Iza’s Ballad

IT WAS THE first time, in all the time she knew her, that Lidia saw Iza for what she was.

When she first saw her she had been only a few months at the clinic. She felt in awe of her each time she appeared down the corridor. At that time, of course, she felt in awe of every doctor because doctors could tell her what needed to be done and how to save people’s lives, but Iza was more than that. People still talked of this remarkable woman who had moved to Pest, the older nurses often mentioning her. One day when Iza dropped in looking for Professor Dekker as usual, someone introduced her to Lidia. Lidia, this is Dr Szőcs who used to work here in the rheumatology department. So this was Professor Dekker’s favourite, Iza, the ex-wife of Antal Antal.

Every month she came. Lidia was wild about her and imagined her at the spa with thick glass walls behind her next to a hot bubbling spring. How brave she had been in the war, helping to sabotage the clinic. How she worked alongside the men when it was rebuilt. Everyone she worked with was full of praise for her hard work, quick intelligence and decisiveness. Beyond that, they stressed what a really good person she was, and what a good child she was to her mother and father.

The porter would tremble with joy whenever she arrived from Pest. ‘Dr Szőcs is here,’ he’d announce as he rang the upper floor and Lidia would hang around the lift so she could be the first to welcome her. Simply being close to her would improve Lidia in some way, even if it was no more than Iza remarking, ‘What do you do with your plants to make them grow so beautifully?’

Then she fell in love with Antal and her feelings towards Iza became more complex.

Everyone at the clinic knew who had divorced whom: those who worked there knew a great deal, not only about colleagues but about patients and even members of their families, nor had Iza made any secret of what had happened. It clearly hadn’t occurred to her that the truth could be unflattering to herself. Her friends who, at one or other moment of confidence on the night shift, had asked her about it always received the same answer: ‘It’s the way Antal wanted it.’ Dekker swore, people wagged their heads and for a while Antal was subject to a certain level of hostility, his colleagues giving him a frosty reception. Somebody put it like this, that if Szőcs wasn’t good enough for Antal how, for heaven’s sake, were simple mortals to relate to him?

When Iza went away to Pest, somehow everything had returned to normal. Antal hadn’t remarried and people at the clinic understood that increasingly he preferred to be alone, that he was becoming some kind of lone wolf figure. ‘The problem,’ his friends said with some sympathy now and the older ones nodded, ‘is that an awful lot can happen in a marriage that makes living together difficult. No one knows what Szőcs is like as a woman, none of us has any experience of her in a relationship and she’s been with Antal since her fresher year. God knows really – it doesn’t matter.’

Lidia was in despair because she had fallen in love with the kind of man that could have married Iza.

Iza talked to everyone sincerely and without reserve, while Lidia could only talk to the patients, best of all to seriously ill patients; her own reserve tended to break down with those who most required her, she was not really a chatty person otherwise. Nothing exciting had happened in her life, her diploma results were good but not outstanding, she was just a child during the war so couldn’t run around bearing arms or delivering illegal leaflets the way Iza did. One summer she had some voluntary work helping to regulate the river but every young person in the village helped in that, as did others from round about Dorozs. Out of uniform she disliked her blonde hair and grey eyes: Iza was dark, with blue eyes.

She knew that, if she very much wanted to, she could become part of the group that occasionally went around with Antal but somehow she didn’t want to do that. Antal’s relationships with women tended to be brief even by the standards of the clinic and they always aroused the unpleasant suspicion that their nature was essentially biological. Lidia wanted more than that: she was interested in Antal’s cares and problems; she’d have like to see him bad-tempered and depressed, then to cheer and comfort him, to feed him when he was hungry and help him in his work if she could. She would have liked to talk to Antal, to get closer to him in more than the physical sense, to talk to him about flowers, about the way some patient suddenly got better, even about what clothes she should wear and what she should read apart from textbooks. Lidia was vulnerably and innocently in love with Antal, and once she became aware of that she looked at Dr Szőcs with different eyes.

She gazed at Iza with longing now and adored her even more. Iza’s all round personal excellence was now rendered even more excellent by the secret power that had bound Antal to her and possessed him body and soul. Under normal circumstances the thought of inheriting another woman’s husband would not have bothered her so much, but it would be impossible even to think that she should follow Iza in Antal’s bed. Once someone had lived with Iza they could never forget her, thought Lidia, and even if they pretended to, she, Lidia, would always be compared to the other woman. Who could possibly compete with the memory of Iza? And if Antal could be dissatisfied with Iza, why should he even notice her?

