The Door Read Free Page A

something in the kitchen. Shortly afterwards, the door slammed and she'd gone.
    When my husband arrived I darted out to fetch our usual supper of two glasses of yoghurt. In the fridge I found a cold platter of rose-pink chicken breasts that had been cut into slices and then reassembled with the skill of a surgeon. The next day I thanked Emerence for her conciliatory treat, and held out the newly washed plate. There was no "My pleasure, and good health to you." She denied all knowledge of the chicken and refused to take the plate back. I still have it today. Much later, when I telephoned to chase up the undelivered parcel, I discovered that I'd hung around the whole afternoon for nothing. The package was in the pantry, under the bottom shelf: she had brought it in with the chicken. She'd stood there waiting at our front door, given my message word for word to the courier, brought it in without telling me, and disappeared off home.
    It was a major event in our lives. For a long time afterwards I thought her slightly insane and felt that we would have to make allowances for the idiosyncratic ways in which her mind functioned.
    Many things served to strengthen this belief, not least the details provided by the local handyman who lived in the same villa as Emerence and was widely respected. He filled his spare time by doing odd jobs and collecting payments. I gathered that since he'd lived there — about a thousand years — not one of the residents had got beyond the porch that fronted Emerence's home. Guests, he said, were never invited in, and she took it very badly if anyone unexpectedly called to her to come out. She kept her cat inside, and never let him out. You could sometimes hear the animal mewing, but you couldn't see what was in there. Every window was boarded over with shutters that were never opened. What else might she be hoarding in there, beside the cat? Even if she did have expensive things, locking them away like that was a very bad idea. Anyone might think she was hiding something of real value. It could lead to her being attacked. She never went out of the immediate neighbourhood, except perhaps for the funeral of someone she knew. She'd walk with them down that last road, but always scurry off home, as if in constant fear of danger. So there was no need to take offence if you weren't allowed in: her brother Józsi's son and the Lieutenant Colonel were also entertained on the porch, summer and winter alike. They had long accepted that entry was forbidden even to them. They laughed it off. They were used to it.
    Hearing all this produced a rather alarming picture in my mind, and I became even more troubled. How could anyone live in such a shut-off way? And why wouldn't she let the animal out, if she had one? The villa had its own little patch of garden, with a fence around it. I thought, in truth, she must have been a little gone in the head. That idea lasted until one of her longstanding admirers, the widow of a laboratory technician by the name of Adélka, revealed, in an epic narrative, that Emerence's first cat, a great hunter, had decimated the stock of a pigeon breeder, a tenant who had moved in during the war. The man found a radical solution. When Emerence explained that the cat was not a university professor amenable to reason, and that it was, unfortunately, in his nature to enjoy killing even when well-fed, the pigeon breeder wasted no breath suggesting she keep the beast under lock and key. He tracked the noble hunter down, grabbed hold of him and strung him up from the handle of Emerence's front door. Returning home, the old woman had to stand there, under her own porch roof, while he gave her a formal lecture: he had been forced, regrettably, to defend his family's only guaranteed livelihood, with the instruments of his choice.
    Emerence said not a word. She released the cat from the wire, the instrument the executioner had chosen over ordinary rope. The corpse was a shocking sight, its throat