Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabó, George Szirtes Page A

cushy job, him, a boy raised on beggar’s alms by that teacher who kept him financially, year by year, and then he does this. He knew he should have found them guilty, everybody knew that, but there he goes, letting off those four worthless peasants, excusing them in the name of the Sacred Crown of Hungary, the idiot. And when his colleagues try to repair the damage and offer him an opportunity to put things right, or at least retire quietly, he carries on bleating about justice – and refuses. Now he can see what justice means: it’s been served on him. Your poor mother would turn in her grave if I deserted you now, so you can come back, dear, and live with me just as before, even though you left me in such an ungrateful way. I am willing to take you back if you like, but not with him. And you’ll get no money, you needn’t ask for that, I have no money myself and even if I had I wouldn’t let your husband have it. Extraordinary! I hope he moves out of town. He can’t stay here, that’s impossible.’
    After that she didn’t go straight home but took a walk to the cemetery. It was summer, early summer, the roses were blooming on Endrus’s grave. He’d been dead precisely eight years. She sat on a bench and gazed at his gravestone, overrun by roses, at the lush grass and the slow dense clouds. Nature was so calm, not indifferent , just calm. Bees were flitting around the graves. She felt deeply disappointed, gazing at the red roses and the blue sky. Why should a cemetery be so beautiful and so peaceful, so full of birdsong and scuffling in the branches when it wasn’t reality? Reality was mortality and the sense of dread waiting for her at home.
    She sat and sat. Then a pebble squeaked behind her. Startled, she turned round. It was Vince. He sat down beside her on the bench and stroked Endrus’s grave as he did each time he came. ‘I guessed you’d come here,’ said Vince. She bent her head, ashamed that her first act had been to run to Aunt Emma for money and to complain, and how could she have spent a minute with Aunt Emma when she knew that she never liked Vince, that she was secretly glad how things turned out because she remembered the dike-keeper, their first conversations and was proud that her instincts had been proved correct when she disapproved of the marriage twelve years before.
    It was so strange during the night to think that though Vince was always beside her while he lived, and healthy too, there was something that could have so embittered her. How she cried, how heart-rendingly when, after having been sacked, Vince explained that he was right, not the people who had sacked him, and of course she believed her husband but was unhappy because of money, because of all kinds of silly things, unhappy because acquaintances deserted them, because the family avoided them, because she was no longer greeted with as deep a bow as before. She felt ashamed now to recall what hurt her then, how cowardly she was, how humiliating her cowardice, how some of Aunt Emma’s warnings took root in her. One night she tried to persuade Vince that they should move elsewhere. Anywhere, to Gyüd if he liked. Vince loved Gyüd. Each summer he would return there to stay with the teacher and his family and go on about what a lovely village it was, how the herbs were so fragrant by the river, how deep the whirlpools of the Karikás were and how the islands were a primeval forest of reeds. But Vince didn’t want to move, which would be another reason to cry, because she thought moving was a wonderful idea, because they wouldn’t be bumping into their town acquaintances, and because life was cheaper in villages and they could live on her widow’s pension (Vince received nothing, but the generosity of the Ministry of Justice allowed her to draw such a pension, it being deemed possible to be the widow of a living man). No, said Vince, his face clouding over, he wouldn’t go, he wasn’t guilty, and there was no need for him