Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Sit down.” Kalman Bajcsy seemed immersed in work. Newspapers open to the pages with economic reports and stock market quotations lay before him; he had underlined some items in red pencil. He remained in his chair, in his shirt sleeves, with his collar open and his tie loose and crooked. He was smoking a pipe; involuntarily he pushed the mouthpiece between two of the buttons on his shirt and scratched his chest with an expression of relief. As was his habit, he left the person he had summoned to his own anxieties, as the confessor leaves a penitent to a moment of concentration so he may discern his hidden faults.

“Terey,” he began carelessly, “you gave me a timely warning that a law prohibiting the transfer of rupees was coming into effect. I failed to take it seriously, I counted on diplomatic privilege; unfortunately, I was asleep at the switch. We are about to go to Ceylon with the minister of trade. I would like to feel free, you understand.”

The counselor nodded sympathetically.

“You spend time among those who may have similar problems: the rajah, that father-in-law of his, the wealthy members of the club. Do you not know someone who could shift a few rupees over to Colombo to be exchanged for pounds?” He looked at Terey from the corner of his eye and sucked on his pipe with smacking noises.

“For a decent fee, of course,” he added cautiously. “Can you do me a service and ask, without mentioning for whom or what the sum in question is? But perhaps you already have such a person within reach.”

“Yes,” Istvan answered in spite of himself. With devilish delight, as if he were pointing the way to a trap, he gave him Chandra’s name, adding, “People I am acquainted with have used his services, and no one has complained.”

“What does he have to do with Ceylon?”

“I don’t know. But he is a man of discretion. Not long ago I heard at a cocktail party that he was asking members of the American embassy staff if one of them were flying to Colombo, because he had a little packet to send. It seemed that he would let others in on profitable transactions.”

He noticed that Bajcsy raised his head and blew a wavering veil of smoke upward.

“So it’s your belief that this Chandra could—”

“I believe nothing,” Terey said firmly. “I am repeating what came to my ear. You know very well, comrade ambassador, that these are business transactions that are carried on face to face. If they were very much talked of, that would mean that the intermediary was not to be taken seriously or that the methods mentioned had been abandoned long before, and were alluded to only for the pleasure of it, like a historic battle a man comes out of without a scratch.”

If Chandra gets him in his clutches, he will square accounts with him. He will repay him for everything. I really don’t know why I gave him Chandra’s name. But perhaps he will not trust him or use his services. He is a free agent.

“Why don’t you ask Ferenc, ambassador? Rather he, I think, than—”

“How do you know I have not asked him?” He leaned over the desk, but added after a moment, “No, Terey, I have not asked him and I will not, because he is too smooth, he gives way too easily. And then I say to myself, Be careful, Kalman, that they do not ease you out without your noticing, while thanks to those obliging fellows who say Yes, yes, you make some blunder that will have you packing your bags and shuffling off to retirement, to the scrap heap. I even like you, Terey, for your scrappiness, for your own interest doesn’t come into it. If you strain at the leash, it’s for our sake”—he tapped his chest with his pipe—“for the sake of our country.”

The state and he are the same, Istvan thought fleetingly, but already I feel that he hasn’t much longer to go. He is at the peak of his career; he will not be a minister, they will transfer him, they will send him somewhere, but a couple of years and then it is the end. For him, retirement will be worse than death. He is beginning to be anxious about what will be left to him when they edge him out, what he will live on. The pension, even the pension given those who have served meritoriously, in relation to his needs, to the verve with which he is accustomed to live, would not seem enough to save him from privation. That situation creates a genuine moral crisis for some of those who were active in our national affairs. When they arrive at a certain age, they reach the ceilings of their careers, and then they become vulnerable to the temptation of fast money: to pluck something, to wrest away something for themselves, to drag it home to the den, to have some independence. If he is planning something, Chandra already has him.

“Perhaps I am bothersome now and then, Terey,” the ambassador said meditatively, thrusting out his thick lower lip, “but, remember, I have the prerogatives of the captain of the ship here, for the embassy is like a little ship on strange, perilous waters, is it not?”

“Except that when a man disembarks, I assure you, ambassador, he will not drown,” the counselor smiled. “It is easy to feel the ground under one’s feet.”

“What did you say?” the older man bristled, indignantly rejecting the analogy. “Do you suppose it is possible to disembark at any moment?”

This had a strange ring. Istvan realized that a perverse impulse toward repartee had led him to say, unintentionally, something that might have been taken as an audacious affront.

He walked out of the office feeling displeased with himself. Judit, who was bent over her typewriter, lifted her hands from the keyboard. The sudden silence of the machine and her look full of encouragement did not stop Istvan, so when he opened the door to the corridor she asked in a low voice:

“Did anything happen?”

“No. Don’t worry.”

“What did he want?”

“Oh, some boring business.” Seeing that he was putting her off, she began striking the keys quickly and irritably, as if to say, No, then. All right; we will see who will be sorry.

Vengeful satisfaction lay on his heart like a layer of slimy silt. It seemed to him that he had only fulfilled the decrees of eternal law, that he had been the intermediary in that cry for justice: blood for blood. Through his agency the reckoning would come. After all, he had washed his hands of the matter; he had not dared to bring judgment on Bajcsy himself. He had usurped no prerogatives.

The death of that Hindu? Along the way Bajcsy had run over more than one person; he had crushed others, not with a car, exploiting his friendships, his position, his past. Without hesitation he had pushed and shoved, had broken people. Now his time was drawing near. Fate had lavished gifts on him, had indulged his desire for power as if it were allowing him to be elevated, even to thrive in an unexpected career, in anticipation of this heart-wrenching fall and the attendant abasement. It was as if destiny were mocking him: you want this, you have it, take it — and see how far you have come from that zealous activism for the good of those who believed in you, who entrusted the leadership to you.

Yes, he was betraying them even by not taking account of every aspect of this matter. Today, years later, he assesses those maneuvers with the political acumen derived from participation in a hundred collusions, in the gymnastic exercise of raising hands that is called voting when he knew already who wielded the power, knew whom to follow in speaking or how to remain silent at someone’s expense — the silence heavier than the stone slab marking a grave after the innocent were condemned. No; Istvan brushed away these thoughts that clung like spider webs. Don’t be God’s policeman. Look to yourself; see that you don’t make worse mistakes. “Let each perish through his own folly”; the old words echoed with bitter wisdom. And that applies to me as well; he felt the thought soothe his conscience. I too have my black card file; I do not even want to look at it.