Skylark (19 page)

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 autumn; 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.”

“Your 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.”

“And then there's washing day to think of,” Mother mumbled. “Next week.”

Father said good night and withdrew into his bedroom, shutting behind him the door that separated it from his daughter's room. He could hear Mother discussing all the niggling details of housekeeping with his daughter, who was already in bed. Then the conversation turned to the washerwoman and Biri Szilkuthy, who had split up with her husband.

Ákos lit the nightlight. But as its feeble glow flickered across the tray on which it stood, he suddenly turned pale and shrank back as if he had seen a ghost.

There on the edge of the tray lay a slip of paper that somehow had not been hidden away in the confusion. It was the torn, pink stub of a theatre ticket for a two-seater box in the stalls, which they had brought home by mistake and kept.

He glanced towards the door, then, after crumpling the incriminating document in the palm of his hand, tore it into tiny pieces. He went over to the white tiled stove and scattered the pieces inside. When they lit the stove for the first time–in the autumn, at the end of September or the beginning of October–it would burn to a crisp along with all the twigs and logs and other lumber they had been throwing inside all summer long.

Then he got undressed. Mother came in too, on tiptoe, quietly closing the door that separated them from Skylark.

They spoke in whispers.

“Well, have you calmed down at last?” said Mother to Father, who lay flat as a board in bed, his head on a low pillow.

“Is she asleep?'

“Yes.”

“Poor thing. The journey tired her out.”

Mother looked at her daughter's bedroom door. Her woman's heart knew all too well that her daughter wasn't sleeping.

Skylark had just switched off the electric lamp and now lay in complete darkness. She breathed a deep sigh, as she often did, many times a day, and shut her eyes. It was the end, she felt, the end of everything.

Nothing had happened, once again, nothing. As always she had only lied and smiled and tried to please everyone. But during her week away, far from her parents, something had changed inside her, something she only became aware of now that she no longer saw the folk of Tarkő before her, nor heard the rattle of the train.

“I,” she began in her thoughts, as we all do when thinking of ourselves.

But this I was her, something, someone whose life she really lived. She was this I, in body and in soul, one with its very flesh, its memories, its past, present and future, all of which we seal into a single destiny each time we face ourselves and utter that tiny, unalterable word: “I.”

Uncle Béla and Aunt Etelka had indeed received her warmly, but she had soon discovered that her presence was superfluous, a burden, and had tried to make herself scarce, to shrink to half her size. That was why she had even slept on the divan. But somehow it was all to no avail.

Whatever she did, whatever she said, she was always in the way–of the Thurzó girls, of Berci, and gradually, as she noticed one evening at supper, even Aunt Etelka began to find her tiresome.

They were all there in the photograph she had shown her parents.

Someone, however, had been absent.

It was Jóska Szabó, the bailiff, a coarse, squat widower in his mid-forties, who had a walrus moustache and came, at least in part, from peasant stock. On the first day he had spoken to her, had walked her home from the grange. But after that he had stayed away, avoiding her company, and whenever they came face to face, he'd cast his eyes to the ground.

Yes, even Jóska Szabó, with his three motherless children, two boys and a six-year-old daughter, Mancika, whom she so loved to sit on her knee and caress. On leaving, she had given the child a silver medallion and chain which had been a confirmation gift from Mrs Záhoczky. What a ridiculous, tactless thing to have done! The shame, the awful shame! She wouldn't say anything to her parents. No, she'd tell them she had lost it.

Her relatives had invited her back next year. She had promised to return. But no, she'd never go again. What was the point?

By then she'd be thirty-six years old. And in ten years’ time? Or twenty? Her father was fifty-nine, her mother fifty-seven. Ten years, maybe not even ten. Her parents would die. And what then, Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, what then?

Above her bed, like the plaster Jesus which hung above her parents’ bed, stood an image of the Virgin Mary, rocking her large, dead child on her knees and pointing to her heart, pierced by the seven daggers of maternal pain. In days long since gone by she had listened to Skylark's childish prayers, just as the prostrate Jesus heard those of her parents. For a second she flung out her arms towards the image in a gesture of passion which, however, she immediately suppressed. Patience. Patience. There are those who suffer so much more.

Her eyes still tightly shut, she lay on her cold and barren girlhood bed, where nothing, save sleep and illness, had ever happened. She pressed the full weight of her body downwards, like a corpse into its bier. The bed was softer and wider than the divan at Tarkő, and she could spread out more comfortably, soberly reflecting on the daily round that now awaited her.

The following morning she'd rise before seven and start cooking. Risotto, without pepper or other spices, and semolina so that her poor, dear father should put on weight. In the afternoon she'd go on crocheting the yellow tablecloth, which still wasn't finished, because her relatives had refused to let her work and she had succumbed to their persuasions. And then next week was washing day.