open doors, closed doors

You can spend a lifetime pounding closed doors that are determined to stay shut. Perhaps these doors suggest intimacies refused us, or professional opportunities we cannot access.  Maybe, we reason, if we knock long enough, we might be granted admission. But what about open doors? Why don't we simply walk through those?

One of the things I like best about facilitating book clubs, is that I get to choose books I'd like to discuss with other people.  Next month, at my And The Winner Is book club, which meets at Dolley Madison Library in McLean (first Thursday every month at 1:00) - we'll be discussing Magda Szabo's The Door - a novel I've shared with friends for more than a year. It's one of the best I've read in the last several years.

Magda Szabo was an important Hungarian intellectual and this autobiographical novel was recently translated by Len Rix for The New York Review of Books imprint.  It concerns the relationship between the narrator (Szabo herself, one assumes) and housekeeper Emerence - who won’t wash just anyone’s dirty linen. When Magda hires her, she gets the message that it is really Emerence who is interviewing her. 

Emerence is of peasant stock. She's immaculate, tireless and strong as an ox. But while Magda is a writer, married to an academic and dedicated to the life of the mind, Emerence is a more physical person. She never reads. In fact she scorns the life of the mind.

One comes to believe that Emerence may not be entirely sane. But that doesn't make her any less a force of nature or pillar of the community.  There are those who use brooms, she maintains, and those who don't, and as far as she's concerned, Magda knows nothing about real life, spending all her time pecking away at a typewriter, spouting out words.  Magda is a churchgoer, but Emerence hates religion. She doesn't believe in God. Nor does she trust lawyers or politicians. Yet nobody could have a stronger moral compass than Emerence. 

It is telling that Magda is named only once in the novel - and that, at a pivotal moment when Emerence uses a term of endearment for her, that only her parents ever used before.  It is at an important turning point towards the end of the book, when Magda lies in order to save Emerence's life.  It is also telling that Magda's husband is always just  my husband, unlike the local neighborhood characters, and friends of Emerence, who populate the book.  This device underscores the enormous power that Emerence exerts - for she is the subject of this novel. She is its central figure.

But the incompatibility between Emerence and Magda is the tension that drives this narrative.  The fierce loyalty that grows between them is matched only by their deep incomprehension of one another. It is as though they speak different languages. And yet they come to love each other - even though one gets the sense that Emerence never truly admires Magda. Instead she thinks of her as a child.  

 The tragic flaw which drives Emerence towards the end, is certainly her pride, while in the face of Emerence, Magda, for all her national prestige and acclaim, lacks certainty. I'm fascinated by the strength of Emerence's character and the conviction, the utter lack of self doubt which makes her unforgettable. 

 The door of the title - the door which separates Emerence from Magda, is one that nobody can or ever should enter.  When that door is finally broken down, Magda believes that she's killed Emerence, even though she was really trying to save her. 

All this makes me ponder how it is often those doors we try to break down that matter to us most. As in Bluebeard's Castle it is the forbidden door that draws us.  When you admire somebody whose sense of the world is entirely different from yours, you want to understand; you want to bridge that gap.  Which is why the exploration of friction between these two disparate personalities is so compelling.  

I've noticed that what I most enjoy in my reading is proximity to the other. I've also noticed that I'm often drawn to books in translation. Maybe closeness to something entirely different from myself stimulates me  and makes me feel I can grow. It also cannot be coincidence that my husband Ben and I spent twenty-five years in the US Foreign Service, living in different cultures and speaking different languages.

 Going through open doors is great. How easy that is! How effortless! How right!  If you can find those open doors, good for you. Life will be a lot more harmonious.  But it's often those closed doors that provoke and confound us, and seem to hold such promise. It's the things we can never quite understand, which we feel compelled to explore.