Abigail

by Magda Szabo

  It was now five o’clock. She was surprised that no one had come to call her to the director’s office: her father must have had difficulty getting a connection. She started to pack her dressing gown and other belongings into the laundry bag and put on her school uniform. She was just doing up the ribbon on her blouse when she heard someone coming down the corridor. It was a strong, firm step, not the usual sort one heard in the building. There was a knock at the door. How odd. No one knocked on the door of a room used by the girls. Perhaps someone was bringing a workman—a plumber perhaps: that morning the nurse had said there was a tap leaking. She called out, “Come in,” and turned to face the now wide-open door. Susanna came in first, and next the General. As on the day when he had first brought her, he was in mufti. Gina threw herself into his arms and burst into tears.

  AT THE HAJDA PATISSERIE

  None of the adults present tried to quieten her. When she had calmed down a little she wiped her eyes and noticed that her coat was draped over Susanna’s arm. The Deaconess had gone to collect it, along with her hat and school bag. She glanced at her father, and then again at Susanna, as if scarcely able to believe her eyes.

  “As you can see, instead of telephoning the General has come to see you,” the prefect said. “I am so pleased for you. The stomach bug or whatever it was that laid you low has affected you far more than we imagined. It has made you depressed and highly strung.”

  “May we go?” the General asked. “I have very little time. I have to be back in Pest by the end of the day.”

  “But of course. Put your coat on, Georgina. The director has given you leave. This is your pass. You must be back by six, no later.”

  You can wait for me as long as you like, Gina said to herself. Her hands were trembling so violently that the prefect had to help her button up the collar of her coat. By six I shall have been in my father’s car for hours, and we’ll be well on the way to Budapest. You’ll never see me again. If I am being allowed out it’s obvious that you haven’t told anyone what I said to you. You really do think that it was the fever speaking. You chose to believe Kőnig and not me. Now I shall tell my father everything. I know what he’s like: it will be goodbye to the Matula for me. He would never leave his daughter in a class where they’ve been tormenting her since the start of the year.

  Her father seemed very subdued, as indeed he was, but when he saw his daughter standing there in her school uniform, with the school bag hanging from her shoulder, his lips twitched and he struggled to suppress a smile. Wait till you hear the rest of it, she thought. This is just the outside, and it’s already enough to drive any sane person up the wall. Now I’m going to tell you the rest of it. In this place you aren’t even allowed to complain to your parents. They censor every letter we write home.

  Susanna bade them goodbye at the door to the outer courtyard, waited for the two of them to go a few steps down the gravel pathway, then called Gina back. She returned reluctantly. She was desperate to find herself on the other side of that huge studded door.

  “I just want to remind you that your father is burdened by the problems of the country, and that the life of an adult is a difficult one. Don’t make it any more difficult for him, Georgina. If there is anything about the school that you don’t like, don’t complain. Allow him to go home feeling happy and reassured. I didn’t trouble him with any of that nonsense you were shouting about when you were ill. The director himself has done nothing but sing your praises, and he made no mention of the unfortunate exhibition you made of yourself at the start of term. Let this be a brief moment of happiness for your father. Do you understand me?”

  Oh, Susanna, strict, severe Susanna! Gina gazed at her as if she, Gina, were the older of the two and not the other way around. What are you thinking? That after I’ve been hammering on this door all these weeks and it suddenly opens, I won’t run straight out into the fresh air and freedom? That humility, or self-sacrifice, or any other of the virtues you beat into your charges with your rod of iron, will make me ultra-diplomatic and lie to my father? But she made no reply, either yes or no; she just nodded her head, a gesture that belonged less to the Matula than to the polite world of Auntie Mimó’s circle. Susanna turned away, closed the door behind her, and Gina hurried back to the General’s side.

  The air outside was mild, almost unnaturally springlike, and twilight was beginning. To Gina’s surprise work was going on in the courtyard. As a mark of honor for the director the fifth year had volunteered for outside duty, even though it was a Saturday and a holiday. The school had had a delivery of coal that morning; the ground-level windows of the cellar stood open and the girls were shoveling it inside, under the watchful eye of Sister Erzsébet. Everyone saw the two of them making their way out. Seeing Sister Erzsébet, Gina automatically stood to attention and gave the due greeting for the occasion, “I wish you good day, Sister Erzsébet. I wish you good day, girls,” and the General bowed. Sister Erzsébet, deciding that Gina had behaved well and shown the politeness of a good Matula girl, ordered the class to stop what they were doing, stand to attention and return the greeting. Choking with rage and resentment, they stood holding their hated shovels and chorused the appropriate formula back to Gina and the gentleman with her, who was so very like her in appearance that he could only be her father, and who would now take her out for a nice long walk and then stuff her full of wonderful things to eat, even though she had been suffering from some ghastly stomach ache ever since last Sunday at Mitsi Horn’s and they would still have to give up their precious free time to tell her what she had missed. The porter studied the exit pass at great length, scrutinized Gina from top to toe, and eventually opened the gate. At last they were out in the street, just the two of them, beyond the watching eyes. She was free!

