«The Hell Rides Of Sindbad, the Beatified» by Gábor 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…