She tried to rid herself of this plainly hopeless infatuation the way one might cure some childhood ailment, the kind treated through minimal medical intervention and a little physiotherapy. Her long hard hours of duty didn’t rule out opportunities for meeting other young people. There was a lively group of young people working at the clinic. Lidia laughed and danced with young men, went to movies with them, ran along the beach in the summer and went tobogganing with them on the pine hills in the winter. She pelted them with snowballs and kissed a few by the bust of the local poet the way all young people did. But then Csere from the finance office made overtures to her, at which point she stopped for a while, frightened to do anything. She feared she had led on Csere without meaning to.

It was not easy weaning herself off Antal because she saw him regularly and talked to him all the time, but that was only about impersonal things, about things that mattered deeply to patients but not to the two of them. Lidia would see him in the buffet or in front of the clinic with whatever woman he had in tow at the time, and that upset her and she felt faintly angry, thinking, ‘What does he see in her? In what way is she different from me?’ The only time she was truly jealous – and even then the jealousy was mixed with pride and love – was when Iza appeared in the corridor and knocked at the door of some room looking for Antal while he was down in the cafeteria leaning a little too close to some woman or running hand in hand with another through the boxwood meadow. When he did meet Iza he would discuss matters as he would with a man and the professor was always there with them.

Lidia almost wept for shame when she realised for the first time that she was jealous of someone who had not lived with her husband for years. It was a comic but heartbreakingly childish state of mind. She suffered every time she saw Iza with Antal, but was at the same time happy because she could at least be in the same building as Dr Szőcs. Lidia’s years of faithful infatuation took on an extra dimension because of this strange new feeling.

There was a time when she completely forgot she loved her but saw that her attraction – because of Antal – was not unambiguous. It was when Iza brought her father to the clinic and Antal asked her and Eszter Gál to look after him. Lidia watched Dr Szőcs teasing the patient, saw how she helped feed him, what patience she showed and how she’d cover the bed with silly gifts, hoping to amuse him, but she also saw how, sometimes after a visit, she’d step out into the corridor and rest her head against the window and look down over the wood as if the trees could respond, as if the wood could tell her why those we love have to die. But whenever the old woman appeared, tapping awkwardly across the stone floor, Iza’s handkerchief disappeared and she smiled at her mother, saying, ‘He seems to be a little better today, my dear, so don’t go weeping at his bedside.’ It was what she always said. Every time.

Tending Vince Szőcs had a calming effect on her. By concentrating on him she could forget Antal. A person can forget everything when her mind is on something else, even such things as never were. Her devotion to Antal was ridiculous, ridiculous and superfluous. Iza was once again what she had been before: an adolescent crush. ‘She’s such a good person’ were the first words she heard about her before she got to know her. And she really was, and it was odd now to think that at one time she regarded Iza as an invincible rival. Lidia felt ashamed of herself.

She thought he was in pain or needed something, but she saw she was mistaken. Vince gave a smile, tried to stretch a little and in a voice that was fully awake said, ‘It has been years since I last dreamt, Lidia, and now, half asleep, I have been dreaming again. Just imagine it, I was at home. At home!’

She adjusted Vince’s pillow and blanket. She was happy to touch him, pleased to do what was necessary. The judge was a clean, quiet, refined little old man, gentle in manner and courageous. ‘You’ll be out dancing soon,’ Dekker used to say when he looked in. ‘My father-in-law is already much better,’ grunted Antal, who was a hopeless liar. When the old man was expecting his wife he’d ask for a double dose of painkillers so she shouldn’t worry about him. When she asked how he was he might perhaps complain that he didn’t feel quite fresh enough. ‘Give me some painkiller, Lidia,’ he would say. His small eyes were intelligent and wise. Lidia would turn away at such moments and fuss about on the table so he shouldn’t see her face. It’s not easy when a patient suspects that he is not likely to live long.

Lidia loved Vince, not because of Antal or Iza, but entirely for himself, for undertaking his heroic role in the usual comedy enacted around those who are incurable. He understood that Iza thought he knew nothing and was wanting to amuse him, so he played cards with her while his strength lasted. He knew what the old woman was hoping to see, so he kept smiling and waving at her with his thin hands that were worn to a shadow. When left alone his body stiffened and he tried to look stronger than his medication allowed. He asked for a radio and for newspapers as long as he could hold them. He joked with visitors. He slept better when Lidia was on the night shift near him and he would pay her compliments when he woke: your complexion is like wild roses, he would say.

