The Adventures of Sindbad (New York Review Books Classics)

by Gyula Krudy

  This is how the visit of Pope Gregory went: Róza remained serious and silent the whole time, behaved condescendingly to both boys and was not at all willing to tug Sindbad’s hair, though she had never wasted an opportunity to do so in the past.

  And far from resting her head on Sindbad’s shoulders, or putting her arms about his neck, she railed at him violently. ‘I wonder that Lubomirski tolerates such a hopeless student at the monastery!’

  Poor hunchbacked Pope Gregory gawped as if bewitched by the sight of the jerkin tightening on Róza’s naked arms and the pearly buttons heaving silently on her rounded bosom.

  But Róza mocked him and slapped him on the back, crying, ‘Just look at this boy. He has a hump like a camel.’

  Pope Gregory blinked, his face quietly reddened and he left the upper floor with tears in his eyes.

  Sindbad felt a certain bitterness that evening when Róza affectionately rumpled his hair, laid her ashen face against his, grasped his shoulder firmly and swung on the chair. He kept seeing the hunchback’s tearful face and concentrated as firmly as he could on his studies, if only to annoy Róza.

  ‘Really, what do you see in that toad?’ Róza asked, annoyed when Sindbad refused to take his eyes from the book.

  He stretched, stood up and stepped lazily over to the window. The evening — a mild June evening — brought to his ear the mingled noises of travellers on the road snaking up the little hill. The first stars were peering over the distant mountains like children playing at hide-and-seek.

  ‘From now on you can study with the hunchbacked toad,’ said Róza later, quite solemnly. ‘Teach yourself Latin, if you like him so much.’

  This mild cloud was the reason that Sindbad went bathing with Pope Gregory in the River Poprád the following afternoon, behaving as if they were the best of friends. The Poprád wound between timber barriers under the ancient monastery, dark and silent as a lake. Further out, in the middle of the current, the waves danced and frothed as merrily as if they had learned the art of cheerful travelling from merchants trafficking up and down the hills, whistling, singing, tippling their way from country to country.

  Naturally, the boys bathed in the deep still water, holding on to the iron staples in the timber, dangling their legs in the bottomless pool. The little hunchback felt absolutely safe in the company of the brave and admirable Sindbad. Suddenly he gave a triumphant cry, ‘Hey, I can feel the river bed here!’ He extended his thin legs. His inky fingers let go of the metal bar and the water silently closed over him. For a brief second Sindbad could still see the curious hump on his back under the surface of the river, then the water, the shore and the tall limes nearby grew unaccountably quiet as if the monastery had touched them with a magic wand and they had died on the spot, as in The Thousand and One Nights.

  Sindbad leapt out of the water as if a crab had pinched him. He stared at the unmoving water and stirred it with a broken branch, then quickly snatched up his clothes. Tight-lipped and silent, he started to run towards the wooden bridge that straddled the Poprád like a great long-legged spider. He brushed against people who shook their heads at the pale little boy in full flight. Sindbad seemed to hear them muttering the name of the mysterious Lubomirski.

  A boat was tied up at the bridge. His knife was sharp for he had little to do in his free time but sharpen it. It took but a moment to cut the rope. Meanwhile the strong current was already sweeping him downstream. Sindbad’s eyes widened as he stared at the tall lime trees. Perhaps Pope Gregory the hunchback was still swinging there and the whole thing was merely a bad joke …

  But the place where the river lay dreaming was as silent as it had been a few moments ago. Carefully, Sindbad manoeuvred the boat to the spot where Pope Gregory had disappeared and poked an oar into the water as deep as it would go. Then he felt around with his arms in case Pope Gregory was just a few inches away … Eventually he began to row quietly down river. He stopped now and then; the oar touched the pebbly bed of the shallow Poprád, a few larger stones emerged in the distance in deeper water like so many Pope Gregories, a scarlet trout shot by, terrified, and the river sparkled and foamed like liquid silver filtered through an enormous sieve.

