Abigail

by Magda Szabo

  “Everyone,” she was assured.

  “And there’s all this left? You have been very restrained. I shall hand the rest out myself.” She took the dish, counted out the pastries and put two on every plate. Gina was given three. The dish was now empty.

  “Now say ‘thank you,’” Susanna said.

  “Thank you, Vitay,” the class chorused.

  “May it do you good,” Gina muttered.

  Susanna went back to the window. Mari Kis slipped her two pastries into her pocket, and the others all did the same. The honey cake that Gina had put into her mouth from a sense of duty turned bitter and she struggled to swallow it. When the time came to leave the refectory she concealed the other two in the palm of her hand, then threw them down the toilet.

  The funeral for the remainder of the General’s offering took place the next day, in the garden. With much digging and raking, the class prepared a space in the vegetable patch. Szabó built a low mound of dry leaves and twigs; Mari Kis gathered a second pile from around the plot, took them to Szabó, and dropped the two pastries from her pocket on the pyre. “Are you ready?” Szabó asked triumphantly. “Ready,” replied Mari Kis. Gina watched as each girl in the class came up one by one and added her own, every single one of the pastries that they dreamed of and longed for. There were so many that Szabó had to build another mound. More twigs were raked up, and more dried leaves. Bánki lit the pyre, and Szabó, like a tubby little priestess conducting some ancient rite, kept the flame going by prodding it with a stick. They all knew that Gina was watching, and they kept glancing to see the expression on her face. But she stood where she was at the other end of the garden and did not so much as tremble.

  Only when the lights were out did she give way to tears—tears for the cremated pastries, the poor innocent pastries. She wept and wept, all the while hating herself for not being stronger and for not having removed herself sooner from that hateful scene. But she was unable to stop either the sobbing or the desperate, choking flood of tears, or wondering as she wept what sort of girls these could possibly be that not one of them came over to speak to her.

  She came to with a start. The light had gone on and someone was leaning over her. Through eyes strained with weeping she beheld Susanna, a Susanna without her bonnet and with her shock of blonde hair, which seemed to have been hastily brushed, coiling down to her shoulders. She was wearing a dressing gown, a rather comely gray. She looked so beautiful, and her appearance was so unexpected, that Gina stopped crying.

  “Is it you crying?” Susanna asked, and sat down on the side of the bed. “You were sobbing so loud it could be heard in the corridor: everything is so quiet out there. It’s very late, past midnight. What has happened, Georgina?”

  She could not, did not want to, reply. She simply opened her hand and took Susanna’s arm. It was against the rules to touch a member of staff, she now remembered. She was aware that the Deaconess had flinched, and realized that she too was thinking of it, but the hand stayed where it was, and Susanna remained at her side.

  “Don’t cry,” said the prefect. “You mustn’t cry: you have no reason to. Everything is going nicely for you here, your father rang on Saturday and all is well at home. I know this is about the parcel. It brought back memories of your family and made you homesick. It’s why I don’t like people sending these parcels from home. So you really mustn’t cry.”

  She spoke very softly, almost inaudibly. Gina held her arm even more tightly and this time Susanna felt obliged to withdraw it.

  “Shush, Georgina. You’ll wake the others.”

  She stood up and looked around. The fifth year appeared to be fast asleep in their beds, but the prefect’s long experience allowed her to read those blank faces as clearly as if their open eyes had declared: “We know she’s been crying, and we don’t give a damn.”

  “A member of the fifth year in so much distress and no one takes the blindest bit of notice? That doesn’t show much generosity of soul.” Her gentle tones took on the hardness of steel blades clashing in an icy wind. “Such a cold-hearted class hardly deserves to take part in the invitation from Mitsi Horn. I know that you know what I am referring to. Mr. Kőnig has told us that he spoke to you about it.”

  For a while no one stirred, and the pretense continued. Then one by one they began to yawn and rub their eyes. Eventually Bánki said: “No, really? If I had known poor Vitay couldn’t sleep and was feeling sad . . .” and they all gathered round her bed, as many as could fit themselves into the space, and Gina burst into tears again, all the more grievously because Susanna could not see that their concern was only a game, an act they were putting on.

