The Adventures of Sindbad (New York Review Books Classics)

by Gyula Krudy

  ‘Bankruptcy was staring us in the face for the third time. I was in continual fear of starving to death. My husband brought no money in, but spent his time at the card table with an old torn Swiss pack in his pocket instead of my portrait. And I was only thirty-six at the time. I used to stand at the window night after night, waiting for him … That’s when I got to know the night sky and understood why the stars at dawn look as if they have been weeping.’

  ‘There was a scholar living in the area at the time who used to stare at the same stars when he tired of studying …’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ Mrs Bánati proclaimed passionately. ‘I swear my whole life has been one round of unhappiness. I swear I suffered sleepless nights, I swear on the life of my fourth husband who joined the army, poor thing. I swear I never …’

  ‘Sindbad was the scholar’s name,’ whispered the night shadow. ‘You must have been happy with someone.’

  ‘Only with the first,’ gushed Mrs Bánati. ‘He was my true love, the sweet darling … Mind you, if the present one were to return at last from the war … Perhaps he is the best after all.’

  Sindbad kissed the lady’s hand and the cockerel beneath the window began to crow. ‘If I pass this way again I might call in.’ And he left as silently as he came.

  He shoved the old scarecrow into the driver’s seat so he could resume his old place in the coffin. ‘The hotel, and be quick,’ he ordered.

  The Green Veil

  The body of St Ladislas being carried on a wagon,* says the ancient script under a painted window in the Matthias Church* and one afternoon at the altar, under the icon of the canonised king, while the wife of the steward was dozing at the gates with her keys in her lap, and some of the black-clad women of Buda were seated at a considerable distance from each other in the pews, like the clubs on a pack of French cards, each preoccupied with her own troubles and prayers, that old rake Sindbad was busily eliciting a promise of eternal love. He was proceeding according to an ancient rubric which ordained that he should lure his female acquaintance into empty churches of a quiet afternoon, and recount to them, in hushed but clearly comprehensible tones, the histories of the various saints depicted in the building. Jewish women would be enticed to kneel on a hassock at the tomb of King Béla* and his queen, the very hassock on which the queen herself used to pray, then Sindbad would touch their brows with consecrated water and, later, in the choir or in some other quiet corner of the church, extort a long passionate kiss from them. Those less willing would be admonished: ‘Please don’t cry out, respect the sanctity of the church.’ Women were loth to resist him in old churches, particularly non-Catholic women; they were overawed by the wonderful altarpieces, by the odour of sanctity drifting above them, by those mysterious pointed windows against which the prayers of dead kings still seemed to flutter like the wings of doves, by the smoke of the censers, and by those hidden nooks and crannies in which, come dusk, some prince of hitherto unspotted virtue might come to life and tug at their pigtails with his iron-gauntleted hands. The steps leading to that altar had been trodden by bishops in velvet slippers. How is one’s heart to remain unaffected by the knowledge that the earnest prayers of men and women had fluttered from their souls like tiny butterflies compounded of sighs, and were even now covering the columns and vaults above so that barely a pinhead of vacant space remained between them? And who knows whether at night, with only the eternal flame to light them, those prayer-butterflies might not come to life and drift down the aisles as if the air were a powdered spectrum, rising and falling, a strange snow reflecting the colours of the altar-candle. Prayers might interlink there: the prayers of brothers embrace, the sighs of lovers settle beside each other, so when the first rays of the sun descended through the windows they might be the first to rise into the highest regions together. Perhaps only the prayers of happy children frolicked in the highest regions in the moonlight beneath the vaulting; the prayers of old virgins, liverish and crazed old women’s fantasies, might flap on bat wings below them, though their prayers could sometimes be as yielding as Persian rugs, since it is old women who have the most beautiful dreams of unknown men. Silky as moths, whiskery, covered in pollen, the thoughts of mature women fluttered beyond individual lovers on the lightest of wings, while the choir filled with grim, retiring, crook-beaked birds waiting for dawn when they might steal silver and gold coins from the sky. It was here that Sindbad made Mitra swear eternal love to him. Then he took her by the arm and, deeply moved, led her from the church.