  The brickworks of the monastery slowly receded into the distance, yellow and red fruit trees extended along the bank, and Mr Privánka, one of the teachers, was doing a spot of weeding in the vegetable garden wearing heavy boots, his cassock rolled up. Sindbad flattened himself on the floor of boat for fear that he should see him. So he rowed on, leaving the monastery far behind. Boughs bent over the stream but there was nothing beneath them but a rotten old pine beam.

  It was late afternoon by now, the sun was disappearing behind the mountains, and bare, abandoned fields stretched out ready for sleep on either side of the river. The silver Poprád no longer sparkled so brightly, a long lilac shadow was slowly settling across its reflective surface.

  Then, some way down, midstream, he caught sight of the hunchback Pope Gregory, drifting face up in the spume. His two arms were extended either side of him, his mouth opened like a black hole. His legs were lost in the water.

  Sindbad wiped his sweating brow and, for the first time, fully understood what had happened. The hunchback had drowned and he would get the blame. The image of Lubomirski would finally step out of the frame, in fact, he was already advancing on him with his red beard. Somewhere in the far distance Róza was standing under the dark boughs of the further shore, her hands joined behind her back, morosely, furiously glaring at the stars as she had done the night before … The river seemed deep, mysterious and terrifying as he rowed after the corpse. Eventually he managed to catch hold of the hunchback Gregory’s feet and, weeping and whimpering, he succeeded in hauling him into the boat. He turned the boat round and slowly, wearily rowed back up the river.

  Some time later Sindbad woke up at home and in bed.

  The yellow lamp illuminated Róza’s ashen face. The girl concentrated her enormous sparkling grey eyes on him and her lips whispered close into his ear. ‘You are a brave boy. And I will love you for ever now.’

  Sindbad’s Dream

  Once Sindbad dreamt he was a king in the heyday of Old England, a young king, about eighteen years old, wearing soft pointed shoes and a silken tunic. His hair was long and fell in waves. His eyes sparkled, he laughed a great deal, beautiful gold coins slipped from his fingers and he conversed in cheerful ringing tones. In this dream he was not only young but light-hearted, happy and magnificent, a soul conceived at sunrise. Courtiers perambulated around him on the grand terrace in costumes of Henry VII’s time and the ladies had long trains to their silken dresses, which they raised to reveal high, white-laced boots. They nodded their curly heads to him when they passed. He continued seeing their white stockings a long time after the ‘king’ dream was over, even as he woke and moved his tired limbs one at a time. A whole row of white-stockinged female legs remained with him. And that morning, while he examined his deathly pale features in the mirror, he mused a little on the sensation of having been a young king during the night. Finally it occured to him that since he had experienced everything there was to be experienced in the world, he would probably die soon.

  That day — a fine early autumn day — Sindbad dressed as carefully as befitted a man over three hundred years old. He selected a light-coloured tie and brightly polished shoes. The barber tucked Sindbad’s head under his arm while he was shaving him, in the eastern manner, then rubbed scented oil into his grey hair. So prepared, old Sindbad set out to find the woman who had once worn white stockings and nodded to him when they met, addressing him as, ‘My darling, my prince’. Sindbad would make a dismissive gesture, as if to say, ‘Come now, enough of such nonsense.’ Of course, that was back in the days when it was the common thing for women in the Buda Tunnel, in Krisztinaváros, in the Castle District, and indeed all the suburbs and environs of the capital, to address him as ‘my darling’. His whole long life he had been ‘my darling’ to two or three women at any one
time. He wouldn’t leave a woman in peace until she had fallen in love with him. And that was why he had spent one tenth of his life waiting under windows, gazing longingly, humbly, unhappily or threateningly. He had a genius for observing women, for following them secretly and discovering their hopes, secrets and desires. Sindbad spent so much time standing motionless, listening to the whirring of sewing machines in small suburban houses, or taking a carriage in order to follow another carriage that galloped along bearing a sweet-scented woman in a wide hat, or stealthily watching a lace-curtained window lit up for the night, or observing a woman at prayer in the church and trying to guess who or what she might be praying for, that sometimes he barely had time to pluck the fruit he coveted. He tired of the business: some new adventure attracted him, excited his blood, his dreams, his appetite, so he failed to complete his previous mission. And thus it was that in the course of his life some eleven or twelve women waited for him in vain, at rendezvous, in closed carriages, on walks through woods or at distant stations where two trains should have met. Sindbad wasn’t on the train, and the woman, that special one, would be standing hopefully at the window, watching from behind the curtains, frightened, wetting her dry lips with her tongue. And several trains would rattle by … including the train carrying the white-stockinged woman, the very one who, both in her letters and in person, addressed him as ‘my darling’, and there was nothing unusual in this at the time.

