Balga and Ilma’s marriage

Balga and Ilma’s marriage gives the play’s search for love a deliberately earthly, comic counterpart. Ilma explicitly identifies Balga as her husband, and their reunion turns marital attachment into a lively negotiation rather than a solemn resolution: when Balga demands that she choose between going with him and staying, Ilma says she would prefer both. The marriage thus ends not by erasing the couple’s quarrelsome differences, but by making room for them within a shared life.

Identity and Introduction

Ilma introduces the relationship plainly: she says that she has a husband, named Balga. The direct identification establishes them as a married couple before their later encounters can be read as mere flirtation or companionship. Her surrounding description of him as an exceptionally ill-fated sort of fellow gives the bond a comic inflection: she recognizes the marriage, but does not present her husband as an idealized figure.

Their relationship is one of the play’s mortal domestic pairings, set alongside the more elevated and perilous love of Csongor and Tünde. The contrast is not simply between serious love and comic marriage. Ilma and Balga’s attachment has its own emotional stakes, but it reaches the audience through bickering, pursuit, and practical demands rather than through the lovers’ quest for an enchanted ideal.

Separation and Repeated Encounters

The play places the marriage within a journey structured by departures and crossings. At the three-way road, Balga leaves, while the stage direction identifies the setting as a meeting point for arrivals from different directions. The road therefore gives their separation a larger dramatic shape: the couple’s paths belong to a world in motion, where characters part, travel, and appear again in changed company.

Their reunion is not immediate. Later, Ilma enters with Tünde, and the pair is again placed together in the fifth act’s desolate landscape. These stage arrangements connect the marriage to the play’s recurring pattern of movement: Ilma is not simply waiting at home for her husband, and Balga’s journey does not prevent her from accompanying Tünde. Their marriage persists across separate routes and shifting affiliations, rather than keeping either character fixed in a domestic setting.

The play also gives their bond a musical and theatrical environment. A song appears during the early action, and later the little devils sing as the action moves through the final act. These choral moments belong to the wider play rather than being identified as songs between husband and wife; their relevance is structural. The couple’s comic domestic story unfolds amid a dramatic world in which songs, entrances, exits, and sudden encounters continually interrupt and redirect individual journeys.

Conflict and Comic Reunion

At the close, Balga enters while physically hauling Ilma along and rebukes her as a faithless, deceitful woman who must run through the world in this way. The stage direction makes the reunion deliberately rough-edged: instead of a decorous homecoming, the couple arrives in motion, with Balga’s complaint and Ilma’s resistance embodied in the very act of his dragging her. His accusation shows that their reunion does not mean the disappearance of mistrust or irritation.

The exchange then turns the quarrel into a choice. Balga asks Ilma to decide between him and the alternative before her, demanding that she say whether she will go or stay. After a pause, she answers that she would rather have both: to go and to remain. The pause gives her response the force of a considered answer, while its impossible double wish punctures the ultimatum’s logic. Rather than making a single route or allegiance the measure of their marriage, the scene lets Ilma articulate a desire that refuses the offered either-or.

Tünde accepts the answer and tells Ilma to withdraw. That response places the couple’s decision inside a larger network of companionship and departure, rather than isolating their marriage from the other characters’ movements. Ilma’s wish to both leave and stay becomes the comic hinge between following her husband and remaining connected to the company she has been accompanying.

Ending and Dramatic Significance

The marriage’s ending is a negotiated comic closure, not a detailed account of married life after the final scene. The text supports a reunion and the couple’s continued attachment, but it does not show their subsequent household or spell out the precise terms on which Ilma’s twofold wish is fulfilled. What it does establish is that Balga calls her his wife through the play’s action and that, at the end, their conflict is resolved through her refusal to choose only one side of the offered alternative.

That refusal distinguishes the couple’s ending from a simple restoration of order. Balga’s physical insistence and wounded complaint preserve the friction between them; Ilma’s answer preserves her own preference instead of merely submitting to his demand. The result is comic because the choice is phrased as an impossibility, but it is also relationally revealing: their bond survives as a negotiation between going and staying, attachment and movement.

Within the play’s larger pattern, Balga and Ilma’s marriage supplies an earthly counterpoint to the separation and reunion of Csongor and Tünde. Its stakes are presented through a husband’s exasperated pursuit and a wife’s wryly expansive answer, not through supernatural punishment or idealized devotion. The final balance is characteristic of their relationship: Balga wants a definite decision, Ilma wants both possibilities, and the play lets their mismatched demands coexist in a shared comic ending.