Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Quiet. There is always hope. What we have before us is only hope. Get some sleep, Istvan. This is the advice of an old, wise”—he hesitated for moment, then said, smiling apologetically and with large eyes reddened as if from weeping—“Frenchman. We will not be able to think this out just now. It is night there as well. We must wait.”

Istvan emptied his glass at one draught. Around the light of an unshaded bulb set low on a wall, deep shadows played over the sides of the room and the ceiling; the horns of the antelope loomed large and the head of the rhinoceros seemed to burst from the wall like a tree trunk gnawed bare by a river.

“Please—” he began, but Nagar flapped his upraised hands.

“I know what family means, though I have been alone in the world. I will remember. I will call you, good news or bad.”

The shrubs, which were dripping with moisture, muffled the echo of Istvan’s heavy steps on the tiled walk. The Austin’s engine had cooled; for a long time it refused to start. At last the motor began to hum. Drops of water crept over the steamed windshield as if it were weeping. He set the wipers going and drove the car almost involuntarily. He was gripped by an uncomprehending astonishment that was charged with grief and fear. How could this be? Battles on the streets of Budapest? Budapest in flames?

In the glare of the headlights he saw a pair of lean, naked old men with slender staves in their hands lurching forward into the light with their eyes wide open. When he pressed the horn, they stopped and extended the bamboo rods as if they were insects’ tentacles. Only then did he realize that they were blind. Large turbans exaggerated the size of their heads; their necks, muffled in long strips of fabric, appeared thick. Their bare legs looked like charred sticks. Where have I seen them? Something took form as if in a dream: the picture of launderers carrying bundles of soiled linen on their heads that Ram Kanval had painted. That ill-fated gift to Grace on her wedding night. Blind. They walk through the night which for them lasts forever. He stopped. Their watchful inertia, a torpor like that of insects, fell away. The shadows of canes riddled the white stream of glare from the headlights as they moved forward. They found the automobile with their groping fingers, and passed by. He almost felt their hands moving over the quivering metal body, which was wet from the dew.

Margit. For so many hours he had not even thought of her. She was not there; she had vanished. But — I love her, he assured himself. Yet the sudden exclusion of her from his thoughts vexed and pained him. How could I forget about her? Blind men, indeed. Still, the thought that she was waiting for him, that he would have to tell her what he had learned, to repeat everything, made him impatient. He would have preferred to be alone.

He left the car in front of the gate. He did not want to raise the shades in the garage. From a distance he saw a yellow light in the window of his living room glowing through the curtain. He felt vaguely guilty that Margit’s vigilance rather displeased him.

He walked into the dark grotto that was the veranda and bumped against a body. Shuddering, he searched his pockets and finally found some matches. In the rosy flame figures loomed, lying curled up on mats. He saw a hat clutched tightly in a fist and recognized the watchman, who in his sleep protectively embraced a girl slender as a child. Their intertwined bodies were covered with a thick, Nepalese blanket of beet red.The man’s brown hand in its gesture of love seemed to rebuke Istvan.

He saw the dusky gleam of long, tangled hair. Just then the match, with its bent red head like a stamen, went out in his hand. He groped his way to the door, opened it as far as the bodies guarding the threshold allowed, and squeezed inside. He walked along a bright shaft of light that shone from under the door of the living room. Margit was sleeping like a child with both hands nestled under her cheek. He took off his shoes and walked without a sound over the rust-colored carpet. He turned off the radio, which was still pulsing with scattered, tantalizing squeals from the shortwave transmitters. He was moved when he saw the ashtray filled with pieces of extinguished cigarettes with lipstick stains. She had worn herself out with worry. She had waited.

He reached for a soft blanket that lay folded on the edge of the couch and covered her, pushing her, or so it seemed, into deeper darkness. He heard her sigh lightly, but she did not waken, and he was grateful. He wanted to light a cigarette, but he put down the pack; the scraping of the match might rouse her. He sat utterly absorbed in his thoughts, racked by tremors of weariness.

Surely his boys were also sleeping. Perhaps there was no great danger. Could the power be slipping from the government’s hands from hour to hour? There are people there, after all, who can think, who will not steer the country toward disaster. What is at stake is not one life or even a hundred, but the welfare of the nation, all we won through the transformations that cost us so much. Liberation — the word had a bitter ring. But it will still take years to forget what we lived through. Once again we are calling down thunderbolts on our own heads. There will have to be discussions, accusations, cries for the gallows. Our guilty will have to be dragged by their necks to the wall. All that — so long as in the hurly-burly of justice meted out in anger, like revenge, corrupted by blind hate, festering with the sense of injuries suffered, the overriding good of the nation is not forfeited, the republic itself is not jeopardized.

Who has the courage to confront a street ringing with cries of righteous indignation and give an order for silence? To issue commands that can win the obedience of those who in madness are ready to kill and destroy — who even believe they are storming the gates for freedom? How can a blind element be converted to an intelligent force that will help the cause of progress for years to come?

He chewed the butt of the unlit cigarette. Dispatches would come tomorrow; at such a moment the ministry would not forget the embassies. Perhaps he could manage to get a telephone connection, to hear the boys’ voices, to order them to listen to their mother. To threaten and to promise…They must not go out of the house. Or, better, should they go to their grandmother, escape from Budapest? I do not even know what is happening in our neighborhood. Where has the fighting taken place? What has burned besides the museum? In the bulletins, burned homes have not been mentioned.

Homes — opulent interiors, outmoded Vienna secession furniture, portraits of grizzled drunkards with rakish mustaches. Sideboards filled with dishes used only a few times a year. Old Meissen porcelain crunching under boots, green slivers of broken windowpanes glittering, wads of stuffing protruding from armchairs ripped open by grenade fragments. Photographs mounted on millboard scattered, dry and slick, spilled from a family album covered with faded plush. Faces long dead but more enduring than those that were still alive yesterday but today are one with the earth, their forms no longer like those of human beings but staved in by tons of steel and the caterpillar wheels of a tank pushing into the brick rubble. The remains of children, of women, denuded without shame in the crumpled remains of their clothing — lying in tatters, twisted like empty husks, body fluids pooled like wax, exposed by the surfeit of light pouring in through great holes in walls beaten in by artillery fire. Someone had begun to bandage wounds, but he had thrown away the dressings, for they were expiring, slumping helplessly in the arms that held them. A brick under the ear or a volume of Jókai served as pillows for the last sleep. Reed roofing with clots of plaster hung from the ceiling. A mirror, undamaged and unseeing as a pool of water hardening with winter’s first ice, reflected the dead emptiness of the ruined dwelling.