Iza's Ballad (6 page)

She was sipping her coffee in the arbour, the lilac bent towards her greying blonde hair, so she looked like a faded bridesmaid with her dry, painted face and all those heavy slack rings on her fingers. She thought how Aunt Emma went around telling everyone, ‘She is my goddaughter,’ while she was working in the kitchen and that she’d only be allowed into the parlour when there were guests. ‘She’s the orphan of my poor departed Margit.’ To them she was a servant one moment and a member of the family the next. Of course, if she married Vince, who would read to Aunt Emma in the evenings, and who would get up and keep her company when she had a fit of asthma? She didn’t allow servants in her room: their place was in the cellar because all kinds of criminal acts are committed at night and a servant might steal or even murder a person.

She took the empty cup but she didn’t run off into the kitchen with it, she ran to the gate instead. Vince was waiting for her on the small bench outside, his hat in his hands turning it over and round, and he laughed when he saw how she was out of breath from running, and there in her hand was Aunt Emma’s coffee cup. ‘Are you bringing that to me?’ he asked and she just stood there not knowing whether to laugh or to cry because she had a fancy to do both. She answered, ‘Ask her!’

The university handbook:
Vol. 1 of the Gaius Institution. One hour per week. Hungarian History and Constitution. Two hours a week
. Two picture postcards from Szentmáté that she sent to him when Aunt Emma took her there as a companion. Bills. Ilona Dávid’s Certificate of Merit from the Girls’ Finishing School, academic year 1904–5. Gergely Dávid, teacher’s nursing expenses at the hospital in Békéscsaba 4–27 November 1907. Receipt for the payment of costs of gravestone for Gergely Dávid, teacher, erected Karikásgyüd, 22 April 1909.

Gergely Dávid.

‘You don’t know what he was like,’ said Vince. ‘Six foot six, thin as a rake, always smiling, though he was so poor he could hardly feed his children. When the river burst its banks everyone headed for cemetery hill, which was the highest point in the village. It was night and they were ringing bells. Two of my aunts ran after my mother towards the dike and I followed them but I fell and the people running behind me trampled over me. The two biggest terrors of our lives were Karikás, the river, and the dike. It was the teacher who found me, picked me up and carried me up the hill. I clung on to his neck and cried. I never saw any members of my family after that, my father’s body was never even found. I’m really scared of water, Ettie.’

Two pebbles, clearly from Endrus’s grave or from the teacher’s, two smooth snow-white pebbles. One broken ivory paperknife, one unaddressed plain envelope, green, with a wax-paper patch in the middle, an ivory cigarette holder, also broken.

This ribbon was the one she wore in her hair. She never sat down in the Lion Ballroom, not for a moment, but kept spinning and twirling while the chandeliers danced in the mirror. It was a night to make her forget poor Aunt Emma and that she’d been an orphan since she was eight. She was waltzing with Erno
̋
Szekeres, with Aunt Emma looking on, her knot of hair full of sparkling flame-like feathers, like an ageing parrot. Her gaze was disapproving because Erno
̋
Szekeres was not
one of us
, with nothing to his name except a few more names. ‘There’s a lad there who never dances.’ She pricked up her ears when they had completed God-knows-how-many circles of the hall. ‘Vince Szo
̋
cs,’ said Szekeres. ‘A court clerk. He can’t dance.’ She almost missed her step, astonished that a young man should not know how to dance and simply stand there under the mirror watching other people dancing. She stared at Vince Szo
̋
cs in an insensitive, unbecoming manner. He in the meantime had just waved at Szekeres and made eye contact with him.

Here was Aunt Emma’s obituary notice in which her name did not appear. Klári, the next poor relation in the line, whom Aunt Emma took in after Aranka, had sent it to them. And there was some earth in a box, and an empty piggy bank. Press cuttings dating to back to 1907.
South Hungary News
, 18 March. ‘It’s twenty years today since the Karikás flooded and burst the dike at Karikásrév, destroying five villages overnight, killing almost 200 people. The worst affected were Karikásrév and Karikásgyüd.’

