Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

The car’s wheels ground through clods of baked clay that sent red dust flying upward. In front of the house a cluster of children were playing marbles, noisily cheering the well-aimed strikes. A slender girl in flowered slacks squatted in the middle of the road, triumphantly shaking a bag that held her winnings.

Rapidly they climbed the steep stairway with red blotches of betel juice to Ram Kanval’s family’s apartment. A huddle of relatives with saddened faces awaited the counselor, whose hand they quickly pressed. They looked respectfully at Margit, for the little translator managed to communicate to them that she was a doctor.

In a shadowy room the sick man lay wrapped in blankets. The outline of his emaciated body could hardly be seen under the folds of fabric. A clay bowl holding a white liquid stood by the bed. Istvan pushed back the window curtain and the westering sun struck Ram Kanval’s face. It was yellowish-green and glittering with sweat. His open mouth sucked greedily at the air. He lay inert; only his eyes darted about as if with an uncontrollable life of their own.

“His wife gave him curdled milk,” the brother explained. “But everything came back up.”

“Very good,” Margit said encouragingly. “Milk is an antidote to some poisons.” She listened to his heart with her stethoscope and counted his pulse. She peeled the cover from a syringe and drew an oily yellow liquid from an ampule. “I will give him something to build his strength. What did he take?”

“An infusion of some herbs.” His father, a stout gray-haired man, threw up his hands in desperation. “If we had known that it would come to this, none of us would have said a word to him.”

“He must be left in peace — above all, in peace,” Margit ordered. “Do not come in. Do not lament over him. He will sleep. His convulsions are stopping. Has a doctor been here? Where is his wife?”

A small woman in a peasant-style cotton sari leaned against the door frame. Her head hung so low that Istvan saw quite clearly the scarlet-tinted parting and the wings of unplaited hair that were a sign of mourning. The tight sleeves of her white blouse cut into her arms.

Ram Kanval recognized Istvan. His face, with a smile on his rigidly set lips, resembled the face of one dying of lockjaw. The counselor leaned over the plank bed and took the man’s cold, limp, sweaty hand.

“Nothing is lost, Ram. You will go yet. I promise.”

“No.” The word came through his labored breathing. “They are lying to you. They said today that they do not want me or my pictures.” He spoke in a broken whisper, coherently, but suddenly he looked walleyed at the ceiling.

“Did he poison himself with alkaloids?” Margit said worriedly. “It is too late for gastric lavage. What was in the stomach would have come up with the milk. The dose was not lethal, but even now I can see the effects of paralysis. Not much can be done to help. I believe he will survive.”

“He will live?” his brother demanded, picking wisps of his mustache from between his lips with a bent finger.

“If he has the desire — if he will fight,” she replied, coiling up the rubber pipe of her stethoscope. “Whether he will have a reason to live depends on all of you.”

“Listen, Ram”—Terey jogged his hand—“I swear that if you don’t go to Hungary, you will go to Czechoslovakia, to Romania. All the attachés are friends of mine.”

“They said my pictures are decadent, opposed to socialism,” Kanval said in a gurgling whisper. “They said that the uprising was not quelled so people’s minds could be poisoned with such an exhibit.”

“Ferenc,” the counselor snarled.

“No. The ambassador himself. It is the end of everything.”

“It is the end of nothing!” Istvan cried, nearly beside himself. “You will go to Paris! I will move heaven and earth.”

Ram Kanval twisted his lips into a misshapen smile. His eyeballs rolled and the pupils darted into the corners of his eyes; he could not control their movements. He must have been growing tired. A sweat heavy as foam broke out on his forehead.

“You must live, do you hear? Live! You will go!”

“Do not shout. I hear you…in red,” he whispered.

All at once he began to choke. Spasms bent his body until whitish clots showed on his lips. His wife knelt by the bed and rubbed his face with a wet towel. “He is dead,” she whimpered. “He has left me.”

Margit pushed her hands off him roughly. “No. He has gone to sleep. Leave him alone. Don’t tire him with questions. Cover the window; the light bothers him. Noise makes him see colors. I would prefer that he be sent to a hospital—” she turned to an older man in a camelskin vest whose bare knee could be seen from below his wrinkled dhoti, shaking nervously.

“What for? Here everyone keeps watch over him. He is well cared for. It is better not to fatigue him. A hospital is costly. And the whole building would raise a cry and say that we killed him.” He tugged at the arm of his daughter-in-law, who was hunched over beside the bed, and commanded, “Put hot water bottles on his legs. Have you been tending him or not? He is your husband!”

“You all wore him out. You know nothing!” She leaped at her father-in-law, waving her open hands like talons in his face. “A while ago a merchant was at the barsati and wanted me to sell his pictures. He put down ten rupees for each of them.”

“And did you sell them?” the brother asked worriedly. “That is quite an opportunity.”

“I am not stupid. He gave ten rupees; he will give twenty.”

Istvan saw that the painter’s eyelids had parted a little. His eyeballs moved uneasily. His lips were forming, not a grimace, but a hint of a smile. “The paints themselves cost more. Do not sell them,” he whispered.

A gaggle of children peeked into the hall, where a gray-haired woman was talking about the case. When they had jostled their way onto the stairs, a little boy jerked at the bag that belonged to the girl with bows in her hair and the marbles fell in a cascade, striking each step hard. The children jumped around, shrieking, to catch them.

“Thank you, sir.” The translator bowed. The ends of his mustache were sticky with saliva. “You have given him hope.”

“Not I. That merchant. He doesn’t believe me.”

They went out to the road and he turned to Margit.

“Yet another casualty of the trouble in Budapest. I’m not joking. If it hadn’t been for the uprising, we would have given him a stipend.” He glanced at his watch and was silent. He hunched over the steering wheel. It was past six.

“I’ll park the car. You run to the box office for the tickets. Cut in front of the line; no one will object. These colonial customs — sometimes I think they like to feel abased.”

They made their way in without difficulty and reached the balcony at the moment when the lights were dimmed. They sat in the first vacant seats they found. After an advertisement in color showing a sleek young man suffering from a headache and a kind soul offering him the wonder drug Aspirin, the newsreel began. They sat nestled against each other; Margit’s hand found Istvan’s, stroked it, then rested on it with a gentle pressure as if to say: Don’t torture yourself, I’m with you. What you will see has already happened. It is the past.

The building of the dam in Bhakra Nangal; the modern city of Chandigarh; in windows, glare breakers that looked like empty honeycombs or thinly sliced Swiss cheese; a palace of justice with gigantic columns like an Assyrian temple; oxen wading in thin mud at a snail’s pace, dragging a wooden harrow with several children standing on it so that the wheels ground more deeply into the churned mire.

Suddenly Istvan trembled. Three hunters flashed on the screen and moved precipitously toward the ground. A city that seemed to be made of white blocks appeared, smothered in a fleece of smoke. A crowd that from that elevation looked like a liquid overflowing fled into gardens and palm groves. He sighed heavily: this was not Budapest or any Hungarian city.