Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Holding each other, they ran over the level strand of beach, which was licked clean by wind and water. The ocean glittered blue and silver so that it hurt the eyes. It drew back, luring them on, only to raise them on a tall wave that churned up sand from the bottom. The swelling water bathed their heated bodies with its coolness and passed them easily to the next wave. The shore withdrew imperceptibly as if at their wish. It all grew more and more distant: the cottages squatting on pilings as if on little legs, poised for flight; the palms shifting their places. They felt as if they had been cast adrift among these hills of water while the shore was slowly wandering, freed of their presence and their watchful looks. Istvan felt the light pressure of the current.

Around him he heard something like provocative applause — the clapping of wet hands — and the greedy smacking of the waves. He grew alert. Margit’s green cap jumped high, then dipped into the deep troughs. She swam calmly, boldly, a few yards ahead of him. She turned her head, frowning as the salt water made her eyes smart. He saw that she meant for him to follow her. She was testing him, courting danger.

They heard the guttural groaning of the buoy, pounded by a wave, engulfed and then floating again with a dull moan of relief.

“Margit!” he shouted. “That’s enough! We’re going back.”

His voice was snagged in the morass of sound that came from the heaving, rustling water. He was not sure that she had heard him. He swam to the buoy and grabbed the ring, which was rough with blisters of rust. A wave dragged him; it tried to wrench him around, to pull him away. He had to be careful to keep it from forcing him against the metal covered with sharp shells.

“Margit!” he cried angrily. She heard; her body shifted, hovering in the deep water. She raised a hand that glistened like a flake of tinfoil as a sign that she understood. He saw with relief that she was turning around.

Blowing water from her nose and mouth, wrinkling her nose in comic revulsion, she clung to the tilting buoy. The current tugged at them. Their bodies jostled each other.

“Have you had enough?”

“At least one of us has to have some sense,” he snapped, holding onto the bare cone of the metal float.

“You’ve lost your nerve.” She gloated like a child. “I could swim like that, and swim and swim. The water carries you. It holds you.” She patted the smooth, tilted surface of a rushing swell.

“I remember how far away the shore is.” He scuffled with the buoy, which, in an unusual burst of animation, tried to shake him like a skittish horse.

The brisk sea wind flicked grains of sand about and lashed their shoulders. The palms began to bend toward each other and their heavy wings feigned flight.

He heard the crunching of packed sand under Margit’s quick step and bit his lip. The lunatic; I wouldn’t have been able to save her. Resentment penetrated him like a chill: we both could have…I, too. I would have stayed with her. And somehow it was easier to think of that, with the water licking their feet like a warm tongue, than to think: I will sail with her to Australia.

“It’s quite a way to the hotel.” Margit sounded surprised as she came up behind him. “But it carried us away. You might have waited. You’re not very concerned about me.”

“It was you who wanted to do it. I’m hungry.” He walked faster as he saw her shadow overtake him.

“And I’m happy.” She marched along beside him, leaving deep footprints that the sea behind them leveled and erased as if reminding them that only the moment existed, so they ought to enjoy it.

He felt an almost agonizing joy that they were together — together, only the two of them, walking the narrow road the sea and the sun smeared with a shifting coat of silver, mirror-glass, and glare. The two of them, as if it were the first day of creation. They could have wandered that way for eternity. A wave rustled like a chatty friend and their steps seemed to sing.

He looked at glittering crabs no bigger than peas. When he reached out for them, they pulled in their legs and let the retreating water carry them with it, hiding them in its turbid depths. He leaned over, determined to seize them. But even as his hand covered them they burrowed quickly into the sand, and the water, as if in collusion with them, hid their traces. So he collected flat shells like rosy petals of stone flowers.

“For Mihaly?” She handed him her rubber cap.

He filled it until it creaked like a moneybag with bits of calcified sponge, broken branches of coral, and polished pebbles with marble veins. Their colors faded as soon as they dried, until he moistened them in a wave, uncertain if it was an illusion, and the sea gushed suddenly over his open hands and plucked away his booty.

For whom am I collecting them? The thought of the reckoning that would follow this happy hour welled up, tinged with bitterness. No, not for Mihaly. He had gathered the shells impulsively for his boys, or rather on their behalf, looking for treasures with their eyes since they were not with him, they were not wading in the quicksilvered water full of changing fire. A senseless impulse. In any case I will not send them this rubbish.

A wave rushed up, hissing, and scraped the shallow bottom. He turned around and shook the shells out into the retreating water, which was full of ragged wisps of rushes. He waited for an obliging swell and rinsed the cap to a glistening turquoise.

“Why did you do that?” she asked with genuine regret. “You’re so contrary.”

He looked at the oval of her face framed by the clinging coppery strands of her hair. In her eyes the sea seemed to be brimming in lustrous green. He felt a profound sadness, as if he had behaved deceitfully and she, utterly trusting, had acquiesced to it. He kissed her to comfort her as one kisses a child and whispers, Sleep peacefully.

A wide path between the water and the white beach gleamed ahead of them, smoothed by the subsiding waves. Far away they saw a twisted black shape like a tree trunk with roots that the ocean had dragged ashore, as if it were throwing off everything that could foul it internally. A dark gray mass of shriveled wild plants, seaweed, and rotted boards with tar stains gave off a rank odor. Two crows pecked at a jellyfish the size of a washbowl, picking out clots of darkening tissue.

“Look.” She stopped, pointing with an outstretched hand.

Half embedded in the packed sand lay the blackened body of a drowned man. His skin was cracked. His hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes were overgrown with rust-colored clots of salt. His eyes were sunken as if the sun had blinded him. The incoming tide had washed up the corpse and thrown a garland of little grasses on it. A few flies hovered close to it; their tiny wings glittered like mica, vibrating with a monotonous hum, but they did not light. Foam spattered high.

“Don’t touch him!” Margit exclaimed. “The water isn’t taking him away. The hotel must be notified.”

“He looks like a piece of rotted wood. He’s not disgusting at all.” He saw that she was startled and repelled. “He has no legs. Exactly like a fashionable sculpture.”

“Stop.”

“How many days was he carried by the waves? He is not loathsome; he connects us to the earth we walk on. How astonishingly quickly he became a thing, no longer a human being.”

The moaning of a gong drifted on gusts of wind like a knell: the hotel was summoning guests for lunch. Margit walked rapidly as if she wanted to run away but the half-obliterated form were pulling her back. She imagined that the corpse had changed position, that the drowned man was trying to rise and follow them. But the hard-packed wet sand had sucked him halfway in, imprisoned him, and would not let him go.