He would usually have to be half asleep before he spoke directly of his feelings, only once the painkillers they stuffed him with started working and his snow-white fingers could move across the blanket. He whispered, but not in a flat voice, rather dreamily: like someone preparing to go to sleep, his words articulated into syllables, like a child with a secret who finally gets around to talking about it.

Sometimes he spoke about Iza as a child, about her lisping, her pinafore, her pigtails and bunches, about the old woman’s younger body, about her first evening dress which was pale blue, and the crown of forget-me-nots she wore in her blonde hair when it was pinned up. There were times she found him crying, wanting to talk about his feelings of shame on being drummed out of his post like some common criminal. She even heard him whispering about how the old woman once cursed him because he lost his job. However often she asked him to forgive her for it Vince could not forget it to this day.

The cardboard figure of Antal became a firmly rounded man in the old man’s conversation. It shook Lidia to discover how good he was to live with. ‘Why did he leave her?’ he fretted. ‘Such a decent boy and she loved him so. Why did he leave her, Ettie, have you any idea?’

Lidia had plenty of opportunity to think why Antal might have left Iza. No one at the clinic had a clue. Nurses who had worked with him for years said no one had ever caught Antal being unfaithful while he was married and he always got on well with his wife. Everyone knew Iza had only ever been interested in Antal. They knew how they fought together to establish Dorozs, they knew Iza’s extraordinary capacity for work and the shy smile she saved for Antal alone.

But now the truth was out. Vince knew no more than anyone what had happened between them.

That night, when the judge started speaking unexpectedly, Lidia leaned close to him. The old woman had stayed longer than usual that day and it was hard for him to sleep after such a visit. The world pressing in from outside and the world within, the world he was well accustomed to, did not quite match: his spirit resented the health surrounding him and undermined the interests of his body.

The judge smiled and his weak wrist shook a little as if he wanted to make some kind of gesture. For a few days now he had been incapable of completing a movement without help. ‘Far away,’ he said. ‘Out in the country.’

‘Rural’ in rural speech means anything that is neither the capital nor the speaker’s home. Kázna, Dorozs, Okolács, Kusu . . .

The naming of the place established an intimate connection between them, drawing them closer together. ‘It’s nice there,’ said the judge. ‘The shore is red before spring and sulphur-yellow after. In my dream I was standing on the dike, not afraid of the river. The water was gurgling under the mill wheel.’

‘The old dike is gone,’ said Lidia, shaking her head. ‘We have a concrete dike now. The river has been regulated.’

This conversation marked the beginning of a strange period when the judge seemed to be getting better. It was a mystery from a medical point of view, an inexplicable three days during which Antal couldn’t be certain of his patient’s condition. Dekker shrugged and Antal rang Iza in the middle of the night. Lidia was passing his office and heard what he was saying: ‘Papa is suddenly well, he feels no pain, I have no idea why.’ Lidia hurried on, her feet silent down the corridor.

Lidia had seen the flood memorial in the square at Villánytelep, inscribed: To those who died in the Gyüd flood, and had learned in school about the disaster that hit the village in 1887. She knew the row of willows and the old dike that the judge’s father was guarding, the one at the bend of the river that she later helped break up one summer when a concrete dike was erected in its place. Everything the judge remembered had vanished: the mill, the old dike and the small thatched houses, all gone. They discussed each street, lane, passage and meadow. Vince told Lidia about the Gyüd that was still a part of his inner life; the nurse told him about Gyüd as it was now with its enormous cooperative farms, its health centre, the machine stores, and the peasants roaring up and down side roads on their motorbikes. There were times they found it hard to understand each other because Lidia called streets and alleys by their new names whereas the judge used the old names. Parts of Gyüd had entirely changed and the nurse would have to draw maps of the village so they eventually realised that either they were talking about the same place with two different names or that these were parts of the village that had not existed at all the last time the judge visited home. Vince tried to prop himself on his elbows and his constantly pale face glowed a little. They talked about the mill where Lidia used to play, which was demolished and replaced by an electric one. Lidia said she was born near the old wooden building and the first thing she would hear on waking was the fresh sound of water as it bubbled through the lock. The judge knew nothing about later developments. The papers had written about the channelling of the river and the building works in the summer of 1953 but it was the only period in Vince’s life when he neither listened to the radio nor bothered with the papers: it was the time the divorce was going through.