  “You must show her some sympathy,” said Susanna. “If I find her still crying after half an hour I shall hold you all responsible. Everything here is new to her. She isn’t used to this kind of life. Her father is a long way away, and the parcel made her homesick. Tell her about our dear Mitsi Horn’s invitation.”

  And she left. The girls nearest to her, Mari Kis, Torma and Murai, Szabó and Bánki, went and sat on Torma’s bed and looked at her.

  “Go away,” Gina said. “I don’t need anyone, least of all the likes of you.”

  “Are you sure you don’t need us?” asked Mari Kis. “But we’re supposed to be entertaining you, so that you won’t feel sad in the night. Like a king with insomnia.”

  “And we have to tell you all about the wonders of Mitsi Horn’s invitation,” Szabó added angrily. “Well, you can find out for yourself.”

  “We have to tell her,” said Torma, nodding her head. “Susanna will be asking about that when she checks up on us.”

  “That’s true,” said Mari Kis. “So listen to this, you pathetic weakling. Every month Mitsi Horn invites girls to afternoon tea at her house, a whole class at a time. It’s incredible what she serves up. What you get to eat is unbelievable. It’s a real banquet, with games and sometimes even dancing, and it’s all so wonderful you want to faint. She has this amazing house near the station and the front door key is just as fantastic: there’s a laughing man’s head on the end of it. She gives a tea party every fourth week from October onwards, and the best class is always invited. We’ve never been there. This will be the first time in our lives. So you’d better make sure that we don’t miss out because of you, or you’ll see what we do to you.”

  Gina stared at them for a moment, then abruptly turned away and buried her head under the quilt. Her heart was beating so hard she thought it must be making the bedcover shake. When Susanna looked in again the whole class was still up and whispering to her, expressing concern and chatting, while Gina slept like a newborn baby. Her cheeks were dry and her face fresh. She’s calmed down, thought Susanna, and nodded. Then she did something she never would by day: she gently stroked the girl’s brow. She could not know that behind that forehead lay the liberating, sleep-inducing, all-comforting idea of using Mitsi Horn’s tea party in the last week of October to make her escape. If an entire class were being entertained in the house, and the house were right beside the railway station, you could nip out the way you went in; or if not there, then through a ground-floor window, or one in the cellar. In a private house probably neither would be covered with iron bars.

  AT MITSI HORN’S; THE ESCAPE

  Now that she finally had a plan, a real prospect of escaping, the behavior of the other girls bothered her less and less. As for the teachers, she came to see that there were some she would be sorry to leave behind. Kalmár, for one: he taught history in a way that made the eyes of his students light up with excitement. Whenever he spoke of the love of one’s country Gina felt more than ready to take up arms herself and, mere slip of a girl as she was, rush off to join the soldiers at the front. Kalmár had become a significant person in her life, and if the figure of Feri still shone in her recollections of the happier world she had lost, he was far away. Kalmár was there to hand, right before her eyes.

  Kőnig’s lessons she detested, yet he was a wonderful teacher, n
ot just highly cultured but also very well-spoken. She was sometimes astonished by how very fine, and how lucid, his explanations were, but her conscience would not allow her to acknowledge what she was hearing. And if she could not approve of Kőnig, she could hardly approve of some of his material. The classical virtues he described in his Latin lessons, so admirable and convincing when Kalmár talked about them, seemed in his mouth dull and boring. Kalmár’s character was the one she associated with the Roman virtues of manly fortitude, and equally with the love poetry of Catullus, while Kőnig was everything that a virile Roman was not, and as for love, he would certainly not still have been a bachelor at fifty-two if he had what it took to stir a woman’s passion. He invariably responded to the literature with a far deeper sensibility than his pupils did, and that too seemed to her unmanly, as did his feeling for poetry and his ravings about “ideal beauty.” What irritated her most was that things happened in his lessons that never did with the other teachers. Kalmár had no qualms about sending a fifth-year girl to stand in the corner, but when Kőnig tried to do the same it always descended into farce: the offenders would smirk and pull faces or take a book and read it when his back was turned, and after a while Kőnig would start to show signs of embarrassment, of worrying that he might have been too strict. He would then announce that the punishment was now sufficient, and effectively apologize to the girl concerned.

