Skylark

by Dezso Kosztolányi

  Skylark was in fine spirits, witty and jovial.

  “My dear parents aren't even pleased to see me. Well, well, they don't even recognise their own daughter.”

  “Of course we do,” said Mother. “It's just that hat.”

  “Doesn't it suit me?'

  “Yes. Only it's so unfamiliar.”

  “It's a bit on the tight side. It flattens my hair,” she said, straightening her hair with her free hand. “It's from Aunt Etelka. The cape too. So that I shouldn't get drenched.”

  “It's a lovely cape.”

  “Isn't it just?'

  “Yes. Only it makes you different. So interesting. So independent.”

  “Aunt Etelka said so, too.”

  “And this?'

  “Oh, yes. The cage.”

  “What is it?'

  “A pigeon.”

  They reached the exit. Skylark again raised the cage to her heart and, while Ákos handed her ticket to the inspector, who was more than ready to go home, she coddled and cossetted her darling bird.

  “Tubi. He's called Tubica. I won't let anyone take my Tubica. I'm taking my Tubica home myself.”

  Outside the station, Father wanted to flag down a hackney carriage. But Skylark caught his arm and wouldn't let him. The unnecessary expense. Besides, the walk would do them good after so much sitting. The porter could carry the luggage.

  Ákos gave the man the umbrella. From beneath his heavy load, the porter kept peering back to see how far they had fallen behind.

  It was no longer raining and the wind had died down. Only occasional drops shuddered down from the branches of the acacias by the side of the road.

  They ambled slowly on between rows of poplars.

  Skylark walked in the middle, Mother and Father on either side. Father carried the flask, in which water still slopped to and fro, and the white striped woollen blanket. He gazed at the ground, lost in thought, and didn't hear a word his wife and daughter said. Again he tugged nervously at his left shoulder, carrying his invisible burden, of which he had spoken for the first time the day before. His face was affable, all the same, and he was visibly pleased by the reunion.

  “So, what news?” Skylark asked her mother.

  “Oh, nothing really. We were waiting for you, that's all. We missed you very much.”

  They arrived at Széchenyi Square, whose usually dusty air had been swept clean by the rain. The houses stood side by side in speechless rows, curtains drawn, shutters and windows closed, looking more dwarfish than ever in the dwarfish night.

  By now everyone was fast asleep. Bálint Környey slept, Priboczay slept, along with his plump wife and four exuberant rosebud daughters; Szunyogh slept, as did Mályvády, Zányi and Szolyvay; Judge Doba slept, in silence beside his lean, dark, wicked wife; Feri Füzes slept, still the perfect gentleman, smiling sweetly in his dreams, and all the other Panthers and good citizens of Sárszeg slept, including Mr Weisz, in a comfortable brass bed, and perhaps his partner too, albeit in a rather less comfortable brass bed, to be sure.

  The Gentlemen's Club, whose first-floor windows would otherwise glow like banners of fire throughout the Sárszeg night, stood in mourning after the exploits of a Thursday night. Only from one window came a pale glimmer of light.

  Here Sárcsevits, Sárszeg's guardian spirit, kept vigil beside an electric light, reading Le Figaro and advancing with the cultivated West, the enlightened peoples of Europe, on the relentless road to progress.

  And someone else was still awake, too: Miklós Ijas, assistant editor of the Sárszeg Gazette.

  After the theatre he had accompanied Margit Lator to her door, the actress to whom he was bound by such ephemeral ties as may properly bind a young, provincial poet to his muse. Sometimes he'd rest his head in her lap as she showered his chestnut mane with kisses before turning to his brow and lips. Now they had just had tea in the “mystical half-light” cast by the little blue lamp in the soubrette's single room, which she rented for five forints a month. Both of them dreamed endlessly of Budapest, and this drew them together. On such evenings as these, Ijas would rehearse the material of his reviews, praising Margit Lator's outstanding vocal range and maligning Olga Orosz. The woman–who, incidentally, was Papa Fehér's mistress, or rather the mistress of the Sárszeg Agricultural Bank–for her part listened patiently to Ijas's unpublished poems, which would remain in manuscript for many years to come. In a word, she appreciated him.