  ‘From this day on I shall regard you as my wife,’ Sindbad told her in the Biedermeier café where the lovers of Buda tended to stop for refreshment.

  Mitra nodded sadly. ‘I feel God will punish me for it. You have seduced and ruined me. I don’t know how I can face my old parents again. They worship a different God.’

  ‘There is only one God,’ proclaimed Sindbad with conviction, ‘He who lives in our hearts and is born out of our love. It is the God who protects us, who allows us to meet in secret, so that no one should know of our love; who tells me what you think; who takes care that our eyes should seek only each other’s, who joins our hands, and brings our hearts together like two tempest-tossed birds that have found each other …’

  ‘You believe in love?’ asked Mitra, gazing at him with big round eyes.

  ‘I believe in nothing but love. Almost everything that exists exists only because men and women love each other. I may be old-fashioned, but in my experience, even today, men spend a great deal of time gazing into women’s eyes. Take this place — this old café only exists because lovers choose to meet here. The tables are made so that feet may freely touch, hands clutch unobtrusively and faces approach so close that, come April, you can see the first freckles of spring on a woman’s cheek. Think of the desire and passion stirring in those who have worn these chairs smooth with their young bodies. Shoes that used lightly to tap each other are now lying discarded on the rubbish heap in St Lawrence’s yard, and gloves, drawn off so that bare fingers might touch each other, when to draw those gloves off was a matter of such life-shattering importance — where are they now? The words ‘I love you’ have been said as often in this little shop as the bells of the great tower in the city have rung out over the Danube. Women and men have sat here, looking at each other, desiring each other, and not one has asked, as you have, madam, if I believed in love.’

  ‘My convent school, my books, the warning terrifying voices of my parents, all tell me that love is an awful unpleasantness. My friends would all laugh at me if they knew I had sworn eternal fealty to you. Why? Because I don’t love you. I don’t even know what it is to love,’ answered Mitra, whom Sindbad had by a long and painful process succeeded in persuading to come to Buda, to walk with him, to have her confess her love to him, to gaze from the battlements of the Bastion over the Field of Blood, and to linger in the royal gardens.

  She was a lively dark-eyed girl who often prayed at home with her aged parents, and was unhappy at always having to listen to business affairs at the table. Sindbad spent days under her window, performing all kinds of tricks with his grey hat, making friends with the grocer, the coalman, the stall-holder on the corner — even the policeman greeted him as he strode along the pavement before Mitra’s house. It took Sindbad a long time to make the girl’s acquaintance, having collected all his lies and displayed them to her like a shopkeeper putting his most glittering wares in the window. Mitra listened to his sweet talk with a serious and contemplative expression. ‘A refined and corrupt man,’ she once called him. She was eighteen already and had few illusions.

  ‘Do you remember Esther, about whom Baron Miklós Jósika* wrote that novel of his?’ Sindbad persevered, and gave her the book the next day. She leafed through it, bored.

  One afternoon he lured her to a theatre with his faithful female cronies. Mitra yawned while the music plied her with its seductive rhythms and the dancer danced herself to exhaustion on the stage below.

  Then he asked her to
draw her curtain one night at a certain time, so she should see him standing stock still in the moonlight, looking like one already dead and returned from the distant shore.

  On another occasion, he spent days ignoring her and wore a flower in his buttonhole, one he was given by a notorious vamp in Pest. He wrote a long sorrowful letter. He made preparations to depart for America and placed an antique ring on Mitra’s finger.

  ‘Let’s go back to the church,’ pleaded Sindbad with a solemn and melancholy expression. ‘You must rescind the vow you made me at the altar. After all, you weren’t serious, nor do you believe in love. I wouldn’t want you to carry such a terrible burden on your conscience.’

  Mitra shrugged indifferently and followed him, her dancer’s ankles twinkling, into the darkening church. A blonde woman in mourning dress was raising her skirt and kneeling before the high altar, just as in Tosca. Sindbad nervously grasped the girl’s hand.

