Abigail

by Magda Szabo

  “This is just the thing for your big-city life,” she said. “A supreme work of art, in the very latest fashion; a unique creation.”

  She hung it over Gina’s shoulder and burst into laughter.

  The outer windows of the dormitory were made of thick, grainy glass, but those inside were transparent, so that if you held something opaque behind them they made a perfect mirror. Torma hung her dress behind one and, with some effort, piggybacked Gina over to it so that she could see just how ravishing she looked. Gina noticed that two nails had been driven into the back of the window frame: they had found a way to see themselves at least down to the waist, as opposed to the face alone, as in the much smaller mirrors in the washroom. Seeing the image she presented in her regulation school outfit, Gina stared into the mirror in total disbelief, then—to her own surprise—she too exploded with laughter. A brown-haired scarecrow of a girl with misshapen plaits stared out at her from a hideous black straitjacket; a bag such as a vagabond might carry was slung over her shoulder, and a key dangled from her neck on a length of string.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mari Kis. “It isn’t really so bad here. Actually it’s pretty dreadful, but you learn to live with it. We have an awful lot of laughs.”

  “We’d better do our talking now,” said the blonde, “while I’m not being punished. I’m almost always being punished. When I am you can’t talk to me at all, only after lights out, and even then it’s not a good idea, because Susanna pops up out of nowhere, and she’s got ears like a rabbit.”

  “But why are you always being punished?” Gina asked. Torma had such a kind and gentle face it was hard to imagine that she would ever be insolent or misbehave.

  “Actually, it’s for love,” Mari Kis explained. “Don’t be so naive. I told you that the director is her uncle. He’s also the poor girl’s guardian, and he’s like the good Lord—those whom he loves he punishes. Now we really must go. We aren’t allowed to stay in the dormitories after the beds are made. Most of the time we just hang around in the day room, but lessons haven’t started yet, so perhaps we can persuade Susanna to let us go out into the garden.”

  They set off for the day room. Someone had opened windows in the corridor and the sunshine was flooding in. Perhaps, Gina was thinking, perhaps . . . Perhaps there aren’t any grown-ups about, only the girls in my year. And perhaps not all the grown-ups are the same. Perhaps I’ll even come to like one of them, if one of them is, if only a little, like Marcelle.

  As they walked, the two keys, the one for her locker that hung from her neck and the one for her drawer in the study-room table, clinked dully together. The other girls’ did likewise. Gina detested the idea of wearing a key around her neck. They were supplied with bags, so why not keep it in there? What else was it for?

  “The key doesn’t belong with the things in the bag,” Mari Kis explained. “The bag is for a handkerchief, a folder for the warnings they give you, the snack they give you at breakfast if we’re going on an outing (it comes wrapped in wax paper), a Bible and psalm book for different occasions in the year, and a box for your pens. That’s it. The keys stay round your neck. It’s compulsory. Instead of jewelry.”

  “Jewelry.” The word reminded her of the sad little moon that Susanna had stripped from her neck. That too was now just a memory, if not a very old one . . . but at that moment something else caught her attention, something her companions had noticed too: through one of the opened windows a tune could be heard, a tune coming from somewhere down in Matula Street, at the front of the building. It was a repeated triple blast on a motor horn, a motor horn on which, in a far-off world, a happier world across the oceans, a world beyond the Seven Seas, a father was sending a message to his daughter. Gina my child, Gina my child, the motor horn called out merrily each time he pressed it. Gina my child, ran the cheerful refrain, again and again, ever more insistently, until it seemed not in the least happy or merry but appallingly, overwhelmingly sad. Gina turned towards the wall and leaned her forehead against it to stop the others seeing her face. She felt she did not know either the blonde or the brunette well enough to give way to her feelings in front of them without embarrassment. Gina my child . . . The sound was already fading . . . now barely there at all . . . and finally no more. The car was now speeding away from Matula Street. Somewhere on its way it would go past the great church, and she would be left behind in the mighty fortress.

