‘He could never forgive women. He thought he perceived miraculous qualities in them, a combination of the fidelity of the saints with the virtues of the martyrs. And how he would rage when one of them took up with another man though it was he who had long left her.’
Hypocrisy is the state of affairs in dreams. Sindbad acts ironically in a world in which he half-believes. In so far as he believes in it, we are given to understand that he is naïve — a creature of the past. Sindbad’s dreams are clearly historical fancies — tiny costumed tableaux, doll’s house flirtations — but the women’s dreams are all the more substantial for including him as he is. In effect he is validated by their dreams.
Dreams are the ultimate channel of communication. ‘I dreamt you were dreaming with me, so I set out,’ he says to Paula on meeting her. In their dreams he revisits the women he once seduced, or who seduced him — or else returns as a ghost. They lock him in secret rooms. They want to take him away to their quiet country retreats. He is what they would have him be. ‘His whole long life he had been “my darling“ to two or three women at a time,’ Krúdy tells us. Maybe this is because Sindbad has ‘a genius for observing women, for secretly following them and discovering their hopes, secrets and desires’. He is a beautiful boy-child with a grey moustache and perfect manners, the infant fascinated by the female principle and its power. And indeed, as an exercise in power, it is hard to say who is in control. Women kill themselves for him, but he kills himself for them too. They have him on a string as much as he has them. It is the mutual exercise of erotic power that makes the transaction such a pleasure.
Yet the pleasure is never free of danger and there is usually a price to be paid for it. Pope Gregory pays it. So do the dead babies sleeping in the ditch, those ‘tiny souls who had perished downless, featherless’ but who nevertheless resurrect themselves as little frogs and hop onto their mothers’ feet as the women are crossing for sexual assignations in the graveyard. So do the suicides drifting in the waters of the Danube and the dead mother who hears her own daughter being seduced by a ghost directly above her grave — all pay the price. Time and again Sindbad envisages his own death although it frightens him. When his lover Fanny proposes a suicide pact he finds the thought so terrifying that he shudders: ‘I know death. Death is for women.’ But it is he who has been dead through most of the book. In any case, the idea of the suicide pact has come to the lady a few hours too late. It is already dawn. ‘The milkman is due,’ says Fanny, ‘my husband will arrive by the first train, the servants will be up and ready to go to the market … and I shall go to hospital to visit my sick brother.’
Romance requires night and mists. Clear light destroys it. A young Hungarian man of the 1920s might have used Sindbad as a working manual of sexual relations. He might not have suspected the tricks those strange long open sentences were playing on him; that the carpet was, in effect, being pulled from under his and the author’s own feet. Yet the manual still has its surprises. The vampirical Sindbad is less interested in the blood of young virgins than in the nourishment provided by fellow veterans of the sexual campaign.
Once, when an officer of the Hussars insulted him, Krúdy tore the man’s sword from his waist and presented the sword to the madam of a brothel. He then fought the duel to which the Hussar had challenged him — and won. He would sit up all night drinking. On another occasion, thinking that Krúdy had fallen asleep, an exhausted drinking companion tried to tip-toe from the room. ‘Come back and talk some more,’ Krúdy’s deep voice ordered him.
The voice that speaks to us in The Adventures of Sindbad has authority. Its discourse is woven out of the night-talk of duels and seductions remembered but not quite believed. ‘Let us therefore close the file on Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence,’ Krúdy declares in ‘Escape from Women’, dismissing his romantic ironical hero with an equally ironic gesture. The new world is moving under Sindbad much as the underground train moved under the feet of the citizens of Budapest, shaking the cobbles of the old.
— GEORGE SZIRTES
THE ADVENTURES OF SINDBAD
Youth
Once upon a damp and moonlit night a man with greying hair was watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops. Somewhere in the monastery at Podolin, he was thinking, there is, or was, an old painting, showing a shaggy-haired figure with a wild upcurled moustache, a thick beard, red as a woman’s hair, two big round eyes with elongated pale blue pupils, and a complexion as ruddy as the colour on a white tablecloth when light passes through a full wine glass on a sunny winter noon. This man was Prince Lubomirski.
Who he was,* what kind of man, before he found himself among other worn gilt frames in the old monastery, is not strictly relevant to this tale. Suffice it to say he was there on the wall, beneath the vault, where peeling plaster revealed faint traces of a mural of long dead saints amusing themselves. St Anne was seated on a low stool, her face somewhat drained of colour by this time, only her two bleary eyes still staring enquiringly at the students who clattered down the cobbled passage-way in their heavy boots. The good woman was eternally solicitous about their education. St George, mean-while, was busily killing his dragon — and Prince Lubomirski took his place in the middle.
The monastery had its share of non-paying novices, and their stout tutors were always ready to terrify them with those big round eyes. The prince had, in his day, supported the propagation of piety by contributing some fine round cobbles to the fabric of the building, so even after his death he retained a certain interest in the disciplining of errant students. Poor Slovakian boys who had found themselves transported directly from tall pine forests to the thick walls of the monastery, raised their caps respectfully to his wine red complexion.
The young ladies of Podolin who came to the monks for absolution would wreathe his picture with flowers fresh from the meadow, and women, who a couple of centuries before would have given birth to red-bearded, shaggy-haired children, prayed before the prince’s image precisely as they did before pictures of the saints. (To be sure, they had forgotten how some two centuries ago, the prince would delightedly remove his buffalo skin gloves in the presence of ladies kneeling at his feet. But he was long past removing his gloves now.)
In this manner Lubomirski remained lord of the manor well after his death: local boys were inevitably christened George, and each Sunday before the town hall the local dignitaries would let off a rocket in honour both of the Lord and of George Lubomirski. (True, they used only half as much gunpowder for the latter.)
The gentleman with greying hair, who, seated one night at his writing table, recalled that vaulted corridor where the heels of the novices clattered and echoed, then faded away in the distance, had himself been a student at the monastery and knew the district well. His name was Sindbad. He had selected this name from his favourite book of stories, The Thousand and One Nights, for in those days, it was still fairly common for knight errants, poets, actors and passionate scholars to choose names for themselves. One hunchbacked lad had chosen to be addressed as Gregory, after the pope, heaven knows why.
Sindbad respected Prince Lubomirski, but he raised his hat to him in much the same way as he did to the stationer, Müller, whose little shop was situated in the shadow of a gateway and was therefore always dark. Here, in this gloom, nature worked in reverse, for while old man Müller had no moustache, his saucy raven-haired daughter, Fanni, did. For a long time Fanni was embarrassed by this, but one day a young teacher arrived in town, and he told her the moustache was both lovely and seductive. And Fanni was seized by such great happiness on hearing this that she leapt into the River Poprád near the dam.