Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Good — you’re here!” Margit called, making her way quickly to their table. “I’m late, but I have news for you, Istvan. Perhaps you’ll even be pleased—” she made a face like a little girl who by chance has found the place in the garden where the hens lay eggs, or spied the first violets of spring, which still smell fresh and cool, and carries them triumphantly to those she loves. “Give me a little coffee. No, pour it into yours.” She pushed the cup toward a glass flagon that hung on a stand, signifying that in Volga the coffee was strong and aromatic, prepared as if in an alchemist’s workshop.

“Order another portion of ice cream for Mihaly. Let him share our joy.”

“Well, don’t wait. Tell us what happened.” He looked lovingly at her.

“Nothing certain as yet.” She drank a little coffee. “It will all be clear in a few days. The professor has given me an appointment as a lecturer for a university course. My subject will be epidemiology, teaching young doctors how to fight trachoma.”

“In Delhi?”

“For a whole month. Perhaps longer,” she said jubilantly. “You don’t even look happy. Why are you two so glum?”

“I am very happy,” he whispered. “But there is serious news.” He leaned forward and told her about the driver’s death; she listened, absorbed in the story. He did not explain why he was in such a hurry to leave the coffeehouse, and he said nothing about the automobile accident. But she understood without words that they ought to go, and was already rising from her seat.

“Thank you,” he said, depositing money on the marble table.

“I have caught you!” They heard a warm, low voice. “You do not see the world around you. I nod, I make gestures, and they are as oblivious as if they were bewitched. Ah, Istvan, Istvan, it is not nice of you to lure my friend away,” Grace said, leaning over the table. Her loosely fastened sari concealed her condition, but her movements were ponderous as those of an apple tree with branches bent under the burden of their fruit.

“Why didn’t you come over before? You were spying on us, you wily thing, and we met by chance.” Margit kissed her.

“A happy chance. I saw how he watched for you,” she said sullenly. “Well, sit down. Margit, you have something on your conscience, for you have simply been avoiding me.”

They were taken aback and said their goodbyes hurriedly. Margit, peeping at Istvan, explained that she had an appointment with Professor Salminen at the clinic and a flight to Agra immediately afterward, and assured Grace that she would visit her at the earliest opportunity. She kissed the Hindu woman, who had suddenly grown somber, on the cheek. There was so much visible joy in Margit’s movements as her figure dissolved in the blaze of sunlight from behind the heavy curtain Terey obligingly opened that Grace’s lips tightened. It seemed to her that she had been dispossessed, lost her beauty, been affronted. She went pale. Standing by the vacant table, she looked around at the place settings and suddenly saw a trace of pink lipstick on the cup. They had drunk from one cup: it pained her. She had visible proof that her suspicions were not unfounded. Her heart beat hard. She raised a hand and put it on her abdomen; the mother’s angry agitation was communicated to the child.

The Austin rolled slowly amid a dense throng of pedestrians torpidly trailing along in the middle of the road. The blast of the horn did not hurry them. They paused and turned their amazed faces toward the car. At the last minute they leaped away like startled birds, their dhotis fluttering.

Istvan drove impassively. After the blue twilight of the coffee shop, the sun hurt his eyes. He disliked sunglasses and rarely wore them. Once he had gotten dark shades from Judit, but on a visit to the Indian Ministry of Culture he had conveniently forgotten them and they had disappeared.

“Best not tell Grace about us,” he said. “The fewer people who know, the better.”

“Who would have thought she would be roaming around the coffee shops in her condition? Surely it won’t be long.”

“No. I was certain that she had gone away from Delhi to the rajah’s estate near Benares.”

Beyond the fortified Ajmeri Gate they drove into a cluster of rickshaws between the vendors’ carts. A warm odor like garlic came from the crowd. Men carried flat wicker baskets piled high with yellowish shocks of camels’ hair on their heads. Istvan turned aside near the wall, plowing through the crowd, which parted grudgingly. Curious faces surrounded them; anxious dark eyes scrutinized them. People offered their services, proposed to serve as guides and bodyguards in the labyrinth of congested streets. A leper came rolling up on a squeaky cart and held out a coconut shell on hands without fingers; the appalling disease had eaten away his lips and tongue. His low, painful mooing attracted no one’s attention. Europeans had arrived; they were important because they had the habit of paying for services. The sight of them aroused the hope of easy earnings.

“Madam, madam, I will show you where there are silk shawls with gold and silver,” mumbled a slender young man with pitch-black eyes and artfully crimped hair. “And perhaps jewels, precious stones, rubies, emeralds from Ceylon.”

“No. Not today.”

“Or perhaps the temple of the monkey god.” Another man pushed his bewhiskered face close to them. He would have looked like a henchman of Ali Baba if it had not been for his meek, filmy eyes and languid voice.

“There.” He showed Margit the large, chipped letters filled with red light bulbs: CORSO. Above it, secured with wires to the walls and to the sills of windows that were never closed, were gigantic cardboard figures garishly painted: a dancing girl with full thighs and showy hips gleaming enticingly through muslin pantaloons finished with disks and bells at the ankles; beside her, two men stabbing each other with stilettos as streaks of blood half a yard long dripped from the balconies.

They walked in the road, squeezing between baskets of fruit as the sellers napped amid the clamor, hawking their wares almost involuntarily with their eyes closed.

“The third house. That must be it.” He pushed Margit into a passageway sticky with soap suds. Their feet sank into piles of ashes and peelings, bitten cores of vegetables, and ragged bags made of fronds. Behind a tenement, workshops covered with rusty tin huddled, and broken-down bicycle rickshaws stripped of their wheels. They heard whistles, the banging of a hammer, the insistent wailing of a child calling for its mother. Starlings in a cage screeched and emitted astonished chirps as they jumped tirelessly from bar to bar.

The first man to whom they spoke — half-naked and bespattered with oil paint as if he had wiped an artist’s brush on his brown, sunken chest — knew no English. But soon they came upon three children, and one — a little girl with large crimson bows in her hair — feeling deeply the importance of her mission, explained in charming pidgin English that the stunt rider’s widow lived in a room behind the tailors’ workshop. So they followed the cadenced hum of sewing machines and the grating of scissors. The tailors sat cross-legged on the floor, turning the cranks of their hand-operated sewing machines, hardly raising their heads to follow the new arrivals with astonished glances. Their backs were bent with hurry; they were paid by the piece.

“Here.” The girl curtsied and drew back a patched curtain. The breeze rolled wads of clipped thread along the floor, and scraps of fabric seemed to dart about like mice.

The room was small, and dark, for the head of a cardboard girl covered the windows. A bed stood in the center — the only piece of furniture, doing service instead of a table or chairs. Next to the wall, on a metal trunk, they saw a photograph of Krishan on a motorcycle, with wings streaming from his arms: the flight in the clouds. Other pictures were set in a half-circle in slits made with a knife in wooden bobbins; they bent slightly, like lesser divinities before a greater one. In a small bowl of water a dahlia floated, glowing like a votive lamp in a narrow shaft of sunlight.