Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“I don’t need them at all. It’s fine with me as it is.” She sifted sand through her fingers; it made a little mound on his chest. “I love the sea. There is such peace about it.”

“Even though I was half dead from driving, the first night here I couldn’t sleep. I heard it,” he whispered. “It has so many voices. It chats and it lures. It rumbles as if it were impatient. It seemed to me that it was taking advantage of the darkness to creep onto the shore, scour the dunes, submerge the beaches, and circle around us, all very cleverly. The roar of the water intensifies in the dark.”

“You got up. I heard you go out onto the veranda. But I didn’t want to open my eyes.”

“I saw how it shone. The land was black and the waves glowed like phosphorus, as if they were full of drowned stars. I was as frightened as a little boy for fear the tide would wash us away, cottage and all.”

“I’m not afraid of the ocean.” She thrust out a cocky lip. “I like the way it carries me along.”

“You swim out too far. I call you and you pretend not to hear.”

“You swim alongside me”—she peeped into his dark eyes—“and I think you would swim as far as you could go. It’s hard to decide when to turn back. It’s easy to swim out. It’s much harder to go back to shore.”

“I saw a map in the harbormaster’s office. The bay has shore currents. It’s best to remember that. They could carry us a long way out.”

“You wouldn’t leave me, though.” She laid her hand on his suntanned chest. “I wouldn’t be afraid to swim away from the shore with you.”

“I don’t like this train of thought!” he shuddered. “It’s silly.”

The sea soliloquized more loudly, surging and washing the smooth sand on the shore with its thick tongues.

“But there are some disturbances at night,” she said, engrossed in playing with the sand, which was as clean as sugar. “The night before last I heard shouts and something like a chase. Last night there were shots.”

“I asked Daniel. He said the police had set a trap for smugglers. Think of these empty cottages. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if gold or opium was stashed in them. The water near the beach is deep; they could sail close to the very shoreline with a cutter. Anyway, those boat-rafts of theirs can scud about for days.”

“You have imagination,” she said approvingly. “You are always ready to reconstruct the whole story. It is enough that someone was running along the coast. One rocket fired; perhaps it was for practice?”

“They also smuggle people — refugees from Pakistan. Daniel told me while you were asleep.”

“They are fleeing. They will not escape themselves. Freedom is in us. We must muster all our courage and determination and break out of the iron band that was forcibly imposed on us.” She turned toward him; he felt her sandy hand resting on his thigh.

“Not forcibly imposed, unless what you mean by ‘forcibly’ is that you have a birthplace, a language and a fate shared with others whom you should not abandon. The rest of our obligations we undertake voluntarily, and you know very well that they are part of ourselves.”

“Primitive blood ties.” She lowered her head with aversion.

“No. I’m speaking of the deepest community of interests with the world we find at birth, which we ought to change, to transform.”

A wavering trill from a flute could be heard in the distance. At the foot of a layer of rocks, between the leaning coconut palms, they saw the dark torso of a conjurer playing his song. He seemed to have no head, for his white turban was indistinguishable from the bright sand milled from under patches of turf parched by the sun.

“It’s easier to change the world than to change yourself,” she whispered bitterly. “The world, the world! And what is that but a game in the sand? You’ve already seen how much of that remains. It’s a lesson you should learn.”

“And you? What role are you marking out for me?” He raised himself on his elbow and looked into her eyes. The ends of her curled eyelashes glittered in the sun.

“Be yourself at last. Free. Write as you like. Don’t be hampered by anyone.”

“Even you?”

“Even me,” she insisted. “Write about your Hungary, but free yourself from that dog collar that’s choking you — from the time you’ve lived through, from its improvised systems. You don’t have to be a bureaucrat whose masters’ words are law. Think of what is yours, your own, unique. What do you have to say? To people, not just Hungarians.”

“My masters’ words are not law to me,” he smiled. “They change too often. And what I would like to say to Hungarians ought to be important to everyone who thinks and feels responsibility for the collective fate.”

“Time — yours, ours, we must submit to it. Don’t let yourself be weighed down. Don’t become involved in collusions for a year or two. Your mind is full of words that are not your own. You put out your hands and they are poised to applaud. It’s not even like a circus, for force doesn’t require dexterity.”

“Stop,” he said. “Don’t torture me.”

“I?” She pretended to be surprised. “This hits home because you think the same.”

Again they heard at a distance the birdlike squeal of the beggar’s flute, until it was swallowed up by the roar of the surging water.

“What is he expecting?” Istvan gazed at the naked body growing still darker among the gnarled, half-exposed roots of the palms. The motionless fronds hung down like roosters’ tails in the sky full of trembling light.

“He is like me,” she said broodingly. “He wants to attract someone’s attention.”

“Why has he been sitting so far away?”

“He doesn’t want to be obtrusive.”

“Do you think he’s waiting for us?”

“He is a beggar, not as shameless as I am, but undoubtedly a beggar. We recognize each other at once.” She drew curves in the sand with a finger and watched vacantly as a breeze sweeping the beach pushed the sand before it grain by grain.

He turned around quickly and pulled her to him.

“Don’t talk like that. Better to hit me. It would hurt less.” He kissed her, breathing hard. “Everything I have is yours.”

“Except you yourself.” She shook her head. “I’m poorer than that beggar, for he doesn’t know what he could have, and I know what you have deprived me of, what you withhold from me.”

“I?”

“You. You don’t want me.”

He kissed her bluish eyelids and smoothed her eyebrows with his lips. He found coarse traces of sea salt on her shoulders. He tried to smother her despondency, to dispel it with tenderness, but he made his argument only to the body warmed in the sun that lazily coaxed caresses from him like a tame animal.

“Don’t,” she begged as he was uncovering her white chest and pressing it with greedy lips. “That man—”

“He is far away.” He laid her gently in a warm hollow in the sand, a white cradle. She threw out her arms and he rested his hands on the palms of hers, entwining their fingers until it hurt. They heard the distant notes of the flute, the cries of birds, and the deep restless groaning of the ocean, which crescendoed until the perpetually washed sand received its baptism by water and the foam soaking into it sizzled.

They rested side by side, languid, sleepy, as the glare of the invisible sun bore down. At the touch of each other’s hands — the affirmation that they were together, bonded in the amicable communion of bodies — a deep, peaceful joy pulsed in their blood.

“Are you going in the water?” she drawled lazily.

“I must!” He sprang up, seized her hands in a tight grip, and raised her from the sand.