The continual crying of this restless spirit in the graveyard frightened off prospective lovers. There were no more visitors, their fingers intertwined like the topmost branches of young poplars, their warm thoughts full of life and darting about the air like swallows, who might stop to meditate on wooden monuments whose inscriptions proclaimed the longevity of old women. The dead woman lay unmoving in her grave: having committed suicide, she was forbidden the pleasures of love in the nether world. Vainly did Sindbad’s midnight tears seep through the holes where beetles had burrowed. ‘Tell me, tell me, how could you be so stupid as to believe me?’
One day, the daughter of the dead woman came to visit her grave. The sight of Emma’s daughter so disturbed the ghost, who had been sleeping among the leaves in the trees, that the heart which long ago had died in him gave a great leap. A moment later he was informing the sexton that according to the contract made on the day he died he was entitled to one single occasion of awaking. The sexton looked up the contract and in a few minutes a melancholy, dark-haired student in a velvet jacket appeared under the weeping willows, treading his way towards Emma’s daughter who was just then gathering dry leaves from the grave.
An old graveyard bat stirred in his daytime sleep and said to the owclass="underline" ‘The suicide’s beautiful daughter is here. She has swallowed a gold ring and the student is about to cut her heart open to retrieve it. It’s the ring he gave her mother.’
‘Serve people right,’ answered the owl. ‘Why should they always be thinking of yesterday! People spend their whole lives discussing what has already happened.’
In the meantime the student had introduced himself to Emma’s daughter and was speaking in lightly flavoured violet-scented words of her mother — who was probably terrified and sitting up in her coffin.
‘Oh, my mother,’ said Emma’s daughter. ‘Night after night she comes and sits at my bedside with her hair glowing like silver letters on the black ribbon tied around a wreath. Yet she was dark-haired, brown as I am now, at the time she died.’
‘And are you happy?’ asked Sindbad, without preamble, since it was already getting on to evening.
‘I have learned by my mother’s example. I keep happiness at arm’s length, lock my heart into my prayer-book and, thank God, have had no occasion for praying yet. I am twenty years old and teach in a school.’
‘Yet nature tells us …’ Sindbad began, then suddenly fell quiet as if ashamed in the presence of those ancient wooden monuments which seemed to be leaning forward, listening intently, though they had heard it all before and in much the same words too.
‘I have lived a very long time,’ he said glumly. ‘There are whole volumes that could be written about me. Old gentlemen in their dotage might read them, wagging their incredulous heads; feeble old countesses might admonish the young attendant appointed to entertain them for sullying their ears with such wickedness. I can imagine people using my name to frighten naughty children on stormy nights, that is, if they had any notion who I was … All I can tell you, young lady, is that love was the only thing worth persevering for, weeping for and living for. The sparkling jewels you wear in your hair will one day adorn some other woman’s breast like props in a play; by the time you are old the delicate silks which now cover your body might serve to polish the shoes of the local Madame Bovary before she goes out to commit adultery; the song you were singing with such passion by the lake will have sunk under the waves like a virtuous urchin and a greedy pike will be nibbling at it. Love alone remains as a low, bitter, ever-restless memory, with the scent of hours which are nothing but memories. Some nights I hear voices that seem to portend something, whether good or ill I cannot tell, sighs which seem to contain my whole life. The love which first entered your heart in the guise of some groom’s best-man or as a suitor in clinking spurs, or like a shy melancholy wanderer, that love remains with you for ever. The waves cannot swallow such memories, the wind cannot blow them away. They are yours alone. What you have loved remains yours: all that caused you unhappiness, that for which you cried in your pillow, for which you died … I am in love with you, dear lady.’
The graveyard owl repeated his previous observation. ‘People will go wittering on about the past.’
By now it was evening, the moon was peeking through the branches like an officious warden and Emma’s daughter, standing by her mother’s grave, suddenly noticed that the student had gone from her side, his leave of absence having expired, and that her hand which had been in another’s warm grip a moment ago was now cold and empty. Her hungry ears heard only the whispering of the wind.
The woman who had killed herself spoke quietly from the tomb, her voice as soft as the rain on the leaves. ‘Go home and do as Sindbad advised. The man is right.’
Escape from Life
‘Once spring comes we’ll go out to the country,’ Mrs Bánatvári used to say on early winter evenings as she strolled arm in arm with Sindbad down Hat Street. ‘We have decent horses, a fine coach, faithful servants and a nice country house. After all, what is mine is yours.’
Sindbad clung happily to the widow’s arm. ‘I have always fancied being a country landowner, galloping through the countryside in my carriage, learning the local dialect, waiting with frost-nipped cheeks on a cold morning at the local station for the passenger train to arrive, a weekly market at the cathedral town nearby, and a casino for the gentry where one could stop for a glass of beer, a bit of local politics and good general gossip. How delightful it would be to live without care, to sleep long and deep with dreams that move like slow lumbering barges and to rise with the sun, fresh and ready for the new day!’
‘I’ll take you with me,’ Mrs Bánatvári answered, her voice trembling with emotion. ‘You’ll see how the old women kiss my hand. I am godmother to all the local infants and the men still remember my grandfather leading them in his red beret at the time of the revolution. There is an apiary where you can fall asleep and dream to your heart’s content and Uncle Samu inevitably turns up in the afternoon for his game of cards and funny stories. Or, if you prefer, you can go to the Grozinger and play bowls with the others, and my finances will even allow you to treat the local dignitaries to a daily barrel of beer. You must watch out for the miserly clerk and offer the mean fellow his daily cigar. You must praise the singing of the schoolmistress and speak approvingly of the chickens the minister’s wife likes to keep. Futray need to be supplied with a few piquant stories and when you speak with the young ladies be sure to mention how you danced with their mothers at the local ball and how they were such great flirts.’
‘I will accept your advice in all these matters, my guardian angel,’ Sindbad answered resolutely, with all the gratitude of one escaped from a shipwreck, for secretly he had been sobbing through his dreams every night on account of some woman’s wicked demeanour. He stopped suddenly in the middle of the street, his head bent, and paying no attention to the traffic rushing past him, wandered over to a shop window hardly noticing the goods on view. He stumbled down streets he had never seen before and was content to lose his way among unfamiliar houses. He imagined himself wandering aimlessly in a foreign city, bundles of unopened mail waiting for him at the hotel. He couldn’t bear to pronounce the woman’s name because the effort cost him such physical pain it flooded through him from head to foot so that the thermometer beneath his arm showed a distinct rise, and whenever he found himself alone and took out her picture it was such delicious agony he had to rest his head on his arm. ‘How marvellous it was to love her,’ he wrote on a scrap of paper then dropped it into the Danube. He straightened his back, his eyes flashed, and an idiotic excitement drove his heart forward like the sails of a mill whenever he saw someone who from the back reminded him of her. The woman’s name was ‘F.’ or that, at least, is how he now thought of her, having sworn to Mrs Bánatvári never to pronounce the other letters of her name. F. He carefully examined every letter F he saw in the street, on shop signs or on soldier’s buttons, it was all the same to him. On pâtisseries and fashion stores, the delicate ‘f’ brought to mind her supple waist; the royal monogram ‘FJ’ which the head gardener had sown in tulips near the central balcony of the state gardens invariably reminded him of the slender legs she so frequently displayed. ‘I’m sure to commit suicide in the country,’ thought Sindbad as Mrs Bánatvári led him in motherly manner through the streets of the city centre.