Iza's Ballad Read Online Free Page B

a garden with trees where you could keep an animal, somewhere the attic would belong exclusively to them. Vince was born in a village and, having only moved to town to attend the gimnázium , or grammar school, he declared that water from the village well tasted better than from a tap. For three weeks they walked round town until they finally found such a house. They were stood outside his old home looking at the windows and its high fence when Vince squeezed her arm and said, ‘This is the one.’ It happened to be the time of thaw, everything dripping, the gutter by the brown gate pouring with melted snow. The gutter had a broad dragon-shaped spout at the top and it was from here the water crashed down. There were three small rooms in the house, one bigger than the other two, while outside there was a red-brick-paved path with plane trees either side that led through the yard to the woodshed, the passage vaulted, closed on three sides like a room with an open fourth wall. When the house was requisitioned by the government in 1923 Vince had gone out into the woodshed to weep so no one should have to comfort him. How good now, after all this time, to have reached the age when it could be his again, though he was no longer in the best of health. ‘You old capitalist.’ Iza laughed. ‘Never satisfied till your name is on the deeds.’ But that was then. Iza didn’t like the house now because she had spent the four years of her marriage in the big room with Antal. She had never stayed over on a visit since the divorce. She gave no reason, but they knew that, for Iza, the big room would always be associated with the memory of Antal and that Iza didn’t like remembering.
    How could this be ‘home’ now?
    The house was so much associated with Vince that she had never really regarded it as a joint property though it was registered in both their names. But they had bought it with Vince’s rehabilitation money, at the price of Vince’s humiliation over several terrible years. It was Vince who had really suffered for it and it meant everything to him: the house justified his whole life and was his greatest source of pride, apart from Iza. Really, that is where Vince should be buried: in the garden. What would she do with this house all by herself? She couldn’t go on living here with just Captain for company. Iza would make fewer visits home now, there would be no reason to come down for her father’s birthday or name day or for wedding anniversaries. Should she take a lodger? What would it be like having a lodger? Would they be like that first tenant in Darabont Street? Or would it be some old woman, as simple and dull as she was? But it would be just as much of a burden if she tried to be friendly. What to do?
    None of this had been discussed with Iza.
    It was three weeks ago that she had arrived unannounced and asked Antal to take her father down to the clinic; Iza had wanted to talk it over with her but she ran away into the pantry, locking the door after her, because she was superstitious that way. She had learned in Auntie Emma’s house that one shouldn’t say any bad thing out loud, or indeed name anything at all that threatened one’s well-being because there were angels behind one, listening, two white ones and one black, and the one in black wasn’t well disposed. Should that one hear what people were most frightened of, should it suspect what caused the fear, it would bring on precisely that which they had put so carelessly into words. ‘I’ve never come across anything as malicious as Christian mythology,’ said Iza once when her mother had warned her not to talk about failing her exams. Iza never failed, she just liked giving herself a fright.
    But there must have been something to that story of the angel, the bad angel. Because she had also heard Vince, when he first fell ill, at a moment of respite between the pains, cracking his bones and starting to laugh. ‘I’ve got cancer,’ he said and she put