The Door by Magda Szabó Read Free Book Online

very last drop, and took my revenge by not mentioning that this was the first time he'd eaten anything with real appetite.
    Emerence pottered about in the kitchen for ages. Though she had always rejected my acknowledgement in the past, I sensed that this time she did expect something. But I didn't even thank her. I set the empty bowl down before her and went back to the bedroom. I could feel her eyes on my back, and it pleased me that at last she was the one who couldn't understand why I was offended. I was triumphant, aloof, rather contemptuous. I was sure I had discovered the reason no-one was allowed into her home. The handyman's suspicions were justified. Behind that locked door there might well be objects of real value, treasures looted from those under sentence of death. It would certainly be a bad idea to show them off. What if someone were to recognise something — then she'd see where it all led, the pointlessness of all that busy looting back then. She couldn't even sell her plunder without risk of discovery. What a picture! The poor Grossmans didn't even have a grave and she was saving up for the Taj Mahal! And she didn't open the door because she was keeping a cat in there! She would even keep an animal prisoner for an alibi. Not bad thinking — all that was missing from the story was any mention of the Grossman dowry.
    She had more pride than I did. If she was in any way surprised, she didn't once ask why the air around us had so suddenly cooled. As I have mentioned, my husband was rather reserved, especially with her, and even though he had never said as much, the old woman's presence had, for years, made him visibly uncomfortable. 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. But at least she no longer brought us gifts. I no longer felt, as I had before, that she was in charge. I believed I had discovered her secret. I didn't even think she was particularly clever because, if she'd had any intelligence, and used it, after '45 she would have been given every opportunity to educate herself. If she'd made the effort to study after the war she could have been an ambassador by now, or a government minister. But she had no use for culture. All she thought about was how much she could hoard, while doling out charity from a stolen christening bowl, and stupefy me, in the small hours of an anxious morning, with the sort of tale she must have heard from a fairground entertainer or found in a trashy novel in her grandfather's attic. Storms and lightning, a well, all those crashing discords — it was too much. Now her political indifference and her hatred of the Church made better sense — much wiser to steer clear of all groups. Budapest was a large place: there may well have been surviving Grossman relatives; anyone might hear the story of the permanently locked apartment, and start to think, and put two and two together, as I had. And why would such a person go to church anyway? What sort of thing would they believe in?
    It was a hard winter. Emerence was inundated with work. My husband's illness filled my every waking minute. The old woman and I seldom bumped into each other. Was it surprising that we almost never embarked on a real conversation?
    Then I found a dog.
    My husband was now able to go out again, and was starting to be his old self, though he still needed my constant care. It wasn't the first time in our thirty-five years of marriage that he'd miraculously clawed his way out of the jaws of death, emerging rejuvenated and victorious — and at the very last moment. In all aspects of his life, winning was supremely important to him.
    It was Christmas day, and the two of us had been to the clinic to collect a prescription, and were making our slow way home in a twilight thick with drizzle, when we noticed a puppy buried up to his neck in snow under the line of trees. It was a form of execution you saw in war