Fanny entered, a sadly bent little wing on her black hat, her veil full of tiny holes the size of snowdrops, and her black-gloved hand as tender and maternal as the precious hands that wipe some minor care from a child’s brow. The young man with the blue apron brought some cherries of deep Flanders Red and cream in a little floral cup covered in vine leaves. Someone started playing the violin in one of the upstairs rooms.
Dead Sindbad sat where the old French gentleman might once have sat. He did not cough or make any noise but contentedly watched the progress of a swallow that had flitted across from Pest to Buda. The dead see no change in the living. Dead mothers always return to orphaned children even when their sons have long been wearing beards. Dead fathers, should they awake at midnight, might be found mending the caps of little boys. And, long after they have turned to dry old sticks and firewood, lovers will still be gathering and whispering at the ear of the grey-haired princess, their voices like the sound of wind among the lilacs, their faces young and fresh as they drift by in their red frock-coats and the white waistoats they had worn as musicians. In Sindbad’s eyes the goldsmith’s wife was as beautiful now as she had been at the masked ball in her youth when he first saw her in her gold embroidered dress in the guise of Maria Stuart.
He sneaked up on her, stealing a ride on a windblown leaf, and began quietly whispering in her ear where her hair smelled fresh and was as neatly combed as if for Sunday. ‘My poor darling, are you dissatisfied, miserable, sad?’
‘I am very sad because everyone has left me and I’m alone,’ the woman sighed to herself. ‘I can no longer see the pink-cheeked shepherds I saw in my youth and I no longer hear music on the wind. My lovers are dead or grown old … Heavens, with what blessed tranquillity I looked forward to strolling quietly and cheerfully along the castle ramparts with some old army officer. Nowadays I can’t resign myself to it. Why — because I am no longer young? Why — because I no longer spend the night in tears on account of some unfaithful lover? It is true, I confess, that while they were around I never wept for any of them. Today, though, I would like to cry for all of them, for all their lies, their bad behaviour and fickleness. Not to feel angry but simply to cry, to cry for years, for ever, for them all. How could they leave me without a word? They never even told me why they were leaving. They simply left …’
‘Because their time had come, my poor darling,’ Sindbad answered with extraordinary tenderness. ‘There is no special reason for men to go. They’d have gone even if you had begged them not to and pursued them or sent messages. Something was calling them, waiting for them, much as the wind calls the leaves. In my case a great storm blew me one night to the window of a poor seamstress …’
‘That is just what is so galling. My pride …’
Sindbad gave a wicked laugh. ‘Your pride? You are proud only as long as you are surrounded by admirers. While you are both conqueror and enchanter.’
The dull tapping of a stick with a rubber end sounded in the deep gateway. A carefully shaven old gentleman in a wing collar and chequered trousers entered the courtyard with the sumach trees and ordered a large glass of red wine.
‘Leave me alone, Sindbad. I have no time for your idiotic conversation,’ she answered, waving the shadow away.
‘I cannot live,’ the ghost muttered.
The old gentleman’s eyes rolled over her like a beer barrel across a yard. He coughed and hid his stick behind the bench.
‘Strange,’ sighed the goldsmith’s wife. ‘Men remain attractive longer than we do. That old gentleman must certainly be the most handsome man in Buda.’
And she adjusted her hat.
Rozina
Sindbad, the bearer of this fine name first found in the volume of The Thousand and One Nights our grandmothers used to read, was travelling by train to an appointment with a lady and was lost in his thoughts. He wiped the soot from his face with a little cologne, arranged a new handkerchief in his pocket, rinsed his mouth and checked the tissue paper wrapped around the flowers he had brought from Pest, though he could have bought some locally since the train was due to arrive at the provincial station well before closing time. He lay back then got up again, absent-mindedly started counting the poplar trees as they passed, and wondered whether it was worth his while coming here simply because Rozina was scared of mice.
Having spent winter and spring on Sindbad’s arm, kissing, walking the streets of Pest, exploring Buda down hidden byways known only to lovers, and sitting in the boxes of theatres where Sindbad would lean in the shadows behind her, his arms solemnly crossed, Rozina, the goldsmith’s wife, avoided the hot summer months by moving to a country house where her grandmother, a veteran of the revolution, occupied herself sweeping the dust and cobwebs from ancestral portraits. ‘The quiet life will be good for me. I shall find peace and forget you,’ said Rozina on one of their three-mile walks together through the hills of Buda. (Sindbad’s eyes were fixed on his feet. It was a long afternoon and his heart was trembling as he wondered whether she would really leave him. In that moment he believed his whole life depended on Rozina, though once she had gone he made a miraculous recovery. He breathed again, a free spirit. ‘I’ll find a new lover — a dancer!’ he thought. Then Rozina unexpectedly sent him an urgent letter. ‘Come quickly, I beg you, I can’t sleep for the mice.’ Sindbad did not think twice, but packed his bags and left.)
There was a little garden next to the station — it seemed every station-master in Hungary preferred fuchsias — and there at the end of the garden, like an illustration from a German postcard, stood Rozina with a parasol in her hand. Sindbad kissed both her hands, muttering incomprehensible words of adoration, and gazed enchanted at the three freckles the village sun had planted on her face.
‘So you still love me?’ asked Sindbad, as though it were the most important thing on earth.
‘Is it possible to forget you?’ answered Rozina, taking hold of Sindbad’s arm as they ambled into the village.
She couldn’t have been bolder and more self-confident, thought Sindbad, than if he had been her lawful husband and had just returned from a long journey: the village poplars on the grandmother’s estate nodding familiarly to him, and the sheep-dog sprawling at his feet. Apple trees in gardens glance at Rozina’s white legs as she passes across the dewy lawn in bare feet. In the shade of the hammock strung from the chestnut tree a little yellow flower peeps out to observe Rozina from below. A blackbird sits in the branches trying to guess what the woman is thinking behind those half-closed eyes,
‘Here we are,’ said Rozina as they arrived at an old country house. A moth-eaten steward’s coat hung on a branch in the garden.
‘I like old houses where the dead ancestors who used to live there leave their voices behind to talk at you from the walls.’
Rozina sighed. ‘It was my great-grandfather who had the house built. There are a lot of chestnut trees in the area and the mice have run wild. No one here is any good at setting mousetraps. You are so clever Sindbad, you can do anything.’
‘I was quite a clever child,’ Sindbad answered with a certain conceit. (Mind you, who has not been a doctor, a joiner, a cobbler, or general factotum at the behest of his beloved? All men in love are children dreaming of heroic deeds. When it comes to impressing the loved one the knocking of a nail in the wall is just as heroic an enterprise as wrestling with a bear.) Sindbad took off his coat.