Mitra shrugged indifferently and followed him, her dancer’s ankles twinkling, into the darkening church. A blonde woman in mourning dress was raising her skirt and kneeling before the high altar, just as in Tosca. Sindbad nervously grasped the girl’s hand.
‘Come, you little sinner, beg to be released from your vows and do so now before you tread so far down the path that you become irredeemable. My heart has found peace and lost its ardour. I have forgiven you, but here, between these holy walls, among these saints all worthy of honour, before the eternal flame and in the name of everything the great majority of men regard as sacred and keep hidden within the recesses of their hearts, you must pray to be forgiven your sin. Kneel and pray.’
The canonised king had grown faint on the stained glass, and there was deep silence beneath the vaulting, a silence shared by all those who had prayerfully shed their burdens in this place. Up in the dark heights of the choir a frightened lost bird was clucking to itself.
‘Pray,’ repeated Sindbad sternly. ‘Ask the great king to release you from your vow, redeem your pledge, regain the peace in your soul, find contentment. Beg him devoutly to forget your vows of love, that love which he with his omnipotent hand has created. Ask that neither daughter nor son of yours should suffer unhappiness because of the false vows of others. Pray that you should not love anyone in your life, nor be cheated by anyone the way you have cheated me.’
Having quietly and prayerfully repeated the words of the adventurer, she rose from the altar steps, smiling and lighter of heart. ‘How strange I feel,’ she said and spread her arms as if seized by some kind of giddiness. ‘As I prayed the king’s face seemed to disappear and yours slowly took its place. It was Sindbad staring sadly and solemnly at me from the glass as I recited the whole vow. Your immobile face reminded me of an old icon that over the centuries had grown used to hearing the suffering voices of women who have knelt before it, telling of their joys, sorrows and sins. Ah, those saints of old were reliable decent men. They never betrayed anyone. They kept their secrets hidden in the pockets of their coats like passwords. And so, with your permission, secretly, I have added a few words to the prayer, words privy to the icon and my heart.’
The usher’s wife was rattling her keys, and the church grew dark in the corner where the queen or beggar-woman used to sit on the low bench. Sindbad drew Mitra closer. ‘And what did those silent words say?’ he asked quietly.
‘If it was really your face on the icon you should have heard them,’ answered Mitra, avoiding the question. ‘St Ladislas might even now be walking the earth in your likeness.’
‘I am indeed St Ladislas,’ Sindbad sighed in his vanity. ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me this afternoon.’
The goldsmith’s daughter gave a quiet laugh. ‘What a queer man you are. You believe my vows rather than my eyes, my hands or my voice. Just as you believe the blessed king. There’s a dark gateway here. Come kiss me on the lips and give me something to remember the afternoon by.’
And for the first time she raised the green veil from her face.
The Night Visitor
One autumn day Sindbad left the crypt where he had been deposited after his suicide.
He was disappointed to find that the lounge suit he had been so carefully dressed in for his funeral was out of fashion. It might once have been sported by dandies on their daily strolls, but more recently the frock coat had been adopted by schoolteachers and village choir-masters, and as for the britches — Sindbad felt like his own grandfather in them. In those days he used to correspond with village girls and travel to distant and obscure regions in the hope of meeting with different kinds of women. He had a fondness for pointed shoes and the scent of lavender. He also liked Lavalière ties that could be done up in one great bow and white waistcoats cut high, to wear when visiting actresses in the provinces or when asking bourgeois ladies for lockets, handkerchiefs, garters and other bijou objects for mementoes. On walks in the Bastion or on visits to the dance school he used to take a deep sniff of their scented dresses and proclaim his love for them without ever once lying; in distracted moods he would dawdle under windows from which, eventually, some attractive woman would lean out; he would bribe chambermaids with a little present and hot-headedly enter strange houses just so that he could kiss the hands of unknown women, beg a blessing off the older ones and extol the virtues of momentary delight, the secret joy, the invaluable fleeting hour, to those who had not previously met him and hence had been taken so utterly by surprise. Ah, life was still worth living then: one might appear secretly by night in a garden, tap at a window, speak beautiful words to those waiting to hear them; one could laugh and grow rapt or languid on the subject of a ringlet, a flower, a small white hand or the peculiar curve of a neck, and watch as the train drew away from the platform. That was Sindbad in his youth — a tireless voyager, a friend to women, a knight errant for those in sleepy provincial towns; he was the last worldly thought of virgins about to enter convents and the hope of the ageing … When the affair was over he would retreat to the sighing boughs of the damp and melancholy graveyard and spend a whole year listening to the drumming of the rain and, when this too grew tedious, he might engage in conversation with his dead relatives who lay to either side of him in the crypt. One particularly worm-eaten old great-uncle tended to toss and turn in his grave. He had had four wives when alive and two or three lovers beside them at any one time, and was still anxious to reassume the flesh: ‘I wonder what my sweet Helen is doing?’ he would ask the spiders. ‘I died too soon to develop a proper taste for her.’
The restlessness of this girl-crazy uncle would eventually restore Sindbad’s appetite for life. One moonlit night, when the sexton left the gates open, Sindbad escaped from the crypt and set out directly for the place where he had spent his happiest days.
The old nurse slipped into the house, her cheeks quite pale, and whispered to her mistress. ‘He is standing by the fence looking into the yard. The moon is shining directly on him. Would madam like to see him?’
That evening, mistress and maid had happened to be speaking of Sindbad. They were just remembering the time when he arrived one night and the fresh snow lay knee-high in town and the two hands of the illuminated clock in the tower were standing vertical. They had been playing cards in the afternoon and the cards slipped through their fingers with a faint lisp in the silence of the curtained room. Their very words sounded mysterious.
‘There’s someone coming to the house, someone whose thoughts lie here … Madam will know best who this person might be …’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered and her heart beat faster as she thought of Sindbad. ‘You say he is waiting by the fence?’ she asked and her fingers trembled on the table as she rose.
‘I saw him with these old eyes of mine. The neighbour’s dogs were fretting and barking,’ answered the old servant.
‘Invite him in, Theresa,’ said the woman after a few moments of thought. ‘He probably wants to tell me something.’
The old servant had often kept watch over the dead at the house: she dressed them, combed their hair, spoke to them and joined their hands. The employers in whose service she had spent her life had quietly passed away, one by one, like the seasons. She almost had more to do with the other world than with the present one … She opened the door without thinking. The little gate gave an agonised little creak as if it were more afraid of the dead than she was, then she retired to the kitchen behind the stove.