The Adventures of Sindbad (New York Review Books Classics)

by Gyula Krudy

  Sindbad nodded sadly and felt rather sorry for himself. Fate might have made Irén young and beautiful or old and kind, someone who waited for him at the railway station, ready to welcome him with longed-for village pleasures and healthful airs. Irén turned over the knitting in her hand. ‘Any man who places his trust in women is a fool, and you, dear sir, are the most foolish of all. Lie down and I’ll massage your back because you don’t look too steady on your feet.’

  Later the ex-dancer prepared a herbal tea, had some leeches brought over from the chemist and Sindbad sweated through the night in his old friends’ house under heavy village eiderdowns. Only once did he venture to ask the question he had always wanted to ask her — and that was after his death in his unquiet period — about that strand of hair on his pillow.

  ‘Certainly not,’ answered Irén sternly. ‘I never kissed you in your sleep. Didn’t you yourself tell me never to have recourse to the marabou fan?’

  Madness from beyond the Grave

  Sindbad spent some of his time as a ghost in a country graveyard because, having committed a sin or two in the neighbourhood, he was instructed to do penance there. The weeping willows and wooden monuments remembered him of the time he used to walk through the old cemetery with a provincial lady on his arm, their forms intertwined like twin stems in a single pot; they also recalled how he lied, continuously, fluently, without any let or hindrance, perpetually grinding out his insincerities like some busy watermill on the great River Danube. The old miller helpfully lifts the sacks of flour on to the narrow shoulders of willing maidens, a melancholy young man on the roof pipes a tune to the corpses of suicides clinging to the millwheel, the catfish glints in the moonlit stream like a medieval king in a silver cloak, and one old wild duck in the reeds informs another in the language of men that someone else has gone and killed himself for love. And in the old cemetery, where the traveller’s mouth pours forth a constant stream of highly coloured words, strewing the lady’s path with golden flour so that he may eventually load that flour into a precious silver sack which the poor woman will have to carry all her life till her back breaks with the effort — there, in the old cemetery where neither the worm-eaten wooden monuments, nor the rain-beaten, rust-furred gravestones that look like strange dogs have ever succeeded in tripping up a passing woman — there, the women walk beneath weeping willows whose boughs the sylphs must part to prevent the cold damp leaves brushing their naked necks, for if the leaves did touch them it might possibly destroy their illusions and prevent them journeying on to joy and endless sorrow. ‘On your way, on your way,’ mumble the old bones underground, yawning and stretching in their coffins, while Sindbad’s lies multiply and multiply, covering the whole district with golden dew, as far as the distant blue chain of mountains and the desolate watchman’s hut by the railway. Emma was the name of the woman whom he had so mercilessly abused. He had devoured her the way a starving red-bearded bandit freed after twenty harsh years of captivity might devour the woodcutter’s daughter in the forest.

  Naturally enough, he spent most of his penitential years at Emma’s graveside. He sat hunched on the mound, like an old crow on a cold autumnal day, tapping the sealed tomb every so often: on particularly rainy nights he could be heard howling miserably like the siren of a distant ship.

  ‘Can I help it if women are so gullible? Why are they so quick to believe anything that is pleasant, delightful and flattering to them? Those with hooked noses, weak mouths, cold soulless eyes and wicked lying little souls, why should they believe that they are made for love? Poor women, learn from my wickedness never to yield yourselves up except after a long and passionate siege, and spend some time each day washing your hearts in the waters of scepticism and forgetfulness; give not a single thought to the man who left you; nor waste your days weeping alone in darkened rooms, for tears are like fleet horses that gallop you to the grave.’

  The ghost made such a pother at night that local lovers no longer dared visit the old graveyard. Over the years, though, long dead grandmothers had grown well used to the idea of their granddaughters responding to the first heart-rending sound of a man’s voice, a voice that formed like mist across a silver mirror, directly above them. The cemetery had served as a trysting place for rich and poor alike — everyone in the little town had explored the hidden path by the ditch that ran through it. Others sleeping in the ditch included tiny souls who had perished downless, featherless, in their embryo state or at nest-robbing time, as exiles from the wonder and brilliance of life. They slept on quietly under the snow while their mothers were dancing and whirling their skirts at The Bugle Boy nearby, though sometimes, on a wet spring day, they took the form of little frogs and hopped onto their mothers’ feet as they were crossing the ditch again.