  After this session, Ijas called in at the Széchenyi Café, where, since there was no music tonight, they were already putting out the lamps. He sat down at one of the dimly lit marble tables near the counter. As usual he ordered rum with his black coffee and smoked one cigarette after another. From the waiter's hand he snatched the latest number of József Kiss's fashionable literary journal, The Week, and thumbed it from cover to cover in search of the poem he had sent in months before, but always sought in vain. In his mind he dramatised this minor literary disappointment into a more general and deeply rooted fin-de-siècle melancholy, and, with an expression that said as much, he gazed out on the street. It was then he saw the Vajkays strolling past in a threesome, the station porter struggling on ahead.

  He rose slowly and, carefully avoiding being seen, watched them with a knitted, darkening brow from behind the liqueur bottles on the counter. He even stooped a little to follow them with his gaze until they finally disappeared from view. At once he took out his notebook. Without returning to his seat, he scribbled something down, something important that he should never allow himself to forget.

  “Poor Skylark with her parents walking after midnight. Széchenyi Street. Porter.”

  He put the notebook back into his pocket. But then he took it out again and stared long and hard at what he'd written, deep in thought.

  Snatching up his pencil again, he added three thick exclamation marks.

  The Vajkays were already passing the King of Hungary, from which the pungent smell of roast meat wafted. Skylark grimaced.

  “Ugh, that awful restaurant smell!'

  “We had our share of that,” said Mother with tactful contempt.

  “Poor things.”

  A horse and cart stood before the St Mary Pharmacy, a peasant with a large leather satchel sitting up on the box. He had driven in from his farm that afternoon to order some medication for his horse, and was waiting for the assistant pharmacist, who worked by candlelight, to finish mixing the three or four pounds of ointment in a marble mortar. Further on, the Baross Café tried in vain to attract the citizens of Sárszeg with its waterlogged, abandoned patio garden. János Csinos gave a first-rate rendition of the latest songs from The Geisha and Shulamit to empty tables and chairs.

  “Did you have rain too?” asked Mother.

  “Only this afternoon. The morning was lovely. We walked over to the church in Tarkő. For Mass.”

  “Is today a high day?'

  “Yes,” said Skylark, “the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.”

  On the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin the swallows gather and fly to warmer climes, to Africa. All that follows then is an indian summer.

  They had reached the park. Their steps echoed on the asphalt. They looked through the fence.

  In the middle of the lawn, dying roses with burnt-out pistils collapsed against whitewashed posts decorated with glass balls. A light breeze scurried down the dark pathways, rattling the odd dry leaf as it passed. The benches, among them the one on which Ákos had sunned himself that Tuesday afternoon, now dripped with moisture. The lawn was turning bald. The park was deserted. Only a policeman paced up and down before the fence, greeting Ákos with a stiff salute. It was the dead of night.

  Ákos gathered his nut-brown coat about him, feeling the cold. He could hear something rustle overhead, way up above in the sky.

  That's the autumn, he thought to himself.

  How suddenly it had arrived! Without majesty, calamity or ceremony; without carpets of golden leaves or wreaths of mellow fruit. A small, quiet aut
umn; an insiduous, tenebrous Sárszeg autumn.

  It crouched darkly in motionless bushes, above the trees, on the rooftops. At the other end of town a train whistled, then whistled no more. A desolate boredom settled over everything. The warm days were over.

  And that was all.

  “There could still be some good weather to come.”

  “Maybe,” said Mother.

  “Maybe,” repeated Father.

  At the corner of Petőfi Street they quickened their step, anxious to reach the house. Skylark had found it hard to get used to life on the plain, and not a day had passed without her longing to be home again. And now she was glad to be back in the town, which, with all its comforts, allowed people to forget so much, and held a promise of real solitude to those who had to be alone.

  She could hardly wait to walk through the front door.

