The Hell Rides Of Sindbad, the Beatified

By Gabor Szappanos

So after having consumed two large stuffed cabbages and six small semi-dry greenish white wine spritzers, his favorite, Sindbad leaned back comfortably on the davenport in the only guest room of the inn to die. He put his legs on the ledge and tucked soft pillows under his head. The pub was not accidentally named Deep Cellar because just now the guest room was under the water level of the Danube: on the other side of the carefully closed double window looking at the little court Sindbad saw curious small fries, carps, horn-fish, tench, burbot, common rudd gathering to the light that filtered through the window of Sindbad’s room. As he was observing the fish from beneath his tired eyelashes he had the river in mind and thought of how much it meant to him. It was this old lazy lecher that taught him to lie. The sailor was always favorably inclined to wooing on the bank of the river – once he was able to kiss even a woman philosopher with black teeth above the black water in a hot and motionless summer night in June in the false light of the yellow gas lamps because he did not want to let out anybody of his love that he felt towards the whole world, i.e. all the women. Lies resurged more easily from him by the river because the treacherous waves showed him a bad example: they came and went, unperceived, as if being absent but were really present all the time. Sindbad was also an old Danube, and his lies were like its tattle waves… He loved the river most when it was so silently, almost imperceptibly clacking under his feet as he was walking, absorbed in his thoughts, on the quayside in unmovable summer nights alone or with some ladyship arm in arm – respectively he took to the river when it became wild and ran over its banks; in such case Sindbad was simply so electrified by the fight for survival as by whirling storms or blizzards. In such case he felt as an unworthy bachelor, still heated by a lascivious flush, who got accidentally on Noah’s bark…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Ortutay
• Release date: Mar 24, 2019

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The Hell Rides of Sindbad, the Beatified

by

Gábor Szappanos

A Travelling Novel

Translated from the Hungarian

by

Peter Ortutay

Copyright © Ortutay Péter

Smashwords Edition–2018

Dedicated to Gyula Krúdy’s Spirit

The Floodwater Sailor

‘Why do you want to die, Mr. Sindbad?’

‘I’m tired of life, Vendelin,’ the sailor answered the bald and red-faced publican’s question.

‘But didn’t you once condescend to say that it’s worth living for women, and very much at that, only for them women.’

‘That’s the heart of the matter, Vendelin. For sometimes it happens that it isn’t worth living even for them. That’s why I am going to take a little rest in the Nirvana or Death, if you understand what I mean, my dear Vendelin, and then sooner or later a writer will come to resurrect and create me to be like him. I only wish he would not be a cad because I don’t want to be a bad man in my next life… But unfortunately it’s not me who decides who to make me resurrect… life, death and resurrection is a big adventure, and all the trumps are not in our hands, Vendelin, are they?’

‘Sorry, Sir, but I have not been resurrected by anybody yet, at least I don’t know if this had ever happened to me, I am not good at all these elevated high-brow things, you know, only at wines, so you just tell me please what kind of wine you would like to have at your Last Supper.’

***

So after having consumed two large stuffed cabbages and six small semi-dry greenish white wine spritzers, his favorite, Sindbad leaned back comfortably on the davenport in the only guest room of the inn to die. He put his legs on the ledge and tucked soft pillows under his head. The pub was not accidentally named Deep Cellar because just now the guest room was under the water level of the Danube: on the other side of the carefully closed double window looking at the little court Sindbad saw curious small fries, carps, horn-fish, tench, burbot, common rudd gathering to the light that filtered through the window of Sindbad’s room. As he was observing the fish from beneath his tired eyelashes he had the river in mind and thought of how much it meant to him. It was this old lazy lecher that taught him to lie. The sailor was always favorably inclined to wooing on the bank of the river – once he was able to kiss even a woman philosopher with black teeth above the black water in a hot and motionless summer night in June in the false light of the yellow gas lamps because he did not want to let out anybody of his love that he felt towards the whole world, i.e. all the women. Lies resurged more easily from him by the river because the treacherous waves showed him a bad example: they came and went, unperceived, as if being absent but were really present all the time. Sindbad was also an old Danube, and his lies were like its tittle-tattle waves… He loved the river most when it so silently, almost imperceptibly clacked under his feet as he walked, absorbedly in his thoughts, on the quayside in unmovable summer nights alone or with some ladyship arm in arm. Respectivly, he took to the river when it became wild and ran over its banks; in such case Sindbad was electrified by the fight for survival through whirling storms or blizzards. In such case he felt like unworthy bachelor, still heated by a lascivious flush, who got accidentally on Noah’s Ark…

