Skylark (4 page)

A rangy railway official came towards them, wearing a red armband and the insignia of a winged wheel on his sleeve. He had been standing between the rails when the train pulled out and was now shuffling hesitantly towards the office.

His face was pale, but on his narrow brow, beneath the peak of his railway cap, his summer pimples bloomed brightly like ripe cherries. His uniform hung loosely about his chest.

He snorted and snuffled, continually plagued by colds. Even in this fine, sunny weather his left nostril was constantly blocked. To dignify his wheezing he would let out the odd sigh. He even coughed now and then, although he had no need to cough at all.

They spotted him at once. Géza Cifra.

The woman nudged her husband. Ákos had already seen him, but hadn't wanted to speak. They wondered what to do.

They turned away, not wanting to face the boy.

They had known Géza Cifra for some nine years.

In the days when he was first stationed in Sárszeg, he had often visited their home, where Ákos would receive him with his customary affability. They'd invite him to tea, sometimes even to dinner. Géza Cifra would accept their invitations; out of awkwardness, mainly, for he couldn't say no to anyone. He praised the tea and extolled the dinner. At the Catholic Ladies’ Club ball he danced the second quadrille with Skylark. He took her out rowing with friends on the lake at Tarliget and was generally attentive to her–in so far as he knew how to be attentive to a woman. But then, without cause or foundation, rumours began to spread in town that he would ask for Skylark's hand. At this he suddenly began to stay away.

He got in with an altogether different crowd, a handful of junior clerks, shady office boys, well below even his social station although close to him in spirit. Consequently, he felt ashamed of his friends, rather as a man who knows he has married beneath himself might feel ashamed of his wife. They met secretly in their lodgings, scoffing at everything, disparaging everyone, especially one another. An amber-tipped cigarette holder or a silver cigarette case could fill them with such unspeakable envy, and the good fortune of one of their number with such loathing, that they would immediately conspire against him and (remaining within the bounds of friendship, of course) contemplate causing him fatal injury, denouncing him in an anonymous letter or simply wringing his neck.

Géza Cifra, who was not naturally inclined to such malevolence, occasionally felt disgusted by his companions. But not enough to break free of them, for, while they were held together in petty wickedness by the iron clasp of passion, he was bound to them through plain lack of cultivation. He simply enjoyed their schoolboy pranks and nasty jokes.

His friendship with the Vajkays gradually cooled. They would no more than exchange greetings and the odd polite word when, as now, their paths occasionally crossed.

Skylark never mentioned Géza Cifra. There had, after all, been others like him. Her parents, however, had never forgotten the boy. Géza Cifra was the one person in all the world they could never forgive and would never cease to resent. What sin, what crime had he committed? None, to be sure. He had never laid a finger on their daughter, never led her on or deceived her, never made improper suggestions as others had.

All that had happened, one fine March evening during the first year of their acquaintance some nine years before, was that Géza Cifra had bumped into Skylark in front of the King of Hungary restaurant and had, out of simple courtesy, escorted her as far as the Baross Café, talking on the way about the weather, good and bad, causing Skylark, to her parents’ complete surprise, to arrive five minutes late for supper, which began, as custom had it, at approximately eight o'clock.

This the Vajkays could never forget. Years later they would still reflect on their daughter's mysterious evening promenade, and Géza Cifra became a kind of family legend, swelling inside them entirely unnourished by fact. At times they despised him, at times they accused him, and at times he was simply that spineless scoundrel, that shamefully unfeeling libertine, that wretched–if not altogether ill-intentioned–weakling of a young man, to whom between themselves they only ever referred as
him
. They never so much as uttered his name.

He had at one time undoubtedly met with the Vajkays’ highest approval. They could never have wished their daughter a more appropriate suitor. They had always dreamed of a decent, homely type who'd wear unironed broadcloth trousers and a painfully knitted brow; who'd sweat a little and blush when he spoke.

Géza Cifra was just such a man.

He was always embarrassed and ill at ease. Uncomfortable in the company of people brighter than himself, he could not disguise his torment. It hurt to look at him.

