Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, was one of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century writers. Not that most of us Anglophones would have known it, as until recently little of her work had been translated into English. The Door, her best-known novel, which appeared in Hungary in 1987, was initially translated by Stefan Draughon and brought out in the United States by an academic publisher in 1995. Subsequently translated into French, the book won the Prix Femina Étranger in 2003 and was beautifully retranslated by Len Rix for British publication in 2005. A decade later, New York Review Books Classics—acting, yet again, in its capacity as the Savior of Lost Greats—delivered this version to an American audience.
It’s astonishing that this masterpiece should have been essentially unknown to English-language readers for so long, a realization that raises once again the question of what other gems we’re missing out on. The dismaying discussion of how little translated work is available in the United States must wait for another time; suffice it to say that I’ve been haunted by this novel. Szabó’s lines and images come to my mind unexpectedly, and with them powerful emotions. It has altered the way I understand my own life.
A work of stringent honesty and delicate subtlety, The Door is a story in which, superficially, very little happens. Szabó’s narrator, like the author a writer named Magda (in interviews, Szabó suggested that the novel was only thinly veiled personal history), follows the intricacies of her intimate filial relationship with her housekeeper, Emerence. In doing so, it exposes the rich inadequacies of human communication even as it evokes the agonies of Hungary’s recent history.
When Emerence first comes to work for Magda and her husband, they have recently moved into a large apartment, following Magda’s political rehabilitation in Communist Hungary: “For ten years my writing career had been politically frozen. Now it was picking up again and here, in this new setting, I had become a full-time writer, with increased opportunities and countless responsibilities.” Emerence chooses Magda and her husband, rather than vice versa—“I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty linen”—and while it emerges that the two women are from the same rural region, the formidable Emerence remains a mystery, of near-mythical proportions. At their first encounter, “she was washing a mountain of laundry with the most antiquated equipment, boiling bed linen in a caldron over a naked flame, in the already agonizing heat, and lifting the sheets out with an immense wooden spoon. Fire glowed all around her. She was tall, big-boned, powerfully built for a person of her age, muscular rather than fat, and she radiated strength like a Valkyrie. Even the scarf on her head seemed to jut forward like a warrior’s helmet.”
Emerence’s strength is imposing (in addition to her housecleaning, she sweeps the snow for eleven buildings on their shared street), as is her reserve. Animals of all kinds gravitate to her; people in the neighborhood rely on her, look up to her, and are grateful for her charity. But in return, she remains stern and aloof. “Although she looked after us for over twenty years,” Magda recalls, “during the first five of them it would have taken precision instruments to measure the degree to which she permitted real communication between us.”
Eventually, however, through a series of exchanges both emotional and material, the two women become close in spite of their differences. Emerence sustains Magda through her husband’s grave illness. She encourages the couple when they adopt a dog, then names him (Viola) and trains him so that she is his real mistress. She relies on Magda for help when awaiting an undisclosed but important visitor. She introduces Magda to her trio of close friends, who surround her like the three Fates. She bestows upon Magda and her husband a number of gifts that they resist at their peril. And, through all of this, tempestuous, the two women repeatedly argue and reconcile.
The greatest intimacy Emerence shares with Magda is to permit her to cross the threshold of her home, to witness her secrets. It is a unique privilege: Although Emerence entertains a great deal on her porch, she never allows anyone beyond the front door. “You’re going to see something no one has ever seen,” she explains, “and no one ever will, until they bury me. But I’ve nothing else you would value . . . so I’m going to give you the only thing I have.”
Even before Magda enters what she terms “the Forbidden City,” she is past the point of no return: “It wasn’t easy to accept that from now on I would always have to consider Emerence. Her life had become an integral part of my own. This led to the dreadful thought that one day I would lose her, that if I survived her there would be yet another addition to those ubiquitous, indefinable shadow-presences that wrack me and drive me to despair.”
Emerence is as practical, anti-intellectual, and hostile to the church as Magda is abstracted, literary, and religious, but in spite of their radical dissimilarities, both women are aware that friendship has its costs. Magda’s dead mother hovers over the narrative, the clearest of her “shadow-presences.” Emerence’s life has been marked from early childhood onward by brutal losses, a trail of tragedy and sacrifice that may explain the locked front door. Questions linger, too, about Emerence’s own shadow, about what she may have done, or not done, through Hungary’s darkest years. The dog Viola—as vivid and fully realized a character as any human, a truly great literary dog—is essential to their love for each other. Their treatment of this creature is a manifestation of their disparate experiences.
Throughout the novel, Szabó sows plentiful allusions—to Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, to Shaw and E. T. A. Hoffmann, to the Fates of Greek myth and to the Bible, even to Gone with the Wind—that lend Emerence a superhuman significance. She may be a mere housekeeper, but she is also an indomitable icon. It is a stature, Szabó implies, of which Emerence is not unaware, which makes the onset of her human frailty, the advent of true old age, perilous and tragic. When that time comes, Magda and Emerence understand differently what it means to care lovingly for an ailing friend. An unintended, heartbreaking betrayal inevitably ensues.
