Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabó, George Szirtes

‘It’s twenty years today since the Karikás flooded and burst the dike at Karikásrév, destroying five villages overnight, killing almost 200 people. The worst affected were Karikásrév and Karikásgyüd.’
    A. P. Weisz’s letter from America.
    Good heavens, Weisz the chemist! How deathly cold he was in the attic: they brought him an eiderdown but he was still shivering under it, his hands and feet frozen as he sat on a mattress in the corner, weeping over his family. Vince had snatched him from the crowd in the air-raid darkness as he was standing in the queue in front of their house in Darabont Street. Vince just took a step out, the sky being pitch black, and tugged the nearest figure through the gap in the fence. The sirens were sounding by then and the guards were watching the sky, not those about to be marched off to forced labour. Weisz, the first tenant of the cellar, was in a panic, reciting psalms in an obsessive accusing voice. Haven’t they had enough? Can’t people respect his need for silence? Are those people still dropping bombs? Is God deaf? Can’t people hear that he is praying? He had no great regard for Szo ̋ cs’s family. The first time a respectful look flickered across his face was later, in the thick of the bombing, when at last they too took shelter in the cellar. You might very well be a scoundrel who was sacked from his job all those years ago – and what kind of people are you if the university rejects your daughter when you’re not even Jewish? – but credit where it’s due, you’re not cowards. It wasn’t that Vince wasn’t frightened: his feet and hands were trembling with worry about Weisz, and the bombs.
    No, she must stop, it was too painful. Suddenly it all seemed so recent, the voices, the very words, Iza whispering: ‘Why hide him?’ ‘Because I had the chance to,’ her father whispering back. Iza falling silent, folding her hands, clearly thinking it over. ‘You’re always doing good, but not in the best way,’ she had said when she looked up. ‘You’re too naive.’ ‘I may be naive but I do know some things,’ Vince had answered, his face twitching because a bomb had just fallen and he was terrified.
    There were some photographs in the lower drawer, pictures of himself and Iza. Iza looked grumpy in her degree-award photo, her hair cropped, her eyes sullen, like a boy. Here were Vince’s slides too. There was a time he was keen on photography, then in 1923 he sold the camera. She held the slides up to the light and tried to guess the subjects. There were shadows, black and white, unknown faces, men with moustaches and bowler hats, women with feathered hats and skirts that reached the ground. Who were they? Why did he take the pictures? There was a wood of some kind too, if that’s what it was, and some rural buildings. She recognised the last: it was a negative of the picture he had given to Lidia. She put the box down as though she had burned herself.
    Her own letters. Prospectuses, brochures advertising foreign towns, package holidays. A run of magazines: Popular Physics . Picture postcards from foreign places. He collected them though he never travelled anywhere; by the time he was ready to do so he wasn’t well enough. Family documents, Iza’s papers, baptismal certificates.
    Here’s the notice sacking him and here, on top of it, his rehabilitation document. Regarding the terms of article 9590/1945 M.E. . . .
    ‘If you leave that man you can come back and all will be forgotten,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘What a disaster he is! But I warned you. What kind of man is it that can be brushed aside like that, as if he were a thieving servant? And him a county judge! Come home, I’m very lonely and you are familiar with my needs.’ (Aranka, who succeeded her at Aunt Emma’s, had just run off with Pista Vitáry.)
    Aunt Emma sipped at her coffee and explained. ‘I mean he wasn’t mad, he knew very well what verdict he was supposed to bring in. He gets a