by Gyula Krudy
‘I thought you’d never leave those sumach trees in the Buda house,’ Sindbad said, gently. ‘I can’t think why you moved back into Cat Street — which you left in disgust in your youth to move to quiet Buda. As far as I know this remains the area where dancers, singers and cabaret performers live. You haven’t gone back to your old profession, have you, Monkey?’
‘No, my dear,’ answered the woman solemnly. ‘I have my fine dresses, my expensive hats, but I only put them on when we go out together. For ten years you have been promising to take me to the circus. And for ten years I have not visited the circus, though I have never been so poor as to dispose of my finest dress and my best hat …’
Sindbad knew from previous experience where such conversations tended to lead, so he quickly interrupted her. ‘No accusations now, Monkey. You visited the circus often enough in your youth. The circus is very much like the music hall. There are clowns in both. And loud women.’
‘But the horses …’
‘Horses, horses! I’ve seen enough of horses to last me the rest of my life. I really don’t understand how a serious, retiring, decent woman like you can spend day and night thinking about circuses.’
‘But Sindbad,’ she argued, her face solemn, ‘it’s been ten years since you promised me the circus. Your back was aching and you couldn’t sleep unless I stroked it. You said that when you got better you would take me to the circus and you’ve not done it. I go nowhere by myself nowadays, my dear. There isn’t anybody else. Only you.’
Sindbad leant forward and stroked Monkey’s hand. ‘We’ve had enough fun in our lives, you and I, Monkey.
You yourself once danced in the chorus line … Let me suggest something else. When spring comes, let’s wait for a fine sunny afternoon, pack a picnic, and wander the Buda hills. We’ll take a horse-drawn coach across the Danube and the bridge will echo to the horses drumming. The coachman will sound his horn and there will be a provincial couple sitting opposite us, continually asking if it’s far to the Kaiser Baths.* The horses will canter on and the coach will roll cheerfully along the rails. There will be children kicking a ball in Széna Square and someone playing an accordion in one of those old wattle and daub inns. But we won’t alight there, no, we’ll keep going and the coachman will give his horn another toot and the provincial couple will ask about the Kaiser Baths again. The fragrance of the Buda hills will already be filling the coach, and we will sit beside each other like a happily married couple. I will be a retired civil servant and you my wife of twenty years. We’ll have a respectable amount of money in the Serbian Bank in Buda, and will have long had our eyes on a house in St Lorincz, a place with a small garden where you can keep ducks and hens …’
‘You rascal!’ cried Monkey, laughing and crying at the same time, and happily throwing her arms about Sindbad’s neck.
‘Well, isn’t that a lot better than going to the circus?’ asked a satisfied Sindbad.
‘A hundred times better,’ answered Monkey and her eyes shone as bright as a child’s at Christmas. ‘So it’s off to the hills in the spring and we’ll lie in the grass.’
‘Yes, Monkey. And now tell me, what have you been doing since I last saw you?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nothing. That’s what I’m used to doing … Do you remember my dark handsome brother who sang ballads so beautifully at the music hall and worked for the railways? Do you remember him? The poor boy got into trouble of some sort and went to America, but no one knew because I baled him out. But, it cost me all I had.’
‘The bonds too?’
‘I just kept them in the cupboard and never used them.’
‘Your jewels?’
‘Heavens! since when have I cared tuppence for jewellery? That’s all in my foolish past.’
Sindbad shook his head and pondered. ‘A pity your brother had to sing so much,’ he grumbled.
‘It’s all the same now. I moved back into Cat Street, back into the house where I once owned the entire first floor and where Mitrovics the driver hung about the street all day waiting for me. And lords and earls would come and I would gad about with them, because I was young then. I’m back because I still have acquaintances here. Dancers from the clubs drop in for lunch with me. And I make a modest living out of that. If some little lordling should turn up now, I would kick him down the stairs.’
Sindbad quietly blew out smoke. ‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘you’ve always liked cooking.’
How did the story go?