  Gertrúd Truth she did like, but the woman was such a tartar in the gym that Gina sometimes feared the rope-climbing sessions would strip the skin off her hands, and if a girl said she was feeling giddy during an exercise she was simply ignored. Gina also liked Kerekes, though his math lessons could be terrifying. He had a habit of suddenly asking you about something from last year’s work, or even from the year before, and always when you least expected it, so you had to visit the lower form’s day rooms to ask the prefect there how to calculate percentages or compound interest, or whatever it was you had forgotten. If you didn’t get it right, Kerekes would blow his top. Éles, the science teacher, was like his name, sharp or caustic. But Gina liked him too. His white coat made her think of her family doctor, and the smell of acid chemicals that pervaded his lessons, indeed his whole universe, brought back the fierce perfumes worn by Auntie Mimó. She also enjoyed the practical tasks they undertook under his supervision, looking after the frequently restocked terrarium that stood beside the huge fish tank, both of which he had entrusted to her care, or picking fruit and doing other little jobs in the garden. She was less fond of Hajdú, the music teacher, though she still preferred him to Kőnig. He was moody, he could be woundingly sarcastic, and he really seemed to think that his was the most important subject in the whole world. She often had her work cut out to keep up with the giddy pace he set, and it was becoming more and more clear to her that in Budapest it was not only the religious songs and chants she had not been taught as well as the Matula girls had: her knowledge of Kodály and Bartók also fell short. They not only knew the former’s songs by heart, they had also been put through a thoroughgoing history of music, including church music, and had no difficulty recognizing the extracts Hajdú played for them on the huge school gramophone. What saved Gina was that, although she had still not yet learned a large number of the psalms, she was fairly well up on the classical side, thanks to the many concerts she had been to with Auntie Mimó and Marcelle.

  She used Miss Gigus’s lessons as a time to relax after the exertions of the morning. She no longer needed to learn new grammar or vocabulary, and her written tasks and translations were dashed off within minutes. Susanna had asked her to help the weaker ones in the day room. She had of course agreed, in the certain knowledge that no one would ask her, and none of them did. When they were given one of the harder exercises they simply surrounded themselves with a wall of textbooks, exercise books and dictionaries, and did the best they could. On one occasion the director called in to observe the class during one of Kőnig’s lessons. Gina failed to answer one of his questions, so he turned to Torma, who was so intimidated by the piercing black gaze of her uncle that she instantly forgot the most elementary rules of grammar, whereupon he made a personal entry in the day’s notes that she had been “slacking.” The moment he left Kőnig asked her the very same questions. This time she returned perfect answers, and Kőnig went straight to the director’s comment and added: “Much improved now. Excellent.” Torma should have shown her appreciation of what he had done but instead she turned to look at Gina. Gina, to her own surprise, had been nodding her approval as, his face beaming with pleasure, Kőnig made the redeeming entry. Now she simply felt ashamed. Any of the others could also have noticed that she shared their view of the teacher’s behavior, and at that particular moment she did not wish to seem to be making common cause with them.

  In the interests of the Mitsi Horn invitation they were making a show of being very concerned about her. The moment Susanna appeared, or a teacher came in during one of the two breaks, one of them would go up to Gina and anxiously inquire if she was taking proper care of herself: would she like something to read, or did she need any help? In the day room or the refectory, when they were given permission to talk quietly among themselves, the two girls sitting nearest to her, Mari Kis and Torma, would put on a smile and whisper the list of Latin prepositions that take the accusative case. From a distance it gave the impression that they were genuinely talking to her. At first Gina would smile back, though it felt as if her muscles were being stretched from ear to ear, and she quickly tired of it. But Mitsi Horn’s party was drawing closer by the day, and she thought she could bear anything until then.

