Skylark (5 page)

Now, pacing along the asphalt, he no longer carried the white striped woollen blanket or water flask he had prepared for his daughter's journey. Yet he seemed to shoulder a far greater burden. His wife walked frailly beside him as if seeking refuge in the shadow of the walls.

School children scurried through the streets, returning from the First of September Book Fair. They had been to exchange their old school books for new ones and were now chattering and laughing about their teachers, especially the two strictest, Mályvády, the maths and physics master, and Szunyogh, the old drunkard. Classes had not yet begun. Today was the first day of term.

It took the elderly couple the best part of half an hour to trudge back to Petőfi Street where the asphalt came to an end and open ditches, overrun with weeds, gaped on either side of the road. Mihály Veres, their stalwart neighbour, sat out in the street, awl and paring knife in his hands. Veres was a cobbler, a struggling grey-haired craftsman who toiled slowly and moodily from dawn till dusk in his dank subterranean workshop, reached by three brick steps down from the pavement. The musty smell of size wafted out into the street and would even infiltrate the Vajkays’ house. The cobbler's horde of rowdy children ran riot in the broad and dirty yard between the pigsties and the empty sheds.

The Vajkay house stood opposite.

This spruce, whitewashed building now slumbered in silence. The five front windows stood shut, the cream lace of the drawn curtains draped over the window cushions which, even in the heat of summer, were never removed.

Ákos rummaged in his pocket for the string of keys he always carried with him and opened the black lattice gate. They passed inside.

He closed the living-room door behind him and carefully replaced the thick wall hanging that was draped, winter and summer, to keep out the draught, from two brass nails on the back of the door.

A hollow interior received them. It was only then they spoke.

“How will we bear it?” said the woman in the narrow hallway, tears already welling in her eyes.

“We'll manage,” Father replied.

“Friday, Saturday, Sunday,” the woman mumbled, as if telling her beads, “then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday–” here she paused to sigh–“then Friday. A week. A whole week, Father. Whatever will we do without her?'

Ákos made no reply. He never spoke much, but felt and thought all the more.

As the woman went on crying, however, he felt obliged to break his silence.

“Come on now, let's not cry. Today's Friday. Friday's tears are Sunday's laughter. And we'll laugh too, Mother, just you see,” he said without a trace of conviction, and disappeared into the dining room.

There stood the table in the bright afternoon sunlight, still covered with the greasy plates, glasses and crumbs left over from lunch. At any other time Skylark would have smartly swept the crumbs away with her little dustpan and brush. But even now, how considerate she had been. Before leaving she had straightened the chairs in the drawing room, made the beds, placed two glasses of water on her parents’ bedside table and set nightlight and matches on the old cabinet beside the gold carriage clock for them to light when it got dark.

Mother began tidying her daughter's bedroom. Ákos, unable to settle, gazed vacantly in through the door.

The room had once looked like a chapel, chaste and white.

But the paintwork had faded with time and the silk cushions had grown soiled and a little grey. In the cupboard stood empty cosmetic jars, prayer books from which the lace trimmings of devotional pictures protruded with German inscriptions, velvet-bound, ornamental keepsake albums, fans scribbled thick with names, ball programmes, perfume sachets and hair-pieces hanging from a length of string.

Beside the door in the darkest corner of the room, facing north, hung Skylark's mirror.

Everything was engulfed in silence.

“How empty it all seems,” sighed Mother, gesturing with an open hand.

Ákos did not know what to say. As if, over the long years of their marriage, he had lost the power to initiate conversation, he simply repeated:

“How empty.”

They went back into the dining room.

There on the sideboard sparkled their treasures–“Souvenirs of Lake Velence,” “Souvenirs of Lake Balaton,” “Glasses from Karlsbad'–accumulated over many years and preserved with unconscious piety. All kinds of other odds and ends glittered alongside them, worthless merchandise now utterly useless and inappropriate: fancy bazaar jugs, tiny china dogs, silver-plated goblets, gold-plated angels, all the ghastly icons of provincial life, dusted every day and assembled on small shelves in rows above the back of the sofa. They trembled when anyone sat down, and toppled on to the chest of anyone who unsuspectingly lay down on the sofa beneath them. And then the pictures; how painfully they too stared back at the old couple now. Dobozy, the Hungarian hero, fleeing from the Turks, clasping his wife around her naked breast; the first Hungarian cabinet; and the baldheaded Batthyány, down on his knees with his arms flung wide, waiting for the murderous bullet of his Austrian executioners.

