Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [33]
Ákos was not interested in the plot, having little time for stories forged by the imagination. As a heraldist, a scholar of blazonry, he insisted on historical veracity. He didn't consider novels and plays as things to be taken “seriously.” He wouldn't even look at a work on which imagination had left its magic mark. In his younger days he had attempted one or two, but had soon wearied of them. Whenever books were discussed in company, he'd always remark that he only read “as much as the exigencies of his vocation would allow.” As the “exigencies of his vocation” allowed very little, he read nothing at all.
He did once take a careful look at Smith's book on character. This he praised highly and for a long time recommended to his friends. As a rule he preferred stimulating, edifying books which elucidated some moral truth or the interconnections between otherwise meaningless or incomprehensible facts. Truths like “hard work is always rewarded” or “evil never goes unpunished”; books that rock one in the lap of the comforting illusion that no one suffers undeservingly in this world, nor dies of stomach cancer without due cause. But where were the interconnections here?
Reginald Fairfax, the English sea captain played by a tall and slender young actor, kissed Mimosa full on the mouth.
The woman offered no resistance. Divesting herself of all the nobility of her sex, she herself offered the European stranger her lips and proceeded to instruct him in the art of love.
Mimosa would not let go of the youth, holding him in a brazen embrace. This woman knew no shame at all. The two mouths remained glued together for some time, devouring each other, tearing at each other, drinking in delight, refusing to break asunder. The smouldering embrace grew still more passionate, while the good citizens of Sárszeg waited breathlessly for what should follow, their eyes riveted to the couple, watching, learning, like children at school, thinking of how they too, in similar circumstances, would do exactly the same.
The glasses brought this image so close to Ákos that for a moment he shrank back.
He put the glasses down disapprovingly, frowned, then glanced at his wife as if to ask what she thought of this unsightly scene.
The woman said nothing. She had long held a rather damning opinion of actors. She often spoke of Etel Pifkó, an ancient local actress who had poisoned herself while pregnant and whose grave lay beyond the walls of Sárszeg cemetery because she had not been buried in consecrated ground and hadn't enjoyed the Church's final blessing.
Wun-Hi lightened the couple's spirits. This pigtailed Chinaman, owner of the Tea House of Ten Thousand Joys, went dashing busily to and fro. His powers of invention knew no bounds.
“You know who that is, don't you?” whispered Ákos.
“Who?'
“Szolyvay.”
“Never!'
“Look at the programme.”
“Goodness, I'd never have recognised him. What an excellent disguise!'
“And the voice too, the voice. Just listen to it. Totally unrecognisable.”
Szolyvay lisped and hawked and bleated. After his every prank the Vajkays looked at each other, their smiles spreading wider each time.
When Marquis Imari appeared beneath a red parasol, threatening to put Wun-Hi's tearoom up for auction, the panic-stricken Chinaman immediately threw himself at the marquis's feet. The whole theatre erupted in a roar of laughter. Ákos and his wife laughed too.
They laughed so much that they didn't hear a knock at the door behind them. Környey came into their box; the first act was nearly over.
“Well,” he inquired, “enjoying yourselves?'
“Tremendously,” the woman replied.
“Amusing stuff and nonsense,” said Ákos, tempering his response. “Entertaining, at any rate.”
“Just you wait; the best is still to come.”
Környey, true theatre buff that he was, only used his opera glasses to observe the audience.
“Look up there,” he said.
He pointed to a box in the upper circle where Imre Zányi sat in the company of a shady-looking woman with straw-blonde hair.
“He sits there every evening,” said the commander in chief pointing up at Z