  ‘Come, you little sinner, beg to be released from your vows and do so now before you tread so far down the path that you become irredeemable. My heart has found peace and lost its ardour. I have forgiven you, but here, between these holy walls, among these saints all worthy of honour, before the eternal flame and in the name of everything the great majority of men regard as sacred and keep hidden within the recesses of their hearts, you must pray to be forgiven your sin. Kneel and pray.’

  The canonised king had grown faint on the stained glass, and there was deep silence beneath the vaulting, a silence shared by all those who had prayerfully shed their burdens in this place. Up in the dark heights of the choir a frightened lost bird was clucking to itself.

  ‘Pray,’ repeated Sindbad sternly. ‘Ask the great king to release you from your vow, redeem your pledge, regain the peace in your soul, find contentment. Beg him devoutly to forget your vows of love, that love which he with his omnipotent hand has created. Ask that neither daughter nor son of yours should suffer unhappiness because of the false vows of others. Pray that you should not love anyone in your life, nor be cheated by anyone the way you have cheated me.’

  Having quietly and prayerfully repeated the words of the adventurer, she rose from the altar steps, smiling and lighter of heart. ‘How strange I feel,’ she said and spread her arms as if seized by some kind of giddiness. ‘As I prayed the king’s face seemed to disappear and yours slowly took its place. It was Sindbad staring sadly and solemnly at me from the glass as I recited the whole vow. Your immobile face reminded me of an old icon that over the centuries had grown used to hearing the suffering voices of women who have knelt before it, telling of their joys, sorrows and sins. Ah, those saints of old were reliable decent men. They never betrayed anyone. They kept their secrets hidden in the pockets of their coats like passwords. And so, with your permission, secretly, I have added a few words to the prayer, words privy to the icon and my heart.’

  The usher’s wife was rattling her keys, and the church grew dark in the corner where the queen or beggar-woman used to sit on the low bench. Sindbad drew Mitra closer. ‘And what did those silent words say?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘If it was really your face on the icon you should have heard them,’ answered Mitra, avoiding the question. ‘St Ladislas might even now be walking the earth in your likeness.’

  ‘I am indeed St Ladislas,’ Sindbad sighed in his vanity. ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me this afternoon.’

  The goldsmith’s daughter gave a quiet laugh. ‘What a queer man you are. You believe my vows rather than my eyes, my hands or my voice. Just as you believe the blessed king. There’s a dark gateway here. Come kiss me on the lips and give me something to remember the afternoon by.’

  And for the first time she raised the green veil from her face.

  The Night Visitor

  One autumn day Sindbad left the crypt where he had been deposited after his suicide.

  He was disappointed to find that the lounge suit he had been so carefully dressed in for his funeral was out of fashion. It might once have been sported by dandies on their daily strolls, but more recently the frock coat had been adopted by schoolteachers and village choir-masters, and as for the britches — Sindbad felt like his own grandfather in them. In those days he used to correspond with village girls and travel to distant and obscure regions in the hope of meeting with different kinds of women. He had a fondness for pointed shoes and the scent of lavender. He also liked Lavalière ties that could be done up in one great bow and white waistcoats cut high, to wear when visiting actresses in the provinces or when asking bourgeois ladies for lockets, handkerchiefs, garters and other bijou objects for mementoes. On walks in the Bastion or on visits to the dance school he used to take a deep sniff of their scented dresses and proclaim his love for them without ever once lying; in distracted moods he would dawdle under windows from which, eventually, some attractive woman would lean out; he would bribe chambermaids with a little present and hot-headedly enter strange houses just so that he could kiss the hands of unknown women, beg a blessing off the older ones and extol the virtues of momentary delight, the secret joy, the invaluable fleeting hour, to those who had not previously met him and hence had been taken so utterly by surprise. Ah, life was still worth living then: one might appear secretly by night in a garden, tap at a window, speak beautiful words to those waiting to hear them; one could laugh and grow rapt or languid on the subject of a ringlet, a flower, a small white hand or the peculiar curve of a neck, and watch as the train drew away from the platform. That was Sindbad in his youth — a tireless voyager, a friend to women, a knight errant for those in sleepy provincial towns; he was the last worldly thought of virgins about to enter convents and the hope of the ageing … When the affair was over he would retreat to the sighing boughs of the damp and melancholy graveyard and spend a whole year listening to the drumming of the rain and, when this too grew tedious, he might engage in conversation with his dead relatives who lay to either side of him in the crypt. One particularly worm-eaten old great-uncle tended to toss and turn in his grave. He had had four wives when alive and two or three lovers beside them at any one time, and was still anxious to reassume the flesh: ‘I wonder what my sweet Helen is doing?’ he would ask the spiders. ‘I died too soon to develop a proper taste for her.’

