Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [40]
“Later he lost weight. Grew terribly thin. He suffered a great deal. We all did. My mother was always in tears. My brother...you know. And me.”
“You were just a child.”
“Yes, and I didn't really understand it all then. But later. It was hard, my dear Ákos, very hard. They wanted me to be a lawyer. I could probably have found a position in the county administration. But the people...I went to Hamburg. On foot. I wanted to run away to America, where all cheats and embezzlers go.”
He laughed. This laugh offended Ákos. Was it possible that someone could speak so openly about his inner feelings, could confess almost boastfully about what hurt inside? Or maybe it no longer hurt. After all, he had laughed.
“But I didn't go to America,” Miklós continued. “I stayed here. Just for that, I stayed here. I began writing. But believe me, I'm more distant from anybody now than if I had gone to America.”
How so? Ákos couldn't understand. It was just high-flown, childish bravado. But he looked closely at the boy and gradually noticed something about his youthful face. It reminded him a little of Wun-Hi's, hidden behind a mask of thick make-up. It was as if Miklós too wore a mask, only a harder, more rigid one, petrified by pain.
“To me it makes no difference now,” Ijas began again, “what Feri Füzes says, or anyone in Sárszeg, or anywhere else.”
He seemed to mean what he said, for he spoke in a harsh voice and strutted with steely resolve.
At any rate, they were strange fellows, these bohemians. They lounged around doing nothing and told you they were working; they were frightfully miserable and yet would tell you that they were perfectly happy. They had more troubles than others but seemed to bear them better, as if they fed on suffering.
Even Zányi hadn't seemed terribly distraught at being deserted by Olga Orosz. At the Lord Lieutenant's lunch party he had entertained the ladies with great ease, gesticulating with a lightly bandaged hand. Tonight he'd get made up again, and on with the show. Szolyvay was often so short of money that he couldn't even afford dinner and had to borrow from Papa Fehér; even so, he showed no lack of self-esteem. And this poor, unfortunate child, who had every reason to complain, simply bragged, speaking of life to one who had already lived so long, advising him, lecturing him and defying all dissent.
Such characters seemed so remote, as if they lived on an island far from the laws of all humankind. If only there were a bridge. A bridge over to this island, this security, this painted façade. But there was no bridge. One couldn't live life like a comedy or fancy-dress parade. For there were those who knew only pain; cruel, amorphous pain, and nothing else. They bury themselves within it, plunging deeper and deeper into a grief that is theirs alone, into an endless abyss, a dark and bottomless pit which finally caves in above them and traps them there for good. There is no way out.
Ákos could no longer listen to his young friend, who was now propounding all kinds of confused ideas about the eternal nature of suffering. He spoke in detail about his poems, about those he had already written and those he was yet to write, and kept repeating the words:
“Work. One has to work.”
Ákos quickly picked up on this.
“Yes, my boy, work. There's nothing nobler than work.”
Ijas stopped talking. It was quite clear that they were at cross purposes, that the couple didn't understand him. But they had listened to him all the same, and out of gratitude he turned his attention to the woman.
“Is Skylark still not back?” he asked.
Mrs Vajkay shuddered. The question was so sudden and unexpected. He was the first person to mention her in the five days she had been away. And by her nickname, too.
“No,” the woman replied, “she's due back on Friday.”
“I can imagine how you must miss her.”
“Terribly,” said the woman. “But she works herself to death at home. So we sent her off to the plain. To rest.”
“To rest,” said Father, mechanically echoing his wife's last words, as he often did when