Abigail

by Magda Szabo

  The train trudged slowly along: it was wonderful—everything about the journey was wonderful. The sun eventually broke through the clouds and shed a golden light on the autumn landscape. They got off at the second station, and a short walk took them to the estate. It had been left to the Matula by a former pupil; some of its produce supplied the school kitchen and the rest was sold to provide free education for those in need. Gina knew that they had not come to enjoy themselves, or at least not only for that: for the first part of the day they would be doing serious work. Gedeon Torma’s educational principles were well known to her. There was no point in training the mind if the body was left idle. It was his practice to drive them to exhaustion every now and then, physically as well as mentally, to teach them to respect all forms of manual labor.

  On their arrival the older girls, who had taken part in grape picking and other autumn harvesting activities in previous years, knew what they had to do; it was only the juniors who had to be instructed. There was no running about or standing around fretting, no voices raised in anger or rebuke. Attached to a map of the estate was a work schedule assigning tasks to each year group, and every class tutor and prefect had one.

  The farmhouse was occupied by the estate manager and his family; it had been passed on to him by the previous owner, a former pupil of the school. They hung up their coats and bags in the designated places and got themselves ready for work. Gertrúd Truth issued them with bags, boxes, baskets and stepladders from the storeroom, supplied the group leaders with large wicker containers and explained the overall plan. Apart from the two lower years, the teams were to change tasks every hour. For one of those hours they would pick apples or bring potatoes and vegetables up from the cellars and underground storerooms; in the next they would fill their bags and baskets with them (they would be waiting in clearly marked piles), and haul them off to the wagons. The younger girls would act as runners for the management team directing operations from the pressing room. Like a priest conducting an arcane rite, the director insisted on opening the first of the cellars himself, then spent fifteen minutes working with Aradi as her partner, carrying vegetables, before lending a hand with the potato-picking, and finally showing the others how to grade the harvest into three separate piles. The best were to go to the front, the next best were for the school kitchen, and the smallest for the orphanage.

  The estate was not so large that it could not be taken in at a glance, but it was inconveniently laid out in two sections, divided by a raised railway line. This was no more than a secondary line, carrying very light traffic, but it proved difficult to cross when lugging large, two-handed baskets or sacks, as the fifth and sixth years would have to, having already carried their hoard of late-maturing apples and hazelnuts from the distant weighing station. The little ones were not allowed to cross at all, even to take messages: those would be taken on by either a prefect or a teacher. The fifth year quickly busied themselves among the apple trees and, although getting the ladders there and maneuvering them into position had brought them out in a sweat, were relishing the exercise, and the girls at the top kept glancing down to see if Kalmár was looking at them. Gina was not involved in the picking; her job was to sort. She loved breathing in the fresh scent of the apples, and she enjoyed the serious business of deciding which should go into which pile. The teachers took turns standing on the embankment, keeping an eye on the rail track and sending back anyone who got too close when one of the local trains appeared.

  In truth these were very few. At one point a goods train came trundling past, and then a second, transporting troops. When that happened, all work came to a halt. Seeing the class, the soldiers stopped singing and turned their faces to take in the sight of schoolchildren laboring in the countryside—young men on their way to the battlefront, gazing in silence at the girls and the apple trees.

  It was one of those experiences whose deeper significance struck Gina only much later. All those soldiers suddenly falling silent, their eyes fixed on her and her companions . . . it took time for her to understand just what it had meant for them, the young men on their way to the frontier and beyond. They had been thinking of their own children, their families, the little patches of earth that were their own gardens, and the grand order of nature to which mankind had been subject since the dawn of time. It was what they too would have been doing had the train not been taking them off to kill or be killed.

  At that moment Hajdú was on duty beside the track. He went to the edge of the rampart, raised an imaginary baton, and the fifth year and the sixth, from slightly further away, launched into “The soldiers are going away / To defend our beautiful land,” and waved at the young men, who waved back and resumed their own song. Gina did not join in. She stood gazing in silence at the slowly disappearing train. She was thinking of her father, and of the placard she had seen on the monument to the Sorrows of Hungary.

  She remained there until Susanna called out to ask what she was waiting for. Has she any idea, this Susanna, Gina wondered, that the person who risks his life day after day in Árkod to try and save his people is telling the truth, and that he wants to spare the lives of those men too, the ones on that train, going off to the war . . . or that there might be a father somewhere who has had to send his daughter away so that he can work in the same cause without having to worry about her? Susanna called to her again, to ask if she had heard: her time for sorting the apples had finished. She should go and help with the baskets. They were ready to be taken away.

