“And then there's washing day to think of,” Mother mumbled. “Next week.”
Father said good night and withdrew into his bedroom, shutting behind him the door that separated it from his daughter's room. He could hear Mother discussing all the niggling details of housekeeping with his daughter, who was already in bed. Then the conversation turned to the washerwoman and Biri Szilkuthy, who had split up with her husband.
Ákos lit the nightlight. But as its feeble glow flickered across the tray on which it stood, he suddenly turned pale and shrank back as if he had seen a ghost.
There on the edge of the tray lay a slip of paper that somehow had not been hidden away in the confusion. It was the torn, pink stub of a theatre ticket for a two-seater box in the stalls, which they had brought home by mistake and kept.
He glanced towards the door, then, after crumpling the incriminating document in the palm of his hand, tore it into tiny pieces. He went over to the white tiled stove and scattered the pieces inside. When they lit the stove for the first time–in the autumn, at the end of September or the beginning of October–it would burn to a crisp along with all the twigs and logs and other lumber they had been throwing inside all summer long.
Then he got undressed. Mother came in too, on tiptoe, quietly closing the door that separated them from Skylark.
They spoke in whispers.
“Well, have you calmed down at last?” said Mother to Father, who lay flat as a board in bed, his head on a low pillow.
“Is she asleep?'
“Yes.”
“Poor thing. The journey tired her out.”
Mother looked at her daughter's bedroom door. Her woman's heart knew all too well that her daughter wasn't sleeping.
Skylark had just switched off the electric lamp and now lay in complete darkness. She breathed a deep sigh, as she often did, many times a day, and shut her eyes. It was the end, she felt, the end of everything.
Nothing had happened, once again, nothing. As always she had only lied and smiled and tried to please everyone. But during her week away, far from her parents, something had changed inside her, something she only became aware of now that she no longer saw the folk of Tarkő before her, nor heard the rattle of the train.
“I,” she began in her thoughts, as we all do when thinking of ourselves.
But this I was her, something, someone whose life she really lived. She was this I, in body and in soul, one with its very flesh, its memories, its past, present and future, all of which we seal into a single destiny each time we face ourselves and utter that tiny, unalterable word: “I.”
Uncle Béla and Aunt Etelka had indeed received her warmly, but she had soon discovered that her presence was superfluous, a burden, and had tried to make herself scarce, to shrink to half her size. That was why she had even slept on the divan. But somehow it was all to no avail.
Whatever she did, whatever she said, she was always in the way–of the Thurzó girls, of Berci, and gradually, as she noticed one evening at supper, even Aunt Etelka began to find her tiresome.
They were all there in the photograph she had shown her parents.
Someone, however, had been absent.
It was Jóska Szabó, the bailiff, a coarse, squat widower in his mid-forties, who had a walrus moustache and came, at least in part, from peasant stock. On the first day he had spoken to her, had walked her home from the grange. But after that he had stayed away, avoiding her company, and whenever they came face to face, he'd cast his eyes to the ground.
Yes, even Jóska Szabó, with his three motherless children, two boys and a six-year-old daughter, Mancika, whom she so loved to sit on her knee and caress. On leaving, she had given the child a silver medallion and chain which had been a confirmation gift from Mrs Záhoczky. What a ridiculous, tactless thing to have done! The shame, the awful shame! She wouldn't say anything to her parents. No, she'd tell them she had lost it.
Her relatives had invited her back next year. She had promised to return. But no, she'd never go again. What was the point?
By then she'd be thirty-six years old. And in ten years’ time? Or twenty? Her father was fifty-nine, her mother fifty-seven. Ten years, maybe not even ten. Her parents would die. And what then, Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, what then?
Above her bed, like the plaster Jesus which hung above her parents’ bed, stood an image of the Virgin Mary, rocking her large, dead child on her knees and pointing to her heart, pierced by the seven daggers of maternal pain. In days long since gone by she had listened to Skylark's childish prayers, just as the prostrate Jesus heard those of her parents. For a second she flung out her arms towards the image in a gesture of passion which, however, she immediately suppressed. Patience. Patience. There are those who suffer so much more.
Her eyes still tightly shut, she lay on her cold and barren girlhood bed, where nothing, save sleep and illness, had ever happened. She pressed the full weight of her body downwards, like a corpse into its bier. The bed was softer and wider than the divan at Tarkő, and she could spread out more comfortably, soberly reflecting on the daily round that now awaited her.
The following morning she'd rise before seven and start cooking. Risotto, without pepper or other spices, and semolina so that her poor, dear father should put on weight. In the afternoon she'd go on crocheting the yellow tablecloth, which still wasn't finished, because her relatives had refused to let her work and she had succumbed to their persuasions. And then next week was washing day.
At last she opened her eyes. Darkness hovered around her, a dense and charitable blackness. At the touch of the cool air, or perhaps of the darkness itself, in which she couldn't see a thing, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. Warm, living tears flooded her pillow as if the glass of water on her bedside table had tumbled down upon it. And now she was sobbing out loud. But she lay on her stomach and pressed her mouth to the pillow so that her parents shouldn't hear. It was an exercise she had perfected through many years of practice.
Father had still not switched off the light.
“Skylark,” he faltered, pointing to the door and beaming contentedly at his wife.
“She's flown back home,” said Mother.
“Our little bird,” added Father, “has finally flown home.”
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Translation copyright © 1993 by Richard Aczel Introduction copyright © 1993 by Péter Esterházy All rights reserved.
First published in Hungarian asPacsirta, 1924
Cover image: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait, 1898
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication
Kosztolányi, Dezso, 1885–1936.
[Pacsirta. English]
Skylark / by Dezso Kosztolányi ; introduction by Péter Esterházy ; translated by Richard Aczel.
p. cm.—(New York Review Books classics)
I. Title.
PH3281.K85P313 2010
894́.51133—dc22
2009035693
eISBN 978-1-59017-402-9
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Skylark Page 18
