In the Wake of Domestic Violence, a Mother Learns to Breathe Again

DEEP BREATH, by Rita Halász; translated by Kris Herbert

The premise of Rita Halász’s debut novel, “Deep Breath,” seems as straightforward as the act in its title — a woman, finding herself in an increasingly abusive marriage, decides to leave her husband. The process of uncoupling, however, is anything but; as a result, the woman can hardly breathe.

When the book begins, Vera and her two young daughters are driving through a snowstorm in Budapest, their belongings in tow; she’s just left the house she shared with her husband, Péter, to move back into her father’s. On the ride over, Vera begins to dissociate. Péter’s prolonged gaslighting has stifled her survival instincts, and her immediate next steps seem as opaque as the view out the dashboard window.

The events that have brought Halász’s heroine to this point are almost cartoonishly abhorrent. Péter’s transgressions range from verbal insults to physical assaults, hitting and strangling her until one night he repeatedly slams her head against the bed until she cries. Only then does he let her go.

And yet, Vera remains uncertain, even after she moves out, as to what exactly happened, and who exactly is at fault. Didn’t she have it coming, by being a “wretched housewife” who once cheated on her husband? When confronted with abuse so excessive, the victim can feel like there’s no recourse but to rationalize it away. “You’re crazy, nothing happened,” Vera hears Péter’s voice telling her in her head, over and over; about the “light red mark” around her neck, she thinks, “You can hardly see it anymore.” The remainder of the novel depicts Vera ever so slowly groping her way back to sanity, with help from her own divorced parents, her steadfast childhood best friend, her psychologist and couples therapists and even a perilous fling with cocaine.

Published in Hungary in 2020, where it won the Margó Prize for best first book, “Deep Breath” has been translated by Kris Herbert, who deftly captures the dizzying cadences and hazardous snares of Vera’s disordered mind. The novel is narrated entirely from Vera’s jumbled first-person perspective, her thoughts reeling across disparate scenes from her marriage as though replaying them might finally clarify what exactly went wrong.

Halász’s terse and unsparing syntax mirrors her protagonist’s disorientation, splicing together different conversations and memories in the span of a paragraph, sometimes even a single sentence. “The faster you get ready, the sooner we’ll be at school, I say in a calm voice” to her children one morning, “and meanwhile last night flashes back. He couldn’t get it up. What’s wrong with this shirt? I cut the tag off. The bear one is in the dirty clothes.” It’s a testament to both Halász’s and Herbert’s narrative talents that even when Vera’s mind tips over a precipice, the reader is still able to parse her spiraling consciousness.

Over the course of the novel, Vera must learn to think, feel and live for herself — the last often manifesting in her literal efforts to inhale and exhale. Her mother encourages her to take swimming lessons (“your back hurts, you’re frustrated, you left your man, so swim”), but she finds it difficult to know how to stagger her breathing. “Maybe the problem is that you breathe in too much air, and then you can’t breathe it out,” her mother suggests. Vera doesn’t tell her mother about her frequent panic attacks, the fact that “I can’t breathe in too much air because a black incubus has wound my chest in a thick web, then sat down, and has crouched there ever since.”

The novel dramatizes the slow coming back to consciousness of a woman so abused she has forgotten the basic functions of living. The process of re-emerging isn’t easy: The book’s final chapters take place in the claustrophobic atmosphere of divorce court, where Vera’s already confused words are further turned against her. In the face of such cruelty, her ability to complete actions that once seemed intuitive, even automatic — like breathing — is remarkable.

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