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It was above all for this reason that Skylark never went to the theatre. As soon as she inhaled this air, felt its heat strike her face, and saw the unfamiliar sight of seething crowds before and beneath her, her head would spin and she'd be overcome by a sort of nausea that resembled seasickness. On the one occasion when they had booked three seats in the stalls, they were forced to go home in the middle of the first act. Since then they hadn't been to the theatre at all. Their daughter said she'd rather stay at home with her needlework.

Gradually the auditorium came to life.

Opposite, in a circle box, sat the Priboczays — the mother a good-natured, fair-haired creature, the father an exemplary paterfamilias, and their four daughters who all wore their hair in exactly the same fashion, parted neatly in the middle, and all wore the same pink dresses. Like four pink roses in varying stages of bloom.

Beside them sat Judge Doba with his wife, a lean, dark-haired, flirtatious woman who simply lived for the theatre, or rather for the actors. She always dragged her husband along with her, who would sit with his prematurely bald head buried miserably and wearily in his hands.

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?