  She had spent so much time thinking about what she would say to her father when they met that as soon as they had taken their seats in the Hajda patisserie the torrent of words burst from her. The General listened with an impassive face, the face of a man only too used to hearing unpleasant news, and he studied her in silence as she held forth, ignoring the delicacies piled high on the plate before her. The things he was hearing he would normally have expected to have been accompanied by floods of tears, but Gina was not crying, or indeed complaining. She was simply reporting the facts. She laid out the reasons why she could no longer remain where she was, and why he had to remove her from the Matula forthwith: her communications were strictly censored, she wasn’t allowed even to mention her problems, either in writing or on the telephone, her class had cut her dead and she had not a single friend. She couldn’t live like that, it was impossible.

  My God, what a tale! The weird traditions of the Matula; the brutal revenge of classmates she had betrayed in a fit of anger; Gina the despised, Gina the traitor, Gina the girl who was too proud to be married to an aquarium! The General pushed his plate of pastries away: he could no longer bear to look at it. Before leaving home he had gone to the Ministry of Defense and seen reports of the actual state of the war, details he had never previously been shown. It was all death and destruction, battles lost, armies in retreat, and the panic-stricken actions of a deranged national leadership—all that, and now the medieval freakery of the Matula, the petty cruelties of a pack of young puppies who could think of nothing more than that, in a moment of fury, Georgina Vitay had blurted out something she should not have. No, my girl, no, he said to himself. In this I cannot help you, however hard it may be for you. I simply cannot take you away.

  Of course, when he was first thinking of sending her to Árkod he could have had no idea that once there she would be so alone, would have not a single friend, and that even her attempts to complain would be silenced. It was something he could never have guessed but that was how it had turned out. One way or another she would have to sort things out with her classmates, and sooner or later she would find a way.

  He realized she was expecting an answer, and that far from merely hoping she was confidently expecting i
t to be a favorable one. To avoid her gaze and not to have to see the light in her face die with disappointment, he pulled her towards him, took her by the shoulders and told her never again to ask him what she had: he would not be taking her home. For the time being it was completely impossible.

  Gina tore herself away from him as if he had not spoken but had struck her. Her eyes were filled not with the sadness he had expected but with steely defiance and rebellion.

  “Then I shall run away again,” she said. “And I shall do so again and again until they expel me. Would you prefer it that way?”

  Run away? Again? She had already done that?

  His face was as white as a sheet. And now he knew, because she spelled it out for him. He was filled with a sense of horror such as he had never felt in his whole life. The fits of sulking, the business of the aquarium, the bizarre traditions, the censorship, had all seemed a kind of game, a matter of childish pranks, childish loneliness, childish punishments for childish crimes, but what he was hearing now—his daughter climbing out of a bathroom window, fleeing across a completely strange city towards the station—was altogether different. Now it was a question of real danger, mortal danger, and not just for her but for himself and for so many others.

  He would have to tell her the truth, to put his terrifying secret in the hands of this young girl, the secret he had kept from her for so long, the one that for love of her he had hoped never to have to spell out. He had to tell her, because if he did not she would run away again, and if she did manage to make her way to Budapest, it would take just one person to discover where she had been living and then it would be impossible to send her back. But there was no other school in the country where he could feel sure that no one would be able to get at her, or from where she could not make contact with anyone outside.

  Gina leaned back, took her father’s hand and smiled for the first time. She had delivered her most powerful threat and she felt sure it would have its effect. It had been a struggle, but she knew she would win. They could now go back to the Matula, collect her clothes from the Sister Housekeeper and, if she really had to, say goodbye to everyone. Everyone except Kőnig. Kőnig she would never forgive.

  The General stood up. There seemed no reason for him to do this, and then crane his head around like that, but there he was, on his feet and with his eyes searching every corner of the room. He was obviously looking to see if there was anyone close by, either to the right or to the left. There was not. The two lovebirds who were the only other people anywhere near them were clearly no more desirous than he was of having their whispered conversation overheard: there were booths on either side of the central aisle and they were sitting in the furthest one away. There was also a large group celebrating a family anniversary, but there were too many of them to fit into a single booth and they had pulled tables up to the window and were chattering away. Mr. Hajda noticed that the gentleman who had brought the little Matula girl was gazing around and immediately took umbrage. The man was unmistakably the girl’s father (what else could he be? He looked so very like her); he seemed to have found something unsatisfactory with the table he had been given and was looking for somewhere more appealing—or cleaner? As if there were anywhere in the town more pleasant or more spotlessly clean than his! This gentleman—obviously not a local—was clearly ignorant of the fact that his was the best patisserie in Árkod, that it experienced none of the usual difficulties sourcing its ingredients, that it offered the very finest confections, and, whether he knew it or not, was frequented by military officers, was in fact the only such place in the city they were allowed to patronize. There might not be any of them there at the moment, but they would certainly come later that afternoon. This critical inspection was positively insulting. To spare himself the sight he withdrew into his kitchen. As he opened the door the shop filled with the delicate aromas of his trade. The scent of sugary cakes and cream buns, Gina’s entire childhood paradise of happiness and laughter, became forever fused with the moment when her father sat down beside her and told her, very quietly: “My girl, you cannot leave the school, now or at any time, for as long as the war goes on.”

