“Work. One has to work.”
Ákos quickly picked up on this.
“Yes, my boy, work. There's nothing nobler than work.”
Ijas stopped talking. It was quite clear that they were at cross purposes, that the couple didn't understand him. But they had listened to him all the same, and out of gratitude he turned his attention to the woman.
“Is Skylark still not back?” he asked.
Mrs Vajkay shuddered. The question was so sudden and unexpected. He was the first person to mention her in the five days she had been away. And by her nickname, too.
“No,” the woman replied, “she's due back on Friday.”
“I can imagine how you must miss her.”
“Terribly,” said the woman. “But she works herself to death at home. So we sent her off to the plain. To rest.”
“To rest,” said Father, mechanically echoing his wife's last words, as he often did when he was agitated and sought to silence his thoughts beneath the sound of his own voice.
Ijas noticed this. He looked into the old man's eyes, as Ákos had looked into his, and felt such pity for him that it wrung his heart. What stagnant, primal depths of pain could be disturbed by just a couple of words.
Miklós stuck to his new task and went on inquiring, probing.
The woman was glad of his attention, although she could not quite fathom its intent. She turned towards the young man.
“The two of you haven't met, have you, Miklós?'
“No, madam,” Ijas replied, “I've not yet had the pleasure. Of course I've seen her once or twice. At a meeting of the Mary Society, for example. She seemed most enthusiastic.”
“Oh, she's awfully conscientious.”
“And with you. I've seen you all walking together. She's always in between.”
“Yes, yes.”
“She seems very kindly and…straightforward.”
“Bless her soul,” said the woman, raising her eyes to the heavens.
“She must be a most refined and pleasant creature. Quite different from the other girls round here.”
“If Skylark could only hear,” said Mother with a sigh, “how pleased she'd be. And she would be ever so pleased to meet you in person. She's fond of poetry too. She has a little book, hasn't she, Father, where she copies down all those pretty poems.”
Ákos tapped the wall with his stick, for the voices he heard within him were louder than those without. He did all he could to drown them. Ijas went on talking. He asked all about Skylark, about every detail of her existence, his questions often as precise as those of Dr Gál when interviewing a patient on a house call. He was trying to draw an accurate mental portrait.
No one had ever shown such interest in their daughter, or spoken of her with such warmth and kindness.
He did not suggest that she was pretty, but neither that she was plain. He didn't lie. Instead he hovered between the two extremes and avoided the danger area altogether, shifting direction and leaving every option open. The woman fed on his every word, and in her soul a vague hope began to stir, a dim presentiment she didn't even dare to admit to herself.
“You really must visit us one day, Miklós,” she said. “If you can spare the time, of course. Do come and see us.”
“If I may be so bold,” said Ijas.
They had reached their own house, accompanied all the way by a young man. This didn't happen often. In fact this was the first time.
Ákos shook Ijas by the hand.
“Thank you, my dear boy,” he said, then turned inside.
The iron gate banged shut behind them.
Miklós looked through the grille into the garden. Here all was silence and solitude.
He looked at the decorative glass balls among the flowers, the stone garden gnome on the lawn, who seemed to stand on guard. A sunflower hung its head in the failing evening light, as if blindly searching for the sun on the ground. The sun into which it would usually stare and which was now nowhere to be found.
He could hear rummaging from inside the house, the old couple preparing for rest. And he could see quite clearly before him the wretched rooms, where suffering collected like unswept dust in the corners, the dust of lives in painful heaps, piled up over many long years. He shut his eyes and drank in the garden's bitter fragrance. At such times Miklós Ijas was “working.”
He stood for some minutes before the gate with all the patience of a lover waiting for the appearance of his beloved. But he was waiting for no one. He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of taking a whole life into his arms, stripping it of flesh and bone, and feeling into its depths as if they were his own. From this, the greatest pain, the greatest happiness is born: the hope that we too will one day be understood, strangers will accept our words, our lives, as if they were their own.
All he had heard about his father had made him receptive to the suffering of others. Until then he had wanted nothing to do with those who lived and moved around him — with Környey, the drunken Szunyogh, Szolyvay the ham actor, and Doba, who was always silent. Not even with Skylark. For yes, at first sight they had seemed worthless, twisted and distorted, their souls curling hideously inwards. They had no tragedy, for how could tragedy begin to grow in such a wasteland? Yet how profound, how human they all were. How much like him. Once this became clear it could never be forgotten. So he did have something in common with them, after all.
He took this lesson with him. His steps were firmer, surer, as he strode back down Petőfi Street. The poem he had been carrying inside his head had been a bad poem and he gave it no further thought. He'd write about other things, perhaps about these people and all they had told him. About the veranda and that long, long table where they once had sat, and sat no more.
At Széchenyi Square he broke into a run. He hurried down Gombkötő Street, for here, next to the bakery, lived Kladek, the senior editor and publisher of the Sárszeg Gazette.
This bearded, slow-witted, but cultivated and conscientious old man no longer even visited the editorial office, and only demanded of his assistant editor that he call on him once a day. He sat beside a paraffin lamp in his ravaged room where books lay strewn about the floor and the windows were all but barricaded by discarded newspapers piled six feet high. He had lost his grip on this cursed modern age and no longer cared what the next generation made of it, no longer cared, however much young Ijas praised the Secession in his paper.
He rummaged in his pocket for a leader Feri Füzes had written about the effect of hoarfrost on grapes. He gave this to Ijas and told him to take it to the printers, to give the peasants of Sárszeg something to read about.
All that remained for Ijas now was to take a call from Pest about the Dreyfus trial and the latest political events. He had to hurry, because the telephone usually rang at nine.
VIII
in which is contained the full text of Skylark's letter
Ákos was just about to set out from home the following afternoon when he met the postman at the gate. A registered letter had arrived.
Skylark. He immediately recognised the pointed, spidery lettering which reminded him of gothic script and also of his mother's hand.
He opened the letter there in the street. At any other time he'd have used his penknife for this purpose, for he believed in order in all matters, however small. But now he ripped the envelope open with his fingers, and with such excitement that he tore the letter too, both in the middle and on one side. He had to piece the fragments back together.
Oblivious to the passers-by, who bumped into him and stared after him as he went, he eagerly read the letter syllable by syllable. The words marched across the page in exemplary, solid lines. The writing was clear, but on this occasion Skylark had used a pencil, a particularly hard pencil that scored the paper with faint, unshaded lines like scratches made by a needle. By the time Ákos had fully deciphered the text, he had reached the park.