The Adventures of Sindbad (New York Review Books Classics)

by Gyula Krudy

  ‘You might care to remember, Sindbad, that on the day of my so-called suicide I spent the night at a ball where I had a wonderful time, staying till well into the morning. It was the miners’ ball and the hall was filled with the scent of hot punch which clung to everything, from the mirrors’ scarlet hangings to the men’s mouths. The snow came down in drifts throughout the night and the roads were buried under it. It was impossible to get home in my delicate little dancing shoes. A kind young man volunteered to carry me home in his arms across the market square. My poor old husband was left stumbling behind with his lantern and bunch of keys. I caught a glimpse of myself in the confectioner’s window. I looked rather pretty in my pink ball gown …’

  ‘And the secret room?’ enquired the night visitor.

  ‘The secret room soon had a new lodger. Neither my heart nor the room were ever empty of lodgers. I never could live without love. It was only yesterday, or the day before, that the most recent tenant left, a half-crazy violinist. The room is vacant. If Mr Sindbad has nothing better to do he could take up his old residence,’ answered Artemisia.

  Sindbad looked away. ‘Strange, how while I was lying in my grave I believed that because I had suffered greatly for your sake and finally put an end to my own life you would remain true to my memory. You were nearing forty when I left you.’

  ‘A woman’s age does not count, my dear.’

  ‘I loved you, I burned for you, I was a slave to you. I thought no one could whisper such lovely eloquent words in your ear as I did, I, who practically died in an ecstasy of happiness whenever I was in your company.’

  ‘A red-bearded mercenary soldier arrived in town,’ muttered the woman. ‘A caveman, who dragged me around by the hair … Will you not take up your old quarters, Sindbad? Lord, how you have aged!’

  Sindbad didn’t answer. He was bored. And recognising this he left the house in which he had spent a year and a half slaving and suffering in the most delightful way.

  Escape from Women

  Here begins the last tale of the voyager which young girls and young men may read, questioning perhaps a detail here and there. In time they too will encounter those miracles which remain wholly unsuspected in one’s youth: the miracle of the inexpressible goodness of women as they sit on their beds combing out their long hair, speaking to their lovers with such ardour and selfless devotion that the lovers believe themselves loved for ever; and the miracle of the treachery of women when a man can only clench his fist, seize a knife, load a revolver, wake with bloodshot eyes, or chew in despair on his own tear-drenched pillow.

  Dead as he was, Sindbad was often astonished to recall that he had never once killed a woman. As his carriage entered that region where the power of women no longer extends, he looked back and saw mostly pious charitable women in his wake.

  ‘The strange thing,’ he thought to himself, ‘is that women tend to behave better than one has a right to expect. Poor things, giving their all, their kisses, their dreams and sighs, smuggling my name into their evening prayers — I’d be surprised if the angels didn’t wonder at times what my name was doing among the usual company of aged fathers, mothers and tiny children … They were very good indeed, poor creatures. From now on Sindbad will teach the young to cherish women, as they do flowers, as indeed they do so many odd, weak, cheated, robbed, often tortured beings … Is it not touching that for all the times they have been disappointed, the hours they have wept and mourned, nothing continues to engage them so intensely as the serious subject of love. Love is everything to them: the air they breathe, the water they thirst for, the miracle they marvel at. They talk of love as though it were something that had independent existence, something so solid it might be grasped. Though it is true that the subject of fashion runs a close second to love in their thoughts.

  ‘God bless you then, dear good women — virgins, countesses, women of affairs, half-crazed Jewesses* — all who listened with trembling lips, sceptical smiles and with desire and astonishment in your hearts when Sindbad favoured you with softly spoken, delicately enunciated lies that filled your heads and souls, that heightened your colour and your mood, and gave you something to think about … For his part, Sindbad would go on to leap from the windows of cursed castles and cry his eyes out for some other woman. At other times, in a complete daze, wholly undiscriminating, he would reach out to pluck one of you, almost anyone — a tea-rose or a roadside thistle — and would have forgotten your name by the morning. Forgotten names and voices, voices into which whole lives were poured, your endless self-sacrifice, the dangers into which your passions led you, and the peculiar, precious vows which Sindbad managed to extract from you with the skill of a practised father-confessor — all forgotten. You were all happy to forswear yourselves in the hour of love … Really it hardly mattered that not one of you ever kept her vow. And, oh, how often you offered up your jewels, your influence, the remainder of your lives.’

