Sindbad kissed the lady’s hand and the cockerel beneath the window began to crow. ‘If I pass this way again I might call in.’ And he left as silently as he came.
He shoved the old scarecrow into the driver’s seat so he could resume his old place in the coffin. ‘The hotel, and be quick,’ he ordered.
The Green Veil
The body of St Ladislas being carried on a wagon,* says the ancient script under a painted window in the Matthias Church* and one afternoon at the altar, under the icon of the canonised king, while the wife of the steward was dozing at the gates with her keys in her lap, and some of the black-clad women of Buda were seated at a considerable distance from each other in the pews, like the clubs on a pack of French cards, each preoccupied with her own troubles and prayers, that old rake Sindbad was busily eliciting a promise of eternal love. He was proceeding according to an ancient rubric which ordained that he should lure his female acquaintance into empty churches of a quiet afternoon, and recount to them, in hushed but clearly comprehensible tones, the histories of the various saints depicted in the building. Jewish women would be enticed to kneel on a hassock at the tomb of King Béla* and his queen, the very hassock on which the queen herself used to pray, then Sindbad would touch their brows with consecrated water and, later, in the choir or in some other quiet corner of the church, extort a long passionate kiss from them. Those less willing would be admonished: ‘Please don’t cry out, respect the sanctity of the church.’ Women were loth to resist him in old churches, particularly non-Catholic women; they were overawed by the wonderful altarpieces, by the odour of sanctity drifting above them, by those mysterious pointed windows against which the prayers of dead kings still seemed to flutter like the wings of doves, by the smoke of the censers, and by those hidden nooks and crannies in which, come dusk, some prince of hitherto unspotted virtue might come to life and tug at their pigtails with his iron-gauntleted hands. The steps leading to that altar had been trodden by bishops in velvet slippers. How is one’s heart to remain unaffected by the knowledge that the earnest prayers of men and women had fluttered from their souls like tiny butterflies compounded of sighs, and were even now covering the columns and vaults above so that barely a pinhead of vacant space remained between them? And who knows whether at night, with only the eternal flame to light them, those prayer-butterflies might not come to life and drift down the aisles as if the air were a powdered spectrum, rising and falling, a strange snow reflecting the colours of the altar-candle. Prayers might interlink there: the prayers of brothers embrace, the sighs of lovers settle beside each other, so when the first rays of the sun descended through the windows they might be the first to rise into the highest regions together. Perhaps only the prayers of happy children frolicked in the highest regions in the moonlight beneath the vaulting; the prayers of old virgins, liverish and crazed old women’s fantasies, might flap on bat wings below them, though their prayers could sometimes be as yielding as Persian rugs, since it is old women who have the most beautiful dreams of unknown men. Silky as moths, whiskery, covered in pollen, the thoughts of mature women fluttered beyond individual lovers on the lightest of wings, while the choir filled with grim, retiring, crook-beaked birds waiting for dawn when they might steal silver and gold coins from the sky. It was here that Sindbad made Mitra swear eternal love to him. Then he took her by the arm and, deeply moved, led her from the church.
‘From this day on I shall regard you as my wife,’ Sindbad told her in the Biedermeier café where the lovers of Buda tended to stop for refreshment.
Mitra nodded sadly. ‘I feel God will punish me for it. You have seduced and ruined me. I don’t know how I can face my old parents again. They worship a different God.’
‘There is only one God,’ proclaimed Sindbad with conviction, ‘He who lives in our hearts and is born out of our love. It is the God who protects us, who allows us to meet in secret, so that no one should know of our love; who tells me what you think; who takes care that our eyes should seek only each other’s, who joins our hands, and brings our hearts together like two tempest-tossed birds that have found each other …’
‘You believe in love?’ asked Mitra, gazing at him with big round eyes.
‘I believe in nothing but love. Almost everything that exists exists only because men and women love each other. I may be old-fashioned, but in my experience, even today, men spend a great deal of time gazing into women’s eyes. Take this place — this old café only exists because lovers choose to meet here. The tables are made so that feet may freely touch, hands clutch unobtrusively and faces approach so close that, come April, you can see the first freckles of spring on a woman’s cheek. Think of the desire and passion stirring in those who have worn these chairs smooth with their young bodies. Shoes that used lightly to tap each other are now lying discarded on the rubbish heap in St Lawrence’s yard, and gloves, drawn off so that bare fingers might touch each other, when to draw those gloves off was a matter of such life-shattering importance — where are they now? The words ‘I love you’ have been said as often in this little shop as the bells of the great tower in the city have rung out over the Danube. Women and men have sat here, looking at each other, desiring each other, and not one has asked, as you have, madam, if I believed in love.’
‘My convent school, my books, the warning terrifying voices of my parents, all tell me that love is an awful unpleasantness. My friends would all laugh at me if they knew I had sworn eternal fealty to you. Why? Because I don’t love you. I don’t even know what it is to love,’ answered Mitra, whom Sindbad had by a long and painful process succeeded in persuading to come to Buda, to walk with him, to have her confess her love to him, to gaze from the battlements of the Bastion over the Field of Blood, and to linger in the royal gardens.
She was a lively dark-eyed girl who often prayed at home with her aged parents, and was unhappy at always having to listen to business affairs at the table. Sindbad spent days under her window, performing all kinds of tricks with his grey hat, making friends with the grocer, the coalman, the stall-holder on the corner — even the policeman greeted him as he strode along the pavement before Mitra’s house. It took Sindbad a long time to make the girl’s acquaintance, having collected all his lies and displayed them to her like a shopkeeper putting his most glittering wares in the window. Mitra listened to his sweet talk with a serious and contemplative expression. ‘A refined and corrupt man,’ she once called him. She was eighteen already and had few illusions.
‘Do you remember Esther, about whom Baron Miklós Jósika* wrote that novel of his?’ Sindbad persevered, and gave her the book the next day. She leafed through it, bored.
One afternoon he lured her to a theatre with his faithful female cronies. Mitra yawned while the music plied her with its seductive rhythms and the dancer danced herself to exhaustion on the stage below.
Then he asked her to draw her curtain one night at a certain time, so she should see him standing stock still in the moonlight, looking like one already dead and returned from the distant shore.
On another occasion, he spent days ignoring her and wore a flower in his buttonhole, one he was given by a notorious vamp in Pest. He wrote a long sorrowful letter. He made preparations to depart for America and placed an antique ring on Mitra’s finger.
‘Let’s go back to the church,’ pleaded Sindbad with a solemn and melancholy expression. ‘You must rescind the vow you made me at the altar. After all, you weren’t serious, nor do you believe in love. I wouldn’t want you to carry such a terrible burden on your conscience.’