‘You’re all the same — you all said the same things with the same intent, now you can all leave me in peace.’
It was at this time, one autumn night — just as the bloodshot moon was sitting like a tipsy old man in the branches of the poplar tree, when all manner of intangible shadows flitted from garden to garden so that it seemed as if night was spontaneously producing animal and vegetable forms of its own, when faithful likenesses rendered in oils grew bored of leaning all day on their frames and stepped out into deserted rooms, when the stories of Kisfaludy* trembled on the tables of old houses and the pages turned over by themselves, when clocks that no one could remember working began to move their hands, and when doors on unoccupied floors of occupied houses started creaking as if in pain because someone behind them dared not cross the threshold — it was then that Sindbad rose from the dead. On this very autumn night he, the enchanted mariner, was driving down the highway in a carriage whose wheels were made of fallen poplar leaves.
The house, which might just as well have been a castle, lay between a high stone wall and dreaming lime trees, like something out of a novel Sindbad might have read in his youth. Although the house, as I have already said, looked innocent enough from the outside, Sindbad brought his hearse to a stop and, having hung the lid of his coffin on a roadside scarecrow and propped up the straw-hatted and green tail-coated figure in the driver’s box, slipped quickly through the keyhole of the gate. Assuming a cloak composed of the damp mist rolling about the garden, he settled on the window, entered, snapped a rusty string in the piano and, looking in one of the locked drawers, found, together with a bottle of hair dye, an old dance card, an autographed fan, an ancient rabbit’s foot and a faded love-letter, the little twist of hair which Mrs Bánati had long ago woven out of one of Sindbad’s locks and which she had vowed to wear forever next to her heart.
‘It’s been years since we last met!’ Sindbad whispered into the sleeping woman’s ear, which lacked the oriental gold earring which used to dangle so enticingly beside her own golden ringlets.
Mrs Bánati opened her eyes and quietly waved the apparition away. ‘Let me sleep, Sindbad. I was just dreaming of my first husband.’
Sindbad chortled lightly, like the wild dove in the middle of the wood. ‘The first? I remember him: Jeney the photographer, who was later charged with fraud, took a picture of him in the damp little alley near the Greek Orthodox church. There he stood like some returning emigré, leaning on the low gate that used to be at the end of the garden, with his great thick beard and that fancy national costume, staring surprised and anxious into the black tube, behind which the tiny Jeney, with his mousy moustache was twiddling with shutters under the green cloth …’
‘He used to call me Liska,’* Mrs Bánati told her pillow as if there were no one else in the room with her. ‘There was an old woman somewhere from whom he hoped to inherit something. It was her name. One day he fell from the roof while he was trying to mend the thatch he had tied himself. I don’t remember any more about him.’ She gave a quiet sigh. ‘He was a good man …’
Sindbad laughed as uproariously as the devil in the lane by the ditch when a gypsy wedding is in progress at the far end of town and the violinists, cellists and clarinettists are making their loud way home … `A pale half-crazy musician lived in town, a long-haired lanky thing, who played “Demon Robert“ with a passion and all the windows in town opened when he did so — do you remember him?’
‘They called him Sindbad,’ answered the woman and dreaming, blushed. ‘My dear good husband was laid out on the bier wearing the national costume he had arranged to be photographed in, with the neighbouring women busily combing out his beard. It was evening and the musician came to pay his respects to the dead. The candles looked like dying suns and an old walking stick with leather tassels was leaning in the corner of the room like a trusty friend: I could have frightened the musician away with it but didn’t, though I felt my husband’s presence so powerfully I thought I would only have to call him and he would wake. My second husband beat me a great deal. He was a soldier. He carried a whip.’
The night visitor stroked the woman’s hand. ‘I know. You were always complaining about it. I was quite ready to believe the story, but I never found a mark on your shoulder.’
‘He was coarse,’ the woman defended herself. ‘That’s why I turned Calvinist, so we could divorce according to the laws as they were. Unfortunately, the minister of the new church I attended on Sundays never managed to preach a sermon that was to my taste. That might be why my third marriage turned out so unhappily.’
‘Madam, you have walked the earth in many guises. When you were a girl you wrote in your diary that you would choose to be a woman of pleasure because the poet Reviczky, whom you adored, had composed some of his finest verses about them. Then came the musicians with their treble clefs, their violins wrapped in green broadcloth, piccolos in pockets, nights of meditation, dreams of old deserted gardens, the wind gently tinkling the wind-chimes. Hunchbacks, asthmatics, consumptives — musicians all. One taught you to catch pneumonia by crossing the snow-covered yard at night in bare feet; another to weep on the stool by the glazed door with the green curtains; a third lured you into churches where, at a wave from the conductor, the timpanist would practically raise the roof with his pounding, and in the silence that followed the soprano would bring a new calm, and a man in one of the side-altars would shoot himself for love of you … As soon as the musicians had gone there appeared a drunkard with wild hair who had never been a soldier but succeeded in trampling through your heart in his great spurred boots. What riotous duets you would sing together when you were in drink.’
‘Bankruptcy was staring us in the face for the third time. I was in continual fear of starving to death. My husband brought no money in, but spent his time at the card table with an old torn Swiss pack in his pocket instead of my portrait. And I was only thirty-six at the time. I used to stand at the window night after night, waiting for him … That’s when I got to know the night sky and understood why the stars at dawn look as if they have been weeping.’
‘There was a scholar living in the area at the time who used to stare at the same stars when he tired of studying …’
‘That’s a lie!’ Mrs Bánati proclaimed passionately. ‘I swear my whole life has been one round of unhappiness. I swear I suffered sleepless nights, I swear on the life of my fourth husband who joined the army, poor thing. I swear I never …’
‘Sindbad was the scholar’s name,’ whispered the night shadow. ‘You must have been happy with someone.’
‘Only with the first,’ gushed Mrs Bánati. ‘He was my true love, the sweet darling … Mind you, if the present one were to return at last from the war … Perhaps he is the best after all.’