  ‘Until tomorrow,’ one would say as Sindbad was packing his bags.

  ‘I’ll bring pictures of the children next time,’ a second promised even as another woman was waiting at some other port of call.

  ‘Now we shall never leave each other,’ ventured a third.

  The sails were already fixed and Sindbad was only waiting for a favourable wind.

  What was it they loved?

  They liked to be treated well. One should treat the majority of well-disposed females with tenderness, as one would treat a child, approving all their nonsense, greeting each petty remark with delight and noticing each new dress, lavishing praise on the most incidental of new accessories. Do so and your fortune’s made. What is most astonishing is that it is the cleverest of them, those hard-headed professional women, who are the readiest to announce that a man has been wholly captivated by their latest item of footwear!

  They liked fine words. They liked music, flowers, sentimental promenades, hours filled with tears, painful farewells; they liked any event, however minor, however common, which could stop the clocks of routine even for a minute.

  They liked gestures of self-sacrifice. It is a well-known fact that many women take it as a personal insult if the suitor does not threaten to hang himself from the tree beneath her window. And wealthy women are almost more demanding of little presents than the poor ones who need them. An extremely rich woman once told her lover at their first appointment: ‘What are you to me? My benefactor. Have you bought me anything yet?’ And yet this lady was so respectable and good that all the orphans in town would kiss her hand, and her heart was known to be of such pure gold that it was doubtful whether the jewellery shops of heaven had ever produced anything finer.

  They liked the word fiancé and they liked the word lover — they liked to form lifelong relationships at the first meeting and one may be perfectly sure they never seriously thought that love might eventually end. They liked long eloquent letters — and though they frequently did not read them right through they felt insulted if the letter did not look long enough. They liked it when men collected mementos such as locks of hair, garters, handkerchiefs, prayer books, hairpins, shoes, anklets, rings, little slips of paper, railway tickets, dying flowers, pieces of ribbon, leaves of trees with pleasant associations, veils, horseshoe nails (if these were found in pairs), portraits, coins, crumbs from cakes, pebbles, cigarette ends, buttons, shirts, books, strings of corsets and empty matchboxes. There was one woman who was especially kind to Sindbad and trusted him with the management of her estate, accepted his advice on financial matters, gave him her jewellery for safe-keeping and even entrusted him with documents relating to her divorce. At the end of the affair she asked for no bills but that he should return to her a particular number of the evening paper, Az Est, which she had had in her possession in the course of a railway journey between Vienna and Budapest and in the margins of which this elegant lady had drawn curious little pictures such as street children chalk on the walls of houses. She was anxious and unhappy and unable to sleep till the old newspaper
was found. ‘See how much I loved you!’ she said with a pained expression and put it to the flame of the candle until it lay in a thousand blackened pieces on the floor.

  They liked domesticity. Once Sindbad brought great joy to a very dear lady when he learned from her the art of knitting stockings. Other women radiated happiness when Sindbad knocked a nail into the wall as a picture hook, when he mended a lock in the house, or when, in the course of a stay at some village, he rose early to check that things at the mill were proceeding as they should. There were ladies among his old acquaintance who forgave Sindbad anything providing our mariner ran down to the butcher to buy a few crowns’ worth of smoked meat to supplement an already ample supper. Others kept him locked up quietly and secretly on the ground floor while they slept content on the floor above. There are ugly snub-nosed men who owe their good fortune to their ability to deal with a horse at stud. It is particularly the women who have experienced the love of handsome and refined gentlemen when young who seem happiest to accommodate some slight disfigurement in a man’s nose or other bodily part in later years.