  XIII

  in which, on the eighth of September 1899, the novel is concluded, without coming to an end

  Inside, Mother clasped her daughter in a passionate embrace.

  “And now,” she said, “I'm going to kiss my little girl to smithereens.”

  Slip-slap-slop smacked the kisses.

  “Stand over here,” Mother commanded, with a certain old-womanly, almost military authority. “Stand up straight. Let's have a good look at you. Why, you're in excellent colour.”

  Skylark took off her rain hat and waterproof cape.

  She had indeed put on weight from all the milk, sour cream and butter. Her mouth smelled of milk, her hair of sour cream, her clothes of butter.

  But the extra pounds did nothing to enhance her appearance. She had spots on her nose, thick rolls of flesh on her bosom, and her neck seemed longer and thinner than ever.

  “Welcome home, my girl,” said Father, who liked to do these things properly, and had waited for Skylark to sit herself down comfortably before greeting her thus. “Thank heavens you're back.”

  He too kissed her on both cheeks.

  Clip-clap-clop clattered still more kisses.

  “Oh!” cried Skylark. “I left it outside.”

  “What?'

  She came back in with the cage.

  “Look, isn't he sweet? Tubi. Tubica. My dear little Tubica. Isn't he a darling?'

  Seeing the electric light, the pigeon began scratching with its twisted, sooty feet, turning its stupid, harmless head and blinking at its new mistress with black peppercorn eyes.

  “He's quite tame,” said Skylark, opening the door of the cage. “He'll sit on my shoulder. He always does.”

  It wasn't a pretty pigeon. It was a tatty, dishevelled little bird.

  “And I've got some wheat grain for you, haven't I? Where are my bags?'

  Father opened the brown canvas suitcase and the wicker basket into which Skylark had packed everything so neatly, just as he had done a week before: toothbrush and comb in the same tissue paper, shoes in the same newspaper. It was from him she had inherited her love of order.

  The tiny grains of wheat lay shrivelled at the bottom of a newspaper funnel fashioned from a page of the Sárszeg Gazette. It was the front page of the Sunday edition, and there in the middle was Miklós Ijas's poem. They fed the pigeon for some minutes, before transporting him in his wire prison to Skylark's table.

  “And that's not all I've brought,” said Skylark.

  The relations had sent two jars of raspberry jam, two bottles of greengage compote, a whole pork brawn and a splendid cake, in the baking of which Skylark and Aunt Etelka had quite excelled themselves.

  It was a coffee-cream sponge, the type they always called “family,” or “Bozsó,” cake. It had been crushed a little by the clothes during the journey, and the filling had oozed out at the sides and smeared the paper. They all observed it for some time, shaking their heads in regret. But they managed to scrape the filling off with a knife, and it was really rather good eaten like that.

  While unpacking, Skylark fished out a photograph from between her blouses.

  “Guess who!” she said with a giggle, handing it to her mother.

  It had been taken by Uncle Béla, who was a keen amateur photographer. Everyone was on it, including Tiger, who sat there proud and stately like a true gun dog, dangling her mammiferous belly, which was so full of gunshot from all the years of hunting that it rattled. So much so, indeed, that Uncle Béla would often wittily remark that Tiger was a veritable dog of iron.

  It was a proper group portrait, comprising all the summer guests at Tarkő.

  In the foreground, arm in arm, stood the two corsetless Thurzó girls, Zelma and Klári, with hairstyles à la Secession and tennis rackets in their hands. Beside Zelma stood a polished but rather irresolute-looking Feri Olcsvay, who, poor fellow, still didn't know whether he belonged to the Kisvárad or Nagyvárad branch of his family.

  Next to Klári knelt cousin Berci on one knee in a mock-heroic lover's pose, leaving a visible snigger on the faces of the two girls, who were hardly able to suppress their giggles.

  In the background, also arm in arm, stood Skylark and Aunt Etelka.

  “It's a very good photograph,” said Mother. “Those must be the Thurzó girls.”

  “Yes.”

