Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“No. That was certainly my brother. I could swear to it now. We are completely different in character. He was meek, a dreamer. He was easily moved; you know, such a—” he groped for a term—“a poet.”

Miss Shankar tittered and looked Istvan in the eye with an unaffected, childlike smile.

“Oh, I beg your pardon.” The rajah put a hand on Istvan’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to offend you. Anyway, what kind of poet are you, when you are sticking it out at this remote post? You are a good embassy official, and that means something.”

“Thank you for that endorsement.” Terey bowed and the beautiful young woman laughed again, covering the bottom of her face with a silk shawl of iridescent peacock blue. “At least one person appreciates me. In the embassy I still have a reputation for being a poet.”

Still chatting, they went out to the wide stone stairs.

“Won’t you stop in and see us? Grace has been complaining because you do not come.”

“I can’t. I have some work, and I must be worthy of your compliment. Don’t forget: I am an official. May I take either of you anywhere?”

“I have a car.” Miss Shankar placidly gave Istvan her hand. “Thank you.”

“My chauffeur is waiting. Do not forget about us. Come — even tomorrow night. There will be a few people, acquaintances from the club. You ought to look in. People are beginning to say that India has changed you.”

“Yes.” Istvan seized on the point. “Tell them that I have taken up yoga and I concentrate for hours in silence.”

“Really?” the girl marveled, covering her bare arms with the shawl so as not to tan like a peasant woman.

“Yes. Doesn’t it show?” He looked out at the wide square around which cyclists swarmed in colorful wide trousers and untucked shirts, and into the air that quivered with veins of sunlight. He breathed in the smell of dust and heated stone and the light fragrances of girls’ perfumes. For an instant he forgot about his companions and was absorbed in the summer afternoon.

“You really have changed,” she whispered timidly. “And we thought you were in love.”

“No,” the rajah smiled triumphantly. “He was faithful to Grace; he must trust to future incarnations. Well — goodbye!”

He hurried to the large green car. A driver in white leaped out to open the door for him.

In the Austin Mihaly sat with his hands on the steering wheel, wearing an expression of enormous gravity. Three Hindu boys were peeping through the lowered windows. At their request the little fellow solemnly blew the horn. He had learned Hindi in preschool, whole phrases together, and it gave him pleasure when, as he talked with Krishan in the garage, his impatient father asked, “What are you two running on about in there?”

He raised the big, pensive eyes beneath his parted bangs to the counselor, brushed the bangs off his forehead and said:

“Uncle, they don’t know where Hungary is. They think it is so small that there is no point in learning about us.”

“And what did you tell them?”

Sulkily he confessed, “I told them they were stupid. They wanted me to start up the motor, but I didn’t have the key. So I only told them I would toot the horn if they would shout, ‘Hungarians are the smartest nation on earth!’ They shouted and I blew the horn until a lot of people came around.”

They rode along the wide avenue, dazzled by the glare from the glass and nickel of automobiles passing them on the right. Above the fresh dark green of the trees rose clusters of the red flower “Flame of the Forest.” The thin white haze in the sky promised more sunny weather.

“Uncle,” whimpered the little boy, “let’s go to Krishan’s for a little while. I haven’t seen him for four days, for I get a scolding right away if I go away from the embassy. Papa is always in a bad humor now. He says I have to stay home.”

“In a bad humor about what?”

“Because the ambassador comes even at night and shouts at him because there is no answer to his dispatches. Now papa sleeps in his room with the iron door, and mama is angry, too.”

They drove up in front of a building like a gigantic wooden barrel, covered with a bulging striped awning. The stammering, rising roar of a motor had already reached them, and a babel of voices full of delight tinged with fear. A band of children stood in an enclosure formed by a net of ropes secured to steel stakes beaten into the turf. Amid a cluster of bicycles leaning on each other and guarded by a bearded Sikh, vendors squatted with shallow baskets of peanuts, mangoes, and small, candy-sweet seedless grapes on which swarms of flies grazed when they were not waved away with a fan made of horsehair.

“I don’t need a ticket,” Mihaly informed Istvan. “Here is how I will get in.” He said something to an attendant in a white uniform with a wide green sash and scampered upstairs to the gallery.

“What did you say to him?” the counselor asked when they were leaning on the railing and looking into the black pit of worn boards.

“That Krishan is my uncle!” he said impatiently. “Look, he is coming up. He saw us!” The little boy jumped up and down, clapping. “Krishan! Krishan!”

“Be quiet.” Istvan put a hand on the back of the child’s neck, though he knew that Krishan could not hear him over the thundering of the motor.

Krishan, fastened into a suit of gleaming black leather and wearing a silver helmet and rectangular goggles, spun his wheels in the arena, trailing a fleeting blue streak of gasoline fumes. Strips of greenish leather a meter long hung from his arms like a tippet that rose as he gathered speed. The roar intensified. The motorcycle moved faster and faster, in wider and wider circles, until it reached the walls. The vibrating whine grew louder and the machine carried the rider onto the wooden casing of the barrel. The big boards throbbed in a dull bass as he flew around them with greenish wings growing out of his arms. There was a spine-tingling metallic whistle as he rocketed forward. Istvan’s jaw tightened as he remembered the screeching of airborne bombs.

Krishan sped by so quickly that they felt the onlookers’ heads turn to watch him. He leaned far to the side, defying the law of gravity, ever climbing in a spiral toward the edge of the wooden pit. He was already so close that they jerked back their heads when fumes of gasoline exhaust and scalded oil struck them in the face. The whistling leather wings almost lashed them.

Krishan bounced like a pea in a bottle someone was shaking with both hands. It seemed that he would reach the edge and shoot out between the ropes into the fluttering treetops, into the glare, into the sky like a stray comet. Mihaly squealed excitedly, caught up in the madness of the stunt.

Suddenly Krishan jerked his right hand from the handlebars and raised it toward the people as if to salute them. Then he took away the other hand. The motorcycle was hardly touching the ground. From the crowd leaning through the railing came a rapturous howl. Istvan’s throat tightened at the needless bravura; after all, the least tremor — the slightest skipping of the wheels on the boards — and the machine would go out of control. In this situation, at this speed, that would mean certain death.

But Krishan lowered his hands, seized the handlebars as if he were curbing a vicious stallion, and, they saw with relief, began riding down. Applause broke out. People leaned over and shouted into the wooden well, which amplified their voices. They clapped with all their might when he spread his legs, planted himself in the very center of the arena, and raised his head toward them as if surveying with disbelief the height to which he had soared a moment before.

“Krishan! Krishan!” Ecstatic viewers standing in the circular gallery like foliage on a wreath leaned down, shouting rhythmically. He stripped off one black glove and brandished his swarthy open hand amid the blue fumes.