  This woman was a widow known as ‘Monkey’ to all those who had loved her. She was a serious, decisive woman of great firmness of mind, for women usually change their pet names together with their admirers. She, however, remained Monkey right to the end. She hardly ever laughed, she never winked and she gazed at Sindbad with a desperate intensity when she threatened to cut her throat with an open razor because of him. She loved Sindbad with an absolute passion, as if he were her destiny. She couldn’t stop loving him even years after Sindbad left her. She had been both deaf and blind until she was ten years old and believed it was this that made her think differently from other women. ‘I will love my prince as long as I live. Whether I see him or not,’ she told Sindbad on one of their infrequent meetings. ‘Why must you love so foolishly?’ Sindbad shrugged. ‘There are other things in life besides love.’

  Nevertheless, that day when forebodings of his own death surprised Sindbad, when he wanted to take his leave of all those women he still respected, he immediately thought of Monkey. The other women, the dark ones, fair ones, the young, the mature, the plump and the skinny, who had all planted their fatal loves in his heart, after whom he had run out of breath, sad, puzzled and perfectly willing to sacrifice his own life a hundred times over on their unresponsive behalf — all were neglected this day. He did not despise them but the thought of them no longer stirred his blood; the memory of their lips which still clung to his lips, the memory of their hands, their feet, their eyes and their voices which, not so long ago, had goaded him to repeat precisely the patterns of his youth in the latter days of his life so that he might kiss those lips and clutch those hands once more, and search the whole world over, to put a girdle about the earth, if need be, seventy-seven times or more in search of his former darlings and their former embraces — all these had vanished.

  Vanished: though the train still carried him twenty-four hours a day back to those old side streets, where, once upon a time on a spring morning he saw a young woman in a window, leaning on the ledge in her white night-gown, her hair still a little wild, her eyes still sleepy, one cheek still red from resting on the pillow, and Sindbad made friendly conversation with her before impulsively slipping in to join her, this strange woman in an unknown town. The adventure ended happily enough and twenty years later, on his next visit to the town, he saw a dark-haired young man in the window, learning his lessons. ‘He could well be a younger version of me,’ thought Sindbad.

  But now, this early autumn day, they were all gone from his mind, and only the serious, firm-minded Monkey remained, she who had never wanted anything from him but to love him steadfastly, from a distance.

  Ages ago, Monkey lived in a lonely house in the outer suburbs of Buda, near the excise post where the tram ran as fast as the express, clattering and humming through the night, so that a sleepless man might occupy himself listening to it.

  The janitor put down the boots he was mending, licked his fingers copiously, leafed through the registration book, found his glasses and concluded that Monkey had moved to another district.

  ‘How could she bear to leave these ancient sumach trees* behind?’ asked Sindbad.

  ‘Dunno,’ answered the janitor and slammed the book shut.

  The sumachs were whispering in the autumn breeze, ‘Heavens, it’s Mr Sindbad’, for there were nights when they had sighed to him.

  The janitor picked up the boots and pushed his glasses up on to his forehead. ‘Heavens, it’s Mr Sindbad!’ he cried, for there were nights when he had brought wine or beer from the nearby coffee-house for him when Monkey still lived there.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Sindbad.

