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Magda Szabo, who died in 2007, was one of Hungary’s most important 20th-century writers. Not that most of us Anglophones would know it, as very little of her work has been translated into English. “The Door,” her best-known novel, which appeared in Hungary in 1987, was initially translated by Stefan Draughon and brought out here by an academic publisher in 1995. Subsequently translated into French, the book won the Prix Femina Étranger in 2003 and was beautifully retranslated by Len Rix for British publication in 2005. A decade later, New York Review Books Classics — acting, yet again, in its capacity as the Savior of Lost Greats — has now delivered this version to an American audience.
If you’ve felt that you’re reasonably familiar with the literary landscape, “The Door” will prompt you to reconsider. It’s astonishing that this masterpiece should have been essentially unknown to English-language readers for so long, a realization that raises once again the question of what other gems we’re missing out on. The dismaying discussion of how little translated work is available in the United States must wait for another venue; suffice it to say that I’ve been haunted by this novel. Szabo’s lines and images come to my mind unexpectedly, and with them powerful emotions. It has altered the way I understand my own life.
A work of stringent honesty and delicate subtlety, “The Door” is a story in which, superficially, very little happens. Szabo’s narrator, like the author a writer named Magda (in interviews, Szabo suggested that the novel was only thinly veiled personal history), follows the intricacies of her intimate filial relationship with her housekeeper, Emerence. In doing so, it exposes the rich inadequacies of human communication even as it evokes the agonies of Hungary’s recent history.
When Emerence first comes to work for Magda and her husband, they have recently moved into a large apartment, following Magda’s political rehabilitation in Communist Hungary: “For 10 years my writing career had been politically frozen. Now it was picking up again and here, in this new setting, I had become a full-time writer, with increased opportunities and countless responsibilities.” Emerence chooses Magda and her husband, rather than vice versa — “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty linen” — and while it emerges that the two women are from the same rural region, the formidable Emerence remains a mystery, of near mythical proportions. At their first encounter, “she was washing a mountain of laundry with the most antiquated equipment, boiling bed linen in a caldron over a naked flame, in the already agonizing heat, and lifting the sheets out with an immense wooden spoon. Fire glowed all around her. She was tall, big-boned, powerfully built for a person of her age, muscular rather than fat, and she radiated strength like a Valkyrie. Even the scarf on her head seemed to jut forward like a warrior’s helmet.”
Emerence’s strength is imposing (in addition to her housecleaning, she sweeps the snow for 11 buildings on their shared street), as is her reserve. Animals of all kinds gravitate to her; people in the neighborhood rely on her, look up to her and are grateful for her charity. But in return, she remains stern and aloof. “Although she looked after us for over 20 years,” Magda recalls, “during the first five of them it would have taken precision instruments to measure the degree to which she permitted real communication between us.”
Eventually, however, through a series of exchanges both emotional and material, the two women become close in spite of their great differences. Emerence sustains Magda through her husband’s grave illness. She encourages the couple when they adopt a dog, then names him (Viola) and trains him so that she is his real mistress. She relies on Magda for help when awaiting an undisclosed but important visitor. She introduces Magda to her trio of close friends, who surround her like the three Fates. She bestows upon Magda and her husband a number of gifts that they resist at their peril. And, through all of this, tempestuous, the two women repeatedly argue and reconcile.
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