An English Translation of Gábor Szappanos' "A Great Night With the Queen Of Petra”

By Ortutay Peter

The manuscript of a novel has been found in a big library of Budapest. Its "encryption" eighty years earlier was on the instructions of a fabled author, who can only be Gyula Krúdy, although his name is never mentioned. The book is also such a literary fiction that it could never have been written by Krúdy.
The writer, who calls himself Gyula Kandúr (Julius Tomcat), is just having his lunch at Majmunka’s house, when all of a sudden a Sindbad shows up, a sort of Frankenstein existing only in Kandúr’s imagination so far. The two doubles initiate a fight. Neither is able to overcome the other, so they decide to let a test of who has the longer wind tell who the real Sindbad is. Kandúr is chained to the radiator and from there he must watch Frankenstein-Sindbad making love to Majmunka’s concupiscent female dancers. Thanks to his imagination Kandúr wins.
Then, with the help of a flying carpet, the two counterparts fly to the city of Petra some 2,000 years earlier. They find themselves in the middle of an orgiastic evening party. They are captured by two guards of the king who needed another two companions at his table. The dinner is not free. After it they both will have to work hard: one of them will have to please until dawn the wife of the impotent king, the other the goddess of the city. She has the shape of a black cubical stone and is placed in front of the gates to the nether world. Kandúr will have to serve the queen, Sindbad the cubic stone goddess.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ortutay Peter
• Release date: Dec 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370486892

Ortutay Peter

Rövid önéletrajz:1942. július elsején születtem Ungváron. A középiskolát szülővárosomban végeztem. Rögtön az iskola után egyetemi felvételeim nem sikerültek, így két évig sajtolómunkásként dolgoztam a Peremoha gyárban. Aztán behívtak katonának... a szovjet hadseregbe, ahol három évet húztam le angyalbőrben.1964-ben felvételiztem az Ungvári Állami Egyetem bölcsészkarára, és angol szakos egyetemista lettem. 1969-ben diplomáztam. Még ugyanabban az évben (sőt korábban) Balla László főszerkesztő felajánlotta, hogy dolgozzam fordítóként (majd újságíróként) a Kárpáti Igaz Szó magyar lapnál. Kisebb megszakításokkal a nyolcvanas évek elejéig dolgoztam az Igaz Szónál. 1984-ben költöztem Budapestre. Angol nyelvtanár lettem az Arany János Gimnáziumban, majd a Kandó Kálmán főiskolán. Az ELTE bölcsészkarán doktoráltam angol nyelvészetből, és a tudományos fokozatomnak köszönhetően 1991-ben az Egri Tanárképző Főiskola főigazgatója megkért, hogy legyek a főiskolán az angol tanszék vezetője. Három évig voltam tanszékvezető, aztán előadó tanár ugyanitt.1998-tól 1999-ig az Ohiói Állami Egyetemen (Amerikai Egyesült Államok) is tanítottam egy rövid ideig. Az Egri Gárdonyi Géza Ciszterci Gimnázium tanáraként mentem nyugdíjba 2004-ben.Nyugdíjazásom előtt és után nyelvészeti tudományos munkákat publikáltam, írogattam, szépirodalmat fordítottam. Eddig hat vagy hét műfordítás-kötetem van, főként F. Scott Fitzgerald amerikai író novellái és színművei, valamint Mary Shelly Mathildá-ja, mely fordításomban először jelent meg magyarul. Közben sikerült lefordítanom angolra Szalay Károly (alternatív) Kossuth-díjas írónak az ötvenhatos magyar forradalomról írt Párhuzamos viszonyok című regényét, mely a United P. C. Publisher kiadó gondozásában Parallel Liaisons címmel jelent meg külföldön.

