Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“We have arrived!” Salminen was infused with new life. “But after such adventures! A real dacoit and a full-blown murder with a fresh corpse. Give us something to drink and we will tell you everything.”

“I only have tea in a thermos. The water is foul here. It’s ghastly even for washing.”

“Give us tea at least. And I was dreaming of a glass of whiskey with ice,” he sighed.

“Where would ice come from? From this blast furnace? Here even I want to cry for myself and my stupidity,” she said with rueful jocularity. She led them between the cottages into a tent that glowed inside with a honey-colored shimmer. Its walls were distended like the gills of fish thrown up on shore.

She walked in front of them. It seemed to Istvan that she carried herself like a more mature woman. She had lost weight. Only the hair he so loved, covered with a light, flat cap woven of straw, seemed more richly alive, took on a fiery sheen against the white of her apron. She was beautiful in this lassitude; even her loose apron of starched linen could not hide the contours of her body. He knew that body — knew it intimately — and now it seemed distant, unattainable.

“As you predicted, professor,” she said as she poured the tea into mugs that had been set into the sand and covered with a napkin, “the course of the disease is different here, and much more aggressive. The mechanical irritation caused by grains of sand accelerates the formation of pus. Everyone here is infected.”

“By what path?” The professor looked around, but saw only one chair and a box serving as table. He huffed resignedly and seated himself on the ground. “As usual, their own fingers?”

“Fingers. The edges of mothers’ skirts. They rub their own eyes with them when they cry as well as the children’s. Well, and the big flies. I think the strain of bacteria may also have a more active mutation. It must be checked in the hospital. For the time being I’m teaching a few willing villagers how to assuage the symptoms; I can’t call it treatment.”

“And how are you feeling?” He inclined his head, fanning himself with his crumpled linen hat as if it were a succulent leaf.

“Well,” she murmured coolly. “Very well by now.”

“Do you have specimens?”

“I have some prepared. I rather thought you would be coming.”

“I will tell you now what happened to us on the way. First a deluge. Surely it rained here?”

“Yes, but the rain evaporated before it touched the ground.”

I will not find a moment to talk with her if she does not want to help me. How to get rid of this jabbering old man, Istvan thought. He was close to despair. Stealthily he intercepted a glance and asked her, begged her with his eyes.

“Where should I bring the things?” the driver called from the road.

“Here. Will you stay overnight?” she asked.

“That depends on the weather.” The professor shifted, rose, brushed off his sandy hands, and turned on the radio. “I must show them what to unload or the simpletons will not bring in the cases that are most important to me.” He went out reluctantly into the sun, slowly pulling on his droopy hat. Now, Istvan thought. Before the music draws gawkers.

“I must talk with you.”

“Good. Later,” she said almost unwillingly.

“Surely I have a right to know.”

“Indeed you have.” She smiled bitterly. “If you care to.”

“Why were you avoiding me?”

She sat with her darkly tanned legs and sandaled feet extended, burrowed deeply into the white sand that glittered like shattered glass. She hung her head and said nothing.

“I telephoned. You were never there. Did you get my letters and telegrams?”

“I got them.”

“What does this mean? What has separated us? Speak to me. Please.”

She raised her dark glasses wearily. Now he could see that her eyes were very pale and ringed with deep shadows.

“A child. Yours.” She hastily corrected herself: “Ours.”

The voices of those carrying the cases and the professor’s remonstrations could be heard close to the tent. Istvan was stunned and silent.

“How did that happen? After all, you said yourself…” he whispered helplessly after a moment.

Music — the chirp of the flute and the moaning of two-stringed violins — filled the tent and, echoing off the canvas, wandered around the village. The driver carried in a long box; fortunately he backed into the tent, for Terey’s face, like a mirror, reflected his shock and despair.

The professor was kneeling, searching for keys to the padlocks. “I have a surprise for you here,” he began. The radio standing beside him wailed plaintively.

Terey rose from the ground suddenly and made his way toward the doorway. He felt the force of the sun with all his body, as if he had been drenched with boiling water. He moved forward, squinting. He took a quick breath and smelled the fusty odor of the open cottages, the smoke of fires burning low. He passed little shops with jars of colorful sweets and hanging bunches of dusty red pepper strips. Two boards propped on empty gasoline drums, and there was a market stall; a leaky roof of stalks had been patched together to cover it. Grains of sand rode on the wind, tumbled from roofs, beat him in the face, and roamed around his skin like ants.

I’ve taken a hit…he dragged his pain behind him as a wounded animal, fleeing, carries the bullet that has struck him. He had been appalled when he saw her defenseless in the ruthlessly denuding Indian sun. Nothing could be hidden here; she would be given away. They would not be able to keep silent. She must be taken from here, she must go to Bombay or Calcutta. Already you want to be rid of her, he accused himself, and you have not even gotten her back. No, no, he defended himself as he waded in the soft, sinking sand, his feet swollen and burning from the heat. Get rid of it while it is still possible, the coward in him whined. But that, he remembered, was against the law. A doctor who agreed to perform the procedure would be a criminal. They must be prepared for everything, even for blackmail. All at once he was terrified as he saw images of curettes not disinfected, specula wiped with pocket handkerchiefs, turbans, hairy faces, unwashed hands, and self-confident dilettantes who bought not only their practices but often their diplomas as well.

You would be risking her health if not her life. It is wrong; you have no right to push her into this. Be brave enough to see her through it. She has demanded nothing from you, after all, and you are already looking for faults in her, accusing her. Speak now, blurt out what you have to say: I love you, I love you…

He drew himself erect. His face was tight with anger. He felt as if he had been slapped in the face. No! No! I have the courage to repeat to all the world what I whispered with my face in your hair, when we enfolded each other in the darkness and I was one with you: Margit, I love you. It will be as you wish.

The sand was grinding under his feet with a dry, unpleasant biting sound. The entire plain was gradually shifting, alive with dust, enveloped in a fine drizzle of grains flying on the wind.

“She must feel that I am beside her,” he whispered. “But why did she say nothing? Why did she hide it from me?”

When in the evening he managed to get Margit out for a walk among the dunes, under a sky full of fire like the mouth of a gigantic furnace, he repeated the question. She turned her face toward him; it was covered by her black glasses.

“And what would you have thought of me?” she said bitterly, even a little contemptuously. “A doctor, and I didn’t know? Those would have been your first words. I’m an adult. I know what I’m doing. I had to deal with it myself. I didn’t want to involve you.”