  He spoke softly, and his tone was neutral, matter-of-fact, the way it was when he talked to her about her late mother. Now she was really frightened. Her father loved her more than anyone, and if he was not going to take her home, knowing as he did how very unhappy she was in her imposed silence and rejection, and after hearing that she had already tried to run away and was prepared to do so again, then he must be about to tell her something she could never have imagined. It was like pronouncing a life sentence on a completely innocent person. There was no point in saying anything. She knew his decision was final, and that no floods of tears would ever change it.

  “People’s lives depend on what I am about to tell you. I never wanted you to know this, not because I didn’t trust you but because I didn’t want to frighten you, or heap worries on your head that you might be too young to bear. But I can’t leave you here again without an explanation. If I did that you might try to run away again, or begin to lose your trust in me and in the love that binds us together. So I shall tell you, but there will be a price. From this moment onwards, Gina, your childhood is over. You are now an adult, and you will never again live as other children do. I am going to place my life, and yours, and that of many other people, in your hands. What can you swear on that you will never betray us?”

  Again she leaned back in her chair, but she continued to return his gaze. Now they were both deathly pale, and the General felt his daughter’s fingers grow cold in his hand. Susanna’s reproachful voice was echoing in her ear: “You must never swear an oath: thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” But the Matula and all its precepts seemed light years away.

  What will she say? he wondered. She is barely fifteen years old. What will her response be? Will she even answer me?

  “On your life,” she said. “I love you more than anyone in the world, and I have no mother—you have been all the mother I have. I swear on your life.”

  So she had understood. The color returned to his face. He was over the first hurdle.

  “Gina, we have lost the war. In truth it was lost from the start. Its aims were always bad, and so has been the way it has been conducted. We have lost so many lives now that God knows when the country will recover, and we are not yet at the end of it. There is nothing left but to try and save as many people—the people in our towns and cities and the soldiers on the front—as can be saved, before the Germans invade and occupy the country. Those of us who know this also know what must be done. We are trying to put an end to the war. If we succeed, countless people will live. Budapest and the other cities, and what is left of the army will be spared. If we don’t succeed, then the loss of human life and the general destruction will continue, and I will be caught up in it, and so will my colleagues.”

  She could no longer see his face directly. He had turned to look at the window, at Mr. Hajda’s large glass bay window with its pretty lace curtains that brought memories of peacetime and happiness and families sitting eating ice cream. But he knew she was watching him, and looking at him in a way that she had never done before.

  “There is an active resistance in the country, involving both soldiers and civilians. I am one of the officers who organized the military side. If we fail, or if I personally make a mistake, I will be arrested and they will come for you. I am like any other man who fears for his child, and if, in order to blackmail me, they arrest you and torture you in my presence, I might not be strong enough to stay silent: all I will care about is that they let you go. I cannot take the risk of your becoming an instrument in the hands of our enemies. We cannot let ourselves get into the position where they try to make me forfeit my honor by means of you, or, if I do stay silent, they kill you. You would have become the sacrifice I would have to make to stay true to my oath.”

  She opened her mouth as if about to reply, then said nothing. She
continued to grip her father’s hand, but it was now the grip of a comrade in arms, brave and comforting. It was what he had hoped for, and it gave him strength.

  “Mimó is incapable of seriousness. There are always people in her house, and if anyone came after me that is where they would find you. They would use trickery. They might lure you out into one of the streets on the basis of some lie or false information, a bogus telephone call, or they could ambush you anywhere in the city. I spent months looking for a place that would be as impenetrable as a prison before I found the Matula. The reason why I don’t write to you there, and why you don’t write to me from there, is that no one at home must ever know that you are in Árkod. Every Saturday I telephone you from a different town. I go to the post office in mufti to ask for the number, and when I am put through I never give my name. All I say is that I want to speak to Gina. Here, you are never allowed out of the school without an escort and no one can get inside. As long as the war carries on, and until I can at last take you home, this is the only place in the country where you will be safe. The other day you tried to run away. If you had succeeded, and if, once you were back home, you had complained to anyone about the way things were in the Matula, I would never have been able to bring you back here because the secret would be out. If the worst then happened, and I came under suspicion, perhaps a couple of months later you would be taken hostage and the only way I could save your life would be to forfeit my honor. Is that what you want?”