Book preview

1. The Challenge

That day I was not feeling very well, I have had this hangover since my high school final exams almost every day, but this time it was different: an unaccustomed stress was working in me. In the morning after the night before I was always fighting against internal fears and I got used to them during the past years. They belonged to my life as thirst, lassitude, sleeping and awakening – that is how the text started, which was written in small puny lilac letters like pearls on large sheets of paper hidden in an envelope with a big red seal on it. The envelope was opened by the staff of the biggest library of the capital with the proper reverence and awe after its eighty year old encryption. During long eight stormy decades the staff kept the secret that they had been entrusted by the fabled author.  Then the text went on:  As there in  Monkey’s house in Cat Street I was slurping the hot chicken broth (with well cooked pigeon-breast, green peppers, tomatoes, carrot and turnip, cauliflower, onion cut into two, black pepper in seeds, cherry-pepper slices and seeds provided by me personally, and with plenty of vermicelli), and meanwhile I chanted one or two two-tongued compliments to Monkey’s dancers also having board there, so that they would not think I was a total Goth or savage, but still I murmured those compliments very cautiously because I did not want to raise Monkey’s inexorable anger and jealousy against me,  all of a sudden I heard familiar footsteps in the staircase. Those were the steps of a judicious, perhaps of a too judicious man. Auspicious police inspectors, judges, university professors, or best-seller star writers saunter that way. Then the footsteps stopped, a couple of seconds passed, and there were three knocks on the door. I peered, Monkey and I looked at each other, and we also exchanged quick surprised glances with the three woman dancers arriving in their negligee. Everybody exchanged a glance with everybody, it was as if at a table we all started clinking glasses, and turning to each other without any system, erratically, so that not to miss anybody, and so it may happen that you clink glasses with somebody more than once, and this is acquitted with a smile. I don’t know why but I immediately had the feeling that there was somebody standing at the door who I have known. Why did I feel him to be an acquaintance? Well, because of the three knocks. Walking sticks ending in a fox-head, studded with brass have this peculiar knock on thick oak-wood doors.

‘As far as I know we do not expect anybody to come to dinner, so who that can be?’ said Monkey wiping her mouth, and as she primped her lips questioningly I noticed that there were old woman’s wrinkles running together above her well formed lips. ‘Time flies above you, too, Monkey, only I remain forever young… you loved me, you waited for me, and meantime you became old,’ I thought, but I didn’t say and didn’t show anything out of my feelings. Monkey got to her feet and slowly went to the door. I went on eating, but not in the same way as before, as if nothing had happened, but as somebody who forefeels something but tries to show that he is even-tempered and strong.

Monkey opened the door and exclaimed dumbfounded: ‘Wow!’ Then in a voice betraying her surprise she said something to the newcomer. What it was I could not grasp. Then there were knocks, shuffle, and a murmur in baritone, then the door of the room which was half open so far opened up widely, Monkey pops in, and exclaims: ‘You haven’t mentioned, Sindbad, that you’ve got a twin brother!’

I shivered, and stopped sipping the broth, and more excitedly than it was usual for me I wiped the chicken grease dots from my moustache with the bib, and looked up… But before I could utter a single word the stranger that for the time being was standing behind Monkey in the corridor, and so was not visible in his own self, said: ‘I am Sindbad!’ 

Monkey looked at us both. At first at the one then the other… this time her eyes were the link between us. As she looked at me again I could already see the image imprint of the man on her retina that would appear in the room in a second. Then the photos on the wall, namely that of Monkey’s old father’s with his rakish moustache and of her niece who died as a little girl, started to have jumps, and as prisoners of the frames began to strain the walls of their flat cage. The old father got so surprised that he wanted to jostle his way out of the picture, but in doing so he was so careless that the glass was broken. The little girl didn’t move, but grew much paler, so it became still more obvious that when the photograph was taken she had already been espoused to death for good. The silent old canary in the window also grew gray, and jumped like a hen on a hot girdle in its cage. The dancers gaped, so that one could see that their tongues, with which they had misplaced so many kisses to men unworthy of them, were red as peony.

‘I always knew, Sindbad, that you were a liar,’ said Monkey to me. She was the first to break the silence after the sound of the broken picture glass. Monkey, the snake in the grass… Yesterday I made her, this damned faggot, so happy that her ears stood stiff as a post! And now, just have a look, how she expresses her gratitude for my generosity. Nobody else would take her for a woman, and now here you are. All of a sudden my double comes into view and she starts accusing me of being a liar!