WHEN I FIRST read this novel, not long after the death of my only aunt, the book spoke particularly to that experience; even as it resonated with relationships, earlier in life, with women who had worked for my Canadian grandmother and for my French grandparents. Anyone who has either been, or had a long-standing connection with, a family retainer knows the complexities of such relationships; others have written powerfully about the experience, from Proust’s housekeeper Céleste Albaret to Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help. Szabo’s Emerence, however, is mythic in her forcefulness, which renders particularly wrenching both her eventual vulnerability and Magda’s failure properly to protect her.
My Canadian grandmother’s housekeeper Rosa, crinkle-eyed, ruddy-skinned, and wiry, was a presence not only in my childhood but well beyond: Raised on a collective farm in the Ukraine, taken by the Germans as a teenager for forced labor in a factory, she arrived in Canada as a Displaced Person shortly after the Second World War, along with her Polish husband and new baby. Barely literate in English—or in her native Ukrainian, or in Russian, or in German, for that matter, though she spoke all these languages—she and her husband nevertheless enabled their son to go to university: he became an engineer and built a successful business. Widowed young, Rosa didn’t seek to remarry: instead, she spent her vacations traveling to the Caribbean, and her weekend evenings dancing at a supper club on the Toronto waterfront. She walked miles each day, and continued to work well into her eighties—coming to clean once a week for my mother and, for a time, for my sister also, after my grandmother died in the mid-1990s.
Having come to work with our family in 1947, having watched my mother grow up, Rosa was, by the time of my childhood, fully a part of my maternal family: my grandmother, too, was widowed early, and my mother her only child. The two aging women relied on one another, confided in one another, bickered, and at times quarreled outright, like blood relatives. Their emotional bonds were contorted by the underlying transactional relationship: my grandmother felt responsible for Rosa, and Rosa for my grandmother, but they irritated one another, and over time, complained volubly to my mother about one another. Their points of friction were embedded in their weekly routines, and after forty years they reached a point of furious rupture—over a trifle, of course (my grandmother was at fault)—which my mother, the peacemaker, worked for months to repair.
Twenty years younger than my grandmother, fifteen years older than my mother, Rosa proved stronger than both of them. When my mother was in the grip of the Lewy body dementia that would kill her, but first robbed her of access to her will and her memories, we took her to visit her old caregiver. “Oh,” my mother exclaimed, her voice filled with wonder, as if her life were restored to her, “It’s you! It’s Rosa!” And Rosa, undiminished at ninety, tears in her eyes, wrapped her arms around the husk of the young girl she’d known so long ago.
My French grandparents relied on Odet, a Portuguese woman who had immigrated in youth to France with her fainéant husband Francisco. Small and round like a loaf, meticulous in all things, she spoke French with a singsong lilt, and wore patterned pinafores over her nylon dresses. When I was a child, she hurried from the kitchen across the hallway’s marble tiles, slippers slapping, when my grandmother rang the little brass bell with a maid for a handle; until Odet told her employers how she hated it, and they put it away forever. She worked for my grandparents for almost thirty years, from eight a.m. till one p.m., six days a week, and she, too, was as much a part of our family as any blood relation. When we were small, she spoiled my sister and me with cakes and treats, and when we were teenagers she pressed upon us, when we arrived each summer, a five-hundred-franc note apiece, a great deal of money at the time. We were aware of how long it must have taken her to earn it. While there, we were largely idle—“you’re on vacation,” she’d insist, often shooing us from the kitchen, “go enjoy yourselves!”—but unlike the adults, we sometimes moved in her domestic world: we made the beds, and set and cleared the table, and dried the dishes and put them away. In the evenings, as we grew up my sister and I did the washing-up, knowing that otherwise Odet would arrive to a mountain of crusted plates and cutlery in the morning. She, rather than our grandmother or aunt, taught us the family recipes, had us from an early age salting sliced cucumbers or eggplant and pressing them between layers of paper towel to drain, scalding and peeling tomatoes and scooping out the seeds, preparing elegant platters of wafer-thin prosciutto and Charentais melon.
For my antique grandparents, Odet had, as far as I know, only affection. She claimed to love them with a fairy-tale simplicity, and acceded to the family myth that my grandmother was, in fact, a lay saint. (My grandmother, born in the nineteenth century, died at ninety-one while eating an orange madeleine, having taken only a small bite: Odet and my grandfather sequestered the biscuit in a glass jar in the cereal cupboard, where it remained, like a saint’s relic, for easily a decade. Tellingly, it did not decompose.) My grandparents treated Odet like a daughter, she used to say; and before Madame lost her memory, she taught Odet everything she knew.
