Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Istvan held Margit by the waist as she pulled herself from the brick shaft. Over the smooth, steep wall, one could look straight down, past two small balconies with white figures of men, to the ground, the stone tiles and reddish dirt sprinkled with gravel. Then came a tingling under the skin, and the thought that a person could fall with a scream of despair which would summon no one until the dull collision of body and earth silenced it forever.

“Careful, please,” warned a guard in a military uniform and creaking hobnailed boots. “Two days ago a girl threw herself off here. The marks are still here—” he showed them dried black spatters on the steep slope of the wall. “When they lifted her, she was like a bag of wet wool; all her bones were broken. Just after the feast of Diwali, as well, a couple jumped. They were holding hands. It was love, and the parents would not permit it, for he was a Brahmin and she was from a village. It is strange how this tower attracts suicides. It is better not to lean out: the earth lures, it draws, one feels dizzy, and before you know it — tragedy!”

The guard shot Margit a look full of suspicious concern.

“They posted me to watch over this place,” he added. “But when someone makes up his mind to jump…I turn my back, and he is somersaulting in the air.”

The wind grew stronger; the narrow windows of the tower whistled like flutes. A cloud of dust, torn grasses, and dry leaves was rising below them. A gust of wind tugged at their hair and they felt a warm stream of air flow over them. Margit huddled down, pressing her swelling skirt around her knees.

“There is going to be a powerful storm,” the guard warned. “It is better to go down.”

“No,” she insisted. “A moment more.”

There was a roaring in the trees below. Their tops lashed in the wind; handfuls of leaves flew off them. A red smoke rose from the parched fields.

“Don’t be afraid, sir. There will be no trouble with me,” Margit assured the guard. She was drinking in the sky, as violently, like a hallucination, it went gray, with swellings dark as ink. A rose and yellow flash kindled on clouds pulsing with light; the lightning heralded dry weather hot as brimstone.

She tried to smooth the hair that had blown about her forehead with a comb, but it was charged with electricity and rose on the air, giving off sparks.

“And it will hit like a thunderbolt.” Suddenly she was frightened. “I have no desire to perish at the hands of the gods. I have outgrown the years when one thinks of death without fear.”

She was silent. After a moment she spoke with an unnatural calm:

“There was a time when I wanted to kill myself.”

She looked him in the face. “I was very young then, and very silly.”

He said nothing. The stale taste of the desert was on his lips. A loud hum and a flapping noise rose around them. Grains of sand hit their cheeks, pricking like pins.

“I loved a cousin. We kissed in corners, like that couple. A splendid fellow. It was pure joy. He went as a volunteer. I vowed I’d wait for him. He was going to write. I never got a single letter. It was 1943. Burma. He died on that hellish road to Mandalay. The Japanese murdered him.”

She moved nearer to him because the wind was carrying her words away. She stood so close that her skirt fluttered around his knees. He caught the smell of her overheated body.

“I wanted somehow to be with those who were fighting. I was working then in a hospital in Melbourne. I still knew nothing about the war. We didn’t have many of the wounded. Neither the ocean nor the jungle were sending back victims,” she said in a passion of remembered grief.

The wind whined loudly. They heard the hum below them. At moments Terey lost her words and caught only the harsh tone of her voice.

“When someone told me, ‘Sister Margaret, someone from the army is waiting for you down below,’ I was sure it was Stanley. I ran down the hall. I can still hear my heels clattering. It was as if I had wings. But a strange man was standing there. He said with a heartiness that appalled me, ‘Be brave, madam. Stanley is dead.’

“I had nothing to remember him by. Nothing. If that man had had any heart at all, he would have given me even a button of his own and said it was Stanley’s. A good lad, but without imagination. And the same evening I gave myself to that man. With Stanley I hadn’t. And the man went back there. All the time he was kissing me, I thought, after all, it means nothing. Stanley is gone, gone, and I don’t want to live.

“I knew the flesh could defend itself, could rebel. Perhaps they would bring me back to life. I remembered one thing: if I got poison into my muscles with a syringe, nothing could help. I had easy access to the ampule. But I didn’t do it immediately after the man left, and I wasn’t able to do it a week later. Perhaps that first one, even unwittingly, saved me? My lover—” she laughed mockingly. “He didn’t even take account of the fact that he was the first; he regaled me with hideous stories of what the Japanese did to prisoners. The next day he telephoned to say goodbye. Perhaps I should have sent him flowers?”

The whole sky trembled above them. Dry lightning flashed three or four bolts at a time. Breathing was difficult; the storm gathered force. Sand lashed them.

“Go down, please.” The guard came up to them again. “It may be dangerous here,” he warned.

They could not see the ground. Below them brownish-red dust gathered in clouds, blotting out the trees. Flurries of dust surged above the ruins of the palace.

“We must listen to him, after all,” Terey urged. “It’s becoming unpleasant. My eyes are full of sand.”

“All right. And I’m sorry I brought this up. You must have thought, she’s a hysteric. Time soothes everything, and life is too short. One shouldn’t throw it away. We must have the courage to see it through to the end; so I think today, at least.”

The guard was grappling with the door, which the wind was jerking about. With difficulty he pushed the bolts into place. Istvan and Margit stood beside each other in the darkness. A white stain of lantern light slid around the wall.

“Why have you not married?” he asked suddenly. “You are pretty, well educated, and, well, you have money.”

“It gives me independence. I don’t have to work. I exercise my profession because I want to be of some use.”

“That explains nothing,” he persisted, taking her arm. The wind keened inside the tower; it forced puffs of dust through the narrow windows.

“I am not yet intimidated by the word ‘alone.’ To marry — there is still time for that. Understand: I have not yet renounced love.”

“I didn’t mean to force you into confessions,” he said quickly.

“I am saying only as much as I want to. You are a person one can be friends with. You are not demanding. Are you disappointed that we haven’t slept together? You probably understand that that first man was not the only one. After him there were a couple more, equally unimportant — I mean, not worth remembering. I noticed soon enough that though it wasn’t difficult to have my choice of men, I didn’t feel happy, even satisfied, the next day. I’m telling you frankly how it is so as not to spoil this comradeship between us.”

They started down the stairs in silence. He saw her graceful legs, bare in the light of the guard’s lantern; the corridor cut its spiral down the thick wall of the tower. They made their way down the monotonous curve until their heads were spinning.

“Surely you aren’t put off by my frankness?” she asked in a breathless voice as they stood at the bottom.

“It was your courage that took me by surprise. Women don’t talk that way about such matters. At least I never knew one who did.”