  Towards the end of the next hour, while they were hauling apples that they had collected, something happened that none of those involved—Susanna, Kalmár, Kőnig, the director, indeed anyone who witnessed it—would ever forget. By now the fifth year were almost completely exhausted. They were in the process of lugging the huge wicker baskets loaded with their carefully sorted pickings over the rails to take them to the pressing house. Kőnig was on track-watching duty at the time, and Susanna and Kalmár were working with them. Kőnig was dancing from toe to toe and holding on to his hat with both hands in the strong wind that had sprung up. Gina knew rather than saw that he was there because she was looking at Susanna and Kalmár when they glanced towards him. Kalmár had said something that had clearly displeased her. She had stopped in her tracks, dumped her basket on the ground, and called to Cziller to come and help her class teacher. She went over to the choicest pile of apples, asked Oláh to bring her one of the sacks and called across to Kalmár to carry on the work with Cziller: she had just remembered that they were supposed to have set a sack aside for the Bishop. She obviously doesn’t want to hear any more of whatever it was he was saying to her, Gina sensed. What could that have been about?

  Kalmár’s face darkened with suspicion. The delighted Cziller took her place beside him, and Susanna began filling the barrel at speed. Susanna was always beautiful, but never so much as at that moment, a timeless figure bent over a task of autumn and completely at one with the landscape. The sack was soon brimming over, and the blood-red apples seemed almost to smile as Mari Kis and Torma eased her two arms into the straps that would hold it on her back.

  Kalmár and Cziller had been at the pressing house for some time before she finally set off with her load. She was carrying the huge bag by herself, with Gina and Bánki following a few steps behind under their own enormous burdens. Arriving at the embankment she quickened her pace and reached a point close to where Kőnig was standing. He turned a sleepy glance towards her and—in the same instant as the fifth year—watched her long dress catch on a piece of metal sticking up between the rails, causing her to miss her step and tugging her backwards, and her load with her. His shoulders flinched, and his hands moved as if to catch and hold her until she regained her balance, but he just looked on helplessly as she stumbled and fell onto the rails, and then, with the class watching in horror, slid down the other side of the embankment and out of sight from where they were among the apple trees.

  Gina later thought how very Matula it was
of herself not to have screamed. In fact none of the girls had. There was so much to take in during those few seconds—Susanna disappearing before her eyes, the fifth year throwing down their baskets and running towards the embankment, Kőnig’s face, first bright red and then deathly pale, and that strange gesture when he had almost leaped after her, thought better of it and held himself back, before clambering up from between the rails and rushing to the side of the embankment and standing there staring down at the Deaconess with that look of anxious inquiry . . . and a voice calling out from the other side of the track, a single word that in its intensity of feeling dispensed with the formal “Sister.” Kalmár was now back, he had been standing there for some time with Cziller, and had yelled, “Susanna!” while Kőnig remained rooted to the spot, staring down in horror at what the fifth year could not see from the other side of the embankment. Just then a train appeared. Had the class not instantly begun to scream at him he might have stayed where he was until it hit him. At the last moment he came to his senses, turned round, uttered a cry of terror and scrambled shamefacedly down the side of the embankment. By now the fifth year had been joined by Miss Gigus, newly arrived from her place beyond the apple trees, where she had been putting the last of the hazelnuts into boxes with a group of year six girls. In true Matula style, her voice conveying neither alarm nor any other emotion—things they had been told time and time again to avoid, and in which both Kalmár, with his unseemly display of feeling, and Kőnig, in his cowardice, had fallen short—she ordered the girls back to work. Vitay was told to wait until the train had passed and then bring back a report on the prefect’s condition. It obviously wasn’t too serious, she added. If it had been, the doctor and two of the teaching staff would by now have been at her side with the first-aid box, and besides, Sister Susanna would have been the first to be upset if she knew she had created a fuss. The train chugged by belching smoke, with the driver leaning out of the cabin window and shaking his fist at Kőnig for dancing about on the line. As soon as the track was clear Gina ran up the embankment and stood waiting for Kőnig to give approval for her to cross. From up there she could see the whole of the estate.

  On the other side, the bright red apples destined for the Bishop lay scattered on the ground. Susanna had been disentangled from the sack she had been carrying and was now sitting with her back resting on Kalmár’s knees. The doctor was holding her wrist. Kőnig was standing a short way away, next to the stretcher, looking at them. There were no other teachers present, only the director. Behind Gina the work had resumed, and the seventh and eight years were once again weighing their potatoes in silence, as if nothing had happened. Below her the doctor was now dipping a wad of cotton wool into a solution and holding it up under Susanna’s nose. The prefect’s forehead was bleeding slightly, and her eyes were closed. As in everything she did, her self-discipline was absolute. She did not so much as sigh or ask a single question.

  “Susanna,” said Kalmár. “Are you feeling any pain? Are you able to stand?”

  The words could not have been simpler, more professional, but the tone . . .

  She became aware of where she was, that it was very uncomfortable, and sat up. She ignored Kalmár’s question, pretending she had not even heard it, tested an arm briefly, then leaned forward and tried to stand, with the doctor’s help. She took a few steps and pronounced herself fit and well, ready to carry on with her work. She seemed to feel something on her forehead, wiped it, and stared at her crimson fingers in surprise.

  “I’ll deal with that right away,” the doctor said. “You’ve grazed it on a stone. Luckily, there’s no harm done, but you must take a short rest. You should be working in your usual clothes, not that long dress. Mr. Kőnig, you are the only one here whose hands are clean: could you give me a hand while I see to the sister?”