He was terrified of everyone and everything. Terrified of arriving too early or of leaving too late; terrified of talking too much or too little, of eating too much or too little. At dinner he would always refuse something twice before accepting it the third time round, his head tilted to one side, wearing a sheepish smile. Even now he did not know what to do.

He could never have imagined what he meant to that poor old couple. All he could sense was that they were colder towards him now, and this he found quite natural. Should he approach them or not?

He was tempted above all to disappear without seeming to notice them. Indeed he resolved to do so at once. Then, thinking how impolite that might seem, how scandalous and ungrateful, he grew alarmed by his own intentions and changed his mind. In the end, he did what he always did in such situations: the opposite of what he'd initially intended.

He walked over to them.

When Géza Cifra raised a gloved hand to his cap and greeted them, Ákos, still standing firm beside his wife, felt a shiver run down his spine.

“Gone away?” asked Géza Cifra.

“Away,” Father echoed hoarsely.

At this point the conversation stalled. It was the moment Géza Cifra always dreaded.

“Actually,” he began, without knowing how to continue. With that and similar words he tried to stop the gaps in the conversation, but to no avail. He smiled, then grimaced. He shivered hot and cold, then swallowed hard. He thought he had tarried long enough, then decided that he hadn't and it would still be improper to withdraw. His Adam's apple slid up and down his goitrous throat.

He cast a flustered glance at his pocket watch.

“Two forty-seven,” he said, taking refuge in railway talk. “Should get in at five twenty.”

Father made no reply, but Mother smiled. A warm, familiar smile, imploring him to stay, as it often had in times long since gone by.

“The train won't be late?” she inquired.

“No,” Géza Cifra replied.

Now he felt sure he could retire. He wanted to salute, but only managed a modest tip of the cap.

The elderly couple made their way out of the station.

A long afternoon lay before them, and, not knowing what else to do, they headed back to the house. They even hurried a little, as if something still awaited them at home.

Ákos had left the county administration some five years previously, taking early retirement on account of his illness. His days passed quietly, melting into months and years. Almost unawares, he had reached the age of fifty-nine. He looked a good deal older, sixty-five at least.

Before retiring he had bought the single-storey house on Petőfi Street from the remains of an inheritance left him by his maternal uncle, Gedeon Körcsy, together with the few odd pennies he had scraped together during his career. Apart from the house, he owned nothing else in the world. Here he would pace up and down, hands behind his back, growing weary of doing nothing. He'd wait for his wife and daughter to get up in the morning, then wait for them to go to bed in the evening. He waited for the table to be laid, then waited to see it cleared again. He pottered about restlessly with an anxious glow in his eyes.

He had not moved in society for years. He neither drank nor smoked. Not only his family doctor, Dr Gál, but also the professor he had consulted in Pest, had warned against arteriosclerosis and forbidden him from taking alcohol and–more distressingly–from smoking his beloved cigars.

The only passion remaining to him from the past was to sit in his cramped and perpetually damp study, leafing through a volume of Iván Nagy's great tome on Hungarian noble families, or Géza Csegheő's precious and thoroughly entertaining little book on the history of coats of arms. He knew a thing or two about heraldry and blazonry, archivology and sigillography, diplomatics and sphragistics. He'd sit and syllabise endless Latin letters of foundation–
litterae armales
–written by ancient kings, and never came across a single document, a single subpoenal
executionale
or capitulary
fassio
, on which he could not immediately shed some light. He saw at a glance how the various families branched out, and could at once divine the meaning of a horizontal bar in the panel of a crest, an eagle with spread wings, a solitary golden globe. And he loved his vocation dearly. The sheer delight of peering through the magnifying glass at a mouse bite, a moth hole or the zigzag channel carved by a woodworm, while breathing in the acerbic fragrance of the mould. It was here he came alive; here in the past. And as others travel miles to visit fortune-tellers, distinguished gentlemen from far-away counties had for many years made pilgrimages to Petőfi Street to discover their pasts.

