Deep in the Queen

An erotic historical picaresque novel by Gábor Szappanos

(A synopsis)

The “manuscript” of the novel has been found in a big library of the capital after an eighty year of encryption. (To encrypt it was the instruction of a “fabled author,” who can be only Gyula Krúdy although his name is never mentioned. On the other hand, the book is such a literary fiction that never could have been written by Krúdy). Briefly, the story is the following: the writer, who calls himself Gyula Kandúr (Julius Tomcat), is just having his lunch at Majmunka’s house, when all of a sudden another Sindbad shows up, who is a sort of Frankenstein and existed only in Kandúr’s imagination so far. The two doubles initiate a fight. A big hassle is started, but none of them is able to overcome the other, so they decide to come to an agreement: let a “who has a longer wind” test tell who the real Sindbad of the two is. The winner will be him. And the test is the following: 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 the two counterparts, with the help of a flying carpet, take a flight to the city of Petra some 2,000 years earlier. They found themselves in the middle of an orgastic evening party. They were captured by two guards of the king who needed still 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 speed (make happy)till dawn the wife of the impotent king, the other — the goddess of the city who has the shape of a black cubical stone placed in front of the gates to the nether world in the sanctuary. Kandúr will have to rejoice with the queen, Sindbad with the cubic stone goddess.

The description of the love-making with the queen: it lasts for an atrociously (sanguinarily) long time, for about five hours, and is filled with a continuous internal fight demanding Kandúr to have a very long wind. Viz. if he is unable to “perform well”, he will be thrown down into the deepest pit of the cemetery, where he is going to meet his death. (The cubic stone goddess closes the aperture of the cemetery pit, and the nether world starts under the pit). During their love-making the queen opens her heart and soul to Kandúr, retells the strange and curious secrets of the city, and as a matter of fact that is the essence of the novel. It turns out from the queen’s words that the city has been in the magic power of a Persian magician (he is the King)for twenty years, and made the good inhabitants of the Nabateus Petra sexmaniacs. The ugly cubic stone goddess is also the magician’s work, for earlier it was the Goddess of Beauty, and her beautiful statue stood in the main square of the city. Then the queen, who starts liking (perhaps loving) Kandúr more and more as a woman, puts him wise to some secrets. She tells him that it is immaterial whether he “performs” well or not, because he will get into the pit at all events. But if he follows her instructions, he can escape from there together with his companion via the nether world. But as a favor in return she asks him to utter the proper magical words at the proper places of the nether world to stop the magic power of the king and magician in the city.

And so it happens. Despite the fact that Kandúr had enough wind, he was thrown into the deep pit where he meets Sindbad, and they start their way down into the nether world, because according to the most detailed instructions of the queen that was the only way to delivery and freedom. (This nether world was also created by the magician, and actually it is an exact copy of the city above, where the dead of the upper city “live” their “life of dead” as souls…). Here our heroes will again come across most exciting and interesting adventures and phenomena, but finally they manage to escape, and again with the help of the flying carpet, and the magic words betrayed by the queen.

But it is not the end yet: they do not start getting home (to Hungary) in panic, but after some rest that they spent on the top of a mountain somewhere around there, they fly back on the flying carpet to Petra to learn what happened in the city after it had been “liberated.” (The king and magician was successfully stripped of his magic power, more than that, thanks to Kandúr, of his “life” as a dead in the nether world, too). There was already an earth-quake on the top of the mountain, the two Sindbads could hardly escape from it, and an earth-quake meets them in Petra, too. And the last blow that shocks the two heroes, who were watching the events from above: instead of being thankful and happy for their freedom and liberation from the black-art and demonry of the magician, the inhabitants of the city start fighting against each-other, and kill the king’s all men, servants and agents, chopping up this way the whole city. Our heroes, horrified, must watch helplessly as the queen is being stoned to death… But the crazy killers are not able to finish the massacre, because it is ended by the earth-quake. After it is over, the whole city is dead… That is THE END of the story (but they remain alive…)

The DEEP IN THE QUEEN is a fictitious pseudo Krúdy-novel, which speaks not only about a series of exciting adventures, but is full of philosophical, mystical, fabulous, magical, postmodern, ansurd and Thousand and one Nights elements — told by means of the traditional fiction. And the end of the novel is a bitter analogue of human wickedness, and of the many situations known from history and politics. (There are lots of nations that do not know what to do with their re-won freedom. We can come across many such examples in the history of the near past of Eastern Middle Europe. E.g. the results of the Hungarian change of systems in 1989 were similar).

Peter Ortutay