by Gyula Krudy
There was a woman in the house too. She was a quiet, pale young thing. But Sindbad knew very well that these white anaemic brides would sooner or later turn into ruddy-faced, round-bosomed countrywomen, for this was precisely what their grandmothers had become. And she would administer a sound box on the ear to the farmhand should occasion demand it. Then, grey-haired, she would dance at a grandchild’s wedding, before finally taking up residence on the wall, rendered into oils and framed in gilt so as to observe succeeding women’s fates, joys and sorrows.
So Sindbad the house-guest was not too concerned about the woman’s pallor and sadness. She had no children yet, that was why she was always knitting babies’ bonnets.
She was called Etelka, and she would disappear from the table without anyone noticing when the choirmaster launched on one of his more ribald anecdotes. The choir-master, who was a solid drinking man, was invariably handed over to the servants at the end of the festivities and they would lead him home. On one such occasion the host leaned over to his guest and said: ‘I’m putting Etelka to the test tomorrow. Tomorrow evening we shall go into town, to the theatre …’
Sindbad puffed at his cigar, pondered a while, then asked quietly: ‘Your wife wasn’t an actress by any chance?’
Kápolnai shook his head. ‘Not precisely, only in a manner of speaking. Her parents were foolish, ambitious folk and sent her to study acting. They thought she’d find a husband all the sooner if she were on the stage. But as it turned out, I met her at the May fair. I’d never seen her on stage.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘For a long time she kept turning me down because she was so attached to the theatre. I persisted of course. They led her on. They told her she had talent. That she would become a world-famous actress.’
‘Nevertheless she married you?’
‘Yes, because I promised her that should it happen that she no longer wanted to be my wife, that day she could go back on the stage again. I wouldn’t prevent her.’
Sindbad drew deeply on his cigar. He glanced around the cottage which was just beginning to give itself up to the mild summer night. The wind crept silently under the vine leaves in the yard. ‘I wouldn’t advise you to put her to the test. Stay at home tomorrow.’
Kápolnai shrugged. ‘Too late now. I’ve promised her.’
Next night Sindbad was so generous with the wine that the choir-master made his own way home. It was midnight and his hosts had still not returned. Sindbad sat preoccupied on the veranda. He knew the theatre in town was performing Rip van Winkle that night. In his boredom he recalled the whole operetta and all the actresses he had gaped at in the spotlight while clutching Lisbeth’s tarlatan* skirt. Once more he saw the fine ankles and smiling eyes. From far away the melody of the chorus rose out of the night, and brushed past his ear like a moth: ‘By cliff-verged paths — the trail leads on …’ they sang.
He heard the noise of trap wheels approaching rapidly down the road: Kápolnai and his wife returning from the theatre.
His host was undoubtedly in a foul mood, but Etelka’s face was glowing and her eyes were so bright Sindbad almost took a step backwards in surprise when she looked at him. She kissed her husband two or three times before retiring to her room.
‘Thank you. Thank you,’ she kept repeating in her gratitude.
Kápolnai bitterly drained a glass of wine. ‘You were right,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘The test came a little too soon. We’ve only been married two years.’
‘Well, how did she take it?’
‘In the strangest possible way. Once we were in the theatre she immediately discovered old acquaintances, actors and actresses sitting in the auditorium. First she gathered them in one of the boxes, then she went backstage to meet the leading lady. A down-at-heel comedian, old before his time, reminded her what wonderful times they had had at drama school. The squinting pot-bellied manager, the liar, had the nerve to tell her that her old contract was still stored away in his desk. I ordered him to give it back at once. The rogue laughed at me and said, who knows, she might need it sometime. An actor! You know what that word means? It means everything that is low, frivolous and rotten. And she, my wife, felt happy there, in that company of actors.’
Sindbad hummed a few sympathetic noises and fairly soon bid the man goodnight. It was no surprise to him to see the two of them sitting and frowning at each other the next morning. That afternoon he heard the sounds of a furious row in progress.
A couple of days later he was walking in the fields for most of the day and returned late in the evening. He found Kápolnai on the veranda, his face in his hands. ‘Etelka has left me to become an actress,’ he said, in a low strangled voice.
This is how it came about that Sindbad was travelling by night in a hired coach (Etelka had gone off in the family trap), seeking the woman in an attempt to persuade her to return.
He tried to defend himself from the cold night wind by entertaining himself with all kinds of foolish thoughts. Among other things he considered the option of the love-lorn Kápolnai himself taking to the stage in competition with his wife, should she prove impervious to argument. He’d look good in patent leather boots and cockade. He could start in the chorus and watch his wife from there, eyes burning, while she flirted with the audience.
It was morning by the time they arrived at a tiny provincial town. The houses were still half asleep and uncombed women stood in doorways regaling each other with their dreams. The coach lumbered down a long street: the road was thick with mud but, under the mud, sly stones crept under the carriage wheels. It was as if the citizens had placed the stones there expressly for the reception of their country cousins. A school-teacherly figure was ambling towards the school, his arms folded, then a baker’s apprentice went by with a piercing whistle, the whole street resounding to his call. The tower at the end of the long road seemed to be waking up, its head still enveloped in mist, vaguely blinking. Vegetables shone, green and fresh, in the gardens. Only the poplars stood bitter and unmoving on the pavement, indifferent to the world around them. They dropped a leaf or two into Sindbad’s carriage as he passed.
