Dezso Kosztolanyi - Skylark

Mother began tidying her daughter's bedroom. Ákos, unable to settle, gazed vacantly in through the door.

The room had once looked like a chapel, chaste and white.

But the paintwork had faded with time and the silk cushions had grown soiled and a little grey. In the cupboard stood empty cosmetic jars, prayer books from which the lace trimmings of devotional pictures protruded with German inscriptions, velvet-bound, ornamental keepsake albums, fans scribbled thick with names, ball programmes, perfume sachets and hair-pieces hanging from a length of string.

Beside the door in the darkest corner of the room, facing north, hung Skylark's mirror.

Everything was engulfed in silence.

“How empty it all seems,” sighed Mother, gesturing with an open hand.

Ákos did not know what to say. As if, over the long years of their marriage, he had lost the power to initiate conversation, he simply repeated:

“How empty.”

They went back into the dining room.

There on the sideboard sparkled their treasures—“Souvenirs of Lake Velence,” “Souvenirs of Lake Balaton,” “Glasses from Karlsbad'—accumulated over many years and preserved with unconscious piety. All kinds of other odds and ends glittered alongside them, worthless merchandise now utterly useless and inappropriate: fancy bazaar jugs, tiny china dogs, silver-plated goblets, gold-plated angels, all the ghastly icons of provincial life, dusted every day and assembled on small shelves in rows above the back of the sofa. They trembled when anyone sat down, and toppled on to the chest of anyone who unsuspectingly lay down on the sofa beneath them. And then the pictures; how painfully they too stared back at the old couple now. Dobozy, the Hungarian hero, fleeing from the Turks, clasping his wife around her naked breast; the first Hungarian cabinet; and the baldheaded Batthyány, down on his knees with his arms flung wide, waiting for the murderous bullet of his Austrian executioners.

“Let's go into the garden,” the woman proposed.

“Yes, the garden,” echoed Ákos.

They went into the garden. Sweltering, yellow heat greeted them outside. Delicate white kittens pranced across the emerald lawn. A large bowl of water stood beside the well, the sunlight making the colours of the rainbow through the glasses inside. A sunflower on a crooked stem lifted its sun-worshipping head to the blazing west. Horse-chestnut trees, acacias and sumachs rose up behind. And still farther back, by the garden wall, a Virginia pokeweed showed off its dark, ripe berries.

On Skylark's crochet bench they sat down side by side.

“Poor thing,” said Mother, “at least it'll be a rest. And perhaps…” She did not continue.

“Perhaps what?'

“Perhaps someone might…turn up.”

“What kind of someone?'

“Someone,” Mother repeated timidly, “some…good fortune,” she added with an affecting, womanly boldness.

Father looked away in irritation, ashamed to hear what he had so often heard in vain, had so often thought himself, yet knew would only ever lead to more humiliating fiascos and bitter disappointments. There was something vulgar about his wife's remark. He shrugged. Then, almost inaudibly, he muttered:

“Absurd.”

He reached for his pocket watch.

“What time did he say?” he asked.

“Who?'

“Him,” the old man barked, and his wife immediately knew he was referring to Géza Cifra.

“Five twenty.”

“It's half past five,” said Father. “She'll have just got in.”

The thought consoled them both a little. They rose from the bench and strolled among the lilac bushes where a stone dwarf stood on guard. At about this time they usually set off on their walks with Skylark, through the empty streets to the calvary cross and back. But not today. They walked around the garden several times, side by side, their pace quickening as they went. Ákos hoped the horses hadn't bolted on the plain and that Tiger hadn't bitten the girl. Mother ambled along beside him, sharing, and thus lightening, the burden of his thoughts. It felt as if that awful week — a week they'd have to spend alone — had already begun badly, very badly indeed. It all seemed so endless, hopeless and bleak.

Skylark had promised to wire home the moment she arrived. They had written out the message in advance, so all she had to do was send it off. All it said was:

“Arrived safely.”

Dusk fell slowly. For a while they waited for the postman out in the garden, but unable to settle they went inside, believing this would somehow speed the telegram's arrival.

Hours went by and still it hadn't come.

Ákos shut all the doors. As every evening, he checked behind the furniture and the clothes in the wardrobes to see if anyone was hiding there. At nine, when he would usually retire, he went into the bedroom with his wife and lay down on the bed, still fully dressed.

Thoroughly worn out, he fell asleep.

In his dreams he was again walking down Széchenyi Street with Skylark and his wife.

But now they deviated from their usual route and turned into a less familiar road, taking them under a tunnel and, through seemingly endless back streets, into a kind of timber yard.

Here he suddenly noticed that his daughter was missing. He looked at his wife, whose face at once confirmed his terrible premonitions. The woman's face did not merely suggest the girl had disappeared, but that she had been kidnapped. He had already seen her kidnappers several times, mysterious characters dressed partly like medieval knights in armour and partly like clowns in black face masks.

Ákos started to run ahead towards the timber yard, then, suddenly alarmed to find himself alone, ran back again. For a moment he thought he had seen her. Beside a wooden fence that reminded him of his own, Skylark, like a quiet madwoman, lifted her slanted, imploring gaze towards him and, reaching out with her hands, cried for help. She appeared to be trapped. Ákos was just about to reach out to her when she disappeared.

After that he searched for her in vain. He rattled gates, inquired at inns, even entered one suspicious-looking house, a kind of suburban brothel, where ugly strumpets cackled at him before turning on him with their fists. Finally he found himself in a strange workshop at the bottom of a flight of steps, deep beneath the ground.

Here in a green apron squatted an artisan, not Mr Veres, but a sly and shifty individual in a regulation cap with a tin number. He clearly knew all there was to know, and, without even looking at Ákos, pointed with conspiratorial indifference to a curtained glass door. Ákos charged through it and, in a dim alcove, finally found his daughter. Skylark lay on the ground, her head shaven, her body horribly mutilated, stab wounds in her naked breast. She was dead.

The old woman quietly pottered about the room, careful not to wake her husband. She could hear his irregular breathing — the sort that often heralds a sleeping cry — and watched his restless head turn on the pillow. Her husband's first sleep tended to be night-marish, and he'd often spring up in bed with an animal howl.

She went over to him, bent down and lightly touched his brow.

Ákos sat up. He took a sip of water.

He kept his eyes wide open.

He could still see before him the figures from his dream, whom he had encountered so many times before. But even now it staggered him that his precious daughter, who, poor thing, lived such a quiet life, could be the focus of such a horrific and dramatic dream.

After these nightmares he would love Skylark still more dearly.

His wife spoke of the telegram.

“Still nothing?” asked Ákos.

“Not yet.”

At this the bell buzzed in the kitchen. The woman sprang up and ran to open the door.