Katalin Street

Magda Szabo is a Hungarian writer whose fame has grown in recent years, largely thanks to the work of translator Len Rix who has brought novels such as Abigail into English and retranslated work, including her best-known novel The Door, and Katalin Street. These three novels he describes as having been written “to explore the effects of the Second World War on the private lives of those who survived”, of which Katalin Street, originally published in 1969, is the first. The novel centres on three families, and their children in particular, who were all neighbours to each other in the years leading up to the war: the sisters, Irén and Blanka, Henriette, whose father, a dentist and is of Jewish descent, and  Bálint, the son of Major Bíró, with whom all three girls are at least a little bit in love. In the novel’s opening section, ‘Places’, these characters are older, they are living in a flat  which “depressed them profoundly”, Blanka is living in Greece, and Irén is married to Bálint, (though he is not her first husband) in a marriage which showed him “that she yearned and pined for Katalin Street just as much as he did.” Henriette is the only one who “visited her old home regularly…

“Not everyone was able to do this, and it made them angry to see others free to come and go at will.”

The novel then takes us back to Henriette’s arrival in Katalin Street in 1934. She is the youngest of the children and Bálint is the oldest. The two sisters are quite different: dark-haired Irén is clever and disciplined; fair-haired Blanka is untidy and careless (in Bálint’s words, “daft”). The children act out a play at school which has significance for their fates later in the novel. Irén plays ‘Hungaria’ with Henriette at her feet (pressing the national coat of arms rather too firmly against her knees). Bálint is dressed as a hussar, and Blanka plays Hungary’s Enemy. Irén hopes:

“…he had noticed how very pretty she had looked that day, how very grown up in that full length dress.”

During the play Blanka refuses to surrender as scripted and Henriette faints with stage fright. Here we see the first signs of romantic feelings between Irén and Bálint, but also Blanka’s stubbornness and anger – an anger that will later lead her to betray Bálint. Henriette’s faint foreshadows her death as we are told when it is revealed that the play will trouble Bálint later in his life:

“The first occasion when it came back to him was ten years after it had taken place, on the day Henriette died.”

The Henriette we met in the opening section is, in fact, a ghost, and will haunt the novel throughout, her visitation interspersed with Irén’s narration. From 1934 the narrative moves on to 1944, and from there to particular years after the war – 1952, 1956 and 1961. As the first section has already indicated, however, Szabo’s approach is not chronological as she will reveal future events when she sees fit – in the same moment we are told about Henriette’s death, we also learn that Bálint will be interrogated by a Party official in 1952. This gives the events of the novel an inevitability which makes the characters seem less culpable of their choices. Szabo also foregrounds the impact of the war and what follows on ordinary life, particularly for women. The internment of Henriette’s parents, for example, is juxtaposed with Irén and Bálint’s engagement as when Major Bíró turns up for the engagement lunch it is to tell them:

“I have to leave you, Henriette must go with me. Her parents are waiting for her.”

In fact, rather than taking her to her parents, he will hide Henriette in his house with strict instructions never to go outside. Her presence there will make Irén doubt her engagement, thinking that Henriette had managed to awaken something in Bálint that went “beyond both love and desire.” Her death will change Bálint completely.

Katalin Street is a wonderful novel weaving an intricate, shifting web of relationships between its four main protagonists. Szabo’s confidence in revealing future events from the opening chapter, but also in the narrative itself, enhances the story she is telling, and the use of Henriette as a ghost (not just hinted at but fully embraced as she roams among the living and the dead) is a masterstroke, particularly as it provides the novel with its memorable, moving ending.