Magda Szabo

"A young writer, struggling for success, employs an elderly woman called Emerence to be her housekeeper.From their first encounter it is clear that Emerence is no ordinary maid.Although everyone in the neighbourhood knows and respects her, no one knows anything about her private life or has ever crossed her threshold. Only a great drama in the writer's life prompts Emerence to unveil glimpses of her traumatic past a past which sheds light on her peculiar behaviour. The Door brilliantly evokes the development of the bond between these two very different women, and the tragic ending to their relationship."

The Door

aywen

You pay back everybody who upsets you, even me. If only you’d shout and scream — but all you do is smile. You’re the most vengeful person I ever met. You sleep with a knife under your pillow, and you wait till the time comes to stick it in. If it’s something really bad you don’t just scratch — you kill.

She didn’t understand that it was because of our mutual love that she went on stabbing me till I fell to my knees, that she did it because I loved her, and she loved me. Only people truly close to me can cause me real pain. She might have grasped that long ago, but she understood only what she wanted to.

maia

Once after she'd been introduced to the tape recorder in apartment and told that you could play back a text or a piece of music, she talked about what it would be like if someone's life were recorded and put on tape, to be rewound, stopped and replaced at will. She said she'd accept her own life the way it was; or rather, as it would be up to her death, but with the proviso that she might rewind it to any point she chose. I didn't dare ask where she would stop the machine, and still less, why there. I didn't think she'd tell me anyway.

The Door quotes

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