  “Well,” said Mari Kis, turning towards her to look gently into her face. “You mustn’t cry. I told you this place is bearable. You’ll see. It’s going to be a really nice afternoon. If you like, Torma will think up something to make it fun. Torma doesn’t care. She’s always being punished anyway.”

  They were being so kind, so very kind, but they could not change the way she felt. The motor horn could no longer be heard, but it carried on and on sounding in her head: Gina my child . . .

  “Tomorrow is the service for the start of the school year. The whole town will be there, staring at us as we walk down the street. Perhaps one or two boys will manage to slip into the balcony,” the dark-haired girl said. “Then the term will begin and we’ll all get married. We get married as soon as lessons begin. You will too. If you’re really lucky, you’ll get Bishop Matula himself.”

  And despite herself, the thought of that made Gina laugh.

  THE LEGEND OF ABIGAIL

  The garden was enormous, and they were given the hoped-for permission to walk in it until lunch. Mari told Gina that they tended the flowers themselves. There was a school gardener, but this was another of the things they had to learn, along with dressmaking and Lord knows what else. According to the director there was nothing worse than inactivity; the road to Hell was paved with hours of idleness. But there was no need to worry, there was no chance of that in the Matula. When lessons were over and they had finished their homework they would then be tested on what they had learned by the Deaconess. There were no weak pupils in the school. Those who couldn’t keep up, or didn’t work, were sent away at the end of the year, never to set foot in the building again. The Matula was the strictest school in the whole world. When you had done your homework and repeated aloud what you had learned you were free to go and work some more, either in the garden or in the sewing room, wherever you were sent. You could even take extra lessons in music or a foreign language if your parents were mad enough to ask for them, and they didn’t even have to pay. If, after all that, you still had some free time, you could of course read, because the school had a huge library, or you could do embroidery, or whatever else came to hand. You walked for two hours each day, and spent another in the gym: both were compulsory. So there was no need to feel anxious. She would never be bored.

  What she was hearing about her new school left Gina with mixed feelings. On the one hand it rather alarmed her. She felt that such a strictly regimented life, with every minute accounted for, must be truly oppressive for anyone whose misfortune brought them there; but she also was aware that these two did not seem too discontented with their lot. On the contrary: though they had never said as much, you could see on their faces that they felt rather proud to be part of this exclusive world, in which everyone was clever and hardworking and would demonstrably have learned so much more by the time they left than people educated elsewhere. What surprised Gina most was being told that there were no day-pupils, only boarders. The fortress was unlike any other school of its kind in the country: it was a proper boarding school, like the ones abroad. Those citizens of Árkod who didn’t want to be separated from their children sent them either to the local state school or to one in the nearest town. Between the state school and the Matula there existed, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, a permanent state of war. The state pupils called the Matula girls the “Holy Tripe Sausages,” and the Matula responded with “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” because their rivals’ school was named after the zoologist Paul Kokas.

  Among the Matula traditions was a celebratory feast for the eighth-year leavers at the end of
their final term, not of course in one of those dreadful hotels in the town but in the school’s Great Hall. It was so grand they even gave you a mug of hot chocolate with your brioche, after which you went over to the state school—the first time you had ever been allowed out without being chaperoned by a deaconess—and bellowed out the dreaded “Cock-a-doodle-doo.” At some point in the distant past the wife of the Chief of Police had been a pupil at the Matula, and, strangely enough, ever since then no policeman had ever been seen on the street outside the Paul Kokas on these occasions, and the Matula girls had been free to crow at will; but whenever the visit was returned and the state pupils began their “Holy Tripe Sausages of Matula / No Father Christmas your way. / You’re so afraid of damnation / All you can do is pray,” there always seemed to be one on duty. The previous year the townies had registered a double setback. They had thrown a huge sausage over the fence, made of stuffed-linen and complete with a halo. Not only did their headmaster receive an indignant letter from the director, but he was so angry he refused to accept their explanation that they had added the halo purely out of mockery and there had been no sacrilegious intent.

