Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Don’t drink it!” Margit blocked him. “See? That’s not water, just a soup of drowned beetles.”

“It won’t hurt me,” he insisted, feeling a delightful coolness trickling through his outstretched hands.

But the old man raised a warning finger. He pulled the bag onto the wide brim of the cistern and drew out round, almost black watermelons. A knife plunged deep with a crunching sound, cutting out a juicy pink half-moon. The refreshing juice trickled over Istvan’s chin and chest. He bit in eagerly, slurping and smacking. Swarms of red midges swirled over him, pushing blindly into his eyes and mouth.

“The best I’ve eaten in India!” he said with profound conviction, rinsing his hands in a stream of water that leaked from a hole in the leather bag.

The old man would take no payment. He gave them two more watermelons for the road. But an hour later, weary with the ride, they tried another and had no taste for it. The unpleasantly tepid flesh, souring in the heat, was repulsive. Even the juice had spoiled; it gave off an odor of fermentation, like the offscourings of fruit.

The sky hovered close to the earth; its glow faded. Languidly, as if with a sword, the distant blaze of the sunset pierced the violet. The ground still panted from the heat of the day. He drove without turning on the headlights. On the horizon the sun was burning out, and though its light spurted in long radiant streams like a despairing call for help, a low moon ambled out and steeped the valley in a bluish afterglow.

“Drive carefully now. Shall I take over?”

“No. My sleepiness has passed.”

A stooped elderly man hobbled along the edge of the road, leaning on a long stick. He raised a hand in the glare of the headlights, but lowered it when he saw that this was not a truck. Istvan gradually slowed down. They passed him standing behind a clump of trees with trunks that gleamed as if they had been whitewashed.

“Shall we take the old man?”

“I’ve heard so much about the dacoits ,” she began. She saw through the rear window that the man had one leg swathed in fabric and was dragging it like a piece of baggage.

“The dacoits don’t touch Europeans. I think they consider us beneath them. We are outside the sacred order, the castes, worse than the worst. Or they see us as a kind of natural disaster which must simply be waited out.”

The lame man stopped, unable to believe his eyes. He did not understand what they were saying to him; he knew only his own dialect, and the few words that Terey managed in Hindi did not reassure him. At last he understood. He got in, but let go his stick and crouched close to the car door as if ready to jump out any minute. He breathed with the shallow panting of old age. In the lazy air of the sultry evening an odor of pus rose from his leg.

“What’s wrong with him?” Margit wondered. “Leprosy, perhaps?”

“No.” He smiled cruelly. “Haven’t you recognized it yet? It’s a mortal sickness called life. It runs various courses, but it always finishes in death. He’s coming to the end.”

They drove in a haze of moonlight. The mountains sparkled as if they had been sprinkled with snow; perhaps even on the high slopes the starry sky had shaken down a dew. The glow of their headlights on the road cut a red wedge of clay packed down by wheels and baked from the heat.

Suddenly a flock of sheep loomed in front of the car; the animals, in a jostling mass, kicked up a reddish cloud of dust. Men drove undersized cattle into the ditch, forcing them to jump like goats. The smells of cow sheds — of milk and dung — burst onto the air. Women stopped along the road, tall women with shawls thrown over their heads. Dogs ran about in the light from the car, their black lips and white teeth flashing.

A gray streak of wood smoke hung in the air over the startled sheep. The women carried copper vessels suspended from fire hooks. The charred brands slept in their ashes: eternal fire. Istvan caught the familiar fragrance of home. Then the lame old man began to shout. Men with long spears ran up to the car. One had a rifle on his shoulder.

“He wants to go to his people. He wants to get out,” Margit guessed. As soon as she pressed the door handle, the crippled man pushed himself onto the road and snatched his stick out of the car. He caught up to the herdsmen and spoke to them, waving his hands.

The left side of the road was already empty. Istvan drove the car in among the gray woolly backs, pushing the flock apart. As they vanished in the cool blue of the night, he asked, “Did anything strike you about the movement of those nomads?”

She said nothing.

“They were walking quietly, as if they were driving stolen animals. The sheep wore no bells. The cows had no clappers. The dogs didn’t even bark. They seemed to dissolve in the dark.”

“Only the smell of smoldering wood was left, and the odor of wounds running with pus — as if he were still sitting behind us.” She hunched over in anger. “I’m not even sure he didn’t think we meant to kidnap him! The herdsmen didn’t seem happy that he returned.”

“They had thrown him out. He’s a burden to them. They’re looking for new pastures, for water. They can’t lose animals for the sake of one old cripple. The animals are their living, so they must care about them above all. Meadows not burnt up with drought — they make it possible to have milk from the cows and sheep, for they don’t butcher them for meat. They would die of hunger first. Milk is life. They had to leave the old man. They wanted to live.”

“And we took him to them again,” she whispered.

“No doubt they’ve already left him.” He spoke without turning his head; he was gazing at the reddish fragment of road the headlights were tearing from the darkness. “They live according to the ruthless laws of nature.”

Before eleven they stopped in a large village. Peasants smoking pipes lay on beds in front of the cottages, wrapped like mummies in white sheets. Their fires glowed red in the breeze. The smoke, like a veil, sheltered them from the mosquitoes that were breeding in the half-dried-up cisterns. They surrounded the car; a couple of the younger ones spoke English. A tall man volunteered to show them the way to an inn and guided the car along a footpath. Istvan had to turn around because the Austin could not squeeze between the clay walls on which cow dung had dried.

“Too narrow,” said the young peasant with as much pride as if he had made a great discovery.

Above silver water the horned heads of buffalo protruded, their eyes blazing like jewels in the headlights. Temple steps, notched and interspersed with clumps of coarse grass, led to the silent reflecting surface. An enormous low moon lurked behind the mangrove. The spreading branches grew in the earth like ropes of aerial roots, creating caves filled with diffuse light.

They turned around cautiously. The pungent smell of rotting herbs, muck, and slime drifted from the water. The shore was a band of black and silver, pocked with innumerable hoofprints.

They drove around the village. They passed a forge that gave off a glare sprinkled with sparks and rang with the cheerful beat of a hammer; the blacksmiths were finishing their work in the cool of the night. They drove along a thick stand of sugarcane near an octagonal building of masonry with windows narrow as loopholes. Behind a closed screen door the light of an oil lamp brooded.

“Here, sahib, is lodging for the night,” the man said comfortingly. “In the old Methodist chapel.”

The dying murmur of the engine summoned an old man wrapped in a patched blanket. Behind the building sat a shed containing the inn’s kitchen and a hencoop. An open hearth threw a shifting glow onto the ceiling; fringes of spider web shaggy with soot hung from the beams. A half-grown boy was sitting cross-legged by the fire and cutting an old piece of gutter into V-shapes with shears, bending the pointed ends up. At his feet lay a scrawny bitch with sagging teats. The boy tried to fit segments of the armor he was making, with its comb of bristling spines, onto her back. He beat a nail into the metal to make holes and secured each section with a wire. At every summons the dog rose meekly and heaved a sigh.