The Door

by Magda Szabó

She never once took her eyes off me. It was like facing an interrogator and a judge in one person.

But what do you know about honour? You think if you toss me a nice juicy bone from Parliament I’ll put my hand on my heart and be your slave, like Viola? Well, don’t bank on it. You know how to make grand statements, but to stay when you’re needed, when you’re saving my life, to cover my misery from the eyes of the world, no, you didn’t have time for that. Get out of here, go and make another pronouncement. You actually had the nerve to say you had me to thank for the prize?”

There aren’t too many moments of my life that make me shiver with horror when I think back on them. But this is one. Never before or since have I so palpably felt this blending of horror and ecstasy. All was well at last — Emerence’s cats running around us playing chase, the shutters guarding the reassuring gloom, the lovers’ seat — the whole empire of Emerence that had long gone up in smoke.

I had always analysed the night at Gethsemane from Jesus’ point of view, but now for the first time it occurred to me how it must have felt for John say, or Philip, when they realised that the man who’d accompanied them on their journey, whose powers they understood better than anyone — they had after all seen Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter raised to life — and from whom they had, until the very last moment, drawn both strength beyond understanding and the certainty of life eternal, had been betrayed.

I was told the chief doctor wanted to see me. I already knew what he wanted to say. He resembled a certain kind of critic. Those who play by the unwritten rules of the craft toss in something inconsequential, some faint praise, for the writer to chew over like an old dog, then shoot him while he gnaws on his bone.

“Get out. Go and make a speech on television. Write a novel, or run off back to Athens. If they send me home from here, don’t any of you try to come anywhere near me, Adélka has left her scissors here and I’ll use them on anyone who comes near me. Why are you so concerned about my fate? There are plenty of care homes. This is the most wonderful country in the world, and I’ve the legal right to be sick for two whole years. That’s what your friend said. Now go. I’ve things to do.”

But I was lying to myself, as if my life depended on it, to avoid somehow putting into words what Viola had announced. But he knew, and my husband knew. The dog had been the first to understand and he had told us both. He was sobbing like a child.

Viola lay at our feet, supremely indifferent. I could now bring him here, to the old woman’s former home, without a qualm. He behaved as if he’d never been there. For three consecutive days my husband had listened to his sobbing, then the whimpering died down and finally he fell silent. Then suddenly he gave up posing as a rag rug, stood up, shook himself, stretched his body, and looked at my husband as if he’d woken from a dream. From that day on he had no voice at all, quite literally: he never again drew our attention to anything. He never again expressed either pleasure or protest. At most, if he was ill he might snarl at the vet. But till the end of his life, he never barked again. The

Emerence was a mythological being and my inheritance might be anything.

vain.

Lido a 16920. Impressionante