  As he had promised, the General called her every week, and they exchanged the usual banalities permitted under the watchful eyes of her teachers. Gina would be told that everyone at home was well, including Auntie Mimó and her friends. She did not repeat her desperate plea for a visit, but she did wonder that her father, who knew her so very well, should be so unable to sense that she was in difficulties from the way she limited her conversation to strictly impersonal things and expressed herself in a manner so very different from the one she had used in Budapest. It was hardly the way a normal girl might speak of her life at boarding school. To her relief, no more parcels arrived. One ritual burning of the pastries had been quite enough.

  Mitsi Horn’s tea party was designated for the last Sunday in October. At the end of lessons on the Saturday the entire school assembled in the Hall of Honor and the director read out the aggregated marks of each form for the month: the results for the fifths were the best they had been since the start of the school year, and for that reason he felt able to overlook the regrettable failure of self-discipline they had shown on the first day back. As a reward for their proper remorse, for their exemplary behavior and their unstinting work, they would be allowed to take part in the tea party that an esteemed former pupil held every year from October to June for the best-performing class of the month. Departure was at 3:30 p.m., return at 7:20 p.m., and they would be accompanied by the class prefect and form tutor.

  That Saturday in October was almost as bright as a summer’s day, with the autumn flowers in the garden in their full splendor. As soon as lunch was over the girls set about their preparation work for the following Monday. Gina took great care over hers, and even memorized the Latin, though she knew there was now little point. She was about halfway through when she was called to the telephone. This time the conversation was much shorter than before. Her father clearly had nothing of special interest to report, and she mouthed only the platitudes approved by her guards. Besides, by the afternoon of the day after next she would be back home.

  When she was ready she went down to the garden to say a proper goodbye. Susanna was nowhere to be seen, and there was no sign of anyone moving behind the iron grille of the teacher’s wing: it was a free afternoon for everyone, a sacrosanct and blessed time. She went over to the statue, sat down on a bench in front of it and looked around the garden. There was a book in her lap, but s
he made no attempt to read it. It was there only in case a teacher spotted her, decided she must be lonely and sent her to join the rest of the class. The book was Daudet’s La Petite Chose, in the original language. She knew it almost by heart. If anyone questioned her about it she would have been able to respond in fluent French. She was looking out over the top of the page when she heard footsteps on the gravel behind her. She turned her head to see who it was and found Aradi, a girl in the eighth year, the tall head girl who had carried the banner in the procession. She was walking very slowly, and her face showed grief and despair.

  Gina moved over to make space for her, relieved to know that even an eighth year such as she could have problems. Aradi had always spoken to her whenever they met, so there was no fear of being subjected to a list of prepositions. Thanks to their Matula command of silence the fifths had managed to keep their secret intact: all knowledge of the traitor’s punishment had been kept from the other classes to stop one of them blurting out Gina’s story to a teacher.

  Aradi sat down beside her, rather reluctantly, and returned her greeting; then, to her surprise, she asked Gina to run back to the eighth-year day room to see if the rest of her class had finished their homework. It was so obviously a pretext to get rid of her that Gina was troubled. Perhaps the older girl had caught wind of the fact that she had been ostracized and no one was talking to her? She stood up, feeling rather offended, but then the urgency of Aradi’s request made her think that something else might be going on. She dashed off as requested, then stopped behind a large stone urn, which hid her completely. It was most unlikely that even a senior girl could have an assignation in this place, so what else might be her secret?

  When she saw the slip of card Aradi pulled from her pocket, Gina underwent a sudden loss of the respect due to the head girl and standard bearer. Had she no proper sense of shame? She had actually come to petition Abigail about some nonsense or other! Preferring not to witness the actual moment when the note went into the pitcher, Gina carried on to the day room to look for the eighth year, who, as Aradi knew full well, had of course long finished their homework and were now being worked hard in the gym by Gertrúd Truth. When she returned to the garden the head girl met her with the happy air of someone who has successfully fulfilled an intention. Gina told her what the class prefect had said, that the others were now having their free exercise session with Miss Truth: they had been entered for a competition involving the Cock-a-doodle-doos and given permission to do extra training. She suggested that her companion should get there quickly before her absence was noticed. Aradi raced off in the direction of the gym, and Gina found herself alone in the garden again.