And in the third act, to the accompaniment of a harsh-toned piano, Etelka stepped forward. Yes, yes: she wore a pink corset and the same shoes she had worn at home. Her face was highly rouged and a small sword hung by her side. She appeared from the wings, singing in a weak voice, her hands clasped to her heart. Sindbad saw her blank frightened look. A more sonorous voice rang out in the audience: ‘Louder, young lady!’
Scuffling, murmuring, hushing: other voices immediately demand ‘Silence!’ The song halts in mid note and Etelka stands on the stage, terrified, tears filling her eyes. Both her hands are trembling.
Sindbad in the front row claps his hands together as loudly as he can. Others take up the applause and someone is shouting something at the back. The woman’s eye falls on Sindbad. The blood drains from her face. She looks like a wounded deer. An actor in a wig hurries forward from the wings. He holds out his arms to Etelka and leading her away, cries to the audience, ‘The young lady is unwell.’
The conductor hammers at the keys of the piano. The audience slowly falls quiet again, only to burst out laughing when the fat comic appears on stage, scuttling on all fours …
‘What are you doing here?’ the woman asks later, her voice unsteady. She has dressed and taken a few deep lungfuls of fresh air out in the yard.
‘I came for you. Your husband sent me.’
‘I’ll go home if you promise never to tell anyone you saw me in a corset.’
Winter Journey
In the night hours, when Sindbad laid his head down on the pillow and thoughts swirled about his head like departing birds of passage, ever fewer in number and ever further off; and later, in the morning, while the warm kisses of the previous night’s dream still lingered with him in bed under the covers, on the soft cushion, or lay tangled in the woolly weave of the carpet; when the aristocratic woman in the black silk dress and scarlet mask, the woman of his dreams, was still standing on the threshold in her lacquered ankle boots and delicate silk stockings, the kind court ladies wear without the queen’s knowledge — at such times, a dark-haired little actress dressed in black with black silk stockings and an eagle’s feather in her hat would often come to visit him in his lonely room, the hair behind her ears soft and loose but freshly combed, just as Sindbad the sailor had last seen her.
So often did the actress visit Sindbad in these half-dreamt, half-experienced hours of pleasure that one day he decided to seek her out.
He remembered adventures of years gone by, in the melancholy days of his youth, when he had been subject to mysterious dreams and fantasies in which two hearts seemed to rise like swallows from a shared nest only to fly off in opposite directions.
A day came when he thought it possible that somehow, somewhere, this actress — whom he had already forgotten once — might herself, under her own bed-clothes, be preoccupied with just such hidden and passionate thoughts of him as he of her when he imagined her sweet heart-shaped face a mere inch from his on the pillow.
It was possible that somewhere she desired him: her affections might be undirected or disengaged so she would have only memories to console her; that she was dreaming of the face of a man long gone because, as things were, there was not one neatly curling beard, nor one set of dashing moustaches reflected in the mirror of her heart.
After he had thought these things over a few times, Sindbad roused himself and set out in search of her, though his hair had turned as grey as the wings of the arctic tern that used to swoop over the clashing waves of the Danube. The trail that harsh winter led him to the town of Eperjes.*
Deep snow lay about the town like fortifications; old houses were tightly shut against blizzards as if fearing the approach of a besieging army. People protected their noses from the cold and Slovaks ambled down the street with long-haired ponies and carts of firewood. It was as if snowmen had come alive in some tale out of Hans Christian Andersen. It was only with difficulty that Sindbad found an innkeeper, a disreputable-looking man with intelligent eyes, who could tell him precisely which direction the group of travelling actors (Paula’s company) took after leaving Eperjes. They were planning to cross the high hills on a rather fragile-looking train which clings to the hills’ steep contours. But there were blizzards in the hills now: the little train might no longer be clinging to anything.
The actors were somewhere else, in Verhovina perhaps, or beyond by now, having left one royal cloak and a pair of courtly riding boots behind with the innkeeper as security.
Sindbad was rather glad he had not succeeded in finding Paula straightaway. She seemed rather more of a prize this way, an exotic finch taking refuge from approaching footsteps in the depths of the forest. ‘I’ll follow her!’ he said to himself as he wandered down the street in the blizzard, looking in windows, enjoying the scent of unfamiliar women.
Then, near the stumpy snow-covered tower where the air was loud with cries of invisible rooks and jackdaws, he saw an elegant woman in a Russian style fur cap and a short fur jacket coming towards him down the cleared path. She wore smart shoes and a fashionable narrow skirt, but when she drew near he could see her face was tired and wasted. The once delicate nose was raw red from the cold and years of make-up; harsh narrow lines framed her listless mouth. Only the forget-me-not blue of her eyes still sparkled sweetness and youth at the passing Sindbad, who raised his hat. (Sindbad always greeted clergymen and well-bred ladies this way in the country, for he preferred them to think of him as a courteous man of religious temper, even if he remained unknown to them.)
The woman passed on and Sindbad turned round to look at her. He cast his eyes over her clothes, her shoes, her long elbow-length gloves again and thought she must be an ageing aristocratic maiden aunt. ‘If Paula didn’t exist I would follow her and stay in Eperjes!’
It was a gross misjudgment, as he realised later, sipping his after-dinner black coffee at the high chair of a coffee-house which turned out to be the domain of the said aristocratic lady. She was the wife of the owner. Once she had worked behind the counter in Pest, now she was carefully leafing through the illustrated magazines, her bracelets clinking about her solid wrist, and when she looked at him it was with a frosty superiority, in the manner of a married woman no longer interested in the conversation of strange men.
Later the gypsies appeared in queer light-coloured hard hats and cast-off dandy cloaks. The primás, or solo violinist, sported a painted moustache and kissed the lady’s hand, asking if he might take the instruments piled in a corner to play at a wedding in the afternoon.
‘Very well. But tell the band not to come back drunk, Zsiga,’ she admonished him in a solemn, semi-maternal manner.
After they had gone Sindbad ordered a French cognac and, having attracted the stern woman’s attention, soon succeeded in drawing a warm, almost complaisant smile from her. They looked hard at each other.
‘No, it’s impossible … quite impossible, at least not here …’
‘But I find you very attractive. I am half in love with you already,’ Sindbad answered with his eyes.
‘Really?’ asked the woman.
‘Really,’ Sindbad’s almond-brown eyes assured her. ‘But you mustn’t be angry with me.’
The coffee woman fiddled with the sugar bowl. She raised her eyes. ‘I am not angry,’ answered her forget-me-not blue gaze. Later she adjusted her hair taking a secret peek in the mirror behind her.
It was time for the departure of the little train that clung to the steep hillside, so Sindbad left without taking another glance at her, regarding the flirtation as a job well done.