In a few minutes three little girls stood before Sindbad. Their hair was cut straight — they looked like three pretty little lapdogs. Their mother rewarded them with a sweet each.
‘Heavens, if only I had children,’ sighed Sindbad plaintively, ‘I’d be forever carrying them on my shoulders, playing with them in the garden and mending their shirts … I’d stare into their pretty little souls like a dreamy traveller gazing into a mountain tarn. I would talk only to them because I would hate to waste my words on anyone else.’
‘They are pretty, aren’t they?’ muttered Eugenia, lost in thought. ‘But I would like to see you again, Sindbad. When I’m alone I often start crying and I don’t even know why. Perhaps I’m weeping for you. I want to see you. So that you can talk to me about my children, since up till now people have only complimented me on my legs and these poor feet squeezed into these tiny shoes. I let the shoes hurt so that wandering actors should find me attractive. Oh, I’m so ashamed of myself.’
‘The children’s eyes might bring me this way again,’ the traveller answered quietly.
Mine
Mitzi was a childless woman and would look away distractedly when the ladies of the town started talking of their children and discussing their thousand upon thousand accomplishments and particularities in her presence. For mothers, sons are an inflated embodiment of characteristics they used to dream of, dwell on and guess at in men, and daughters are repositories of those beauties and talents they had once hoped to discover in themselves. In provincial towns, where the fashion magazines are delivered once a fortnight, where wandering actresses do not dance nightly at the sign of the Linden and where seducers are eventually known for what they are, children assume an overwhelming importance in women’s lives. Women behave well, give birth often and it is not unusual for them to blossom suddenly at fifty, to find their second spring when late buds appear on the apple tree they thought only fit for firewood in the domestic hearth. Once more they stroll arm in arm with their husbands with an air of happy abandon, and tip their heads dreamily to one side as they did when they were brides and maids. So Mitzi, who was highly conscious of her position as leading lady of this town where stone effigies of stern-eyed bearded men gazed down from the church walls while women went to confession, would have been glad to discover at her knee one day a child or two whom she could dress in white stockings and little sailor suits. When she was alone — providing no one could see her daydreaming, lost in a serious trance, watching and blowing away the smoke of her slim cigarette as the French novel slid from her hand — she could see a little ragamuffin dressed in a shirt, standing in the corner, waving a thick-handled riding crop. Mitzi stretched her hand out to the child but there was only a rocking horse by the wall. A young merchant had brought it to her once, having purchased it at some market on the shores of the distant Volga. The tail of the horse formed a flute that could actually be played. On these occasions Mitzi would give a loud sigh and rub the illusion from her eyes. (Mitzi’s husband, Matthew, was a hollow old beech-tree, who only felt happy when he was in a wood. He was a wood merchant come rain or shine and was more interested in what lay under a tree’s bark than in his wife’s dreams. ‘I must buy her a ruby ring,’ he thought whenever he remembered her in the course of his travels.)
This was the broad picture Sindbad obtained of Mitzi’s life after consultation with a drunken old Pole who used to walk up and down the town in his choirmaster’s velvet coat, entertaining his students with wicked gossip, regaling them with embellished versions of local love affairs. That is until the brandy in him finally caught fire and burned him out, which event was greeted with a hearty ‘Thank Heaven!’ from the young (but also mature) women, into whose hands the choir-master-cum-knight errant had smuggled notes from young landowners, traders fresh from market, or indeed from anyone prepared to cross his own palm with coin of a certain reassuring weight.
Ever since then he was to be found sitting at the cemetery gates dangling his stockinged and slippered feet and grinning ironically at the little town spread out along the hillside. ‘And who was your sweetheart? Who did you love, sir? Whose favours did you enjoy?’ the ghost asked Sindbad when the latter turned up on pretence of humbly requesting that he should be allowed to sing a motet or two in his spare time. Old brandy-breath looked him up and down. ‘I see from your appearance you are neither a travelling merchant nor a bored hunter fresh from court, so why should I lie to you? This wounded little pigeon arranged her affairs so cleverly I could never quite keep track of her — though, as you know sir, I can’t vouch for everyone. A half-crazy flautist hung around town for a while making a nuisance of himself, until I eventually drove him out. He had a collection of old sheet music out of which he compiled a romance that he dedicated to Madam Mitzi.’
In other words Sindbad knew practically nothing of his old love, one of the two sisters who had adopted him the last time he was in town. He attended on them and they sewed him a Polish-style felt coat to keep him warm in winter, lining it with the black lambswool they had borrowed from their father’s fur travelling outfit. He slipped past the pretty chambermaid who walked across the snow-white rugs covering the floor in bare feet, as was the custom. Naturally, he couldn’t help touching her as he went and she cursed the apparently over-familiar black cat nearby who, she assumed, had rubbed himself against her.
The woman was leaning on the windowsill, half kneeling on a well-padded chair, and as she was wearing only a light nightdress, Sindbad could take proper stock of her figure. She seemed quite slender in the waist — ‘even as a girl she used to order girdles from Vienna,’ he remembered — yet there was something plump about her, as there is about many bored women who from quite early in the afternoon like to nibble chocolates or preserved fruit while lolling on the bed, promising themselves that the next day they really will go out and weed the garden, but who somehow always end up munching an apple; they bring ice-cream home in cool, green-painted tin dishes, and later in the evening, once guests are no longer expected, they like to gnaw at a stick of garlic-flavoured dry wurst … Her white stocking had a very pleasant scent, the frill at the hem of her skirt was sparkling white, and the bow on her slipper was like the ribbon in the hair of some cheerful convent girl. Her gown was embroidered with a pattern of oriental flowers in honour of the long silent musical clock that no longer amused her with Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla turca’ but which might just spring to life, just as the ringlets on her neck might go some way to conjuring up the merry month of May with its scented grasses growing on dewy white hillsides. Her ear lobes were as translucent as the marble out of which the figure of Venus had been carved, her breasts the kind that novice monks must dream of. There was the palest of shadows above her upper lip, a down of youth such as you see on young boys wrestling in the grass. Her brow bore the habitual wistfulness of women deserted by their lovers.
‘Maria,’ cried Sindbad, moved by the sight of her, and he seized her in his arms, just as he used to do when he was a student set on conquest at all costs.
Mitzi stiffened and coiled like steel. With a single movement she sprang from Sindbad’s embrace. ‘I knew only you could be so presumptuous,’ she responded coldly. ‘I heard you had been seen about town, and would have been extremely surprised if you hadn’t called. Has Eugenia invited you for supper tonight? What an easy life she has, her husband home and her children persuaded to stand guard at her side. Sadly I am always alone, my husband is always buying and selling tracts of woodland. I am amazed I didn’t hear your footsteps, particularly as I happened to be thinking of you.’