The Adventures of Sindbad (New York Review Books Classics)

by Gyula Krudy

  The people changed but they were replaced by others precisely like them. As if birth, death and marriage were all part of some curious joke. Even now it was the ancestral dead sitting round the table. They reproduced themselves: women, children. The weathercock spins, the wind and rain beat at the roof precisely as before, and neither the cloud approaching from the west nor the meadow stretching far into the distance appears to acknowledge the fact that the man sitting at the window is of this century not the last.

  Portraits of ancestors appear throughout the adventures. They add tone to that mortuary charm. The irony underlying them proclaims the fact that Sindbad does not fully believe in either them or himself. He is an aging lover and has already died several times over. Those magical transformations and that continual shifting between spirit and flesh only go to show that he is hardly there.

  He is certainly a creature of vestiges. Sindbad is a self-proclaimed voyeur and fetishist. He loves women’s clothes almost more than the women themselves. He admits that he finds the naked woman disappointing. He has an eye for fashion and enjoys watching women parade in their latest outfits. In ‘Sindbad’s Dream’ he notes women in their silken dresses ‘which they raised to reveal high white-laced boots’; in ‘Winter Journey’ we meet the woman of his dreams ‘still standing on the threshold in her lacquered ankle boots and delicate silk stockings’. ‘Your figure is as it was, neat and graceful,’ Sindbad says to one of his many actress loves, Paula, in another story. ‘Let me smell your hair! Show me your shoes and your stockings! You ought to wear finer gloves. The little ribbon about your neck is charming.’ He is equally fastidious about the details of men’s clothing, preferring the slightly romantic and faintly ridiculous, though he knows the difference between them. In ‘The Woman Who Told Tales’, young Albert, who has been deeply smitten by the mysterious siren and ex-flower girl, Mrs Boldogfalvi, wears a highly romantic costume of tall riding boots, cloak and a plumed hat. In fact he is not unlike Sindbad himself when Mrs Boldogfalvi first meets him. Pursuing Mrs Boldogfalvi, who has grown bored with him, Albert arrives at the inn she has just left, his face covered in dust, throws down his plumed hat and cries: ‘Devil take her! What am I doing wearing this fancy dress?’

  Fancy dress is an important element of Sindbad’s fantasies. Take a passage from another of Krúdy’s winding sentences:

  … when behind open windows striking women of foreign appearance are taking their clothes off in the sleeping compartments and men wearing military decorations are reading broadsheets in the dining car, and you pick up that blend of Havana and cologne even through the smell of coaldust, then Sindbad becomes a black moustached, Henry VIII-bearded sleeping car attendant in a gold braided hat, who calmly and elegantly steps into the sleeping compartments, approaches the lovely Romanian woman who is already dozing and asks, in a cool but delicate manner, ‘Is there anything else I could get you, madam?’

  Here, as elsewhere, Sindbad is a little Oedipal boy sensually pleasing his mother. The wisest and most fully rounded of Krúdy’s female protagonists is the woman nicknamed Monkey, who, in only the second story of the book, is already left to arrange matters after Sindbad’s death. She raises his chin to the light of the window, closely examines his face, strokes his hair and says to him:

  ‘… sometimes I love you so much I feel less like your lover — your discarded, abandoned and forgotten lover — than like your mother. I know you so well. It is as if I had given birth to you.’

  This is one of the key perceptions of the book, not so much for its revelation about missing mothers or the lure of the maternal but for its recognition of Sindbad’s ambivalence. It turns out that Monkey knows more about his life than he does. A simplistic reading would suggest that all the women in Sindbad’s life are merely projections of his desire, but Sindbad himself feels and acts as though he were a projection of theirs. Sindbad’s contemplations on women will sometimes appear offensive to a modern reader. The passage in ‘An Overnight Stay’, where we are told that Sindbad likes ‘Leaves in the park in autumn, blotched as if with blood, and abandoned windmills where one day he might murder the woman he loved best’ is worrying, and another in ‘Escape from Women’, where Sindbad suggests that treating women like children is downright insulting. But the very same passage later transforms these child-women into would-be mothers of Sindbad. As the ruminations progress, Sindbad comes to recognise himself as a rogue, one who, in the Middle Ages, ‘would have gone the rounds of the prisons where he would have been shorn, first of his nose, then of his ears’. This is familiar territory of course, and is only half-heartedly offered as an excuse.

