Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [41]
Ijas noticed this. He looked into the old man's eyes, as Ákos had looked into his, and felt such pity for him that it wrung his heart. What stagnant, primal depths of pain could be disturbed by just a couple of words.
Miklós stuck to his new task and went on inquiring, probing.
The woman was glad of his attention, although she could not quite fathom its intent. She turned towards the young man.
“The two of you haven't met, have you, Miklós?'
“No, madam,” Ijas replied, “I've not yet had the pleasure. Of course I've seen her once or twice. At a meeting of the Mary Society, for example. She seemed most enthusiastic.”
“Oh, she's awfully conscientious.”
“And with you. I've seen you all walking together. She's always in between.”
“Yes, yes.”
“She seems very kindly and...straightforward.”
“Bless her soul,” said the woman, raising her eyes to the heavens.
“She must be a most refined and pleasant creature. Quite different from the other girls round here.”
“If Skylark could only hear,” said Mother with a sigh, “how pleased she'd be. And she would be ever so pleased to meet you in person. She's fond of poetry too. She has a little book, hasn't she, Father, where she copies down all those pretty poems.”
Ákos tapped the wall with his stick, for the voices he heard within him were louder than those without. He did all he could to drown them. Ijas went on talking. He asked all about Skylark, about every detail of her existence, his questions often as precise as those of Dr Gál when interviewing a patient on a house call. He was trying to draw an accurate mental portrait.
No one had ever shown such interest in their daughter, or spoken of her with such warmth and kindness.
He did not suggest that she was pretty, but neither that she was plain. He didn't lie. Instead he hovered between the two extremes and avoided the danger area altogether, shifting direction and leaving every option open. The woman fed on his every word, and in her soul a vague hope began to stir, a dim presentiment she didn't even dare to admit to herself.
“You really must visit us one day, Miklós,” she said. “If you can spare the time, of course. Do come and see us.”
“If I may be so bold,” said Ijas.
They had reached their own house, accompanied all the way by a young man. This didn't happen often. In fact this was the first time.
Ákos shook Ijas by the hand.
“Thank you, my dear boy,” he said, then turned inside.
The iron gate banged shut behind them.
Miklós looked through the grille into the garden. Here all was silence and solitude.
He looked at the decorative glass balls among the flowers, the stone garden gnome on the lawn, who seemed to stand on guard. A sunflower hung its head in the failing evening light, as if blindly searching for the sun on the ground. The sun into which it would usually stare and which was now nowhere to be found.
He could hear rummaging from inside the house, the old couple preparing for rest. And he could see quite clearly before him the wretched rooms, where suffering collected like unswept dust in the corners, the dust of lives in painful heaps, piled up over many long years. He shut his eyes and drank in the garden's bitter fragrance. At such times Miklós Ijas was “working.”
He stood for some minutes before the gate with all the patience of a lover waiting for the appearance of his beloved. But he was waiting for no one. He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of taking a whole life into his arms, stripping it of flesh and bone, and feeling into its depths as if they were his own. From this, the greatest pain, the greatest happiness is born: the hope that we too will one day be understood, strangers will accept our words, our lives, as if they were their own.
All he had heard about his father had made him receptive to the suffering of others. Until then he had wanted nothing to do with those who lived and moved around him–with Környey, the drunken Szunyogh, Szolyvay the ham