It happened once, also in spring time but twenty years ago, that he was walking slowly on the quayside towards the Chain Bridge to Monkey in Cat Street. His nose soused by the unhealthy air of the small pubs and halls during the long and dark winter nights was fanned by embalmed odors flowing from the Buda Hills. There was the smell of the wet soil, charcoal and a dash of the scent of the lilies of the valleys in those odors. Sindbad was sniffing the air as a rutting deer in King Mathias’s park of Hüvösvölgy, keeping up his nose high; his blood started sobbing wildly. Whistling a Nyírség  folk song he ambled along the turbid water of the Danube laced with all kinds of river deposits and driftwood islands. Absorbed in his memories, trying the weight of old spring scents in his nose he arrived at the bridge quickly. On the wings of the high-altitude winds the clouds above his head rushed in wild dash – from more sides, to more directions. As he watched them a strange soaring flight caught him. He had the feeling there was no land under his feet. He was afraid of looking up at the bridge. Then he looked anyway, and the left lion was no longer a lion but a maid moving a yellow blue scrubbing brush up and down! Her two breasts bubbled over from her faded grey old jersey and smoothly knocked together as she was pulling the brush back and forth. Her round behind hogged loftily. Her look directed straight into Sindbad’s eyes was somehow very familiar. The Sailor started towards her mesmerized. He went as if wool-gathering and floating above the block-pavement and so was almost run over by a cab. Sindbad continued his way on the bridge and all of a sudden everything started to move: the pillars became female thighs and arms that were wiggling around him, the roundish iron bolts turned into kissing mouths with the taste of strawberry which almost choked him, and the chain bundles were no longer chains but heavy jewels circling alabaster necks. And everything was so familiar… He could feel the fresh scents of this Buda March even in the dining room smelling stale from the cigarettes of Monkey’s boarder dancers where he was paddling Life with this big spoon… But all this was long ago. In olden times even the floods were milder than now… Now Sindbad was thinking of the forthcoming Death, of how stupid the people were. They think that one can die only in an accident, illness or marasmus. But no, one can do it as he is doing it now: without pain and drama. He simply decided to die and that was all. He ordained Vendelin to come to see him at three of dawn, and apologized in advance for the bother the moving of his corpse would cause. Tears streamed forth from Vendelin’s German stamped eyes when he kissed his most loyal guest’s hands to say good-bye.

‘Oh no, Vendelin, don’t do that, life is going on the same as I, and let us not make cheap display of emotion!’

Sindbad continued brooding in the crossfire of the looks of the Danube fish. Anasztázia Dénesfy, the daughter of the ultra-rich vine land owner of Tokaj became demented. In her last days she lumbered her flat with knives, swords and cutlasses because she wanted to defend herself against Sindbad who in her opinion sought her life. (Whereas the truth was that she bugged Sindbad with constant telephoning. This bugging was ended by the sad fact that due to after-sum the Sailor’s telephone was disconnected – after Sindbad had cursed a thousand times Bell’s invention). On every shelf, on the mantle-piece ledge, at her pink slippers with pompons under the bed, in the pockets of her dressing gown, on the umbrella stand in the hall, and suspended above the entrance she had also a cold steel (and a small dagger inlaid with diamonds as a hairpin fixed in her bun) to have something under her hand if Sindbad breaks in on her through the door. In her better moments Anasztázia would prefer the Sailor to marry her, in her worse moments by choice she was ready to stab a knife into his heart saying that Sindbad had scathed her life – because he did not want to marry her. (Sindbad argued that he never ever wanted to marry anybody but this was shallow consolation for her). Fate, however, disposed that once when she was rushing about in the flat as a lunatic, Anasztázia accidentally ran into a sword with which her ancestors cracked the Labantzes  for centuries. She ran into it because the war instrument lay ready for use on the common table at the wall and its grip squared the wall from behind. Anasztázia’s snow white soft belly skin yielded to it but the hard stone wall did not… When Sindbad learnt the death rumor, he remembered how they had been together two years ago, when Anasztázia set out a devil with horns with salty sticks on her pastry plate. A couple of months later somewhat wanly she declared to the Sailor that she had sold herself to the devil in exchange for ten happy years. It was already then that Sindbad as a writer did not like the evocation of the hoofed one very much because he knew that words like pictures had much magical strength and one was by no means allowed to fiddle with them. But at another time Anasztázia feared the evil spirits so much that she hung a small convex mirror on the door outside her flat the purpose of which was to divert the demons intending to penetrate, and there was another concave mirror in the house, too, that was supposed to sniff out the ones that were perhaps in the room already – she explained to Sindbad at his last visit. (The inside mirror did not move at his presence which was interpreted by Sindbad that there was no draught in the apartment, but Anasztázia enlightened him that this meant that Sindbad had not brought with him demons clawing at him that time).

