The Adventures of Sindbad (New York Review Books Classics)

by Gyula Krudy

  The happiest times, though, were those they spent in the district through which water used to be drawn up to the castle from the river below, the place still known as Víziváros or Watertown, where the goldsmith’s wife had herself been born in a Renaissance-style house. There was a restaurant there which opened in the summer, with sumach trees in the courtyard. These trees changed into a most beautiful red colour as autumn advanced and a red-combed cockerel stood and mused on the unused tables. Red was the wine which the apronned waiter placed before them on the mild end-of-October afternoon when the wild vine was no longer fruiting on the nitrous walls.

  Fanny pointed to the rusty iron-grille marking the floor above them. ‘That’s where I was born, Sindbad, thirty years ago. My mother died not long after my birth and her polished coffin was carried down the stairs by retired soldiers. My father collected antique boxes and liked to walk about in slippers, and in the evening, once he had finished with his boxes, he’d stand and ponder with his hands thrust into his pockets. My childhood was rather sad on the whole. My best friends were the naked shepherds, the goddesses and the swans, those violinists in powdered wigs and breeches and the enamelled mail coaches which decorated the lids of my father’s boxes. Later my father brought home a little old snuff-coloured gentleman who was always reading the fables of La Fontaine. He had a high white waistcoat. I can no longer remember his name but whenever he looked up from the old French book I found I was staring into the most extraordinary, unforgettable pair of eyes I had ever seen. They were sad and blue, all-forgiving, all-comprehending, wise and gentle. They contained everything the house meant to me: patient attention to the tiny joys of life, immediate and tacit forgiveness, good behaviour and the ability to dream quietly. The old Frenchman’s eyes taught me to live so quietly as to forget the hustle and bustle of life, that it should be no more than the sound of a small violin being played in a silent street; he taught me that towers may not be known because they are always enveloped in mist, that it is best to suffer unnoticed, that my shoes and gloves should always be clean and that I should comb my brown hair off my neck with a wet comb … When I was first unhappy — many years ago — my instincts led me back to the old house. It was autumn and I sat down at one of these tables and ate cherries and cream. Our old Frenchman was still alive then and he watched me for a while from the corner without my noticing. Ever since then, whenever I’m in trouble, I come here in case the old man is still alive.’

  For the first time Sindbad took some trouble to examine the house containing the little summer restaurant which went under the name of The Golden Goose and sported an ancient coat of royal arms above the gate. He noted the red-combed cockerel and the silent gallery above him where the woman he now regarded as his wife used to run about as a child.

  One day, after his death, he returned to the house in quiet Víziváros — it was as if he had only left yesterday. The cockerel stood guard in the usual place and the sumach trees waited patiently in their red garments like so many court officials. The elderly royal couple they were waiting for would soon be passing by, their heads bowed, passing by and passing on.

  Sindbad didn’t have to wait long. He heard light faint footsteps under the arch of the gate. A rusted lock was moaning in the wind, grumbling that though the guard dog was gone human feet were still shuffling, stumbling, struggling and striding down the worn cobbles outside, feet which imagined they were conveying kings, generals, poets and a hundred varieties of happiness home after a night of drinking.

  Fanny entered, a sadly bent little wing on her black hat, her veil full of tiny holes the size of snowdrops, and her black-gloved hand as tender and maternal as the precious hands that wipe some minor care from a child’s brow. The young man with the blue apron brought some cherries of deep Flanders Red and cream in a little floral cup covered in vine leaves. Someone started playing the violin in one of the upstairs rooms.

  Dead Sindbad sat where the old French gentleman might once have sat. He did not cough or make any noise but contentedly watched the progress of a swallow that had flitted across from Pest to Buda. The dead see no change in the living. Dead mothers always return to orphaned children even when their sons have long been wearing beards. Dead fathers, should they awake at midnight, might be found mending the caps of little boys. And, long after they have turned to dry old sticks and firewood, lovers will still be gathering and whispering at the ear of the grey-haired princess, their voices like the sound of wind among the lilacs, their faces young and fresh as they drift by in their red frock-coats and the white waistoats they had worn as musicians. In Sindbad’s eyes the goldsmith’s wife was as beautiful now as she had been at the masked ball in her youth when he first saw her in her gold embroidered dress in the guise of Maria Stuart.