  In a paper recently given at the Collegium in Budapest, the translator John Bátki pointed out how Krúdy evokes the old Goddess cults of his home country, the marshy wetlands of the River Tisza. Bátki draws on research by Marija Gimbutas into the neolithic religions of old Europe to demonstrate that Krúdy’s later work is open to anthropological readings. Perhaps Sindbad is a faded Adonis or Tammuz. Even if that is the case, we simply cannot take him at his own evaluation. Krúdy doesn’t, nor, for that matter, does Sindbad himself. Sindbad says he cannot help but tell the truth, but this truth concerns his condition, not any objective state of affairs. The condition subsumes his hypocrisy.

  ‘He could never forgive women. He thought he perceived miraculous qualities in them, a combination of the fidelity of the saints with the virtues of the martyrs. And how he would rage when one of them took up with another man though it was he who had long left her.’

  Hypocrisy is the state of affairs in dreams. Sindbad acts ironically in a world in which he half-believes. In so far as he believes in it, we are given to understand that he is naïve — a creature of the past. Sindbad’s dreams are clearly historical fancies — tiny costumed tableaux, doll’s house flirtations — but the women’s dreams are all the more substantial for including him as he is. In effect he is validated by their dreams.

  Dreams are the ultimate channel of communication. ‘I dreamt you were dreaming with me, so I set out,’ he says to Paula on meeting her. In their dreams he revisits the women he once seduced, or who seduced him — or else returns as a ghost. They lock him in secret rooms. They want to take him away to their quiet country retreats. He is what they would have him be. ‘His whole long life he had been “my darling“ to two or three women at a time,’ Krúdy tells us. Maybe this is because Sindbad has ‘a genius for observing women, for secretly following them and discovering their hopes, secrets and desires’. He is a beautiful boy-child with a grey moustache and perfect manners, the infant fascinated by the female principle and its power. And indeed, as an exercise in power, it is hard to say who is in control. Women kill themselves for him, but he kills himself for them too. They have him on a string as much as he has them. It is the mutual exercise of erotic power that makes the transaction such a pleasure.

  Yet the pleasure is never free of danger and there is usually a price to be paid for it. Pope Gregory pays it. So do the dead babies sleeping in the ditch, those ‘tiny souls who had perished downless, featherless’ but who nevertheless resurrect themselves as little frogs and hop onto their mothers’ feet as the women are crossing for sexual assignations in the graveyard. So do the suicides drifting in the waters of the Danube and the dead mother who hears her own daughter being seduced by a ghost directly above her grave — all pay the price. Time and again Sindbad envisages his own death although it frightens him. When his lover Fanny proposes a suicide pact he finds the thought so terrifying that he shudders: ‘I know death. Death is for women.’ But it is he who has been dead through most of the book. In any case, the idea of the suicide pact has come to the lady a few hours too late. It is already dawn. ‘The milkman is due,’ says Fanny, ‘my husband will arrive by the first train, the servants will be up and ready to go to the market … and I shall go to hospital to visit my sick brother.’

  Romance requires night and mists. Clear light destroys it. A young Hungarian man of the 1920s might
have used Sindbad as a working manual of sexual relations. He might not have suspected the tricks those strange long open sentences were playing on him; that the carpet was, in effect, being pulled from under his and the author’s own feet. Yet the manual still has its surprises. The vampirical Sindbad is less interested in the blood of young virgins than in the nourishment provided by fellow veterans of the sexual campaign.

  Once, when an officer of the Hussars insulted him, Krúdy tore the man’s sword from his waist and presented the sword to the madam of a brothel. He then fought the duel to which the Hussar had challenged him — and won. He would sit up all night drinking. On another occasion, thinking that Krúdy had fallen asleep, an exhausted drinking companion tried to tip-toe from the room. ‘Come back and talk some more,’ Krúdy’s deep voice ordered him.

