Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [58]
“Yes, with you.”
“The matter with me,” he began, wiping away the ash that had fallen into his moustache, “the matter with me,” he repeated in a deep and resolute voice, “is that I'm a swine.”
“You?'
“Yes, me.” He nodded.
“What are you talking about?” the woman whined. “You of all people, the sweetest–'
“Shut up!” the old man shouted. “Hold your tongue. I'm a swine. A useless, miserable swine. That's what I am.”
The woman took pity on her husband and went over to embrace him. Ákos pushed her away.
“Leave me alone.”
“Nonsense,” said the woman, deep in thought. “You a swine? Why on earth should you be a swine?'
“Because,” said Ákos, spitting out his second cigar, which had pinched his tongue with its caustic poison, “because I am,” he repeated wearily.
Only now did his head really begin to spin. In this closed room, where yesterday's stagnant heat stood trapped, his drunkenness hit him with full force. His head fell to one side and he seemed to be nodding off. But his face grew increasingly pale. It made a picture of such frailty that his wife asked uneasily:
“Shall I make some tea?'
Ákos nodded.
The woman snatched up her crocheted shawl and ran as she was, barefoot, in her nightdress, into the kitchen, where, after clattering with pots and pans, she lit the stove. She boiled the kettle for tea.
Ákos sat in the armchair, almost motionless. He clasped the velvet armrests with both hands, for he felt the chair was rising slightly into the air. Only a couple of inches at first, but then higher, floating, foot by foot, all the way up to the ceiling and back, gaining speed as it went. Then it began to spin. It wasn't actually unpleasant, this spinning. Ákos found it quite amusing. He stared at the objects that hurtled past, the dancing mirror, the bow-legged doors, reeling all together in a tipsy waltz. He continually lost and regained consciousness.
In one such moment he managed to pull himself together. He stood up to get undressed. He pulled off his jacket and trousers, and tore off his necktie, whose clasp got caught on a button of his shirt. Drunk as he was, he still folded his clothes together neatly, with all the fussiness of old age, when the mind is increasingly preoccupied by ever more trivial details. He placed his watch, signet ring and keys in his wallet so that he'd be able to find them again in the morning and slip them back into his pockets, as he had done throughout the thirty-six years of his marriage.
His wife came in with the teapot, a mug and some rum.
“Drink this,” she said to her husband, who was already sitting on the bed undressed. “You'll feel better in no time.”
Ákos filled the mug with rum, then splashed a drop of tea on top and stirred it in. The woman climbed into bed, shivering with cold from the kitchen.
The old man could only manage a few sips.
“Now come to bed,” said the woman.
And he would have done so, too, had he not been struck by the thought that always occurred to him before going to bed: that he should search the whole house for the hidden burglar he never found. In his shirt and underpants he tottered about in the dining room.
The chandeliers still burned. For a moment he didn't know where he was. It was so light everywhere, out in the hall and in his daughter's bedroom too. He stubbornly staggered on to the drawing room.
Here he was greeted by still brighter light. At either end of the piano the two lamps, which mother had left on, still glowed, illuminating the keyboard, the open lid and the open scores strewn over the music rest.
Ákos burst out laughing, so heartily that his laughter echoed through the hollow house and all the way to the bedroom, where his wife, with knitted brows, tried to follow what was going on. Her husband soon returned.
“What happened here, then?” he asked in the same coarse tone he had used when he first came home. Once again he stood in the middle of the bedroom. “What kind of nonsense have you been up to? Been having a ball, have we?” and he laughed so loud that he coughed, choking on his words.
“What are