  He sneaked up on her, stealing a ride on a windblown leaf, and began quietly whispering in her ear where her hair smelled fresh and was as neatly combed as if for Sunday. ‘My poor darling, are you dissatisfied, miserable, sad?’

  ‘I am very sad because everyone has left me and I’m alone,’ the woman sighed to herself. ‘I can no longer see the pink-cheeked shepherds I saw in my youth and I no longer hear music on the wind. My lovers are dead or grown old … Heavens, with what blessed tranquillity I looked forward to strolling quietly and cheerfully along the castle ramparts with some old army officer. Nowadays I can’t resign myself to it. Why — because I am no longer young? Why — because I no longer spend the night in tears on account of some unfaithful lover? It is true, I confess, that while they were around I never wept for any of them. Today, though, I would like to cry for all of them, for all their lies, their bad behaviour and fickleness. Not to feel angry but simply to cry, to cry for years, for ever, for them all. How could they leave me without a word? They never even told me why they were leaving. They simply left …’

  ‘Because their time had come, my poor darling,’ Sindbad answered with extraordinary tenderness. ‘There is no special reason for men to go. They’d have gone even if you had begged them not to and pursued them or sent messages. Something was calling them, waiting for them, much as the wind calls the leaves. In my case a great storm blew me one night to the window of a poor seamstress …’

  ‘That is just what is so galling. My pride …’

  Sindbad gave a wicked laugh. ‘Your pride? You are proud only as long as you are surrounded by admirers. While you are both conqueror and enchanter.’

  The dull tapping of a stick with a rubber end sounded in the deep gateway. A carefully shaven old gentleman in a wing collar and chequered trousers entered the courtyard with the sumach trees and ordered a large glass of red wine.

  ‘Leave me alone, Sindbad. I have no time for your idiotic conversation,’ she answered, waving the shadow away.

  ‘I cannot live,’ the ghost muttered.

  The old gentleman’s eyes rolled over her like a beer barrel across a yard. He coughed and hid his stick behind the bench.

  ‘Strange,’ sighed the goldsmith’s wife. ‘Men remain attractive longer than we do. That old gentleman must certainly be the most handsome man in Buda.’

  And she adjusted her hat.

  Rozina

  Sindbad, the bearer of this fine name first found in the volume of The Thousand and One Nights our grandmothers used to read, was travelling by train to an appointment with a lady and was lost in his thoughts. He wiped the soot from his face with a little cologne, arranged a new handkerchief in his pocket, rinsed his mouth and checked the tissue paper wrapped around the flowers he had brought from Pest, though he could have bought some locally since the train was due to arrive at the provincial station well before closing time. He lay back then got up again, absent-mindedly started counting the poplar trees as they passed, and wondered whether it was worth his while coming here simply because Rozina was scared of mice.

  Having spent winter and spring on Sindbad’s arm, kissing, walking the streets of Pest, exploring Buda down hidden byways known only to lovers, and sitting in the boxes of
theatres where Sindbad would lean in the shadows behind her, his arms solemnly crossed, Rozina, the goldsmith’s wife, avoided the hot summer months by moving to a country house where her grandmother, a veteran of the revolution, occupied herself sweeping the dust and cobwebs from ancestral portraits. ‘The quiet life will be good for me. I shall find peace and forget you,’ said Rozina on one of their three-mile walks together through the hills of Buda. (Sindbad’s eyes were fixed on his feet. It was a long afternoon and his heart was trembling as he wondered whether she would really leave him. In that moment he believed his whole life depended on Rozina, though once she had gone he made a miraculous recovery. He breathed again, a free spirit. ‘I’ll find a new lover — a dancer!’ he thought. Then Rozina unexpectedly sent him an urgent letter. ‘Come quickly, I beg you, I can’t sleep for the mice.’ Sindbad did not think twice, but packed his bags and left.)

  There was a little garden next to the station — it seemed every station-master in Hungary preferred fuchsias — and there at the end of the garden, like an illustration from a German postcard, stood Rozina with a parasol in her hand. Sindbad kissed both her hands, muttering incomprehensible words of adoration, and gazed enchanted at the three freckles the village sun had planted on her face.

  ‘So you still love me?’ asked Sindbad, as though it were the most important thing on earth.

