Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Krishan was squatting beside the car, smoking a cigarette. He was having a rest; the cries from the house did not disturb his siesta. The sun glinted on his frizzy, greased hair. On his hand he had a tattooed monkey that was covering its eyes. (May they not see what I do, ran the illustrated prayer.) On his fingers he wore a heavy gold signet ring, a gift from his wife. It was hard to think of him as one of the poor.

“Krishan, is your wife giving birth?”

He lifted his triangular face. His little catlike teeth showed from under his mustache in a smile like a grimace.

“Don’t trouble yourself, sir. She gives birth this way every month. The spoiled blood does not want to come out of her, and it hits inside her head. She has a tumor, but if it is cut out she will not be able to bear a child, and what do I want with such a wife?”

“Krishan — she is exhausting herself!”

“And I am not? For the second day I have not had a moment to breathe. Let her die or get well; then this will not be a hindrance to life or to work. She knows that, so she doesn’t want an operation. She loves me; the fortunetellers said that she would have a child. Perhaps this will pass and she will heal? My uncle had a tumor, and then the holy man came and pierced the place that hurt with a fork. It made a little wound that ran for three weeks, and that was the end of the tumor. It depends on what a person’s fate is. My horoscope commands me to avoid sweets. I don’t eat them.”

Terey went to the secretary’s desk to drink tea from a thermos. He bathed his hands in the stream of air from the large fan. Judit listened to his report.

“Beast,” she said, referring to Krishan.

She drew a flat bottle from the medicine chest and poured half a glass of cognac.

“I’ll give her a swallow.”

“You will kill her. Her husband will charge you.”

“It’s the old English way. When I was in London—”

“Or in Siberia?” he broke in.

“There as well. If someone’s period was late — for no cause of her own making — she took a glass of something strong and — to the bath! Here we all have a bath, but without the liquid incentive. It will work; you’ll see.”

She walked through the corridor with a firm step.

“I must pour it in myself. She loves Krishan so, she would leave the cognac for him.”

She went down the corridor slightly hunched, looking at the surface of the golden liquid in the little glass.

Istvan was left to his own thoughts; he sat down and, feeling relieved, lit a cigarette. He relived his conversation with Bajcsy, thinking of more adroit responses, more resourceful ways of making his case.

“Calm down; quit thinking like a second-rate actor,” he scolded himself and began looking over the mail. Invitations to lectures had arrived, and letters asking when an exhibit of Hungarian handicrafts was coming to Kampur, and several notifications of receptions, including one from the vice minister of agriculture.

Among the magazines lay a long brown envelope that Judit had brought him. He shook out photographs and spread them fanwise on the table.

They were all there — beautiful girls seized by the unexpected, ruthless glare of the flash. In the slender, flexible bodies, the dancing gestures, he discovered again the joy of that evening hour. Light bulbs in the background appeared as luminous flecks, like stars too near. What would be the fates of those blooming young women? What awaited them? The flash appeared to hold them in suspension, to fix them, to shield them from the liberating, destructive force of time. But how briefly! These photographs will still have meaning for me, will evoke the sultriness of Delhi at night, he thought — but for my sons?

If his boys were to exhume from a drawer the file of glossy thick papers with images of exotically dressed beauties, they would lean forward eagerly, they would snatch them out. Perhaps they would allude to him with some vulgar, boyish word of admiration that would suit their notion of man-to-man complicity. Dad: he knew how to get the girls! They would consider Grace’s beauty with detachment; they would look at the wide Hindu eyes, the full lips. How much of what he had experienced was it possible to transmit? How could the surging of the breath and the nails clawing on the carpet, the fragrance of the hair his face was buried in, be preserved in words? How to capture that excitement which even now made the heart pound? He wrote poetry. He had published two volumes that had received measured praise, that were not easily understood. Perhaps, then, that wedding night, which had not been his wedding night, would be revived in verse.

Toward Grace, however, he felt a thankfulness slightly tinged with aversion. He was even gratified that she had gone with her husband to Jaipur to be introduced to the rest of his family and shown her new estate. Though it had the ring of a romance from a century ago, she had to receive homage from the subjects to whom the young rajah was not only a master, a figure of authority, but an object of affection. They spoke of him with concern and respect; they had known him since he was a child. Istvan was relieved at not having to meet the rajah, to look him in the eye, to smile, to press his hand — at being spared all that. Though, of course, he could have managed to lie, if one could describe as lying the resumption of the friendly gestures that had passed between them before the event he would have preferred to erase from his memory.

He was grateful to Grace that she was not in Delhi. He felt the cowardly satisfaction of an accomplice who sees his partner in crime and does not feel their act as a betrayal, but thinks indulgently of himself, feels his guilt mitigated, and absolves them both.

A past to hide, to bury. Would that mad, reckless act not be punished some day? Would not justice demand that it be reflected on once again, apart from the violent spasms of the flesh and the singing of the blood?

He shuddered. He began to listen intently. The cries outside the window, so monotonously repeated that he had almost become accustomed to them, suddenly stopped. She died, he thought with a mixture of sorrow, relief, and disgust at the imbecility of Krishan’s wife. But did he have a right to judge her? What could she have done? Krishan had long since squandered her dowry. To be barren is to be cursed. He would send her back to her parents in the village to be a laughingstock. Perhaps it was better, instead of letting oneself be spayed, to accept the verdict of death.

When he left the embassy after work, he met Judit returning from the servants’ quarters. Her face glistened with sweat, but she was smiling triumphantly.

“It went well. It flows,” she whispered in his ear. “She had never touched alcohol before; that is the Hindu religion. The cognac worked a miracle.”

“Not for long.”

“No miracle exempts one from death,” she said soberly. “In any case, she is not suffering now. We have a month to get her to a surgeon.”

Terey looked into her dark, somber eyes, now, in the glare of the sun, lighted from inside like amber. He could see that she was moved.

“You don’t allow yourself a show of emotion.”

“Do you want me to cry over her? I hate pious stupidity. If she will not listen to us, too bad, let her die. I’m afraid a month will seem terribly long to her. She has so much time yet. The day after tomorrow she will forget that she was calling for death to free her from suffering. When I know people better, even when I look at you, it seems to me that each is to himself both hangman and victim. There is no salvation.”

“It will be a hollow victory for you that you predicted the course of events. You need only be patient and wait a little.”

“Yes, Istvan,” she nodded, “but surprises happen sometimes. A couple of times I was so fortunate as to happen upon — a man.”