Once Sindbad was dining with Monkey. There were six people around the table, with only one other man beside Sindbad in the company — the old gentleman in a skull cap and neatly arranged necktie who watched from the wall and hadn’t opened his mouth in years. He was, after all, stuck in his gilded frame.
The ladies around the table, who all lived in the house in Cat Street, were, for the most part, wearing long housecoats. They had pulled these housecoats on over their underclothes, for they were not in the habit of dressing till the evening, when the big drum sounded and the band signalled the beginning of the next performance. Their hair, which would be beautifully coiffeured by clever hairdressers by the time evening came, was now brushed any old how, cascading over their foreheads and into their eyes. At first they regarded Sindbad with a certain interest, and the odd one even stuck her elegant and finely shod dancer’s leg out from beneath her housecoat, but when it became apparent (over soup this was — a chicken soup with vegetables, just as Sindbad liked it) not only that Sindbad was unavailable, but that he was eating his soup under Monkey’s jealous eye, the dancers took no more notice of him and consumed the rest of their dinner without recourse to cutlery. All artistes, in the privacy of these four walls they smacked their lips, licked their fingers and thoroughly enjoyed their food, as if knives and forks, like girdles and mascara, were merely reminders of their sad lives, their gay and melancholy profession. It was day now, noon, and the evening lay in the distant future; they took great pleasure in their eating. One of them, a soft-featured, reddish-haired woman, started to sing a peasant ditty she had heard back in the village. It was a song sung by army recruits: ‘If only my mother could see me in the city …’ The women listened attentively to her passionate rendering, one or two with tears in their eyes. Who knows what they were thinking?
There was only one of them, a small-boned, flirtatious-eyed girl with a strange smile, who wouldn’t let Sindbad alone. She kept rubbing her foot against his leg under the table, and on one occasion whispered to him, ‘Come down to the music hall tonight.’
Monkey spotted this immediately, of course, and hissed at her, ‘You snake. You serpent. Careful I don’t poison you.’
The girl ran off, and not long after the others gathered themselves together, having toyed with the breadcrumbs and rolled them into little balls with their delicate fingers. Yawning and sleepy-eyed, hands in pockets, they dispersed to various corners of the house in Cat Street only to emerge in the evening — when the big drum thuds at the heart of the band — in great feathered hats and expensive dresses, decked out in jewels. There was to be no more eating with fingers, nor singing to their heart’s content. They were on company time now. It was only at Monkey’s dinners they could relax and be themselves.
‘I see these trollops still hold a peculiar charm for you!’ Monkey started up once she was alone with Sindbad. ‘This lunch was intended as a test. I was curious whether you would retain your sang-froid, your composure, your indifference, in the company of four or five women, for so you ought by now, you ancient old roué. You were practically beside yourself with joy when that nasty piece of work started prodding your leg. Well, my dear, I told her where to get off. Because, as I said, this lunch was a test. I’m a poor unfortunate woman. You’ll never change.’
Sindbad shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t understand your ladyship,’ he grumbled. ‘You bring on the dancing girls then complain when I’m not rude to them.’
Monkey’s face was red with anger. ‘You have to b
e rude to women like that! My God, if men knew women as I know them there’d be no more of this ridiculous talk of love. Understand, dear, that woman is creation’s coup de grâce. And the young are the worst. Mind you, I wouldn’t trust any of them, not even the old ones. A woman’s mind is always set on destruction and she weaves her snares of love expressly for the destruction of men. She trades in jewels or in virtue. You want the spirit of the age? Think of an old frump. And no, dear, I will not tolerate a man in my rooms. Women have to behave decently here. Oh, they have offered me handsome amounts to allow them to entertain their rich gentlemen at home. But I have grown to despise money. I don’t want much: honour, order, decency. Honour! There’s something worth having in a life. And you know, that may be precisely why my dancers come to me. Not that it is easy to get a room here. Not everyone enjoys the favour of my lunches. Those who have been my lodgers speak well of me. Here, the sick are cured, the thin grow fat, and I don’t allow them to throw their money away. They come to me in rags and in disgrace, and they leave wealthier and better dressed. Because I’m honest. I trade neither in jewels nor in virtue.’
