The complete eccentricity of Emerence in Szabo's The Door

Passing the half-way point in Magda Szabo's 1987 novel, The Door, and am getting more puzzled all the time about the central character, the narrator's servant-maid-housecleaner Emerence. Like the narrator we learn more about her back story as the novel unfolds, but much of what we learn at one point turns out to be false or misconstrued, as we realize later, and maybe it's my inattentiveness over the past 2 days of reading but I can't even answer some of the basic questions. At one point it's implied - as the narrator learns on a visit to E's native town - that she had a child, but we later learn from E that the child was an orphan entrusted to her care (she turns out to be the expected guest from America who never turns up for the dinner E has prepared for her, leading to curses and vitriol and an incredible temper tantrum). We know that E had a traumatic childhood - but did she really have twin siblings who died in a lightning strike while in E's care? We know she sheltered wounded soldiers, persecuted Jewish families, and others in her house - during WWII and, it seems, also during the era of Soviet dominance. She tells the narrator that one of the people she sheltered - for 2 years, I think - later rose to prominence in the Hungarian government (she refers to him as "the lawyer's son" - here's an area where the nuances are lost by non-Hungarian readers, I'm afraid). What we do know is that, whatever trauma she faced and whatever good she has done for people in need, she is an extremely difficult and incorrigible character in later life, the time span of this novel: adamant in her condemnation of all religion, narrow-minded in her opinions about literature (worthless) and art (movies are decrepit, she announces, once she learns that they're based on illusion and effects), strangely doctrinaire in her view that only work with one's hands has merit (as the narrator notes, she could have become a great Communist leader had it not been for her contempt for government), hateful of all those who try to help her, indiscriminate in her cold-blooded attitude toward death (she writes a will that among other things commands the narrator to kill her 9 cats so as to avoid their slow death via starvation and neglect), and just plain weird in her ambitions - saving her money to erect an elaborate crypt for herself and the exhumed bodies of her family members. It's hard to sympathize with this eccentric, and part of what drives the novel is speculation about why the narrator tolerates her and even comes to like her.