Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [11]
“Gone away?” asked Géza Cifra.
“Away,” Father echoed hoarsely.
At this point the conversation stalled. It was the moment Géza Cifra always dreaded.
“Actually,” he began, without knowing how to continue. With that and similar words he tried to stop the gaps in the conversation, but to no avail. He smiled, then grimaced. He shivered hot and cold, then swallowed hard. He thought he had tarried long enough, then decided that he hadn't and it would still be improper to withdraw. His Adam's apple slid up and down his goitrous throat.
He cast a flustered glance at his pocket watch.
“Two forty-seven,” he said, taking refuge in railway talk. “Should get in at five twenty.”
Father made no reply, but Mother smiled. A warm, familiar smile, imploring him to stay, as it often had in times long since gone by.
“The train won't be late?” she inquired.
“No,” Géza Cifra replied.
Now he felt sure he could retire. He wanted to salute, but only managed a modest tip of the cap.
The elderly couple made their way out of the station.
A long afternoon lay before them, and, not knowing what else to do, they headed back to the house. They even hurried a little, as if something still awaited them at home.
Ákos had left the county administration some five years previously, taking early retirement on account of his illness. His days passed quietly, melting into months and years. Almost unawares, he had reached the age of fifty-nine. He looked a good deal older, sixty-five at least.
Before retiring he had bought the single-storey house on Petőfi Street from the remains of an inheritance left him by his maternal uncle, Gedeon Körcsy, together with the few odd pennies he had scraped together during his career. Apart from the house, he owned nothing else in the world. Here he would pace up and down, hands behind his back, growing weary of doing nothing. He'd wait for his wife and daughter to get up in the morning, then wait for them to go to bed in the evening. He waited for the table to be laid, then waited to see it cleared again. He pottered about restlessly with an anxious glow in his eyes.
He had not moved in society for years. He neither drank nor smoked. Not only his family doctor, Dr Gál, but also the professor he had consulted in Pest, had warned against arteriosclerosis and forbidden him from taking alcohol and–more distressingly–from smoking his beloved cigars.
The only passion remaining to him from the past was to sit in his cramped and perpetually damp study, leafing through a volume of Iván Nagy's great tome on Hungarian noble families, or Géza Csegheő's precious and thoroughly entertaining little book on the history of coats of arms. He knew a thing or two about heraldry and blazonry, archivology and sigillography, diplomatics and sphragistics. He'd sit and syllabise endless Latin letters of foundation–litterae armales–written by ancient kings, and never came across a single document, a single subpoenal executionale or capitulary fassio, on which he could not immediately shed some light. He saw at a glance how the various families branched out, and could at once divine the meaning of a horizontal bar in the panel of a crest, an eagle with spread wings, a solitary golden globe. And he loved his vocation dearly. The sheer delight of peering through the magnifying glass at a mouse bite, a moth hole or the zigzag channel carved by a woodworm, while breathing in the acerbic fragrance of the mould. It was here he came alive; here in the past. And as others travel miles to visit fortune-tellers, distinguished gentlemen from far-away counties had for many years made pilgrimages to Petőfi Street to discover their pasts.
In his younger days he had earned his living from the “verification of lawful lineage,” from filiatio and deductio, and although he no longer had any financial need of his vocation, he found himself unable to give it up. He could become as ensconced in a donatio regia as in some fascinating