Skylark

by Dezso Kosztolányi

  The judge was a very melancholy man, and not without good reason. His wife betrayed him left and right, quite openly, with actors, articled clerks and even older grammar-school boys. It was said she'd had separate door keys made for her lovers, who would visit her whenever her husband was not at home. Doba for his part knew nothing, absolutely nothing–or at least didn't show it. In court he would excel himself in the execution of his lofty office, impartially administering justice to others. But at the end of the day he'd sit in the Széchenyi Café with his wife and her circle, light up a Virginia and keep silence. Now he was silent too.

  Leaning out of the club box sat Feri Füzes and Galló with a host of aldermen and other town dignitaries, who made up the membership of the Theatre Committee. They all suddenly rose to their feet. Gyalokay had arrived, the new Lord Lieutenant of Prime Minister Kálmán Széll.

  Gyalokay really did appear to be the “agile” figure who was often described in the Sárszeg Gazette. He had nimble quicksilver movements and a bushy, chaotically upward-shooting moustache which was so dense one could have been forgiven for imagining the Lord Lieutenant had inadvertently left his whisker brush in its midst–two thick whisker brushes poking up from the two separate stems of his moustache. He simply couldn't stop fidgeting, waving and bowing, springing up from his seat every other minute as if it had turned to hot coals beneath him. He reminded one of some feverish, restless rodent–of an otter, above all.

  He had hardly finished with the gentlemen in the club box when he turned to nod a greeting to the Vajkays, at which Ákos emerged from the shadows and gave a deep bow. The audience switched their opera glasses between Vajkay and the Lord Lieutenant. Fortunately they were soon forced to conclude their alternating inspection, for the conductor tapped his baton and the orchestra launched into the overture.

  Many were already familiar with the pleasing melodies of The Geisha. There were some, the Priboczay girls for example, who had already seen the whole performance several times and knew the songs by heart. Indeed, all four girls had learned to play them on the piano. For Ákos, on the other hand, everything was strange and new. Not only the audience, but the illuminated stage front and even the curtain with its embroidered mask from whose open mouth a quill protruded like a lolling tongue.

  As the curtain rose, his eyes and mouth gaped open. He leaned forward to focus all his attention on the stage. The fantasy world of eastern legend came to life before him. Flashes of yellow, red, green and lilac; colours merging with movements, sounds and words, new and unfamiliar sensations fusing with ancient, half-forgotten reveries.

  It was all quite dazzling.

  The façade of a Japanese tearoom, lanterns swaying against the indigo sky backdrop, and the tiny tearoom girls, the geishas singing in splendid unison.

  His ears were struck by snatches of words:

  Happy Japan,

  Garden of glitter!

  Flower and fan

  Flutter and flitter...

  Merry little geishas we!

  Come along at once and see

  Ample entertainment free,

  Given as you take your tea.

  “Japan,” he whispered to his wife.

  “Yes, Japan. Japan.”

  They could not entirely follow the performance. The events that passed on stage, the various happenings in time and space, became jumbled before them into a decorative skein whose strands and fibres they were unable to unravel at once. The woman ran her finger down the programme, reading the names of the chorus girls–names like Márta Virág, Anny Joó, Teréz Feledy, Lenke Labancz.

  Singing could now also be heard from the wings, still to the tune of the ensemble. The audience listened to the invisible singer who made a sudden and sonorous entrance on stage, at which the auditorium erupted in applause. A huge bouquet was handed up from the orchestra, which the new arrival, the leading geisha, swept up to stage level with a bow, then set to one side. She was Olga Orosz, the prima donna, the infamous, the celebrated, the fascinating star of the theatre about whom there was always so much gossip.

  Ákos asked his wife for the opera glasses. The prima donna soon fitted into the two swollen crystal circles of the lenses.

