It was spring and Sindbad was leaning nonchalantly on the parapet of the bridge, gazing at the fast-flowing river, his mind like a conscientious schoolboy’s, dreaming of the towns, villages and hamlets that the white foam would pass through after it had vanished from his sight. He imagined scenes in humid sunlit mist or by the light of shepherds’ campfires; he saw fishermen pulling at oars while a solitary girl wandered the shore, gathering courage, clutching her child to her heart; he saw men with wild bloodshot eyes sinking into the waves and a little village further downstream where the body of some fine fellow slides to rest on the grassy bank, while that very evening the heavy hulk of the steam packet bound for the south cuts through the waves to the accompaniment of a guitar and a ringing baritone voice. There on the shore lies the drowned victim, his frenzied eyes staring at the stars, stars contemplated by a legion of other eyes. That unseeing glance may be telling the Dog Star or the Great Bear about the woman who is even now strolling on the deck with her new admirer’s arm about her waist, and they too may be searching for some star that will guard their steps, to whom they may sigh as they gaze out of their window late at night, in whose name they might exchange their vows. And the women, swimming beside the men in the same current, deep beneath the waves or rising to the surface, as they pass the towns they used to know, where once they were happy to dawdle in the café, remember the strange words that passed behind vanilla-coloured curtains, words of their own, words they hadn’t thought to hear from a woman’s mouth, or of the promenade where a man confessed that the most unfortunate thing he had ever done was to come to this town, and how the future appeared to offer him nothing but a prospect of endless misery. Now they were all swimming together, silent as the fish that nuzzled at their eyes and their hearts as if wanting to know where they had come from, what they had seen before they had fled contact with human eyes and escaped into these dark corridors of water? Gloating, wicked, sly and soulless eyes — that’s the reason anyone leaves town, after all. Under the island, at the bend of the river, where calm waves that seem to know where they are going eddy and whirl in confusion, male and female corpses meet and touch in the murmuring tide, and should they be washed to shore together, with what peculiar expressions they examine each other! No one here bothers to ask the question ‘Why?’ Perhaps they are no longer thinking of what happened yesterday — what the pillow told them, what words were spoken by mouths or what eyes had lied to them! Here on the shore, they sprawl on the grass until peasants find them and go through their pockets, keeping silence like old friends. That woman might have been on the till somewhere in the Josephstown district. She might have leapt into the flood on account of a soldier, so that she could follow him in some way to his border post at Zimony. The man might be weeping for his darling, now conveying her innermost thoughts by means of kisses into the mouth of another, having not even bothered to turn up for one last meeting at the lease-room hotel where he had been waiting for her with a loaded revolver. What peculiar glances might they be casting at each other now in the passing stream?
Having heard the rattling of the coffin, Sindbad, our hero, was lost in contemplation of his lover who yesterday had leapt into the Danube.
‘I shall wear my blue veil,’ her farewell letter said, among many other things.
Sindbad silently thought that he would do nothing to avoid his own approaching death. And what had she been up to in the meanwhile, there in the River Danube, since he last saw her? What sights had she seen, what had she heard since they had shared their pillow talk the night before? She might have all kinds of sweet witty things to say that he might listen to drowsily. What splendid stories women might tell once their appetite for love had passed?
Sindbad looked round. He was quite alone on the bridge. Slowly he let himself down into the Danube to meet his dead darling somewhere under the island.
And perhaps he met a number of other female suicides on his way.
The Children’s Eyes
In the course of his various deaths — like an invisible passenger beside the driver of a mail coach to whom the women of the neighbourhood blow kisses and wave farewell as the coach sets off from some inn at the end of town, and the horn is blowing, and insomniacs peer from behind their curtains, and the wheels clatter all night down uneven roads that seem to have been built over empty wine cellars into unfamiliar towns — Sindbad revisited all the places where he had ever been particularly happy or unhappy. Fate willed that he should travel as a ghost until the great day of salvation chose to arrive. For some months he took shelter in an empty crypt under the threshold of a highland church whose occupant had wandered off somewhere. All day he watched legs stepping over the stones and learned to recognise people by them. Already there were a few well-known old acquaintances whose tap-tap he could tell from some way off, and he kissed the heels of beautiful women as they passed over him, sighing so violently that the flat stone above the crypt seemed to move. (The women in question would snatch their skirts together and, having occupied their place on the pew, would pick up the prayer book that had been lying there since their grandmothers’ time and leaf through for a prayer against the temptations of the devil.) Brides, hesitantly treading girls in white silk slippers and virginal stockings, dressed head to foot in fresh new clothes, and sweet little blouses whose monograms had not yet been closely inspected by any man — Sindbad would have married them all if he could, if only he was able to get out from beneath the church steps. His attentive gaze followed the women as they went in to pray and whenever he saw tears in their eyes this had such a violent effect on him he was practically out of his skin with concern. This state of affairs continued until one day the proper inhabitant of the crypt returned from his wanderings and demanded his place back.