  The restlessness of this girl-crazy uncle would eventually restore Sindbad’s appetite for life. One moonlit night, when the sexton left the gates open, Sindbad escaped from the crypt and set out directly for the place where he had spent his happiest days.

  The old nurse slipped into the house, her cheeks quite pale, and whispered to her mistress. ‘He is standing by the fence looking into the yard. The moon is shining directly on him. Would madam like to see him?’

  That evening, mistress and maid had happened to be speaking of Sindbad. They were just remembering the time when he arrived one night and the fresh snow lay knee-high in town and the two hands of the illuminated clock in the tower were standing vertical. They had been playing cards in the afternoon and the cards slipped through their fingers with a faint lisp in the silence of the curtained room. Their very words sounded mysterious.

  ‘There’s someone coming to the house, someone whose thoughts lie here … Madam will know best who this person might be …’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered and her heart beat faster as she thought of Sindbad. ‘You say he is waiting by the fence?’ she asked and her fingers trembled on the table as she rose.

  ‘I saw him with these old eyes of mine. The neighbour’s dogs were fretting and barking,’ answered the old servant.

  ‘Invite him in, Theresa,’ said the woman after a few moments of thought. ‘He probably wants to tell me something.’

  The old servant had often kept watch over the dead at the house: she dressed them, combed their hair, spoke to them and joined their hands. The employers in whose service she had spent her life had quietly passed away, one by one, like the seasons. She almost had more to do with the other world than with the present one …
She opened the door without thinking. The little gate gave an agonised little creak as if it were more afraid of the dead than she was, then she retired to the kitchen behind the stove.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ asked the woman, her face quite white.

  The last time Sindbad had passed this way his hair had just begun to grey at the temples, a process as delicate and timid as the uncertain snow that falls in late autumn. Many women had cradled that dear head of his against their bosoms, but it was all winter there now. The frock coat hugged him tightly: he might have been a provincial gentleman on his way to a meeting or to his own silver wedding … The pointed shoe creaked ceremoniously across the home-made rugs and the folded collar lent a certain dignity to his cleanly shaved chin. A tall cigar case protruded from his cigar pocket. The white waistcoat had probably been dried in the sunlight by careful feminine hands.

  ‘Where have you sprung from? I thought you were dead, I heard you were, but was I dreaming? Why can’t you find peace in the other world?’ she asked him, as Sindbad sat perfectly still in the soft pointy-legged armchair, having placed his tall hat and dog-skin gloves on the floor like some old dandy.

  ‘I wanted to see you once more, Euphrosyne,’* answered Sindbad, his voice compounded of leaves and shadows. ‘I want to talk to you about the bitter past, so full of waiting and hope, about those marvellous days when every morning found us at the window surveying the dawn snow or the brilliant icicles hanging from the eaves in the beautiful beams of the sun peeking over the wooden roofs, when we tried to guess what delights and pleasures the approaching day might hold by gazing at tiny patches of blue sky reflected in pools in the streets. And now I am long dead, I’d like to know how you spend your days, what you are thinking, what you dream of at night. I’ve come back in the hope that you might welcome a few words of encouragement, advice or reassurance.’