  She was playing Mimosa, the leading singer of the tearoom, who was, like all the other girls, in the business of love. This, according to the Japanese custom, was not to be seen as something degrading: she earned an honest living through the sale of her body. She was dressed in a full and flowery kimono with white silk slippers. She wore her hair Mimosa-style, with carnations gracefully pinned on either side. Under the dark vault of her eyebrows, her almond eyes flickered hesitantly up at Ákos.

  In the strange stage lighting, it was, even with the aid of opera glasses, quite impossible to tell whether her eyes were black or blue. At times they really did appear jet black, then blue again, but for the most part they were somewhere between the two, sparkling in flashes of violet light. She may even have been a touch cross-eyed. If so, this suited her all the more.

  And her expression was intriguing, too. She appeared to look into everybody's eyes at once, addressing herself to each gaze individually, trying to bewitch each one with the same empty, superficial charm. To say she had a beautiful voice would be to go too far. Her voice was muted, faint, veiled. When she switched to ordinary speech she let out a husky giggle at the end of every phrase. They said she was a heavy smoker and drank too much, which would explain the hoarseness.

  Ákos was not interested in the plot, having little time for stories forged by the imagination. As a heraldist, a scholar of blazonry, he insisted on historical veracity. He didn't consider novels and plays as things to be taken “seriously.” He wouldn't even look at a work on which imagination had left its magic mark. In his younger days he had attempted one or two, but had soon wearied of them. Whenever books were discussed in company, he'd always remark that he only read “as much as the exigencies of his vocation would allow.” As the “exigencies of his vocation” allowed very little, he read nothing at all.

  He did once take a careful look at Smith's book on character. This he praised highly and for a long time recommended to his friends. As a rule he preferred stimulating, edifying books which elucidated some moral truth or the interconnections between otherwise meaningless or incomprehensible facts. Truths like “hard work is always rewarded” or “evil never goes unpunished”; books that rock one in the lap of the comforting illusion that no one suffers undeservingly in this world, nor dies of stomach cancer without due cause. But where were the interconnections here?

  Reginald Fairfax, the English sea captain played by a tall and slender young actor, kissed Mimosa full on the mouth.

  The woman offered no resistance. Divesting herself of all the nobility of her sex, she herself offered the European stranger her lips and proceeded to instruct him in the art of love.

  Mimosa would not let go of the youth, holding him in a brazen embrace. This woman knew no shame at all. The two mouths remained glued together for some time, devouring each other, tearing at each other, drinking in delight, refusing to break asunder. The smouldering embrace grew still more passionate, while the good citizens of Sárszeg waited breathlessly for what should follow, their eyes riveted to the couple, watching, learning, like children at school, thinking of how they too, in similar circumstances, would do exactly the same.

  The glasses brought this image so close to Ákos that for a moment he shrank back.

  He put the glasses down disapprovingly, frowned, then glanced at his wife as if to ask what she thought of this unsightly scene.

  The woman said nothing. She had long held a rather damning opinion of actors. She often spoke of Etel Pifkó, an ancient local actress who had poisoned herself while pregnant and whose grave lay beyond the walls of Sárszeg cemetery because she had not been buried in consecrated ground and hadn't enjoyed the Church's final blessing.

  Wun-Hi lightened the couple's spirits. This pigtailed Chinaman, owner of the Tea House of Ten Thousand Joy
s, went dashing busily to and fro. His powers of invention knew no bounds.

  “You know who that is, don't you?” whispered Ákos.

  “Who?'

  “Szolyvay.”

  “Never!'

  “Look at the programme.”

  “Goodness, I'd never have recognised him. What an excellent disguise!'

  “And the voice too, the voice. Just listen to it. Totally unrecognisable.”

  Szolyvay lisped and hawked and bleated. After his every prank the Vajkays looked at each other, their smiles spreading wider each time.

  When Marquis Imari appeared beneath a red parasol, threatening to put Wun-Hi's tearoom up for auction, the panic-stricken Chinaman immediately threw himself at the marquis's feet. The whole theatre erupted in a roar of laughter. Ákos and his wife laughed too.

  They laughed so much that they didn't hear a knock at the door behind them. Környey came into their box; the first act was nearly over.

