He rose slowly and, carefully avoiding being seen, watched them with a knitted, darkening brow from behind the liqueur bottles on the counter. He even stooped a little to follow them with his gaze until they finally disappeared from view. At once he took out his notebook. Without returning to his seat, he scribbled something down, something important that he should never allow himself to forget.
“Poor Skylark with her parents walking after midnight. Széchenyi Street. Porter.”
He put the notebook back into his pocket. But then he took it out again and stared long and hard at what he'd written, deep in thought.
Snatching up his pencil again, he added three thick exclamation marks.
The Vajkays were already passing the King of Hungary, from which the pungent smell of roast meat wafted. Skylark grimaced.
“Ugh, that awful restaurant smell!'
“We had our share of that,” said Mother with tactful contempt.
“Poor things.”
A horse and cart stood before the St Mary Pharmacy, a peasant with a large leather satchel sitting up on the box. He had driven in from his farm that afternoon to order some medication for his horse, and was waiting for the assistant pharmacist, who worked by candlelight, to finish mixing the three or four pounds of ointment in a marble mortar. Further on, the Baross Café tried in vain to attract the citizens of Sárszeg with its waterlogged, abandoned patio garden. János Csinos gave a first-rate rendition of the latest songs from The Geisha and Shulamit to empty tables and chairs.
“Did you have rain too?” asked Mother.
“Only this afternoon. The morning was lovely. We walked over to the church in Tarkő. For Mass.”
“Is today a high day?'
“Yes,” said Skylark, “the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.”
On the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin the swallows gather and fly to warmer climes, to Africa. All that follows then is an indian summer.
They had reached the park. Their steps echoed on the asphalt. They looked through the fence.
In the middle of the lawn, dying roses with burnt-out pistils collapsed against whitewashed posts decorated with glass balls. A light breeze scurried down the dark pathways, rattling the odd dry leaf as it passed. The benches, among them the one on which Ákos had sunned himself that Tuesday afternoon, now dripped with moisture. The lawn was turning bald. The park was deserted. Only a policeman paced up and down before the fence, greeting Ákos with a stiff salute. It was the dead of night.
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.