Iza's Ballad Read Online Free Page A

laughed. ‘I’ll knock before I enter next time.’
    This time, when she reached the corner of what had been Salétrom Square, she felt a great wave of gratitude. It was six months since the old woman had last been there and she had to find a track across the freshly dug soil where the new buildings were to be constructed. The place looked so different from what it had been and, without the huts, it looked even more like a lowland estate than it had before. Only the well remained but there were trucks labouring around it and some long-necked machine was hissing away in the background. The labourers were just finishing for the day, a bell was ringing and someone shouted. She stumbled between the mounds of earth. Someone took her arm and helped her across an unsteady plank. ‘Why didn’t you go round?’ asked a young man. ‘Didn’t you see the notice, “Building in Progress”?’ She mumbled something to the effect that she didn’t see it. She started walking faster.
    At the next turning her eyes were struck by the plump green ivy bubbling through the fence of her home.
    When Vince was rehabilitated and received the twenty-three years’ worth of wages he was owed, they didn’t speak about it, but both of them knew that it was the end of their life at Darabont Street. The money came in winter, the winter of 1946, and Iza had gone off to university so there were just the two of them at home when the letter informing them arrived. Vince didn’t say anything, just offered the postman a cigarette, then went out into the yard in his jacket, without even a scarf or hat. She took his cap out to him but she didn’t dare go up to him and stopped at the top of the steps because Vince had ambled over to the neighbour’s pigsty, leaned on the fence and looked in as if there were something to see in the trough or the pans full of water. She could guess what he was feeling and didn’t want to disturb him, so continued watching from the threshold as he bent awkwardly over the wooden fence and it occurred to her that Vince had grown a stoop in recent years, that he was more hunched than he should be at his age. It started snowing, the flakes settling in Vince’s great mane of hair. The first tenant trundled across the yard with the rubbish, quite ready to offer a greeting now. Vince turned round, took a glance across the bare yard, past the neighbour’s sties, past the chicken run, past their own solitary patch of ground where no flower ever grew because the first tenant’s chickens kept scratching the soil away and, as he looked up, his glance showed that he had the house in mind.
    He saw that she was standing on the steps, gazing at him, so he blew on his hands to show that he had just realised he was cold, then hurried to her side where they embraced. When she had disentangled herself she saw Vince’s innocent eyes were filled with tears.
    Iza was late coming home that evening and Vince didn’t mention it to her, though Iza was thinking of the rehabilitation and it was Iza who had put in the request for it. They put the letter granting it under her plate. Iza read it through twice, nodded, smiled, then said to her father, ‘There you are!’ and Vince repeated, ‘There you are!’ while she just looked at them there-you-are-ing at each other, because under the silly words there lay twenty-three years of humiliation, of acquaintances turning away on meeting, pawnbrokers, a wardrobe made up of flea-market bargains, the flat on Darabont Street.
    ‘They are building a big block on the Nyíres,’ said Iza, swallowing her roast potato. ‘Centrally heated, permanent lease.’
    Vince smiled, shook his head, remained silent for a while, then declared, ‘I want to go home.’
    ‘Fine,’ said Iza, putting down her fork, ‘buy yourselves a little cave and furnish it with bearskin. God, what a hopeless old fool you are!’
    Home, in Vince’s language, meant his own home, a house where there was space to grow some flowers and