  The continual crying of this restless spirit in the graveyard frightened off prospective lovers. There were no more visitors, their fingers intertwined like the topmost branches of young poplars, their warm thoughts full of life and darting about the air like swallows, who might stop to meditate on wooden monuments whose inscriptions proclaimed the longevity of old women. The dead woman lay unmoving in her grave: having committed suicide, she was forbidden the pleasures of love in the nether world. Vainly did Sindbad’s midnight tears seep through the holes where beetles had burrowed. ‘Tell me, tell me, how could you be so stupid as to believe me?’

  One day, the daughter of the dead woman came to visit her grave. The sight of Emma’s daughter so disturbed the ghost, who had been sleeping among the leaves in the trees, that the heart which long ago had died in him gave a great leap. A moment later he was informing the sexton that according to the contract made on the day he died he was entitled to one single occasion of awaking. The sexton looked up the contract and in a few minutes a melancholy, dark-haired student in a velvet jacket appeared under the weeping willows, treading his way towards Emma’s daughter who was just then gathering dry leaves from the grave.

  An old graveyard bat stirred in his daytime sleep and said to the owl: ‘The suicide’s beautiful daughter is here. She has swallowed a gold ring and the student is about to cut her heart open to retrieve it. It’s the ring he gave her mother.’

  ‘Serve people right,’ answered the owl. ‘Why should they always be thinking of yesterday! People spend their whole lives discussing what has already happened.’

  In the meantime the student had introduced himself to Emma’s daughter and was speaking in lightly flavoured violet-scented words of her mother — who was probably terrified and sitting up in her coffin.

  ‘Oh, my mother,’ said Emma’s daughter. ‘Night after night she comes and sits at my bedside with her hair glowing like silver letters on the black ribbon tied around a wreath. Yet she was dark-haired, brown as I am now, at the time she died.’

  ‘And are you happy?’ asked Sindbad, without preamble, since it was already getting on to evening.

  ‘I have learned by my mother’s example. I keep happiness at arm’s length, lock my heart into my prayer-book and, thank God, have had no occasion for praying yet. I am twenty years old and teach in a school.’

  ‘Yet nature tells us …’ Sindbad began, then suddenly fell quiet as if ashamed in the presence of those ancient wooden monuments which seemed to be leaning forward, listening intently, though they had heard it all before and in much the same words too.

  ‘I have lived a very long time,’ he said glumly. ‘There are whole volumes that could be written about me. Old gentlemen in their dotage might read them, wagging their incredulous heads; feeble old countesses might admonish the young attendant appointed to entertain them for sullying their ears with such wickedness. I can imagine people using my name to frighten naughty children on stormy nights, that is, if they had any notion who I was … All I can tell you, young lady, is that love was the only thing worth persevering for, weeping for and living for. The sparkling jewels you wear in your hair will one day adorn some other woman’s breast like props in a play; by the time you are old the del
icate silks which now cover your body might serve to polish the shoes of the local Madame Bovary before she goes out to commit adultery; the song you were singing with such passion by the lake will have sunk under the waves like a virtuous urchin and a greedy pike will be nibbling at it. Love alone remains as a low, bitter, ever-restless memory, with the scent of hours which are nothing but memories. Some nights I hear voices that seem to portend something, whether good or ill I cannot tell, sighs which seem to contain my whole life. The love which first entered your heart in the guise of some groom’s best-man or as a suitor in clinking spurs, or like a shy melancholy wanderer, that love remains with you for ever. The waves cannot swallow such memories, the wind cannot blow them away. They are yours alone. What you have loved remains yours: all that caused you unhappiness, that for which you cried in your pillow, for which you died … I am in love with you, dear lady.’

  The graveyard owl repeated his previous observation. ‘People will go wittering on about the past.’