Sindbad listened to Monkey, nodding the while. Yes, in many ways he too held her conduct in high respect. And he wasn’t slow to tell her this.
Monkey accepted the praise but the flush of anger still burned on her cheek. She threw some seeds to the silent old canary then smoothed her dress and sat down opposite Sindbad again. ‘In the past, when I first had the good fortune of your acquaintance, I didn’t want to upset you. Today, however, I can tell you straight — now that we’re on the subject — that I know every woman you’ve been in love with these last ten years …’
‘It was always only you,’ answered Sindbad.
‘For all I know you may be thinking of someone else this very moment. Because I know you, as well as if I had given birth to you. I knew when you loved me and when you didn’t love me. My own love has not changed a jot. It’s strange, I know, I hardly understand myself. I fell in love with you ten years ago and immediately I knew I would love you for the rest of my life. Even if you had died, Sindbad, I would not have forgotten you. Since I had the bad luck to fall in love with you — and sometimes I didn’t see you for years — it was important for me to know what you were doing. That’s why I enquired into your every step, learned about your affairs, investigated each of your loves. You never saw me, but you were never out of my sight. Even when you were asleep I was watching your sleeping face so I would know your dreams. I wanted to understand you, for I knew I couldn’t live without you.’
‘You went and bribed the servants,’ observed Sindbad sharply.
‘It’s nothing to do with you how I knew about your affairs. Listen to this! You’ll soon see I know everything.’
Monkey stepped over to the cupboard and took out a slim volume much like a prayerbook. ‘This is where I used to write those things I didn’t want to forget. Here we are. 21st June 19—. The lawyer K’s wife lives apart from her husband and is waiting at the suspension bridge. 5 p.m. Sindbad arrives in closed car, number 37, the woman gets in. They spend two hours riding up and down behind drawn curtains in the Hidegkúti Road. This ride is repeated every week from June to October. During the same period the lawyer K’s wife leaves her husband every Wednesday afternoon and strolls arm in arm with a blond officer on Fisherman’s Bastion.* Two mornings a week she spends her time at the salon of the well-known couturier, Madame X, which several prominent men are known to frequent.’
Sindbad jumped to his feet. ‘That’s a lie. She was an honourable woman.’
Monkey flicked her hand as if waving away a fly. ‘I’m not in the habit of lying, my dear. I know what I know. You were head over heels in love with that woman. True, I felt quite sorry for you then, but I didn’t want your disillusion to come as too much of a shock. I allowed time to do its work. And lo and behold, here you are beside me again and it seems you love me. Let’s move on. May, 19—. Flora M. is a secretary in the director X’s office. A little round thing, brown-haired with a slight squint. Sindbad escorts her home every night for weeks and months on end till he succeeds in seducing her, then immediately leaves her. The seduction takes months because Flora M. is desperately in love with one of the firm’s representatives to whom she eventually becomes engaged …’
‘You’re a devil, Monkey. I’ve always thought of that woman as a beautiful but sad dream, the kind one sometimes awakes from to a tear-soaked pillow.’
Monkey continued in stiff formal tones. ‘The representative was replaced by another. And that’s the sum total of Flora’s existence.’
One night — it was autumn going on winter and the snow was falling softly outside — Sindbad woke from his sleep with a sharp pain in his heart. Images from his dream still flickered before him; it was the usual dream of that time, women’s faces, some in hats, some bare-headed, painted and unpainted faces; women’s eyes, girls’ eyes, all fixed on him in the same way as though Sindbad were the only man in the world; images of bare shoulders and stockinged legs with high-heeled shoes; then a long line of women in slips, women known to Sindbad, women he’d like to have known; plump arms, slender arms, every one of which was clasped about his neck, a generation of womankind trembling under the covers, performing somersaults in the pastures of his heart …
He woke and the procession of dream women faded in the half-light like a lantern carried by some housewife across a snow-covered yard on a winter evening. For a while the glow of the lamp may be seen against a wall or haystack; a dark-haired female figure sways on the ripples of darkness, then the last woman, bright-eyed, wearing a feathered hat, finally disappears in the far distance — leaving Sindbad alone with his heartache. And shortly after this he began to feel ever more certain that very soon, perhaps within the hour, he would die.
