Iza's Ballad Read Free

respect for Iza.
    She didn’t really believe Antal when he said it was the end. But when Dekker appeared in the corridor and walked towards her, the string bag in her hand felt much heavier. It was as if she were carrying lead rather than lemons. Dekker was a professor and she could tell by his face that her poor tremulous questions would be answered directly.
    Later Iza asked her what she and the professor had said to each other. She tried to put it together in her mind but she couldn’t. She could only remember Dekker touching her on the shoulder because she had shaken off the well-intentioned fingers, as if a sudden fierce bitterness had taken possession of her, more an irritation, a deep antipathy, so she felt that Dekker, who had spent three months moving heaven and earth to help Vince and would have given his soul to save him, was a murderer and, what was more, a murderer of the same age as her husband. What right had he to be so healthy ?
    She stopped in the doorway.
    Antal said Vince had been unconscious since sunrise and would probably not recover consciousness but slip into death as he slept. Yes, but if she walked in he might wake; it couldn’t be that forty-nine years of physical and spiritual union should prove weaker than death. But what would happen if he should sense her closeness and start speaking in that gentle, childish voice of his, and ask her to account for all that was happening, for his pain and for his ebbing life? What would happen if today, on this his last day, he were suddenly to became aware of the threshold on which he was standing and burst into helpless tears again, sobbing as he did when he lost his job back in the Twenties when he stood beside her bed in his nightshirt, dropping tears, begging, ‘Help me, Ettie!’ What if he asked her to help him now when he already knew there was no hope yet still begged for his life, for what was impossible. Vince loved life; never mind being a pauper, unemployed, or sick, he still thought merely being alive, simply being on earth, the fact that he could wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, that he could be in a place where the wind blew, where the sun shone and where the rain pattered quietly or poured down, was wonderful. She would have to lie to him as she had been lying continuously for months now. She was afraid that Vince would leave her without a word, that he might cast his terrified conscious eyes on her one last time and, after having dozed off with pain or with the assistance of drugs, his thoughts might turn to silent accusation or complaint.
    Antal threw his coat on a chair as he entered. It was only now the old woman noticed he was not wearing a white surgical gown. He didn’t look like a doctor without it, just a member of the family, something he hadn’t been for a good few years now.
    The first person she spotted in the room was Lidia. The nurse turned her way when the door opened and stood up from the chair by the bed, smoothing her apron. She didn’t greet the old woman in words, just nodded, the only natural thing to do in these unnatural circumstances. She adjusted Vince’s blanket a little, then went straight out, not even casting a glance back at the bed. ‘How strange,’ the old woman thought. ‘She has been at his bedside for weeks and she leaves like that, her eyes quite dry, without any sense that she was part of this. Can people get used to death?’
    Vince wasn’t conscious but he didn’t look detached from the world either, more as though he were simply asleep, the skin on his brow tight and silvery. His nose had grown since yesterday and there was no trace of the little red moon on its bridge where his glasses used to sit. She looked again and realised it was not a matter of his nose growing but of his face falling back. ‘He has left me,’ thought the old woman. ‘He didn’t wait for me. For forty-nine years I have known his every thought. Now I don’t know what he has taken with him. He has left