Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Crazed with love: the words sank into Istvan’s mind. He too was insane, evading obligations and trying to find Margit against her will. Love…with equal ease it creates and destroys.

It was well that the policeman had not fired. Terey knew he would have had to throw himself on the man. He breathed deeply and slowly recovered his equanimity. Would I so passionately have taken the part of the girl who had trodden on all the bonds of family? She was following a voice that I know. She is wild — he thought, but the word took on an unaccustomed meaning: genuine. She had the courage to be herself.

“What will you do with him?” He pointed to the wounded man whose mother was holding him up. “He ought to go to a hospital.”

“Travel on horseback, and even more by tonga, would be bad for him. In any case, we need to question him,” the officer said, leaning toward the man. “Would you like for us to take you away?”

“Yes!” the mother replied vehemently. “Save him!”

“No, I will wait here.”

“You want to wait for her?” cried the outraged old woman. “She will be back, but with him. She ran away to him. Do you hear? She will be back to watch while he kills you. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” he whispered. He moved his limp fingers, which were half-buried in the wet ground.

“We cannot take him, then,” the officer sighed with relief. “He does not want that, so he does not go.”

“I will let you have the vehicle if it is needed,” said the professor.

Fear seized Istvan: would this be the end of the expedition? Would they go back without his ever seeing Margit again? If only the officer would end the haggling! Let the wounded man stay where he was.

“After all, he has hardly any blood on him,” the officer persisted.

“The blood collects inside, in the pleura.” The professor swung his phonendoscope. “There may be complications.”

“There may, but there may not,” Istvan said so eagerly that he was embarrassed at the sound of his own voice, which showed no regard for the injured man. “What could you do for him in a hospital?”

“I might try pressure to slow the movements of the lung. But the clots that form there themselves stop up the wound and create pressure.” He reached for the orderly’s bag and Terey, certain now that they would travel on, drew a long breath. “I will leave him a little codeine.” He dug out a small bottle. “Tell her to give him a couple of drops with water if he begins to cough. He must not lie down. He must sit just so.”

The mother squeezed the bottle in her hand and looked distractedly at them. She had one arm around her son, who seemed to be dozing with his head drooping helplessly.

“Shall I show you the way back, gentlemen?” the officer asked.

A policeman held two horses, which were stamping and jerking at their reins. The departure of the rest of the patrol had made them restless.

“Thank you. We will find it ourselves.”

The officer wrestled with the horse for a moment with one foot in the stirrup before he jumped into the saddle and, with a casual salute, rode off at a trot.

When they came to the wet meadows, Istvan turned around, casting a farewell look at the pair huddled by the reddish wall of the cottage. The mother crouching by the limp body of her son he could imagine to be a cruel mockery of a Gothic Pieta.

The professor reached into his pocket and reflexively turned on his radio. But the boisterous voice of the saxophone blared like sacrilege in the vastness of the open landscape — among the tall grasses and thorn trees, the swelling choir of dissonant voices, the ringing and rasping of millions of insects with drying shells, now saved from the flood and praising the sun. He turned it off.

“Do you think she will return to her husband?” Terey mused. “What is he hoping for?”

“That his wound and his defenseless condition will arouse her caretaking instinct. That in the end she will come to the one who most needs her help. He calculates wrongly, for his mother is with him. That is enough to soothe her conscience. She went after the other man because he is lonelier. The whole world is against him. So he will prize her all the more, and they will cling to each other all the more tightly in the night. They are condemned to be together. As long as he lives, until they shoot him, she will have him exclusively to herself as she could have no other man.”

“And apart from that, he is a man,” Istvan laughed, “at least judging from what the old woman said. No ox was ever so numbed from work as her husband.”

“Must a loving, faithful husband always arouse compassion?” The professor lit a cigarette. “Somehow I cannot sympathize with him.”

“He betrayed the other man, and from greed. You could find a hundred justifications, but neither you nor I have any sympathy for him, because we approve of honest struggle and, like all the world, we don’t like informers. Say what you like, he was tempted by the bounty on the head of a boyhood friend. Sometimes it’s necessary to use the services of Judas. Then one pays him, but doesn’t shake his hand or sit at the table with him.”

“Are you trying to convince me, then, that we are both on the side of that robber?” the professor asked reprovingly.

“No. But we do not approve of the axiom that the end justifies the means. Though it may achieve results, it destroys those who apply it.”

“Do you prefer knightly gestures? Do you believe in the duel between the transgressor and the noble policeman who must put himself at risk, as in Graham Greene’s novels?” the professor teased him through a nimbus of cigarette smoke. “And could you dare to say, I never betrayed anyone? I do not say for money, but for position, to avoid a conflict, for peace and quiet? Have you never contradicted the truth? I am old now and I can claim the privilege of being candid. In another sense, of course, I am not much better than that Hindu whom fate so promptly repaid. He can be happy that his account with himself is settled; our sins still cry out for justice.”

“I hate such conversations,” Istvan flared, “because they absolve all wickedness. I may seem a boor to you, but I am on that woman’s side. She has the courage to be herself, to be guided by passion, by her heart.”

“She is carried away by her physical longings.” The Swede threw his cigarette into the grass. “She is thinking from below the belt.”

“She is a woman.”

They walked through the steaming grass without speaking. Large grasshoppers fluttered from under their feet with a rustle of bright red wings; then they fell like dried pods and jangled triumphantly as they sank from sight into the underbrush.

Above the trees the sky blushed rose and the clouds, weightless tulle spread high above them, began to be suffused from below with the deepening colors of the sunset.

“I am hungry,” the professor said at last, in a conciliatory voice. “We must bestir ourselves and cook something.”

“We have the pigeons,” the orderly reminded them.

When they emerged onto the road between the cottages, where groups of half-naked children were dabbling in mud and building a dam, the professor turned on his radio. They heard music, then an English bulletin from New Delhi. They listened curiously. The children did not move away at their approach, but clustered around them and looked importunately into their faces, astonished by the music no less than by the voice from the professor’s pocket.

Suddenly, at the conclusion of the newscast describing the meeting of Premier Nehru with a delegation of Sikhs demanding autonomy; a fight against rampant tigers in northern Vietnam; and a fire on a cotton boat in Calcutta, Istvan heard an announcement from Europe, pushed to the end of the program and condensed to one sentence. Budapest: The government has declared amnesty for political prisoners, claiming abuses by the security service; authoritative sources estimate that approximately four thousand will be freed. Istvan clenched his fists; he wanted to learn more, to hear some commentary. But he was in the middle of Asia and the attention of the listeners was absorbed by Asian affairs, not by what had happened on the other side of the globe in a small country of nine million: Hungary.