  “Well,” he inquired, “enjoying yourselves?'

  “Tremendously,” the woman replied.

  “Amusing stuff and nonsense,” said Ákos, tempering his response. “Entertaining, at any rate.”

  “Just you wait; the best is still to come.”

  Környey, true theatre buff that he was, only used his opera glasses to observe the audience.

  “Look up there,” he said.

  He pointed to a box in the upper circle where Imre Zányi sat in the company of a shady-looking woman with straw-blonde hair.

  “He sits there every evening,” said the commander in chief pointing up at Zányi. “But only when she's playing. The great she, Olga Orosz. He's madly in love with her, you know. Has been for two years.”

  Ákos focused his opera glasses alternately on Zányi and Olga Orosz. His eyes couldn't seem to get enough of them.

  During the interval Környey entertained Mrs Vajkay with local gossip, while Ákos, in his serious frock coat, neatly combed hair and waxed moustache, made an appearance in the club box before the gentlemen of Sárszeg. He paid his respects to the Lord Lieutenant, who received him very warmly, his light, fidgety body leaping out from, and back into, his seat in a flash. He immediately invited Ákos to join him for lunch the following day, when the Budapest commissioner would also be present. Then they began to discourse on the proper conduct of elections, so freely and in such depth that they failed to notice that the second act had already begun. This Ákos watched in their company from beginning to end.

  Miklós Ijas arrived halfway through the act, having only just completed his editorial duties. He sat down in the seat permanently reserved for the Sárszeg Gazette. As always, he didn't cast a single glance at the stage. He rested his head on the back of the seat before him in a gesture that seemed to say: rubbish. He was never satisfied with the performance, yet never missed a single one. He was especially critical of Szolyvay, of whom he'd recently written: “He plays to the gallery and his Wun-Hi is an altogether scandalous example of provincial histrionics, totally lacking in either character or conscience, which would be summarily dismissed by any self-respecting audience in Pest.”

  This judgement, which caused no small stir, was considered too harsh by many and entirely unjust by others, including Szolyvay himself, who, after a few days’ contemplation, reverted to his tried and tested theatrical antics which never failed to bring irresistible hoots of laughter from his audience. The editor pursed his lips in vexation.

  Ijas only raised his head when Margit Lator came on stage, playing the part of Miss Molly Seamore. She was, in his eyes, a genuine actress, and in his reviews he praised her refreshing ingenuity, rated her vocal range superior to that of Olga Orosz, compared her to the legendary Klára Küry, and repeatedly insisted that she belonged on the Budapest stage. Some said that all the poems he published in the Sárszeg Gazette were dedicated to her.

  At the end of the second act, Környey went over to the club box and took Ákos down to the courtyard to smoke a cigarette.

  They groped and zigzagged their way through dimly lit archways until they reached the first floor of the inn, with its red marble stairway whose wide steps Ákos had once climbed with his wife and daughter to the ballroom above. The large mirror, before which women would make final adjustments to their coiffures before entering the ball, still stood between two cypress trees. But now the ballroom door was firmly locked. A cold, unfriendly twilight hung in the corridor. The chambermaid, a plump woman in white stockings and high-heeled patent-leather shoes, leaned on the banisters, rocking back and forth with a copper candlestick holder in her hand, making unmistakable gestures to the young men on the floor below. Something indecent was evidently afoot.

  They hurried past her down the steps and out through a little door into the theatre courtyard. Here they lit up.

  Acetylene lamps illuminated the canvas backs of the stage sets with a garish glow. Seedy youths took down the lanterns which had been used on stage and carried them to the props cupboard. In the middle of the courtyard, beneath a large sycamore, sat Szolyvay at a one-time restaurant table drinking a spritzer.

  “You were splendid,” said Környey, complimenting him.

  “Splendid,” Ákos echoed, “absolutely splendid.” And he chuckled.

