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Fiction
KATALIN STREET
By Magda Szabo
Translated by Len Rix
235 pp. New York Review Books. Paper, $15.95.
Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo’s work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master’s profound and haunting novel “The Door.” Luckily for us, they have not stopped there. A translation of “Iza’s Ballad” followed, and now we have “Katalin Street,” originally published in Hungarian in 1969 and elegantly translated into English by Len Rix.
When I started to read “Katalin Street,” I couldn’t help comparing it to “The Door” — so struck was I by the divergent narrative approaches. Distilled and claustrophobic, “The Door” centers on the relationship between the narrator — a writer — and her housekeeper, Emerence. As time wears on, the two women come to be bound by a furious, unpredictable intimacy. “Katalin Street” takes a baggier shape, crisscrossing through time and perspective as the novel tracks the fates of three families — the Elekeses, the Temeses and the Helds, who are Jewish — in a zigzag that covers prewar Budapest, the German occupation and Communist rule; the longer of two sections, “Moments and Episodes,” hops along in time and space.
The differences in method are visible from the get-go, yet I came to feel that the two novels share a similar heart. In the opening pages of “The Door,” the narrator announces: “I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.” It takes many more pages to uncover what exactly the narrator means by this confession; in the meantime, those lines kept me rigid with dread. In “Katalin Street,” the central trauma is the murder of young Henriette Held during the German occupation. Long before the tragic particulars of Henriette’s death — the secrets, the fatal blind spots — are uncovered, the aftershocks are powerfully felt. In both novels, Szabo’s characters, in their complicated attempts to save one another, are just as likely to destroy.
Historical trauma also sits at the center of both works. The hulking and terrible shadows of the past loom over “The Door,” but even after Emerence’s most potent secrets have been unspooled the enigma of her character is never fully pierced. Through the titular Katalin Street, Szabo locates a more straightforward expression for her characters’ tortured relationships to history. The opening finds the central characters, whether by death or flight or expropriation, banished from their former lives. We begin in Communist-era Budapest, where the Elekes family has managed to survive, at least in body, and now live together in a cramped flat:
“From its windows they could see their old house. Its facade had been covered in scaffolding for several months now, undergoing redevelopment along with its immediate neighbors. It looked like a childhood friend who, either in anger or a spirit of fun, had put on a mask and forgotten to take it off long after the party had ended.”
Katalin Street, where the initial bonds between the Elekes, Held and Temes families were forged, has been transformed into an analog for the past as a place of no return. The Elekeses can glimpse their old home through the window of the present, and yet it might as well be light-years away. Nor is solace to be found in the barbed warren of memory:
“Everything that had happened was still there, right up to the present, but now suddenly different. Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop to individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places, and a handful of moments, really mattered.”
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