At any rate Sindbad had the feeling that he was also guilty in Anasztázia’s death (he knew very well that women considered it a disaster if men did not marry them and because of this they might even lose their reason), so he was of the opinion that a little purgatory would do him no harm. He did not worry for he knew he would still return to the earth as a human.

At half past two he glanced at the room window, sent a last farewell look straight into the cold eyes of the fish, and died.

He chose the swimming stake for penitence and entrusted Vendelin to make it. The publican was really good at wines only because the wood he selected, as it turned out later, was all wet. The raft made of blocks was wet, the stake logs were also wet, and so were the small sticks used as firelighter. Perhaps the paper was also wet because Vendelin stored everything close to the river where it was impossible to hang out even the cloth, respectively, it was not impossible but it dried hardly. (Anasztázia’s maid Marcsi always lamented on this to Sindbad and said that she often asked her lady to move to the Buda Hills where even the air was better and that would do good for Anasztázia’s weak lungs, too. But her lady allegedly answered the following to her: ‘Silly girl, but there is dewfall in the hills…’ ‘Well, Mr. Sindbad, there’s dewfall also on the riverbank, but I didn’t dare tell her this because in times when even people with a diploma have to shovel snow, I didn’t want to bid defiance to my ma’m’).

At five in the morning Vendelin, the proprietor of the Tabán¹ Deep Cellar lit all the four angles of the floating raft with Sindbad’s corpse on it and put it to the water of the Danube that bloated to a sea. During this activity he continued to talk to the fisherman next door in his slumber cap who threw out a net of his window to get fat fish at the corner of the White Eagle and Greek Street.

The stake was a sticking sort of one because it did not want to get away from the publican for a long time although he egged it to start downwards, towards the original water-course of the Danube. From the Deep Cellar to the Tabán church it hitched in its way all the house-roofs and chimneys – it was like a soak that tottered from one lamp-post to the other. The stake was not burning, it was only smoking, the heat, as it turned out later, scorched only Sindbad’s left toe and his hair. For the time being the smoke circled around the stake and often mixed inextricably with the smoke of the tumbledown chimneys. Sometimes it happened that the roof of the house at which it took some tentative rest all of a sudden sank and left only sporadic bubbles where it had been. At another time it joined a house-roof that was also moving and stemmed not from Tabán, but was brought by the Danube from a faraway town or village. By the way the drifting was not yet very strong there, it took the stake some time to get to the Tabán church; it was already a quarter past ten when it got there. It was not surprising that the raft was stuck by the tower, too. The water reached already the flower ornament of the frontispiece of the church. And as soon as Sindbad’s soul (which similarly to the smoke of the badly burning blocks of wood – was circling so far around the stake as a faithful dog around its master) had heard the Gregorian song of the thin boyish voices coming from the inside of the church, from under the water as if from some diving bell, and spiraling to God, he felt a strong allurement to break away from the stake and to return to his eternal home, the Interstellar Big Conscience Mass, from where by the way he was summoned immediately after he had shaken off his mortal body, and where he had to get to in forty days. But about that later…

The soul that regained the ability of omniscience knew at once that there were no accidents. In the depth of the church now under water a purgatorial Holy Mass was just officiated for the spiritual salvation of a certain lady named Anasztázia Dénesfy. Anasztázia’s father, who in the belly of the Tokaj Mountain had a wine cellar almost as big as a small town was and so big that horse races could be held between the rows of barrels, opened a number of old vintage cobwebby muscatels for Sindbad in his underground empire. It was only twenty minutes before that this gentlemen disembarked from his boat at the shoulder next to the flower ornament, entered the tower through the window, then cautiously fumbled his way down into the church on the ornamented winding staircase carved of wood, so that despite all the difficulties caused by the flood