Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [32]
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.