‘Wouldn’t it be nice to ride into town at the head of a troop of marauding janissaries,’ sighed Sindbad.
‘And?’
‘And to ravish you away.’ And mocking laughter would break from Sindbad’s lips.
There were a number of autograph books in whose pages Sindbad’s name might have been found, though his stays were usually short: he wouldn’t wait too long under the bridge, his hands thrust into pockets, his green hat on his head, for any woman. After his resurrection he often sought out this town of passionate women; he would visit the cellars with the men and scrawl his name on the cellar walls as light-heartedly as he did in the autograph books. In theatres and restaurants he sat behind the women and promised to visit them next when their husbands were out. He spoke to their shoulders and necks and his hands never strayed into the folds of their dresses. He invited the women to die with him, or to run away over the border. And now, at twilight, when he saw them again passing the old bridge where, under snow-covered roofs, the yellow curtains of the little café were as luminous and bright as castles in the puppet theatre, that long-extinct volcano, his heart, felt something extraordinary stirring in it. He was deeply moved.
The tip-tap of those little shoes as the women drew nearer conjured ineffable hours, days of splendour which crept into his heart, swooped into it as lightly as a swallow entering its nest. He recalled passionate words, sighs and cries escaping from women’s closed lips, those gestures and kisses by which they bound him. And somehow their faces appeared before him as clearly as they did at those rendezvous in the graveyard, among the beechwoods on some hillside, under a Christmas tree or on a veranda laden with winter plants. It was as if their faces had petrified — those eyes, those mouths — all that time ago, so that all their lives they could express but one emotion: love.
Sindbad stood invisible by the columns of the bridge and allowed the women to drift past him, whereas in the past he would swiftly tuck his hand under their arms or into their muffs. And how those delicate ears would redden in the flood of passionate words.
Now they passed him in the winter dusk: the goldsmith’s wife, her eyes sparkling with devotion and temptation; the lady-stationer who once confessed to an old love and selflessly entertained Sindbad by entrusting him with all her secrets; the dreamy schoolmistress who spent the most blissful of afternoons warbling deliciously about theosophy and the immortality of the soul; the pianist who relented only at the moment of farewell; Irma, who delivered sleepy observations about her beautiful sister, Janka; Johanna, who fled into the neighbouring town on a sledge with the intention of killing herself; Aranka, who reminded him of her wealth and promised her lover a carefree future; Maria, who kept thinking of her Easter confessional … and Lelia, who wanted nothing from him save that he come back. The ghost on the bridge saw bygone hours pass across old familiar faces as if time had failed to give them a good scrub and wash the kisses away.
How many declarations since then — to other men, on other occasions, in other words? But this did not occur to the dead man who, like an old maid himself, could think of nothing but the compliments, the words of the women locked in his heart and never forgotten.
The last to pass over the bridge was the teacher of mathematics who was much respected in town for the calm clarity of her thought. Her face always smelled of cold water and she wore a white collar above her tight bodice. Sindbad stepped from the shadows.
‘Do you remember me?’
The teacher stared at Sindbad for some time in considerable surprise. When she smiled faintly it was like dreaming on an early spring evening when late blossom covers the apple tree like a white veil.
‘I do remember you,’ she answered and squeezed Sindbad’s hand. ‘You told me I was like Dr Faustus in female form. I have often thought of the Doctor since then.’
