Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“The water will boil shortly.” The caretaker threw sticks onto the fire. “You surely have your own tea. I invite you: we have only local tea, smoke-dried. I will dress the chickens quickly.”

He went over to the poles where the birds were sleeping with their heads tucked under their wings and felt them, gauging their weight with his hands. As he wakened them, they cackled. He chose two, carried them away as they flapped their wings and squealed in desperation, and took the shears from the boy’s hands. He stopped in the doorway, which was splotched with moonlight as if with chalk.

The chickens had squawked themselves hoarse and were paralyzed by their sense that death was near. They dangled lifelessly. With one grating snarl of the shears he cut off their heads and let the bodies fall onto the heavily trodden grass. The headless birds lunged about as if to escape, spraying black blood against the moon. They jumped, dragging their wings, staggering drunkenly in circles. Before they went rigid they burrowed into clumps of weeds.

The dog walked out in her strange armor with its protruding points like a beast in a fairy tale. She licked up the blood from the dried grass as if from necessity — as if overcoming an aversion.

“Why have you got her up that way?” Terey asked.

“A panther has already taken two dogs from my son,” the old man blurted out. “This dog has pups too small to live without her. My son wants to protect her. He understands that it will be good for her.”

He did not pluck the chickens. He only tore off the feathers together with the skin. They stuck to his fingers, which were dark with blood. The bitch snatched the entrails as they were ripped out and gulped them down with one snap of her lean muzzle.

“I won’t eat,” Margit whispered. “I want to wash up, have some tea, and sleep.”

“I’ll watch to be sure he doesn’t skimp on the spices.”

“The water is in a barrel under the ceiling, but it is cool. You need only pull the cord and it will pour. The other barrel, the one by the wall with the dipper beside it, is for washing after. The water closet is here — but who except in a case of great urgency would come out to the yard — only please flush. One guest from the ministry is already sleeping: a Hindu, not important. If I had known that you were coming, I would have purchased more vegetables and some tinned foods and set aside the best part of the hotel,” he said proudly.

The moon shone brightly; it seemed to stare unnervingly into their faces. Weariness came over them, and they shivered from the chill of the mountain night. The flickering light gave the walls of the shed a greenish tinge and glimmered on the disemboweled chickens. The dog sniffed the severed heads and munched them, choking on the beaks.

The boy came out of the kitchen to help Istvan spread out the bundles of bedding that were strapped to the roof of the car. But, enthralled by the green globe that was the full moon, he stood for a long time with his head turned up as if he were bewitched.

Margit slipped into the shed and sat on a block of wood behind the caretaker, who was tending the fireplace. He ran his hands over the hot embers as if his skin were fireproof. The feathers that still stuck to his fingers sizzled; the stench of them drifted through the room.

Why did I feel the slaughter of those roosters as an injury to myself? Nothing really happened; the rest of the chickens fell asleep again. They will not realize tomorrow that there are fewer of them. Does some ruthless hand also snatch us away for some reason that to it is self-evident? An evil vision — as if I press blindly on toward something that I don’t yet comprehend, but that will overtake and seize me. Is it possible to hear in the cries of slaughtered birds the voice of one’s own fear of death?

She pressed her fingers between her teeth and bit until it hurt. It was a relief. That herdsman, lame, thrown aside by his people — we took him back to be thrown aside again, to live through the despair of isolation a second time. They will leave him on the road. They will betray him. He will try feverishly to catch up with them, dragging his ailing leg. The long shadow will gain on him, a whine will urge him on: the craven sob of the hyena, walking along as if with a broken back, sneaking from one windfallen tree to another, under bushes, in the twilight, lured by the decay of the body. It also wishes no man to be wronged; it wants only the carrion, the rotting meat. Its jaws snap; they can crush the thickest bone. And that cripple knew it was waiting for him to die, if not tonight, then tomorrow. The next day. Shouldn’t I have stayed by him, torn away the rags even if he resisted, made an incision, put on a dressing? Did I do all I could have?

She reproached herself for the relief they had felt at letting him go, at giving him back to his own people, perhaps his own family. The sick should be treated by force here. Women swinging vessels with embers in front of their eyelids, men guarding flocks with spears in their hands. It may even be that they are happy; it is enough to accept the premise that this is the only life possible for them, inevitable as fate. Does it matter how one dies? We pass through that black gate alone, slipping from the arms that want to hold us. Is it worth it to form bonds in this life, to cling with all one’s might, to struggle?

Perhaps that man who sat on the edge of the road threw away his stick because he knew by then that one does not defend oneself — that he was doomed because he was already dead in the eyes of his people, who had walked away. Perhaps he was reconciled to it. She smelled the scent of a hyena whining with the lust to tear and devour the still-warm body.

She prayed, she hid her face in her hands and prayed, for rescue for the lame man. After all, some truck might come along; he might shout, might stop it. A will to struggle might awaken in him. But she felt a bitter certainty that the sick man would not cry out, and that the hyena, frightened away by the truck’s headlights and the roar of its engine, would return.

In a drowsy burst of weeping she accused herself and begged for mercy for the man whose kin had abandoned him. And they will feel no guilt; their hands will be clean. Because they won’t know. Blessed ignorance.

In the leaping firelight the old man turned his brown, furrowed face toward her. “The chickens will be ready soon.”

The door opened. Istvan said that the bed was ready. He was baffled when Margit rose and clung to him desperately.

“A sleepy little girl?” He stroked her back and held her close. “I’ll tuck you in in a little while. I’ll feed you.”

“Do you think”—her tense whisper demanded an answer—“that they took that man with them?”

“Who?”

“The old man with the infected leg.” She was angry that he had not understood at once. “I saw a hyena slinking along behind him.”

“Of course they took him. You were dozing. That nightmare tired you. But surely you wanted to exchange me for him and devote your life to him,” he said with an indulgent smile. “You know the devout principle: nonviolence. Change nothing by force. Let evil destroy itself, and let us perfect ourselves. Let the world not hinder us in this. Nor any hyena.”

She was appalled. “You can’t be serious.”

“Of course not. I wanted to remind you of the law of this country in which we are only guests. They must deal with this themselves — not as individuals but as ethnic groups, as a state.”

“Mother India!” she sighed.

“Exactly. Remember how those mothers by the walls of the dung cottages raise locks of their daughters’ hair in the sun and delouse them. They comb out the lice and let them fall into the grass. To kill them is not allowed, for life is sacred. Calm down. Don’t castigate yourself. What is one cripple in the scheme of things? Life goes on.”