He dressed quickly and sat down on the divan. At first he was very frightened because he had secretly believed that somehow he could put the whole thing off, despite the fact that he had been seriously ill recently and his voice sounded husky and strange, like the voice of a childhood friend overheard in the next room. Perhaps that lad, Bignio … whenever he found himself engaged in absent-minded desultory conversation it was the voice of young Bignio he heard talking somewhere in the neighbouring room.
‘I shall shortly be dead,’ he said to himself, breaking the sentence into distinct syllables. ‘Yes, yes. I can hear young Bignio talking in the next room again.’
Of course, it was only in the first moments of his fear that Sindbad spoke aloud in the empty room, because, somehow, eventually, he recovered his composure: he could move his paralysed eyelids once more, and the pain relaxed its grip on his heart.
He stood up and stepped out onto the balcony where a thin layer of snow-covered tubs of flowers left over from the summer. It was dawn, the town was asleep and invisible snowflakes drifted around his head in cold draughts. He stared out into the hushed darkness for a while without thinking — then suddenly he saw himself in short child’s boots and a little fur coat, ambling down a path beside an old church, over weeds that had been trodden into the snow. There were rooks sitting on the cross surmounting the spire, and a red-cheeked brightly dressed woman was approaching, carrying a bucket of water from the icy well nearby. The dream town lay all about him and he marched along down the weed- and snow-covered path … Having passed the church he noticed other things: at a window with white curtains, a portly and mature woman turned her enormous eyes on him, her nose crooked, a grotesquely sensuous smile on her lips, a smile he might have seen somewhere before, if only for a moment a long time ago … then the image was gone and he was simply standing on the balcony again while endless flurries of snow swept by him.
And as he stepped from the balcony back into the room, it was still the hook-nosed older woman of his childhood he was thinking of, the woman he had seen so long ago and had practically forgotten. Now he saw her again and felt her fat white arms, her swollen shoulders and her brown back creased with fat. T
here was a mole there somewhere too … her fingers had shiny little white nails, and those white nails were touching the young Sindbad in a spellbindingly feminine way. He feels those dazzling feminine nails first on his feet, then on his brow, then across his chest. The wide lips twist into that grotesque smile and he hears a sound, part sigh, part hiss, above his head. It’s as if a bird had flown across the room.
Once again Sindbad felt bands tightening about his heart, so he decided he would make final preparations for his impending death. He wrote a few lines to Monkey informing her of his condition. ‘I’ll be gone by the morning.’ The servant at the inn took his note and meandered down the stairs, whistling merrily in anticipation of a handsome tip. Perhaps he thought number 5 was sending him on another errand of love, much as he used to in the past, when his task was to bring nightly supplies of champagne, tea, cigarettes and stuff from the pharmacy and there was plenty of silver for him to slip into his waistcoat pocket.
While he was about his business Sindbad lay down on the worn old rug, because that was what he felt like doing. He spread his arms out and stared rigidly and desperately at the lamp above him. As long as he could see its two bulbs he was all right. So he kept looking at the two bulbs which used to shine with such peculiar brightness when they cast their light across the shoulders of a long succession of women.
Until now he had always felt a great sense of calm looking at the light, but now one of the bulbs gave a sudden wheeze. Immediately the other one groaned. It sounded like a chronic invalid turning on his bed … Somewhere, some time in the past, his father, his beautiful melancholy father, was lying on the bed. It was New Year’s Eve and the young Sindbad was holding his hands.