Sentimental Journey
Sindbad heard a peculiar noise in his dream. From inside the coffin it sounded like clods of earth falling into his grave. He had been dreaming of women, as usual, of weary shoulders that had once glimmered at him, of young women’s ankles, and of the fine heads of hair he had noted here and there on his travels. The peculiar knocking woke him and he raised his head from the pillow thinking he had died. A charlatan had once told him — and this had been confirmed by a fortune teller — that he would die suddenly. Death would be like a guest from a far-off land suddenly entering the gate. Or somebody walking in the opposite direction down a long path or in the busy traffic of the city, a figure you’d pick out among a thousand. Death was an evil-looking, unpleasant foreign man with piercing eyes, who had been sizing him up from a distance. They’d approach each other, getting ever closer. Sindbad’s knees would go weak and only cowardice would keep him moving forwards in the hope he might be able to avoid the malevolent stranger. He’d feel dizzy, shut his eyes tight and hold his breath. Sometimes this invisible dizziness surprised him, as if someone had thrown a butterfly net over his head and this weighed so heavy on his skull and his eyes that he would forget everything that had ever happened to him. He clutched at wayside trees and felt he was on a funicular into the other world with strange indifferent faces around him. It was as if he had suddenly become invisible: women who yesterday would have looked him in the eye and allowed the flame of his desire to leap in the depths of their own, now hid their mouths and lips when Sindbad cast a bold glance at them; men with vacant looks whom Sindbad would ordinarily have ignored and held in contempt, since he had listened to so many of them, learned their ways, knew their sad passions, their demeaning lusts, their unforgivable blunderings in love; all these passed him by with expressions of utter indifference while he clung to a lamp-post, numb and dazed, like a fish drowning in air. Whole minutes would pass as he employed all his strength and energy to free himself of the gripping vortex of death and return to reality; it was like the raising of a grey veil, its colours like those you might find on the sides of a disinterred coffin. He took a deep breath: that is how I shall die, he thought, and had taken at least a dozen steps before he noticed a pair of forget-me-not blue eyes shining under a straw hat prinked out with flowers. ‘It was a minor stroke,’ he said later to himself, aloud, as if jeering at a retreating enemy. He walked down the avenue of poplars and there was no malevolent-looking antagonist striding towards him, only some shy, dark-haired and as yet innocent, women ambling along in a perfectly friendly manner.
‘I’m sure I hadn’t been thinking of anyone in particular then, that afternoon,’ Sindbad reflected at the opera one evening, the conductor having announced the interval. He thought of death as a cudgel blow which might perhaps strike him as he lay in the arms of his beloved. At least it would have the decency to intervene by a lakeside or some deep river where he might disappear almost immediately. And sitting alone in his room at midnight, his favourite book of verses or some sad old romance having dropped from his hands, it occurred to him how awkward it would be if certain women were to meet at his funeral. Though most of them would probably only watch from a distance, as if they had nothing to do with him. Only one or two naïve ones, of the sort he had cheated, would blub their eyes out at the graveside, and he hadn’t much cared for them anyway. But he wasn’t dead yet, though he could still hear that odd coffin-like rattling even after having had a good look around the room and recognised all the furniture. On the wall there was a photograph of a young girl lying dead on her bier, her half-closed eyes peering with otherworldly calm out of the small circular gilt frame. Here a lady of Queen Elizabeth’s time stands stiff-waisted in smoky oil colours, the notes of an imagined Hungarian folk song fluttering around her brown hair. Wrapped in her own thoughts a female fairy glances down from the walclass="underline" Sindbad has never met her but has always believed she would visit his room some time and, finding him absent, draw off her gloves, extend her arm from beneath her sable fur and write a few lines in blue ink sprinkled with gold powder on a very white sheet of paper to say she had called and was inexpressibly grieved not to have met him. There is no man living who does not believe that one day she will simply turn up, that most precious, most tender of women, whom he has known only in his imagination, someone he has dreamed of since he was a child and has failed to meet only because she happened to be a dancer in Seville or a Tartar princess in the Caucasus. Or perhaps she has long ago turned into an old lady who is astonished to find that her tarot shows a knight-in-arms destined especially for her, and however superstitiously she shuffles and lays out the deck the result is the same; or, conversely, she is still running about the playground in a little skirt while her nanny is dreaming romantic dreams about the poet Kisfaludy, or she is someone glimpsed at the window of a galloping coach, or a stranger arriving in town in the dawn hours, seen climbing the stairs of a sleepy house with a newspaper in her hand. Who knows where she is to be found, that woman in the music of whose voice one might hear the mingled chimes of life and death? And nobody ever steps out of that dream into reality. But what would be the point of dreaming if dreams came true?