The Adventures of Sindbad (New York Review Books Classics)

by Gyula Krudy

  ‘You’re very late,’ answered the woman.

  Sindbad examined her carefully. Her brow and her eyes, the wavy dark hair swept off her face, the shadow under her long eyelashes: it was all as before. She used to be referred to in town as the Bountiful Mrs Kecsegi; did men still call her that? Only on her temples and in the pallor of her complexion could one detect traces of those sleepless nights and tears shed on the pillow. Many had passed from this house in hearses, to the accompaniment of weeping. Husband, children and lover had one by one left her. Poor woman, her life was an endless round of mourning. And prying, gossipy neighbours do nothing to lighten a widow’s load. Perhaps they were already drilling holes in the walls so as to observe the movements of this unattached woman. Who is visiting her in the evening? Who is that she is talking to? Is she really spending her time mourning the dear departed?

  ‘I should take a husband, Sindbad,’ the woman apologised and lowered her eyes. ‘Next door have drilled a hole in my bedroom wall. They want to pry even into my dreams. I dare not dream any more. I know that once I’m safely married they’ll leave me in peace.’

  Sindbad reassured her. ‘No one can see me, I am only a spirit. Only you can see me, Euphrosyne. I speak to you as if I were a dream figure at your bedside.’

  ‘It’s true, when you died I dreamt most intensely of you,’ the woman continued, absorbed, as if picking up a long neglected train of thought. It was a persistent thought that accompanied her everywhere, which trailed her, which clung to her dress like some furry little monkey. Sometimes she turned around. Who is following me? ‘I dreamt your dead body was laid out on the wood chest in the kitchen and my servants were all dressed in mourning clothes. I picked you up with an enormous effort, and carried you on my shoulders. I almost collapsed under the weight. But I kept going. I took you to bed. I laid you out and kept looking at you to see if you were really dead. You were dead and I strewed the yellow silk eiderdown with flowers … Next day I was sure you were dead. Did I weep over you? I think I wept quietly at night, when no one was looking, when I myself hardly noticed it.’

  Sindbad stroked her brow; she felt it like an autumn breeze. ‘Ah, you should think of something nicer. Have you revisited the places where we used to stroll arm in arm when no one could see us? Have you walked through those distant suburbs where the houses suddenly shrank so that we could touch their eaves? Have you walked with anyone through an old graveyard where the rain has washed the names off the gravestones and made all the dead anonymous? Have you visited the little pâtisseries where our feet used to touch under the table, or inns where we took shelter for the night, where the innkeeper was as ruddy-cheeked as English novels would have him be, where the windows gave on to a park and we could touch the red leaves of the vine that was growing wild? Have you taken a carriage through the autumn countryside as we used to do, holding hands the whole way, not knowing why? Has anyone told you since I left that your legs are shapelier than the legs of deer on reservations, your hands whiter than those of princesses who have long died and have nothing to do but rest their lovely hands on their heavy silk dresses, that the locks of hair curling on your neck give well-wined and dined young men plenty to think about, and that the rustling of your silk skirt is like the whispering of moss in the forest in June where both happy and unhappy lovers have kissed? Has anyone told you they would die for you and that life without you would be pointless and hopeless?’

  The woman sighed and answered in a breaking childlike voice: ‘People have said a great deal since then … But they all lied. Only you told the truth, Sindbad. Oh, how I believed you. I trusted in you as in a god, as in my mother when I was a child. And I have never gone with any other man to those places we visited, where we were constantly telling each other how our love would never end. I have never seen another man’s face above my shoulders in the reflection of that lake where we used to row and I would have felt ashamed in front of the old man in the café if, one or two years later, I had waited, hopeful and excited, for an appointment with another man, there where since time immemorial women have waited for their lovers in secret. Will you let me be married again?’

  ‘You have behaved impeccably, so I will,’ the ghost answered, pulling his frock coat even closer about him, and ceremonially bending his knee, he gave a little bow and left her.

