Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

He crawled with his grenade gun to a balcony. Its crumpled balustrade had been pushed aside by an explosion. Below, through streaks of smoke, he could see the pavement slippery with dew and quivering tramway cables now severed and reaching the ground. In the distance he heard commands barked hoarsely in German. He saw burned-out ruins, the reddish wreck of an automobile eaten away by fire, its wheels stuck in black pools of rubber: its melted tires. From far off came bursts of submachine gun fire. The street was filled with the stench of smoldering rags, hair, bodies in the rubble of buildings, invisible to the eye, and the odor, exasperating as spider webs in the face, of war.

No. No, he pleaded, shielding his eyes with his hands. Not Budapest in ruins. Save the city. How I hate war! How I hate those who bring it on.

Under his lowered eyelids he felt the pulsing of a fire. A mane of flame pushed outward from the window of a building. It roared. It devoured the house from inside with insatiable violence. The hellish days of service to foreign occupying armies lived on in him. Images pushed into forgetfulness had seized on his first moment of vulnerability to reappear in an ominous vision, to frighten him in his dreams. That was the past. It was over. But for him and millions of others, years later, the dark residue from the war still trickled into the memory like venom. He pressed his eyelids, pressed toward the radiating pain, as if to obliterate the hateful visions. He rested his forehead on the broad arm of his chair and breathed deeply, inhaling a familiar odor: a heavy infusion of cigarette smoke mingled with the saccharine smell of insecticide.

“Papa—” he heard the despairing voice of his son so close by that he sprang to his feet, listening. His heart beat hard. The barely audible breathing of the sleeping woman seemed to deepen the silence in the room. Slowly he regained his awareness that the child’s voice was only a bad dream; from the turbulence in his mind had risen a premonition that something alarming had happened to Sandor. The leaping, throbbing fire subsided into its sources — the glare from beneath the shade of a lamp nearby and a large moth fluttering near it, beating in a soft bass key and throwing spots of shadow onto the wall — and he slowly grew calmer.

He glanced at his watch: twenty after five. Instinctively he roused himself in time to listen to the first news reports. He switched the radio on and lit a cigarette. One thought absorbed him.

Just after the hymn in which the prayerful voices of the Indian choirs built to a jarring crescendo, a young, cheerful voice announced that the weather would be sunny and cool with a wind from the northeast. A summary of Krishna Menon’s speech before the United Nations, defending the Algerian people’s right to self-determination and warning against putting pressure on Egypt, dragged on interminably. A gathering of French and English warships near Malta…Everything is more important to Hindus — he clenched his fist — even the appearance of locusts, than developments in Europe.

Margit awoke and gazed around with wide open eyes. He moved to the sofa and laid his hand on her feet, which were hidden under the blanket. Without exchanging a word, they waited until the world news came on.

Suddenly they heard the word: Hungary.

In spite of a call to lay down arms, the fighting was continuing. The government was not in control of the situation. The people were demanding that Gerő resign. The laborers would not work. At the rallies they were choosing factory councils. Armed citizens’ patrols had taken up their posts at government buildings.

A crowd had torn down a bust of Stalin. The five-pointed star had been pulled from the public buildings and had disappeared from flags and soldiers’ caps. Premier Nagy had called on all the people to preserve the peace, and received a delegation of youth. The hunt for officials of the state militia and the lynchings were still going on. Throughout the nation the situation was grave, and the tension was growing. In the village of Magyaróvár the secret police had shot into a crowd gathered in the market square; the crowd had attacked a building and tried to disarm them. Many victims had fallen. Further deployment of armored Soviet units circling Budapest had been observed. This meager information, he thought, was encouraging. The less that was happening, the better. He breathed deeply. Nothing had been said of fighting in the streets of the capital, of fires and destruction. So the night had passed peacefully.

“I fell asleep,” Margit lamented. “I couldn’t hold out until you got back. Why didn’t you wake me?”

He looked at her pleadingly and stroked her feet; he could feel their warmth through the blanket. “I had to be alone.”

Parrots screamed outside the window. Inside the house, people were beginning to move about.

Whenever Terey tried to get a telephone connection to Budapest during the two hours a day when the British cable was in service on “the other side” of Europe, the answering voices tinkled with polite hopefulness, “There is no connection to Budapest today. Please call tomorrow.”

He begged the London operator to find out if the number did not answer — if the customer was not there — or if there had been some serious damage to the line. He even heard a garbled fragment of conversation in Hungarian. “This is the military operator,” someone seemed to say, and he called into the telephone that he was a member of the staff at the embassy in New Delhi speaking in an official capacity. But the sound grew faint and gave way to senseless gibberish reinforced by amplifiers. At last the friendly voice from London informed him that Budapest was closed to international calls.

His colleagues as well were trying to establish contact with the ministry. When they met early in the mornings he saw their discouragement, and rage and despair choked him. His premonitions grew worse: he saw his home with burnt walls and blank windows. He saw the charred bodies of his children buried with others in a pit with a metal plaque bearing the inscription “Unknown Victims of the Uprising.”

On the third day of the unrest the Indian press began publishing photographs. In the embassy people tore newspapers from each other’s hands. The pictures were more horrifying than the bulletins; corpses of members of the secret police hung from streetlights, terribly mutilated, their uniforms ripped away. Who had they been? Perhaps completely innocent people — simple soldiers whom chance had made the targets of revenge.

The faces of a crowd, stony masks of hate and anger — they looked at young boys in civilian clothes, with weapons, standing on a tank and waving a tricolored flag with a hole where the star had been torn out. Istvan looked with numb foreboding at a group of women pressing handkerchiefs to their noses, stifling cries of pain and disgust and perhaps shielding themselves from the odor of putrefaction, for a row of bodies raked by a volley of gunfire lay at their feet. The women had come to identify their kin, fathers, husbands, and sons, who had wanted to take up arms, to capture the barracks. Below that was a picture of a captured AVH commander with his soldier’s coat unfastened. He sat with his prematurely bald head on his chest, with a blank but concentrated look, as if he had grown impatient at waiting so long to be shot. Behind him stood a Hungarian soldier with the cockade of a revolutionary on his cap, placing cartridges in the chamber of an automatic pistol.

“See, see!” Ferenc pushed an illustrated magazine toward him. “This is the way it really looks.”

The picture filled a page: a Soviet tank blown up and standing on end. The half-burned body of a soldier under a wall, spattered with glass from shattered windows. He knew that stiffening of the body, when death gives the command. The last Attention! He grieved for the young soldier with light hair tousled by the wind. He grieved terribly for Budapest.