‘Heavens, Monkey, you know that Gyula Kandúr is my honest name, and Sindbad was invented just for my double in my short stories.’

‘That’s all smoke,’ brushed off the essence of the matter Monkey. ‘There’s one thing I know for sure: we had only one Sindbad in the apartment until now, but now we have two…’ Suddenly I was full of envy: how come that some women were able to look at factual truths so unsophisticatedly. One man or two men: it’s just a quantitative question for them. If they didn’t need two, one of them would be left out in the cold. She eyed Sindbad, standing stock still, up and down, almost as shamelessly and openly as an old lecher feasts his eyes on a good sort. ‘How good-looking your twin brother is. Are you not afraid of my seducing him?’ asked my Bunny mingling eyes with me. Then added: ‘If you are, you’ll have to digest the venom of your spleen.’

‘Well, you see, Monkey, your problem is that you have got eyes, but you cannot see… – I grumbled to myself. – Do you want to seduce a Frankenstein, you dumb board?’  Namely I was horrified when I looked at Sindbad, let’s call him so for amicability’s sake. Seemingly he was like me. Furthermore, he was dressed precisely so much as me, only his bow-tie was not black, but sea-blue. During the last months I brought him to life again and again, five times or more, and he had scars on his face at different places. But they were not scars.  I resurrected him, let him live for a little while, but then I dispatched him back into the underworld, and this happened repeatedly each time under different circumstances: sometimes I had resurrected him from a crypt, sometimes from a pit at a construction site, and left some time for his organs to regenerate. He came to life, gathered flesh as a distillery pig, then went back into the grave, shriveled up again, rotted away, depending on the circumstances under which he had to return. So it is quite possible that the roughness of his skin was the consequence of the fact that I, his creator, did not work with due humility and precaution: I was always in a hurry when I made him get a human shape, so he scarcely had the time to regenerate properly, some of his muscles probably did not develop in synch with each other, in all likelihood that was the reason of the unpleasant protuberances on his skin that looked as scars on the face… Well, it doesn’t matter, now it had no extraordinary importance. What was important was that Monkey found this face engaging. Certainly women like big and rough masculine faces… The rougher the better. My grim thoughts were interrupted by the upstart’s voice crackling impatiently:

‘I am Sindbad’.

‘No, my dear friend, you are just my creation’.

I tried to sober down Sindbad with my sober reply, and then I started slowly circumambulating him with my hands joined behind my back. I wanted to learn this way, without being noticed, if there was a keyless machine or something on his back because seemingly he could only reel off that ‘I am Sindbad’ stuff all the time. But before I managed to get around him, he threw out his left arm and administered a sound box on my ear so skillfully that I immediately found myself among the dancing girls, and landed directly in the fair-haired dear one’s lap. Everything reeled before my eyes, my little dear’s face reeled, her brown braided and small pear-like nipples also reeled, and as ripe as the wine hung down almost into my mouth, because her pink dressing gown had opened in front, and when I was conchie again, I just felt that the fair-haired dear one and Monkey were wiping my brow on the sofa, and pressed a cold knife-blade to my head to stop the lump growing behind my ears. When I summoned up my nerves a little, I stood up and stared at Sindbad. He just stood in the doorway as if rooted to the spot. He looked as a politician who just heard the news that her mother had died: there was nothing in him that would show any sensibility. But there was more than impassivity in his look - or rather less? His stiff eyes expressed emptiness. I would not be delighted at all if I looked the same as my double.

‘So, you two stereotype Sindbads, what are we supposed to do now I ask you?’ tried to speed up the flow of the matters the dumb and blind Monkey. ‘Who is real, and who is the fake?’