“Let's go into the garden,” the woman proposed.

“Yes, the garden,” echoed Ákos.

They went into the garden. Sweltering, yellow heat greeted them outside. Delicate white kittens pranced across the emerald lawn. A large bowl of water stood beside the well, the sunlight making the colours of the rainbow through the glasses inside. A sunflower on a crooked stem lifted its sun-worshipping head to the blazing west. Horse-chestnut trees, acacias and sumachs rose up behind. And still farther back, by the garden wall, a Virginia pokeweed showed off its dark, ripe berries.

On Skylark's crochet bench they sat down side by side.

“Poor thing,” said Mother, “at least it'll be a rest. And perhaps...” She did not continue.

“Perhaps what?'

“Perhaps someone might...turn up.”

“What kind of someone?'

“Someone,” Mother repeated timidly, “some...good fortune,” she added with an affecting, womanly boldness.

Father looked away in irritation, ashamed to hear what he had so often heard in vain, had so often thought himself, yet knew would only ever lead to more humiliating fiascos and bitter disappointments. There was something vulgar about his wife's remark. He shrugged. Then, almost inaudibly, he muttered:

“Absurd.”

He reached for his pocket watch.

“What time did he say?” he asked.

“Who?'

“Him,” the old man barked, and his wife immediately knew he was referring to Géza Cifra.

“Five twenty.”

“It's half past five,” said Father. “She'll have just got in.”

The thought consoled them both a little. They rose from the bench and strolled among the lilac bushes where a stone dwarf stood on guard. At about this time they usually set off on their walks with Skylark, through the empty streets to the calvary cross and back. But not today. They walked around the garden several times, side by side, their pace quickening as they went. Ákos hoped the horses hadn't bolted on the plain and that Tiger hadn't bitten the girl. Mother ambled along beside him, sharing, and thus lightening, the burden of his thoughts. It felt as if that awful week–a week they'd have to spend alone–had already begun badly, very badly indeed. It all seemed so endless, hopeless and bleak.

Skylark had promised to wire home the moment she arrived. They had written out the message in advance, so all she had to do was send it off. All it said was:

“Arrived safely.”

Dusk fell slowly. For a while they waited for the postman out in the garden, but unable to settle they went inside, believing this would somehow speed the telegram's arrival.

Hours went by and still it hadn't come.

Ákos shut all the doors. As every evening, he checked behind the furniture and the clothes in the wardrobes to see if anyone was hiding there. At nine, when he would usually retire, he went into the bedroom with his wife and lay down on the bed, still fully dressed.

Thoroughly worn out, he fell asleep.

In his dreams he was again walking down Széchenyi Street with Skylark and his wife.

But now they deviated from their usual route and turned into a less familiar road, taking them under a tunnel and, through seemingly endless back streets, into a kind of timber yard.

Here he suddenly noticed that his daughter was missing. He looked at his wife, whose face at once confirmed his terrible premonitions. The woman's face did not merely suggest the girl had disappeared, but that she had been kidnapped. He had already seen her kidnappers several times, mysterious characters dressed partly like medieval knights in armour and partly like clowns in black face masks.

Ákos started to run ahead towards the timber yard, then, suddenly alarmed to find himself alone, ran back again. For a moment he thought he had seen her. Beside a wooden fence that reminded him of his own, Skylark, like a quiet madwoman, lifted her slanted, imploring gaze towards him and, reaching out with her hands, cried for help. She appeared to be trapped. Ákos was just about to reach out to her when she disappeared.

After that he searched for her in vain. He rattled gates, inquired at inns, even entered one suspicious-looking house, a kind of suburban brothel, where ugly strumpets cackled at him before turning on him with their fists. Finally he found himself in a strange workshop at the bottom of a flight of steps, deep beneath the ground.