  There were many other legends and traditions in the place, like the one about getting married. This one was thanks to a former pupil, Mitsi Horn, who had become engaged in her final year and came back at the start of the September term with an engagement ring on her finger. She was sent immediately to the director and made to leave it with him until she left. First of all, just imagine: she had had the nerve to bring a profane piece of trumpery like that onto the premises, and second, think of the scandal! She was still a pupil and she had been mixing in the outside world, with grown-ups, which raised the inevitable, and painful, suspicion that whoever had given her the ring, clearly a person of the opposite sex, must have kissed her; I mean, real kisses.

  But the matter was not put to rest by her not wearing the ring. The contagion was already inside the building, and all the other girls wanted to become engaged too. Finally, in a flash of inspiration, a former pupil, who had been in the third year at the time and had left the school almost a thousand years ago and then, by one rather amusing means or another, gone on to become a famous actress in the capital, thought of a way for them to do that. Since there were no young men around to serve as fiancés, actual fiancés of flesh and blood, they would be paired off with some object or picture. It became the tradition that every year each girl should be betrothed to an item in the class inventory. These inventories hung by the door in every classroom and listed everything that could be found in the room: pictures, furniture, teaching materials, all recorded against a number. The first girl in alphabetical order was given item number one, the second item two, and so on. It was considered highly amusing to get yourself married in this way, and the teachers were of course totally unaware of what was going on. The director himself was included in the distribution, but only to the eighth year, or he would have too many wives and he was allowed only one. Best of all was when, for whatever reason, he spoke to this wife of whose existence he was totally unaware. It was a perfect scream, though sadly you couldn’t laugh out loud because you would never be able to explain what was so funny. But the most interesting thing of all, they told Gina, was that they all invariably ended up somehow falling in love with the husbands they had married in jest. Sometimes the school inspectors would be taken aback at how much one of them knew about some famous person or other—for example, the girl who had married the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius and had read everything she could find about him and knew every detail of the life of the man who was now her life-partner. Even Torma who, having the misfortune to have a name beginning with “T,” had been married to an etching of the first-ever printing press, had once stunned her uncle in this way. He had found some dust in the classroom and scolded the luckless “girl number eighteen” for not having cleaned it properly during the break. “Just look at that dust on this picture of the printing press! But then, what would someone like you know about a fine thing like that?” She started to reel off everything she had read in the library encyclopedia and other reference books on the subject. He stared at her in disbelief, incapable, for the first time in his life, of coherent speech, while she went on and on in the same endless monotone: “The invention of the movable type printing press took place in the last three decades of the fifteenth century. Opinions differ as to the identity of the inventor, though most commentators agree that it was John Gutenberg of Mainz. Another possibility is that it was a certain Metel, or Mentel, of Schlettstadt. The name of Albert Pfister of Bamberg is also mentioned, although he was merely a pupil of Gutenberg.” By the time she had got to Pfister he had turned on his heel and sailed out of the room like a black barge. Several of the girls noted that he was so shocked his forehead was covered in sweat. But Torma was punished all the same, not for the monologue about the printing press but for her failure to clean properly.

  Gina listened to their stories and laughed along with them, but at the same time she had the feeling that compared to herself these girls were as immature as primary school children. She thought of her friends in Budapest, of the experiences she had had there, and of Feri, above all of Feri, holding her close against himself while dancing during that last afternoon tea at Auntie Mimó’s. He was real, and he was young, not just a picture. If jewelry was forbidden, then obviously an engagement ring would be too. But why resort to this bizarre method of finding yourself someone to daydream about? To take a printing press as husband was all very droll, but real boys were a lot more interesting.

