Here, the traveller’s eyes rested more readily on the leaves of the wild vine than on Irén’s open-necked blouse. Whole years went by without him showing any curiosity as to the colour of Irén’s slippers. And at supper he addressed himself to the gentle Váraljai rather than to her. ‘No,’ he said to the devil who on summer afternoons used to tempt him by parading in white sunlit dresses. ‘I am not going to burden my conscience with this particular sin.’ There was only one occasion, when Irén prepared a little pillow with yellow ribbons for Sindbad’s special convenience and he discovered a long dark wisp of hair on it, and he could imagine that that afternoon, while he had been away, her head had rested and dreamt on it. In the deceptive light of dusk Sindbad thought he recognised it as Irén’s and because of this he shortly left the hospitable house and only returned after a certain time had elapsed.
But Váraljai, like many good, gentle, sterling fellows, died young. Irén was shaken by his unexpected death. Already one care-worn line had spread itself across her brow, and now it lengthened and settled like a halo. Her childlike smile grew grave as if she had spent long sleepless nights staring into the darkness. Her expression, which for Sindbad had conjured the fresh scent of plum trees in spring, now brought to mind long autumn rains, evenings wrapped in shawls on the cool terrace in fading light and the aimless rattling of fallen leaves. He is a child sitting on a low stool, apprehensively, almost fearfully watching the garden yawning with autumn. His great aunt keeps a little yellow skull in the laundry cupboard. He is saying a hasty goodbye to a woman crying in a highland village, the night dark and the rain mournfully beating on the carriage roof.
He paid a few more visits after that. Irén would be decently occupied in knitting and the guest room was no longer freshly scrubbed. There were mice in the house and he could hear them running about the attic among the dried chestnuts. The sweet-scented bed smelled of old newspapers still bound up with string as they were when the subscriber first received them and put them aside. And every night the dry branch of the poplar scraped against the window of the guest room since there was no one in the house to prune it.
‘Has another woman taken advantage of you?’ asked Irén, the former dancer, her voice a little heavy. Like many old women in the village, she wiped her mouth with her fingers before she spoke.
Sindbad nodded sadly and felt rather sorry for himself. Fate might have made Irén young and beautiful or old and kind, someone who waited for him at the railway station, ready to welcome him with longed-for village pleasures and healthful airs. Irén turned over the knitting in her hand. ‘Any man who places his trust in women is a fool, and you, dear sir, are the most foolish of all. Lie down and I’ll massage your back because you don’t look too steady on your feet.’
Later the ex-dancer prepared a herbal tea, had some leeches brought over from the chemist and Sindbad sweated through the night in his old friends’ house under heavy village eiderdowns. Only once did he venture to ask the question he had always wanted to ask her — and that was after his death in his unquiet period — about that strand of hair on his pillow.
‘Certainly not,’ answered Irén sternly. ‘I never kissed you in your sleep. Didn’t you yourself tell me never to have recourse to the marabou fan?’
Madness from beyond the Grave
Sindbad spent some of his time as a ghost in a country graveyard because, having committed a sin or two in the neighbourhood, he was instructed to do penance there. The weeping willows and wooden monuments remembered him of the time he used to walk through the old cemetery with a provincial lady on his arm, their forms intertwined like twin stems in a single pot; they also recalled how he lied, continuously, fluently, without any let or hindrance, perpetually grinding out his insincerities like some busy watermill on the great River Danube. The old miller helpfully lifts the sacks of flour on to the narrow shoulders of willing maidens, a melancholy young man on the roof pipes a tune to the corpses of suicides clinging to the millwheel, the catfish glints in the moonlit stream like a medieval king in a silver cloak, and one old wild duck in the reeds informs another in the language of men that someone else has gone and killed himself for love. And in the old cemetery, where the traveller’s mouth pours forth a constant stream of highly coloured words, strewing the lady’s path with golden flour so that he may eventually load that flour into a precious silver sack which the poor woman will have to carry all her life till her back breaks with the effort — there, in the old cemetery where neither the worm-eaten wooden monuments, nor the rain-beaten, rust-furred gravestones that look like strange dogs have ever succeeded in tripping up a passing woman — there, the women walk beneath weeping willows whose boughs the sylphs must part to prevent the cold damp leaves brushing their naked necks, for if the leaves did touch them it might possibly destroy their illusions and prevent them journeying on to joy and endless sorrow. ‘On your way, on your way,’ mumble the old bones underground, yawning and stretching in their coffins, while Sindbad’s lies multiply and multiply, covering the whole district with golden dew, as far as the distant blue chain of mountains and the desolate watchman’s hut by the railway. Emma was the name of the woman whom he had so mercilessly abused. He had devoured her the way a starving red-bearded bandit freed after twenty harsh years of captivity might devour the woodcutter’s daughter in the forest.
Naturally enough, he spent most of his penitential years at Emma’s graveside. He sat hunched on the mound, like an old crow on a cold autumnal day, tapping the sealed tomb every so often: on particularly rainy nights he could be heard howling miserably like the siren of a distant ship.
‘Can I help it if women are so gullible? Why are they so quick to believe anything that is pleasant, delightful and flattering to them? Those with hooked noses, weak mouths, cold soulless eyes and wicked lying little souls, why should they believe that they are made for love? Poor women, learn from my wickedness never to yield yourselves up except after a long and passionate siege, and spend some time each day washing your hearts in the waters of scepticism and forgetfulness; give not a single thought to the man who left you; nor waste your days weeping alone in darkened rooms, for tears are like fleet horses that gallop you to the grave.’
The ghost made such a pother at night that local lovers no longer dared visit the old graveyard. Over the years, though, long dead grandmothers had grown well used to the idea of their granddaughters responding to the first heart-rending sound of a man’s voice, a voice that formed like mist across a silver mirror, directly above them. The cemetery had served as a trysting place for rich and poor alike — everyone in the little town had explored the hidden path by the ditch that ran through it. Others sleeping in the ditch included tiny souls who had perished downless, featherless, in their embryo state or at nest-robbing time, as exiles from the wonder and brilliance of life. They slept on quietly under the snow while their mothers were dancing and whirling their skirts at The Bugle Boy nearby, though sometimes, on a wet spring day, they took the form of little frogs and hopped onto their mothers’ feet as they were crossing the ditch again.