‘Where are the traps,’ he asked, rolling up his sleeves.
‘Do you think they’ll do?’ Rozina asked anxiously, as she brought forth the little wire and wood contraptions.
The old daughter of the revolution leant on a stout stick on the veranda and watched Sindbad through thick round glasses as he busied himself with the traps.
‘An officer and gentleman,’ she whispered to her grand-daughter.
The moon had risen above the distant woods and the grandmother, having thrown her stick a few times at the clumsy chambermaid, grumbled a little, sighed and went to sleep.
‘Careful soldier boy doesn’t run away,’ she whispered in warning to Rozina.
The moon was shining through the vine leaves directly onto Rozina’s face. She was as white and dreamy as an actress under a moving spotlight. Sindbad gazed in awe at her moonlit face: it was only in advanced old age that he was to discover that women are always looking into invisible mirrors. And quietly, in subdued tones full of the most noble feelings, like a faint bell tinkling above a river, he told Rozina that ever since childhood he had been seeking a face like hers. In his childhood dreams, as he turned off his desk light, this woman’s face would appear radiantly before him. On all his journeys, on all his aimless wanderings, this was the face that called to him and drew him on. This was the face with whose image he was born, that had glimmered in his cradle, until the moment he made its acquaintance as an adult when he first noticed it on a balcony in Aranykéz Street.*
‘Señora,’ proclaimed Sindbad with absolute solemnity, ‘I will never again be able to live without you.’
Rozina reciprocated the urgent squeeze of his hand. ‘Speak,’ she sighed gently and equally seriously. ‘Your words are fluttering round my head like the miraculous singing of invisible birds.’
She inclined her head as if following the progress of the moon. Her black eyes opened to such a size one might have thought she had suddenly lost track of it. She grasped his arm urgently and complained in a sorrowful voice. ‘I have no one but you … If you were to leave me, Sindbad, I wouldn’t know what to do. Speak to me. Whisper lovely soft things in my ear. It’ll be as if you really loved me.’
Sindbad stared at a cloud that had swum across the moon and was convinced the words that came to him now were inscribed on those jasper-coloured sails. Love. Love.
The woman trembled, stood up suddenly and pointed into a dark corner. ‘A mouse,’ she hissed with repulsion.
She had turned deathly pale, her hand shook and she broke into uncontrollable sobbing. ‘A mouse!’ she repeated, shuddering.
Sindbad smiled a heroic smile, lit a candle and threw the first mousetrap which had served its purpose out into the yard together with its victim.
‘Idiot!’ cried the woman, trembling in fury. ‘I won’t even be able to step out into the yard. Is that what you want? I hate and despise mice.’
Sindbad smiled wearily. ‘It is a very little mouse,’ he muttered.
‘Go. I hate the sight of you. You have killed a mouse. Murderer,’ she spluttered. ‘I loathe you. I don’t love you. Don’t you dare touch me with those hands. Be off with you.’
‘It was a very small mouse,’ Sindbad repeated, easily offended like most lovers, and he took his hat and cloak and waited a while before the house in case his darling called him back. The house was silent. So, with a genuine reason for sadness this time, Sindbad wandered off towards the station in time to catch the night train. Later, after he had become a ghost, he developed a particular grudge against mice.
The Unforgettable Compliment
There is a small town in the highlands which in Sindbad’s day (`In my day,’ as men who are sick at heart tend to say) was notorious for its women, who would spend the day unkempt, bleary-eyed, their hair uncombed, beating their husbands and their children, screeching in loud birdlike voices, carrying saucepans full of cabbage, rising at dawn to do their laundry, competing with broad-footed Saxon girls, sticking their heads into the cobwebs in the attic and climbing up the flue with slippers flapping on their bare feet. Indeed, there was only one proper lady in the town, an impoverished countess who wore old-fashioned military kid gloves when she did her housework. But as the day went by, once the sleeping crows and jackdaws in the clocktower had travelled a full half revolution, once the autumn titmouse was calling ever more softly in the apple tree, once cellar doors were opening all around town and the icy, tempting, casket-perfumed air poured from the hills and blue shadows settled across the rooftops like stories told by travellers through the forest, as it darkened towards evening, the very same ill-kempt women put on their finery, drew on elegant shoes, fixed blazing jewels in their combed hair, washed their faces as thoroughly as if preparing for a ball and wore such expressions of delight the desire for pleasure seemed to ripple across them like lamplight on water. And so they brought out sweet-scented stockings, lace collars, attractive scarves, white gloves and plumed hats … Sometimes they just sat in the window watching the deserted street, at other times they paced along with a spring in their step as if about some business, passing through the market, by the chemist, swinging their hips past the bookseller’s lit window. They would chat together about Paris and Pest, and happily link arms as the snow gently fell. A strange man is standing in the inn’s draughty doorway under the lantern with its red lettering. The omnibus toddles from the Poplar Inn towards the railway station, and the one-eyed servant Tirnovai stands on the running board wearing a gilded cap. Who will the omnibus fetch from the station and who is that strange melancholy-looking gentleman standing there with his hands in his pockets? The cut of his clothes suggests he is from the capital and, the nerve of it, he is wearing a tie pin in the shape of a ballerina’s leg. And why doesn’t he say anything to anyone there at the end of the street where the road bends round towards the little bridge where the street lighting stops? Who can he be? What would he say if someone were to speak to him? What would he have to say about where he has come from? And if he spoke, would he pay some woman a compliment that she would not forget as long as she lived?
Sindbad, who used to spend his winters in little towns like this one, took stock of the women passing the environs of the Poplar Inn, and always had a compliment ready which he might whisper, however indifferently, perhaps even with an air of mild boredom, into the ears of local village women before they returned home and changed into their dowdier indoor garments. He knew for certain that they would hesitate in the candlelight before the mirror and glance at themselves approvingly before undoing the first clip. They’d look in the mirror, smile vaguely and think of the fine words and lies they had been told in the darkness. And as they stood before the mirror in this fashion it might seem that their one and only desire might be never to take those clothes off, since it was these that made them desirable, unforgettable objects of love. This was how they had glittered, if only for a few minutes, under the lights of the promenade. The tap-tap of their delicate shoes evoked the music of Budapest — or so Sindbad persuaded them —, their jewels borrowed their fire from those seen in the boxes of the Royal Opera House in Vienna with the Princess Annunciata seated in the left-hand row. As for their hair, their eyes, their mouths — he had never seen the like. Only when he looked into those particular eyes was he aware of the bluish tinge of the March winds as they blew through the wood; only ‘her’ hair carried the delicious fragrance of lilacs such as decorate the altar at a young girl’s wedding; ‘her’ mouth alone breathed the odour of summer evenings after the watering of the gardens. As for their gait beneath those fashionably short skirts, they reminded Sindbad of precious moments at the Grand Opera when the tulle-skirted quadrille advanced and Donizetti’s score lay open on the conductor’s music stand.