The judge had lived a long time and Lidia listened how, as he spoke, the village where she lived just a few years ago came to life again. She met the judge’s father, the biological one, and the other, real father: the River Karikás, teeming with fish and crab, that actually supported them financially, who got into a temper one day, rose and killed one-third of the village population. She got to know his terrors, how the child Vince listened through his two blue windows at dawn trying to gauge the mood of the river, imagining how things were at the dike. She heard about Dávid, the teacher at the gimnázium, about law school, about Aunt Emma, about Darabont Street and even about Captain.

Lidia’s brief life amounted to practically nothing in comparison with the judge’s. It was enough for her to act as a kind of living gauge by which to register the changes the judge was so desperately keen to hear about. But her story was only typical to herself; the judge listened to it as he might to a fairy tale. Her father had been a pastor, who didn’t survive the war. He disappeared from the sheep meadows of Gyüd the way Máté Szőcs disappeared from the dike. Once she had finished primary school she was put on a train to a boarding school where she matriculated and went on nurse training while her widowed mother supported herself by working in a cooperative retail shop. Lidia didn’t get her diploma through a public grant, by receiving a school bursary or because a teacher insisted she should. No one offered her their pittance so that she might buy books; she saved her own money and bought them for herself. She grew up with as much security as if both parents were alive and maybe more. People took greater care of her because she was half an orphan.

They travelled a long way together those three nights before he died. Lidia had a clearer idea of the village as it used to be than she ever had from her mother’s simple memories or her schoolteachers’ poor lessons; the judge could follow Lidia down new streets that he could not have remembered or ever have walked, roads down which he would have liked to walk with Iza. ‘The mill’ – he laughed – ‘well of course it wouldn’t be there, it’s just the way I see it. There’s an electric mill instead . . .’ He stopped and contemplated what the shore might be like now; he had taken so many photographs of it when he was a lawyer.

If over those three days he responded to everything as if he were healthy, it was because he was, at last, talking about Gyüd.

The old woman’s life, he explained, started roughly when they met. As for Iza, she hated sad stories as a child. There was one particular ballad, a beautiful ballad from his student days, that he could never sing to her because she would burst into tears and plead for the dead character to be brought to life again. She never heard the end of the song. Mrs Szőcs wasn’t interested in seeing the village and Iza loathed both Gyüd and the Karikás because it brought her father so much suffering. The fact was she couldn’t bear him to talk about the past at all, and each time he did she would turn her serious eyes on him over the steaming plates at supper and insist that the future should turn out differently. He had to promise her. ‘I can’t tell you how good Iza was to me,’ said the sick man and his surprisingly healthy face lit up with the joy of the memory. ‘Nobody has ever been nicer to me.’

As he spoke Lidia could see the schoolgirl Iza discussing the future with her father. She saw her as her father described her, as a pint-sized redeemer spreading out her school atlas and examining the map of Budapest because she wanted to see a major city, a really big city, and trying to work out where in City Park the statue of the historian Anonymous might stand. Iza loved the look of that hooded faceless figure. She saw it once when she was a young woman visiting Budapest with their petition for the sanatorium, then again as an adult when she was no longer alone but had Antal and other young people at her side. The idea of ‘the village’ became more attractive to her, not Gyüd of course, but the general idea of villages as a problem or concept: how to solve the issue of rural health care. Listening to her father Lidia saw how carefully Iza examined a newspaper, pointed out a line, faultlessly pronouncing some politician’s name, leaning her pretty head against the judge’s shoulder. ‘She became more sophisticated than anyone I have ever known,’ he boasted. ‘So clever! Isn’t that so, Lidia? How clever! It’s just that she never explains things, but when would she have the time to do so? It is like not knowing how the sputnik works. I read about it in the general science magazine but I still don’t know. What is that miraculous field at Gyüd called?’

‘The electric field,’ answered Lidia. ‘There’s a memorial statue on it, a lawn, some benches and a children’s playground.’

