Sindbad leapt out of the water as if a crab had pinched him. He stared at the unmoving water and stirred it with a broken branch, then quickly snatched up his clothes. Tight-lipped and silent, he started to run towards the wooden bridge that straddled the Poprád like a great long-legged spider. He brushed against people who shook their heads at the pale little boy in full flight. Sindbad seemed to hear them muttering the name of the mysterious Lubomirski.
A boat was tied up at the bridge. His knife was sharp for he had little to do in his free time but sharpen it. It took but a moment to cut the rope. Meanwhile the strong current was already sweeping him downstream. Sindbad’s eyes widened as he stared at the tall lime trees. Perhaps Pope Gregory the hunchback was still swinging there and the whole thing was merely a bad joke …
But the place where the river lay dreaming was as silent as it had been a few moments ago. Carefully, Sindbad manoeuvred the boat to the spot where Pope Gregory had disappeared and poked an oar into the water as deep as it would go. Then he felt around with his arms in case Pope Gregory was just a few inches away … Eventually he began to row quietly down river. He stopped now and then; the oar touched the pebbly bed of the shallow Poprád, a few larger stones emerged in the distance in deeper water like so many Pope Gregories, a scarlet trout shot by, terrified, and the river sparkled and foamed like liquid silver filtered through an enormous sieve.
The brickworks of the monastery slowly receded into the distance, yellow and red fruit trees extended along the bank, and Mr Privánka, one of the teachers, was doing a spot of weeding in the vegetable garden wearing heavy boots, his cassock rolled up. Sindbad flattened himself on the floor of boat for fear that he should see him. So he rowed on, leaving the monastery far behind. Boughs bent over the stream but there was nothing beneath them but a rotten old pine beam.
It was late afternoon by now, the sun was disappearing behind the mountains, and bare, abandoned fields stretched out ready for sleep on either side of the river. The silver Poprád no longer sparkled so brightly, a long lilac shadow was slowly settling across its reflective surface.
Then, some way down, midstream, he caught sight of the hunchback Pope Gregory, drifting face up in the spume. His two arms were extended either side of him, his mouth opened like a black hole. His legs were lost in the water.
Sindbad wiped his sweating brow and, for the first time, fully understood what had happened. The hunchback had drowned and he would get the blame. The image of Lubomirski would finally step out of the frame, in fact, he was already advancing on him with his red beard. Somewhere in the far distance Róza was standing under the dark boughs of the further shore, her hands joined behind her back, morosely, furiously glaring at the stars as she had done the night before … The river seemed deep, mysterious and terrifying as he rowed after the corpse. Eventually he managed to catch hold of the hunchback Gregory’s feet and, weeping and whimpering, he succeeded in hauling him into the boat. He turned the boat round and slowly, wearily rowed back up the river.
Some time later Sindbad woke up at home and in bed.
The yellow lamp illuminated Róza’s ashen face. The girl concentrated her enormous sparkling grey eyes on him and her lips whispered close into his ear. ‘You are a brave boy. And I will love you for ever now.’
Sindbad’s Dream
Once Sindbad dreamt he was a king in the heyday of Old England, a young king, about eighteen years old, wearing soft pointed shoes and a silken tunic. His hair was long and fell in waves. His eyes sparkled, he laughed a great deal, beautiful gold coins slipped from his fingers and he conversed in cheerful ringing tones. In this dream he was not only young but light-hearted, happy and magnificent, a soul conceived at sunrise. Courtiers perambulated around him on the grand terrace in costumes of Henry VII’s time and the ladies had long trains to their silken dresses, which they raised to reveal high, white-laced boots. They nodded their curly heads to him when they passed. He continued seeing their white stockings a long time after the ‘king’ dream was over, even as he woke and moved his tired limbs one at a time. A whole row of white-stockinged female legs remained with him. And that morning, while he examined his deathly pale features in the mirror, he mused a little on the sensation of having been a young king during the night. Finally it occured to him that since he had experienced everything there was to be experienced in the world, he would probably die soon.
That day — a fine early autumn day — Sindbad dressed as carefully as befitted a man over three hundred years old. He selected a light-coloured tie and brightly polished shoes. The barber tucked Sindbad’s head under his arm while he was shaving him, in the eastern manner, then rubbed scented oil into his grey hair. So prepared, old Sindbad set out to find the woman who had once worn white stockings and nodded to him when they met, addressing him as, ‘My darling, my prince’. Sindbad would make a dismissive gesture, as if to say, ‘Come now, enough of such nonsense.’ Of course, that was back in the days when it was the common thing for women in the Buda Tunnel, in Krisztinaváros, in the Castle District, and indeed all the suburbs and environs of the capital, to address him as ‘my darling’. His whole long life he had been ‘my darling’ to two or three women at any one time. He wouldn’t leave a woman in peace until she had fallen in love with him. And that was why he had spent one tenth of his life waiting under windows, gazing longingly, humbly, unhappily or threateningly. He had a genius for observing women, for following them secretly and discovering their hopes, secrets and desires. Sindbad spent so much time standing motionless, listening to the whirring of sewing machines in small suburban houses, or taking a carriage in order to follow another carriage that galloped along bearing a sweet-scented woman in a wide hat, or stealthily watching a lace-curtained window lit up for the night, or observing a woman at prayer in the church and trying to guess who or what she might be praying for, that sometimes he barely had time to pluck the fruit he coveted. He tired of the business: some new adventure attracted him, excited his blood, his dreams, his appetite, so he failed to complete his previous mission. And thus it was that in the course of his life some eleven or twelve women waited for him in vain, at rendezvous, in closed carriages, on walks through woods or at distant stations where two trains should have met. Sindbad wasn’t on the train, and the woman, that special one, would be standing hopefully at the window, watching from behind the curtains, frightened, wetting her dry lips with her tongue. And several trains would rattle by … including the train carrying the white-stockinged woman, the very one who, both in her letters and in person, addressed him as ‘my darling’, and there was nothing unusual in this at the time.
This woman was a widow known as ‘Monkey’ to all those who had loved her. She was a serious, decisive woman of great firmness of mind, for women usually change their pet names together with their admirers. She, however, remained Monkey right to the end. She hardly ever laughed, she never winked and she gazed at Sindbad with a desperate intensity when she threatened to cut her throat with an open razor because of him. She loved Sindbad with an absolute passion, as if he were her destiny. She couldn’t stop loving him even years after Sindbad left her. She had been both deaf and blind until she was ten years old and believed it was this that made her think differently from other women. ‘I will love my prince as long as I live. Whether I see him or not,’ she told Sindbad on one of their infrequent meetings. ‘Why must you love so foolishly?’ Sindbad shrugged. ‘There are other things in life besides love.’