Abigail

by Magda Szabo

  Gina was shrewd enough not to find the broom, the bucket and the sponge too quickly. She knew exactly where to look for them (there were cleaner’s storerooms along every corridor) but she started by visiting each in turn, as a way of spinning out the time: if anyone caught her out, she would explain that she was looking for a better mop and a drier broom. She was in no hurry to get back to the Latin lesson when there were all these wonderful possibilities to look forward to.

  She went into the office and found herself alone for a few minutes. Suba was obviously still in the staff room trying to get through to the glazier.

  A truly woeful sight confronted her. She had never taken a great deal of interest in aquariums, but the gleaming little corpses spread across the sodden carpet and the parquet flooring, all with their mouths gasping for air, for a last taste of life itself, could not fail to move her. The aquarium had a stand of its own: it was impossible to imagine who might have hauled it down, and why. Eventually Suba returned. Gina slowly and casually mopped the water up and then, taking great care not to put her hand on them, brushed the shattered fragments of glass into a pan and tried to sweep up the spilled sand and ballast. She was reluctant to touch the fish, not because they repelled her but because of the thought of their having slowly suffocated overnight. Suba made no attempt to help. He just walked about talking to himself and muttering that the glazier’s assistant was on his way and the director had told him to keep his eyes open. When he was last there at nine he had found everything in order, and if the aquarium had collapsed it didn’t have legs of its own to jump about so someone must have pushed it off its stand, and that could only have been a burglar. Who else would have broken into the office?

  As she fiddled about with the carpet Gina kept looking around. Nothing appeared to have changed. Suba knelt down, picked the fish up by their tails and tossed them in the bucket. He told Gina to get a move on, then telephoned the director to announce that he had found nothing amiss and they had finished cleaning up, but he should come and see for himself. There was no clue as to who might have broken in; it was even possible that no one had. The door had been locked, there were bars on the window, the cupboard, the table and the desk drawers were all intact, and no one would have forced their way in just to knock an aquarium onto the floor. Perhaps a very gentle earthquake might have caused it? But none of them had felt anything.

  The director arrived at almost the same time as the glazier’s assistant. He walked around the room checking everything, and was just emptying the steel safe (there was a great deal of money in it) when Mráz appeared. Gina continued to dab the carpet, very gently, though by then it was almost completely dry, taking note of all that was happening: crouching there was so much more interesting than Ovid’s lachrymose wailings. “Nothing seems to be missing,” Gedeon Torma declared as Mráz made his entry, like an actor appearing on stage for the closing lines, his mustache twitching with a small smile as he bade the director good day. He squatted down beside the aquarium and prodded the metal where one of the panes had shattered into pieces, while the director sorted through the contents of his desk, murmuring as he did that no one had been into any of the drawers, rested a hand on the top of the filing cabinet, went through the personal records and archived letters, and pronounced everything in order. The workman turned the aquarium round and smiled once again, as if something the director had said had secretly amused him.

  He had one piece of good news. Purely by chance there were some panes of glass in the workshop that would do to repair it, this famous aquarium that the director had treasured all these years, and he went off with it under his arm. From outside the room came the sound of the bell. Gina realized with delight that she had managed to miss the entire Latin lesson, though sadly there was no way she could prolong the idleness any further. She picked up the bucket and cleaning implements and followed the workman out. Kőnig had just emerged from the classroom, carrying a pile of Latin translations on his arm, and he accosted her. “Georgina Vitay, have you finished in there?” Since he could see with his own eyes that she had, there seemed little sense to his question, but then what else did one expect from Kőnig? Standing to attention as required, she clasped the mop to her chest like a soldier on parade and confirmed that she had. In the same instant she noticed that Mráz had also stopped and turned round, still clutching his burden, and was studying her closely. Their eyes met, and she had a sudden longing to see herself in a mirror, to discover what sort of face she presented: this Mráz was no beauty, but he was after all a man, and the look he was giving her left her feeling strangely disturbed. Then he disappeared, leaving her alone with Kőnig. The moment he saw what was in her bucket, the ornamental fish mixed in with the water and dirt from the mopping-up, he began to tremble. “The poor things,” he exclaimed, and whatever pity she herself might have had for the little lace-tails vanished at the sight of his grief. My God, she thought, I hope he isn’t going to weep into the bucket! All that emotion for a few fish!

  She returned the implements to the closet and made her way back to the classroom, where Mari Kis told her that the divine Ovid had been hellishly difficult. Stupidly, she failed to ask her which passage had been set. Following the afternoon snack, when the others were free to do whatever they chose, she discovered she would have to do it herself. Susanna summoned her to her room, planted her exercise book in front of her and told her that she understood that she had had to miss a lesson. It really worried her when a pupil missed an exercise, so would she have the goodness to make it up? There was the passage; she had asked Mr. Kőnig for it to pass on to her. Gina thought she would explode. Susanna sat with her throughout, and though she was busily mending her underwear there was not the slightest hope of Gina nipping out on some pretext to get her Latin book and look over the full extract. She made a very poor job of the translation, the worst she had done in all her time in the school. She was so angry at having to do it at all that she had found it impossible to concentrate.

