Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

As the sun on her knees became unbearably warm, she flicked her straps down and partly uncovered her small breasts. Droplets of perspiration sparkled between them. She pushed up her hair, which was sticking to the back of her neck, and tossed it over the back of her chair. She remained for a moment in that pose, hands above her head, sighing deeply with half-closed eyes.

“Not many of those who are fleeing stop to think that they are no longer sharing the fate of their country. They have wrenched themselves from that common bond. Even if I could see the forces that threaten Hungary better from a distance and make my arguments without interference, I sense an unspoken stricture: ‘But you will not share the future with us. You will not risk your neck. You have already walked away. You have said your No. Well, that is enough; we can understand your decision, but at least spare us your preachments.’ In spite of sentiments, attachments affirmed once in a while, with every year I would become more estranged. And that’s the truth. Everything I would write there about Hungary would be about the past.”

She took his hand and laid it on her heart, stroking it. “And must you drag the past with you? You will find a hundred themes, another country, new people. You will rediscover Australia even for us, for Australians, because you will see it for the first time, with new eyes. You are poisoned with politics. Do you have to be the dog at the heels of the sheep to block their way, to bark and turn them back?”

He took his hand away.

“You know whose dog I can be without losing my dignity.”

“Mine?” she whispered, stroking his hair.

“No. Not yours.”

“It’s terribly difficult to communicate with you. You’re becoming tiresome. You can always write about yourself; you say, after all, that a person is a universe. Artists are never tired of telling about themselves. Go. Swim. Cool your head, my great writer on the five-year plan. You’re bent on suicide. Well, why are you looking at me like that? You’d be ashamed to admit even to yourself that you’re destroying your own talent. You believe that an angel will fly down and take you by the hand like Abraham when he was about to kill his own son. But you Catholics don’t like to glance into the Bible,” she jeered maliciously.

“And perhaps you’re shifting some of the responsibility to me? I will take you on my conscience, free you from your shackles and carry you so far away that you can absolve yourself. I, you hear, I.” She beat her fist against the frame of her chair. “What you want is for me to become the voice of destiny. I will be. And I swear to you, I will save the poet in you.” Her lips tightened in a grimace of pain and angry impatience. “Only don’t make me beg too long. It’s humiliating. Now go.”

She curled up and put her bent hand under her forehead. She seemed to be crying. He stood over her for a moment, ready to kneel and embrace her and whisper words of comfort, but a sense that he had been insulted grew within him and he stiffened with resentment.

He went down to the water. He slipped off his beach coat; the sun touched his arms like a trainer examining an athlete’s muscles. He broke into a run, threw himself into the water, and did a hundred meters of crawl. He did not look around. He felt the need for intense exertion, even risk. As his breathing grew steady and he changed to the breaststroke, the surface of the tilting waves flashed as if with mica, pricking his eyes. Water the color of laundry bluing, bitter-tasting, stuck on his lips. He swam doggedly, putting distance between himself and the shore, though he was sure Margit had come out of the shade and was leaning on the railing, watching his head as it disappeared time after time in the troughs between blue ridges.

She would be beckoning to him to come back; that was just why he did not look around. It occurred to him that he would have to wage a determined struggle to get back to the beach. The current was stealthily, imperceptibly pushing him before it. It was as if Istvan, carried out from wave to wave, was not catching foam in his hands, but the mane of a thrashing horse.

Suddenly something told him: enough. He put his legs down into the water: they trembled like a cork on a fishing line. He looked around. The bank was far away. The veranda was empty. He counted the houses; he had not erred. Margit had gone in. She was not looking out at him at all. He let himself drift calmly; he swam in a long diagonal toward the beach. An hour later he stumbled onto the shore, collapsed onto the hot sand and breathed with his mouth open. He had no saliva.

I have not set a date for our leaving, so she thinks I don’t love her enough. She lashes me like a horse to make me take the hurdle. Poor thing; why is she so tormented? Hasn’t she had enough proof?

The sky was like a sheet of zinc, with no gleam of white from a cloud or a gull’s wing. He walked slowly back to the water’s edge. Gushing wavelets ran up to his feet, streaking them with foam when he stepped in them. He strained his eyes looking for shells or branches of broken coral to take her as a peace offering.

The first taxis were coming into the palm grove. Out of them scattered whole Hindu families, mothers and children — groups of six or eight, so many that he marveled that they could have packed themselves into the cabs. Women in long saris, covered by parasols and guarded by their men, waded in the water, jumping back with squeals as warm spurts darted from the mischievous waves. Brahmins from wealthy families shunned the sun, shielding their light skins to avoid the tanning that would make them resemble the despised Dravidians.

Three girls wrapped in pink tulle went waist-deep into the water. Crouching and slapping their hands on the surface, churning up sparkling droplets, they bathed like old Hungarian farm women who had worn long shirts fastened between the legs with safety pins. He stood there for a moment, ready to jump in if help should be needed; he knew they could not swim. But they came out of the water, which tugged at them, sucking at their transparent dresses; the soaked tulle clung to slender thighs. A man in a blue shirt thrown over narrow trousers smoked a cigarette, not watching over the bathing women but only looking into Terey’s face with a hostile expression, as if he wanted to push him away.

He shrugged and ran along the wet strip of beach. A heap of seaweed smelled of fish and iodine; loose scales glittered like sequins on the dried plants. At last he found a forked branch of coral, white as if from salt. His heart warmed with a childish happiness that he could give it to Margit.

Under the leaning trunk of a palm the elderly Hindu was sitting with a flute, playing an evening greeting to the sea and the setting sun. Istvan passed him at a distance; even his long shadow did not graze the feet of the hunched old man. He remembered that the shadow of an infidel could contaminate, offend, render one unworthy to mingle with the divine.

The room seemed empty. Margit lay without speaking behind the lowered mosquito netting. He pushed aside the nets and at once met importunate, anxiously questioning eyes.

“I’m sorry.” She extended a hand. “I was unbearable.”

He took her hand, turned her palm upward and put the branch of coral in it. It flushed pink in the low light; outside the open door the sky was bursting with brilliant wine red.

“Do you feel unwell?”

“No. But I didn’t have the strength to watch while you were swimming in the ocean. If you loved me…I knew you were swimming a long way out to spite me. I came in from the veranda, but I saw you all the time, here, from behind the netting.”

“I didn’t think you had such an imagination.”

“Imagination!” she sighed. “I simply have a heart. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to, Istvan.”