Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Have I satisfied you on the points in question, comrade ambassador?” Terey rose.

“Take yourself off!” the ambassador roared. “Get out of my sight or it will be too bad…I can’t stomach you, Terey.” He sprang up and stood by the window with his back turned. He did not even look around when the counselor closed the door to his office.

“In a hellish humor, eh?” Judit leaned across her desk. “Did he try to bite your head off?”

“Yes, but he realized in time that he couldn’t stomach me.” Istvan winked. “Do you know what sent him into such a fit? A homeopathic dose of poetry — just one poem of mine in Illustrated Indian Weekly .”

“You’re not behaving sensibly.”

“If I had been sensible, I would never have been a poet,” he admitted ruefully. “The boss doesn’t know what he wants. First he calls me in, then he says he doesn’t want to look at me. It’s not as though I’m forcing myself on him.”

“You’re in a good humor,” she said, surprised. “Have you had news from home?”

“They are alive. They have enough to eat, a roof in one piece over their heads, and glass in the windows. What more do you want?”

For a moment she did not speak, but brooded with her fingers against her lips. Finally she whispered, “Ferenc has a letter for you. It’s best that you get it from him, but don’t mention that I told you.”

His mind filling with fresh agitation, he went straight to the secretary’s office. He tugged at the door handle, but the room was locked. Ferenc had gone out.

At his own desk, beside the newspapers rolled up and secured with bands of thick paper — the daily allotment of press brought by the caretaker — he saw a narrow envelope with words stamped in Hungarian: air mail. He looked carefully to see if it had been opened. The back bore no sender’s address, but the handwriting looked familiar. He tapped the envelope on the desktop and carefully cut the edge with scissors. He drew out sheets of paper covered with unsteady writing. He looked at the signature on the last of the folded pages and suddenly had to stifle a scream of grief. The letter was from Bela.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you. I miss you terribly. I caught myself, as I walked through Heroes’ Square, in a dialogue with you, as if you were here. A huge statue lay pulled down on the pavement, the larger-than-human face turned toward the sky, the crown of the head white with bird droppings, like a graying of the hair invisible to us until now. As long as it stood, it was not subject to the ravages of time. It did not age; it grew in fame. Some fellow was battering its head with a hammer on a long handle until the bronze shell groaned, but the head did not give way. The chap grew warm from his exertions, threw off his jacket so that his suspenders could be seen crisscrossing his white shirt, brandished the hammer, and banged away like a madman. No one was near, but little groups of passersby watched furtively in front of the half-opened gates of houses. Amid the metallic ringing of his blows came the high whistling of stray missiles fired from beyond the zoo toward the suburbs.

I walked through the square, where there was hardly any light, only the soft luminescence of the wet paving and tramway rails. I felt as if I were in a dream. A small, disappointed man was taking his revenge, pounding with a hammer like a child beating his fist on the corner of a table that had given him a bump on the head. I wanted to watch him at close range. I admit there was some journalistic curiosity in this: a monument on the pavement, a body in a bronze uniform groaning under the hammer head. What was this fellow trying to avenge by shattering it? Had he lost someone close to him? Or was he only disappointed because of what he had imagined about greatness, infallibility, divinity? Perhaps he was punishing it for his own blind trust, for his love and attachment. Perhaps he was one of those who had marched chanting the name on the monument, at the calls to action forgetting their grievances, for only the man in bronze would think on their behalf and establish laws.

I felt no joy in the frenzied toil of the man with the hammer. It was easier to shatter this monument without leaving a trace, except for the clinking of bronze, than to change the convictions of people, to straighten bent necks, to get it through their heads that the violence the fallen leader employed, just by virtue of its being raised to a legal norm, was a crime three times over. Death took him, and his colleagues stripped him of his merits; they exposed him for what he really was. But they did not root out the poisonous old antipathies, and contempt for the ordinary man, who was supposed to listen and admire. They hate the demigods from an older time before whom they groveled, but today in the depths of their souls they would take a lenient attitude toward “wet work,” for indeed there are situations in which it is simplest to have recourse to those unpleasant but effective methods and — at a stroke — do what must be done.

So I said to you, and today I will recount everything. I was walking to the stone pedestal when a tank came from the avenue, shooting into the square with automatic rifles. I tell you, it was like a bad dream. I was not even afraid. It was as if I were incapable of being touched by what was happening. I looked out from behind the granite plinth; above me stood gigantic jackboots from which wisps of straw protruded as if in mockery. Only the statue lay on the empty square, the dead face with its mustache turned toward the lowering sky. In the wavering glare of rockets from over the Danube, it seemed to sneer. The tank rolled onto the square and peppered an abandoned tramway car until shards of glass sprayed from the broken windows. They had been afraid of an ambush. Tons of rocking steel crawled toward the park; wheel belts left a wale of indentations in the asphalt. Flashes came from beyond the railroad bridge, and round after round of machine gun fire ripped the air. I was alone by the fallen statue on the darkening square. Suddenly I saw the attacker, the avenger, crawling out of its hollow interior, dragging his jacket. He had taken cover there. He spat on his hands and hit the head with his hammer. The head moaned like a bell that has burst. The noise of the blows lured the curious to the gates. Traffic started up again; people slipped by quickly along the walls.

I am writing this for you. I have not succeeded in finishing the letter. I am writing now after a two-day interruption. Today by the cemetery wall I saw the bodies of people who had been shot. They lay one by another, as if looking to each other for warmth. I was told they were informers, agents. Someone seemed to know who they were. He summoned people from the street who brought them in and handed them over to the workers’ guard. They had been beaten with no investigation. I am going with the people of the capital. That strong current carries me along, but there are moments when — condoning impulses of hate, hurriedly explaining to myself that it must be so, that this is the price that must be paid — I feel a chill as I think which way this turbulence will drag us.

Istvan, the mob is terrible. It is good that you are not forced to watch what is happening. Stalin said, rather ten innocent be punished than that one enemy elude us. That was a crime, but today, just as hastily, people are unjustly punished. They have already told me of people hung without justification. There is an appalling momentum on the street; they are squaring accounts as if they did not believe that law would re-establish itself and tribunals mete out justice openly. The crowd wants retribution now, this minute, blood for blood. In return for the humiliation they have suffered they beat the interrogation officers, the former masters of life and death. They spit in their faces and their victims do not even dare wipe the saliva that trickles from their foreheads. They look back with lifeless eyes as if they know what awaits them.