Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Look. Lose yourself in the madness of the sky,” he whispered. “Those fires mean wind tomorrow, strong, hot wind. Do you know what is happening in Cairo? There are glows in the sky there as well, but it is man’s doing. Look there, Margit. The sky seems to sing with flame.”

She turned toward him. The sky was nothing to her. He saw an enormous devotion in her eyes.

“Listen: if war breaks out…would you have to go back? Or perhaps you all would be interned here,” she said as if thinking out loud. “India will be on our side. Then you would stay with me.”

If Margit had not wanted to go to the reception — after all, she had no compelling reason to go — she would have resisted their urgings and stayed with me, Istvan argued to himself as he walked out of his house alone. But since she has come to Delhi to stay, and the dean invited her, it’s only fitting that she go and mingle with the professors. In the evening I will have her all to myself. How long can a party like that last? She cannot be the first to rush out or they would say straightaway that she was shunning them. Well — an hour and a half. Two at the most.

Perhaps I could drop in on Nagar. Surely he is with the Russians; he was invited. That’s all right. I’ll wait. I like the barking of the teletype. I’ll look over the latest communiqués. I may just find out something. Nagar will tell me how it was at the Soviet embassy, because the correspondents will also be pressing the Russians for information about what is happening in Hungary.

The sixth of November; the thirty-ninth anniversary of the revolution. A coolish evening, with air like the taste of light wine when it leaves a sour bite of fermentation on the tongue. Wide lawns, leaf-sprinkled basins with sluggish fountains, cloying the eye with the melancholy of autumn. A yellowish-green sky with morbid veins of red. Now and then the falling of a heavy drop of dew. The music of the insects, now growing faint. Sometimes from far away, like a paltry imitation of it, the brief, importunate jingle of bicycle bells and the bleating of rickshaws with rattling motors. He walked along the edge of the road. He had left the car at home; he had nowhere to hurry to.

The day before yesterday the party at the ambassador’s residence had fallen flat. Bajcsy had unexpectedly arranged for the showing of a film about the experimental cultivation of rice in the floodplain of the Danube. This was a stratagem to preserve appearances. Such information from their country had a calming overtone, so he wanted to draw in members of the corps and a few guests and pretend that all was well, since they were devoting their attention to agrarian matters. He would take the occasion to listen to opinions, to scent out what the Western diplomatic missions were expecting from Nagy’s new government. “The gathering took place in a pleasant atmosphere”; that ought to be the tenor of the report for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Damn that party! Istvan winced. A thin line appeared at each end of his lips: the traces of a malicious smile. The ambassador, bickering with his wife, had shifted from one foot to the other; they had waited on the stairs; and no guests had arrived. On the tables stood bottles of Coca-Cola and mineral water, glasses filled with plum vodka and wine, and trays of hors d’oeuvres. The park was illuminated with strings of colored bulbs. There were long rows of empty garden chairs; a white stream of light beat on the screen, which looked like a partly opened shroud. The six people who had cared to come chatted in whispers as if they were in a funeral home.

A terrible day! The showing seemed a mockery. The guests trailed about like specters. From six in the morning cannon had been rumbling around Budapest. Istvan saw red fragments from distant firings swaying in clouds of November fog. Time and again the artillery boomed. The shattering of windowpanes on the sidewalk made a noise like high-pitched sobbing. Wet rust-colored leaves lay scattered in the park. There was an appeal from writers and a call from the Hungarian Red Cross to save the capital.

“If you would take a glass of fruit brandy, sir,” Ferenc urged, tilting his head. “It is a cool evening…” and a few timid guests took what he held out to them with his obliging air. Trojanowski was there, and the cultural attaché. The Poles did not disappoint them. The Yugoslavians came. So did the president of the Hungarian-Indian Friendship Society, a tall, wrinkled man with a brown cashmere shawl thrown over his head and arms in the manner of poor village women, and a representative of the ministry — a petty official, a person of no importance.

The French and English did not come. They were preoccupied with the Suez and had no interest in parties. The struggles for the canal continued. The Americans were boycotting the embassy because Kádár had called in the Russians. Beginning this morning, TASS’s bulletins had referred to the developments in Budapest as counterrevolution. If the Hungarian ambassador arranged the showing of a trivial film, it amounted to an endorsement of the Soviet intervention. The Russians and the Chinese did not come, for they did not know if the showing were a cover for something — a demonstration, perhaps. In a few days it would be known who the staff at the embassy were and which side they were on; better to wait, Istvan thought, smiling bitterly. How many times during the last week had the ambassador called the caretaker in and asked insistently if invitations to a reception at the Russian embassy had arrived? But the large envelopes with gold engraving were not to be seen. “Perhaps they have forgotten,” Ferenc said consolingly, though they both knew that such a lapse of memory would be a pretext.

Counterrevolution. The steep, narrow streets of Buda overrun with thundering tanks. They didn’t want to see us, he nodded to himself. They didn’t want our mournful faces marring the holiday. As yet they have no instructions as to how to conduct themselves toward us. Without guidelines from the ministry, even friendship is temporarily suspended.

Nagy had gone mad. He had renounced the Warsaw Pact and declared neutrality. The Russians know very well what that neutrality means. All the Western publications are triumphantly flaunting pictures of murdered communists. Cardinal Mindszenty openly called on the nation to fight. Neutrality…neutrality in relation to what? To socialism? To capitalism? With force of arms, with this revolution, to win — neutrality? A sword in the hand of a madman. The unstable “military balance” at this moment does not favor either side. The Russians are saying clearly: Whoever is not with us is against us. The power has slipped from Nagy’s hands. The wave has carried him away; the street has decided. And on the street the blind force of an armed crowd has exploded with festering hate and time-hardened resentment. That confounded Major Stowne, when I met him, tucked his riding whip under his arm and gripped my hand. “Congratulations!” he said. “At last you have decided to break out of the Red bag that was thrown over your heads.”

If that is what he thinks, and he has little to do with politics, what must be the Russians’ view? Why should they trust us? Why did Kádár disappear with four ministers on the eve of the attack? The West was saying, “Broken in prison, the man lost his nerve, dropped out of the game.” He absconded from Budapest. He is beyond the encircling Soviet armies now, in Szolnok. He is leveling accusations at Nagy. He is devising a new government. No doubt he is just beginning to fight — for the highest stake, for Hungary? Or for himself? To which side is he loyal? Time will tell.

In spite of himself he walked faster. Beyond him was an arch of heavy stone — the Arch of Triumph, a symbol of liberation, of the freedom for which his people, too, were striving. Angular knees rose high in parade step, gleaming from under plaid kilts. The last division of Scots marched away to the screech of bagpipes. His glance rapidly swept the wide vista of the avenue leading to the distant parliament building, its dark mass yellowed by the afterglow from the blue vault of the sky. Sacred cattle, their humps red with cinnabar, grazed on lawns; their brass bells started up their familiar rattle when the animals moved.