Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

It seemed to Istvan that the silly game with the box had broken the ice. The atmosphere changed and the woman brought an earthenware vessel with cool sour milk.

“Are you going to drink this?” Terey asked the professor uneasily. “Aren’t you afraid of brucellosis?”

“They give it, we drink it, and then take sulfaguanidine.”

He swallowed the cool, clotted liquid with relish, and Terey and the driver followed his example. Only the orderly waved his hands as if to say, No, thank you.

“He knows there are such things as bacteria and viruses,” the professor said sympathetically. “Yet he does not recognize the simple truth that what is crucial is to maintain a balance in the organism, to keep up its ability to fight off infectious agents. Excessive sterilization, inordinate hygiene, take away our resistance. And one must live amid contagion, one must breathe, eat, touch. Do not look at me that way. I guarantee that if the expectation of sickness itself does not bring on aches and pains, nothing will happen to you. Well, little ones, eat.”

He encouraged the children with gestures, and at once they began scraping the biscuits with their teeth like squirrels, looking intently at him.

The professor took a small box from his pocket, pushed aside a leather flap, and ran his finger over its contents until a shrill, breathless jazz rhythm erupted. The children gazed at him as if they were bewitched. Even the prone figure raised itself on one elbow and a gleaming bronze head with a few wisps of grizzled hair looked out from under the gray sheet.

“A Japanese transistor radio. They have better ones than we have. I bought it in Hong Kong.”

Shadows darkened the doorway and two policemen came in. They wore shorts, shirts with sleeves rolled up, and red turbans, and stooped slightly as they crossed the threshold. Then they stood erect, one leaning on his rifle. The other, wearing sunglasses and with thumbs thrust into his burlap belt, which had twisted under the weight of his Colt revolver, was trying to understand whom he was dealing with and what attitude to assume. Should he treat the unannounced arrivals as intruders, take a hard line from the start, or — since, after all, they were white foreigners — be polite to them? The professor was still amusing the children by rolling the box. The police did not speak the ceremonial words of greeting, so no one welcomed them.

The officer squatted with a reflective air and when the box rolled near his feet, pushed it adroitly. “Who are you, gentlemen?” he began. “What do you want here?”

“I am with the UNESCO mission from Agra. We want to wait out the rain.”

“But why here?”

“Because fate willed it,” the professor smiled, and the policeman nodded comprehendingly.

“Is one of you a doctor?”

“I am.”

“We have two wounded. Are you willing to treat them?”

“I am an eye doctor, but I will do what can be done. Where are they?”

“Not far from here, but we will not go in the automobile. We are on horseback.”

“I am well able to walk.” The professor rose and directed the orderly to take his medical bag. To the disappointment of the others in the room, he put the radio, which was still playing, into his pocket and went out in front of the cottage.

“You will go with me? Do you want to go in such mud? You are not obliged to,” he pointed out.

“Certainly we will go together. This is interesting.”

He bent down and stepped across the threshold, where the box of biscuits had come to a stop. They walked in a stream of noisy music that lured the curious from the neighboring cottages. Istvan surveyed the havoc the rain had caused. The water was washing over the shoulder of the road, cheerful, coffee-colored, gleaming. They passed brimming floodplains fringed with bristling sticks, tufts of torn-up grass, and leaves as thick as if they had been cut from linoleum. Inebriating smells rose from the fiercely steaming earth. Clouds trailed over the sky like rapid chalk strokes. The storm had swept by; its traces were barely visible. The sun blazed and the angry roar of the swollen river could be heard, though only distantly.

“Where was he wounded?” the professor asked.

“In a tree,” the officer answered gravely.

“But I am asking, where is the wound?” He pointed his open hand toward his chest.

“In his head. He is unconscious. But he speaks continuously, so surely his condition is not very bad.”

“And the other man?”

“A peasant, stabbed with a knife. Not serious.”

Outside the village they waded into the tall, streaming grass. Quail darted from under their feet with a loud sputtering of wet wings.

“Pity I did not bring my shotgun.” The Swede’s eyes followed the birds gliding among the bushes.

“When were they wounded?” Istvan asked.

The orderly translated. “In the evening and later at night.”

“And why were people still shooting this morning?”

The policeman looked gloomily at the counselor, then shrugged.

“We did not know how many of them there were. Best to be careful.”

“And he was alone?”

“Alone.”

“You have him?”

The policeman walked quickly. The legs of his short pants, wet from the grass, brushed loudly against each other. The mud on the path made sucking noises under their feet.

Finally the officer spoke. “No.” He almost spat out the word. “He got away.”

“Does he have a weapon?”

“Only a knife. We will get him and take him before the court. He will be sentenced to hard labor. It is worse than death.”

Clouds of droning mosquitoes hovered over a swamp overgrown with reeds and rushes. They saw a few horses with coats darkened by the recent downpour and saddles covered with transparent plastic that sparkled in the sun. A dark gray cottage with a flat roof surrounded by a thick, low wall of flax looked from a distance like a bunker among banana trees with young leaves in a luminous green glow. Farther on they could see a mango tree, tall and spreading, with a white trunk and roots like ropes growing into the earth.

Beside the horses stood a policeman with a rifle slung on his shoulder, barrel down. A man sat against a wall as though he were a puppet, with bare legs wide apart and straight out. In the middle of his chest a bandage was held in place by a cross of adhesive. An old woman crouched beside him, holding up a copper vessel from which she poured a stream of water onto her hand and lapped at it, then after a moment sprayed it from her mouth into the wounded man’s face. Wet hair hung on his forehead; his eyes were closed in a lassitude like death.

“Not even bloody,” the officer said belittlingly, passing the man on his way to the door. A policeman lay on a piece of oilcloth; two more sat by him. Squeezed into a corner, hunched over with her arms around her knees, sat a young girl with fiery, wrathful eyes. Her hair was thick and disheveled; her deep bosom, hardly lighter than her arms, could be glimpsed through her torn bodice. It was clear that she had been working nude to the waist in the fields.

The professor bent over the man lying on the oilcloth. His head was wrapped in a thick bandage black with congealed blood. The doctor raised one eyelid, looked into the eye, then lifted a limp hand. He felt the pulse and, as if dismayed, let go. The hand fell onto the clay floor with a muted bumping sound.

“He is beginning to stiffen.”

The orderly set about fastening the flaps of the bag with the sign of the Red Cross.

They left the house with its smell of a cooling fireplace and wet clay. Bristling clusters of dried red pepper pods hung by the doorway, rattling lightly at each breath of wind.

“He has already died?” the officer asked incredulously.