The Door

by Magda Szabó

She’d seen enough of God’s handiwork during the war. She had no quarrel with the carpenter and his son: they were ordinary working people. The son was taken in by politicians’ lies. The moment he started to make trouble for the leaders, they had to get him involved in something, so that he would be executed. The person she felt most sorry for was his mother. She couldn’t have had a single happy day. The strangest thing was, the first time she got a proper night’s sleep must have been on Good Friday. Up till then she’d had nothing but worry over her son.

“So, are you surprised that my mother threw herself down the well?

Perhaps there was a deeper issue here than nursing our mutual grievances. What I had seen, as Viola sat eating, might not have been the idyll it seemed. The banquet might have expressed a deeper level of feeling, something more properly mythological. When I thought about it, the pair of them at that table weren’t at all like a mistress giving her good little dog his reward, they were more like figures from a Greek myth, taking part in some horrific celebration. The roast meat the animal had snatched was only a semblance. It was more than food, it was a meal not for human witness, a tangle of viscera, a species of human sacrifice — as if Emerence were feeding the actual person to the dog, along with all her fond memories and feelings. The person who hadn’t come that afternoon, who had merely sent a message, had wounded that most important part of Emerence about which she would never speak, not to anyone. Viola was the unwitting Jason. Beneath Medea-Emerence’s headscarf glowed the fires of the underworld.

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.

There was no such thing as a sane man.

I know now, what I didn’t then, that affection can’t always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else.

When the sands run out for someone, don’t stop them going. You can’t give them anything to replace life. Do you think I didn’t love Polett? That it meant nothing to me when she’d had enough and wanted out? It’s just that, as well as love, you also have to know how to kill. It won’t do you any harm to remember that. Ask your God — since you’re on such good terms with him — what Polett told him when they finally met.”

By now we were really shouting at each other; myself, like Robespierre, representing the power of the people — although it was in those years that they were doing their best to drive me to the point where I could no longer work, and send me to the ghetto I’d been assigned to with my husband (who had himself been so harassed and humiliated he couldn’t work at all) in hopes I might decide just to go away, either by changing what I did or the way I lived, or by leaving the country;

In her view Horthy, Hitler, Rákosi and Charles IV were all exactly the same. The fact was that whoever happened to be in power gave the orders, and anyone giving orders, whoever it was, whenever, and whatever the order, did it in the name of some incomprehensible gobbledegook. Whoever was on top, however promising, and whether he was on top in her own interests or not, they were all the same, all oppressors. In Emerence’s world there were two kinds of people, those who swept and those who didn’t, and everything flowed from that. It made no difference under which slogans or flags they staged national holidays. There was no force that could overcome Emerence.

But if she experienced a sense of fellow feeling with anyone, her compassion was all-embracing, and this didn’t extend only to the deserving. It was for everyone. Absolutely everyone. Even the guilty.

Emerence didn’t join me in these little outbursts, though she too noticed the fragrances bearing the message of the season and the barely visible shoots of green, not yet a full canopy, or a bud, not even a baby leaf, appearing on the branches, reminding us that work was beginning in the fields; and in our villages the new-born light, diffracted in spring’s prism, would bring back the girl who once jumped and danced without a thought or care — the girl I once was, the girl she had been.

With her there, I experienced real shame at every cynical remark that was made, and the way we all snapped at each other, or worse, let our rancour hibernate until the right moment came to put the knife in, because time was flying by and every second spent filming cost money. And there she was, dressed in her Sunday best, waiting to see something happen and taking it all in with deadly seriousness.

how easy it was to be pious when your lunch would be ready and waiting when you arrived home from church.

“You have an appalling nature,” she began. “You puff yourself up like a bullfrog, and one day you’ll explode. The only thing you’re good for is getting your friend in the helicopter to make trees dance by trickery. You never grasp what is simple. You always go round the back when the entrance is at the front.”

I would have gone with the devil himself if he could have persuaded me that I might be desirable to a man. But there must be something wrong with me, because he didn’t just dump me, he also robbed me. I wasn’t ugly. Not that it matters. It didn’t kill me.”

“You were the light of her life,” she said, “her daughter. Ask anyone who lives round here how she described you. ‘My little girl.’

If the fabric of her emotional life hadn’t been woven with a finer thread, and more sensitive strands, than mine, she might have refused the set; or asked us if we’d sweep the snow off the streets for her, or do her duty in the laundry, since by the time she’d be able to sit herself down on the lovers’ seat, Budapest would have stopped transmitting.

Even now I cannot forgive myself when I am reminded of what I ought to have done, but went no further than the thought. I’ve always been good at philosophising, and I wasn’t ashamed to admit that I had done wrong. But what didn’t occur to me was that, compared to her, I was still young and strong. And yet I didn’t go out and sweep the snow. I didn’t send her home to watch the film, though I could have handled the broom perfectly well. As a girl in the country I had danced with one often enough. I was the one who kept the front of the house clear in those days. But I didn’t go down. I stayed right where I was. It was Christmas, and I too exchanged my usual taste for savoury and bitter things for something sweet — for that sweet, sad, lovely film, after all those grotesque, existentialist productions.

Emerence no longer wished to live, because we’d destroyed the framework of her life and the legend attached to her name. She had been everyone’s model, everyone’s helper, the supreme exemplar. Out of her starched apron pockets came sugar cubes wrapped in paper and linen handkerchiefs rustling like doves. She was the Snow Queen. She stood for certainty — in summer the first ripening cherry, in autumn the thud of falling chestnuts, the golden roast pumpkin of winter, and, in spring, the first bud on the hedgerow. Emerence was pure and incorruptible, the better self that each and every one of us aspired to be. With her permanently veiled forehead and her face that was tranquil as a lake, she asked nothing from anyone and depended on no-one. She shouldered everyone’s burden without ever speaking of her own, and when she did finally need my help, I went off to play my part in a TV show and left her, in the squalor of advanced illness, for others to witness the single moment of degradation in her life.

Emerence didn’t believe in Heaven but in the present moment.

“Get out of here,” she said softly. “You never bought a house, though I asked you to — and I had planned so many treasures for you to have in it. You never had children, though I promised I would bring them up. Put the sign back on the door. I don’t want to see anyone who witnessed my shame. If you’d allowed me to die, as I made up my mind to when I realised I would never be capable of real work again, I would have watched over you from beyond the grave. But now I can’t stand having you near me. Just go.”

But not even then will it be possible to soften the fate of a woman for whom no-one has made a place in their life.

“Emerence is dead, Sutu is alive. And she doesn’t love you, or anyone else. She lacks that capacity, but her countless other qualities make up for it. Sutu, if you show her respect, will help you for the rest of your life, because you can never put her at risk. She has no secrets, no locked doors; and if she ever did have such a door, there are no siren songs that would induce her to open it to you — or anyone.”