  The General arrived while they were having their supper. He stood glancing up and down the vast refectory while the older Aradi read out further episodes in the life of the pious Swiss maiden. It took him some time to pick out the face he had travelled so far to see, hidden as it was among the many heads peering up from their plates. The director ordered a setting to be laid for him, and Gina was so excited she could barely eat another mouthful. Her father had never appeared at such a late hour before. She longed to run across to greet him, but Matula self restraint required that she wait until the meal was over, and even then it was only after Susanna had given permission that she was able to go to him. It would have been impossible for her to leave the school at that late hour, but in any case the General did not ask for it. He said he had very little time to spend in Árkod, and if he could simply exchange a few words with his daughter while they waited for prayers it would be enough. Susanna sent them off to the study room, which was always free at that hour.

  Her father had brought her a box of pastries and a beautifully wrapped parcel from Auntie Mimó. Gina promptly hid it in her blouse. Her aunt had sent her a bottle of perfume, a stick of rouge, an eyebrow pencil and a marcasite brooch shaped like a squirrel. She told her father that she was now much happier in the Matula, and gave him a shortened account of the strange circumstances in which she had broken the ice and been reconciled with her classmates. She had been speaking for some minutes when she became aware that, although her father was still listening to her with a smile on his face, and had been telling her what her family and their acquaintances in Budapest had been doing, passing on messages from them and explaining that Ili the housemaid would be leaving them in the spring because she was going to celebrate her engagement at Christmas, there was something different about him. Nothing had changed in his tone of voice or his demeanor, but the two of them had always been so close, there had always been such a deep bond of sympathy between them, such an instant mutual understanding, that she knew something was troubling him. She stop
ped in the middle of a sentence, as if some voice she alone could hear had shouted: “Don’t tell him about what happened in your last session in the gym, it really doesn’t matter that you were the only one who could do those floor exercises and that Gertrúd Truth was so pleased with you—it’s of no importance now.” She sat looking at her father and waited. He gazed back at her, surprised by the sudden silence, then urged her to tell him more about the school and the other girls. He doesn’t know where to start, she said to herself. What is this news he is waiting to tell me? It frightens me.

  The conversation became very hesitant. If the bell had not called her to prayers she might have become horribly garrulous and superficial, the way close friends will sometimes chat idly about this and that when there is something needing to be said between them, something so important that they spin out the conversation until the right moment comes. The bell brought a brief respite. Then Susanna appeared, and although she said nothing her manner made it clear that she had come to fetch the girl and it was time for the guest to be on his way. Her manner softened only when the General declared that he had no wish to overstay his time, but he wondered if he might join his daughter in the service, then leave for Budapest immediately afterwards. Susanna arranged for him to sit not with the teaching staff but with Gina, and when she noticed that he was still holding Gina’s hand after the prayers had started she simply closed her eyes.

  The reading was from Paul’s epistle to the Romans. The Chaplain explained that the school motto was taken from chapter 9, verse 16, where it states that mercy is not “of him that wills or of him that runs” but belongs to God, because human wishes and intentions amount to little: whatever happens is the result of His will. Gina was so conscious of her father’s presence that she listened with only half an ear. It was only much later, when Mráz, the director’s ornamental fish, her father’s presence and that reading from the apostle had become no more than memories, that she was able to see the connection between them. It was always a source of happiness to her that the person she had loved more than anyone in her life—more, after she had been married and had her own home, than even her husband and her children—had had a goal and had fought for it, never bothering to ask whether or not it was his own will that he was following or whether the purpose behind it accorded with God’s. He knew what he wanted, and he strove for it until the hour of his death.

  She was allowed to accompany him to the gate. Passing through the garden they sensed the coming of snow: none had yet fallen, but they could smell it in the air. They stopped just inside the vaulted porch, too far from the porter’s office for anyone to hear what they said. And at last he revealed what he had been waiting to reveal all evening. It was what Gina had so accurately foreseen.

  “You must say goodbye to me, Gina. Kiss me, but do not cry. Our enterprise is entering a critical phase. It will be a long time before I can come and see you again, weeks or possibly even months, and for a while I won’t be able to telephone you either. You must not be afraid or sad. Just wait patiently until I contact you again.”

  He looked down at the well-scrubbed flagstones under the vaulted ceiling. The weekly telephone calls had provided the momentum that had carried her from one Saturday to the next, even if the inescapable presence of Susanna and the director had reduced them to banality. Only now did she realize how much they represented continuity. Could she stay on in the Matula without hearing his voice? Perhaps for months? But the holidays were starting in December!