The inn was called The Golden Elephant and it looked as dark and sombre as something from an old English novel. The innkeeper, a suspicious, bearded Jew, examined Sindbad from head to toe. Sindbad asked him about the missing woman.
‘Is the gentleman a traveller?’ asked the innkeeper.
‘No.’
‘I only ask,’ the proprietor of The Golden Elephant warned him, ‘because there would have been no point in telling me he was. He has no luggage. No luggage, no reduction in room tariff.’
Sindbad enquired again about the woman.
‘No women of any kind in my place,’ the innkeeper answered and led him upstairs by a dangerous rickety set of steps. The room was low-ceilinged and damp, and Sindbad looked at the bed with trepidation. On the wall he discovered a picture. It showed various members of the royal family. Communing silently with them, Sindbad eventually closed his tired eyes.
When he went out in the afternoon there was a brilliant scarlet poster nailed to the prison-like walls of The Golden Elephant. The company had arrived in town and would give a performance that night in the Elephant’s banqueting hall. The worthy townspeople are hereby invited thereto by Dummy Dunai, director of the theatre.
‘That’s it!’ cried Sindbad. ‘Here’s Etelka.’
He spent some time in the coffee-house watching the comings and goings, but eventually the constant smoking and spitting of the guests annoyed him and he left. He wandered about town, glancing at shop displays ancient enough to have tempted him in his childhood. He admired the likeness of the chief of the fire brigade in the photographer’s window. Behind the mallow-coloured curtains of the café he noted a dark-haired, doe-eyed young woman with a faint moustache. She was wearing a white pinafore and arranging cream cakes on a tray. He ducked into the lemon-and-vanilla-scented shop and made strenuous efforts to get acquainted with the
brown-haired girl who was at first rather frightened of such a complete stranger. Later she confessed her name was Irma … but just as they got to this point Sindbad remembered the fugitive Mrs Kápolnai, quickly paid the bill and was gone, though he would happily have stayed in the café. He ambled aimlessly about town while country women and young girls giggled into their handkerchiefs at him then hastened on. An old officious-looking man examined Sindbad’s patent leather boots with clear distaste. Then the ginger-moustached proprietor of the barber shop made a loud approving remark to his customers on the subject of Sindbad’s neatly styled hair.
Eventually it was evening. Sindbad took his place in the front row and, not without a certain excitement, waited for the curtains to rise. Slowly the auditorium filled up …
And in the third act, to the accompaniment of a harsh-toned piano, Etelka stepped forward. Yes, yes: she wore a pink corset and the same shoes she had worn at home. Her face was highly rouged and a small sword hung by her side. She appeared from the wings, singing in a weak voice, her hands clasped to her heart. Sindbad saw her blank frightened look. A more sonorous voice rang out in the audience: ‘Louder, young lady!’
Scuffling, murmuring, hushing: other voices immediately demand ‘Silence!’ The song halts in mid note and Etelka stands on the stage, terrified, tears filling her eyes. Both her hands are trembling.
Sindbad in the front row claps his hands together as loudly as he can. Others take up the applause and someone is shouting something at the back. The woman’s eye falls on Sindbad. The blood drains from her face. She looks like a wounded deer. An actor in a wig hurries forward from the wings. He holds out his arms to Etelka and leading her away, cries to the audience, ‘The young lady is unwell.’
The conductor hammers at the keys of the piano. The audience slowly falls quiet again, only to burst out laughing when the fat comic appears on stage, scuttling on all fours …
‘What are you doing here?’ the woman asks later, her voice unsteady. She has dressed and taken a few deep lungfuls of fresh air out in the yard.
‘I came for you. Your husband sent me.’
‘I’ll go home if you promise never to tell anyone you saw me in a corset.’
Winter Journey
In the night hours, when Sindbad laid his head down on the pillow and thoughts swirled about his head like departing birds of passage, ever fewer in number and ever further off; and later, in the morning, while the warm kisses of the previous night’s dream still lingered with him in bed under the covers, on the soft cushion, or lay tangled in the woolly weave of the carpet; when the aristocratic woman in the black silk dress and scarlet mask, the woman of his dreams, was still standing on the threshold in her lacquered ankle boots and delicate silk stockings, the kind court ladies wear without the queen’s knowledge — at such times, a dark-haired little actress dressed in black with black silk stockings and an eagle’s feather in her hat would often come to visit him in his lonely room, the hair behind her ears soft and loose but freshly combed, just as Sindbad the sailor had last seen her.
So often did the actress visit Sindbad in these half-dreamt, half-experienced hours of pleasure that one day he decided to seek her out.
He remembered adventures of years gone by, in the melancholy days of his youth, when he had been subject to mysterious dreams and fantasies in which two hearts seemed to rise like swallows from a shared nest only to fly off in opposite directions.