  Clearly embarrassed, Kőnig mumbled something about not being able to stand the sight of blood. Kalmár snatched up the first-aid box and his voice took on a murderous edge. The astonished girls standing on the embankment then overheard speech that no Matula person should ever utter: “If you weren’t so damn useless you would have caught her. Get the hell out of here!”

  “Vitay, you go and help her instead,” the director said. Gina shrank back reluctantly, but even from where she was she could see that Susanna was blushing a bright red. Kőnig, feeling older and more crushed than ever, turned and went back up the embankment to resume his watch. Gina noticed the director whispering furiously in Kalmár’s ear, while the nurse led Susanna out of earshot. In short, she had witnessed yet another of those miraculous little scenarios at which the Matula was so adept: nothing had happened at all, or, if anything had, it was of no importance, there had been no unseemly language or ugly behavior, nothing had been said that was unworthy of the school, and no hard words had passed between members of the teaching staff. Gina went back to her class and told them that Susanna was fine and carried on with her work. Shortly afterwards Kőnig disappeared, the director took his place on the embankment, Kalmár went off, stiff-faced, with restless emotion showing in every movement of his body, and Cziller, who had been working happily alongside him all this time, had difficulty keeping up with him.

  They did not see Susanna again until dinner, when the work was over. She had a sticking plaster on her forehead but was moving as gracefully as ever, as if there had never been any accident. Kőnig was keeping his distance from her, sitting on his own, but this time the director did not invite him to come and join him. Gina felt that the man hardly deserved to be treated like a pariah. Was he really such an object of loathing? Of course not. Better just to ignore him.

  Kalmár too was sitting well away from Susanna; he had found a place among the girls. Gina knew the Matula well enough by now to realize that after making Susanna sit against his knees and bawling at his colleague he was now watching his every step and every movement.

  After supper and a short rest it was time for games, including netball. Susanna elected to join in. She wasn’t able to run, she said, her foot was a little sore, but she took part nonetheless, laughed a great deal, and took it in good part when it was their turn to shout at her. Kőnig did not fall in with any of the classes, and for a while he disappeared altogether. They did not see him again until they were on their way back and had boarded the train, but he was still avoiding the fifth year. The girls were all now singing the same song. They were tired but they were happy, their nostrils filled with the scent of apples and the autumn landscape. Suddenly Susanna stood up, as if there was something she needed to go and reassure herself about. Mari Kis and Gina followed her discreetly to see where she was going, and if she had gone to look for Kalmár. He was with the director, who had ordered him to spend the homeward journey in his company, and the two men were sitting together in a coupé, where the older man was now explaining—in exactly the tone he used with his niece, according to Szabó—what was considered right and proper, in good taste and generally polite.

  But it was Kőnig that Susanna had gone to look for.

  Gina had missed him because he had been still on the platform when Susanna went to look for him. The two of them were now hidden from her by a panel that protruded from the washroom, but their voices could be clearly heard: the song had finished and Hajdú’s messenger had not yet arrived to tell them what he wanted them to sing next.

  “Mr. Kőnig,” Susanna said. “Won’t you join us? There is an empty seat for you.”

  “Thank you, no,” he replied. “The air is fresher here.”

  “Did you have your supper?”

  “But of course. I like eating.”

  “I would be very happy if you came and sat with us.”

  “May God reward you,” he responded. “Your goodness surpasses even the standards of the Matula.”

  She said not a word more. She turned and went back to the compartment, arriving just a few steps behind Gina and Mari. The amazing thing was that Kőnig should have been so arrogant, though that might have been because
he was reflecting on and grieving over the consequences of his (in)glorious discharge of his duties. But if he had ever nursed any such hopes he had now blown his chances with the prefect forever, even were there no such rival as Kalmár. When Susanna was safely back in her seat the two girls, rather daringly, asked her if they could go and wash their hands, and went back to the director’s coach. Through a narrow slit they could just about see the speakers. Gedeon Torma was explaining something of grave significance, with a face of funereal gloom. St. George was sitting there like a block of wood, almost soldier-like, wearing the ecstatic look of a martyr in extremis, while Torma turned the screw. “What a fine match these two would be!” Mari Kis whispered to Gina. “Aren’t the deaconesses lucky to be allowed to marry!”

  CARICATURES

  So now the central problem was the question of Kalmár and Susanna.

  The fifth year had decided that they certainly should be married, but they could think of no way to help them attain that goal in the shortest possible time. In fact they soon realized that there was very little they could do. There was no point in dreaming about it. They would somehow have to find a way of making it possible for the two of them to spend time together away from other people. They took their meals in the same room, and every Saturday Susanna joined Kalmár for the weekly class assessment, but generally their lives were lived within such narrow constraints that if they hoped to avoid the most painful consequences there was absolutely no hope of their ever being able to spend time together. Susanna seldom left the school, and when she did, to go to her professional association in town, the Bishop’s office or the dentist, she always left a telephone number with the duty sister, so that even the day staff knew where to contact her in an emergency. The idea that she would ever venture outside other than on business or to carry out some charitable task was unthinkable.