Here in a green apron squatted an artisan, not Mr Veres, but a sly and shifty individual in a regulation cap with a tin number. He clearly knew all there was to know, and, without even looking at Ákos, pointed with conspiratorial indifference to a curtained glass door. Ákos charged through it and, in a dim alcove, finally found his daughter. Skylark lay on the ground, her head shaven, her body horribly mutilated, stab wounds in her naked breast. She was dead.

The old woman quietly pottered about the room, careful not to wake her husband. She could hear his irregular breathing–the sort that often heralds a sleeping cry–and watched his restless head turn on the pillow. Her husband's first sleep tended to be night-marish, and he'd often spring up in bed with an animal howl.

She went over to him, bent down and lightly touched his brow.

Ákos sat up. He took a sip of water.

He kept his eyes wide open.

He could still see before him the figures from his dream, whom he had encountered so many times before. But even now it staggered him that his precious daughter, who, poor thing, lived such a quiet life, could be the focus of such a horrific and dramatic dream.

After these nightmares he would love Skylark still more dearly.

His wife spoke of the telegram.

“Still nothing?” asked Ákos.

“Not yet.”

At this the bell buzzed in the kitchen. The woman sprang up and ran to open the door.

“It's here,” she cried, hurrying back.

“Arrived safely.”

She read it aloud.

Ákos took it into his hands and gazed at it with happy, unbelieving eyes.

“
Arrived safely
.”

He, too, read it out loud.

Fully reassured and smiling at their earlier fears, they undressed, put out the light and both dozed off to sleep.

And high time too; it was already after midnight.

On Saturday
the town was flooded with people from the surrounding farms. Saturday was market day.

It was still dark when the first women arrived. Rattling down the unpaved streets in their carts, they dragged a train of dust behind them. First they fed their brood of bawling infants who bounced among the kohlrabi in the depths of their wicker-ribbed wagons. Pulling flat milk bottles from their boots, the teats already swarming black with flies, they pressed them into the tiny mouths of their hungry offspring, who greedily gulped down the warm, sour milk.

Some time later the peasants from Kék strolled in. They congregated around the gossips’ bench on Széchenyi Square and, with squat clay pipes jutting from their fanglike teeth, they rambled on about rinderpest and rising taxes. Beside them, in a separate group, stood the local artisans and tradesmen, complaining about the shortage of cash, which couldn't be raised anywhere these days, because their lordships were playing it safe and kept their money in the Agricultural Bank at 5 per cent interest.

The market seethed in the sweltering heat, humming with noise and ablaze with every imaginable colour. Red peppers shone as brightly as the florid scarlet paint in the paint-shop window across the square. Cabbages displayed their pale-green, silken frills, violet grapes glistened, marrows whitened in the sun, and yellowing melons, already past their best, gave off a sickly choleroid stench. Farther off, towards Petőfi Street, stood the butchers’ stalls where truncated carcasses swung with raw, barbaric pomp from iron hooks, and barrel-chested butchers’ boys in skimpy vests shattered bones with heavy mallets. From Bólyai Street, where the potters gathered, came the clatter of the crockery stalls. Everywhere poultry pecked, maids gossiped and gentlewomen moaned about impossible prices. Above them all stretched a veil of silvery grey dust, Sárszeg's murderous dust which robbed so many local children of their lives and brought the adults to an early death.

Miklós Ijas, assistant editor of the
Sárszeg Gazette
at barely twenty-four, viewed this scene through the plate-glass windows of the Széchenyi Café. He wore a modish English suit, a turned-down collar and a slender lilac necktie.

He had woken at half past nine and immediately hurried to the Café to read the Budapest papers. Although he'd had no breakfast, he ordered rum with his black coffee and lit one cigarette after another. His lip curled with disgust.

He saw this same scene every day. The celebrities of Sárszeg swam past his plate-glass window as if in an aquarium.

First came Galló, the prosecutor, on his way to court, bareheaded, with a flat brown briefcase in his hand. With a furrowed brow and an affable smile he was rehearsing a stern indictment speech against some heinous Swabian highwayman. Fashionable townsfolk passed slowly by with ivory-knobbed canes. Priboczay was already standing in the doorway of the St Mary Pharmacy, performing his daily manicure with a penknife. Feri Füzes was hurrying towards the Gentlemen's Club.