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.