Monkey’s face was red with anger. ‘You have to be rude to women like that! My God, if men knew women as I know them there’d be no more of this ridiculous talk of love. Understand, dear, that woman is creation’s coup de grâce. And the young are the worst. Mind you, I wouldn’t trust any of them, not even the old ones. A woman’s mind is always set on destruction and she weaves her snares of love expressly for the destruction of men. She trades in jewels or in virtue. You want the spirit of the age? Think of an old frump. And no, dear, I will not tolerate a man in my rooms. Women have to behave decently here. Oh, they have offered me handsome amounts to allow them to entertain their rich gentlemen at home. But I have grown to despise money. I don’t want much: honour, order, decency. Honour! There’s something worth having in a life. And you know, that may be precisely why my dancers come to me. Not that it is easy to get a room here. Not everyone enjoys the favour of my lunches. Those who have been my lodgers speak well of me. Here, the sick are cured, the thin grow fat, and I don’t allow them to throw their money away. They come to me in rags and in disgrace, and they leave wealthier and better dressed. Because I’m honest. I trade neither in jewels nor in virtue.’
Sindbad listened to Monkey, nodding the while. Yes, in many ways he too held her conduct in high respect. And he wasn’t slow to tell her this.
Monkey accepted the praise but the flush of anger still burned on her cheek. She threw some seeds to the silent old canary then smoothed her dress and sat down opposite Sindbad again. ‘In the past, when I first had the good fortune of your acquaintance, I didn’t want to upset you. Today, however, I can tell you straight — now that we’re on the subject — that I know every woman you’ve been in love with these last ten years …’
‘It was always only you,’ answered Sindbad.
‘For all I know you may be thinking of someone else this very moment. Because I know you, as well as if I had given birth to you. I knew when you loved me and when you didn’t love me. My own love has not changed a jot. It’s strange, I know, I hardly understand myself. I fell in love with you ten years ago and immediately I knew I would love you for the rest of my life. Even if you had died, Sindbad, I would not have forgotten you. Since I had the bad luck to fall in love with you — and sometimes I didn’t see you for years — it was important for me to know what you were doing. That’s why I enquired into your every step, learned about your affairs, investigated each of your loves. You never saw me, but you were never out of my sight. Even when you were asleep I was watching your sleeping face so I would know your dreams. I wanted to understand you, for I knew I couldn’t live without you.’
‘You went and bribed the servants,’ observed Sindbad sharply.
‘It’s nothing to do with you how I knew about your affairs. Listen to this! You’ll soon see I know everything.’
Monkey stepped over to the cupboard and took out a slim volume much like a prayerbook. ‘This is where I used to write those things I didn’t want to forget. Here we are. 21st June 19—. The lawyer K’s wife lives apart from her husband and is waiting at the suspension bridge. 5 p.m. Sindbad arrives in closed car, number 37, the woman gets in. They spend two hours riding up and down behind drawn curtains in the Hidegkúti Road. This ride is repeated every week from June to October. During the same period the lawyer K’s wife leaves her husband every Wednesday afternoon and strolls arm in arm with a blond officer on Fisherman’s Bastion.* Two mornings a week she spends her time at the salon of the well-known couturier, Madame X, which several prominent men are known to frequent.’
Sindbad jumped to his feet. ‘That’s a lie. She was an honourable woman.’
Monkey flicked her hand as if waving away a fly. ‘I’m not in the habit of lying, my dear. I know what I know. You were head over heels in love with that woman. True, I felt quite sorry for you then, but I didn’t want your disillusion to come as too much of a shock. I allowed time to do its work. And lo and behold, here you are beside me again and it seems you love me. Let’s move on. May, 19—. Flora M. is a secretary in the director X’s office. A little round thing, brown-haired with a slight squint. Sindbad escorts her home every night for weeks and months on end till he succeeds in seducing her, then immediately leaves her. The seduction takes months because Flora M. is desperately in love with one of the firm’s representatives to whom she eventually becomes engaged …’
‘You’re a devil, Monkey. I’ve always thought of that woman as a beautiful but sad dream, the kind one sometimes awakes from to a tear-soaked pillow.’
Monkey continued in stiff formal tones. ‘The representative was replaced by another. And that’s the sum total of Flora’s existence.’
One night — it was autumn going on winter and the snow was falling softly outside — Sindbad woke from his sleep with a sharp pain in his heart. Images from his dream still flickered before him; it was the usual dream of that time, women’s faces, some in hats, some bare-headed, painted and unpainted faces; women’s eyes, girls’ eyes, all fixed on him in the same way as though Sindbad were the only man in the world; images of bare shoulders and stockinged legs with high-heeled shoes; then a long line of women in slips, women known to Sindbad, women he’d like to have known; plump arms, slender arms, every one of which was clasped about his neck, a generation of womankind trembling under the covers, performing somersaults in the pastures of his heart …
He woke and the procession of dream women faded in the half-light like a lantern carried by some housewife across a snow-covered yard on a winter evening. For a while the glow of the lamp may be seen against a wall or haystack; a dark-haired female figure sways on the ripples of darkness, then the last woman, bright-eyed, wearing a feathered hat, finally disappears in the far distance — leaving Sindbad alone with his heartache. And shortly after this he began to feel ever more certain that very soon, perhaps within the hour, he would die.
He dressed quickly and sat down on the divan. At first he was very frightened because he had secretly believed that somehow he could put the whole thing off, despite the fact that he had been seriously ill recently and his voice sounded husky and strange, like the voice of a childhood friend overheard in the next room. Perhaps that lad, Bignio … whenever he found himself engaged in absent-minded desultory conversation it was the voice of young Bignio he heard talking somewhere in the neighbouring room.
‘I shall shortly be dead,’ he said to himself, breaking the sentence into distinct syllables. ‘Yes, yes. I can hear young Bignio talking in the next room again.’
Of course, it was only in the first moments of his fear that Sindbad spoke aloud in the empty room, because, somehow, eventually, he recovered his composure: he could move his paralysed eyelids once more, and the pain relaxed its grip on his heart.
He stood up and stepped out onto the balcony where a thin layer of snow-covered tubs of flowers left over from the summer. It was dawn, the town was asleep and invisible snowflakes drifted around his head in cold draughts. He stared out into the hushed darkness for a while without thinking — then suddenly he saw himself in short child’s boots and a little fur coat, ambling down a path beside an old church, over weeds that had been trodden into the snow. There were rooks sitting on the cross surmounting the spire, and a red-cheeked brightly dressed woman was approaching, carrying a bucket of water from the icy well nearby. The dream town lay all about him and he marched along down the weed- and snow-covered path … Having passed the church he noticed other things: at a window with white curtains, a portly and mature woman turned her enormous eyes on him, her nose crooked, a grotesquely sensuous smile on her lips, a smile he might have seen somewhere before, if only for a moment a long time ago … then the image was gone and he was simply standing on the balcony again while endless flurries of snow swept by him.