  An Overnight Stay

  What did Sindbad like?

  He liked snowdrifts and women’s legs.

  The provincial dance school and the little inn where he could sit like a stranger and whisper to the innkeeper’s wife, suggesting that they should run away together.

  Leaves in the park in autumn, blotched as if with blood, and abandoned windmills where one day he might murder the woman he loved best.

  Melancholy roads between the hills and the smile of the woman in charge of the horses at the travelling circus when she received his bouquet.

  He liked the scent of graveyard flowers in tales told by old women as they knitted socks and remembered past loves, and the lies he told to novice nuns in the corridors of railway carriages.

  He liked wooing complete strangers in highland towns, making up to innocent bourgeois women with many children then suddenly leaving — and peeking through the windows of houses in crooked deserted streets on snowy nights to see what was happening by candlelight.

  He liked hands, hair, women’s names, voices and caresses. He liked to appear in young girls’ dreams, to court fallen women at masked balls as if they were princesses, and to recite poems to those with rough hands.

  He liked lies, illusions, fictions and imagination — he would love to have swung from the high trapeze in a rose-pink vest or been an organist at a princely residence, or a confessor in a Jesuit church! A sought-after gynaecologist in Pest or a young tutor in a girls’ school! A night-light in the Sacré Coeur, an illuminated capital in the prayer-book when young women are interceding for their dear ones at the Franciscan church! A window pane through which lovers kissed, a tiny icon under the pillow, a silk-ribbon in a high girdle, or a poet in exile whose works were studied by young girls in secret.

  Bearing all this in mind it is understandable that the unhappy young man should have taken his own life. His desires were incapable of fulfilment. It was of no consolation to him that one hundred and seven women had reciprocated his love, women who, he imagined, had dandled him into a haze of nostalgia; one hundred and seven women, each of whom had brought something new, irrational but wholly unforgettable into his life: a voice, a gesture, a scent, a strange word, a sigh … After all, there were more than one hundred and seven women remaining who still haunted his dreams, over one hundred and seven apparitions ringed in red, all of whom he would love to have loved. All of whom he fell in love with at first sight, feeling he had only to extend his hand in order to touch them. When in town, he gazed at women passionately and adoringly, the blood in his temples racing — there were pale flowers on the point of fading, tea-roses ranged along the balconies who looked through him with careless self-conceit, all glowing ears, sweet-scented necks, soft hands and oriental decadence, tight buds and meadow flowers whose fresh lips emitted soft streams of laughter as if they were springs and bubbling brooks, and actresses who had loved often and long. He moaned with the sheer joy of living, his heart in his mouth, every time spring and summer came round and he could watch them parading their new clothes. The white blouses of women about town, the traveller’s green skirt and the secretary’s cheap shoes; the hairdresser’s black apron, the feathers in the hat of the forty-year-old grand dame, the nurse’s white uniform, the black scarf of the impoverished aristocrat from Buda, the actress’s loose pantaloons, the hand clad in mother-of-pearl gloves holding opera-glasses in the private box, the leg braced on the high step of the carriage in the process of alighting, the cooing and cackling of Jewish women and the white necks prayerfully bent in Buda churches; these had occupied Sindbad’s imagination throughout his life … women without their clothes were all the same, they never i
nterested him.

  What is more, after his death, whenever the snow flew fast or the wind whistled, and he had occasion to escape from his crypt, he inclined to frequent places which retained some memory of a neatly tied garter or a sweetly sloping shoulder. And his very favourite haunts were those ruined forts, river banks and silent gardens where, enchanted and dizzied by love, he had committed suicide for one or other woman’s sake.

  In many of his dreams a certain Irma appeared and called to him — she was a woman who lived in a village Sindbad the voyager had once found himself in, in Pest county. The weathercock on the roof had just stopped turning when she saw him step through her narrow gate. The guard dogs had started barking furiously at the moon, and the woman in the inner room had woken up and was listening attentively, her head propped on her elbow.

