Only for Sarah to find a procession of carts drawing up in front of her house a year later, heaped with thousands of envelopes and packets. In his guise as Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun, it turned out, Johann Luigi had penetrated both Medina and Mecca during the missing year and actually kissed the black meteorite in the Kaaba.
He was the first explorer to see Abu Simbel, then mostly buried by sand, and wrote that Rameses' ear was three feet, four inches long, his shoulders twenty-one feet across, estimating correctly that the pharaoh must have been between sixty-five and seventy feet tall despite his notoriously self-indulgent life.
Once more Johann Luigi went to Cairo intending to lecture on Islamic law, but the plague struck the city and he went to St Catherine's monastery in the Sinai to escape it. There in 1817, two years before the great English explorer, Strongbow was born in southern England, Johann Luigi Szondi abruptly succumbled to dysentery and was buried without ceremony in an unmarked Moslem grave at the foot of Mt Sinai, within sight of the cave where the Albanian son unknown to him, the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, would eventually produce his spectacular forgery of the original Bible.
Johann Luigi was only thirty-three when he died and he had visited Mecca fully half a century before Strongbow, who would be the next European to do so. It was true Strongbow's vast explorations would surpass those of the remarkable Johann Luigi. But it was also true the Englishman's haj would stretch over forty years, not a mere eight.
Long after Johann Luigi's death, letters in his familiar handwriting continued to arrive in Budapest from all parts of Africa and the Middle East. Tender letters filled with love, always promising that he would be home within the prescribed three months. Year after year they came — the last, four decades after his death.
But Sarah didn't know he was dead, and who could say that letter was the last?
There was always the chance another letter might find its way to Budapest from some obscure corner of the Levant, where Johann Luigi had entrusted it to a sleepy caravan merchant moving slowly through time on the back of a camel.
So when Sarah looked back on her life she couldn't help but consider her marriage perfect. As she passed into her eighth decade, well after most of her sisters and cousins had been widowed by husbands who had never left home, her husband was still sending her love letters. And even though he had wandered a bit, he had never failed to write home.
So Sarah died embracing his memory, listening to one of her granddaughters read aloud what was in fact Johann Luigi's last letter, delivered on the morning of the day she died, an exquisite description of a sunset at Mt Sinai that ended with the customary promise that soon, very soon now, he and his beloved Sarah would be together again.
And so they were. Smiling gently, she closed her eyes. Those sweet words from her husband the last she heard in life.
For years an exact count couldn't be made of Johann Luigi's love letters. But not long after he left Budapest, two facts had become apparent to Sarah.
First, the love letters were beginning to fill the floor-to-ceiling bookcases she had built in her kitchen so his letters would be near her while she was cooking.
And second, the love letters were likely to become the most complete source of information on the Middle East to be found anywhere in Europe.
By nature Sarah was an imaginative and energetic woman who found housework tedious. Therefore as soon as her children were no longer infants she began to cast about for a project that could engage her talents.
One Friday afternoon while reading a letter from her husband on Damascus cutlery, an idea struck her.
As was obvious, the amount of detail on purely commercial matters in her husband's love letters was no less than astonishing. Why not use this information for a trading venture?
Secretly she went to a moneylender and mortgaged her house to raise funds. The sale of imported Damascus cutlery was a success and with the profits she turned to a second scheme, rugs from Persia, as described in another love letter. The rugs paid off her mortgage and after that came cotton from Egypt and jewels from Baghdad.
With business growing, Sarah began employing her sisters and aunts and female cousins as bookkeepers.
Momentum gathered as more love letters arrived from the wandering Johann Luigi, detailing possibilities of new markets. Paying interest on bank loans seemed a waste of resources, so Sarah decided to found her own merchant bank.
Banking soon intrigued her as much as trade, so she opened a commercial bank as well. Its operations multiplied and she bought several other banks. By the age of forty her banking assets were the largest in Budapest, and by the age of fifty her branches in Vienna and Prague and elsewhere accounted for the bulk of financial business in those cities. Assets swelled, as did trade with the Levant, based on her husband's love letters.
Until by the time of her death the House of Szondi, as it had come to be called, was the single most powerful financial institution in central Europe.
The executive pattern of the House of Szondi remained the same after her death. From the beginning the boards of the banks had been staffed exclusively by her female relatives, first sisters and aunts, later nieces and grand-nieces.
The senior managing board for all the banks, known collectively when in session as the Sarahs, in honor of the founder, met upon her death and naturally chose not Sarah's son but her daughter to be the new head of the House.
Sarah the Second assumed her position as managing directress, but being less single-minded than her mother she also took into consideration the men of the family. Now that the House of Szondi had become so rich it seemed ridiculous, to her, for the husbands and sons and fathers of the directors to be still working as petty local traders, the only life they had known since the ninth century.
Even her own older brother Munk was still running a discount dry goods store on the lower east side of Budapest, where he labored long hours stacking imperfect sheets and pillowcases.
Sarah the Second knew that her brother had always secretly loved the violin, which he played at home in a tiny windowless room no bigger than a closet, music being widely viewed as a frivolous pastime in his trade, where men were supposed to have strictly practical interests.
So Sarah the Second made her brother an offer. If Munk would come out of the closet and devote himself full-time to his real passion, music, she would support him for the rest of his life. Naturally Munk was enthusiastic and readily agreed.
At the next meeting of the Sarahs she announced what she had done, thereby in effect setting the course for a new family pattern. The directors were quick to follow her example and other secret musicians soon emerged from among the males in the family. Munk himself was immediately joined by three cousins, equally talented men who had also been running discount stores on the lower east side of Budapest.
Together they formed a competent string quartet, which was soon in demand on the concert circuit.
The next generation of male Szondis was surrounded by music from childhood. Brothers and nephews and grand-uncles took to practicing together, under the baton and guidance of the reigning Munk, and over the following decades the all-male Szondi Symphonic Philharmonic, not to mention the numerous Szondi baroque ensembles, became as famous in the musical circles of central Europe as the all-female House of Szondi had become in the world of banking.
Thus while the women of the family made money, led by the reigning Sarah, the men of the family made music, led by the reigning Munk. But in keeping with the new matriarchal traditions of the family the first-born male in each generation, the new Munk, was never the son of a Munk but always the son of a Sarah, and therefore the eldest nephew of the last Munk, a confusing line of descent not easily understood by anyone but the Szondis.