. Early in the morning of Mother's Day that year, she burst into our bedroom. My startled husband had difficulty rousing himself from his drugged sleep, so I got up, and gazed in amazement at her standing in the fresh light flooding in through the open window. She was again in her best clothes, leading Viola to my bed on his leash. On his head was a cheap felt hat with a curving rim; it was jet-black, with a newly cut rose blazing in its band; his collar was interwoven with a garland of flowers. And from then on she appeared at dawn each Mother's Day with the dog, singing the old holiday greeting on his behalf:

Thank you, Lord, for I am loved,

and fed and have a downy bed;

and thank you Teachers, Mum and Dad:

God grant good harvest in the field.

This little verse, which she would have recited on public occasions to her teachers in a rudimentary school, sometime between the 1905 Russian Revolution and the outbreak of the First World War, rang out in her unwavering voice beside our bed, year after year. Viola always did his best to rub himself free of the little hat from God knows where, but this wasn't permitted. And each year the old woman finished with the same coda:
I
,
the boy-child, thank you for everything. The rose in my hat is for my lady mistress.

There was indeed a rose in his hat every Mother's Day. Ever since, I have been unable to see a black felt hat without calling up this memory of the two of them: it is dawn, the air is fresh and fragrant; Emerence is in all her finery, our dog has a garland around his neck, and his ears are flattened down under the rim of the hat. In Bluebeard's Castle, the parts of the day were clearly defined; and Emerence too had claimed her eternal time of day on Earth. Every dawn is hers, with its special light, and gentle mists rising from the lawn.

This ritual got on my husband's nerves so intensely that on the eve of Mother's Day he avoided going to bed. He either dozed in the armchair, in his dressing gown, or took himself off to my mother's room, closing the door behind him. What made the dawn visit intolerable for him was being caught still in bed, undressed. But I also think it irked him that Emerence had so much affection for me, and expressed it in such an eccentric way.

For there was nothing offhand or casual in the way Emerence loved me. It was as if she'd learned it from the Bible, which she'd never held in her hands, or had drawn closer to the Apostles during her three years of schooling. Emerence didn't know the words of St Paul, but she lived them. I don't believe there was anyone — apart from those four pillars supporting the arch of my life, my two parents, my husband and my foster-brother Agancsos — capable of giving me such unqualified and unconditional love. Her feelings made me think of Viola, wandering so forlornly through the labyrinth of his private emotions, except that Viola wasn't my dog, but hers. No matter where she was working, if it occurred to her that I might need anything she would instantly drop whatever she was doing, and relax only when she was satisfied that I wanted for nothing; at which point she would rush off again. Every evening she prepared dishes she knew I would enjoy, and she appeared with other things as well, gifts that were both unexpected and undeserved.

Then one day they organised a general clearance of household junk in our district. Emerence systematically scoured the streets, picking up everything that was either of interest or designed for some unusual purpose. She washed her booty carefully, repaired it and smuggled it into our home. This was before the wave of nostalgia hit the nation; but Emerence, with the surest of touches, was going about collecting items which later came to be considered of value. One morning I found in the library: a painting in a damaged frame, later discovered to be of some worth; one half of a pair of patent-leather boots; a stuffed falcon clinging to a branch; a pot for heating water adorned with a ducal coronet; and the make-up box of a former actress — we'd been woken by the heavy perfume emanating from it. It was a traumatic start to the day. Viola was howling — he had done the rounds rummaging with Emerence and had a good sniff of everything, but when they'd got back he'd been shut up in my mother's room so he wouldn't be a nuisance while the collection, planned as a surprise, was prepared, cleaned yet again, and put in place. It also included a garden gnome and the somewhat tattered statue of a brown dog. It was Viola's restlessness that finally got us out of bed that morning. What made the scene really explosive was that it was my husband, and not me, who was first out of the bedroom. The dog was yelping outside the door, wanting to come in. Emerence, with her well-bred delicacy over the giving of gifts, had laid out the treasures and disappeared. My husband had an absolute fit when he went into his study (which was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling) and found the garden gnome, next to the single boot, leering at him from the rug in front of his collection of English classics. Emerence had pushed
Ulysses
back on the shelf to make way for the crowned water heater, which she had filled with plastic flowers. The falcon was perched over the fireplace.