  As Sindbad took a couple of turns about the courtyard it was as if the man in the moon had taken a puff of his long-stemmed pipe and blown a little white cloud of smoke into the moonlit yard. Irma sat up uneasily in her bed and called her old maid who was sleeping in the corner. ‘Nana,’ said the lady. ‘Look out in the yard and see why the dogs are so restless.’

  The ancient peasant bumbled over to the window and turned her myopic eyes up to the moon. ‘That young man is here again, the one who came before. He’s standing by the fence.’

  ‘It’s Mr Sindbad, surely,’ cried the woman. ‘I knew he’d return … after all, why should he leave me here for ever?’

  The maid grunted and sought her bed in the dark. ‘He’s dead and daren’t come in,’ she muttered. ‘We didn’t treat him very well the last time …’

  ‘It was vintage time, wasn’t it?’ the woman exclaimed. ‘The village was full of the scent of ripe grapes and drunken bees were humming about the terrace. A white-haired gypsy in red breeches was plucking his dulcimer and the roof was dark. The chimney at the end of our house was the only one smoking and there was a great fire in the kitchen. Perhaps the servants were roasting an ox. Mr Sindbad couldn’t sleep and was resting his head on the dulcimer, and his strange friend, Joco — we only knew his first name — kept singing one song over and over again in that harsh wine-stained voice of his, like thin ice cracking round a well one winter’s day when there’s roast pig on the spit and you’re chewing a crisp bit of cabbage between your teeth. Like sour wine trickling down an old man’s throat, that’s what Joco’s singing was like, and he had been singing ever since dinner. The weather was really rather mild, it was that lovely time of autumn when the nights are still warm and I was reading poems by Kisfaludy* under the branches of the huge chestnut tree: I was in love with Sindbad. Do you remember, Nana?’

  ‘He was a handsome young man,’ the old servant answered with a satisfied grunt.

  ‘The night wore on and on and still they did not move from the terrace. The servant brought more wine: I was tossing and turning in my bed. I heard carnival noises and that voice like broken snow crackling under the sleighs of a wedding party, like the smell of cabbage soup and the taste of bacon hanging in smoky rings, continually singing for Mr Sindbad’s entertainment, with the occasional heavy plucking of those thick dulcimer strings. I slipped on my house-shoes and an underskirt and knocked on the window overlooking the corridor. “Stop this noise now.“ But since Joco had done me the favour of introducing me to Sindbad he was not bound to obey me. He simply raised the bottle of wine in my direction. “What are you so cross about, you little sack of poison?“ he mocked me. “After all, I’ve brought you the man you love.“ I was so angry I rushed out on to the terrace and knocked the dulcimer over — the whole house vibrated — and I boxed the musician’s ear a few times too, but Joco eluded me. I took Sindbad’s hand and dragged him off to bed.’

  ‘That’s how it was, all right,’ sighed the maid.

  ‘It was wonderful!’ the woman answered abstractedly and laid her head on her pillow. ‘The old dulcimer player has long since died and followed Joco and Sindbad, his partners in festivities, to the grave. Oh, if only I could hear that dulcimer once more and listen to that old song reeking of the beer-hall out on the terrace! If only Sindbad could rest that lovely melancholy head of his in my lap again! If only I could be young once more! And this time I wouldn’t box the ears of any musician who was entertaining my darling.’

  Far off in the village, the clock in the tower struck twelve, the old count emerged from the church walls, set out for his nightly constitutional and everything began to move: portraits of pig-tailed ancestors and broad-bosomed matrons, thin-lipped women clutching white handkerchiefs; all of them shifted and leaned forward curiously. In the distance one could faintly hear the sound of a dulcimer approaching. Already it was in the neighbouring street and the extraordinary hoarse voice the whole country knew as Joco’s sounded as though it were practically next door. People were coming and going under the window, the gates creaked, and suddenly the dulcimer was right there on the terrace among the clusters of wild grapes.

  The old maid, lying on her bed, said, ‘I have brought them to you, madam. While you were sleeping I slipped out to the cemetery and brought over Mr Sindbad’s companions.’