A. P. Weisz’s letter from America.

Good heavens, Weisz the chemist! How deathly cold he was in the attic: they brought him an eiderdown but he was still shivering under it, his hands and feet frozen as he sat on a mattress in the corner, weeping over his family. Vince had snatched him from the crowd in the air-raid darkness as he was standing in the queue in front of their house in Darabont Street. Vince just took a step out, the sky being pitch black, and tugged the nearest figure through the gap in the fence. The sirens were sounding by then and the guards were watching the sky, not those about to be marched off to forced labour. Weisz, the first tenant of the cellar, was in a panic, reciting psalms in an obsessive accusing voice. Haven’t they had enough? Can’t people respect his need for silence? Are those people still dropping bombs? Is God deaf? Can’t people hear that he is praying? He had no great regard for Szo
̋
cs’s family. The first time a respectful look flickered across his face was later, in the thick of the bombing, when at last they too took shelter in the cellar. You might very well be a scoundrel who was sacked from his job all those years ago – and what kind of people are you if the university rejects your daughter when you’re not even Jewish? – but credit where it’s due, you’re not cowards. It wasn’t that Vince wasn’t frightened: his feet and hands were trembling with worry about Weisz, and the bombs.

No, she must stop, it was too painful. Suddenly it all seemed so recent, the voices, the very words, Iza whispering: ‘Why hide him?’ ‘Because I had the chance to,’ her father whispering back. Iza falling silent, folding her hands, clearly thinking it over. ‘You’re always doing good, but not in the best way,’ she had said when she looked up. ‘You’re too naive.’ ‘I may be naive but I do know some things,’ Vince had answered, his face twitching because a bomb had just fallen and he was terrified.

There were some photographs in the lower drawer, pictures of himself and Iza. Iza looked grumpy in her degree-award photo, her hair cropped, her eyes sullen, like a boy. Here were Vince’s slides too. There was a time he was keen on photography, then in 1923 he sold the camera. She held the slides up to the light and tried to guess the subjects. There were shadows, black and white, unknown faces, men with moustaches and bowler hats, women with feathered hats and skirts that reached the ground. Who were they? Why did he take the pictures? There was a wood of some kind too, if that’s what it was, and some rural buildings. She recognised the last: it was a negative of the picture he had given to Lidia. She put the box down as though she had burned herself.

Her own letters. Prospectuses, brochures advertising foreign towns, package holidays. A run of magazines:
Popular Physics
. Picture postcards from foreign places. He collected them though he never travelled anywhere; by the time he was ready to do so he wasn’t well enough. Family documents, Iza’s papers, baptismal certificates.

Here’s the notice sacking him and here, on top of it, his rehabilitation document. Regarding
the terms of article 9590/1945 M.E. . . .

‘If you leave that man you can come back and all will be forgotten,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘What a disaster he is! But I warned you. What kind of man is it that can be brushed aside like that, as if he were a thieving servant? And him a county judge! Come home, I’m very lonely and you are familiar with my needs.’ (Aranka, who succeeded her at Aunt Emma’s, had just run off with Pista Vitáry.)

Aunt Emma sipped at her coffee and explained. ‘I mean he wasn’t mad, he knew very well what verdict he was supposed to bring in. He gets a cushy job, him, a boy raised on beggar’s alms by that teacher who kept him financially, year by year, and then he does this. He knew he should have found them guilty, everybody knew that, but there he goes, letting off those four worthless peasants, excusing them in the name of the Sacred Crown of Hungary, the idiot. And when his colleagues try to repair the damage and offer him an opportunity to put things right, or at least retire quietly, he carries on bleating about justice – and refuses. Now he can see what justice means: it’s been served on him. Your poor mother would turn in her grave if I deserted you now, so you can come back, dear, and live with me just as before, even though you left me in such an ungrateful way. I am willing to take you back if you like, but not with him. And you’ll get no money, you needn’t ask for that, I have no money myself and even if I had I wouldn’t let your husband have it. Extraordinary! I hope he moves out of town. He can’t stay here, that’s impossible.’

After that she didn’t go straight home but took a walk to the cemetery. It was summer, early summer, the roses were blooming on Endrus’s grave. He’d been dead precisely eight years. She sat on a bench and gazed at his gravestone, overrun by roses, at the lush grass and the slow dense clouds. Nature was so calm, not
indifferent
, just calm. Bees were flitting around the graves. She felt deeply disappointed, gazing at the red roses and the blue sky. Why should a cemetery be so beautiful and so peaceful, so full of birdsong and scuffling in the branches when it wasn’t reality? Reality was mortality and the sense of dread waiting for her at home.

