Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi [62]
At last emerging from the storm which had whipped up his blood, he slowly made his way to the bed and lay down, thoroughly exhausted.
It was good to lie down, if only because he no longer had to face his wife. He was ashamed of his earlier outburst, his sentimental, pusillanimous verbosity, which would make any man in his right mind blush. With the quilt pulled high over his chin, he really seemed to be hiding in bed. He waited to see what would happen next.
His wife, however, had run out of things to say. She just sat there, motionless, in her armchair.
Now she would have liked her husband to speak, to confirm or deny what she had said. She waited for fresh words, new points of view, which would either support her own or refute them for good. For however forcibly she had spoken, inside she wasn't at all convinced of what she had said. In the structure, the architecture, of her agile speech for the defence, with all its cunningly contrived sighs, inflections and crescendos, she nevertheless felt she had left a gap somewhere, a crack that still needed filling. But Ákos did not echo the well-meaning torrent of words to which he had yielded.
Thus the woman remained alone, tormented by still more painful thoughts than the man she had consoled. She stood up, as if somehow looking for help, for herself, for him, for all of them. All kinds of things occurred to her, all kinds of people; even, for one short moment, Miklós Ijas, who had seemed so sympathetic the other day.
But she immediately swept the thought from her mind. He was no more than a boy, hardly twenty-four years old.
Ákos lay in silence.
It was left to the woman to speak again. As if she were talking to herself, summing up all that had gone before.
“We love her very much,” she insisted. “Both of us. And even if we loved her a thousand times more, we still...”
“Still what?” Ákos prompted, lifting the quilt from his mouth in genuine curiosity. “What could we still do?'
“We still–” Mother sighed. “Could we still do more?” she asked.
“That's just it,” replied Ákos dully, in a voice devoid of hope. “What more could we do? Nothing. We've done all we can.”
All we can, the woman thought. Everything humanly possible. We've endured everything.
And she looked about her. But Ákos was silent again.
Now she could see that she stood alone–alone in the room, alone in the world, alone with her pain. And her heart was wrung with such despair that she almost collapsed.
But then her gaze involuntarily wandered towards the ebony crucifix that hung on the wall above their conjugal bed.
From the black wooden base hung the dear, tortured body, modelled from cheap plaster. The bony ribcage, the chest which tumbled forward ravaged with pain, and the hair, thickly matted with deathly perspiration, all glittered in their coating of thin gold leaf.
On the boundary between life and death, this swooning Son of God had watched over them for decades. He, who heard their every word and observed their every gesture, who saw into the darkest corners of their hearts, must have surely seen that they weren't lying now.
He flung open His arms upon the cross, exalting human suffering in a single, heroic gesture that belonged to Him alone since the beginning of time. But His head dropped, anticipating the numb indifference into which it was about to fall, His face already petrified with pain. Even He could not extend the woman a helping hand.
But His presence was powerful all the same. Something real, something immense, in this provincial room, where everything was so tiny. He, who had come into the world to help the wretched, had died for those who suffer, radiated the glorious light of global historical tragedy, the brilliant, burning light of eternal love.
The woman took one step towards the crucifix. And now, for the first time, the tiniest of teardrops glistened in her eyes.
Again it was she who spoke.
“We must pray, Father,” she said, mainly to herself. “We must have faith in God, in Christ the Saviour. I pray all the time. Whenever I wake up in the night and can't