In Other Words Katalin Street by Magda Szabó
Katalin Street is populated with characters who circle the shards of their dreams, perplexed by how relationships, and life, can so quickly unravel.
One reason Magda Szabó’s novels haunt the reader is because there are almost no resolutions to the travails of her characters. In Szabó’s The Door and Iza’s
Ballad, her protagonists mean to do their best, but their cherished relationships nevertheless shatter, with no chance of mending the fractures. Her 1969 novel Katalin
Street, newly translated by Len Rix (who also translated The Door), is populated with characters who similarly circle the shards of their dreams, perplexed by how relationships, and life, can so quickly unravel.
Set in Hungary around the time of the German occupation, Katalin Street is the story of three neighbors and their children, who once played delightful games in the connected back gardens of the three houses. That was how Henriette lived in preWorld War II Budapest, after her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Held, moved into the neighborhood. By the time Henriette turned sixteen, however, the long arm of fascism was moving cruelly in her direction, even as her former playmates, Bálint and Irén, were planning a future together.
On the day of Bálint and Irén’s engagement, Henriette’s parents, who are Jewish, are sent to a detainment camp. In the ensuing weeks, Bálint becomes completely distracted by trying to protect Henriette, to the consternation of Irén, who loves him perhaps too selfishly. In spite of their best, clumsy neighborly efforts, Henriette is shot dead by a soldier in a heart-stopping scene, and Bálint comes unhinged.
With the Held family in ruins, and Bálint’s father, the Major, off to war, only Irén’s family remains physically, if not psychologically, intact. Szabó sketches an unforgettable portrait of the Elekes family: a slovenly, unpredictable mother; an upstanding headmaster father; impetuous, blond Blanka; and the faithful — if oblivious — Irén.
Recalling her wedding day, Irén expresses her disappointment that their housekeeper Rose was then no longer with them. “I had really loved her, and my disappointment at losing her was heartfelt. She had looked after Blanka and me since birth and had helped us all in a great many ways. Our mother had been completely casual about our diapers: either they were forever falling off or she would simply forget to change us. When we cried she invariably assumed we had colic and plied us with chamomile tea. She would do that for us, but she didn’t change our diapers.” This is a remarkable characterization, and a glimpse of the ways in which Szabó surprises us. Even on her wedding day, Irén is recalling that as a child her diapers hadn’t been changed often enough.
When Bálint returns home after being a prisoner of war, Irén is still waiting for him, engagement ring on her finger. But his inner fulcrum seems to have broken, and he indulges in such meaningless infidelities that Irén is forced to leave him. More years go by, and incredibly, Irén and her family find that to live without Bálint isn’t tolerable either. Having Bálint close by allowed them a key to the past, to the time when they had been truly alive. It is as though those who are left alive, and even Henriette, who has died, are still trying to make their way back to Katalin Street. In their present measly surroundings, they are haunted by the notion of “somewhere else.”
Szabó has a way of using just the right simile: “Others would soon forget the Major’s thirty-fifth birthday celebration, but not Bálint. And even for him the picture was incomplete. It survived in separate segments, like an orange, that kept returning at random moments later throughout his life.” The novel itself is composed of fragments, which come together into narrative form through the act of recalling them. Memory is the driving force of this story.
At the same time, the narrative exposes the spiritual vacuum in which the characters exist. The three families were neighborly enough, but they each seem to lack a larger purpose to buoy them through life. Mr. Elekes once believed in his work as a headmaster, but even his sense of morality — his cheap morals, as his daughter refers to them — is shattered during the wartime brutalities and by the corruption of the war’s aftermath.
Szabó falters somewhat at the end of this book by returning to Henriette’s ghost when the reader is naturally more interested in the living Irén, and in knowing whether the true love she had pined for was simply another illusion. This is the rare book that you’ll finish and want to go right back to the beginning to reread the first two chapters, if only to better understand Irén’s fate.
— Priyanka Kumar