‘Allow me to expiate my crimes in peace, sir. My corpse has been trampled over by all kinds of beggars and whores.’
So Sindbad got back on the mail coach again and tried to tell from approaching inn signs whether the town ahead was familiar or not. (The innkeepers’ wives had grown uncommonly old in these parts: ah, how he had lied to them, whispering in their ears how together they could lure some rich traveller into the house, then rob him, or manufacture counterfeit coins in the cellar, coins of such quality no one could tell them from the original; how he had promised he’d abandon his vagabond life, take the business in hand and within a few years make such a success of it they would be in a position to buy that aristocratic villa that had been on the market some time!) One evening the mail coach drove through the outskirts of a town and passed an inn bearing the arms of the ‘Star of St Leopold’, whose fine name, roast suckling pig and particularly delicious herring salad had remained a fond memory of Sindbad’s over several years.
‘There used to be two sisters in this town, both of whom were deeply in love with me,’ he thought to himself and unceremoniously took leave of his friend, the side-whiskered driver.
The moon was standing directly above the many-storeyed tower of the church where he stopped to question a vagrant ghost about parish affairs. The spirit answered everything politely and precisely until Sindbad broached the subject of local women, at which point it broke into the most vile oaths. ‘Do not mention those women in my presence,’ raged the ghost as the tower-warden’s wife tipped a bucket of water over them for disturbing the silence.
Sindbad later discovered that the furious ghost was called Charlie by the women. He had been a weaver and his speciality used to be to stand by his loom and sing hymns in order that the cloth should attain a particular whiteness and brightness, while the women called to him through the window, ‘Charlie, Charlie dear!’ The upshot of all this was that he went and hanged himself.
Just before the cock crew Sindbad met a tipsy musician who had spent the whole night entertaining the spirits of drunken revolutionaries in a ruined cellar and was on his way back to the graveyard. From him he discovered that the ladies who once loved him now lived in the market square and had married rich elderly middle-class gentlemen; that even now it was their sport to steal each other’s lovers, admirers and benefactors and that only recently one sister had tried to poison the other.
‘I like the sound of this town. How nice to find myself here at last,’ Sindbad murmured under his breath and let the musician go on his way. A violin passed him on invisible legs. When they buried the musician they had propped the violin next to his coffin.
One of the women was called Mitzi, the other Eugenia. (Eugenia was particularly insistent that gentlemen should pronounce every letter of her name, and preferably with a slight sing-song pursing of the lips — Mitzi, after all, was just a common shop-girl’s kind of name.) So, after the daylight hours which he spent in the cemetery dicing with dead mercenary soldiers, occasionally laughing out loud to himself, as soon as it grew dark, Sindbad set out to find the women. It was Eugenia who had made him swear to forsake all forms of gambling, from cards through to the roulette table, as she rifled her father’s safe for old gold ornaments from whose shining surfaces kings in full-bottomed wigs and ancient queens with lily-white necks glanced anxiously at Sindbad galloping off to the smoky French Room of the ‘Star of St Leopold’, where a fat barber and a cardsharp in a white waistcoat dealt the deck for a round of faro.
It was spring in the town then and it was as if Sindbad had brought his gospel of flowery phrases, instant promises and complex lies expressly to these naïve, pure-hearted young women. (Soon enough autumn would arrive with all its sadness, its huddlings by barely burning fires, its rain streaming down the windows like women’s tears, a time for consoling abandoned ladies and reading appropriate passages from books of verse, for sitting together, listening to the strange sounds of the wind.) Eugenia was in the big room with a wealthy admirer whom she dismissed, saying, ‘I need to discuss the rent with Mr Sindbad.’ Moneybags, a red-eyed, unmannerly man with an over-confident belly and rather tight-fitting clothes, took full stock of Sindbad while waiting for his hat. ‘I’ll give you a sound thrashing for that,’ thought the traveller who had been known to brawl with tough coach-drivers at the Blue Cat in his youth.
‘Sindbad!’ cried Eugenia, as if she had only become aware of his presence after her admirer’s departure. ‘Where on earth have you been? What delightful places have you travelled to? Have you had many lovers? Have you returned with the gorgeous flame of youth when you loved only me?’
The traveller ran his eye over the lady, taking in every detail. Her nose seemed to have grown a little since the days he used to watch tiny white clouds break across her narrow forehead while making love to her. It had not been quite straight even then. Her eyes now dissimulated those emotions which had once been genuine: devotion, humility and entreaty. Her nostrils seemed blacker now that she applied copious amounts of rice-powder to her face. And what had happened to that innocent mouth with its unselfconscious smile which used to look as if some wandering apostle who had spent the night on her floor had taken his leave by kissing her lightly on those childish lips while she was sleeping? That saintly man would have travelled on wrapped in his blue cloak until he found his final resting place on the church wall of some pious village, but the smile would have remained on the virgin’s mouth right through dawn into the day — a smile for whose sake Sindbad was once prepared to rob and even murder. Ah, but nowadays that twitching of the mouth, the occasional moistening of those extraordinary deceivers, the corners of the lips, the treacherous sparkling of the eyes, just like children playing with a signalling mirror on a fine summer afternoon, the self-conscious arching of the neck and the curious rolling of the letter ‘r’ — these were part of the repertoire of any lady who knows perfectly well that in a sunlit corner of a small garden, there where the shadows begin, the light material of her dress becomes transparent and that men are so infinitely stupid that one blazing ring on a white hand or a pink garter tied with a heart-shaped May Day favour or the sudden raising of an eye, until then firmly fixed on the ground, accompanied by a slightly whorish movement of the arms is enough to occupy them in their loneliness.
‘There has been a lot of lying here before me,’ thought Sindbad.
‘And of all your lovely plans, which have come to fruition, my dear friend?’ spoke the woman and moved her legs as if to draw attention to her green stockings. ‘Your brothers and sisters — what became of them? Your little sister of whom you used to speak with such tenderness? Your sweet old mother, who I wanted to meet, so that I might kneel before her, kiss her hand and ask her for her blessing?’
Sindbad calmly let his eyes rest on her silk dress. He nodded without taking up any of these matters.
‘Ah, this town is so boring — you can’t imagine how boring it is, Sindbad,’ the woman continued. ‘Every day the same people, the compliments of the chemist, the jokes of the vet! … The blazing eyes of the young men at Sunday Mass and when they stop going to church they never even notice me. Oh, ageing is terrible for women who were once surrounded by eager admirers who followed them everywhere with their eyes, the whole town apparently populated by wandering actors, a thousand Romeos, my dear sir — and then to find those glances cooling, and even the captain of the fire brigade only comes to dinner when I cook him his favourite meal.’
Sindbad nodded sadly.
‘It’s just not good enough!’ cried Eugenia in a sudden fury, then cast her eyes down and smiled. ‘At least you should see my children.’