  “The big one doesn't look very nice. The little one's a bonny creature, but her face is so expressionless.”

  Ákos asked to see the photograph. He only looked at his daughter.

  She stood by the door of the barn, which was propped open by a wooden rake. With one arm clinging to Aunt Etelka and the other planted against the wall of the barn, she appeared to be reaching out for protection from something that frightened her. She seemed so alone among the others, even among her relatives, her own flesh and blood. Only this gesture of hers was visible, this gesture of desperate escape, which was, in its own way, quite beautiful. Otherwise her face could hardly be seen, for, as always, she hung her head and showed the camera only her hair.

  “Well, what do you think?'

  “You look nice,” Father replied. “Splendid.”

  Skylark had finished hanging her clothes in the wardrobe and was just shutting the door when she suddenly said:

  “Oh yes, did you get my letter?'

  “Indeed we did,” said Father, quick to reassure her.

  “Was it frightfully painful, my poor dear, that beastly tooth of yours?” asked Mother.

  “Of course not. It went away in no time. It was nothing.”

  “Which one was it?'

  “This one.”

  Skylark stood beneath the chandelier, her mouth wide open so that her mother could see, obligingly thrusting her forefinger deep inside to point out a decayed, brown tooth, half of which was missing. The other teeth at the front were like tiny grains of rice, set a little far apart, but white and whole.

  “Dear me,” said her mother, stretching up on tiptoe, for her daughter was a good deal taller than she. “You'll have to see the dentist. You can't leave it like that.”

  Ákos didn't look.

  He couldn't bear to witness any form of physical suffering, illness or wound.

  He only stared at his daughter's face as she opened her mouth. And there, in the electric lamplight, beneath the chandelier, he could see, still more clearly than when she had gone away a week before, that a soft but indelible ashen haze had descended over her skin, like a thin, hardly visible but none the less durable cobweb. It was age, indifferent and irreparable, which he had finally accepted on his daughter's behalf, and which no longer caused him any pain. As the three of them stood there together, they really did seem quite alike.

  “So, how is everyone?” asked Mother.

  “They're all very well, thank you.”

  “Aunt Etelka?'

  “She's fine.”

  “Uncle Béla?'

  “Likewise.”

  “So they're all well.”

  In Tarkő it had been exactly the same.

  “So, how is everyone?'

  “They're all very well, thank you.”

  “Yo
ur mother?'

  “She's fine.”

  “Your father?'

  “Likewise.”

  “So they're all well,” they had said.

  But Skylark made no mention of this. All she added was:

  “They send their kindest regards.”

  And, unbuttoning her blouse, she began to get ready for bed.

  “So you enjoyed yourself?'

  “Tremendously.”

  “I can't even begin to tell you tonight,” she added. “But tomorrow. I'll speak of nothing else all week.”

  “At least you had a good rest.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you?” Skylark began, raising her voice a little in mild self-reproach. “And you, my poor things? I can imagine how awful it must have been. The food at the King of Hungary.”

  “Awful,” Ákos replied with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “Actually,” said Mother, playfully affecting pride, “your father was wined and dined by the Lord Lieutenant.”

  “Really?'

  Skylark cast a penetrating glance at her father.

  “There's something not quite right about Father. Something I don't like. Come over here, my sweet. Let me have a good look at you.”

  Father went over to her obediently. He didn't dare look his daughter in the eyes. He was frightened.

  “How pale you are,” said Skylark, lowering her voice. “And how thin! Your little hands too, how thin they've grown!'

  Skylark placed her bony but none the less pleasantly feminine hands on her father's and stroked his aged wrists as if they were a child's. Then she kissed them tenderly.

  “Now you're in my hands,” she said in an almost manly voice. “Father dear, you have to put on weight. Do you understand? I'll cook for you.”

  “That's true,” Mother brooded. “What shall we cook tomorrow?'

  “Something light. I've had all I can take of fatty country cooking. A caraway soup, perhaps, and meat with rice. Perhaps a little semolina. And there's the cake, too.”