  “Real boys?” said Mari Kis, and her eyes grew round with wonder. “Where are there real boys? They exist only in the school holidays, if you can find them. But who would want to start something with a girl from this place, someone you could never write to, and who, even at home, all that way from Árkod, would be afraid of being seen standing in the street talking to a person of the opposite sex? You can only love someone here if you are so committed you don’t care what happens to you; either that, or you are just about to take your school leaving exams and know you will soon be free.”

  Gina was in two minds: should she tell them about Feri? But she said nothing. Not that she did not trust them, but she had known them for such a short time, far too short a time. Mari Kis had already noticed that she was shocked rather than amused by what she had heard.

  “It doesn’t do to draw attention to yourself here,” she said, and Torma nodded in agreement. “My parents pay only a quarter of the fees because they aren’t rich. If I made a nuisance of myself I would lose my bursary. Torma has no one at all, only the director. If the school hadn’t taken us in, who would look after us and give us an education?”

  This was the first time Gina had ever thought about what it meant that her father was able to pay her school fees, however considerable they might be, or had reflected on the difference that had made to her daily life. It had never occurred to her that others might have to be on their best behavior, be submissive at all times and respect the rules, or be denied the chance to finish their time in a school where they were being educated for a minimal fee or none at all. But even now she was listening with only half an ear to what the other two were saying: she was wondering how she could evade Susanna’s vigilance by writing to Auntie Mimó and slipping a covert message for Feri into a text that would certainly be censored. And would Feri send a reply? Would they even post the letter? Torma and Mari Kis were now trying to guess who would be teaching them the various subjects, and the names they reeled off meant nothing to her.

  She was walking with her eyes fixed on the ground, trying to think of a way to make contact with the world she had left behind. With her head lowered, she stumbled into something and almost fell, but Mari Kis caught her arm. Raising her eyes, she saw that they had reached the far end of the garden, where a high stone wall marked the school boundary. A curving recess had been cut into its considerable depth, and in it stood a statue, the statue of a young woman. Curly l
ocks spilled out from under her headband, over a gentle brow, and she held a classical-style stone pitcher.

  Torma mounted the two steps at the base of the semi-circular plinth and kissed the stone face on both cheeks. Mari Kis followed her and did the same, and they chorused, “Hello, Abigail.”

  The statue also had a smile on its face: a rather solemn smile, not unlike the ones on the happy faces of the two young girls.

  “This is Vitay,” said Mari Kis. “Georgina Vitay. She’s going to be with us. So now you know who she is, Abigail.”

  (Oh dear, another of their games, the same childish nonsense.)

  “Say hello,” Torma insisted. “You must say hello! This is Abigail. The miracle-working Abigail.”

  That was too much. Gina stepped back. Oddly enough, she now felt more sure of herself than ever before in the fortress: true, it might be a strictly controlled world, a squat, four-square sort of world full of rules to trip you up, but at least there was something rather childlike about it. It was like when they brought out a figure of the Devil to frighten you on Christmas Eve, when you knew all along that it was really your father’s batman in fancy dress.

  “That’s fine,” said Mari Kis. “You might want to say hello some other time—just wait till you’re in trouble. We don’t have guardian angels in this place, or carry amulets, nothing of that sort, and you can’t be pestering God over every trifle. But if you really think you can cope on your own, you go ahead.”

  “Abigail is always there for us,” Torma said. Her voice was perfectly serious. “If you’re in trouble, serious trouble, she really will help you. She always does.”

  (Oh, well, let them enjoy their fairy tales.)

  She was now feeling almost liberated, cheerful even. They’re just children—this Torma who married a printing press, and Mari Kis, who introduced her to a stone statue. She was thinking of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the last production she had attended in the Opera House, and once again her heart was torn. The singer who played the part of the Commander was an acquaintance of Auntie Mimó’s, and during the interval they had been able to visit him in his dressing room. He had greeted her with “Kezét csókolom—I kiss your hand!”