The Door

by Magda Szabó

The Door is also a commentary on the writing process, the snobberies of art, the uses and barters of creativity, and the ways in which stories and life conspire against the artist’s attempts to control them.

Magda Szabó’s novel is a study of survival tactics, of finding voice out of silence, and of the ways in which authenticity dismisses fakery at every turn not just in art and culture but in a life truly lived, and truly ended.

One can tell instinctively what sort of flower a person would be if born a plant, and her genus certainly wasn’t the rose, with its shameless carmine unfolding — the rose is no innocent. I felt immediately that Emerence could never be one, though I still knew nothing about her, or what she would one day become.

I would have liked to know the colour of her hair, but she kept it covered, as she would for as long as it remained synonymous with her inner self.

Even as I spoke I was thinking that I had never believed those nineteenth-century novelists who compared a character’s face to a lake. Now, as so often before, I felt ashamed to have dared question the classics. Emerence’s face resembled nothing so much as a calm, unruffled, early-morning mirror of water.

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.

With the tightly swaddled black puppy in her arms, she rocked back and forth, a caricature of motherhood, an absurd Madonna.

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 only know what I have to do on paper. In real life, I have difficulty finding the right words.

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.

If someone can’t be helped, then they don’t want help. If she’d had enough of life, no-one had the right to hold her back.

It’s just that, as well as love, you also have to know how to kill.

The bond between us — produced by forces almost impossible to define — was in every way like love, though it required endless concessions for us to accept each other.