The Door

by Magda Szabó

Thus far I have lived my life with courage, and I hope to die that way, bravely and without lies. But for that to be, I must speak out. I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.

Until your attitude to a person is clear, any such defining term will be inaccurate.

For a long time afterwards I thought her slightly insane and felt that we would have to make allowances for the idiosyncratic ways in which her mind functioned.

They had come to realise that the old woman’s character would always provoke anonymous accusations, the way magnetic mountains attract lightning.

As she delivered this tirade about Christ as victim of political machinations and a trumped-up criminal charge, who finally stepped out of the life of his poor Virgin Mother after all her sleepless nights of heartbreak and worry, I fairly expected a bolt from above to strike her dead.

For the first time, I saw what a remarkable creature she was. She claimed no interest in politics and yet, by some mysterious everyday process, she had managed to absorb something of what we had all been through during those years after the war.

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.

Viola guarded Emerence’s home all through the winter. I put a stop to it only after a certain Saturday night, when he came home drunk. When she brought him home, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The dog was reeling, his belly was like a barrel, he was panting heavily and rolling his eyes. I couldn’t even pick him up because he kept toppling over. I crouched down to examine him. He hiccuped, and I smelt the beer. “Emerence, the dog’s drunk!” I gasped. “We had a little drink,” she replied calmly. “It won’t kill him. He was thirsty. It did him good.”

She was like Jehovah: she punished for generations.

He wasn’t worried about leaving us in the apartment with a perfect stranger. Viola would tear anyone who attacked us limb from limb. Hearing his name, the dog gave my husband’s hand an enthusiastic lick and rolled over for us to rub his belly. It was difficult to get used to the fact that he understood everything.

No, I thought, this was too much. She could find another audience for her outbursts. I turned on my heel and requested that she kindly remove the debris from my mother’s room and, if it wasn’t too much to ask, refrain from casting us in supporting rôles, or use our home as a theatre for these impossible episodes in her private life. I didn’t quite say it like this, I put it in terms she could understand. She understood.

I brought that sort of thing on myself, I heard him say — I took everything and everyone so seriously, and I was for ever getting myself mixed up in other people’s business.

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.

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram / perque domos Ditis vacuas.

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.

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.

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.

This was her peculiar way of demonstrating her feelings. Her choices were an expression of her individual point of view.

She didn’t understand why I had involved myself in it, but since that was how things were, she accepted it, just as I had accepted that she would never open her door. If that’s how the master was, what was one to do? There was no such thing as a sane man.

Most of our visitors were artists. For them, the place was a familiar world of gentle lunacy. My ultra-correct relatives, with no fantasy life of their own, I had written off long ago.

You’re scared of the master. I can understand that. But don’t try to hide your cowardice by calling things kitsch.”

She stood with her back to me, facing the light, cursing me without pause. It was an unusual experience for me. I was never scolded as a child. My parents’ method of punishment was more refined. They hurt me with silence, not words. It upset me more if I was made to feel I didn’t deserve to be spoken to, asked questions or given explanations. Emerence tucked the boot under her arm, as if she were intending to take it home with her, and flung the spur she had removed down on the table top. “Because you’re blind and stupid and a coward,” she continued. “God knows what I love about you, but whatever it is, you don’t deserve it. Maybe, as you get older, you’ll acquire a bit of taste. And a bit of courage.”

Once again, as I gazed at the winking, blood-red garnet, all I felt was deep shame. I was about to run after the old woman, but then the thought returned: I had to break her habit of demonstrating her attachment to me by these undisciplined, insane means. 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.

!!!

The nephew thought for a while before he spoke. “Her taste is impeccable, doctor.” He gazed steadily at my husband. “I thought you would have noticed that. It’s just that when she goes looking for presents for the two of you she doesn’t buy for grown-ups. She chooses for two young children.” My

I hadn’t been able to write a single line, but then the ebb and flow of writing involves, even on good days, being in a state of grace.

God knows how you got yourself a name. You’re not very bright, and you know nothing about people. Not even Polett, you see; and yet how often did you drink coffee with her? I’m the one who understands people.”

Writing isn’t an easy taskmaster. Sentences left unfinished never continue as well as they had begun. New ideas bend the main arch of the text, and it never again sits perfectly true.

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.