  The voice that speaks to us in The Adventures of Sindbad has authority. Its discourse is woven out of the night-talk of duels and seductions remembered but not quite believed. ‘Let us therefore close the file on Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence,’ Krúdy declares in ‘Escape from Women’, dismissing his romantic ironical hero with an equally ironic gesture. The new world is moving under Sindbad much as the underground train moved under the feet of the citizens of Budapest, shaking the cobbles of the old.

  —GEORGE SZIRTES

  THE ADVENTURES OF SINDBAD

  Youth

  Once upon a damp and moonlit night a man with greying hair was watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops. Somewhere in the monastery at Podolin, he was thinking, there is, or was, an old painting, showing a shaggy-haired figure with a wild upcurled moustache, a thick beard, red as a woman’s hair, two big round eyes with elongated pale blue pupils, and a complexion as ruddy as the colour on a white tablecloth when light passes through a full wine glass on a sunny winter noon. This man was Prince Lubomirski.

  Who he was,* what kind of man, before he found himself among other worn gilt frames in the old monastery, is not strictly relevant to this tale. Suffice it to say he was there on the wall, beneath the vault, where peeling plaster revealed faint traces of a mural of long dead saints amusing themselves. St Anne was seated on a low stool, her face somewhat drained of colour by this time, only her two bleary eyes still staring enquiringly at the students who clattered down the cobbled passage-way in their heavy boots. The good woman was eternally solicitous about their education. St George, mean-while, was busily killing his dragon — and Prince Lubomirski took his place in the middle.

  The monastery had its share of non-paying novices, and their stout tutors were always ready to terrify them with those big round eyes. The prince had, in his day, supported the propagation of piety by contributing some fine round cobbles to the fabric of the building, so even after his death he retained a certain interest in the disciplining of errant students. Poor Slovakian boys who had found themselves transported directly from tall pine forests to the thick walls of the monastery, raised their caps respectfully to his wine red complexion.

  The young ladies of Podolin who came to the monks for absolution would wreathe his picture with flowers fresh from the meadow, and women, who a couple of centuries before would have given birth to red-bearded, shaggy-haired children, prayed before the prince’s image precisely as they did before pictures of the saints. (To be sure, they had forgotten how some two centuries ago, the prince would delightedly remove his buffalo skin gloves in the presence of ladies kneeling at his feet. But he was long past removing his gloves now.)

  In this manner Lubomirski remained lord of the manor well after his death: local boys were inevitably christened George, and each Sunday before the town hall the local dignitaries would let off a rocket in honour both of the Lord and of George Lubomirski. (True, they used only half as much gunpowder for the latter.)

  The gentleman with greying hair, who, seated one night at his writing table, recalled that vaulted corridor where the heels of the novices clattered and echoed, then faded away in the distance, had himself been a student at the monastery and knew the district well. His name was Sindbad. He had selected this name from his favourite book of stories, The Thousand and One Nights, for in those days, it was still fairly common for knight errants, poets, actors and passionate scholars to choose names for themselves. One hunchbacked lad had chosen to be addressed as Gregory, after the pope, heaven knows why.

  Sindbad respected Prince Lubomirski, but he raised his hat to him in much the same way as he did to the stationer, Müller, whose little shop was situated in the shadow of a gateway and was therefore always dark. Here, in this gloom, nature worked in reverse, for while old man Müller had no moustache, his saucy raven-haired daughter, Fanni, did. For a long time Fanni was embarrassed by this, but one day a young teacher arrived in town, and he told her the moustache was both lovely and seductive. And Fanni was seized by such great happiness on hearing this that she leapt into the River Poprád near the dam.

  Sindbad’s parents, let it be known, were punctilious in paying his fees to the monastery and on more than one occasion sent barrels of wine as a contribution to Holy Communion, over which Sindbad officiated, wearing his red surplice and rattling off the Confiteor at the speed of light, before ceremoniously and becomingly ringing his bell, as if the novices in the rear pews were only waiting for this word of command before they could get down on their knees. It was in this office one Sunday, while wearing his red surplice, that he succeeded in seducing Anna Kacskó, who had come to mass along with a few friends of hers. How did all this happen?