  ‘Is it possible to forget you?’ answered Rozina, taking hold of Sindbad’s arm as they ambled into the village.

  She couldn’t have been bolder and more self-confident, thought Sindbad, than if he had been her lawful husband and had just returned from a long journey: the village poplars on the grandmother’s estate nodding familiarly to him, and the sheep-dog sprawling at his feet. Apple trees in gardens glance at Rozina’s white legs as she passes across the dewy lawn in bare feet. In the shade of the hammock strung from the chestnut tree a little yellow flower peeps out to observe Rozina from below. A blackbird sits in the branches trying to guess what the woman is thinking behind those half-closed eyes,

  ‘Here we are,’ said Rozina as they arrived at an old country house. A moth-eaten steward’s coat hung on a branch in the garden.

  ‘I like old houses where the dead ancestors who used to live there leave their voices behind to talk at you from the walls.’

  Rozina sighed. ‘It was my great-grandfather who had the house built. There are a lot of chestnut trees in the area and the mice have run wild. No one here is any good at setting mousetraps. You are so clever Sindbad, you can do anything.’

  ‘I was quite a clever child,’ Sindbad answered with a certain conceit. (Mind you, who has not been a doctor, a joiner, a cobbler, or general factotum at the behest of his beloved? All men in love are children dreaming of heroic deeds. When it comes to impressing the loved one the knocking of a nail in the wall is just as heroic an enterprise as wrestling with a bear.) Sindbad took off his coat.

  ‘Where are the traps,’ he asked, rolling up his sleeves.

  ‘Do you think they’ll do?’ Rozina asked anxiously, as she brought forth the little wire and wood contraptions.

  The old daughter of the revolution leant on a stout stick on the veranda and watched Sindbad through thick round glasses as he busied himself with the traps.

  ‘An officer and gentleman,’ she whispered to her grand-daughter.

  The moon had risen above the distant woods and the grandmother, having thrown her stick a few times at the clumsy chambermaid, grumbled a little, sighed and went to sleep.

  ‘Careful soldier boy doesn’t run away,’ she whispered in warning to Rozina.

  The moon was shining through the vine leaves directly onto Rozina’s face. She was as white and dreamy as an actress under a moving spotlight. Sindbad gazed in awe at her moonlit face: it was only in advanced old age that he was to discover that women are always looking into invisible mirrors. And quietly, in subdued tones full of the most noble feelings, like a faint bell tinkling above a river, he told Rozina that ever since childhood he had been seeking a face like hers. In his childhood dreams, as he turned off his desk light, this woman’s face would appear radiantly before him. On all his journeys, on all his aimless wanderings, this was the face that called to him and drew him on. This was the face with whose image he was born, that had glimmered in his cradle, until the moment he made its acquaintance as an adult when he first noticed it on a balcony in Aranykéz Street.*

  ‘Señora,’ proclaimed Sindbad with absolute solemnity, ‘I will never again be able to live without you.’

  Rozina reciprocated the urgent squeeze of his hand. ‘Speak,’ she sighed gently and equally seriously. ‘Your words are fluttering round my head like the miraculous singing of invisible birds.’

  She inclined her head as if following the progress of the moon. Her black eyes opened to such a size one might have thought she had suddenly lost track of it. She grasped his arm urgently and complained in a sorrowful voice. ‘I have no one but you … If you were to leave me, Sindbad, I wouldn’t know what to do. Speak to me. Whisper lovely soft things in my ear. It’ll be as if you really loved me.’

  Sindbad stared at a cloud that had swum across the moon and was convinced the words that came to him now were inscribed on those jasper-coloured sails. Love. Love.

  The woman trembled, stood up suddenly and pointed into a dark corner. ‘A mouse,’ she hissed with repulsion.

  She had turned deathly pale, her hand shook and she broke into uncontrollable sobbing. ‘A mouse!’ she repeated, shuddering.

  Sindbad smiled a heroic smile, lit a candle and threw the first mousetrap which had served its purpose out into the yard together with its victim.

  ‘Idiot!’ cried the woman, trembling in fury. ‘I won’t even be able to step out into the yard. Is that what you want? I hate and despise mice.’

  Sindbad smiled wearily. ‘It is a very little mouse,’ he muttered.