  “I shall be here again at Christmas. If there is any chance at all I shall be with you on Christmas Eve. If I don’t come, it will be because it is simply impossible. But I will come at some point after that, sometime after the school holidays. If not, someone else will give you news of me. That is as true as the fact that we love each other. Do you understand what I am saying? Promise me that you will never do anything foolish, and that you will wait patiently.”

  Since the first of September that year Gina had been a daughter of the Matula, trained by Susanna. To prevent him seeing how sad she was now, she buried her head in her father’s shoulder and clung to him. But she did not have to try too hard. He grasped her chin and raised her face to look into it one last time, and she saw the same profound sorrow written on his. He kissed her, then pushed her away tenderly, and gestured silently that she should not accompany him to the gate. Her eyes followed him for a few moments, and she saw his face once again when he turned round, his eyes glittering in the blue light of the porch. She was sure she could make out his form even after he had disappeared into the street. She had no idea that she would never see him again.

  THE ST. NICHOLAS’S DAY SERVICE

  On November 29 they decided that, as they were never going to be allowed to cook dumplings or make lead castings to discover the names of their future husbands, they could at least try making paper stars. Of the St. Andrew’s Eve divinatory practices the lead-casting was the only one Gina was familiar with. She had never heard of the one involving meatballs wrapped round a piece of paper (the first to rise to the surface in boiling water would have the name inside it) or of the paper star method: you had to fill five of the six points with the names of all the possible contenders and leave the last one blank, trusting fate to send you someone you had not yet met. Gina worried about the idea of using the names of real people in her own, but Oláh reassured her: the others would also have at least one suitable name besides Kalmár’s and they would fill in the rest with the boys’ names they liked most. You had to put your star underneath your pillow, tear off one of the points during the night, and then look (but only in the morning) to see who the oracle of St. Andrew had given you.

  They waited for that moment with mounting impatience. To make sure the magic worked they kept the names they had chosen strictly to themselves. However, when Susanna came to put the lights out she ordered them to lift their pillows so that she could see what was underneath them. They obeyed with downcast looks. She went from one bed to the next gathering up the stars, tore them into shreds one after another, without bothering to read what was on them, and dropped the pieces into her huge pockets. She uttered not a word of reproach, but it was perfectly clear from the look on her face what she thought of all such superstitions. When she finally left them, lying in the dark and feeling thoroughly dejected, they tried to think how she could have known about them. They worked it out soon enough. They had been inadvertently betrayed by Dudás, the good honest Dudás, who hated doing anything badly and loved everything to do with drawing—paints, pencils and the like. She had decided that if they were going to make a star then it should be a really good one, and they should ask for some of the proper drawing paper from the store cupboard. No one reproached her for her blunder: first of all, it no longer mattered, and second, no one would ever have imagined that Susanna knew about the St. Andrew’s oracle and the folk superstition attached to it, or that it would be enough for her just to see Dudás handing out drawing paper to the class—clearly not for writing out endless long division sums or irregular verbs in French—to realize that they would be making name stars back in the dormitory.

  Luckily something happened the next day that made them forget their disappointment. Szabó, who tended the plants in the staff common room, returned from her “weed nursing” (as she called it) with some sensational news: the following Friday, the name day of the Regent, was to be a national holiday and a school holiday as well. Gedeon Torma, simultaneously boiling over with rage and puffed up with pride at the promised moment of glory, had told the Chaplain that because the festival was common to both Church and state the school would have the honor of celebrating the day by welcoming the city dignitaries at their usual service. The fifth year were beside themselves with delight. Everyone knew that the requirement to give them a holiday on December 6 drove the director to distraction: Admiral Horthy could call himself what he liked, Caiaphas or Jebuzeus, but not Nicholas. It gave those reprobate Matula girls the idea that the school celebrated the day
and enjoyed all that wonderful food as part of a purely pagan festival that had no place inside the school walls.

  “It’s going to be fantastic!” Szabó said, between her gasps for breath. “The Mayor will be joining us, and so, believe it or not, will the Lord Lieutenant. He’s officially a Catholic, but they ignore that on national holidays, and they’ll all be there—the city aldermen and representatives of the local garrison. The director may be heartbroken because he hates the name Nicholas, but he’s also horribly proud. He told the teachers who were there to start preparing their classes immediately and to remind them what sort of behavior would be expected on the day, because the whole of Árkod would be there to dignify the proceedings.” She added that the Chaplain was so beside himself he was like a young girl going to her first ball, and the other teachers were also glowing with pride. The fifth year duly spread the word, and the whole school began thinking about and looking forward to the great event.

  Their normal church services were rather dull affairs: those civic leaders who did occasionally worship there rarely came to the school-specific services. This event promised to be something special, a welcome touch of color in the general grayness. They were so beside themselves that evening that Susanna had her work cut out to keep them quiet. What excited them was not so much the prospect of a celebratory supper (many of the pupils were the daughters of farmers who paid the fees in produce and the food in the Matula was always good) as the prospect of seeing people from the town.