Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Did you hear? Amnesty in Hungary!”

The professor had been too preoccupied to have any attention to spare for the news. “I was waiting for a weather report,” he confessed. “I did not even hear the dispatches. Is it important?”

How to explain it to him?

The driver announced that he had arranged for beds, taken linen from the vehicle, and hung mosquito netting. The owners of the cottage had voluntarily vacated it and moved in with neighbors, as Salminen had predicted.

The orderly reached for the pigeons. The feathers yielded softly to the plucking; the skin was torn away. The fingers stuck to the spongy meat as if it were clay.

“Throw them away,” the professor ordered. “They stink. Take the tinned meat and make tea. We will go to the shore to see if the river has fallen.”

The street was swarming with people. Flutes chirped; measured slapping brought moanings from a drum. They looked out from the cottage. The body of the policeman, wrapped in a sheet, was being carried to the shore for burning.

Terey lay covered with mosquito netting, feeling under his back the thick plaited ropes stretched across the frame of the peasant bed. Time after time a reeling flash of distant lightning could be seen through the open door.

“There will surely be good weather,” the driver said to reassure the professor before mumbling “Good night” and beginning to chuff and whistle in his sleep.

They left the door open to create an illusion of moving air. The night noises were disturbing. Istvan heard a loud tread: something passed by with a slow step and scraped against the door frame until flakes of dried clay fell off. In the fitful glare of lightning he made out the long black snout of a pig scratching itself. It moved on a step and took a long piss, snorting with satisfaction. The voices of cicadas pealed, piercing as alarm bells. The villager singled out to be the guard walked around the Land Rover, coughing and muttering. The river hummed below them. Mosquitoes on the screen sang their threnody of hunger, begging for a drop of blood.

The white-draped form that had made its mournful way to the river bank haunted him. Trailed by shrill dirges, it had taken the shape of a phantom. In the evening, when they had gone down to the water, the pyre was already going out. The black, rushing river was swallowing the shining red scales of fire. Two peasants, hunched over, were raking up the unburned branches with rods; a handful of sparks flew toward the low sky.

A policeman. Yesterday he had ridden out on his horse, swaggering, certain of his power, with a gun, with comrades, and in a moment his ashes would whiten the muddy current. He had been, and now he was no more. And his wife still did not know that she was a widow. She was putting the children to sleep, squabbling with her neighbors, perhaps daubing the edge of her ear with perfume or buying a prosperous future from a traveling fortuneteller.

The wounded man was sitting in front of his cottage, resting against the wall. An oil lamp standing on the ground threw a wavering yellow glow on the bottom of his face and the cross of adhesive tape on his gaunt chest. It seemed to be marking out the target for a bullet. He did not feel the mosquitoes that bit him and then, satiated, sizzled in the flame of the lamp. The policemen converged on the village for the night. Their horses whinnied close at hand: it was a homelike, familiar sound. “Do you know”—the driver, an old soldier with an affinity for weapons, had mulled over the day’s events that evening—“that when that bitch escaped, she took the dacoit ’s gun?” There had been more wonder in his voice than condemnation.

And I am running away to Margit. I am living, I am breathing in the hope of meeting her. If the river falls…Not Ilona, not the children; the one I would will to come to me is the red-haired girl. A few months ago I did not know her; if she had been in Australia, I would not even have known of her existence. In India, too, we might not have met. He felt a stabbing pain at the thought. How has it happened that she is closer to me than anyone else? Not to know her — it would be as if she had died, or as if she had never been. He felt despair in this wandering on the brink of sleep, then smiled as he thought, If I had not known her, I could not have longed or suffered. The bulletin from Budapest repeated itself: the freed prisoners took their rumpled clothes, sprinkled with shining flakes of camphor, out of bags and looked doggedly, inquisitorially at their troubled guards: “Well — and who defended socialism, you or we?”

And into the well that was the prison yard, with its sharp odor of tar and privies, the intoxicating aroma of summer was bursting. The whizzing of automobiles, the grating of tramways, the hallooing of children, was beating against the wall topped with barbed wire, into the windows covered with rusting tin baffles, through the chinks open to a sky full of twittering tongues. The breath of free life filled the air. One could walk, not only three paces from the next man, but as many as one liked. A scraping of the gates and one’s vision reached to the bridges over the Danube, the burnt castle on the high bank of Buda, the innumerable lights spread wide, wide as arms that want to embrace the recovered capital, and more: the homeland.

Whom will they set free? Everyone? He thought of the journalists and writers he knew who had been arrested. He was saddened at the thought that he would not be there to share their joy. No doubt someone would telephone, and Ilona would answer, “Istvan has been at the mission in India for a year.”

Tomorrow I will see Margit. No: there is nothing more important. I am not a good husband; a feeling of guilt suffused his heart, and the words took on a new tenor, as if someone standing by had said, He is not a good Hungarian, he cannot be trusted. With relief he recognized Ferenc’s voice, with its tone of obliging readiness. He breathed deeply, and in spite of his remorse and rancor peace returned, for he knew he had only been dreaming.

Morning began with the plodding of buffalo, the groanings of a herd streaming with watery mud. The peasants were driving the animals from the miry, flooded river banks to the meadows.

Istvan shaved with his head at a slant so as to see the edge of his cheek in the mirror, which gave off such a glare that the sun itself, the source of the brilliant weather, seemed to pulse from it. The little band of children would not leave him. Thin girls dandled big-bellied tots, bracing them on their hips. They chattered like sparrows and flicked away the flies that crawled on their parted lips and wide eyes. The villagers brought the men cheese and milk; they were too dignified to accept payment.

The river had receded visibly, leaving a bright silver strip of thin silt more than a dozen kilometers long. Two boys in water up to their knees were sounding the stream in front of them with poles, shouting to keep up their courage. Their reflections were chopped by a murky wave and snatched away by the rapid current.

Inserting plucked branches with tufts of quivering leaves into the river bottom, they marked out a new ford. A lane as wide as the Land Rover appeared behind them, lined by the branches, which swayed with the current. The vehicle would have to roll down onto the river bed, turn upstream almost in the center of the freshly deposited, hard-packed sandbar in order to reach the shale sill a hundred meters on, and travel over the shale to the other bank. The chauffeur, wading in the turbid water, scrutinized the route.

“I will try to drive through.”

But the professor preferred to wait until noon, and ordered that two pairs of oxen be prepared in case the engine died. The villagers had already transferred the baggage to the other bank, pulling it from each other’s hands, making a game of moving the vehicle’s contents. Terey entrusted a bundle of clothing to a little boy, and he himself swam with the current. Two young fellows set off after him, pounding the water, but could not catch up. The river had a yellowish sheen; the bathing was refreshing.