The Door

by Magda Szabó

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

It’s like that, sometimes. Suddenly you want to end it all.

It has always been important to me to lead a full emotional life: to have those who are closely connected to me show pleasure when we meet.

Our Neanderthal ancestor learned to weep the first time he stood in triumph over the bison he had dragged in and found no-one to tell of his adventures, or show his spoils to, or even his wounds.

She always got involved with this type, both animals and people. Wrecks interested her.

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

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.

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.

Anyone with a good eye would have seen that my unfailing, unvarying sociability was a cover for the appalling fact that I am capable of nothing more than friendship, and truly attached only to the number of people I might count on one hand.

The worker would fight for his rights only until he became the boss.

You have a strange God who judges people on the basis of plums. My God, if I have one, is everywhere — at the bottom of the well, in Viola’s soul, and over the bed of Mrs Samuel Böőr because she died so beautifully. She didn’t deserve to — only the very good deserve that, but that’s how she went, without suffering, and with dignity.

Emerence no longer wished to live, because we’d destroyed the framework of her life and the legend attached to her name.

I had long known that the more simple a thing was, the less likely it was to be understood;