Abigail

by Magda Szabo

  She shook her head. Every contour of her face had come from her father, but now she had taken on the look of her mother, and the General met the steady gaze of his long-dead wife. So, it’s happened at last, he mused, as he studied her. It’s finally happened, just as I thought it would. Your childhood is over. You have grown up, my darling.

  “Apart from myself there is one other person I can entrust you to. I have already asked him to watch over you. He is the leader of the civilian opposition in the city.”

  It came to her in a flash:

  “Another one? Where was it this time?”

  “On the monument to the Sorrows of Hungary.”

  STOP THIS POINTLESS SHEDDING OF HUNGARIAN BLOOD! WE HAVE LOST THE WAR. SAVE THE LIVES OF YOUR CHILDREN FOR A BETTER FUTURE.

  “If that person contacts you, then you can go with him. And go you must, because if he sends you anywhere outside the Matula it means that they are on your trail and he has found somewhere to hide you.”

  “How will I know who he is?” she whispered.

  “You have known him for some time without realizing who he is. When you discover who it is you will be very surprised. Now, do you still want me to take you home?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “If by any chance I am unable to telephone you, don’t try to write or contact me. Just wait. If I can, I shall call you every week, or come and see you. If I do neither, there will be a reason why I am keeping away, why I can’t come. At all events, stay calm. Will you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “And now we must part. I know you have been given a bit more time but I must get back to Budapest. If I never see you again . . .”—his voice did not waver; it was as if he had mulled over what he was about to say many times—“. . . then you will at least know that I loved you, and you will know that I died because I wanted to free my country from a war in which there are no heroes, only victims. Kiss me, and then we must go.”

  Her kiss was cold, her normally glistening lips dry and lifeless. The General tapped his fork on a glass, Mr. Hajda appeared and cast a reproving eye over the untouched plates. The General’s gaze followed the line of his glance.

  “How many girls are there in your class?” he asked.

  “Twenty, including me.”

  “Twenty, plus the prefect with the fair hair. Shall we treat them?”

  “They won’t accept them, father. I tried once before.”

  “You must try again. There is no anger that lasts forever.”

  Mr. Hajda’s face brightened. He was asked to pack up the pastries left on the plate, along with another thirty. They filled two large boxes; Gina had difficulty carrying them.

  Once outside, they barely spoke. She did not look at him. She kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead, while he kept his on the street, in the squat black-and-white city to which he had entrusted his greatest treasure. An austere city, a stern one, worthy of his trust.

  “I won’t go in with you,” he said, when they reached the gate. “You go on by yourself. It will be easier for us both.”

  “Yes, father.”

  “Have you forgotten anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So now you know everything. Can you be true to your word, even when you feel you can bear it no longer?”

  “I shall be true,” Gina replied.

  This time they did not kiss. Gina did not cry, nor did she smile. “You have given me your word,” the General said again, and the girl nodded once more. He rang the bell and the great studded door opened before them. Gina immediately went in, and the porter—as if he knew what they had been through at parting—left it open until her youthful form reached the end of the corridor and finally disappeared. The General watched her as she went, a large parcel in either hand; she never once looked back, perhaps to ease the pain of parting. As she walked towards the dormitory block her back seemed to stoop a little, as if she carried the weight of the world’s burdens on her shoulders.

  THE STATUE SPEAKS

  She was now in a hurry, on her way not to the sick bay but to the dormitory, and trying hard to think of somewhere to hide the boxes of pastries before another ritual humiliation could take place. But she was stopped by Susanna, coming the other way down the corridor. She expressed surprise that Gina should have claimed so little of her permitted time and asked her if she had come back early because she was feeling ill again. Gina reassured her: she and her father had discussed everything that mattered and he had to get back to Budapest; she was now on her way to the kitchen with these boxes of pastries. The sight of them filled Susanna with delight: the class had finished their voluntary labors and were sitting in the bath washing off the coal dust before getting ready for their tea, and a bit of extra cheer would be most welcome after all that shoveling. Except that they won’t eat them, Gina thought. They’ll throw them away again. But she no longer cared.

  This was the new Gina, the one who had come into being such a short time earlier that day in the Hajda patisserie. She no longer saw life in terms of petty wrongs and insults, and certainly not by the number of pastries that might or might not be eaten. She was trying to take on board everything she had learned from her father—not something to be done all at once—and she was relieved when Susanna reminded her that she had an hour of her free time left and if she liked she could go to the music room after tea; she should take her book of psalms and her Bible, read the Holy Scriptures, memorize some hymns, and play the piano if the urge took her.

