Ákos was still sober enough to know that he was drunk. He ambled on stiffly, without swaying.
A few gas lamps glowed weakly through the gloomy night. The dry heat had finally broken. A vaporous humidity covered everything, heralding the approaching rainstorm. Shadows flitted across Széchenyi Square in the eerie light which fanned out from the arc lamp of the Baross Café, lending an uncertain, fantastical aspect to the Sárszeg night. Above, the illuminated yellow clock of the Town Hall glowed like a ripe melon.
On the terrace of the Baross Café young people were still eating ice cream. Ákos made his way towards them. He suddenly stopped in his tracks.
There on the terrace, beside a lavender bush, he spotted a young man in a fashionable new panama hat and a white summer suit leaning over a glass. Géza Cifra, on finishing his evening shift, had dropped in to listen to the Gypsy band.
He looked drearier than ever. His cold had now broken out in full force. Not only his left nostril was blocked, but the right one too, for his nose was even more sensitive than a tree frog to changes in the weather, and at times like these he could hardly draw any air at all. He breathed noisily through his mouth. Before him stood a glass of raspberry cordial and a straw.
Ákos observed him for some time. The youth appeared perfectly happy, with a look of self-satisfaction spread across his face that seemed to suggest complete disdain for the world. To Ákos even the innocent raspberry cordial, which he began to suck up through his straw, seemed like a pool of venomously strong, red schnapps.
So his little lordship is having fun, Ákos grumbled to himself with inexpressible hatred. If only he could knock that foppish panama from his head, with its fancy, dangling ribbon.
He turned red with rage, tensing the muscles in his puny arms.
He drew closer. Yes, he had the strength to do it now, to floor the boy with a single blow, to trample him underfoot, to strike him wherever he could, to tear his hair, gouge out his eyes, to kill him, kill him.
But what should he kill him with? He had only his pocket knife. He could make a scene at the very least. He walked over to Géza Cifra's table.
Ákos planted himself before the youth provocatively and offered no greeting.
Géza Cifra greeted him.
He removed his panama hat and sprang to his feet.
Ákos did not move. Then he plunged both hands into his trouser pockets to avoid shaking hands, and stretched his fingers out against the cloth. After a while he nodded meaningfully, then once again, a still deeper, more pronounced nod of the head.
“Do take a seat.”
Ákos took one more step forward. They were now so close their faces almost touched. Géza Cifra, who never drank at all, could smell the pungent schnapps on Ákos's breath.
“I won't take anything,” said Ákos sardonically. “And I don't want anything either. I just wanted to see you.” And he lunged his whole torso derisively towards the youth.
“I'm most honoured. But please sit down.”
“I won't sit down,” said Ákos stubbornly. “You just go on amusing yourself,” he added, meaning something altogether different. “Good night.”
“Well, good night then…” Géza Cifra stammered, relieved that the conversation had come to an end and he no longer had to think of what to say and how to get away. “A very good night to you, and my kindest regards to your dear wife, good night.”
Ákos turned away without so much as a tip of his hat. But on the pavement he stalled again and took one more long, hard look at Géza Cifra, nodding as before. The young man felt this, but didn't understand what it meant. No longer daring to look back, he turned his head, picked up the copy of the newspaper Agreement, which lay in a wicker frame on the chair beside him, and buried his whole body inside it.
Beside the spire of St Stephen's, the moon appeared between the clouds as suddenly as if someone had pressed a secret button. Its strong but dejected light fluttered across the sleeping town. Ákos made his way towards Bólyai Street.
He walked in the moonlight, his tilted bowler casting a thick shadow over his forehead. The greenish haze reminded him of his last visit to Budapest, when the doctors had instructed him to give up alchohol and cigars, life's last pleasures, and he, on such a night, had ambled back to his hotel room. And now, at this daybreak hour, he fancied that he finally saw himself as he really was, both now and in times gone by. He saw the old bones which had served him for fifty-nine years, and God only knew for how much longer. He looked thoroughly, mortally sad.
Everywhere dogs were barking. Behind every fence, shaken from sleep by the restless moonlight. A moonlight chorus of yapping animals, howling with primal rage, throwing their weight back on their crooked, narrow hind legs, blinking up at the moon with short-sighted eyes, squinting at that mottled, porous, golden cheese they had been longing, for millennia, to wolf down from the sky.
At the corner of Bólyai Street, Ákos again heard the strains of Gypsy music. He thought the band must be following him. But no, they were bowing and scraping some way on ahead, at the house where Olga Orosz lived.
The Gypsies were performing a dawn serenade, lifted to the tips of their toes by their zeal.
Beneath the window, in which a light had just come on, stood Dani Kárász, István Kárász's son. A tear rolled down his cheek, as one had rolled down his father's cheek some hours before.
They had just struck up Mimosa's song, in honour of the prima donna.
Ákos, as he turned into Petőfi Street, attempted to whistle the tune, but couldn't. Instead he hummed Wun-Hi's song, the jovial, oriental ditty that began:
“Chin, Chin Chinaman…”
X
in which, after several years in the making, the great day of reckoning finally arrives, and our heroes receive from life the solace and just deserts that come to each and every one of us
A drunkard never walks where he can fly.
Only the sober believe that the inebriate stagger to and fro. In reality they float on invisible wings and arrive everywhere much earlier than expected.
That time passes in between is of no consequence. For them time does not exist, and those who trouble themselves with such trifles are entirely deceived.
Nor shall the inebriate come to any harm, for the blessed Virgin carries them in her apron.
But opening the gate was another matter. Ákos spent ages fumbling with the key, turning it this way and that in the lock. But it still refused to budge. He wrestled still longer with the front door, before finally realising that it hadn't been locked at all.
He went inside, grumbling and cursing. Nothing in his house was as it should be. Why, they could be robbed blind without even knowing, could lose everything they had.
Such disorder was, of course, exceptional.
What had happened was that, when the clock struck nine, his wife had started to worry. For as long as she could remember, her husband had always been home by this late hour. She went out into the street and squinted into the darkness to see if he was coming. On her way back inside she had forgotten to lock the door behind her.
Mrs Vajkay grew increasingly anxious. She couldn't imagine what might have happened.
She had been at home all day. After Ákos had gone to call in at the club for a quarter of an hour that afternoon, she had received two visitors. One was the washerwoman who had come to discuss the arrangements for washing day. The other was Biri Szilkuthy, Skylark's one and only close friend, a pretty young woman whose husband, a forester of sorts, had left her for a till girl at the Széchenyi Café. They were now suing for a divorce.