Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [55]
He walked in the moonlight, his tilted bowler casting a thick shadow over his forehead. The greenish haze reminded him of his last visit to Budapest, when the doctors had instructed him to give up alchohol and cigars, life's last pleasures, and he, on such a night, had ambled back to his hotel room. And now, at this daybreak hour, he fancied that he finally saw himself as he really was, both now and in times gone by. He saw the old bones which had served him for fifty-nine years, and God only knew for how much longer. He looked thoroughly, mortally sad.
Everywhere dogs were barking. Behind every fence, shaken from sleep by the restless moonlight. A moonlight chorus of yapping animals, howling with primal rage, throwing their weight back on their crooked, narrow hind legs, blinking up at the moon with short-sighted eyes, squinting at that mottled, porous, golden cheese they had been longing, for millennia, to wolf down from the sky.
At the corner of Bólyai Street, Ákos again heard the strains of Gypsy music. He thought the band must be following him. But no, they were bowing and scraping some way on ahead, at the house where Olga Orosz lived.
The Gypsies were performing a dawn serenade, lifted to the tips of their toes by their zeal.
Beneath the window, in which a light had just come on, stood Dani Kárász, István Kárász's son. A tear rolled down his cheek, as one had rolled down his father's cheek some hours before.
They had just struck up Mimosa's song, in honour of the prima donna.
Ákos, as he turned into Petőfi Street, attempted to whistle the tune, but couldn't. Instead he hummed Wun-Hi's song, the jovial, oriental ditty that began:
“Chin, Chin Chinaman...”
X
in which, after several years in the making, the great day of reckoning finally arrives, and our heroes receive from life the solace and just deserts that come to each and every one of us
A DRUNKARD never walks where he can fly.
Only the sober believe that the inebriate stagger to and fro. In reality they float on invisible wings and arrive everywhere much earlier than expected.
That time passes in between is of no consequence. For them time does not exist, and those who trouble themselves with such trifles are entirely deceived.
Nor shall the inebriate come to any harm, for the blessed Virgin carries them in her apron.
But opening the gate was another matter. Ákos spent ages fumbling with the key, turning it this way and that in the lock. But it still refused to budge. He wrestled still longer with the front door, before finally realising that it hadn't been locked at all.
He went inside, grumbling and cursing. Nothing in his house was as it should be. Why, they could be robbed blind without even knowing, could lose everything they had.
Such disorder was, of course, exceptional.
What had happened was that, when the clock struck nine, his wife had started to worry. For as long as she could remember, her husband had always been home by this late hour. She went out into the street and squinted into the darkness to see if he was coming. On her way back inside she had forgotten to lock the door behind her.
Mrs Vajkay grew increasingly anxious. She couldn't imagine what might have happened.
She had been at home all day. After Ákos had gone to call in at the club for a quarter of an hour that afternoon, she had received two visitors. One was the washerwoman who had come to discuss the arrangements for washing day. The other was Biri Szilkuthy, Skylark's one and only close friend, a pretty young woman whose husband, a forester of sorts, had left her for a till girl at the Széchenyi Café. They were now suing for a divorce.
Biri Szilkuthy inquired after Skylark, with whom she had only recently grown friendly. The two of them would sit whispering for hours on the bench beneath the old horse chestnut tree.
Mother offered her a chocolate from the box