  The lady slipped on her house-shoes and crept over to the window. The moonlight had already slid behind the house. The vaulted terrace was dark.

  There were shadows perceptible in the faint light of the corridor. Sindbad was resting his head against the dulcimer and Joco, a big-bellied, sharp-moustached, curly-headed old man, was raising a glass of red wine to her. Having greeted her he resumed his singing. The gypsy in red breeches was strumming the instrument with invisible hands. Sindbad bowed his head.

  Irma stood at the window, her heart racing. It was only when the ancient cockerel began to crow that she woke from her trance. The shadows were gone from the corridor and the sound of the dulcimer sounded faintly from the graveyard.

  Sumach Trees in Blossom

  This story begins with Sindbad still a young man — young in so far as his legs were steady but where his heart should have been he wore an antique red-gold amulet rather than a black hole. His eyes sparkled like the winter sun on frosty pines and his ankles were so slender and lithe he might have worn dancing shoes like the professional dancers at The Green Devil. He gazed mockingly into women’s eyes because he imagined each of them to be a potential murderer, while all the time his mouth spoke the required words with such refinement and courtesy he might have been an abbé addressing an innocent elderly lady who was thinking of leaving her jewellery to the monastic foundation. He pretty well knew all there was to know about women’s tears, their sighs and inviting looks, but retained a respect for the sincere hate and fury they felt when abandoned. Being a wise man, however, he never imagined that there was a single woman in the world who spent sleepless nights dreaming passionately of him. Women were always thinking of something else when they were alone! At this time, though, he was inclined to believe that he might deserve a lady’s attention.

  Here we are thinking of the affair of the goldsmith’s wife, who occupied Sindbad’s thoughts for some years. Not that he failed to notice that other women possessed neat ankles, fine heads of hair, lovely eyes and attractive voices. Nevertheless, whenever he walked alone under the poplars or idled time away at a small inn in Buda (in the Tabán district* particularly, in those smoke-filled vaulted rooms with large wine glasses where a blind musician wheedled away in a corner accompanying a faded ballad singer and the innkeeper peered so suspiciously out from under his otter-fur cap that he looked as if he were sizing up his chances of passing a bit of counterfeit money) Sindbad carried on dreaming, calculating, setting traps, and contemplating romantic plans for seducing housemaids and countesses. And whenever he was busily planning out his future in this way Sindbad’s thoughts invariably centred on the goldsmith’s wife: he imagined her in her small château with red windows, its roofs swimming in mist, or saw her riding in a four-horse carriage. In the midst of his reveries, he would often write her name on the table with his finger dipped in w
ine. The table before him now was covered in large versions of the letter F. The letters together added up to the word Fanny, and that word, whether in the smoky, dreamy distance, or in the tops of the poplars or on the yellow walls of the vaulted inn in the Tabán, inevitably conjured the figure of the goldsmith’s wife in a wide-collared mantle with a crown on her head like one of those raven-haired Madonnas in some monastery in Holy Russia. The golden amulet Fanny had given him to wear next to his heart showed the Virgin as she might have appeared to pious medieval engravers. Sindbad would often press the relic to his lips when he found himself alone.

  Since the goldsmith’s wife was very well known in Pest, Sindbad’s meetings with her had to be conducted in the most mysterious and exciting secrecy. They met in churches, at balls, at boat races or on the less frequented paths in the sanatorium gardens; in the evening the carriage would wait with curtains drawn in some silent street and the goldsmith’s wife would emerge from an alley and on quick delicate feet find the carriage door open and step in; at other times they would exchange stolen kisses on the dark spiral stairs that led to the lame seamstress’s shop; or Sindbad would leap on to the streetcar as it entered the tunnel just so that he might secretly squeeze the beloved object’s hand for a minute or so; or he would suddenly grasp her arm in the twilit square under the Matthias Church just as the choir was singing the Hungarian ‘Hymn to Mary’ in the tower.