  ‘It was like this. One day she gave me her cat. She said she was bored of it. Then she threw her old preserving jars on the rubbish heap. She threw away her old velvet hat too. The hat bored her. She was bored with everything here. So she moved away.’

  The janitor pinned a price on the boots he had mended. The boots crackled. ‘I haven’t opened the doors at night for anyone since Mr Sindbad stopped visiting.’

  Sindbad strolled, preoccupied, from the distant single-storey house, where the well stood in the middle of the courtyard surrounded by sweet-scented sumach trees. He poked a few fallen autumn twigs with his stick.

  ‘Could Monkey have changed?’ he asked himself.

  And he set off to follow the footprints of Monkey’s black low-heeled shoes.

  Monkey — sought by Sindbad throughout the length and breadth of Buda and Pest — sat in the window in her pink night-gown, leaning on the ledge and reading a novel by Paul de Kock, just as she had been twenty years ago. Seeing Sindbad trundling down Cat Street, she formed a trumpet with her hands and like a cheerful cabby bellowed from the fourth floor, ‘Here, boy!’

  Sindbad immediately recognised Monkey’s voice, for in the whole of Hungary there was only one woman with a voice like that — half hunting horn, half child’s rattle. He looked up and waited for Monkey to give him a graceful wave. The coast was clear. He ran up three steps at a time, arriving exhausted and breathless on the fourth floor.

  Monkey was standing in the doorway of the hall, a little cigarillo in her mouth as usual. ‘You had better go easy on those old pins,’ she said, indicating Sindbad’s legs. ‘What the devil were you doing in Cat Street?’

  ‘Looking for your ladyship!’ answered Sindbad, throwing himself into a chair in the hall.

  Monkey refused to believe him as usual. ‘Some little floozie of yours lives down this way, I bet. I’ll find out, you know, and give her a poke in the ribs. I don’t like being cheated right before my eyes, Sindbad.’

  Sindbad raised his hand as if taking an oath. ‘It’s you I’m looking for, Monkey. It’s such a long time since I saw you. Last night or the night before I dreamt of you and have been looking for you since. You haven’t forgotten me, have you?’

  Monkey took the cigar from her mouth. ‘No, my dear,’ she answered a little downcast. ‘It’s not my way to forget people so quickly. Even though it’s been three whole years since I even saw you, and now I am reading Paul de Kock once again. My only sins are the imaginary ones in my book. But come in, let me get a closer look at you.’

  She led Sindbad from the dark hall into the room overlooking the street. There was the old furniture and the portrait of her ancient father who long ago had become merely an all-seeing image; there was the portrait of the dead child to whom Monkey had at one time been an aunt; and there was the sampler framed behind glass as a memorial to the same dead little girl. There was the silent old canary in the window. And there,
thrown untidily on the armchair, was the same knitted scarf that had lain on it last time Sindbad came to visit her at her previous address. The woman raised Sindbad’s chin to the light of the window and closely examined his face and his eyes, gently stroking his hair.

  ‘You know, Sindbad,’ she said after a short silence, ‘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.’

  Sindbad sat down in the armchair and waited while Monkey carefully turned down the page in her book, and put it back in the cupboard.

  ‘It was you who bought me these Paul de Kock novels, remember? You wanted me to read them at home, alone. I have read nothing else since then.’

  Sindbad hummed a little tune as he watched her: she hadn’t changed in ten years. She was a healthy, strong, dark-blonde woman, between thirty and forty years of age, who went early to bed, rose early, and hadn’t worn make-up for a very long time. She liked wearing slippers and cooking tasty meals. In her late teens she used to like riding in carriages with amusing men for company, enjoyed champagne to the sound of gypsy bands and flinging her silk skirt about when dancing. But she got bored with such things because, as she said, there were so many flighty and downright wicked women in Pest that she was ashamed to be seen with them. Wearing slippers was preferable.