Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“I want to be a vice-minister. I will be. I want to rest, to go to a small, comfortable country — to a country like Holland — and I’ll bide my time. They won’t push me lower. Perhaps I won’t be read by schoolchildren as you will, but such people as I made the history of the republic.” The sagging fold of skin under his chin quivered with his shallow breath. “They won’t put me out to pasture. I won’t be buried alive. I’ll be where the party puts me.” Yet he spoke as though he would give orders to the party.

Istvan remembered the ambassador’s wife’s anxiety, the instinctive fear that the taut string would break. It was the tale of the golden fish: the boss knew the magic words and he knew in which ear to whisper them. And they had been fulfilled, but the party of today was not the golden fish. On his doughy hands, damp with unhealthy sweat, it would be difficult today to feel the corns, the traces of hard labor, for they belonged to the distant past. He had grown stout; his broad hindquarters filled more and more capacious chairs. He had lost his immunity, though he thought he still had it. The first failure would break him; he would sink into despondency. He would be like a rag. Istvan did not feel hatred for him. He was almost grateful that he could feel sympathy.

“You wanted the truth? And for what? Will things be easier for you when you know it? You insist on your right to it, and you don’t know what it is. Truth corrodes like acid. That is the price of power. Some of those who rule know the truth. And they must keep it hidden inside themselves, for if they shouted it to the nation, the people would stop their ears and run away. And they must open their mouths in order to issue commands every day, to lead, to govern. How I envy you that boyish ignorance, Terey!”

His hands shook. He noticed it and rested them heavily on his parted knees. “I don’t want to scuttle you,” he whispered furiously. “Just get out of my sight. Go to Hungary. Go to Australia. Go to the devil. Anywhere I can’t see you and those good, stupid, inquisitive eyes of yours.”

Istvan knew that Bajcsy was too distraught to play the game. He had crushed him; he knew he held the advantage. He heard his wheezing. He saw the fold under the unevenly scraped chin, the gray and black stubble; the cracks in the baggy skin showed through. The conversation must have taken a toll on him. No, I’ll not attack him. I’ll not inflict a blow. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.

Suddenly he seemed to see the ambassador in Budapest, walking with the shuffling steps of an old man. He stopped and leaned on a tree, oblivious to people who looked at him as they passed by, gasping through parted purple lips. Light air washed by a spring shower, wet, gleaming pavement and sparkling leaves, wrought iron garden fences, a boundless sky — and a man unable to get his breath. His feet slid along the ground, which had long since ceased to be a battlefield and become, in spite of the paving stones, soft and slushy. He shuffled, and if he still felt the earth under the soles of his shoes, it seemed unfriendly; it had become insistent. It reminded him that it was there, that it was waiting.

A servant brought a tray with coffee in two small, brittle cups. “Drink.” The boss’s tone was peremptory. Roused from his thoughts, Istvan looked at Bajcsy’s crumpled face. The older man reached for a cup and lifted it to his open lips. His hand trembled and drops of brown liquid fell onto the rug.

“So I shouldn’t go back to work?”

“That would be best.”

He looked back from the doorway. He saw the bulky, stooped figure, in a jacket hitched up too high, crammed between the arms of the chair.

“And my letters?”

“I ordered that.” He took the responsibility for everything on himself, certain that he was equal to it. “They are in the safe. Tell the cryptographer to give them to you. I don’t need them. I think we understand each other.”

Istvan passed through the shadowy house and walked out between the pillars on the porch. He sighed deeply and inhaled the clean, fragrant air as if he wanted to escape the dust, the weightless suspended particles, the ashes blown from the pipe that was stifling the ambassador. The watchman pulled aside the heavy gate; the garden seemed to be sleeping in the winter sun.

Fragments of sentences came back to him and he brooded over gestures and tones of voice, thought of more pertinent, incisive answers, marveling that they came to mind only now. He shrugged with a dissatisfied frown, like a man who should have provided crucial information but procrastinated, and an evaluation was written. But Ferenc didn’t pin the business he had going with the whiskey bought with the diplomatic certificates on me, and he could have; I wouldn’t have been able to explain. They would have believed him. In the end he preferred that nothing be said about it; he was saving his own skin. Unconsciously Istvan wanted to see his colleagues in a better light. He was hungry for goodness and congeniality.

His feet scraped on the paving stones; the sound echoed from the embassy walls. The working day was over. The caretaker stood among the palms in green-painted pots, keeping an eye on the Indian sweepers to make sure they took up the matting that served as a walkway and beat it, rather than simply brushing its surface as the usual cleaners did.

“Is it you, counselor?” The caretaker lunged toward him with such unfeigned joy that Istvan could not push away his extended hands. “I said I would bet my head that you would come back.”

“But you accused me in the matter of the bottles.”

“How could I be quiet when they all pounced on you? I spoke because no one else gave me a wretched bottle. I told them what kind of man you are, and right away they turned it into something to blame you for. I meant to defend you. A person has to bite his tongue before saying a word. I, after all…Surely you believe me,” he said pleadingly, pressing his hand.

“I believe you now — but it was painful for me.”

“I would have been on your side, comrade counselor. But when the ambassador said that he knew from a certain source that you had bolted, I kept quiet. I had my tail between my legs.”

“And you signed,” Istvan said bitterly.

“I signed. And not only I. It happened in such a way that there was no holding one’s own ground.”

“Very well, old friend. There is no more to say. The most important thing is that you didn’t go back on me.”

“The way it came out it was as if we had been slapped in the face.”

“Is the cryptographer still here?”

“Yes. In his office. The secretary is in, too.”

He hopped over the roll of matting that lay in the middle of the steps as if it were a threshold that was too high. He had hardly opened the door when Judit rose from her desk and threw herself on his neck as if he had been saved from impending death. She kissed him. He did not hug her; he stood with his hands lowered. He felt her warm, ample, friendly body against him. He saw, close to his face, her blue-painted eyelids and mild hazel eyes.

“Are you angry? Won’t you forgive us? Understand, Istvan, Bajcsy had information from some woman, absolutely certain information that you had sailed from Cochin with that Australian. Listen! I called you at the shore. They told me at the hotel that no such person was there. They always mix things up, mispronounce our names. They said — though I persisted — that a married couple had been there and gone away. No doubt they said that to get rid of me. A call from Delhi startled them. Then there was the meeting. The ambassador was so sure when he said that he knew the facts, that he was notifying us…that woman…”

Grace. It flashed through his mind. Grace, surely.