Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabó, George Szirtes Read Free Book Online

and drew the curtains as had been her habit all those years when she was still living at home, and closed the shutters. The rain was pouring now, they could hear it loud against the glass. She didn’t go over to the old woman again but stopped at the big chair. Her mother could see she was weeping, her expression tender, childish and angry under the flowing tears.

4
    IZA LEFT THE light burning that night.
    The objects in the room, those beyond the circle of yellow light, were just about glimmering and she couldn’t see the picture above the bed, only the gilded underside of its frame. But she could see it with her inner eye, in her thoughts and memories. The picture, lacking its companion, was merely a remnant. The mill was missing.
    Iza fell asleep before she did. The old woman had cheated her.
    They had gone to bed at the same time and she had not been answering Iza’s questions for a while, breathing regularly so her daughter would think she was drowsing. The girl kept tossing and turning for a long time, it wouldn’t have been an easy night for her even if her father had not died that day. She hadn’t slept here ever since she had moved to Pest. The bed she was sleeping in was her father’s, not the old sofa of her married years. Once she had left the house it had returned to much as it was before. The second-hand office came for their joint furniture and she bought whatever she needed new in Budapest. Nobody finds it easy sleeping in their childhood home, of course.
    Iza didn’t want to leave her mother alone on this night, which was why she didn’t check into a hotel as she had always done to avoid staying with her parents. It must have been the supreme sacrifice for her. The girl took a long time getting to sleep and kept turning and sighing, looking over at the old woman, then suddenly got up and took something, which was also unusual as she never took sleeping pills and looked down on people who reached for drugs at the least excuse. But this time, just this once, she did take one and it succeeded in putting her to sleep. The old woman lay there with her daughter next to her, so close she could feel her breath on her face as she had done when the girl was a child. She had never seen anyone sleep as beautifully as Iza did, her head laid on her elbow, with that black arc of her eyelashes. She didn’t dare kiss her and kissed the hem of the pillow instead as she slipped out of bed and through the door.
    The sitting room was the same as it had been in the afternoon, the morning, or any other day, and yet, somehow, it was different. It was as if it had grown and the walls were higher and wider too. Iza’s note remained on the table and she scanned it again. Ever since she was a child Iza had written down things to do the next day and couldn’t go to sleep unless she’d done so. ‘Estate agent,’ she read. ‘Clinic, undertakers, medical panel, packing.’
    The last word on the list: that’s why she’d got up. Tomorrow would be the reading through of documents and Iza would decide what they should take back to Pest, and tomorrow they’d have to open the drawers of Vince’s little writing desk.
    No one else had ever looked inside it and even after forty-nine years of marriage she had no idea what he kept in there bar official papers about the family and so forth. The house rule was that no one would disturb anyone else’s things. Aunt Emma, in whose house she grew up, would always be waiting for the postman outside the house and she didn’t baulk at tearing up letters to other members of the family right there in the street. She didn’t want to be like Aunt Emma.
    If Antal hadn’t turned up with that strange request she’d be lying next to Iza, allowing herself to fall asleep. But her son-in-law had disturbed her, much as the nurse had disturbed her at the clinic and, for the first time, she was beginning to wonder whether she knew everything about Vince. This bad feeling led her to think about the