The enigmas of the central characters in Szabo's The Door

The late Hungarian Magda Szabo is best known to the extent she's known at all to American readers for her 1987 novel, The Door, which got some great reviews when recently reprinted in the admirable New York Review Books series of rediscoveries. A year or so back I read another novel by her, Iza's Ballad, and then our book group read it and we were blown away by her style, knowledge, and intelligence. Started reading The Door last night and can see immediately why it was so well received. Szabo knew how to put the bone in the throat; in the first (very short) chapter, almost like a preface, the narrator (unnamed?) confesses that she has repeated nightmares about being shut behind a glass door, and she ties these nightmares into the death of her cleaning woman (can't recall her name; begins w E and that's what I'll call her); in fact, she says she caused the death of E - and that's where the story begins. Over the next 50 or so pp we learn about the strange relationship between the narrator's family (she and her husband, both 60-something intellectuals, in Budapest; the narrator is a writer, obviously a replica of Szabo herself - though this is clearly not a memoir) and this serving woman: E. E is the most hard-working servant ever, but also one of the strangest. In Szabo's time we didn't really have the vocabulary for this, but today we can see that E is "on the spectrum" with some form of autism. She has no capacity for building relationships or showing empathy. She's prone to strange outbursts of vitriol, and fiercely protects her private life. In fact, she will let nobody into her house and she keeps doors and windows blocked. The narrator speculates that E may be hoarding loot pilfered from Jewish homes during WWII; it's also possible that she is afraid for some reason. E has a morbid fear of thunderstorms, and one night in a rare moment of openness she described her horrendous childhood to the narrator - telling a story of her twin siblings, entrusted to her care, killed by a lightning strike. That would explain her fear, but it seems too pat and maybe fabricated, though she does also seem like one suffering from PTSD , cause unknown. So lots of strands open in the first few chapters, we see E as troubled and perhaps dangerous, can't determine whether she's to be pitied or loathed. I also wonder how this fits in with other employer-servant novels - thinking for the moment of My Antonia - but this one seems so much darker and tied in some way not yet clear to the horrors of WWII and to the difficulties, in particular for writers and intellectuals, during the rise of the Soviet bloc.

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