Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

But seeing that Terey was sitting with his eyes closed, he did not dare rouse him. He walked slowly away, disappointed.

Events take their inevitable course, exposing the logic of connections. Even Grace had only accelerated their course.

Was it precisely for Margit that fate had brought him to India? He was immovable in the conviction that he had been born for this test, had matured for it through the years. They had come to each other from two extremes of the globe, led unerringly so that…It had to happen as it did. Any other choice would have been a denial of the truth. Had he known from the beginning how he must proceed, though he had not wanted to admit it to himself and had delayed, had put off the fatal hour?

It was not at the moment when he had stammered out “I don’t want—” but earlier, much earlier, that he had doomed her and himself. He had reached the decision in anguish, always resisting, dragged step by step.

Then by the sea at midnight, when he felt that there was no appeal from the verdict, and she slept with her face pressed into her bent arm and he heard in her breathing a quiet choking like the smothered echo of recent crying, he had needed to be alone. Alone. He had waited until her breathing grew soft and regular. He had extricated himself from the mosquito netting. The stairs of the veranda creaked. Under his toes there was the cool, grainy sand. The wide beach slept in the dark; the sky with knots of stars hung like netting flung unevenly above it. The ocean rushed onto the sloping shore and streams of water flowed down, scouring millions of shells. A ridge of dredged-up seaweed, parched by the sun and black during the day, teemed with a shining powder of alien life.

He moved as if without volition, slipping over the tilting dunes, walking in the beam of the lighthouse — the lowest of the stars, set aglow by human hands.

He was only a step from the sea. All his senses were attuned to the vast surging and subsiding of the water, the exhalations of salt and decaying plants. The breeze ruffled the hair on his chest and blew around his legs. He felt a light warning chill. At the water’s edge, where the hard-packed ground was licked clean by the tides, he stopped. Foam died away at his feet with a hiss like a stifled sigh.

The world. A vision of the world: a writhing mass of suffering. Terrified creatures murdered by bestial toil and hardship. What was his despair compared to that abyss of pain and misery?

It seemed to him that he was hearing a remote swelling wail, but it was only the calls of distant tugboats signaling to each other. So many die at this hour. They don’t live to see the dawn. A heartfelt tear of crystallized grief. They can do nothing more. To the last breath they are disturbed by the certainty that they could have accomplished more; they are pained by the enormity of good left undone.

I stand in the darkness, naked before the sea, the sterile earth and the stars — alone, as in the moment of death. Let me count the days that are left to me and stifle the thought of myself, of the body’s joy, of approbation fleeting as foam.

As if he were feeling around him those who were departing the world that night, as if he were one of them, he dared to raise his head. Great stars hung like the points of raised spears.

Help me, so I may accomplish even a part of that which You began, from which You stepped aside — so I may advance a few steps farther on the road You abandoned. Take my eyes if they see only superficial things.

A sacrificial flame kindled in his heart.

Change my tongue into a coal if it speaks idle words. Let me have one thought, one desire: to give myself without calculation, without receiving a word of gratitude, even without hope, to the last spasm and the bottom of my heart, to the renunciation of myself in Your name, Who are love. To serve You by giving myself over to the most miserable, to those who never know satisfaction, to the jealous, to those with a cruel thirst for love and those who don’t believe in it. They wait for me, though they know nothing about me. They: those nearest me, those from my country and those from distant continents. I see them as if with one face, breathing hoarsely through its open mouth, pouring with sweat — a work-worn, sorrowful human face. Yours.

He was accustomed to the darkness now. On the smooth, gleaming sand he saw thousands, hundreds of thousands of crabs no bigger than peas, rolling yet smaller globules from the mud. Another wave came. If it were not to engulf them and wash them away, this was the last moment to burrow in and hide — to wait until the stream of water retreated. They emerged from the packed sand and began again. He thought of time and generations, arduous human building, creation in the face of destruction. All the shore teemed, glimmering with phosphorescence from the unabating, hurried activity.

Though the cry he had flung into the dark went without an answer, in the slow billowing of water white with crests of foam and the swarming of the crabs, which did not pause from their labor, he found new strength.

He went in to Margit, who shivered in her sleep when she felt the coolness of his body. He lay with his eyes open, his muscles contracted with pain.

“What have you come for?”

Margit’s whisper. It seemed to him that he was still seeing her at the shore.

“I had to be with you.”

The bitter curl of the lips. The shadow, the memory of her smile.

“You were afraid that…”

“Yes.”

“Did you come out of concern for me or for yourself?”

In the twilight of the avenue her hair gleamed like copper under the streetlights; he could not see her face. He opened the doors of the Austin. She hesitated, then bent over and got in without looking at him. Her eyes evaded his by gazing into the street, toward the long line of trees interspersed with the greenish glow of the lamps.

“That would have been simpler,” she said after a while. “For where do I start? You took everything from me.”

She said no more. She was overcome by weariness. Suddenly she raised her head and their eyes met in the mirror.

“How little you know me. Don’t be afraid,” she said in a hard tone. “I won’t do that. You can’t free yourself from me now. I’ll be a weight on your heart through all the nights we won’t be together. It’s terrible, Istvan, but even after what you’ve done, I can’t hate you. I can’t.”

“I had to do it,” he ventured in a whisper as pain pierced his heart.

“You had to. You had to.” She bent her head. “How I hate Him. The cursed idol, faceless, infallible, for He is not material, like us.” She was blaspheming, spasmodically clenching her hands. “You’ve sacrificed us both for Him.”

He listened. Every word burned, then turned to ashes. She had cut him to the quick; she could not have wounded him more deeply.

“I will not kill myself, do you hear? Don’t torture yourself, go, rest…Go to sleep,” she whispered, laying her hand forgivingly on the back of his bowed neck. He bit his lips and trembled under her touch. Suddenly a sob wrenched itself from him. The tears of a man broken by pain; it is most charitable not to look at them.

“Will you ever forgive me?” he moaned. “Me…You should accuse me, not Him.”

She contradicted him with a slow movement of her head.

An approaching car cast a sharp glare over her. Her eyes were wide, as if she were blind. She was numb; she saw days like voids before her, a desert impossible to wade through, time when she would be alone as a stone among stones.

“Go now,” she whispered. “End your vigil over the dead.”

“Let me stay. Let me take you to the plane. I want to be with you to the last.”

“When the porter rang and said the gentleman was waiting, I cried, ‘Who?’ ‘The one who always comes…’” She repeated the phrase through clenched teeth. “I sent him to check. I didn’t think you’d have the courage. But it was you. And everything came back. You’re here.”