  By now it was evening, the moon was peeking through the branches like an officious warden and Emma’s daughter, standing by her mother’s grave, suddenly noticed that the student had gone from her side, his leave of absence having expired, and that her hand which had been in another’s warm grip a moment ago was now cold and empty. Her hungry ears heard only the whispering of the wind.

  The woman who had killed herself spoke quietly from the tomb, her voice as soft as the rain on the leaves. ‘Go home and do as Sindbad advised. The man is right.’

  Escape from Life

  ‘Once spring comes we’ll go out to the country,’ Mrs Bánatvári used to say on early winter evenings as she strolled arm in arm with Sindbad down Hat Street. ‘We have decent horses, a fine coach, faithful servants and a nice country house. After all, what is mine is yours.’

  Sindbad clung happily to the widow’s arm. ‘I have always fancied being a country landowner, galloping through the countryside in my carriage, learning the local dialect, waiting with frost-nipped cheeks on a cold morning at the local station for the passenger train to arrive, a weekly market at the cathedral town nearby, and a casino for the gentry where one could stop for a glass of beer, a bit of local politics and good general gossip. How delightful it would be to live without care, to sleep long and deep with dreams that move like slow lumbering barges and to rise with the sun, fresh and ready for the new day!’

  ‘I’ll take you with me,’ Mrs Bánatvári answered, her voice trembling with emotion. ‘You’ll see how the old women kiss my hand. I am godmother to all the local infants and the men still remember my grandfather leading them in his red beret at the time of the revolution. There is an apiary where you can fall asleep and dream to your heart’s content and Uncle Samu inevitably turns up in the afternoon for his game of cards and funny stories. Or, if you prefer, you can go to the Grozinger and play bowls with the others, and my finances will even allow you to treat the local dignitaries to a daily barrel of beer. You must watch out for the miserly clerk and offer the mean fellow his daily cigar. You must praise the singing of the schoolmistress and speak approvingly of the chickens the minister’s wife likes to keep. Futray need to be supplied with a few piquant stories and when you speak with the young ladies be sure to mention how you danced with their mothers at the local ball and how they were such great flirts.’

  ‘I will accept your advice in all these matters, my guardian angel,’ Sindbad answered resolutely, with all the gratitude of one escaped from a shipwreck, for secretly he had been sobbing through his dreams every night on account of some woman’s wicked demeanour. He stopped suddenly in the middle of the street, his head bent, and paying no attention to the traffic rushing past him, wandered over to a shop window hardly noticing the goods on view. He stumbled down streets he had never seen before and was content to lose his way among unfamiliar houses. He imagined himself wandering aimlessly in a foreign city, bundles of unopened mail waiting for him at the hotel. He couldn’t bear to pronounce the woman’s name because the effort cost him such physical pain it flooded through him from head to foot so that the thermometer beneath his arm showed a distinct rise, and whenever he found himself alone and took out her picture it was such delicious agony he had to rest his head on his arm. ‘How marvellous it was to love her,’ he wrote on a scrap of paper then dropped it into the Danube. He straightened his back, his eyes flashed, and an idiotic excitement drove his heart forward like the sails of a mill whenever he saw someone who from the back reminded him of her. The woman’s name was ‘F.’ or that, at least, is how he now thought of her, having sworn to Mrs Bánatvári never to pronounce the other letters of her name. F. He carefully examined every letter F he saw in the street, on shop signs or on soldier’s buttons, it was all the same to him. On pâtisseries and fashion stores, the delicate ‘f’ brought to mind her supple waist; the royal monogram ‘FJ’ which the head gardener had sown in tulips near the central balcony of the state gardens invariably reminded him of the slender legs she so frequently displayed. ‘I’m sure to commit suicide in the country,’ thought Sindbad as Mrs Bánatvári led him in motherly manner through the streets of the city centre.

