Iza's Ballad Read Online Free PDF Page B

the big mirror with the knitted berliner shawl. By the time Iza returned with the tea she sat hunched on the sofa beside the fire. Iza froze on the threshold, the steaming mug in her hand. The clock had stopped, showing a quarter to four: the whole aspect of the room was peculiarly changed now that the mirror was blind.
    ‘She knows,’ thought the old woman. ‘I told her back then .’
    Iza’s mouth twitched but she didn’t say anything. She waited for the old woman to drink her tea, then snatched the shawl from the mirror and put it round her mother instead. She opened the cover of the clock face, moved the hands to the right time and set the thing going.
    The old woman shuddered when the mirror glistened behind her once more. She felt something had been taken from Vince, the last thing that belonged to him, and she didn’t even dare glance at it. The silvery surface was so alive, so much like a lake; she was afraid he might appear and start swimming, that something, or someone, would shimmer out of it. Even the sound of the clock hurt her; it meant the wheels were moving round though Vince was beyond time. Might it be easier coping with the world like this? Iza didn’t believe in anything that old people believed in.
    Iza took the mug from her but stayed close, next to her legs. She was always beside her at every moment of crisis, ever since she was born, not like a child at all, more like a sister. When the first lodger at the old house in Darabont Street made a remark about Vince, Iza answered for him. Iza was just a baby when Vince lost his job and would have known nothing of the circumstances at the time. There she was, defending her father, her face chalk-white with indignation, and the lodger just stared at her: she so small, not quite eight years old, as if her little body were entirely compounded of some dry, defiant passion. When she went to the dentist Iza usually accompanied her and they had their teeth done together, Iza always first in the chair, and she couldn’t be a coward afterwards because Iza would not utter a cry when the dentist was drilling or removing a tooth, the only evidence of her pain being a faint fluttering of her eyelids. Iza helped manage her money, helped her cook and even with her spring cleaning when there was no other help; she would help without being asked, of her own free will, as if it were the natural thing to do. Now here she was again, sitting at the end of the divan, clutching her hands. How they adored her, she and Vince, from the day she was born. A tear crept into her eye as she thought of how Vince would never see his daughter again.
    ‘We are not to weep for him,’ said Iza.
    The old woman looked up at her through her tears because she had heard this from her before. It wasn’t a matter of medical concern; the cook had said the same thing when her first child died and she was choking with tears mourning for her little boy. They were still in the nice flat then, the old flat, her cook a gaunt old woman who never went anywhere – summer or winter – without her umbrella, to which she had fixed a porcelain button with a picture of the Empress Elisabeth on it. ‘You mustn’t shed tears for him,’ the cook said, when they took baby Endrus away. ‘He won’t get any sleep on the other side if you do. You mustn’t weep for him.’
    ‘You’ll not be alone,’ she heard the girl saying. ‘You’ll sell the house and stay with me in Pest.’
    Now she really started crying: the relief, the sense of being saved and liberated, suddenly burst in on her. All those terrors, everything she was afraid of – empty evenings, pointless days, lodgers, long days with nothing to do – all these had come to nothing. By the time Iza came home from the surgery she would have everything prepared for her and they would spend all their free time together, as they did in her childhood. She knew she would not be left to fend for herself but this was more than she had dared hope. She