‘I have been dead for years,’ Sindbad answered, ‘and the door only opens before me if someone urgently desires me to call. You called, so here I am. My dear, my sweet Maria. What do you want to tell me?’
With a movement that might have been interpreted as flirtatious, but could equally have been simply clumsy, Mitzi offered Sindbad a chair, as she did to the red-moustached council officer who tended to call when her husband was away. ‘Sit down, dear friend, you who were the foolishness of my youth, my sin, my amusement. Who is wearing the coat lined with black lamb’s wool now? Do the girls still go to Mass on an early December morning, while their darling kneels thoughtfully beside the altar in his red skirts and ceremoniously rings the bell? Eugenia and I stood in the choir and the tears flowed from our eyes. Rooks were whirling in the fog above the rooftops, the villagers were coming and going in the market like ghosts and always it was your scarlet skirts we saw. Do you still love me as you did then, when your prayers were addressed to me?’
‘If I were alive I would kiss your foot now in precisely the same mad devoted fashion,’ answered Sindbad.
‘It is because you are long dead that I dare speak of you like this, Sindbad. I want a child. A strong, dark-haired boy with a fine large head. A little bear cub I could no longer manage once he turned five years old — who would hang the cat with a length of string and set fire to my bed. A bad, spiteful little boy, that’s what I want, one I could tame and educate as I once did you when you wanted to break the door open at night, and stabbed my arm with a knife, who, when I knelt on the floor, bit my ankle. That’s the kind of boy I want.’
The woman bent her head as if at the confessional, a penitent trying to recall whether there was anything else she should reveal to God’s anointed. She seized Sindbad’s hand. ‘One that is mine, mine alone!’
The Woman Who Told Tales
This story concerns Mrs Boldogfalvi, a high-living lady of years gone by, who excelled both at prayer and at lying to men. Many years had passed since the first happy lie which slipped from her lips in the florists in Servita Square as she was tucking a fresh spring buttonhole into the lapel of an elderly earl. French authors have long ago described the process whereby little flower girls become great ladies, a process which begins with arranging violets in the shadow of some ancient church and reading small advertisements in the daily press, distinguishing one male customer from another only by the scent of a waxed moustache. These moustaches always appeared at a proud height above the little flower girl’s head. A small trick of the eyes and the mouth and these proud male embellishments were enticed closer (at least such used to be the way poor women could devastate a man’s heart).
Mrs Boldogfalvi’s magnificent lies, her startling good looks, and her modest accommodating manner, which seemed to approve everything men said to her, however idiotic, allowed the good creature to spend her life without too many cares, now delicately sparkling, other times withdrawing into silence, like a precious stone hidden in a deep wooden chest. She knew many men and succeeded in finding favour with every one of them. Those signs of weakness, vanity and all too frequent stupidity that a wise woman may detect in any man, she cultivated with an extraordinary selfless devotion. True that Mrs Boldogfalvi depended on ever more elaborate lies in order to hold the attention of her male acquaintances. By now she had consumed an entire library of novels and committed to memory countless fine phrases, figures of speech and apt comparisons culled from the works of passionate poets. And by the time the years really began to weigh heavily on her, Mrs Boldogfalvi was so caught up both in the life of the metropolis and of the country that she was eminently capable of entertaining guests without recourse to novels altogether.
She succeeded in cultivating the perfectly appropriate lie, the lie that each particular ear was most pleased to hear. As every man seemed to demand his own specific legend or myth so Mrs Boldogfalvi kept a vast store of them. There was one for the earl, one for the student, one for the impoverished poet, and she told each his own, quietly, quaintly and with utter conviction, so that the listener began to recognise the circumstances and lineaments of his own life within it. This subtle woman could even gain access to the deepest recesses of the soul, those depths you reach only when you can’t sleep. Is it not the case that everyone would soonest hear the story he believes in his heart of hearts, the one where he dreams his own life? Mrs Boldogfalvi would fix her listener with sad eyes full of childlike sincerity. ‘Oh it’s not your life I’m talking about, I’ve no means of knowing that. I’m talking about someone else, a stranger. Interesting though, isn’t it?’
Sindbad, who spent part of his early life at the feet of the said lady listening with amazement to her lies, wondered at men’s credulity, nobility and good nature when, without a moment’s thought, they drained the brew that Mrs Boldogfalvi had carefully prepared for them. After his death Sindbad would visit the place where once — near the walls of an old church during Eastertide services, when the pious tillers of the soil waited with bowed heads for the priest to bless their fodder — he leaned against the wall, reading poems from a little book, half listening to the boom of the organ and the reedy voice of the rector at his psalms. Sindbad never even noticed the woman riding in his direction, until her horse reared above him like a performing pony before a circus ringmaster. It took some effort on the woman’s part to bring the horse under control. And as she patted its neck with her gloved hands her lively long-lashed eyes looked deep into his: it was as if she had sprung straight from a novel by Miklós Jósika.
(`You had a remarkably interesting face,’ Mrs Boldogfalvi told him later, once Sindbad had settled on his cushion to hear the nonsense calculated to drive good sense out of him. ‘I was curious about you, about your green cloak and about the book of poetry, and there was a strange point of light swimming in your eyes, like a lamp seen through net curtains, something that always attracted me to a man.’)
At that time Mrs Boldogfalvi was being pursued by a particularly jealous lover and used to be escorted around the country by officers of the hussars. (Her husband was not much interested in her travels, preferring the husbandry of bees. He read newspapers a year after they appeared once they had worked their way through to the top of the beehive and had turned a deep yellow.) The jealous young man had made a few foolish threats and would sit in the corner nursing the darkest of thoughts without ever once taking his menacing eyes off her. So she was on the run, not by coach, since the carriage wheels would leave deep marks on the ground, but on horseback, a horse’s hooves being harder to trace. The young man needed time to forget, to find peace or, failing that, to commit suicide. This was how Mrs Boldogfalvi happened to find herself in the uplands, by the wall of that particular church at that particular Eastertide, just when Sindbad happened to be leaning against it.
They ordered dinner at the sign of The Bear where Sindbad had his lodgings. Sunset found him sitting by the window, dreaming of distant landscapes when there was a soft knock at the door, and before he could answer, in stepped Mrs Boldogfalvi.
‘Pardon me, sir. I am a stranger in the town and you seem like a gentleman.’
Sindbad stared in surprise at the lady before him in her little black riding costume and her Queen Elizabeth hat as she settled unconcernedly onto the arm of the worn old settee and tapped the ground with her little spurs as she spoke.