Good heavens! Wasn’t this the town he had visited just before his death? Why didn’t he notice the tunnel they passed through just before the station? It was a small mountain town full of cheerful gold miners. During the day the entire population spent its time searching for gold in the valleys while dwarfs left their windows open for ventilation, revealing their hoards of hidden gold. Here was the mayor, the priest, the school teacher. But once night fell the town was lit up and everyone was having a good time. We shall never die, they say to themselves, there’s enough gold in those mountains. There was singing of songs, playing of instruments, the clinking of glasses and the sound of women laughing as though someone were tickling them. Sindbad had an acquaintance here who married a gold miner. The story of this acquaintance, a certain Paula, originated from the time the gold miner came up to Pest and asked her parents for her hand in marriage. Paula kissed Sindbad when no one was looking and whispered into his ear that when she was an old woman and bored with her husband, and if he still considered her attractive, he could find her and visit her. That’s how Sindbad found himself in the mining town: and the miner’s wife showed him her jewels, her expensive fur and her coach and four. I beg your pardon, said Sindbad. I have come too early. He left, and with a chalk drew a cross on the gate so he should not forget the house when he came that way again. But in the meantime he died … and became a sprig of mistletoe. Nevertheless he soon found the gate and shortly afterwards was to be found in her room.
The gold miner’s wife sat in front of the mirror, combing her hair. She had long golden hair and the comb ran lightly through it like a boat gliding across the water. Up and down moved the comb — at that moment it was the proudest utensil in the whole house, not surprisingly, since in its previous life it had been a mere dancing master in one of the outer suburbs of Pest. ‘I too could have been a comb,’ thought Sindbad, but tried to remain unobserved.
The comb glowed brighter and brighter with pride, to the great envy of the mirrored wardrobe and the silk-covered bed. The bed linen was of silk such as you find only in the beds of kings and gold miners. Delicious perfumes mingled together in her bedroom. Sindbad stretched out — in so far as a sprig of mistletoe can stretch — and thought what an ass he was not to have escaped from his former mistress earlier.
After combing her hair the woman took off all her clothes. She was like a dream of snow. She moved about the room, stroked a silk skirt that was thrown across the back of a chair, gave a sigh, then disappeared into the silken bed. Then she turned off the light.
By the Danube
Sindbad once spent a melancholy time in a small village by the Danube, trying to heal his sick mind and troubled heart. He was staying with strangers and there was only a shadowy veranda where he could stretch his legs out. (He practically had to get down on all fours in order to enter the peasant cabin.) This was where he lived, forgotten by everyone, watching from the veranda as the great Danube, wide as a lake at this particular stretch, flowed by in front of him. In the evening a lamp burned on the opposite bank sending rays of light across the black water. During the day sooty tugs made their way downriver, stopping now and then to drop anchor, their little red and white pennants seeming to wave directly at Sindbad as if the boats had hesitated by the village expressly to greet him. (On these occasions Sindbad would imagine a taciturn walrus-moustached steersman, puffing his pipe somewhere in the stern of the noisy tug while his wife washed his shirt in the lifeboat.) In the afternoon the pot-bellied Vienna packet sliced through the waves, floundering on, graceless as a fat priest. Its paddles solemnly shoved water aside and the deck above was set with white-covered tables off which portly foreigners ate cold ham and sipped at chilled beer while women and girls in brightly coloured dresses leaned on the rails wearing wide straw hats and waved their handkerchiefs at Sindbad. (At such times Sindbad would have liked to have been a ship’s officer in white trousers and gold braided cap. He would be wearing white shoes and dreamily pacing the deck, casting winning glances at the large-eyed Romanian women in their raw silk gowns.) Then the Vienna packet disappeared round the bend and Sindbad was left with the distant ruins on the hills opposite. Once there were kings living among those hills and the trees had not quite obscured the road along which the kings drove to the castle, wearing velvet cloaks and great clinking spurs, their ladies beside them. The ladies’ dresses had high waists and gold-embroidered satin skirts. They wore boots, since they frequently went riding and would gallop along the flat shore with curly-headed youths in their wake. Though the Danube washed the very foot of the hills the women tended not to bathe there as it was not fashionable at the time. (Sindbad also wanted to be a friar confessor in the castle chapel, and hear the ladies’ confessions while blindfolded with a white scarf. He was sure that confessions could be trusted in those days — not like now. Hell, after all, was far closer then. The friar had only to mutter the word and the devil himself would appear at the door. Sindbad particularly wanted to grant absolution to the wife of King Louis the Great, at the castle chapel, preferably during Passion Week …)
Then evening fell. Hills, forests, castles and red-roofed peasant houses faded in the descending gloom, but a rowing boat glimmered faintly on the silvery Danube, and in that boat sat a number of women in white, their white veils fluttering above the water. Then the jetty lamplighter appeared in the darkness on the far shore and silence settled on the great river. Silent and unseen the ripples ran on carrying news of Sindbad to distant seas, telling of his melancholy as he sat on the rickety veranda in the small village. (If those ripples travel far enough, thought Sindbad, they should arrive at a remote province of some foreign country where a buxom dark-eyed oriental woman is certain to be washing her round white knees in the waves of the Danube. And those cool ripples will suddenly give way to a warm current which will embrace those white legs. These would be the waves on which Sindbad’s eyes had lingered so desirously, there between the tall hills.) Then it was night, and at last Sindbad’s friends, the trains, appeared and rushed along the high embankments.
The veranda from which Sindbad looked out in his seclusion, offered a fine view of the embankment which ran plumb through the middle of the village, the embankment down which one hundred and fifty carriages thundered each and every day. In the daytime the engines provided entertainment for Sindbad: the huge black contraptions rolling along at an enormous rate presented themselves in his imagination as living beings. They were great, proud irritable creatures who only visited the region because they had to. The monstrous American-style express trains blasted the small village with one or two puffs of smoke before disappearing. The little top hats raced beyond the tops of the trees, the big wheels turned so fast you’d have thought it was their last day on earth and the iron bridge gave a respectful shudder as if greeting a well-known but highly respected visitor for whom it was unnecessary to lay on a more ceremonious welcome. ‘Eee-egh,’ muttered the iron bridge and the Buffalo engine was already flying beyond the town, so that within a few minutes only the hills still echoed its rapid panting. Lanky telegraph poles stared frightened, almost bewildered, at the row of carriages with well-bred ladies and gentlemen at the windows, at the white tablecloths and wine flasks flashing by inside the dining car where the cook in his chef’s hat gazed out, and at the sooty contemplative fireman frowning on the footplate. The long carriages hurried towards their destination and in the gangway of the very last one a man and a woman were holding hands. (Naturally, Sindbad imagined himself on his honeymoon, seated on a green davenport, gazing intently into the eyes of some young girl, as if for the first time, while the white-coated porter interrupted them with a knock at the door to inform them that dinner was being served …)