But their actual daughter, Denise, my aunt, posed challenges. Unmarried, she lived initially in another apartment in the same complex, even though she spent much of her free time with her parents. After my grandmother’s death, however, my aunt moved in with my grandfather, ostensibly to care for him, though perhaps also to protect her own fragile sanity; and this made Odet’s life a misery. Herself working long hours, nerves frayed, always a woman with a short fuse, Denise treated Odet neither as daughter nor as sister, but as a maid, an underling, the domestic help; which, after decades with the family, baffled and infuriated Odet. “C’est une garce,” Odet muttered to my sister and me, irate in a way we’d never seen her, and once, agonizingly for all, to Denise’s face: “Vous êtes une garce.” Our grandfather attempted, with only moderate success, to salve all wounds; but his daughter, his blood, remained his first responsibility. Odet’s loathing for Denise seeped into the fabric of her days: the unmade bed, laundry left on the floor, the spattered bathroom sink, overflowing ashtrays with their filthy, ashy reek—even when she wasn’t at home, Denise was ubiquitous. Eventually, Odet and her husband decided to retire early and return to Portugal: “I wanted to wait till your grandfather died,” she told me, “but I couldn’t stand it.”
It was my Tante Denise, recently deceased when I read Magda Szabó’s novel, of whom The Door put me most powerfully in mind; or rather, of my own failings with regard to her. Always idiosyncratic, often difficult (she had a history of depression and a bipolar diagnosis), Tante Denise became, with age, impossible. After her father’s death, in addition to her lifelong chain-smoking, she took rather pointedly to drink; but after my father’s death, she threw herself wholeheartedly into the project, and deteriorated rapidly from an elegant if frail bourgeois lady into a rough-skinned haggard sot, increasingly rebarbative and vexatious, prone to insults, rages, and physical collapse. Because my sister and I lived far away, we didn’t for some time grasp the extent of the problem; but were set straight by the building’s concierge and eventually by the neighbors, more than one of whom had been called upon to rescue Denise after a drunken fall.
We had long been aware that our largely secular, liberal North American mind-set was a far cry from Denise’s: an exhaustingly devout pied-noir Catholic, she was a staunch cultural and political conservative who firmly embraced hierarchies and traditional roles. She believed, too, that our failings are God-given—her temper, for example, and eventually her drunkenness—and hence to be accepted by those who love us, like the color of our eyes. My sister and I, meanwhile, with our Emersonian belief in agency, in the capacity to change, and with a perhaps naïve optimism for the future—we sought to help our aunt get a grip on things. We believed, we wanted to believe, that she had a whole chapter of her life still ahead. We arranged for her to dry out in rehab, which she resisted until we suggested we might enlist her doctors’ help and formally oblige her. But she got so drunk the night before her departure that when she fell, broke her hip, and was rushed to hospital, they couldn’t operate for over fifteen hours. We cheered the fact that on account of the surgery and its aftermath, she’d quit smoking; for which she cursed us roundly, and with venom. In the rehab hospital (of a different sort altogether than had been planned), she had me wheel her out onto the deck with her oxygen tank so she could light up: she went to considerable inconvenience to restart her habit. Just as she couldn’t wait to smoke again, she couldn’t wait to slake her thirst; she engaged a neighbor’s loose-tongued housekeeper (with whom she’d spent many afternoons tippling) to slip her bottles on the sly in her hospital bed. When finally back at home, albeit with around-the-clock care, she set about her self-destruction in a spirit of almost exuberant vengeance against us, the nieces—her only nieces—who had so impertinently and egregiously bucked the generational hierarchy, disrespected her desires, and ruined her life. In her last weeks—because after that return home, she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer almost at once, and lived less than three months—she often refused to speak when one of us called, instructing her caregivers to say that she was busy, or didn’t feel well enough. When I visited, she glared at me with an expression of terror and desolate aloneness that haunts me still: unlike the eyes of the others I’ve known dying, hers afforded an unconsoled glimpse of the abyss. Her Catholic faith apparently provided no solace. She refused to discuss her cancer, or her drinking, or to acknowledge her imminent death. In the last days, she turned her face to the wall and fell silent.
READING THE DOOR, I was again painfully aware of having failed my aunt. What does unconditional love entail? Tante Denise’s Catholic version and Emerence’s stoical one—to accept a person’s flaws, to respect their desires, and to continue to love them, without judgment—are surely closer to the answer than were our self-righteous attempts to reform Denise “for her own good.” Just as Magda betrays Emerence by following society’s supposedly benevolent rules, I, too, had betrayed my lonely aunt, who, after the long-distant death of her beloved mother, and the more recent death of her beloved father, and the intolerable death, at the last, of her beloved brother, had wanted only oblivion, the oblivion that whiskey offered, or death itself. She wanted to be permitted to obliterate herself, and she wanted to be neither abandoned nor condemned for doing so. This would never have been an easy wish to grant; but in the event, I failed until too late even fully to understand her wishes. I failed to see her, alone on her darkling plain; I failed to accompany her as far as the gate—which is all, and the best, we can do.
There is nothing simply ordinary about the friendship between Magda Szabó’s two women characters. Set on the stage of a single street in mid-twentieth-century Budapest, theirs is nothing less than the account of humanity’s struggle to love fully and unconditionally, a struggle that is perhaps always doomed. As Szabó’s narrator reflects: “Humankind has come a long way since its beginnings and people of the future won’t be able to imagine the barbaric early days in which we fought with one another, in groups or individually, over little more than a cup of cocoa. But not even then will it be possible to soften the fate of a woman for whom no one has made a place in their life.”