Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

She grew tense in his embrace; he felt her alienness. It hurt him, but he had to defend the world in which his life was lived — to which he was connected by the twin forces of struggle and creation.

“If I didn’t understand you, my dear one — so dear! — if I didn’t know when you spoke that you were filled with anxiety and suspense, that you want the best for me and that you believe that you are rescuing me, it would be hard, after what I’ve heard, for us to talk to one another.” He weighed his words carefully, holding her in his arms; it was not easy for him to put all his bitterness into words.

“You are good to me, very good, not because you are submissive, but because you really do think of me, of Istvan Terey, who has only one life. You don’t even know if what I write has any value, but you believe in my ability, you believe in my behavior as you see it. In my words and gestures of tenderness you find certainty, the confidence that you aren’t making a mistake. Love makes you perceptive. Often it seems to me that you know more about me than I know about myself.

“You have premonitions about a poet, Istvan Terey, who could be born only if he were with you. You know the power of love. You know its force, that ardent readiness to surrender. Sometimes I wake up at night because I dreamed about you, and I look for you. My throat is tight and the taste of blood is on my lips. I’m ready to scream because you aren’t beside me, because the thought has come to me that I’ve lost you somehow or that you have left me. Margit, I’m sure that no one has ever loved me as you do, or ever will, and that I have in my hand a gift that is priceless, unique. If they were to tell you, ‘If Terey lives, you must die,’ you would show no shadow of hesitation. You would say, ‘Take me.’ Can there be a greater sacrifice than life?”

She relaxed a little and nestled her face against his arm. When he stopped speaking, she seemed to beg him, with a light touch of her lips, to say more in this language which was not his own. She remembered that and agonized at the thought that in Hungarian the words would have a different, perhaps more beautiful ring; they might lead her closer to what she wanted to understand, to sound to the very deepest level.

“If it were only that you had given yourself to me, I would be grateful to you. I would desire you, for you’re the most beautiful woman on earth to me, but that isn’t everything. It’s a precious gift, but not unique. Margit, there’s not much true love in the world, though so much is said about it and still more is written. Those who haven’t known it swear it doesn’t exist. You’re a mature, intelligent woman. You have a profession; you have some experience of life. Tell me: how many times have you loved as you do now? You yourself have said, only two times that count. Years ago there was — Stanley. You were full of passion and girlish naivete. That passion was unconsummated and untested. It was a presentiment of the element, like the hum in the shell you put to your ear that lets you imagine the ocean.

“There were men in your life. You crossed out their names because, as you say, they didn’t count. At last I was here, blown into your life from the far side of the world, from a country that’s strange to you, putting thoughts into your language with difficulty. There are thousands of matters that absorb me that you know nothing about, and yet you say without hesitation, ‘You are the man. I was waiting for you. I only want to belong to you. I want more: to help you become what you ought to be.’”

Her thigh moved over his knee; she rested her head on her hands. He hardly saw the moist gleam of her wide-open eyes. “Speak,” she begged. “Speak.”

“The last evening in Agra you said — sitting by me, for I had just awakened — you said, with a world of goodness and devotion in your face, ‘I wish you were a leper.’ I was taken aback. I was seeing the stumps of those people on the carts with their hands and feet eaten away — those poor stammering wretches to whom one gives alms. ‘Are you mad?’ I shouted. I was angry at you. Then you stroked me tenderly and said, ‘For then all the world would disown you except me. Then at last you would know that I love you.’ It seemed an eccentric metaphor to me, but now I see the truth in it. You are capable of that sort of love — of deep, even painful joy at devoting yourself beyond human endurance, recklessly, without calculation.”

“Speak,” she whispered when he was silent.

“Very well, Margit.” He put his hand on her warm, receptive one. “This will hurt. I warn you.”

“Go on,” she breathed, moving her lips over his chest.

“You thought of my boys. You know that I have two sons. You bought them, Geza and Sandor, carved animals, elephants, buffalo, tigers. You chose very carefully. I remember it all: your defiant smile, for it had to be a surprise for me, and it was. You put me to shame; you had thought of them and I, their father, hadn’t. I remember every move, the funny way you wrinkled your nose when you looked closely to see if they were really sandalwood. A box of toys from you, but you kept yourself in the background, so they came from me, and you were happy to do better than I had, to fulfill my responsibility for me. And now you demand that I go away with you and take away their father at a stroke. Margit, I love you, but I don’t want to lose them for—”

She writhed like a fish when it feels the hook.

“No, Istvan!” she cried in desperation, pounding the pillows with her fists. “You know me, after all. Don’t think badly of me. I had one desire — to save you from the fate of those people in the film. I was trembling all the time we were in the theater, thinking that you could have been one of those who were shot or mangled. Or one of the exiled and homeless who fled as refugees, feeling bitter because they had lost, or because they had not understood what they were doing and had brought destruction on the capital they love. You want to be free. A creative person must be free. I only wanted to help you in that. I’m stupid, stupid. Forgive me, Istvan. I’d never have dared demand that you give up your children.”

She beat her forehead against his hand and her hot tears flowed over his skin. He stroked the back of her neck and felt sorry for them both. He clenched his jaws until it hurt.

“I don’t want you to suffer like this.”

“You did right! You should beat me if you see me being senseless and wicked. I had the best intentions, and only now I see that I didn’t love you enough. Don’t remember it against me, please.”

“I’m like a leper, Margit, at least for one-third of humanity, because I come from there, from the Red camp. You would like for me to repudiate my country, and it is there. To abandon my family, and it is there. To forget the language they speak there. You want me to advance by betraying my homeland. Think: you yourself would lose your respect for me. You would never be able to trust me. You would wonder: since he renounced all that, how can I be sure he will not be untrue to me as well?”

“Don’t distress yourself,” she moaned. “I know the way I spoke was horrid, but I was truly not thinking that way.”

He was close to her. She felt his presence with her body, which was touching his; his open palm was under her forehead. But she felt that he was far away, looking at her contemptuously. The bitter taste of her mistake was in her mouth.

“It’s my fault, Margit,” he said, suffering as much as she was. “I shouldn’t have loved you, shouldn’t have met you on it with every gesture and every kiss vowing faithfulness. I couldn’t renounce you. I didn’t know how. And I can’t do it today. I’m so happy that I found you. That I have you. Don’t ask me to hasten the hour that must come. I ought to beg for your forbearance, for when I say, Stay with me, I’m not speaking of the last day, the hour of death. That is how it should be…I’m only pushing the day away, like a coward. It’s not far off: a year, two years — the threshold we can’t cross together.