TE23 Double Feature

The Hangman’s House

Andrea Tompa

any kind of mark this term, the total will be put in altogether, she lied innocently at home, It wasn’t like that in my time, her mother accepted it, she’d originally been a Maths teacher, but she was confident that if there was going to be any serious trouble the girl would say, and Granny asked in surprise at eleven in the morning how come there was no school that day, well, there wasn’t, it was cold and they couldn’t heat the school, or the rest had gone off on community work and she’d been excused because she’d got a temperature, Then let me see that so-called temperature, and that was why she’d drunk two elderflower teas in the Plafar in deák Ferenc utca, the pleasant-smelling herbalist, 1 lei 50 with sugar, 1 lei if she didn’t take sugar, but she always did, she told Grandmother, and Granny didn’t ask any questions because she had a vague idea that there must have been something the matter with the number, it had to be sewn on as firmly as Auntie Lili’s family’s six-pointed stars which she’d cut out of an 348

old quilt for the Salamon girls, and in the morning she’d asked for a safety pin for the number but she wouldn’t let her have one, You’ve already taken all my safety pins and shed them, Granny had grumbled and fished out some rusty thing, or she must have upset the teachers with the thick, curly hair that she’d inherited from her, because she wasn’t prepared to wear it in a plait or a ponytail, nor would she let her mother brush it properly, and she’d gone out, after much anxious pleading, with her hair just as she’d got out of bed; Granny had shouted at her for ten minutes at the bottom of the stairs, and finally Grandfather had gone up to the attic, but now this number 71 had almost gone through the gate beside the biology teacher of average build, redolent of aftershave and cigarettes, as he stood with unwavering gaze directed not at her but at her uniform, and suddenly sprang upon her and seized her arm so that she cried out, because in fact no rule prescribed how long the man-made fibre uniform dress 349