  And they liked order. They liked to keep track of all Sindbad’s debts and to frown and fret over the means of clearing them. ‘You’ll see how good it is once your mind is at rest,’ they’d say, especially older women who tried to persuade Sindbad that their love for him was purely Platonic. Ah, these Platonic affairs afforded Sindbad hearty amusement. He bowed his head, smiled to himself, and waited quietly to see what the women wanted of him. They forbade him wine, cards and loose company, kept his underwear in order, and were delighted when he pretended to feel drowsy at dusk. How often did they make him swear to abjure dice and to drink wine only by small glassfuls! Sindbad could repeat every form of vow by now, word for word; he knelt down without being asked and was delighted to get through the ordeal. For the next few days he would feel very well, covering the woman’s hands with grateful kisses, checking over her book-keeping and quibbling with the taxman over a few pennies, then he’d disappear without warning.

  He had been loved by blondes, brunettes, slim girls and fat ones, and each time he believed he had found his one true love, just as they believed they had found theirs and never forgot him.

  As the years went by there were messages from far away. Women wanted him to come back: they were bored, they felt nostalgic; they wanted to laugh, cry, cackle, fret and be happy. But Sindbad did not go back because he kept account of the lovers that had succeeded him in their affections. The subsequent pain and bitter disappointment prevented him ever forgiving their unfaithfulness. He was a rogue: in the Middle Ages he would have gone the rounds of the prisons where he would have been shorn, first of his nose, then of his ears. Furthermore, he always believed he was speaking the truth and one can ask no clearer proof of a man’s wickedness. 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 done the leaving.

  Let us therefore close the file on Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence.

  Mrs Bánati, the Lost Woman

  Where does the story of Mrs Bánati begin? Where does it end? Perhaps it begins like the river’s source, springing from the earth in little runnels. Somebody is playing a thin-toned violin at the window and Mrs Bánati is still in pigtails, looking in the mirror and listening to the violin. The river gathers force and shoulders its way past cities and towers, past ever-fresh landscapes; morning finds it at a well-kept park, by the evening it is washing the banks of a cemetery or toying with the lanterns of the great city. The thin-toned violin has fallen quiet and big-chested men are looking deep into Mrs Bánati’s eyes: one man declaims at her as he might at some public meeting, another sighs and murmurs lovely words at her, and a third hides his intentions under a little black silk cap and keeps repeating how he wishes only to console her, regale her with good advice and make life comfortable for her but never notices what shoes she is wearing. Men come and go like landscapes along a river. Following her fourth marriage Mrs Bánati was engaged in reflecting on the lies told her by men — reflecting on how things were, for no one was currently lying to her. At night the shades of discarded men visited her and sat down beside her but Mrs Bánati peevishly hid her face in the pillow.

  ‘You’re all the same — you all said the same things with the same intent, now you can all leave me in peace.’

  It was at this time, one autumn night — just as the bloodshot moon was sitting like a tipsy old man in the branches of the poplar tree, when all manner of intangible shadows flitted from garden to garden so that it seemed as if night was spontaneously producing animal and vegetable forms of its own, when faithful likenesses rendered in oils grew bored of leaning all day on their frames and stepped out into deserted rooms, when the stories of Kisfaludy* trembled on the tables of old houses and the pages turned over by themselves, when clocks that no one could remember working began to move their hands, and when doors on unoccupied floors of occupied houses started creaking as if in pain because someone behind them dared not cross the threshold — it was then that Sindbad rose from the dead. On this very autumn night he, the enchanted mariner, was driving down the highway in a carriage whose wheels were made of fallen poplar leaves.

