VII

in which the couple talk to a fledgling provincial poet

At midday on Tuesday their table at the King of Hungary, which the waiter had reserved for them, remained empty.

Ákos ate with the Lord Lieutenant. His wife took the opportunity to lunch with an old friend, Mrs Záhoczky, the widow of a colonel and the president of the Catholic Ladies’ Association, at whose home the ladies of Sárszeg would congregate every Tuesday to discuss, over coffee and whipped cream, preserves and assorted pastries, matters of everyday business.

Lately they had proved themselves particularly zealous in the charitable field. They had founded an orphanage, a Mary Society for young ladies, and a Martha Home for serving girls, where one could be assured of finding reliable staff. Their attention had even extended to the rapid spread of poverty in the town, and they provided free meals and clothes to a number of the poor, quite irrespective of religion. All their members made sacrifices, each according to her means, and they were looked upon with gratitude by the whole town.

Mrs Vajkay's husband came for his wife at around six o'clock. He related to her all that had occurred at the Lord Lieutenant's lunch.

There must have been about forty people present, he said, among them the Budapest commissioner, a most obliging gentleman. They had all had a splendid time. The consommé was served in little cups, not in bowls as at home or at the King of Hungary. There were two types of fish, followed by fillet steak in a sauce with ham dumplings. There had been a choice of dessert, which he had found himself too full to try. He had, however, allowed himself half a glass of French champagne.

His wife, for her part, described the afternoon tea. Above all she extolled the milk loaf, which was particularly fresh and spongy.

On the corner of Széchenyi Square they ran into Miklós Ijas.

Everyone ran into someone in Sárszeg, like it or not, several times a day. For the town was so constructed that wherever one was headed, one's route unavoidably led across the square. The townsfolk hardly bothered to greet one another, and merely signalled with their eyes. Such encounters were not occasions of any great excitement. It was rather like members of the same large family meeting one another in the hall of their own home.

The only point of interest was the time at which such encounters would occur. Everyone kept his own hours. Mályvády, for example, would always come striding across the square at exactly half past seven, followed by his pupils, to whom he was as friendly and benign out of school as he was strict once the first bell had sounded. His pupils stumbled behind him carrying cardboard boxes, discs and iron rods for their physics experiments. Sometimes they could even be seen bringing tame rabbits or sparrows which their teacher would place inside a bell jar, deprive of air and summarily execute. Szunyogh would appear just after eight and, hearing the little school bell announce the commencement of classes, would often break into a run, struggling in his overcoat which he wore with the collar turned up, for he was terrified of the headmaster and did not care to be seen arriving late. At nine Dr Gál would make his first appearance. At ten Priboczay completed his familiar manicural manoeuvres outside the pharmacy. At eleven Környey would pass in the driving seat of a light gig, whisked along by a strong, iron-grey horse, belonging to the fire brigade. Just before twelve the actors sauntered across the square, and from noon till dusk the Panthers brought the town to life, installing themselves either in the King of Hungary or in the Széchenyi Café.

Ijas would set off on his travels at about eight in the evening when he finally got away from the editorial office of the Sárszeg Gazette. He'd trudge along the side streets with his only companion, Ferenc Freund, a red-faced, jovial, sharp-witted Jewish boy who understood him, encouraged him and even dabbled a little in poetry himself. But more frequently he'd walk alone, as he did now.

In spite of their fleeting introduction at the theatre the day before, Miklós's unexpected appearance on the square set Ákos Vajkay's mind racing. There had been a time when he had sat young Ijas on his knee and pressed apricots into his mouth. But that was long ago. He hadn't mentioned it at the theatre, for the boy was sure not to remember.

At one time the Vajkays had been frequent guests in the Ijas household, at their tidy, hospitable villa in Tarliget. That was until a dark coincidence all but swept the fine and famous family off the face of the earth.

One evening János Ijas, Miklós's father, a man of considerable social standing in the county, was arrested at his villa in Tarliget by two detectives and taken away.

The case was something of a mystery. After all, his name alone served as sufficient pledge of his honour, and he was known to be a man of considerable means. And if it was true that he squandered money and sometimes risked his hand at cards, he was nevertheless respected as a thoroughly honest man. It was rumoured that the whole affair had been some kind of mistake, that he had been reported by his secret enemies and that there was no evidence against him whatsoever. He had, it was alleged, once sold a property through an intermediary who had accepted the sum of 1,500 forints from a first buyer, but then, when a second appeared, prepared to pay a higher price, had made a separate deal with him. The first buyer, who had thus lost the property he sought, reported Ijas to the authorities by way of revenge, claiming that he had never been reimbursed, and that the sale had already been officially registered.

The details remained somewhat obscure before the public, but Ijas was detained on remand and was refused bail at any sum. Whether or not the hearing ever actually took place, no one could remember. But it was a fact that poor old János Ijas was not released from jail until some eighteen months later, mentally and physically a broken man, whereupon he went abroad and died. Anguish had already driven his wife to the grave during his imprisonment.

At the time the newspapers had written this and that about the case. Especially when the tragedy of the father was followed by that of his eldest son. Jenő Ijas had been stationed in Sárszeg as a lieutenant in the Hungarian army. Because of the rumours surrounding his father's case, proceedings were taken against him too, in order to establish whether, under the circumstances, he could still be considered worthy of his commission. The lieutenant did not wait for the outcome of the investigation. One morning he walked out to the Tarliget estate and there, beneath the huge walnut tree, shot himself in the head with his service revolver. In a farewell letter he pinned to his military tunic, he wrote that this was the least he could do to defend his father's honour and good name.

