The Door by Magda Szabó

Author:Magda Szabó
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Hungarian Literature, Classics, Communism, Contemporary
ISBN: 9781094015743
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 1987-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FILMING

In my student days, I detested Schopenhauer. Only later did I come to acknowledge the force of his idea that every relationship involving personal feeling laid one open to attack, and the more people I allowed to become close to me, the greater the number of ways in which I was vulnerable. 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.

This realisation wasn’t helped by her behaviour, which was so unpredictable. Sometimes she was so offhand, and so rude to me that any stranger would have wondered why I put up with her. But it didn’t matter, because I had long ago learned to ignore the shifting tectonic plates under the surface of her being. She had probably made a similar discovery — like Captain Butler, she had no wish to put her heart on the line a second time, but she didn’t know how to protect herself against the threat of dependence on me. If I was sick, she nursed me until my husband returned from work, but I could never reply in kind because Emerence was never sick. She didn’t even think it worth bringing to my attention that she had suffered an injury in the kitchen or during the course of her work. If she burned her foot with sizzling fat, or sliced her hand on the carving knife, she didn’t comment, but treated herself with household remedies. Emerence had a low opinion of people who complained.

With time, she felt able to drop in for no particular reason, and indeed no explanation was necessary. It was understood that she and I liked being together. When we were alone in the apartment, and we both had the time, we chatted. It remained impossible to persuade her to read any of my books, but it did now affect her when they were unfavourably reviewed. She understood the personal nature of the waves of politically motivated attacks on me, and she would fly into a rage of exasperation. She once asked me if she should report a critic to the Lieutenant Colonel. I tried in vain to calm her down. At such times she was possessed by anger and hatred. By now, without ever acknowledging its full worth, she no longer fought against the view that my work represented some sort of achievement, and she constructed an elaborate theory to avoid having to reject us. Writing was an occupation comparable with play. The child took it seriously, and carried it out with great care, and though it was only play, and nothing depended on it, it was tiring. She was forever putting questions to me that no writer, journalist or reader can answer: how did a

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