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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.
    “It's here,” she cried, hurrying back.
    “Arrived safely.”
    She read it aloud.
    Ákos took it into his hands and gazed at it with happy, unbelieving eyes.
    “
Arrived safely
.”
    He, too, read it out loud.
    Fully reassured and smiling at their earlier fears, they undressed, put out the light and both dozed off to sleep.
    And high time too; it was already after midnight.

IV
in which some of the more notable figures of Sárszeg appear before us in the King of Hungary, one Bálint Környey among them
    On Saturday the town was flooded with people from the surrounding farms. Saturday was market day.
    It was still dark when the first women arrived. Rattling down the unpaved streets in their carts, they dragged a train of dust