So the narrative line is broken time and again, and Sindbad dies and returns and drifts through time as if time itself were nothing but an autumn mist. Neither is he restricted to a merely human existence. He can turn into inanimate objects. He is protean in so far as desire is so, being able to read himself into any body or any thing. There is a hint of the late Byron of Don Juan and Beppo in the way Sindbad floats. Sindbad is a sort of sentimental digressive Don Juan, and his world is not unlike that of Byron’s Venice — more provincial of course, its glamour second-hand and peripheral, but genuine for all that. In Krúdy, Hungary becomes a floating world, much like Byron’s.
That sense of the periphery relates to the notion of empire too. The standard imperial values are reduced to resonances and associations vainly flapping in the provincial void. Of what value is the pioneer spirit, the spirit of enterprise, buccaneering courage or high-minded philanthropy here? Here, opportunities for advancement are chiefly in the form of reverie, a reverie whose relation to the possible and here-and-now is problematic. The reality on which fantasy must work is itself fading. Krúdy loves everything faded. The whole paraphernalia of the Austro-Hungarian pastoral has begun to look slightly ridiculous to a sharp eye. Krúdy knows the game is up, that the world awaiting Sindbad’s descendants will not be like that of Sindbad’s own centuries. In ‘Sindbad and the Actress’ he shows us that which had appeared to be eternal in the Hungarian village.
The people changed but they were replaced by others precisely like them. As if birth, death and marriage were all part of some curious joke. Even now it was the ancestral dead sitting round the table. They reproduced themselves: women, children. The weathercock spins, the wind and rain beat at the roof precisely as before, and neither the cloud approaching from the west nor the meadow stretching far into the distance appears to acknowledge the fact that the man sitting at the window is of this century not the last.
Portraits of ancestors appear throughout the adventures. They add tone to that mortuary charm. The irony underlying them proclaims the fact that Sindbad does not fully believe in either them or himself. He is an aging lover and has already died several times over. Those magical transformations and that continual shifting between spirit and flesh only go to show that he is hardly there.
He is certainly a creature of vestiges. Sindbad is a self-proclaimed voyeur and fetishist. He loves women’s clothes almost more than the women themselves. He admits that he finds the naked woman disappointing. He has an eye for fashion and enjoys watching women parade in their latest outfits. In ‘Sindbad’s Dream’ he notes women in their silken dresses ‘which they raised to reveal high white-laced boots’; in ‘Winter Journey’ we meet the woman of his dreams ‘still standing on the threshold in her lacquered ankle boots and delicate silk stockings’. ‘Your figure is as it was, neat and graceful,’ Sindbad says to one of his many actress loves, Paula, in another story. ‘Let me smell your hair! Show me your shoes and your stockings! You ought to wear finer gloves. The little ribbon about your neck is charming.’ He is equally fastidious about the details of men’s clothing, preferring the slightly romantic and faintly ridiculous, though he knows the difference between them. In ‘The Woman Who Told Tales’, young Albert, who has been deeply smitten by the mysterious siren and ex-flower girl, Mrs Boldogfalvi, wears a highly romantic costume of tall riding boots, cloak and a plumed hat. In fact he is not unlike Sindbad himself when Mrs Boldogfalvi first meets him. Pursuing Mrs Boldogfalvi, who has grown bored with him, Albert arrives at the inn she has just left, his face covered in dust, throws down his plumed hat and cries: ‘Devil take her! What am I doing wearing this fancy dress?’
Fancy dress is an important element of Sindbad’s fantasies. Take a passage from another of Krúdy’s winding sentences:
… when behind open windows striking women of foreign appearance are taking their clothes off in the sleeping compartments and men wearing military decorations are reading broadsheets in the dining car, and you pick up that blend of Havana and cologne even through the smell of coaldust, then Sindbad becomes a black moustached, Henry VIII-bearded sleeping car attendant in a gold braided hat, who calmly and elegantly steps into the sleeping compartments, approaches the lovely Romanian woman who is already dozing and asks, in a cool but delicate manner, ‘Is there anything else I could get you, madam?’
Here, as elsewhere, Sindbad is a little Oedipal boy sensually pleasing his mother. The wisest and most fully rounded of Krúdy’s female protagonists is the woman nicknamed Monkey, who, in only the second story of the book, is already left to arrange matters after Sindbad’s death. She raises his chin to the light of the window, closely examines his face, strokes his hair and says to him:
‘… sometimes I love you so much I feel less like your lover — your discarded, abandoned and forgotten lover — than like your mother. I know you so well. It is as if I had given birth to you.’
This is one of the key perceptions of the book, not so much for its revelation about missing mothers or the lure of the maternal but for its recognition of Sindbad’s ambivalence. It turns out that Monkey knows more about his life than he does. A simplistic reading would suggest that all the women in Sindbad’s life are merely projections of his desire, but Sindbad himself feels and acts as though he were a projection of theirs. Sindbad’s contemplations on women will sometimes appear offensive to a modern reader. The passage in ‘An Overnight Stay’, where we are told that Sindbad likes ‘Leaves in the park in autumn, blotched as if with blood, and abandoned windmills where one day he might murder the woman he loved best’ is worrying, and another in ‘Escape from Women’, where Sindbad suggests that treating women like children is downright insulting. But the very same passage later transforms these child-women into would-be mothers of Sindbad. As the ruminations progress, Sindbad comes to recognise himself as a rogue, one who, in the Middle Ages, ‘would have gone the rounds of the prisons where he would have been shorn, first of his nose, then of his ears’. This is familiar territory of course, and is only half-heartedly offered as an excuse.
In a paper recently given at the Collegium in Budapest, the translator John Bátki pointed out how Krúdy evokes the old Goddess cults of his home country, the marshy wetlands of the River Tisza. Bátki draws on research by Marija Gimbutas into the neolithic religions of old Europe to demonstrate that Krúdy’s later work is open to anthropological readings. Perhaps Sindbad is a faded Adonis or Tammuz. Even if that is the case, we simply cannot take him at his own evaluation. Krúdy doesn’t, nor, for that matter, does Sindbad himself. Sindbad says he cannot help but tell the truth, but this truth concerns his condition, not any objective state of affairs. The condition subsumes his hypocrisy.