In his younger days he had earned his living from the “verification of lawful lineage,” from
filiatio
and
deductio
, and although he no longer had any financial need of his vocation, he found himself unable to give it up. He could become as ensconced in a
donatio regia
as in some fascinating chess puzzle, and would dig through generations of ancestors and kinsmen, grandparents and great-grandparents, until he arrived at the most exciting of all, the primogenitor, the first forefather, the
primus acquirens
, whose ingenuity had established the fortune of a whole generation and whose heroic deeds reflected glory on all who descended from him. His head hummed with King's Wardens, Dames of the Star Cross Order and Knights of the Maltese Cross. He had nothing but admiration for those admissible at court.

When he had no other work, he'd turn to his own friends and acquaintances. He had once even wanted to verify the lawful lineage of Géza Cifra. For a while the genealogical
tabella
progressed quite smoothly. He even took it with him to the archives of the neighbouring county in order to gather more recent data. Then he suddenly got stuck. Neither he nor the records could uncover the exact identity of Géza Cifra's paternal grandfather. And so the family tree he had begun to sketch remained unfinished. Its frondose branches withered as if ravaged by a violent storm. Whenever Ákos came upon this sketch among his other papers, a scornful smile flitted across his face. Géza Cifra was just a common upstart, and not of noble descent at all.

But oh, the stories he could tell about his own ancestors, whom he seemed to know more intimately than the living. The Ádám Vajkays and the Sámuel Vajkays who had lived in the mountains and kidnapped young girls. Or the women, the Kláras and Katalins and Erzsébets, who had taken part in Maria Theresa's powderpuff balls. Or his wife's ancestors, the powerful Bozsós who had lived as wealthy aristocrats with splendid estates right up until the middle of the eighteenth century; or even about the odd isolated word once uttered by ancient kinsmen in the depths of bygone centuries and about the obscure golden lily which blossomed on the scarlet panel of their crest. Such ancient blood throbbed in their veins that they hadn't even possessed a noble patent, acquiring their rank through donated estates and laying claim to their coat of arms by right of ancient custom. This one escutcheon hung in a frame on his study wall, together with a family tree he had painted himself in fine, pale watercolours, after decades of fastidious research had led him all the way back to King Endre II. His own humble position and meagre means prevented him from applying for the title of royal and imperial chamberlain, a title upon which, according to his ancestry, he could none the less make every lawful claim. But this never disturbed him in the least. Not a man of outward vanity, he was interested in the principle alone, in itself sufficient to swell his secret self-esteem.

By the time he reached fifty, his work had been complete. He had traced the lineage of every last Vajkay and Bozsó, dead or alive. What remained to be done? Browsing over sheets of paper, onionskin and parchment, he would sit in his study for hours on a creaky couch draped with a Turkish rug, rapidly losing its colour in the stuffy, museumlike air. Here he'd ruminate about the future.

But all the future seemed to hold for certain was the prospect of his approaching death. Of this simple fact he would speak with all the callous indifference and alarming objectivity of an old man, often bringing his wife and daughter to the brink of tears. On the tomb of his long-departed parents he set a stone of dark-brown marble, engraved in gold lettering with the words: The Vajkay Family Vault. He took care of the grave, planted four box shrubs beside it and regularly watered the turf. He even painted the bench where he would sit and muse during his visits to the cemetery.

It was, he announced, his wish to be buried there when the time came, between his mother and father. He should be laid in state in the guest room, the hall should be draped in black and only two priests should perform the funeral. He kept his will in a sealed envelope locked in the bottom drawer of his writing desk, and informed his wife of where it might be found when the time arrived. The last years of his life he spent increasingly in preparation for his death.

The only time he'd betray any anxiety at all was when a member of his funeral society died. Then he'd hurry off to town with his funeral register–his “little book,” as he called it–to pay his society dues. Back at home he'd leaf once more through the register, checking that the fee had been duly entered, and with the yellowing, trembling fingers of a hand on which the hard, calciferous veins stood out blue and swollen, he'd point to the appropriate columns and figures, indicating to his family that all was in order.