Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“There is still the tape recorder. The tape will preserve it forever.”

“And where will you find the light of that hour, the glow of clay walls, the dust soft as a carpet, and the cry of the thirsty hawk? The faces of the peasants listening with rapt attention, who abandoned their unsatisfied bodies — he carried them away, he involved them in the fates of the warring gods. No, that is not my brother,” he said loyally. “None of this concerns you: your kindness is devoid of understanding. To you he is just one blind man. But you are cripples. You hear his songs and do not understand them, for you do not know Malayalam,” he burst out, clawing the air. “I went to the mission school. I know who Homer was. I want you to understand! Would you dare suggest to Homer that he try to recover his sight? Do you understand what a pathetically ludicrous idea that is? What can you give him that is more than what he has, what he brings from inside himself?”

His brother must be the object of his love and pride. It seemed to Istvan that the man could tear an opponent to bits like a tigress defending her young if something threatened the singer. The two of them are mad. It is impossible to arrive at an understanding with them. They have the advantage over us; they are in no hurry. They believe that they will live on innumerable times, drawn ineluctably into vortexes of change.

“So you want nothing from me.” There was a note of irritation in the man’s voice. “I do not like being a debtor.”

“Support the mission. They gave him shelter there.”

“They are not our friends. They teach that we live only once. They implant an alien sense of hurry. I cannot give a paisa to that mission.”

He bent to retrieve his hat, but Daniel, standing on the sand below the steps, was already handing it to him.

“Thank you again.” He seized Terey’s hand like a beast of prey and pressed it until it hurt. He must be a practitioner of yoga, he thought. Strong — and he seems so unimposing.

The Hindu nodded to the attendant, who ran behind him eagerly and listened deferentially to his orders. His head with its curly black hair bobbed in zealous agreement, like the head of a bird pecking grain.

A sea of tilting mirrors gave off silver fire. The two Englishwomen were returning from the beach under parasols as light as those in paintings by Renoir. They were accompanied by a young man with a bronze tan who waved colorful bathing suits and wrung rainbow-tinted sparks out of them.

“Unhappy thought,” Margit said apologetically, extending her hand with a meek smile, “we will never come to understand this India.”

He sat down beside her. He picked up a weekly newspaper that was warmed by the sun and smelled of printer’s ink, but he did not read it. He was unconscious of everything but the girl, hot from fever and with dark rings around her eyes — rumpled, wan, and so desired.

“Come,” she whispered and put his head on her shoulder, holding him to her like a child. “Stay this way a moment. No, don’t kiss me. I’m sticky. Lie against me. I want to enjoy knowing that you’re here. You will never understand that hunger.”

“I understand,” he murmured, and it seemed to him that he really did. His eyelids touched her bare neck, with swelling greenish veins under her golden skin. He saw tiny wrinkles, or rather their distant harbingers — the signs of the way she would look when time lay on her. Now only sweat and the dust of the moment outlined them, dust sifted from the shifting white dunes through the warm, gusty air that rocked the coconut palms and rattled their fronds like a fire close by.

“I’m better. Tomorrow I’ll try to get up. Istvan, forget about that blind singer. Leave that to the people here. Let them see to it that justice is done.”

“Did you want me to say that?”

“No.” She was silent for a moment; they heard the whishing of the tide, the squawks of startled gulls and the cautious scratching of a water rat who was climbing on a pole under the floor. “I was thinking of our old house, of all our family. If you knew them, you would know at once why I am as I am. My grandfather held tight to his money to the last. My father trained under him as a bank executive. Grandpa never spared him humiliation; he would give him tongue-lashings in front of the staff. On Christmas Eve, instead of presents, he would give us checks in envelopes — a gift that didn’t require him to think about us. He didn’t have to find out what we wanted, go to the shops and buy things; it was simpler just to fill out the checks.

“I remember Christmas on the yacht, spending the night on the bay. A huge turtle baked in its shell, stuffed with bananas. As long as mama was alive, we observed tradition: a festive dinner, the men in jackets, I in a long white dress with lace — the kind of dress I thought I would be married in. But that’s in the past for me; don’t worry.” She stroked him jokingly as if to reassure him.

“It’s terrible — the way time obliterates the past. Whenever I was rummaging in the cabinet and came across a handkerchief of mama’s, the smell of perfume would bring her back so vividly that I would cry like a little chit of a girl. Our cousin Donald…”

He saw tears on the ends of her lashes, but she was smiling. His look encouraged her to speak.

“I told you about the old clock in the hall.”

“The one in the shape of a woman with arms akimbo and the clock dial for a face,” he whispered, knowing that she would be glad.

“Yes. Donald took an air gun and shot at the pendulum. Grandpa caught him and was furious, not because the clock was a precious family piece, only because the target was so large — as big as a saucer — and he had missed it. Grandpa took the gun, put in the bolt, and missed as well. ‘You can’t shoot with that. It will ruin your eye,’ he yelled, and threw the gun out onto the street. Before Donald could run down the stairs, some little scamps had taken it away. It’s foolishness I’m telling you about, but that was my home — my real home. The others were just places to sleep.

“One returns home. That is where I want to give birth to our son or daughter. Best of all, one of each. You’ll like it. You’ll see. It will be ours. My father prefers a more modern house; I prefer the old one. Anyway, my father only thinks of his new child now. I’ve been pushed into the corner, and I annoy him; he stumbles over me as something that belongs to the past. I can’t manage to be happy about this little brother, probably because I haven’t seen him. Besides, I’m used to being an only child — and perhaps you make it hard for me to see anything else.”

He was touched to the quick by the memory of a rambling whitewashed house with streaks of bluing bleeding through. The high, chipped doorsill: how hard it had been for him to crawl over it! For whole years they had split the kindling on it. Sharp splinters had stuck in his bottom. He saw the hall, with its smell of dry clay, inlaid with flat stones. His ears rang with the squeal of a swarm of chicks, yellow with brown stripes on their backs, which fled at the rattle of the wrought iron door handle in the form of a ram’s horn. Dim light: windows filled with myrtle and pots of impatiens. Piles of pillows on the beds and a light scent of fresh air and moisture, for the linen had been taken to the orchard to be aired in the breeze and warmed by the sun. He had been born in a bed like that, and he could have slept for ever, listening to the placid chat of the neighbors and the whinnying of horses, the far-off barking of dogs and the creaking of the well-sweeps.

But he could not live in that house anymore. In Budapest, where the boys were, and Ilona…that was only the place where he hung his hat. He could change it with no regrets, move into another street. Even to Buda, near the castle. If a house had lost its significance — changed into a temporary stopover — could a country as well? Is it not enough to be a human being — free, without roots?