‘Good heavens,’ she thought as he was speaking. ‘That girl has done everything for him. She could have done no more than if the situation were reversed, if he were the daughter and she the father. She has kept him alive beyond his eightieth year and though she knows his constitution is weak, the poor little man, as soon as she leaves his room she is close to tears. She barely has the strength to stumble over to the window. She loves him. She has spent her life surrounding him like a living defensive wall. But why did she never go to Gyüd with him? Is it possible that she didn’t let him relate to things, that she never explained anything.’

‘Listen, Mr Szőcs,’ said Lidia, unaware that she was shouting. ‘There’s a memorial statue in the square to the victims of the flood, it’s of a young man. He is shading his brow and is looking towards the river as if watching to see which way the foam is running.’

The door of the room, the walls and even the house plants were expanding. The plants were whispering like willows and the hot tap that they had tried vainly to repair that morning started running again, reminding them of water, of rivers and the unusually low March stars that swung above the waters of the Karikás.

Propped on pillows, half dead already, the judge took his last imagined walk through the village where he was born. His legs felt sturdy. At one point he started singing. Antal came in astonished, the old man’s voice drifting into the corridor like the humming of an innocent, half-conscious, happy child. The judge was sitting up and Lidia was leaning forward listening to the strange song. Antal knew what he was singing, because he too had sung it on the headmaster’s name day, strange as it was that Cato should have chosen it instead of a happier song. He had never known that his father-in-law remembered it. Vince would often sing at home but Antal had never heard him sing this before; it was an old tune with words by József Bajza:

Up in the castle chamber

torches blaze and glow

laments resound and echo

through the house below.

In the middle of the chamber

raised high up on her bier

a lovely virgin bride

lies dead and cannot hear.

Her cheeks and breasts are pale

like hills in a white shroud

her beautiful eyes closed

like stars behind a cloud.

Lidia was singing along with the sick man, evidently having learned the song, and didn’t notice him as he opened the door. The nurse’s voice was quiet but clear.

Ah would it were that I

lay on that bier instead,

not you, my lovely flower,

bright virgin of my bed.

The girl glanced up at Antal – was there ever such a meaningful look? Then she quickly turned her back and shook her head as if to say she had no need for help, the patient was quiet and, however strange it might sound, he actually felt well. Deep inside him Antal heard that strange, unexpectedly happy and innocent voice, half sighing, half out of breath, aware that it was impossible to get to the source of that gentle crooning.

Her cheeks and breasts are pale

like hills in a white shroud . . .

For the first time Lidia knew that if Antal ever asked her to take the place of Iza she could do so and would not, as she had always thought, continually have to be compared with her. The joy this brought was quickly succeeded by a vague sense of regret as if it had suddenly transpired that Dr Szőcs had been born with one leg but somehow nobody had noticed. The lovely virgin whose sad history Iza never wanted to hear was palely glowing on her bier as far as Lidia was concerned, but had also become an idea, a curious symbol. ‘Good Lord,’ thought Lidia, ‘how exhausted she must be with that constant self-discipline, that need to save not only her family but the whole world. How hard to live with the hardness of heart that dares not indulge itself by grieving over dead virgins! The poor woman believes that old people’s pasts are the enemy. She has failed to notice how those pasts are explanations and values, the key to the present.’

While Vince was dying and imagined his daughter was sitting beside him, Lidia talked to him as if she were Iza. But when he died and Iza tried to give her money, she felt Iza had been lying to her in some way, that she had cheated on her feelings and that she hadn’t deserved such adulation. Now that Lidia had taken her place at her father’s deathbed, Iza’s offer of money was positively insulting to her. Here at the police station, looking at Iza’s tired face, she felt, for the first time, indifferent to her. She was over both adulation and loathing: there was no more jealousy or pity. She was so indifferent to her now that she could wish her well without any personal ill feeling; all she hoped was that, just once in her life, she might be obliged to listen to the ballad of the virgin the way that everyone heard it or would hear it in this or that form, that, like the knight, she might tread the hall in torchlight, look into the dead bride’s face and gaze at her white breast.

Iza’s mother, whom they wanted to adopt because Antal said she had become a shadow of herself, someone frightened of everything and quite without resources in Budapest, had not called on Iza in her last moments. Lidia knelt beside her the way she had knelt by Vince in March. The old woman suffered and was thirsty, and kept saying, ‘Water.’ What had Iza done to her, Lidia wondered as she gazed impassively at Iza’s tortured face. What could Iza have done to make the old woman forget her name down the narrow path that lead to her death?

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