Magda
Szabo, who died in 2007, was one of Hungary’s most important
20th-century writers. Not that most of us Anglophones would know it, as
very little of her work has 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 here 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 — has now delivered this version to an American audience.
If
you’ve felt that you’re reasonably familiar with the literary
landscape, “The Door” will prompt you to reconsider. 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 venue; suffice it to say that I’ve
been haunted by this novel. Szabo’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. Szabo’s narrator, like the
author a writer named Magda (in interviews, Szabo 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 10 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 11 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 20
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 great 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, Szabo sows plentiful allusions — to Book 6 of Virgil’s
“Aeneid,” to Shaw and E. T. A. Hoffmann, to the Fates of Greek myth and
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, Szabo 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.
The
novel opens with a brief chapter about Magda’s recurring nightmare,
years after Emerence’s death: the nightmare of the closed door. It sets a
highly dramatic tone that, in literal terms, is not borne out by the
ordinary events that follow.
But
there is nothing simply ordinary about the friendship between these two
women. Set on the stage of a single street in mid-20th-century
Budapest, theirs is nothing less than the account of humanity’s struggle
to love fully and unconditionally, a struggle that is perhaps doomed.
As Szabo’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.”
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