Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabo

Vince was here, so clearly that she didn't need to talk to him. She couldn't see him but felt his presence and it was as if this was the very opportunity her confused thoughts were waiting for. Slowly the darkness in her mind lifted. She didn't tell Vince how hard it had been waiting for him, and how impossible it was to describe the dreadful emptiness of life without him because Vince knew all that, and he wasn't going to say where he'd been and what he'd been doing. Strange how quickly he had become part of the new estate. There was nothing frightening or disturbing about him; everything was as natural as it had been throughout their lives together; it was just that he had turned into a house, a set of buildings, a light bulb. The strange thing was how easy it was to assemble him from such tiny fragments. How could a man turn into a building? What material might he be made of? It was a pity he couldn't speak and tell her what she wanted to know.

Iza's Ballad is about two women, a mother and a daughter, and how each of their lives is transformed the death of Vince, their husband and father. Ettie has been with Vince for most of her life, and his death leaves her life deflated, emptied out of its essence or being. She takes comfort in the practicality and judgment of their daughter Iza, who has decided to take her mother away from the old house in the village where she grew up and take her to live with her in modern Budapest. Ettie is grateful for Iza's ability to see clearly and act prudently when she herself is bewildered, but Iza's plan turns out to be a real stinker: there is no room in Iza's life for Ettie, and in Budapest she begins to waste away.

The setup might seem like it leads to comedy, as the old woman's country manners clash with the young woman's citified ways. But Iza's Ballad is not a comedy, and the small ways Iza unwittingly robs the old woman of her life actually seem more tragic because they are so small: the items not taken from the old house, the furniture taken but reupholstered, the cook who prevents the old woman from cooking meals. Ettie is hopelessly out of her element in Budapest and a danger to modern appliances; it's easy to be sympathetic to Iza, whose want to look after her mother is sincere. But as Ettie becomes more and more despondent, Iza's practicality begins to look too aloof, too suffocating, too emotionless.

Iza's Ballad is one of those books where the characters' histories must be laid out in every detail before the author is satisfied that they have become real. Behind the conflict between Ettie and Iza there are innumerable decades, centering, naturally, on Vince the husband and Vince the father. It seems that Vince had once been a judge in the small village, and had been removed and disgraced after standing up for some defendant (I was not totally clear on this) against the pressures of Nazified Hungary. To Iza, history like this is part of a past that modern Budapest seems to have left behind. To her ex-husband Antal, whose life has been entwined with Vince's and Ettie's as much as Iza's, this past must be preserved; so much so that he even buys the old house from Ettie and Iza when they move to Budapest. Iza's Ballad has a few minor characters like this, including Iza's boyfriend Domokos and Antal's fiancee Lidia, who have become so entangled with the family that they too deserve their own viewpoint sections.

Iza's Ballad disturbed me because it seems to recognize a fundamental and cosmic tragedy in what are common experiences: every couple must experience, to some degree, what Ettie goes through when Vince dies, and it's horrible. The tragedy is compounded by Iza's inability to understand it; her take-charge attitude is in the end, only a shield to keep her from feeling, but even if she were to marry Domokos, or return to Antal, wouldn't she, too, end up like Ettie in the end? And the novel's all the more disturbing because it refuses, as you might expect, to give Ettie and Iza a moment of reconciliation or mutual understanding. The disconnect between them is resilient, permanent, and perhaps more indicative of the way we relate to our own parents--or children--than we'd like to think.