  By now they were counting the days before leaving the capital. ‘And think of all those ugly people who envy us our happiness,’ added Mrs Bánatvári. All those little objects she so superstitiously collected, those portraits of pale-faced, frock-coated, wavy-haired gentlemen painted on ivory, whom Mrs Bánatvári would have fallen in love with had she lived at the time the pictures were painted, all those books on the bedside table, all were transferred into her travelling bag; Petőfi’s* poems together with those of Aladár Benedek* (since she read no poetry after Benedek), the heavy Egyptian Book of Dreams, a volume of Carthusian Meditations,* the Book of Card Games which was required reading in the country where the local intelligentsia slap the table when play grows exciting and lastly, a human skull. All these would accompany them on their journey.

  ‘Oh, and I mustn’t forget my pistol,’ muttered Mrs Bánatvári in that voice so frequently adopted by faint, expensive, dreamy women. ‘You are my last love, Sindbad, and life won’t be worth living if you leave me.’

  Sindbad, who watched these preparations with his hands tucked deep into his pockets as if these great yawning suitcases with their pink labels bearing the names of hotels in foreign capitals were nothing to do with him, was thinking that he would appropriate Mrs Bánatvári’s little pistol and not go to the country house after all. There was a golden box he noticed before it went into the suitcase. It contained a letter torn into tiny shreds.

  ‘That was written in farewell by the man who loved me most of all,’ Mrs Bánatvári whispered and crossed herself.

  ‘We’ll read it once we’re in the country,’ Sindbad muttered.

  Here were strange little mirrors which must once have shown the lady in the full bloom of her beauty, shreds of lace, plumes from hats, the sewing needles that accompany women wherever they go, various rings a superstitious creature might collect in the course of her life, rings to guard her against disease, cataracts, drowning, all kinds of misfortune, rings to ward off hopeless love and sleepless nights, all strung on a silk thread. There was a range of buttons suitable for coats and dresses and a collection of little scissors each of which might have been christened with a name of its own, and an altar-cloth she had begun to embroider some twenty years ago and which she still took out every summer. There was the history of the Count of Monte Cristo and a silver flask intended to store tea or water for boiling. Into the case with them all. Mrs Bánatvári had a kind word for each of them, each conjured some pleasant memory. But she did not forget about Sindbad either.

  ‘Some time in the summer we’ll have to pay a visit to that little Polish spa where a sick gentleman once carved a statuette of the Virgin for me … We’ll go simply everywhere, just as we did with my first husband who was an inveterate traveller. Switzerland, Italy — everywhere he called the hotel porters by name. He knew the best inns in e
very town, local fashions, local idioms … Sindbad, you will escape to the good life with me, into life as it should be lived.’

  Sindbad smiled and nodded, wondering whether F knew he was leaving the capital for ever.

  ‘We’ll spend two of the summer months in the village. I’ll talk to the lime trees, the horses and the cows, for I’m a sentimental sort of woman,’ she continued dreamily. ‘There’s a chimney there that will mumble, indeed practically talk, only when I spend a night under the roof. We have a feral cat that runs about in the forest with others of its kind but it senses my presence and returns to the house when I am at home. My grandfather’s old horse, a forlorn-looking creature, tosses his head restlessly when the train carrying me blows its whistle at the station, and as for the servants and old women, they dream long convoluted dreams in my honour, and it is my task to explain these to them. Rooms long shut up are bathed in sunlight and dusty old mirrors used only by ghosts in my absence grow young again. I cure the diseased trees and the swallow in the eaves recognises me. Do you like the sound of it, Sindbad?’

  Sindbad nodded enthusiastically. ‘It all sounds very fine,’ he sighed, completely surrendering himself to the idea, as if he could already see himself swimming in the river, staring into the sun with sightless eyes while the fish engaged him in conversation, enquiring about the latest fashions. Was it truly the end of that marvellous life he had lived at F’s side? From this day on he would be an elegant country gentleman, companion to a sweet, dreamy, superstitious woman with a voice like old sheet music, who, none the less, could not screw her eyes up half so charmingly as that other one whose voice had a more animal quality, whose laughter bubbled, who did not call Sindbad to the enjoyments of a quiet life, but rather to death, decay and annihilation, to the dance to exhaustion at the ball of life where the masked guests are encouraged to lie, cheat and steal, to push old people aside, to mislead the inexperienced young, and always to lie and weep alone …