Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Timidly he made out the outline of her face in the dark, the straight nose, the pale, narrowed lips — lips he remembered as full, parted, expectant.

“When you go back,” she breathed in the voice of one who is dying of an illness and in exhaustion whispers, “When you bury me, I want you to…”

He waited, quivering and ready, vowing to himself to do anything she might demand.

“Don’t let them crush you. Stand up for yourself. Be hard, cruelly hard, as you are to me.”

To the last she was thinking only of him: he and his writing were important. She believed that he was a creator. That with a word he could call things to life, revive them, stop time.

The old peanut vendor shook his smoky stove on its bamboo slat. An imperceptible breath of air bent its five red flames. As if she could not bear for anyone to go away disappointed that night, she let him hand her nuts in a little cone of twisted newspaper that smelled of kerosene. She did not open it; it lay between them. The old man caught the money and walked away a few steps. Then, as if his honesty had gotten the better of him, he turned back and held out another bag.

“I had a premonition that it would end this way.” She opened her hands spasmodically as if she were trying to grasp an elusive thread. “And I didn’t want to accept it. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Do you regret everything? Would you rather we had never…”

“No.” For the first time, she looked at him. “Without you I would never have known how it was possible to be the happiest woman in the world. Should I thank you? Do you want to wring that from me? You gave me a gift and then took away all the joy. You shattered it.”

The words lashed him. He cringed and took the blows.

Beggars, some of them women and children, came out of the darkness squealing like hungry birds. They peered into the car. They stood patiently for a long time with fingers outspread. She dug the last of her change out of her pocket. They crowded in, shouting and pushing. In the light from passing cars he saw their thin legs, their tattered, threadbare clothing. They could not shake off the whining crowd; the mendicants shoved their faces through the window and tapped on the car with their fingers. Great flashing eyes gazed from under matted hair, waiting for the hand that sprinkled coins.

“Give them something.”

“They’ll never leave us alone,” he said. When she threw a whole handful of coins onto the walk, he turned on the headlights, blew the horn, and drove on — escaped.

“I’m poorer than they are,” she whispered. “I have nothing.”

They rode along the Yamuna. Below them the funeral pyres were burning out. He drove her through Old Delhi. On the sidewalks the homeless lay like headless cocoons, wrapped in soiled sheets. Garlands of colored light bulbs blazed as if in derision; gigantic figures of film heroes swung on cables. We were here, he thought bitterly as each place they passed evoked a memory. We visited Krishan’s wife in the little room behind the tailors’ workshop. We bought sandals. We took our first walk, when I pushed her into the smoke of dried cow dung as if it were deep water — the stench of burned bodies, the smell of unleavened bread baked on tin plates. She was immersed in the real India.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked drowsily.

“Nowhere.” Frightened, he hastily corrected himself, “Nearer to dawn…Perhaps you will want to come back?”

“I have nothing to come back to.”

It was growing cool. The bent grass, trodden down by foot traffic, gleamed with the early morning dew. The sky was going white; behind clusters of huge trees a fiery fissure split the night.

They drove up to the hotel. He waited for her to let him follow her, but she motioned to him to stay where he was. Two sleepy bellhops, yawning and scratching under their arms, went to get her suitcases. He got out of the car and opened the trunk.

“You ought to eat something,” he reminded her, but her look silenced him.

He had not had a bite all the previous day, but he felt no hunger, only bitterness — the slimy dregs of bile. As they were passing the gardens outside the city, he stopped the car. In spite of her protests he called an old man from a shed with watering cans all around it and asked him to cut some roses.

“How many?” he asked, rubbing the scratchy stubble on his face and yawning until the yellow incisors flashed in his otherwise toothless mouth.

“A lot,” Istvan shouted impatiently. “All of them.”

The man brought a sheaf of buds. They were almost black, with stiff leaves; they smelled of the freshness of the night and of wet mown herbs.

“What are they for?” She fixed her eyes on the fleshy petals sprinkled with dewdrops. She held them apathetically on her knees.

The road crawled along, curving gently through arid hills. They came upon a sadhu who had abandoned everything to follow the truth he sought.

And then the airport appeared. The corrugated aluminum roofs of the hangars gave off a white glare. Travelers surrounded them: women with children, carrying bundles with pots tied to them. A megaphone chattered in a foreign language, the voice compelling attention and then wearying the listeners, for they could understand nothing. A beautiful girl with enormous earrings served them coffee from a machine. They drank it and looked mutely at each other.

A mustachioed clerk asked Miss Ward the weight of her luggage and noted it on her ticket. Istvan seemed to feel the girl in his arms — his arms, which had carried her, cherished her. The rising roar of engines could be heard like the voices of winged beasts surging into the air. A bass voice called, “Flight to Nagpur. Change there for Bombay and Madras.”

A stewardess with slim thighs, wearing an iridescent blue sari, raised a bare arm and beckoned to them with long fingers. They left the hall, which rumbled like the inside of a barrel, and walked down to the wide, flat, grassy airfield. He noticed that it was a beautiful, sunny day.

The airplane was white in the light. The stairs had been rolled up to it.

Margit pressed the prickly armful of roses, which only now were taking on a red tint. She did not give him her hand and he did not dare reach for it. He saw her face, wan and looking older than her age, her blue-veined eyelids and her eyes, which mirrored despair itself.

“It’s wrong, Istvan,” she whispered through colorless lips. “Even a dog doesn’t deserve this.”

She turned around and almost ran toward the plane so he would not see her burst, trembling, into tears. The stewardess took her by the arm and led her inside as if she were ill.

Before the steep stairs were rolled away, the Indian woman appeared once more and put Margit’s roses on the little platform. He remembered the prohibition against traveling with plants and fruit: fear of contagion.

The left engine roared first, then the right. The airplane turned where it stood. A hard breeze jerked at the white skirts of the barefoot attendants who bent over and pushed away the stairs.

He gazed at the round windows; the sun blazed on them as on a row of mirrors. The plane moved slowly, hopping lightly. The odor of exhaust hit him in the chest. The breeze ruffled his shirt and nipped at his pants legs like a dog. Clouds of dust drifted about and grit beat his forehead. He shielded his eyes and when he lowered his hands, the plane was a speck sailing into the glistening blue. Then it was lost as if in the depths of the ocean.

When he was sitting in the Austin, unable to put a hand on the wheel, Mihaly’s cicada began to sing in its box as if it were insane. He undid the thread, raised the lid and shook it out onto the grass. He saw that its wings glinted like glass as it flew toward the tops of the trees, from which came a rasping as of metal gears: the overture of the advancing heat.