Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“I knew from the beginning.”

He expected her to ask the next question, to probe for the truth. But she only leaned on his arm and reminded him, “All day tomorrow behind the wheel. You must rest before the drive.”

His hand was on her erect back. He led her into the bedroom; neither turned on the light. His ear caught the familiar rustling, the steps of bare feet, before she appeared out of the darkness naked, vulnerable. She stood with hands lowered as if transfixed by a sudden chill. He knelt half a step in front of her. She stood motionless so as to be near him, so his cheek could rest on her flat belly and his arms encircle her hips. “Margit,” he whispered. “My love.”

When he touched her she trembled, nestled to him, and pressed her lips to his. “I’m taking you to me as if these were the last moments of my life. As if it were all I could take into eternity.”

“Don’t say that!” he pleaded. He stroked her hips, then encircled them tightly with his arms.

She put her hands on his arms and dropped to her knees. Her firm nipples moved against him. Her cool skin slid softly against his, and in a cloud of hair her temple rested against his shoulder. Her forehead pressed against his pulsating neck and she heard the hammering of his heart; she felt his trembling. They knelt for a moment, listening to each other like horses that stand in a pasture head by head gazing at the setting sun, and only a shudder runs through the glistening reddish coats.

Morning broke, washed by a short, hard rain. The palm fronds gleamed as if they were freshly polished. The ocean danced in silver and green. “It’s as changeable as your eyes,” he said when they had emerged from the water and a light breeze was drying them.

“Our last swim.” She stood still, luxuriating for one more moment in the tranquillity of the bay.

“Stop,” he begged. “Be glad a beautiful day has begun. It’s like a good omen.”

“It will be sweltering. We’ll drive in shifts, shall we?” She bent to brush sand from her feet. “I liked that bay. I felt happy here.”

“Perhaps we’ll come back.”

She looked at him with enormous eyes that seemed to say: Do you believe that? The Angelus bell warbled plaintively; someone tugged at it as if in anger. Suddenly the ringer stopped dead, and the bell clanged off key.

Among the slender trunks of the palms, at the feet of the furrowed mound, stood a jeep. Police in shorts and red turbans were standing motionless; the high bank was swarming with half-naked fishermen swathed in white. Without going far out of their way, they saw what had drawn the crowd. The peasants’ eyes were riveted on the actions of the police as they examined faint tracks awash with loose sand.

Between them, his body curved as if he were bowing, lay the old sadhu. His forehead rested on the ground. Both hands were pressed to his chest as if he had wanted to hold to himself something very precious which was slipping away from him. A few steps farther on were a gourd with black holes, decorated with glass and bits of crushed tinfoil stuck on with a resin, and a common flute of the type used by snake charmers, beggars, and sellers of peanuts.

“Please do not come near.” A policeman stopped them. “We are waiting for the photographer.”

“What happened to him?”

“He is dead. He was a rich man. He was an important person in these parts. There will be trouble.”

“Especially for the family,” another officer grinned, his white teeth gleaming under his mustache with its twirled-up ends, “when they try to establish the amount of the inheritance.”

“Accident? Suicide?” Istvan demanded. The wind stirred the gray wisps of hair on the dead man’s sunburned neck.

“He is holding both hands on the haft of a knife, but that might simply be a reflex: someone may have thrust it in and he wanted to pull it out, and fell as you see. We would all have preferred that it be suicide. He had extensive business interests, not always above board. But a believing Hindu does not commit suicide. Even those in misery endure hunger and difficulty beyond human strength. They wait for the end; they want to be purified by suffering and attain a happier life. To be born into a wealthy family,” he explained sourly.

Fishermen stood on the talus, which exposed tangled masses of brown palm roots. They surged and pushed to get a better view. Suddenly the bank gave way with a dull ripping sound and the ground opened. Dark, slender figures sprang onto the sand.

The officer put his whistle to his bluish lip, but already the police were brandishing clubs. The fishermen were shouting and running in all directions to escape the bamboo cudgels. Those who crawled along the bank, hiding behind the palm trunks, snorted with laughter like boys being chased.

“Wait.” Margit held on to Istvan. “Here is the photographer.”

He fixed his tripod in place, took various views of the remains, then knelt, lay on the sand, and seemed to be prostrating himself before the dead man. Finally the corpse was turned over. The legs straightened as if with relief, the hands dropped and the black handle of the knife with its copper decoration showed from under the ribs.

“We can go,” Margit breathed. “Did you see how they looked at me? As if they had never seen a woman. I was sorry all the time that I didn’t have a beach coat.”

“What were you waiting for?” They waded through the loose sand. “Perhaps he sent those runaways to paradise.”

“A worshiper of the sea. I thought of that at once. Would you like to know why I stayed? I had to see the knife. You went out during the night; in my sleep I felt the coolness of your skin when you came back. And you didn’t give me back the lancet.”

“Do you think…I could have…”

“You believe it is your calling to hasten the verdicts of justice,” she said with emphasis. “If you had been certain that the old man was responsible for the deaths of those defenseless people and might evade judgment because he was a sadhu, because he was rich and the police preferred not to fall afoul of him, you wouldn’t have spared either yourself or those you love. I know you.”

He looked at her set lips. She was walking so fast that a red hank of hair that had escaped from under her aqua bathing cap swept her back. The sand parted under her narrow feet.

Before they went under the shower to rinse away the saltiness of the sea, he took her in his arms and turned her toward him. They stood that way, breathing rapidly. Her eyes were full of a cold fire.

“What do you want?” she asked. “You’ve killed, after all. You said so yourself.”

“It was war then.”

She tilted her head and suddenly he understood that she was like him: hard. She had been able to hate. She had come to India. She wanted to help people in misery. She had come to have her chance at life, to challenge fate. Well — she had had him. She had plunged into love, into the measureless element, but he knew by now that he was the stronger of the two.

“You don’t need a knife to kill,” she said pointedly. “Now let me go.”

She went into the shower and pulled down the straps of her bathing suit. A hail of bright drops beat on her breasts, which were paler than her arms. She immersed her face in the silver stream and closed her eyes: beautiful and distant.

“Sahib!” Daniel called from the veranda. “Murder on the beach! He was not a good man. Sahib, I have filled the petrol cans. He left a fortune. There are sandwiches in the basket and a mountain of oranges. They will probably arrest his nephews, since they would inherit it.”

They saw a dried red starfish on the hood of the Austin.

The rains, the monsoon downpours, had not destroyed the roads. The beds of the mountain rivers were not flooded. The wheels of the car churned shallow, sparkling water; they could imagine that the tires were relieved to settle into the swift current that made streaks in the yellow sand on the bottom. They plowed their way between mountains with dark brownish-red walls like clotted blood. The slopes were overgrown with matted, thorny bushes. Patches of earth parched from drought, lashed by winds, scratched and swept bare, gleamed over cracked subsoil. The sky had retreated upward and was empty, marked at long intervals by a black cross — a hawk that circled slowly and escorted them without bothering to move its wings.