  One reason why Sindbad neglected to thank the prince in an appropriately humble fashion was because he was a boarding student at the Kacskó residence. Old man Kacskó was a chief magistrate — one of the ‘old school’ you used to be able to find in little hillside towns. In his youth he might have been no more than a magistrate’s runner, then a magistrate’s clerk; but as time went on he grew a beard and learned the ropes simply by being there. And as his beard grew so did his belly, until, in the end, he became chief magistrate. There is nothing in the highland magistrates of that rakish quality typical of the lowland sort; they are solid upright men who have big families and do their bit at home cutting up wood and making candles, rarely losing their tempers unless the cook burns the soup. Old man Kacskó brought his heavy fist down on the table.

  ‘I am chief magistrate!’ he thundered.

  Minka, his gentle, glum, neatly combed wife answered as was her wont, ‘Yes, but not when you’re at home.’

  ‘How dare you talk like that to me in front of my daughters?’ shouted old man Kacskó, and put his hand to his ear as if trying to catch the words of some Slovakian plaintiff at a hearing.

  ‘They are my daughters,’ Minka sighed. ‘The chief magistrate shows little interest in the fact that they should be married one day.’

  After this there was little left for Gyula Kacskó, chief magistrate, to do but escape to his office. He sent one of his clerks home to fetch his favourite pipe.

  It was true that no one seemed to care much whether the Kacskó girls married or not. There were three of them, three maidens, brought up to be pretty, healthy and strapping, and they lived, as did Sindbad, on the upper floors of the house. They took weekly turns to do the cooking: Magda excelled at mutton, Anna at cabbage and Róza at sweet pastries. In the afternoon or the evening, when Sindbad had, for his own good reasons, to leave the downstairs sitting room (if only so that old man Kacskó and mother Minka should be able to have a proper row without the chief magistrate escaping to his office), the young ladies took turns to escort Sindbad, who was frightened of being alone and was not too fond of study, to his room, to sit at his desk, engage in a little handiwork and read endless novels. Magda and Anna were usually so absorbed in their novels that Sindbad could fall asleep over his homework without them noticing. But Róza, who was just sixteen, and was not as likely as the others to look condescendingly on the adolescent Sindbad, would often reach over, grab a hank of
the student’s thick dark hair in her fair hands, and give it a sound, good-humoured tug. The boy yelped in pain. Róza blushed all the deeper and tugged even harder.

  ‘Study!’ she cried, her eyes sparkling, ‘or else, as God is my witness, Lubomirski will fail you.’

  Sindbad quickly bent over his book again, till one day on the deserted upper floor, where bags of oats lay like dead men in the empty rooms, a sudden wind sprung up. Róza was frightened and shut her eyes listening to its roar, then, perhaps because the fear grew stronger in her, she gave a little shiver and leant against the boy, pale and distraught, letting her head drop onto his shoulder and putting her arm about his neck.

  As for Sindbad, the wind gave him such a fright he didn’t dare turn the page of his book though he had learned all that was to be learned from the one that lay open before him.

  So, back in the days when George Lubomirski watched over the progress of the pupils of Podolin, grasping, in his buffalo skin gloves, the hilt of his sword on which representations of the currently popular saints were clearly to be seen — in the days when Róza Kacskó good-humouredly, energetically and somewhat tenderly tugged Sindbad’s hair, then leaned her head upon his shoulder once the punishment had been duly administered, there was a boy who was second to none in his study of theology, of the sacraments and of the piety due to icons, who for one reason or other was referred to as Pope Gregory by the novices of the ancient monastery. Pope Gregory was a hunchbacked little boy with features as delicate as the holy wafer he received once a week. Though Sindbad often took the opportunity of punching Pope Gregory, he nevertheless made friends with him, and what’s more, one afternoon, just when Róza was due to be sitting at his desk at the Kacskós’, supervising his studies, he invited the little hunchback up. It could only have been to show off Róza, to demonstrate her friendship, her lovely eyes and fair hands.