The Adventures of Sindbad (New York Review Books Classics) by Krudy Gyula

Author:Krudy, Gyula [Krudy, Gyula]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781590174661
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

The Night Visitor

One autumn day Sindbad left the crypt where he had been deposited after his suicide.

He was disappointed to find that the lounge suit he had been so carefully dressed in for his funeral was out of fashion. It might once have been sported by dandies on their daily strolls, but more recently the frock coat had been adopted by schoolteachers and village choir-masters, and as for the britches — Sindbad felt like his own grandfather in them. In those days he used to correspond with village girls and travel to distant and obscure regions in the hope of meeting with different kinds of women. He had a fondness for pointed shoes and the scent of lavender. He also liked Lavalière ties that could be done up in one great bow and white waistcoats cut high, to wear when visiting actresses in the provinces or when asking bourgeois ladies for lockets, handkerchiefs, garters and other bijou objects for mementoes. On walks in the Bastion or on visits to the dance school he used to take a deep sniff of their scented dresses and proclaim his love for them without ever once lying; in distracted moods he would dawdle under windows from which, eventually, some attractive woman would lean out; he would bribe chambermaids with a little present and hot-headedly enter strange houses just so that he could kiss the hands of unknown women, beg a blessing off the older ones and extol the virtues of momentary delight, the secret joy, the invaluable fleeting hour, to those who had not previously met him and hence had been taken so utterly by surprise. Ah, life was still worth living then: one might appear secretly by night in a garden, tap at a window, speak beautiful words to those waiting to hear them; one could laugh and grow rapt or languid on the subject of a ringlet, a flower, a small white hand or the peculiar curve of a neck, and watch as the train drew away from the platform. That was Sindbad in his youth — a tireless voyager, a friend to women, a knight errant for those in sleepy provincial towns; he was the last worldly thought of virgins about to enter convents and the hope of the ageing … When the affair was over he would retreat to the sighing boughs of the damp and melancholy graveyard and spend a whole year listening to the drumming of the rain and, when this too grew tedious, he might engage in conversation with his dead relatives who lay to either side of him in the crypt. One particularly worm-eaten old great-uncle tended to toss and turn in his grave. He had had four wives when alive and two or three lovers beside them at any one time, and was still anxious to reassume the flesh: ‘I wonder what my sweet Helen is doing?’ he would ask the spiders. ‘I died too soon to develop a proper taste for her.’

The restlessness of this girl-crazy uncle would eventually restore Sindbad’s appetite for life.

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