She sat and sat. Then a pebble squeaked behind her. Startled, she turned round. It was Vince. He sat down beside her on the bench and stroked Endrus’s grave as he did each time he came. ‘I guessed you’d come here,’ said Vince. She bent her head, ashamed that her first act had been to run to Aunt Emma for money and to complain, and how could she have spent a minute with Aunt Emma when she knew that she never liked Vince, that she was secretly glad how things turned out because she remembered the dike-keeper, their first conversations and was proud that her instincts had been proved correct when she disapproved of the marriage twelve years before.

It was so strange during the night to think that though Vince was always beside her while he lived, and healthy too, there was something that could have so embittered her. How she cried, how heart-rendingly when, after having been sacked, Vince explained that he was right, not the people who had sacked him, and of course she believed her husband but was unhappy because of money, because of all kinds of silly things, unhappy because acquaintances deserted them, because the family avoided them, because she was no longer greeted with as deep a bow as before. She felt ashamed now to recall what hurt her then, how cowardly she was, how humiliating her cowardice, how some of Aunt Emma’s warnings took root in her. One night she tried to persuade Vince that they should move elsewhere. Anywhere, to Gyüd if he liked. Vince loved Gyüd. Each summer he would return there to stay with the teacher and his family and go on about what a lovely village it was, how the herbs were so fragrant by the river, how deep the whirlpools of the Karikás were and how the islands were a primeval forest of reeds. But Vince didn’t want to move, which would be another reason to cry, because she thought moving was a wonderful idea, because they wouldn’t be bumping into their town acquaintances, and because life was cheaper in villages and they could live on her widow’s pension (Vince received nothing, but the generosity of the Ministry of Justice allowed her to draw such a pension, it being deemed possible to be the widow of a living man). No, said Vince, his face clouding over, he wouldn’t go, he wasn’t guilty, and there was no need for him to hide from people. Then he turned away and didn’t want to talk about it any more.

Before his rehabilitation she could never persuade him to visit Gyüd and in November 1946, when the letter arrived, trembling, lips twitching, he took his small suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and started packing. She didn’t need to ask him where he was going, she could see it from his face, the way he was shaking. She asked Iza to see him down there but she shook her head, pointed to her books and was interested in nothing but her approaching university exams. She wanted to talk her father out of the trip too, and spent the evening explaining to him that there were no hotels in Gyüd, that he had practically no living acquaintances there, that the teacher was long dead and that the Dávid children were all gone, working in one place or another. Those who were still there would stare at him as if he were some kind of curiosity. ‘What do you want to see in Gyüd?’ she asked her father. Vince stubbornly continued to pack his bag and answered, ‘The dike!’ ‘Excuse me but I have not the least interest in the dike,’ said Iza, lovingly stroking her father’s arm. ‘I’m afraid you can’t pass on memories as if they were a kind of inheritance.’ Vince just looked at her, his hand still above the suitcase, his face suddenly thinner, thinner and sadder. In the end he didn’t go, since that was the time she got that awful flu and he didn’t want to leave her while she was ill, and, besides, the weather was worse than usual, nor did he ever make the journey. He never saw his birthplace again, didn’t even mention it much; he grew older and weaker, and rarely left the house. He was past sixty-six when they rehabilitated him, his movement was limited on account of rheumatism and his stomach was already troubling him; it was just that no one suspected what it would turn out to be.

She pushed the drawers shut. There was nothing unexpected here, which is to say no more than everything associated with fifty years of shared life. But there were no secrets among these common things, no photographs of women, no pressed flowers, no secret letters, nothing that did not pertain to Vince’s childhood or family life. She felt ashamed of herself for ever having doubted him, even for a moment – she should have known Vince better. It was the effect of Antal and Lidia. By the time they got there, Dekker told them Vince was no longer conscious and he remained unconscious when she sat down beside him. Maybe he never told Antal to give the picture to Lidia but simply happened to whisper something and Antal misunderstood him. He was constantly whispering, poor thing, whispering time after time when he got the injections. And why would he have talked about dying? Vince knew nothing of that, never suspected.