Only the fifteen-year-old Miklós was left alive. He was taken in by his relations, who brought him up on the Hungarian plain. Here he rode and exercised in the open air, while doing his fair share of eating and sleeping. Later he applied to study law at the University of Kolozsvár but never sat his exams, and learned English instead. When the scandal died down in his home town, he suddenly turned up in Sárszeg, to everyone's surprise, as a journalist.

Because of his awkward situation, Miklós kept himself to himself. Even Feri Füzes picked a quarrel with him and spoke ill of him to others. The Gentlemen's Club refused to grant him membership. Thus he spent his mornings in the Café behind a newspaper and his afternoons in his rented digs, writing. He was seen as something of an eccentric, an ardent devotee of the latest artistic fad, the Secession. The only reason he was out strolling now was that he carried a poem in his head. He had set out in the vain hope that it would take shape along the way, but the words spun in nebulous circles and remained worn, dull and vacant. He sauntered bareheaded in his English suit and slither of a lilac tie, a trilby in his hand. His thick chestnut hair plunged over his steep forehead, exuding eternal youth.

Glimpsing the Vajkays he looked up and hurried over towards Ákos. The day before he had found something deeply sympathetic about the old man's timid, wavering reticence. He stretched out his hand.

“Hello, Ákos.”

Vajkay shook his hand warmly, as if apologising, in everyone's name, for all that had happened.

“Hello, young man.”

Ijas faltered for a moment, then asked:

“Which way are you heading?'

“Home.”

And because he couldn't decide what else to do, and was weary of brooding over his poem, Miklós strung along with them.

“If you don't mind,” he said.

Ákos bowed, the woman lowered her gaze. Young men always made her feel awkward.

They ambled on through the mild evening air in which the houses of Sárszeg stood immobile with a certain false pathos, as if they were still waiting for something to happen.

“Have you much to do at the Gazette?” Ákos asked, simply making conversation.

“Enough.”

“I can well imagine. To write a newspaper every day. All those articles. In these hard times, with the world all upside down...that Dreyfus business...the strikes...”

“Five thousand are on strike in Brazil,” Mother ventured warily.

“Where?” asked Miklós.

“In Brazil,” Ákos repeated with conviction. “Why, only the other day we read about it in a Budapest daily.”

“Possible,” said Ijas. “Yes, I remember reading something,” he mumbled indifferently.

He breathed a deep sigh.

“I'm working on something else right now.”

He was thinking of his poem, which would appear in the Sunday edition of the Gazette, and he gave a twitch of his lips, affecting sensitivity, as he always did when alluding to his unrealised literary ambitions and seeking recognition.

But the allusion was wasted. Ákos had never read his poems. Mother might well have, but she never looked at the authors’ names. She didn't think it important.

They reached the corner of Petőfi Street, which stretched deserted, deep into the silence. Miklós stopped.

“What a miserable wilderness this is,” he said. “How can people bear to live here? If only I could get to Budapest. I was there last week...Ah, Budapest!'

To this he received no reply. All the same it seemed to him they had listened without ill will. And as his confidence in the elderly couple grew, he was overcome by an urge to open his heart to them.

“It was the first time I'd been to the capital,” he began, “since my father died.”

He had mentioned his father. The one person whose name no one dared to speak and whose death had lain silenced under a cloud of shame. This drew the Vajkays closer to the boy.

“Ah, yes, poor fellow,” they said together.

“You knew him, didn't you?” said Miklós, looking at Ákos.

“I did indeed. And liked him. And respected him. He was a very dear friend.”

Their pace slackened. Ákos knitted his brow. How children suffer for their parents, and parents for their children.

Then the woman spoke.

“Our families used to meet. They came to us, we went to them. You, Miklós, were only little then, six or seven. You and Jenő would play at soldiers. We'd sit out on the veranda. By that big, long table.”

“A damn good man,” Ákos interrupted.

“I can hardly remember his face,” said Ijas gravely.

The three of them had arrived beneath a gas lamp. Ákos stopped and looked at Ijas.

“He was about your height. Yes, about as tall. You're a lot like him. But your father was more strongly built.”

“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 he was agitated and sought to silence his thoughts beneath the sound of his own voice.

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 actor, and Doba, who was always silent. Not even with Skylark. For yes, at first sight they had seemed worthless, twisted and distorted, their souls curling hideously inwards. They had no tragedy, for how could tragedy begin to grow in such a wasteland? Yet how profound, how human they all were. How much like him. Once this became clear it could never be forgotten. So he did have something in common with them, after all.

He took this lesson with him. His steps were firmer, surer, as he strode back down Petőfi Street. The poem he had been carrying inside his head had been a bad poem and he gave it no further thought. He'd write about other things, perhaps about these people and all they had told him. About the veranda and that long, long table where they once had sat, and sat no more.

At Széchenyi Square he broke into a run. He hurried down Gombkötő Street, for here, next to the bakery, lived Kladek, the senior editor and publisher of the Sárszeg Gazette.

This bearded, slow-witted, but cultivated and conscientious old man no longer even visited the editorial office, and only demanded of his assistant editor that he call on him once a day. He sat beside a paraffin lamp in his ravaged room where books lay strewn about the floor and the windows were all but barricaded by discarded newspapers piled six feet high. He had lost his grip on this cursed modern age and no longer cared what the next generation made of it, no longer cared, however much young Ijas praised the Secession in his paper.

He rummaged in his pocket for a leader Feri Füzes had written about the effect of hoarfrost on grapes. He gave this to Ijas and told him to take it to the printers, to give the peasants of Sárszeg something to read about.

All that remained for Ijas now was to take a call from Pest about the Dreyfus trial and the latest political events. He had to hurry, because the telephone usually rang at nine.