Abigail

by Magda Szabó

Life undoubtedly calls for dignity and self-discipline, and for a person to be able to react to things in an adult way it was necessary to distinguish between what was merely unpleasant and what was truly bad, especially in wartime, when all over the world people were dying in their tens and hundreds of thousands. A badly cut lock of hair was an utterly trivial matter.

In passing over that threshold, Gina was entering her new world, the one that represented her new home, the one that would so totally transform her life: she was like a child being born, or a dying man exhaling his last breath.

They have swallowed me whole. I am no longer myself, she thought, and her breathing became a rapid pant. The prefect, knowing what this meant in a young girl, hurried to finish her task. And now they’ve taken even my hair. I have nothing left.

Later, many months later, she came to understand that this laconic remark was indeed the simplest and in fact the only possible way the Deaconess, who lived so close to her God, could have said: “I truly pity you, my child. It will be difficult for you here, and in my own way I shall do all I can to help you get used to it. But I don’t count for very much in this place. Someone more powerful than I must find a way. But fear not: find it she will.”

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?”

Things were calmer during evening prayers. The Chaplain was talking about the honor of being a Christian woman. His theme was that, “As the scented rose adorns the rose bush, so do the virtues of long-suffering, patience, gentleness and neighborly love adorn a Christian maiden.” All my life I have been a wild thing, Gina reflected. I am impatient and impulsive, and I have never learned to love people who annoy me or try to hurt me. Now I shall try to learn these virtues, and I shall do so for the sake of my father: for him I shall seek to be gentle and patient.

Gina had also learned how much more special something was if you had had to struggle to achieve it, and how much stronger you were if you faced life as a group, like mountaineers whose very lives depended on an invisible rope linking them together, sharing the same passions, the same hopes, the same waiting and worrying, and were ready to act as one to help any of your number who needed it.

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.

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.

But what about all those people whose papers are not in order, the ones Abigail is unable to help? And what exactly is that danger? She could not begin to imagine. She would of course learn later what she could not have known then, when the threat had merely advanced its shadow, that in just a few more months all hell would be unleashed against those affected by the Jewish Laws, and it would become clear that Abigail had indeed saved Krieger, Zelemér, Kun and Bánki, and their parents with them.