Magda opened her great brown eyes to the dazzling day. She glanced at the bedside clock: it was ten o’clock. She wondered for a moment whether she would get up and go to Mass, and then she turned over and went back to sleep again. I need it more, she said to herself, God knows.
Magda had an entirely satisfactory understanding with God: this understanding was the foundation of her success in the art of living. Stefan had an entirely satisfactory understanding with himself, with the same consequences. That Magda and Stefan had an entirely satisfactory understanding with each other was the consequence of numerous determinants, such as the fact that they had each survived hell.
When Magda awoke again it was to the sight of Stefan standing over her with the coffee pot and a large cup and saucer.
“It occurs to me,” said he, “that if I awaken you now—it is eleven a.m. by the way—you will have time to go to the Mass at midday. Should you so wish.”
“A-a-a-h,” Magda sighed, and stretched. “First give me the coffee. Then I shall address the question.”
She sat up, in a heave of white arms and satin nightdress, and Stefan poured out her coffee.
“I will fetch my own,” he said, leaving the room.
Magda considered the day ahead. It would be pleasant to do nothing, and then to walk in a park, and to eat dinner in a restaurant with some friends. Stefan re-entered the room.
“I will not go to Mass today,” Magda told him.
“The Pope himself would excuse you,” said Stefan.
“Do not speak so of His Holiness,” said Magda sternly.
Magda was Slovene and Stefan Hungarian; as Displaced Persons they had been given entry after the end of the war to the Commonwealth of Australia, and it was in a migrant camp outside Sydney that they had first laid eyes on each other. They had begun their life’s conversation in French and, as the efficient instruction provided by the Federal Government progressed, had switched over to English. Within a year of their arrival in Australia they were both fluent, however idiosyncratic, English-speakers and they then began also to read voraciously. Soon Stefan was branching into the classics, but here Magda could but barely follow him.
“I cannot get along with this Shakespeare,” she said. “This Hamlet prince, for example: he is not to me the stuff of heroes.”
Their common language soon came to contain various old-fashioned locutions which, transferred from the pages of such as Hardy and Dickens, had found their way eventually via Stefan’s into Magda’s discourse, and even sometimes into that of their many Hungarian friends who in Magda’s presence at least spoke English habitually. They all agreed sardonically that although the war—and more recently the revolution—and their own consequent fortunes had been a heavy price to pay for the privilege, they were and would remain grateful for the acquisition of “this wonderful language” and they were still liable to laugh delightedly at a newly discovered idiom. “A pig in a poke!” they might exclaim; and they would shout with pleasure, the way their Magyar ancestors might have done as they rode their swift horses across the vast and fertile Hungarian plain.