Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“We go places together, you and I, after all — the same parties, you see me—”

“Just so; I see how the high life is getting a hold on you.”

“I do it for you, not for myself. Winning people over is one of our duties. Even when I leave, it will make it easier for my successor. I am feathering the nest for him.”

“I only remind you not to fly from it too soon.”

Istvan smiled derisively. “I do what everyone does. I am no different from the rest of you.”

“You play the bachelor. We have our wives here. They are what they are, but at least we can look at the Indian beauties without losing our composure.”

Now and again the people at the embassy would begin a probing conversation about the skin of Indian women, which was rough to the touch, about their hair, which was glistening and hard as horsehair, about odd or arcane lovemaking customs. He sensed that his colleagues wanted to sound him out about whether he had become familiar with such things, what experience he had acquired. Then against his better judgment he was silent; he changed the subject; he referred them to the Kamasutra in an English translation, illustrated with photographs of stone sculptures from the Black Pagoda.

“Be careful, Istvan. Look to yourself. Don’t slip up,” Ferenc warned him jokingly.

“I feel absolutely safe, for everyone is spying on me,” he rejoined.

Grace Vijayaveda had finished her studies in England.

“She wanted me to send her, though it was money thrown away since she did not marry an Englishman. She will not be a judge or advocate here, so why the training in law?” her father complained. “I can pay for her whims, within reasonable limits, of course.”

Istvan was disturbed by the incongruity between the balding, obese owner of a weaving mill in Lucknow and his petite, athletic daughter. Gray hair like an aureole encircled the man’s yellowish face, which was full of good-humored cunning. Only his large eyes with their warmth, their color like chocolate melting in the sun, resembled hers. The old manufacturer crossed his ankles, spreading heavy thighs that could be seen under his none too clean dhoti. He preferred the airy traditional dress to woolen trousers. He was one of the pillars of the Congress Party; once Gandhi himself, when the police were looking for him, had stayed overnight in his house.

He knew how to make the most of his past, in which he had been a little reckless and which now served him well. He did business, he squeezed out income, couching everything in noble phrases: for India one must earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow, broaden the industrial base. A drive to lead awoke in him; he knew how to build capital, he had nerved himself to wrest it from others. As long as weaving mills belonged to the English, he fought them hard, using every means at his disposal. When he built portfolios of stock, when he took the property of foreigners, it did not bother him at all that he was behaving in the same way as the colonialists.

“I am a Hindu. I am a son of this country, not an interloper,” he explained to Istvan. “That is the fundamental difference. Perhaps your turn will come soon. Take the power — yes, you, communists — and the factories will stand. You will come prepared.” It was clear, however, that he spoke without conviction — that even as he was evoking sympathy and admiration for the risk he was taking, the thought of radical change did not figure seriously in his calculations. He had beaten that thought back for decades.

Istvan liked to banter with him. He spoke vividly of the way land had been distributed in Hungary, and factory owners dispossessed. The old man listened greedily, with a fear that afterward sweetened his sense of his own absolute power over thousands of tame, undernourished workers. As he savored that twofold joy, he sipped yet another double whiskey with ice.

His daughter wore her sari gracefully, but swathed in that silken drapery she seemed in disguise. Istvan preferred her in the habit of her riding club: cherry-red frock coat, canary vest, and long black skirt. She sat sidesaddle and galloped with a flowing motion, softly and with just a touch of bravura.

From his childhood he had been familiar with horses. He had ridden with the herdsmen on the steppes of Hungary. Toward the end of the summer the wild horses grew unruly; the stallions bit each other, reared, and struck out with their hooves. Their manes were full of prickles and sticky balls of burdock. Even their coats gave off a pungent steam. “First, learn how to fall off the horse…and you must get up at once, dust yourself off and mount him again. He must understand that he will not get rid of you, no matter how he bucks and kicks. That lesson will stand you in good stead all your life, for life is a spitfire mare that likes to run away with her rider,” said the old csikos with a face like a copper kettle, twirling up the ends of his grizzled mustache.

Horses raised in India were of mixed breed, not overfed, accommodating. They heard one’s voice and felt the pressure of the calf, they ran after the white ball of their own accord, as if they understood the rules of polo. They positioned themselves to make it easy to strike with the mallet when the dust rose from the hard-trampled, cracked clay. Trainers in red turbans, mustachioed Sikhs with beards rolled up and gleaming as if they had been soaked in black lacquer a moment before, goaded them on with shouts. The horses broke into a short gallop, then moved sideways above the white ball as it lay on the grass. They understood that the aim was to block the opponent’s way so that he could not hit with the mallet. The taut legs, firmly planted hooves, and muzzles contorted as if in jeering smiles irritated Istvan. He made his horse trot in a tight circle; he wanted to go for the ball. Again the riders moved as in a cavalcade, swaying like waves on the horses’ backs, in a joyful hubbub, with raised mallets that glinted white in the westering sun.

Later, as their muscles tingled with pleasant sensations of weariness, they dismounted and returned the horses to the stable boys, who ran up noiselessly; the good old school. In the hall of the club, the stench of horse sweat mingled with the fragrance of perfume. He relished the first swallow of cold whiskey as it bit his throat.

Grace breathed deeply; he saw her breasts disturbingly near, the hair on her temple moistened with drops of sweat, her lips parted.

The servants took back the mallets and brought towels, dampened in hot water and steaming, to wipe the red dust from faces and necks. The air in the dimly lit hall smelled of cigar smoke, was alive with the quiet tinkle of glasses, the soft rattle of crushed ice in a silver shaker, the throaty gurgling of tilted bottles.

Grace liked to turn up uninvited for the Sunday morning jackal hunt. As the traditional sport of the Queen’s Lancers, the hunt was rather an occasion for displaying skill, for readying oneself to thrust at full gallop, for practice at pinning down a swiftly escaping quarry, than for shedding blood and displaying a trophy dangling lifeless. The jackals with their triangular, spiteful faces and long, fluffy tails dodged about among clumps of cane. Their little paws worked rapidly; they seemed to fly over the trampled turf. A horse, carried away with the lust of the sport and feeling the insistence of the spur, bore down on the prey; then came the moment to test the lances. The jackal’s cries urged the furious hunters on. The light pole with its metal fittings was fixed under the arm, to jab with its point, to lift the animal from the earth.

The horse gave chase, almost trampling the fleeing jackal. A blow — a thrust — the victim jumped away, and the rider, his lance buried in the ground, rose like a pole vaulter, his spurs etched against the sky as he was lifted from his saddle, then fell heavily on his back, like a clown.