  The house, which might just as well have been a castle, lay between a high stone wall and dreaming lime trees, like something out of a novel Sindbad might have read in his youth. Although the house, as I have already said, looked innocent enough from the outside, Sindbad brought his hearse to a stop and, having hung the lid of his coffin on a roadside scarecrow and propped up the straw-hatted and green tail-coated figure in the driver’s box, slipped quickly through the keyhole of the gate. Assuming a cloak composed of the damp mist rolling about the garden, he settled on the window, entered, snapped a rusty string in the piano and, looking in one of the locked drawers, found, together with a bottle of hair dye, an old dance card, an autographed fan, an ancient rabbit’s foot and a faded love-letter, the little twist of hair which Mrs Bánati had long ago woven out of one of Sindbad’s locks and which she had vowed to wear forever next to her heart.

  ‘It’s been years since we last met!’ Sindbad whispered into the sleeping woman’s ear, which lacked the oriental gold earring which used to dangle so enticingly beside her own golden ringlets.

  Mrs Bánati opened her eyes and quietly waved the apparition away. ‘Let me sleep, Sindbad. I was just dreaming of my first husband.’

  Sindbad chortled lightly, like the wild dove in the middle of the wood. ‘The first? I remember him: Jeney the photographer, who was later charged with fraud, took a picture of him in the damp little alley near the Greek Orthodox church. There he stood like some returning emigré, leaning on the low gate that used to be at the end of the garden, with his great thick beard and that fancy national costume, staring surprised and anxious into the black tube, behind which the tiny Jeney, with his mousy moustache was twiddling with shutters under the green cloth …’

  ‘He used to call me Liska,’* Mrs Bánati told her pillow as if there were no one else in the room with her. ‘There was an old woman somewhere from whom he hoped to inherit something. It was her name. One day he fell from the roof while he was trying to mend the thatch he had tied himself. I don’t remember any more about him.’ She gave a quiet sigh. ‘He was a good man …’

  Sindbad laughed as uproariously as the devil in the lane by the ditch when a gypsy wedding is in progress at the far end of town and the violinists, cellists and clarinettists are making their loud way home … `A pale half-crazy musician lived in town, a long-haired lanky thing, who played “Demon Robert“ with a passion and all the windows in town opened when he did so — do you remember him?’

  ‘They called him Sindbad,’ answered the woman and dreaming, blushed. ‘My dear good husband was laid out on the bier wearing the national costume he had arrange
d to be photographed in, with the neighbouring women busily combing out his beard. It was evening and the musician came to pay his respects to the dead. The candles looked like dying suns and an old walking stick with leather tassels was leaning in the corner of the room like a trusty friend: I could have frightened the musician away with it but didn’t, though I felt my husband’s presence so powerfully I thought I would only have to call him and he would wake. My second husband beat me a great deal. He was a soldier. He carried a whip.’

  The night visitor stroked the woman’s hand. ‘I know. You were always complaining about it. I was quite ready to believe the story, but I never found a mark on your shoulder.’

  ‘He was coarse,’ the woman defended herself. ‘That’s why I turned Calvinist, so we could divorce according to the laws as they were. Unfortunately, the minister of the new church I attended on Sundays never managed to preach a sermon that was to my taste. That might be why my third marriage turned out so unhappily.’

  ‘Madam, you have walked the earth in many guises. When you were a girl you wrote in your diary that you would choose to be a woman of pleasure because the poet Reviczky, whom you adored, had composed some of his finest verses about them. Then came the musicians with their treble clefs, their violins wrapped in green broadcloth, piccolos in pockets, nights of meditation, dreams of old deserted gardens, the wind gently tinkling the wind-chimes. Hunchbacks, asthmatics, consumptives — musicians all. One taught you to catch pneumonia by crossing the snow-covered yard at night in bare feet; another to weep on the stool by the glazed door with the green curtains; a third lured you into churches where, at a wave from the conductor, the timpanist would practically raise the roof with his pounding, and in the silence that followed the soprano would bring a new calm, and a man in one of the side-altars would shoot himself for love of you … As soon as the musicians had gone there appeared a drunkard with wild hair who had never been a soldier but succeeded in trampling through your heart in his great spurred boots. What riotous duets you would sing together when you were in drink.’