The Fawn by Magda Szabó

Author:Magda Szabó
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

9

The rain has now stopped. The air is steamy and mist is rising from the flowerbeds; the mountains behind the house are still covered in cloud, but the sky over my head is clear and bright again. The water will have washed away the mud challah loaf I made; there will be nothing there now to show that it ever existed. It was Béla Kárász who taught me how to make them, but I never learned how to plait them as beautifully as he did. He once brought me a tiny one with a letter baked inside it; he expected me to eat it, of course – he had no idea that in our house every little delicacy like that went straight to my father to break in half and the letter would fall out into his hand; there was a picture of two turtle doves kissing in one of its corners.

There are doves in my garden up on Eagle Hill. They always remind me of Ambrus. I love watching the way they flutter their wings, the assured way they swoop through the air. We once hit a pigeon, do you remember? We found it next to the car spread out in a strangely unnatural way, already dead. I sang a little dirge and you mumbled something, but we both felt very bad about it. Yesterday Elza was wearing a hat with a black pin through it, I couldn’t keep my eyes off it; it ended in a dove with its wings spread wide. Elza’s face has become a lot thinner and her nose is more pointed than when she was younger; she looks not so much Spanish now as Indian, and at the same time more conventional, more respectable, but her eyes are more restless than other people’s, it’s as if she’s never quite sure that people aren’t looking askance at her; she was arm in arm with Auntie Ilu and I spent some time watching the way they moved together and supported each other; next to Auntie Ilu’s soft, yeasty-looking body Elza looked hard and bright, they were like a knife and a sponge laid side by side; Angéla was with them, it was as if she had two mothers, only she never once looked at either of them. Hovering between the two of them, or above them, invisible but almost palpable, Uncle Domi was their one great reality; I had to smile when that idea struck me, because he’s been dead for so many years now.

It was you who told me he had died; you told me briefly and tactfully, in the midst of Auntie Ilu’s shrieking, while Elza stood dry-eyed by the telephone trying to call the doctor. Today everything is sweetness and light between them: with the passing of the years Elza has come to be seen as a sort of second wife. That’s only natural: Auntie Ilu has forgiven whatever there was to forgive, Elza has called no-one to account for her wasted years

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