Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

“In a few days I will come to Delhi to stay. We must think about where I will live.”

“Why not with me?”

“Be sensible. I want to have a room for myself, probably at the Janpath Hotel. It is the most comfortable. Not cramped. So I will be here; why are you irritated? Suppose I want to meet with someone from the Ophthalmological Institute, or the professor arrives and wants to find me? At your house? And Grace? She will be so angry that I didn’t stay with her, for it was she who induced me to come to India.”

“I would prefer—” he began, carefully lighting a cigarette.

“I also,” she interrupted him, “will remember the twenty-third of October. From this date we begin to count our days. We will be together. I will go away for a little. I will collect my things and return.”

“Perhaps I could drive you?”

“No. You have been running around Agra with me too much. What do you think — that in Delhi they don’t know about us? Three hours by car is no distance at all to the gossips. How I shall enjoy these evenings when we sit across from one another! You can even read the paper. I will be preparing a lecture, and whenever I look up, I will see that you are there. I don’t need much to be happy. And there will be a long night before us, and we will not be at all in a hurry to go to sleep.” Her bare knees, her slender legs when she stretched them, filled him with an immeasurable tenderness.

Someone’s fingers ran over the door with a tapping sound.

“Come in!” he called. But no one entered. They only heard the cook’s voice through the door.

“Telephone, sir.”

He opened the door; there was no one in the dimness. He looked questioningly at Margit, uncertain if he could trust his senses.

“I don’t hear it ringing,” she said.

“Sir,” the cook spoke up from the corridor, “the telephone rang a long time, so I picked up the receiver. Mr. Nagar insists that it is urgent.”

With one jump he seized the telephone. “Hello. Terey here.”

At once he heard the rapid, excited sentences: “Come immediately! The dispatches are so hot, my fingers are burning! You should be here now!”

“Tell me in two words!” he shouted, full of anxiety.

“An uprising in Budapest. They are sending all the Western agencies. No joke; this is a regular revolution. You don’t believe it? Turn on the radio. There will be a newscast from Delhi any minute. They have to put out something. But I’m getting it firsthand. Well, what, then? Terey, are you locked up somewhere?”

“I’ll be there right away.”

He stood as if paralyzed and unable to breathe. He was still holding the receiver. It had begun. Hungary. The capital. He felt a coolness on his face, like the fateful breath of events yet unknown. The boys. Ilona. What will happen to them?

Margit was half reclining with her long legs in the golden glare of the lamp. A shadow covered her face. He went over to her and buried his lips in her crisp, lightly fragrant red hair.

“I must go right away.”

She curled up, grasped his hand and pressed it to her cheek. The way Krishan’s wife had told him goodbye when he went to the arena, he thought.

“I’ll wait. I won’t go to bed. I’ll read,” she said tranquilly.

“I may be back very late.”

Only then did the tension in his voice strike her. She looked up. “Is something wrong?”

“A disturbance in Budapest. That was the bureau chief of Agence France-Presse.”

“I’ll go with you. I’ll wait in the car.” She got up, but he put his hands on her arms and seated her in the chair.

“No. Stay here.”

Suddenly she felt that there was a barrier between them, that he had set a limit to what they would share. She huddled in the chair. “I’ll wait,” she said stubbornly. “Even till morning. Go, then.”

He ran out of the room. He did not even close the door behind him. She heard a whir; the reflection of the Austin’s lights played over the walls of the neighboring villa. She listened to the drone of the motor until there was only silence. She went to the desk and turned on the radio. A Delhi station was broadcasting a program in Hindi, an unintelligible torrent of words. She realized that she would be equally incapable of understanding the Hungarian bulletins. She wandered around the dial and by chance found a Calcutta station. English: she sighed with relief.

“The unrest that broke out at noon today in the capital of Hungary is growing. It began with academic rallies and workers’ demonstrations and has ended with lynchings, disarming of police, and takeovers of government buildings. There were even exchanges of gunfire with the Soviet garrison quartered there under the Warsaw Pact. Today in Budapest flyers have been circulated with the speech Gomulka made at the rally in Warsaw. The attention of the world was focused on Hungary…” The speaker went on to report that there had been protests over the kidnapping of five leaders of the Algerian Liberation Front, whom a pilot had handed over to the French after landing at a military airport. The Moroccan and Tunisian ambassadors had been recalled from Paris. There had been a sharp letter from Nasser and the king of Jordan.

None of it interested her. She stood dejected, with her hands in the harsh light of the lamp. Only now did the gravity of the news dawn on her. She began searching feverishly for information. She heard a polyglot din punctuated by frequent repetition of the word “Budapest.” Her cheeks tightened at the sound of it as if the name were a frost.

“I will not give you up.” She leaned with all her weight on the edge of his desk. “You will not take him from me.” She moved the hand over the dial, eliciting hoarse, hurried sentences shouted in Arabic, nasal voices from Asiatic stations, as if one were fingering impatient strings, and Portuguese cadences, darkened with pathos, from Goa. It seemed to her that humanity’s entrails were heaving with alarm, that it sensed the rhythm of cause and effect leading to…

As a race horse feels tension in its muscles before its run, she knew that a test awaited her, and suddenly she saw her great opportunity, never to be repeated: I will have him. I will. She bit her lip. A new hope presented itself: that all Istvan’s past might be obliterated, that he would have nowhere and no one to return to and would settle on this shore alone, a shipwrecked man rescued from the elements, with the terrible freedom of those who possess nothing. All bonds with that unknown city that was her rival would be severed. And then, bringing love as a dowry, he could make his entrance to a new continent, Australia, where he would live, to a new language in which he would create, to money and connections that would free him from feelings of strangeness and from the necessity of living on charity and donations. He would become a citizen of her world. He would be, very soon, a person of importance, would feel himself to be at home.

Blue streaks of smoke curled in the lamplight. The stone head looked on with wide, unseeing eyes, with the shadow of a smile that seemed to speak of the evanescence of all human beings’ desire to possess everything over which they exercise power and everything they set as a goal of conquest. A hatred of this broken piece of sculpture came over her because it seemed to mock her — to know what awaited her, and already to pity them both.

Several cars stood in front of Nagar’s villa. By the time Istvan got out, one had started up. Istvan recognized the Tanjug correspondent; they liked each other. He was sure that when the man saw him he would come over for a moment’s conversation at least, but the Yugoslavian, unsmiling and absorbed in thought, only greeted him in passing. “Damned partisan,” Istvan thought with exasperation as the man’s automobile moved back onto the road, its tires whining.