Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Perhaps you never knew women at all.” She laughed in the darkness. “Except as companions in the bedroom.”

The force of the wind drove it through the narrow passage like a draft in a chimney. The hot, dry air had a coppery taste. The old beggar sat stoically with his back turned to the entrance. His arms encircled his legs; his forehead rested on his knees. The wind tousled his hair and showered his bare back with dust.

Istvan was worried about the car. Squinting, he looked at the palace yard. The Austin stood nearby like a faithful animal. It seemed to quiver before the hoofbeats of the charging storm. He was thinking that even if they didn’t drive away, it would be best to wait out the storm in its comfortable seats.

He ran over and unlocked the door. It pushed back against him violently. He struggled until Margit sank into a seat, then settled in beside her.

“The clouds are boiling around us. It’s like being in the cockpit of an airplane.” He rolled down the window and dust poured in. In the wild torrent of sand they saw a green parrot. The wind was bowling it along by its outspread wings, breaking its long flight feathers.

“Poor bird.”

“Poor people! Think of the huts the wind will pummel to bits — the sheets of tin ripped away, the cane supports — the sand that will be strewn through the roofs the wind pries open, and into pots of rice and babies’ mouths. It whips the face.”

The storm droned around the car. Thick grains of sand rang on the roof like a pelting rainstorm. A yellow glare pierced the undulating grayness. The wind flung up a disc of fire, large as a soccer ball and spraying sparks. It made three great jumps and struck the trunk of a tree. Malignant zigzags of white light flashed, then grounded themselves in the earth with a roar like a cannon shot. It seemed to Istvan and Margit that the whole world trembled. Terrified, she seized his hand.

“What was that?”

“It must have been globular lightning.” He saw her green-clad figure indistinctly; he was half-blinded by the lightning.

“Let’s get out of here. If you can drive.” Her voice broke. “The tower attracts lightning.”

He started the engine and released the hand brake, but before he could put the car in gear it began to roll lightly, pushed by the gale. In front of them something dark was being flung about in the clouds of dust. The wind was dragging a severed branch, inflating its thick clusters of leaves as if they had been a sail.

“There’s no sense in this, Istvan,” she pleaded. “The highway will be blocked by broken trees. Let’s take cover in the ruins of the palace.”

The thick walls offered shelter. He turned off the engine and put on the brake. His forehead was sticky with sweat. There was not enough air in the car.

“Were you afraid? It was very unpleasant to me, too — the way that ball of lightning flew toward us.”

“Give me a cigarette,” she answered tersely. “Let’s open the window a little.” They smoked in silence, watching the wind rush over the tiles in the palace courtyard, welter among the enormous dry leaves, and split the cherry-red pods, long as sword blades, that had been blown from the thorn trees.

“I know that moment must come. Yet that invitation to the darkness alarms me,” she said reflectively, quietly, as if it did not matter whether he heard.

Only after a moment did he understand, to his great astonishment, that she was speaking of death. A wave of shame swept over him; he had seen in her only an Australian with a pretty face, unseasoned to life, bored and amusing herself a little by treating Hindus. Now it seemed to him that with these confessions she had exposed herself — more than if she had flung off her dress and invited him to touch her breasts.

“For can one still be oneself there, and remember?” She sat musing, her eyes following the streaks of dust that seemed to swirl like smoke among stone tiles rubbed to a sheen by the feet of generations. Her head was tilted down a little and her lips were tight as if with some suffering not expressed. He wanted to help, to comfort her, if only by showing that he understood her feelings.

“The war affected both of us. I had my bad times as well. They drafted me from the university; I couldn’t get a deferment even for a couple of months, so I could take the examinations and have my year’s work count. They sent me to Ukraine, to the front, and in 1944 fighting was going on by the Danube, on Hungarian soil. Today it’s easy to say: the capitulation of an ally of the fascists. That’s not the way we felt then.”

He took a deep pull on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke, startling the flies that were creeping around the windowpane.

“You fought the Russians?” Her small face with its heavy wave of chestnut hair turned toward him.

“Yes. I knew then that the Germans were losing. I was full of rage and despair that we had been drawn in. But we fought to the last ditch. For the Germans, Hungary was only a point of retreat — to me, this was the end of my homeland. I wanted you to know: I was your enemy then.”

She nodded.

“I saw when the Germans fired at the withdrawing Hungarian divisions, though the position was impossible to hold and they themselves were retreating. I hated them. But I was afraid of the Russians. When Budapest fell, I wanted to kill myself. I thought it was the end of Hungary, that we were a lost nation. By chance I came upon a family — I was wounded and hungry, my strength was gone — and they gave me clothing, they took me in. I left after a couple of weeks to finish my studies, as if none of it had happened. There is always time for death. And it will come without being invited. It appeared that we had to begin all over again. There was work for all. At that time they didn’t ask many questions about who you were. They didn’t rummage through your past like a policeman going through your pockets.”

She nodded again and he spoke on.

“Naturally you don’t know much about my country. How would you? We are a small nation, surrounded by a Slavic sea. It seemed that we would never raise our heads again, that we had to resign ourselves to the outrage perpetrated by history, which would enter the fact in its dry record. I thought that that was the verdict and that we would be quartered, divided among those whom we had invaded. That we would cease to exist as a state. But it happened otherwise. We have a republic.”

Before them the arcades of Akbar’s palace came into view: broken columns in a rain of sand, their outlines unclear as in a worn-out film.

“And how is it now in Hungary?” She put out her cigarette.

“It is possible to live.”

She brooded a moment before gathering her courage to ask, “So things are not good there?”

“No. You are thinking that it is our fault. It certainly is. The Russians came, bringing people who had lived among us at some time or other — people who were model Hungarians to them, but not to us. They said they came to teach us, to mold us in the spirit of equality and freedom. Some had gotten out of jail through the good graces of Stalin. Others, even if they had managed to avoid prison, were morally stunted, were easy tools. They knew very well how to intimidate the resistance.

“Prisons! They were eager to build them. The shadow of prison walls fell on everything we undertook. They had very little in common with our country. They knew nothing about it. They frightened people even with their pronunciation of words, their strange accents, the clumsy idioms that reminded everyone of where they had come from and who was behind them.

“Unjust verdicts, coercion, hardships beyond people’s strength — they were so careless that they counted all that as part of the cost of building. They didn’t imagine that it could be any other way, that they shouldn’t be the leaders, speak from the rostrums, have their faces on busts and portraits. They! They! But then something arose that was a people’s republic after all. Workers came to understand the mechanism of politics. Laborers in the countryside began to read. New forces came into being, forces they had to deal with.”