Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

An old woman in a washed-out, faded sari, which had been blue long before but today was the color of smoke from burning stalks, was kneeling and baking little flat cakes on a tall copper spirit stove that crackled with a violet fire and hissed malevolently. A heavy aroma of boiling coconut oil lingered in the air. “Namaste ji,” she said, bowing and setting a mug with a thin cake on the floor. “She is not asleep. She is drawing him to her. Durga, Durga—” she called in a shrill voice, lengthening the vowels like herdsmen on the pastures.

The girl lay with her arms bandaged from hands to elbows and folded lifelessly on her breast. The smooth brown skin on her bare belly could be seen from under a short jacket. Several pink scars were covered with gauze soaked with grease; flies hopped nimbly over the bandage. When he leaned over and looked into her black eyes, which were dimmed with pain, he smelled the sickening odor, familiar to him from the war years, of burned hair. He could not see it for the shawl in which her head was swathed.

“Durga, a lady and gentlemen have come to help you. Friends of Krishan.” Only at the sound of his name did she seem to recover a measure of consciousness.

“Oh, sir,” she turned her head slowly, “he liked you.”

“Tell me: what can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I need nothing.”

“How will you manage?” He looked at her mouth. On the thick, high upper lip, which gave the young woman the expression of a capricious child, he saw whitish blisters from the fire. She had thrown herself onto the flaming pyre, had tumbled hands first into the blaze. Her face had been in the flames before the attendants dragged her out. He seemed to hear the sizzling of the living body and the flames springing to entwine themselves in her hair. He felt an enormous pity for her.

“I will stay here,” she answered in a resigned voice. “I will not return to the village.”

“She will stay here,” the old woman affirmed sympathetically, pouring dough onto a chattering skillet. “She has no money. Everything went for the motorcycle. There are still payments to be made.”

“What about damages?”

“I do not know if the insurance was in order. That was the responsibility of the Sikhs who own the circus. And they are in no hurry to give money away.” It was obvious that she was intimately acquainted with Krishan’s affairs. “Durga has no money to return to the village. A gentleman promised to get her a place in a dancers’ house here. Durga sings like a lark.”

“And these burns?” Margit asked.

“They are forming scars, but what is most important is that her face is as pure as a baby’s,” the old lady said caressingly. “She will be successful. People will remember Krishan for a long time. Suttee. Suttee,” she clucked with approval. “Not many women love so much that they jump into the fire after their husbands. True love attracts men.”

“Did I understand her correctly?” Margit said, aghast. When Istvan nodded, she whispered, “It’s monstrous! How they can speak so calmly about steering her into — it is worse than suicide.”

“She is a widow. According to the old custom, she died as well as her husband. Her heart, at least,” he said, confirming her ominous inference.

Mihaly moved close to the woman. “Durga, why was Krishan killed?”

“He was angry, as he usually was before his appearances. He shouted at me that my cooking was bad. It was true. I had brought him chapati. He threw it at me. The boys were standing in a group by then. They helped him. He liked the way they led him out with an excited shout. He remembered that there was not much gasoline in the machine. He went to get the canister. The lid of the gas tank was unscrewed. The boys were peeking into it. They were smaller than you. They were licking sweets on sticks. They laughed and I laughed. One of them got another to put his stick in and measure how much gasoline there was. It amused him that the smaller boy listened blindly and would be licking a lollipop with the taste of gasoline. Then Krishan pushed them away, though he liked children and very much wanted some of his own. He poured gasoline in and said to me, ‘I must be done with this.’ He put his hands here,” she raised one bandaged hand and pointed to her arms.

“The boys were already pushing the motorcycle to the ring. Then the curtain closed. I have always listened to the roar of the engine and I understood what it was saying. I knew when he was climbing up the walls and when he began riding down. I waited. I could not breathe. I prayed that everything would be all right. Suddenly the motor died. I could not hear when he crashed. I only heard people shouting — a different kind of shouting, like the roar of a beast that was eating him. I was so weak, so entirely without strength; it was as if all my blood had soaked into the ground.” She spoke slowly, in a singsong voice.

She recites the story of Krishan’s death as if it were a ballad, Istvan thought, and suddenly felt ashamed that at such a moment he could think of art.

“The first one pulled back the curtain. She was in a white sari. Then a pack of boys stormed out of the building, and the people who were carrying him. And I knew he was dead, for she went before the bearers.”

“Durga saw her all the time,” the old woman interjected. Removing the pan from the stove, she said something to the girl in their language; they understood that she was trying to persuade her to eat. The sick girl made a motion of refusal with her bandaged hand and the old woman began by herself to chew the heavy, half-done cake, pouring cane syrup over it.

“Durga saw her, too,” Mihaly whispered, staring.

“Whom?” Margit asked.

“Her dead sister,” answered the old woman. Cocking her face like a cat biting a fish head, she smacked and licked the ends of her fingers and the inside of her hand, onto which a few drops of the sticky syrup had leaked. “She came to take him.”

Istvan cursed himself for his cruel curiosity, like that of a surgeon probing a wound. It had been strangely gratifying to listen to this duet, with the musical accompaniment of the shifting hum of sewing machines in the neighboring room, a hammer beating metal in the yard like a broken bell, and the twittering of bicycles below, all mingling with the mournful, pleading, hopeless calls of vendors sitting on the edge of the sidewalk. This suffering was satisfying to him, was the food that nourishes the beginnings of poetry: the threnody of the Indian widow. It seemed to him that he had been led here for a purpose, as if a higher power, aware of every step, had ordered him to abandon all sympathy and only absorb, remember — that he would commemorate the fate of the one who had perished, and the young woman who was receding into the teeming multitude that was India. A few days yet and she would dissolve amid the flickering of silk saris, the jingle of gramophone music, and the throbbing of the drum, though today she was bleeding with the pain of her loss.

“They laid him down. They took off his leather clothing. The manager rolled it under his arm immediately and took it away. And I so wanted him to be burned in that costume. He liked it,” she recalled in an undertone. “The police took the motorcycle. I saw the bent metal body. I felt as if my bones were broken. And Krishan lay with his head to one side, looking toward me. I tried to straighten him and then I felt that this”—she pointed to the top of her head with her bandaged fingers—“was completely soft. Suddenly a few drops of blood leaked from one of his nostrils.” The memory sent pain sweeping over her. “More and more people came running up. They shoved me in the back with their knees. The ones who were near were silent. The others in the back were shouting to be let through. But as soon as they saw, they were quiet — as quiet as he and I.”