  ‘Go. I hate the sight of you. You have killed a mouse. Murderer,’ she spluttered. ‘I loathe you. I don’t love you. Don’t you dare touch me with those hands. Be off with you.’

  ‘It was a very small mouse,’ Sindbad repeated, easily offended like most lovers, and he took his hat and cloak and waited a while before the house in case his darling called him back. The house was silent. So, with a genuine reason for sadness this time, Sindbad wandered off towards the station in time to catch the night train. Later, after he had become a ghost, he developed a particular grudge against mice.

  The Unforgettable Compliment

  There is a small town in the highlands which in Sindbad’s day (`In my day,’ as men who are sick at heart tend to say) was notorious for its women, who would spend the day unkempt, bleary-eyed, their hair uncombed, beating their husbands and their children, screeching in loud birdlike voices, carrying saucepans full of cabbage, rising at dawn to do their laundry, competing with broad-footed Saxon girls, sticking their heads into the cobwebs in the attic and climbing up the flue with slippers flapping on their bare feet. Indeed, there was only one proper lady in the town, an impoverished countess who wore old-fashioned military kid gloves when she did her housework. But as the day went by, once the sleeping crows and jackdaws in the clocktower had travelled a full half revolution, once the autumn titmouse was calling ever more softly in the apple tree, once cellar doors were opening all around town and the icy, tempting, casket-perfumed air poured from the hills and blue shadows settled across the rooftops like stories told by travellers through the forest, as it darkened towards evening, the very same ill-kempt women put on their finery, drew on elegant shoes, fixed blazing jewels in their combed hair, washed their faces as thoroughly as if preparing for a ball and wore such expressions of delight the desire for pleasure seemed to ripple across them like lamplight on water. And so they brought out sweet-scented stockings, lace collars, attractive scarves, white gloves and plumed hats … Sometimes they just sat in the window watching the deserted street, at other times they paced along with a spring in their step as if about some business,
passing through the market, by the chemist, swinging their hips past the bookseller’s lit window. They would chat together about Paris and Pest, and happily link arms as the snow gently fell. A strange man is standing in the inn’s draughty doorway under the lantern with its red lettering. The omnibus toddles from the Poplar Inn towards the railway station, and the one-eyed servant Tirnovai stands on the running board wearing a gilded cap. Who will the omnibus fetch from the station and who is that strange melancholy-looking gentleman standing there with his hands in his pockets? The cut of his clothes suggests he is from the capital and, the nerve of it, he is wearing a tie pin in the shape of a ballerina’s leg. And why doesn’t he say anything to anyone there at the end of the street where the road bends round towards the little bridge where the street lighting stops? Who can he be? What would he say if someone were to speak to him? What would he have to say about where he has come from? And if he spoke, would he pay some woman a compliment that she would not forget as long as she lived?

  Sindbad, who used to spend his winters in little towns like this one, took stock of the women passing the environs of the Poplar Inn, and always had a compliment ready which he might whisper, however indifferently, perhaps even with an air of mild boredom, into the ears of local village women before they returned home and changed into their dowdier indoor garments. He knew for certain that they would hesitate in the candlelight before the mirror and glance at themselves approvingly before undoing the first clip. They’d look in the mirror, smile vaguely and think of the fine words and lies they had been told in the darkness. And as they stood before the mirror in this fashion it might seem that their one and only desire might be never to take those clothes off, since it was these that made them desirable, unforgettable objects of love. This was how they had glittered, if only for a few minutes, under the lights of the promenade. The tap-tap of their delicate shoes evoked the music of Budapest — or so Sindbad persuaded them —, their jewels borrowed their fire from those seen in the boxes of the Royal Opera House in Vienna with the Princess Annunciata seated in the left-hand row. As for their hair, their eyes, their mouths — he had never seen the like. Only when he looked into those particular eyes was he aware of the bluish tinge of the March winds as they blew through the wood; only ‘her’ hair carried the delicious fragrance of lilacs such as decorate the altar at a young girl’s wedding; ‘her’ mouth alone breathed the odour of summer evenings after the watering of the gardens. As for their gait beneath those fashionably short skirts, they reminded Sindbad of precious moments at the Grand Opera when the tulle-skirted quadrille advanced and Donizetti’s score lay open on the conductor’s music stand.