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

writing desk and what would happen if Iza should stumble across something she wasn’t supposed to see, some secret of Vince’s that was his alone and which he should have taken with him because it was nothing to do with those still living. He was thirty-one when he married, which is not that young after all, and why should Iza go through the God-knows-what souvenirs of his youth? She herself couldn’t say what exactly these might be or what she was afraid of, but it was a panicky feeling: Vince had given a present to Lidia but she – his wife – had no idea of how that came about or what it meant, since she had always believed that Vince kept the picture of the mill above his bed out of habit, nothing else, and if this wasn’t the case there was something she didn’t know about Vince and she should be the one to discover it.
    It wasn’t an easy task she had given herself and she didn’t feel free to cry. Iza must have suspected something in her sleep: she could hear her through the open door, moving, sighing and turning from one side to the other. She pulled the first drawer open but she didn’t touch anything for a while, she simply closed her eyes so she couldn’t see, all her deepest, most commanding instincts being against what she was about to do, which was a breach of trust, as if she were robbing and humiliating Vince who was lying helpless in the clinic and could no longer stop her. At the same time she felt closer to him than ever these last few afternoons; the drawers brought to mind a living Vince, it was the real Vince who was looking back at her, everything she came across, alive, speaking, full of energy.
    The contents of the writing desk were in perfect order, as Vince’s things always were. Order was as characteristic of her husband as it was of Iza, just as relative, unfeminine mess was characteristic of her. In the topmost drawer were tins and all kinds of official papers tied round with ribbons in the red-white-and-green national colours. The tins ranged from the tiny to a normal size, like treasures on a child’s toy shelf.
    In the first she opened there was a lock of Endrus’s hair. She hadn’t realised that he too had cut off a lock: there were two strands of hair either side of his medal, under glass, one from each child. Endrus’s was soft and dark. How clearly it brought him back, this soft little snippet, that small cheerful face so like his mother’s you could see it at a glance, so early lost that they had not so much as a photograph of him. Had he lived he would be forty-eight years old now. Oh, God, dear God!
    She twisted the shiny lock of dark hair this way and that. Now he’d be together with his father. Endrus would have made a clumsy angel since he was a clumsy toddler too, dropping things all the time, his arm so weak.
    What could it be like in heaven?
    Certificates. Vince had shown her these once. The stream of distinctions from the village school in Karikásgyüd and the local gimnázium . Student name: Vince Szo ̋ cs; religion: protestant; born: 11 January 1880; birthplace: Karikásgyüd; father’s name: Máté Szo ̋ cs; occupation: dike-keeper.
    How furious Aunt Emma was, slamming down her coffee cup so hard it cracked. Dike-keeper! What’s a dike-keeper? She was not easily calmed down, to be told it didn’t matter, he had been dead a very long time and that it was Gergely Dávid who had brought Vince up. ‘The teacher in Karikásgyüd?’ asked Aunt Emma. ‘Wonderful! Does he think a law degree makes him one of the gentry now? Dike-keeper! And they sent him to school, on public taxes, because he was so clever. Typical of this ridiculously liberal country!’
    She was sipping her coffee in the arbour, the lilac bent towards her greying blonde hair, so she looked like a faded bridesmaid with her dry, painted face and all those heavy slack rings on her fingers. She thought how Aunt Emma went around telling everyone, ‘She is my goddaughter,’ while she was working