  She hung her coat up in the deserted corridor. Going into the washroom she could tell where the others were by the voices coming from behind the closed bathroom doors. Those who had finished must have gone to the day room—she could hear someone singing. She was not feeling especially happy just then, but she could not help smiling. Much to the delight of the deaconesses the class had taken to singing canticles in their so-called “quiet time.” Following a rota, one of them would bellow out a psalm so that the others could carry on talking without fear of rebuke (“filling your precious moments of contemplation with idle chatter!”). Their little games and cunning schemes, their anger and their acts of spitefulness seemed miles away from her now, she in whom the General had placed his trust, who was the bearer of secrets in whose recesses lurked the shadow of death. At this point she would much rather have been left on her own. If one could put a name to what she now felt towards her classmates whispering their silly school jokes and nursing their petty grievances under cover of the sacred music, it would have been envy rather than anger. Happy those whose greatest concern was what practical joke they might play on Kőnig the next day, what was the worst sort of punishment they could expect if they were caught, and what a fine blow they could strike at her now by treating Mr. Hajda’s pastries like so much rubbish. “We have lost the war, our soldiers are dying pointlessly, every one of them who falls is a victim, nothing more than a victim, and the reasons for the war are all bad. The war is illegitimate. That’s not what Mr. Kalmár teaches us, and it’s not what he thinks, but then everyone I’ve met here thinks as he does—apart from someone I don’t know, or rather do apparently know but haven’t yet identified, the leader of the civil resistance.”

  By the time she had washed, tidied herself up and collected her hymn book and Bible the rest of the class were ready too, and they all trotted down for their tea. Erzsébet, who had supervised the coal-shoveling, had already shared out the pastries, along with the usual apples and croissants. “Those who do good work deserve a special surprise,” she told the class. They seemed paralyzed with joy for a few seconds, then promptly devoured them. Gina heard Nacák say that the school must be suffering from senile dementia, or the Last Judgment must be at hand, because that was what she had read in the Book of Revelations. A few weeks earlier the seventh year had been given a similar voluntary task on a day when the school was due to send a parcel of food to the front, and the director had suggested that, to honor their splendid efforts, their weekly apples an
d cakes should be included in it.

  “These are from a patisserie,” Jackó whispered. “Perhaps Erzsébet has fallen in love. It’s such a new experience for her she’s lost her wits and this is the result.” Gina prayed that the others would believe this, and she was on the point of thinking she might escape a second humiliation when Erzsébet, with her inborn love of the truth, spoiled everything and told the class the full story. They stood to attention, as required, while the class monitor expressed their gratitude to the director and Governors for acknowledging their voluntary work through the gift of pastries, though of course they were always happy to labor without reward because God loved the work of busy hands. At this point Erzsébet shook her head and told them that the pastries were a present from Georgina Vitay’s father, and he was the one to be thanked. There was a moment’s silence, and all faces turned towards Gina. The monitor stood up again and, with a diplomatic froideur that would have withered an elder statesman, delivered the approved formula: “We thank Georgina Vitay’s father for his kindness from the bottom of our hearts.”

  “You may now leave the refectory,” Erzsébet concluded, “and go to the sewing room and mend your clothes until supper—except for Georgina Vitay, who has forty-five minutes of free time left.”

  The class filed out. Gina went to the music room, sat down facing the door and waited. She was so sure that something was about to happen it was as if she had been forewarned. She wanted only to get it over and done with, not just because it might be extremely unpleasant but because she had no time now for these games. She needed to think, and to incorporate what she had been told into her thinking.

  The fact was that there could be no escaping her situation. Whatever the attitude of the other girls to her, and whatever the consequences, she would have to remain where she was. So far she had thought of the fortress simply as a prison; now she knew it as much more than that. It was a place of refuge. A bleak one, no doubt, but one she would have to put up with. She would have to make her peace with the rest of the class and persuade Mari Kis, as quickly as she could, to give her back the things she had found in her bed, beginning with, and above all, the letter. The great solution that had so far presented itself to her, to get herself expelled if she couldn’t run away, was now out of the question. But if her letter, that dreadful farewell note that Mari Kis now had in her possession, should ever, either from anger or revenge, be put in the hands of a teacher or Susanna, she would not escape expulsion. How, without betraying what her father had confided in her, could she persuade Mari Kis, first, not to make a terrifying use of what she had found and destroy her, and second, to forgive her? If Gina tried to speak to her she would simply turn her back and refuse to answer her. The idea was out of the question. And then, why had Mari waited so long? It was almost a week since the tea at Mitsi Horn’s, following which she would have found the letter. She could have given it to the prefect at any time during the last five or six days. She would have to have a word with her in private, keeping calm and rational. But when? Mari Kis would never give her the chance. It was unthinkable.

  But the chance soon presented itself. The attack she had been so long expecting was under way, and Mari Kis was the standard bearer for the class. She marched into the room, closed the door behind her and went straight to the piano, where Gina’s psalm book lay open on the music stand. Her bag was slung over her shoulder. She unhitched it, opened it and hurled the contents onto the piano. Ten- and twenty-fillér coins came tumbling out in a shower.

  “Nineteen times two pastries, thirty-eight pastries,” she announced. “One pastry, thirty fillér—at least that was the price when we were last in a patisserie. If the price has gone up since then, let me know and we’ll make up the difference.”

  “Give it back to me,” said Gina. She did not look at the money. “I beg you, in the name of all you love and hold dear, give it back. If you want, I’ll clean your shoes for a whole year, I’ll do anything, whatever you ask, anything. I’ll wear a sign on my back saying what an idiot I am, and what a traitor. I promise I’ll even wear it in the garden. In the name of mercy, Mari, give it back to me!”