A day came when he thought it possible that somehow, somewhere, this actress — whom he had already forgotten once — might herself, under her own bed-clothes, be preoccupied with just such hidden and passionate thoughts of him as he of her when he imagined her sweet heart-shaped face a mere inch from his on the pillow.
It was possible that somewhere she desired him: her affections might be undirected or disengaged so she would have only memories to console her; that she was dreaming of the face of a man long gone because, as things were, there was not one neatly curling beard, nor one set of dashing moustaches reflected in the mirror of her heart.
After he had thought these things over a few times, Sindbad roused himself and set out in search of her, though his hair had turned as grey as the wings of the arctic tern that used to swoop over the clashing waves of the Danube. The trail that harsh winter led him to the town of Eperjes.*
Deep snow lay about the town like fortifications; old houses were tightly shut against blizzards as if fearing the approach of a besieging army. People protected their noses from the cold and Slovaks ambled down the street with long-haired ponies and carts of firewood. It was as if snowmen had come alive in some tale out of Hans Christian Andersen. It was only with difficulty that Sindbad found an innkeeper, a disreputable-looking man with intelligent eyes, who could tell him precisely which direction the group of travelling actors (Paula’s company) took after leaving Eperjes. They were planning to cross the high hills on a rather fragile-looking train which clings to the hills’ steep contours. But there were blizzards in the hills now: the little train might no longer be clinging to anything.
The actors were somewhere else, in Verhovina perhaps, or beyond by now, having left one royal cloak and a pair of courtly riding boots behind with the innkeeper as security.
Sindbad was rather glad he had not succeeded in finding Paula straightaway. She seemed rather more of a prize this way, an exotic finch taking refuge from approaching footsteps in the depths of the forest. ‘I’ll follow her!’ he said to himself as he wandered down the street in the blizzard, looking in windows, enjoying the scent of unfamiliar women.
Then, near the stumpy snow-covered tower where the air was loud with cries of invisible rooks and jackdaws, he saw an elegant woman in a Russian style fur cap and a short fur jacket coming towards him down the cleared path. She wore smart shoes and a fashionable narrow skirt, but when she drew near he could see her face was tired and wasted. The once delicate nose was raw red from the cold and years of make-up; harsh narrow lines framed her listless mouth. Only the forget-me-not blue of her eyes still sparkled sweetness and youth at the passing Sindbad, who raised his hat. (Sindbad always greeted clergymen and well-bred ladies this way in the country, for he preferred them to think of him as a courteous man of religious temper, even if he remained unknown to them.)
The woman passed on and Sindbad turned round to look at her. He cast his eyes over her clothes, her shoes, her long elbow-length gloves again and thought she must be an ageing aristocratic maiden aunt. ‘If Paula didn’t exist I would follow her and stay in Eperjes!’
It was a gross misjudgment, as he realised later, sipping his after-dinner black coffee at the high chair of a coffee-house which turned out to be the domain of the said aristocratic lady. She was the wife of the owner. Once she had worked behind the counter in Pest, now she was carefully leafing through the illustrated magazines, her bracelets clinking about her solid wrist, and when she looked at him it was with a frosty superiority, in the manner of a married woman no longer interested in the conversation of strange men.
Later the gypsies appeared in queer light-coloured hard hats and cast-off dandy cloaks. The primás, or solo violinist, sported a painted moustache and kissed the lady’s hand, asking if he might take the instruments piled in a corner to play at a wedding in the afternoon.
‘Very well. But tell the band not to come back drunk, Zsiga,’ she admonished him in a solemn, semi-maternal manner.
After they had gone Sindbad ordered a French cognac and, having attracted the stern woman’s attention, soon succeeded in drawing a warm, almost complaisant smile from her. They looked hard at each other.
‘No, it’s impossible … quite impossible, at least not here …’
‘But I find you very attractive. I am half in love with you already,’ Sindbad answered with his eyes.
‘Really?’ asked the woman.
‘Really,’ Sindbad’s almond-brown eyes assured her. ‘But you mustn’t be angry with me.’
The coffee woman fiddled with the sugar
bowl. She raised her eyes. ‘I am not angry,’ answered her forget-me-not blue gaze. Later she adjusted her hair taking a secret peek in the mirror behind her.
It was time for the departure of the little train that clung to the steep hillside, so Sindbad left without taking another glance at her, regarding the flirtation as a job well done.
The night blizzard and the icy compartment, the impenetrable darkness outside, the screeching, squeaking and groaning of the wheels like so many apprentice ghosts, the rattling of the chains, the choked puffing of the engine and the warmth of his fur coat had a soporific effect on Sindbad. He consulted his watch. It was getting on for ten. Back in Eperjes the coffee-house owner would have donned his little black cap, and his wife would have lain down in her lonely bed. She would be pulling off her stockings, and the cinders in the iron stove would be glowing like animal eyes. Now she’d be tucking her plumpish body under the duvet, blowing out the candle, stretching herself for a second — or perhaps longer — and the strange gentleman who cast such amorous glances at her that afternoon in the coffee-house would cross her thoughts. Might he have left town?