Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“So you believe they really shouldn’t have left?” She grew somber. “And you? What would you have done? Would you have taken a chance and returned to that Kádár?”

“What do I care about him? I would have been returning to my homeland. Understand: your country has never really been threatened. Your Australia is not just a nation but a continent. Only a man who is suffocating knows what an open window is. Kádár had to adopt the slogans of the uprising because the nation was calling for reforms. If he is honest enough to follow through with them, we must make every effort to support him. If he lied, nothing will save him. But that is in the future. Only time will tell.”

“You prefer to wait here—” her lips were parted. She held her breath.

“That doesn’t depend on me. I care most about something else. Margit, I love you. Remember that.”

She smiled, but there was anguish in her face. She lowered her bluish eyelids. He saw how fatigued she was, how overwrought. He felt a deep tenderness and gratitude. In her own way — a different way than his — she, too, was disturbed by what was happening in Hungary.

He got up and sat on the arm of her chair. She rested her head on his chest for a long time and they sat in a comfortable silence.

“Tell me,” he whispered, stroking her springy red hair, “how are things going at the university? Handsome fellows, those students? Are you nervous before your lectures?”

After seven he began to pace about uneasily. Suddenly he announced that he had something urgent to attend to, something he had forgotten about. Though the cook had set the table, he reached for the key to the car.

“I’ll be back in half an hour. I’m very sorry.”

Margit nodded to say that she understood, she would wait.

“Will madam eat? Everything is ready.” Pereira was perturbed. “Shall we wait for the master?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said calmly, but her hands trembled when she poured some whiskey and the siphon, under pressure, wheezed.

When he returned as he had promised, she did not have the courage to ask him anything. Only as they were lying close together and he was sleepily stroking her smooth knee as it rested on his thigh did he confess in an undertone, “I didn’t tell you the truth, Margit. I was ashamed. I went to the cinema again to see that newsreel. I went in without a ticket; I gave the doorkeeper a rupee. I stood in the dark and watched it. It seemed that the first time I overlooked some details that are important to me. I looked at the faces to see if I recognized anyone.”

She listened, curled up as if she were cold. This will always be closer to him than I am, she thought despairingly. He pats me mechanically, as one pats a dog.

Her calm, her sudden torpor, he read a different way. “You are wise, Margit,” he said. “Very wise. It’s better not to speak of what happened there.”

“No.” Her head shook on the pillow. “We ought to talk to each other. When you don’t speak, I’m not sure if you’ve learned anything. Did you understand that this was a useless sacrifice? I’m terrified at the thought that tomorrow you might be tempted to do something self-destructive. The experience of others seems to mean nothing to you. Must everyone give his back to the lash?”

“That’s not the way it is,” he said indignantly, kissing her hair. “You see that I’m not doing anything foolish.”

“I want you — I beg you — not to go back there,” she said passionately. “I want to save you. I believe in your talent. Do you think they will allow you to write without constraints? To write as you wish?”

“At the moment — certainly not.”

“Well, be brave enough to say, I am not going back to that cage.”

It was the first time she had spoken so brutally. The sight of that river of refugees gave her added courage. If so many had made their way across the border, why did this one, her chosen one, hesitate?

“I’m not going back,” he whispered, touching her temple with his lips. “I’m not going back, and as yet nothing is pressing me to.”

“I wanted to remind you that I didn’t renew my contract for next year. As of January I’m free.”

“What will you do?” He leaned on his elbow.

“Wait. For you. I will patiently cut the threads that still bind you to this lost cause. The strongest tie was burned away by the uprising. You saw yourself that those who were keen for the struggle, the real patriots, have left Hungary. They won’t let the complacent ones be at ease; they won’t let the free world sleep. They won’t let it forget. Australia waits for you — a whole continent that you can move, wakening sympathy for your country.”

Istvan listened, choked with emotion.

“Certainly I am not ordering you to decide in an hour, or tomorrow. I know this will be terribly difficult for you, but I will be with you then. I won’t let them destroy you. You have to write, to create. In your literature, were there no poets who went into exile and returned to find themselves famous, to see their books being passed from hand to hand like torches?”

“Of course there were.”

“Well — you see. You see yourself,” she said triumphantly.

They lay in the dark. Passing automobiles threw dancing splotches of light on the walls, as if someone were shining a flashlight and trying to peer into the house. A feeling of loathing came over him, spawned not by thoughts of India but by memories of whispers, the furtive looks with which he had measured the distance from hostile ears. Some colleagues warned against others, dropping words like stones: agent, spy, informer. The quip ran through his mind: if you want to be a member of the writers’ union, you must put out two books and put away three friends. Awards, favorable notices in the press, the thrusting of names and titles into the limelight, even undignified celebrity, and the disappearance of other writers — the silencing of their voices, to the astonishment of readers — all took place at the push of a button, at the express direction of people who had nothing to do with culture.

He remembered all that, yet his resistance was aroused by Margit’s demand that he share her aversion to Hungary. It was his country. It was not decent to speak ill of it, as it was not decent to speak ill of one’s mother.

“You think I’m too stupid to know what happened in your country,” she whispered. He felt her warm breath on his neck. “I wanted to understand you better. I’ve read everything that has come out in English about the countries behind the Iron Curtain.”

This admission moved him, even amused him a little. She must have felt this, for she added hotly, “That’s not funny at all. You will say it is all propaganda and slander, and I remember what Krushchev said. Nothing need be added—”

He took her in his arms, rocked her on his chest and tried to soothe her. Silence deepened throughout the house. Even the great blades of the ceiling fan were motionless. Only in the flashes from the headlights of the few passing cars did the shadows swing around and silently elongate.

“Great Britain is covering up some murky business as well, but there is this difference: no premier has yet dared to speak of it so openly,” he said tersely, bitterly, as if he were bringing charges. “Let these Hindus tell about the weavers whose fingers were cut off, about the murder of the family of the last mogul, about how here in the Red Fort a major of the Queen’s Lancers shot even little children and for that was made a peer of England. And the way they fed dissensions among the Arabs, because oil is more precious than blood. And General Templer, who led the Dayaks to battle against the Malayan partisans and applauded them for beheading prisoners…well, and Suez. You saw, after all, that a brazen crime has been committed, but the poor don’t count. You can shoot at the villages as if you were on a firing range and get away with it.”