Those exceptional qualities of mind became instantly apparent when she gave vent to her hatred of the written word. She was an orator of real stature, a natural.

I once told her that if she hadn’t fought non-stop against the opportunities she’d been offered, she might have been our first woman ambassador or prime minister; she had more sense and intelligence than the entire Academy of Sciences. “Good,” she said. “It’s a pity I don’t know what an ambassador does. The only thing I want is the crypt. Just leave me in peace, and don’t try to educate me. I know quite enough already. I wish I knew less. Those who want something from the country are welcome to have it, since you tell me it’s so full of opportunities. I don’t need anyone or anything. Understand that once and for all.”

Everyone had to die one day. She’d shed a tear for all of them as soon as she could find the time.

In the end it was the Lieutenant Colonel who provided an explanation: Emerence probably hated power no matter whose hands it was in. If the man existed who could solve the problems of the five continents, she would have taken against him too, because he was successful. In her mind everyone came down to a common denomination — God, the town clerk, the party worker, the king, the executioner, the leader of the UN. 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.

This old woman is not just oblivious to her country, she’s oblivious to everything. Her spirit shines bright, but through a cloud of steam. Such a thirst for life, but so diffused over everything; such immense talent, achieving nothing. “Tell me,” I once asked her. “You only rescued people? You never handed anyone in?” She glared at me, with hatred in her eyes.

She made a plan for the future, and there were no barbers, or Kennedys, or flying dogs in it. There was no place for anyone but herself, and the dead she would gather in.

I had no idea what she liked about me. I said earlier that I was still rather young, and I hadn’t thought it through, how irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal its current. And yet I was well versed in Greek literature, which portrayed nothing but the passions: death and love and friendship, their hands joined together round a glittering axe.

“Circus”, in Emerence’s vocabulary meant national disasters — in this case the Second World War — all those situations where women become neurotic, grasping and stupid, and men go berserk and start knifing people, as happens in the wings of history’s theatre.

She hadn’t dreamed up a fairy-tale castle in place of her charming old home. It was quite beautiful enough the way József Szeredás had built it, a house designed not just with affection but with love. It had all the force of a timeless statement.

And at the heart of all these events, beneath and behind them, lay the primal wounds — the baker torn apart by the mob, the barber who robbed her, little Éva Grossman who brought shame on her in Csabadul, the heifer, the cat strung up on the door handle, and the one great love of her life.

In my student days, I detested Schopenhauer. Only later did I come to acknowledge the force of his idea that every relationship involving personal feeling laid one open to attack, and the more people I allowed to become close to me, the greater the number of ways in which I was vulnerable.

It wasn’t easy to accept that from now on I would always have to consider Emerence. Her life had become an integral part of my own. This led to the dreadful thought that one day I would lose her, that if I survived her there would be yet another addition to those ubiquitous, indefinable shadow-presences that wrack me and drive me to despair.

It remained impossible to persuade her to read any of my books, but it did now affect her when they were unfavourably reviewed. She understood the personal nature of the waves of politically motivated attacks on me, and she would fly into a rage of exasperation. She once asked me if she should report a critic to the Lieutenant Colonel. I tried in vain to calm her down.

I think it must have been decades since she’d been past the Grand Hotel, if indeed she’d ever seen it.

Grand Budapest Hotel?

At least three vital facts went with her to the grave, and it must have been a source of satisfaction to her to look back and see that we still didn’t have a full account of her actions, and never would.

Emerence was capable of arousing the finest feelings in me, and also the most base. Because I loved her, I could become so furious with her that sometimes I was shocked by my own response.

“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.”

!

At that moment I understood our recent history as I never had before. “Not by name, only that he had been hidden for a long time, by many people, but longest of all by a truly admirable comrade. I heard it yesterday, on the third news broadcast.”

In her opinion, only those who knew what physical labour was actually like had the right to mourn for Jesus. I didn’t even look at her. I scuttled off to the bus, the solemn serenity of my morning completely evaporated.

One day Emerence would be able to show me, without uttering a word, that what I consider religion is a sort of Buddhism, a mere respect for tradition, and that even my morality is just discipline, the result of training at home, in school and in my family, or self-imposed. My Good Friday thoughts had taken quite a battering.

Make him laugh for once, that’s a real prayer. What must you really think of Christ, of God, when you make pronouncements about him as if he were a personal friend? How cheap you think salvation is!