  Mari Kis stared at her. A completely different Vitay returned her gaze, one she had never seen before: either she had gone mad or she was drunk.

  “It’s our money for Sunday’s church collection, you scum. Because of you the entire class will now have to put nickel-plated buttons in the collection box, and where can we possibly find enough between now and tomorrow? If Susanna notices that we aren’t putting real coins in we’ll be done for. Perhaps you should just give us away first, before she catches us—just go and tell her to watch us on the day, and watch us closely. We have nothing left now, after what I have just given you. From now until Christmas the only cash Susanna will let us have out of our pocket money will be for the church and charity.”

  “Just give me the letter and you can do what you like with me,” Gina said. “Anything, do you understand? If that means hitting me, then go ahead. I won’t hit back. Or if you prefer, I could fall from the top of the wall bars in the gym and make it look like an accident; if you’re lucky, I might even break a leg. You don’t know what I’m talking about? My letter, the one you found under my bed! You can keep everything else—my comb, my powder box, my diary, the purse, the photo album, even the bunch of keys, though I’ve no idea what you would do with the keys to someone else’s house. Do you hear me? Just tell me what I have to do! You wouldn’t even have to talk to me. I no longer want you to take me back. All I want is the letter.”

  “I found something under your mattress?” Mari Kis retorted. She was now furious. “I never met anyone quite as shameless as you! You made us eat your filthy pastries, we ate them in good faith because we had no idea you were trying to foist them on us again, and when we try to pay you for them—because we want nothing from you, we would rather starve—you are as brazen as ever. So I’ve stolen something from you? If I had found anything of yours in your bed, when I went and fetched your nightdress, do you really think I would have picked it up and stolen it? You have the gall to tell me there was something in your bed when there was absolutely nothing? Just you wait, Vitay! If you think that these slanders will get you out of trouble, then you really don’t know the fifth year!”

  And she flounced out of the door in such a passion that she forgot that she was supposed to walk on tiptoe and behave decorously, not least because she was not officially allowed to visit Vitay, who was still in her allotted free time and supposed to be reading the Bible and strengthening her soul with religious music. Instead she slammed the door behind her with such force that the painting of Geneva Cathedral over the mantelpiece jumped in its frame and almost hurled itself to the floor. Gina stood staring after her. She did not doubt for a second that Mari Kis had been telling the truth, that she truly had not taken anything from the bed, only the nightdress. So then, her things must be with Susanna. She must have found them when Gina sent her to the dormitory to look for evidence. She could now breathe easily again, because if the prefect had kept silent about them all this time then she obviously intended to protect her: she must have destroyed the letter and hidden the other things to stop their being used against her. Dear, lovely, noble Susanna! Her heart spilled over with gratitude: with the prefect’s help she had been spared. The class still hated her, and when they knew what she had accused Mari Kis of they would hate her even more, but never mind. She could put up with that.

  She gathered up the coins and stuffed them into her pockets until they were so full they bulged visibly. When she left the music room she would shield them with her Bible, and tomorrow she would take them to church in her shoulder bag, push her way to the front of the queue, and as soon as someone was watching she would explain that she had been asked by the rest of the form to put all their money into the collection in one go. Then perhaps they wouldn’t try their stupid stunt with the buttons. The trick would be discovered soon enough anyway, as soon as the box was opened and w
ord got back to the Matula, so what would have been the point?

  The old Gina would have been only too pleased if they had got themselves into trouble; she would have paraded her own sixty fillér before one of the teachers as proof that she had had nothing to do with the buttons and been more than happy to leave the others to incriminate themselves. But not now. It would be yet another problem that she had brought upon them, and it would enrage the innocent Mari Kis even more.

  She raised the lid of the piano and started to pick her way through a particularly difficult psalm. In the greatness of Thy wrath, do not chastise me. (There was something they didn’t show in that news film we saw: all that blood was shed to no purpose.) Do not chastise me, oh Lord . . . (Auntie Mimó knows nothing about these things. In his lessons on national defense Mr. Kalmár says that this person who is trying to undermine public morale . . . ) as You look upon me and grieve in Your heart . . . ( . . . is a traitor. The person he thinks of as a traitor is actually a hero. And I have been entrusted to his care. He must be the one who left the leaflets on Mitsi Horn’s pew, and who wrote those words on the monument to the Sorrows of Hungary. Kalmár is quite wrong. They have all been misled . . . ) . . . do not chastise me, oh Lord . . . (I can’t let them track me down here. I must make myself as indistinguishable from the others as a drop of water in a stream . . . ) In Thy great wrath . . . (so that my father can go about his work without worrying about me. I cannot take the slightest risk that they might use me to blackmail him.) . . . In Thy great wrath, do not chastise me, oh Lord . . . (We must try to save the lives of our soldiers. The war was started for all the wrong reasons. My father’s associates are trying to save the country.) . . . as You look upon me and grieve in Your heart. (I shall be strong. I shall be wise. I shall be patient. If only my father’s enterprise can succeed! And may we all get out of this alive.) Do not chastise me, oh Lord.