By now the train sounds no more than a distant coughing and the rattling is a long way off. The wide funnel hoves briefly into sight as it rounds a bend, and thick black smoke is pouring out and settling on the landscape. Ho-ho-ho … cries the engine as it rolls across the iron bridge and the engine driver in his blue jerkin and his sooty hat is absorbed in the prospect of the rails before him as he leans out of the window. The white steam hisses and darts past the wheels, and the engine flue is like a tax office clerk’s hat when he goes to pay his respects to his boss on the first day of the year. The faded and dusty passenger cars follow each other with apparent indifference but in the train, behind the windows, life in all its variety is in progress: round-eyed children gawp at the village; plump mothers have removed their stays and sprawl comfortably on the leather seats, nibbling at ham bones spread out on serviettes; men in shirt-sleeves laugh loudly, joking with the women; and one bald man is carefully drawing the curtains closed while strains of cheerful singing emanate from the end of the train. A choir of young peasant girls in the third-class carriage join in a tune, young lads wave their hats in the middle of the compartment. The conductors are bright-eyed young men with fine twisted moustaches bellowing out the name of each station, saluting military fashion to a plump widow in a black dress and white stockings, who slowly descends the steep steps wearing a complacent smile. The girls with the wind-tousled hair — they might be teachers or governesses with newly earned diplomas making their way to some distant town — sport white blouses, and lean out of the departing train’s window, their arms exposed, casting a few flirtatious glances at the figure of Sindbad loitering on the platform. A perspiring man in linen trousers leans across the soft-shouldered girls and a tall thin girl pinches his arm. The train draws away, a cheeky young peasant bride in the third class pulls her skirts up at Sindbad by way of greeting and the conductors swagger broad-chested on the steps. (Now Sindbad rather fancied being a railway conductor: he imagined stepping white-gloved into the ladies’ compartment where a blushing bride was sitting in déshabillé because of the heat, asking him complicated questions about the timetable, and having answered them the conductor would quietly close the door behind him.)
And at night, when the express rushes almost silently across the high embankment, the engine seems to be flying on its well-oiled wheels, the lamps cast long beams of light along the rails and the carriages roll steadily along. When behind open windows striking women of foreign appearance are taking their clothes off in the sleeping compartments and men wearing military decorations are reading broadsheets in the dining car, and you pick up that blend of Havana and cologne even through the smell of coaldust, then Sindbad becomes a sleeping car attendant with a black moustache and a Henry VIII beard, in a gold braided hat, who calmly and elegantly steps into the sleeping compartments, approaches the lovely Romanian woman who is already dozing and asks, in a cool but delicate manner, ‘Is there anything else I could get you, madam?’ And the express rolls steadily down the rails while people dowse their candles in the little peasant houses rapidly disappearing behind them, and husband and wife quietly lie down together.
Somewhere, far off in the night, the faint lights of a melancholy freight train are blinking and the driver is sitting in his cabin, his cap drawn over his eyes, drawing deeply on his pipe.
No, Sindbad did not spend very much time thinking of that freight train the summer he spent by the Danube.
Sindbad and the Actress
It happened once that Sindbad was travelling by coach … It was late at night and the full moon was hiding behind raincoat-shaped clouds. Sindbad sat silently in the middle of the carriage gazing at the driver’s shoulders. Occasionally the wind whistled across the fields: it was getting towards autumn and Sindbad wondered how he had become involved in this present adventure. Why should he be speeding down the highway at night, across marshy ground in a damp wind when he could be sleeping soundly in his own bed? How had this come about?
Sindbad — who was a youth of merely a hundred years then — was going to spend some time with a friend in the country. He had always liked those old country cottages where the walls were covered with images of his father’s and grandfather’s contemporaries. Sitting beside those ancient fireplaces he remembered tales told to him by his grandmother while his beautiful sad-eyed mother sat at a delicate sewing table stitching canvas in the blush of twilight. It was as if the very servants were those who had busied themselves about him in his childhood. Isn’t that uncle János, the liveried old village clerk? Pity his name is actually Miska. Surely he must be some late descendant of uncle János: after all, these liveried clerks tend to succeed each other in dynasties.
The host is the jolly sort who likes a bit of entertainment, a certain Kápolnai by name. Goes riding in the morning, takes a turn around the estate, then sits down at noon to a hearty meal. And here’s the village choirmaster from his youth. He sits at the end of the table and once he gets a few glasses of wine down him he waxes lyrical, treating the assembled company to a homily full of fine rhetorical flourishes. There’s a stork’s nest on the chimney stack and the guard dog is called Tisza, after the river* … Sindbad would often sit down to consider how it was that an entire world, a world that was supposed to have disappeared some time ago, could so resurrect itself before him. It was as if Hungarian village life had remained unchanged over the centuries. The people had changed but they had been replaced by others precisely like them. As if birth, death and marriage were all part of some curious joke. Even now it was the ancestral dead sitting around the table. They reproduced themselves: women, children. The weather-cock spins, the wind and rain beat on the roof precisely as before, and neither the cloud approaching from the west nor the meadow stretching far into the distance appears to realise that the man sitting at the window is of this century not the last. Snow falls, logs from the forest crackle in the fire. The current host is rubbing his hands before the stove just as his ancestor used to do. It’s plain as plain could be that grandfather and great-grandfather, who stare down from the walls, are still very much here, and have never gone away. When spring comes round they’ll stand behind the host and whisper in his ear: time to sow rape seed in the meadow … and it will be done.
There was a woman in the house too. She was a quiet, pale young thing. But Sindbad knew very well that these white anaemic brides would sooner or later turn into ruddy-faced, round-bosomed countrywomen, for this was precisely what their grandmothers had become. And she would administer a sound box on the ear to the farmhand should occasion demand it. Then, grey-haired, she would dance at a grandchild’s wedding, before finally taking up residence on the wall, rendered into oils and framed in gilt so as to observe succeeding women’s fates, joys and sorrows.
So Sindbad the house-guest was not too concerned about the woman’s pallor and sadness. She had no children yet, that was why she was always knitting babies’ bonnets.
She was called Etelka, and she would disappear from the table without anyone noticing when the choirmaster launched on one of his more ribald anecdotes. The choir-master, who was a solid drinking man, was invariably handed over to the servants at the end of the festivities and they would lead him home. On one such occasion the host leaned over to his guest and said: ‘I’m putting Etelka to the test tomorrow. Tomorrow evening we shall go into town, to the theatre …’