Born in 1917 in Debrecen, Madga Szabó is the most translated Hungarian author. In 1947, she published her first two books of poetry and was awarded the prestigious Baumgarten Prize two years later, only for it to be revoked by the communist party for not adhering to socialist realism. She subsequently lost her position at the Ministry of Religion and Education and was forced to teach in a Calvinist girls' school until 1959. The Door’s narrator, Madga, is also a writer living in her native Hungary. As the novel begins, she’s finally allowed to write again after 10 years of being politically shunned, and she has a lot of work to catch up on.
Magda and her academic husband live in a small, close-knit town. In order to dedicate time to writing, she hires a housekeeper to manage their flat. Here we are introduced to the real main character of the Door: Emerence. She is both a mythical creature and also the very real, lifeblood of the town; she cleans many of the resident’s houses, helps keep their lives in order, and sweeps the streets clean of leaves and snow.
Emerence is filled with secrets, best embodied by the house she lives in where no one is allowed to enter further than the front porch. There are rumors of past run ins with the law, an antagonistic relationship with a neighbor who ends up murdering her two cats, and stories of looted goods that are locked behind the titular door. Despite this —or possibly because of this— Emerence is well respected and relied on, a fact of which she takes great pride. She may be sweeping the streets, but “[she doesn’t] wash just anyone’s dirty linen.” Eventually, she agrees to work with Magda and a 20 year relationship, quasi-friendship is born.
In essence, the Door is about the relationship between these two vastly different women and how ultimately, these differences could not be fully overcome. Emerence is old, anti-intellectual, secular, values loyalty, sacrifice, and physical labor. Above all she is proud and stubborn, but deeply kind and reliable. Magda is young, spiritual, and career driven. Her job as a writer forms a point of contention between the two, because in order for her intellectual or artistic pursuits to be explored, someone else must take care of the manual labor. While Magda values political and social expectations, Emerence has no need for lofty worldviews. Her philosophy boils down to the fact that “there are those who sweep and those who pay others to sweep.”
Throughout their time together, Madga tries to get Emerence to open up, but she proves a tough nut to crack. Emerence trains their (male) dog, who she renames Viola, so he only answers to her. She fills Magda’s home with tacky gifts and throws a fit when they are removed at her husband’s request. She causes a spectacle at Magda’s house when an expected guest bails last minute. All of these incidents are tinged with a mystery they can’t quite understand, because Emerence never explains herself. It isn’t until Magda’s husband ends up in the hospital for an ongoing illness, where an exhausted Madga surrenders to Emerence’s care, that she finally shares a story from her traumatic childhood.
From then on, Emerence begins to offer tidbits of her past here and there, and we gain a little more context for her extreme behavior and cagey lifestyle. For example, Emerence had been in love with a man once, only to find herself abandoned by him. After her next partner also leaves her, taking off with her money, she swears off men. Speaking of her past self in third person she declares, “she shook herself down as if nothing had happened and announced that never again would she be anyone’s property.” She lived through and witnessed violence from both sides of the political spectrum, helping hide Nazis and Jewish families alike. Life has forced her to be tough, and as her mode of survival, Emerence snaps at any apparent question of her judgement or character. Over time, Magda grows accustomed to her ways and also deeply reliant on her help, and she and Emerence develop an almost mother-daughter bond.
The great shock of the Door arrives in a gut-wrenching scene of betrayal which changes both Magda and Emerence’s lives forever. After Emerence falls ill and secludes herself in her home, the town begins to worry and devises a plan to get her medical assistance, orchestrated by Magda and the lieutenant (one of the other few townsfolk Emerence trusts). It is eluded to in the intro, where years later in Magda’s old age, she recounts a reoccurring nightmare she has about not being able to open her door to let paramedics in to save ‘her patient.’ She writes,
“It is no dream. Once, just once in my life, not in the cerebral anaemia (sic) of sleep but in reality, a door did stand before me. That door opened. It was opened by someone who defended her solitude and impotent misery so fiercely that she would have kept that door shut through a flaming roof crackled over her head. I alone had the power to make her open that lock. In turning the key she put more trust in me than she ever did in God, and in that fateful moment I believed I was godlike —all-wise, judicious, benevolent and rational. We were both wrong: she who put her faith in me, and I who thought too well of myself.”
The moment in reference is one of the most grotesque, tense scenes I have ever read. As it goes on you question how such an event could play out, not for its lack of reality, but for the tragedy that unfolds. After carefully constructing her image and guarding her secrets, Emerence’s façade, like her front door, are knocked down. She is made vulnerable for the first time and it is the greatest betrayal she could face. This is one of the few books I’ve read which ends on a melancholy note, without any effort to spare the reader’s feelings, and I greatly respect that. In scorning her during her last moments, Emerence caused Magda great pain too. But she also learns to respect that.
I write for other people. Thus far I have lived my life with courage, and I hope to die that way, bravely without lies. But for that to be, I must speak out. I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.
The Door is a beautiful and haunting story about friendship, class, political and philosophical differences in approaches to life, and the difficult choices we are forced to make and the aftermath of our decisions. I cannot recommend this book enough, there is so much more I could talk about, but I don’t want to spoil the incredible experience of reading it for the first time.
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