This unfortunate dumb bird took the whole thing as a joke without having the slightest idea that it was bloody serious. Besides she was a rotten observer, too, once she was unable to make a difference between the two of us. And what does fake mean?  The other one wasn’t a fake either, but just an invented figure. But now I had no time for philosophizing. I nipped up a chair standing at the dining table with one hand, and with a stretched motionless arm pointed with it at the door. It always worked in the pub. Thus I often made even Hussar officers fly if they went against me or swaggered. And how do you think the other reacted? He, too, stepped doggedly to the table, took up a chair and did the same. We stared at each other with sparkling eyes. And then hell broke loose. I don’t know who made the first move, but in a moment we were knocking and thrashing each other as we could with our chairs. Perhaps at first I bashed him on the conk and laid one on him, for he was the first to hit the floor, but so it appeared that he was bidding defiance to the world because he sprung up so frighteningly quickly as if his muscles were made of steel or rubber. He shinned me. I felt such a sharp twinge that I thought lightning had hit down on me, and I almost swallowed my tongue. It was for the second time this day that I lurched back into my Blondie’s lap who considered my approaching her repeatedly already too much and rude, so she pushed me away and flew screaming out of the room in the press of the fight accompanied by the non-stop yammering of the two dancers and Monkey.

‘These crazy nuts will demolish my apartment!’ yelled Monkey.

Then when it was again my turn to lie prostrated on the floor at the sofa, all of a sudden I heard an old man’s trembling voice. This was Monkey’s old father who dived out of the picture, staggered to his feet with some difficulty as a dwarf that was smaller than minced meat; his rakish moustache drooped sadly. How he had aged, I wondered. With an aching middle he started picking the splinters of the glass having covered his own picture, and turning on his waterworks said complainingly: ‘Why, Mr. Kandúr, we are having hard times these days, are we not? They do not let even the dead rest in peace.’

‘Life is tough, old sport!’ I answered. ‘There’s no peace nowadays nowhere, only in fairy tales. And sure you won’t find any if you are prying to boot and leaning out of the picture because you want to see things better. So don’t be amazed if you also get involved…’

The little man, hardly eight inches in size, said in his thin whinny voice: ‘But I am already dead, Mr. Kandúr…’

‘It’s not easy to get off the treadmill once you are in, old sport…’

Then the old man cried something like ‘Here’s the end of the world!’, and jumped to the best of his ability and hid himself behind one of the legs of the sofa. At the same time I heard something swoosh, and jerked my body to the right. The old Gothic dining chair scratched my arm and then went to pieces on the floor. I took the opportunity, snatched one of the massive legs of the broken piece of furniture, and using it as a broadsword, took it with both of my hands, lifted it and pounded it down on Sinbad’s head. A loud crack, and the chair’s leg – snapped! It made Sindbad silly for a moment, but he took it easy! My God, what kind of a monster had I pulled out of the grave? Any other decent one would have passed to the other world after such a blow, but it was just child’s play for him.  I was reaching and taking already another chair’s leg with both hands, but it was not as good as the previous one, for it was full of sharp splinters after it had been had broken, so I lifted this piece of wood above my head pretty hopelessly and disappointed. Sindbad, the rogue, bidding defiance to the world turned and looked at me, and then I had the feeling that a spark appeared in his eyes – and at the next moment we both started laughing. We laughed and laughed, more and more uproariously because as far as I was concerned this was the only way for me to exonerate from all the stress that I had suffered from so far. Physically I am awfully strong, and I am not afraid of anyone as a rule, but my nerves were not made of ropes, and I was already on edge because of all this razzle-dazzle and being often in my cups in the pubs.

‘Let’s… ha-ha-ha… let’s decide… ha-ha-ha… by some other means who is the strongest!’ suggested Sindbad after he had managed to get a word in.

‘Okay!’ I agreed at once without thinking the whole matter over.

‘Monkey, you may come in and bring the girls with you! Let them ask a day-off from the music hall because they’re going to play he-re!’ said Sindbad pronouncing the last word in syllables.

Monkey entered with a questioning look. We glanced at each other and then, as her eyes wandered over to Sindbad, her mouth produced a half-smile, and she prudishly dropped her eyes as if she knew something that I didn’t.

‘Where are the girls?’