#magda szabo

Magda Szabó, The Door (1987)
translated by Len Rix (2005)

I seldom dream. When I do, I wake with a start, bathed in sweat. Then I lie back, waiting for my frantic heart to slow, and reflect on the overwhelming power of night’s spell. As a child and young woman, I had no dreams, either good or bad, but in old age I am confronted repeatedly with horrors from my past, all the more dismaying because compressed and compacted, and more terrible than anything I have lived through. In fact nothing has ever happened to me of the kind that now drags me screaming from my sleep.

“For so many years I’d been held down by outside forces, inside an invisible but almost palpable circle. It took some time for me to grasp that somewhere a decision had been taken, that the barrier which had always been held down was being raised, the door on which we hadn’t knocked for years had opened of itself, and I could enter if I chose.”

Magda Szabo, The Door