  He wrung his hands continually as he stood gazing at the actor, chuckling. A devil of a fellow, this Szolyvay. Szolyvay, yet not Szolyvay. The pigtail was still swinging from his bare head and beads of perspiration rolled across his thick make-up. Ákos could not contain his laughter.

  Szolyvay was preoccupied with graver matters, deep in conversation with the group that surrounded him concerning the latest developments in the old affair between Olga Orosz and Imre Zányi.

  Dr Gál was also present, as the theatre's in-house physician, together with several members of the Theatre Committee and other insiders and friends of the performers. Among them stood Papa Fehér, manager of the Agricultural Bank. For want of anyone better, he had his arms around an anonymous-looking geisha girl with large dark-blue shadows on her eyelids.

  “It was a frightful scandal,” said the comedian, picking up where he had left off. “Last night we began Act Three of The Cardinal half an hour late. The audience didn't know what had happened, but it was that madman Zányi. After the second act, he'd set off into town just as he was, in a purple robe and golden chain, and burst into Olga Orosz's flat in Bólyai Street. Seized by a sudden fit of jealousy, he smashed one of her windows, made an almighty racket and came back with a bloody fist. They saw him from the window of the Széchenyi too, pulling his purple cardinal's robe up round his knees as he ran back to the theatre. It was quite a scene, I can tell you. It'll cost him a month's pay.” The others were dumbstruck and pressed for further details.

  “Olga will have nothing more to do with him,” Szolyvay continued. “She's getting married. They say Dani Kárász has asked for her hand.”

  So Dani Kárász, the son of the wealthy landowner István Kárász, was going to marry an actress. This excited them. They were hungry for more, but the comedian threw down his cigarette when he saw Miklós Ijas coming towards them from Margit Lator's dresser. They hadn't spoken since the appearance of his review. With all the dignity of a mandarin, Szolyvay withdrew.

  Környey caught Ijas by the arm and introduced him to Ákos.

  “I don't believe you've met,” he said. “Ákos Vajkay; Editor Ijas.”

  Ijas pouted. He objected to being addressed in this fashion.

  He bowed and raised his hat to Ákos.

  “How do you do,” said Ákos.

  “How do you do,” said Ijas.

  They walked as far as the patisserie together, sizing each other up, but without uttering a word. There they parted.

  Ákos bought a box of chocolates wrapped in gold ribbon and took it up to his wife's box.

  His head was swimming from all he had seen and heard. He hadn't really understood it all, there was simply too much to take in. He gazed bemused into thin air, and was relieved whe
n the curtain rose and he could sink back into the artificial, but at least more transparent, spectacle of the play.

  The geishas, now dressed as bridesmaids, celebrated with song and dance Marquis Imari's wedding day, among them the girl whom Papa Fehér had been holding in his arms. All the little misses, fair and dark, fat and thin, turned their pretty snouts towards the gorgeous spectacle.

  Among them, commanding centre stage, stood Olga Orosz, soaring from triumph to triumph. All the action on stage seemed to revolve about her. She was the focus of every word and every gaze. And what a beautiful creature she was, too, what a wicked, godless little kitten! She wasn't even young any more. Past thirty, for sure, perhaps even over thirty-five. But her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if ten-derised by all the different beds and arms in which it had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flesh of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.

  She hardly sang at all, only trilled and screeched the notes of some haphazard scale. But the audience were riveted. They would have thrown their very souls at her feet.

  Is there no justice? Upon the head of this abomination, this lecherous, almost biblical fornicator, surely sulphurous rains should fall? Instead she was swamped with flowers. Everyone knew all the details of her immoral existence and that her very soul was up for sale. They knew she belonged to the dregs of society, a filthy rag not even fit to wipe one's boots on. But what did they care? They worshipped her, idolised her, prized her above gentleness and kindness, she who was worthy neither of love nor respect, who scoffed at all things beautiful and sublime. No justice, no justice!

  Pressing his opera glasses to his eyes, Ákos wondered what he would do if he ever met her. Turn away perhaps, or measure her with a scathing stare, or simply spit on the ground in front of her?