Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

I am not going to write about the confounded hospital, Istvan vowed to himself. Margit is already being pulled away from me, and I won’t be able to get out of here.

They went to the outpatient department. A young woman was sitting by the door, holding a bowl in her hands. An orderly was standing over her. Pulling out her swollen eyelid, he plucked out her lashes, which were heavy with pus and plastered together with it, as calmly as if he were pulling feathers from a slaughtered chicken. If the eyelid bled, he reached wearily for a tuft of cotton, wet it with an acrid-smelling liquid, and dried the eye. In the bowl, which the woman was holding with great care, lay bloody tatters of cotton and eyelashes sticking to the edge like fish bones pushed to the edge of a plate. Big flies crawled around the dish and beat against the window screens. Two sheets of flypaper dangled from the ceiling, black with insects. Istvan heard their long, desperate buzzes.

“I am preparing the case for madam doctor.” The orderly opened the peasant woman’s swollen eye. “I did not know madam was here already.”

Margit washed her hands, rinsed them in a bowl that was lavender from permanganate, and put on a pair of rubber gloves that were floating in it. Over her forehead she wore a round mirror that looked like a silver star. When she was leaning over the woman and peering into the diseased eye, Istvan saw a reddish-blue tangle of veins and yellow grains of encysted pus like boiled barley. The skewed reflection of them, magnified in the mirror, hung above Margit’s lips as she pursed them in concentration. It was repugnant; somehow he wanted to protest.

“Go, Terry,” she said tenderly. “Connoly will tell you about our base of operations. You see, they’ve already caught up with me. Don’t be angry.”

“Good luck,” he half-whispered, as if the wish were for himself, not for her.

“Good luck.” She raised a hand; it looked alien and dead in its rubber glove. “We’ll meet this evening. Wait for me.”

“If you need statistical data,” the doctor said invitingly, “we’ll go to the records room.”

The nauseating smell of the hospital was on Istvan’s lips.

“Perhaps I will seem rude,” he began cautiously, “if I speak frankly: no. Let’s go out to the yard. I’d like to smoke.”

“But here we can—” then, noticing beads of sweat on Terey’s forehead, Connoly added quickly, “You’re right. A cigarette doesn’t taste right in here. Let’s go into the open air. The senses can be numbed in here — and you are a poet!” he concluded with a mock frown.

With relief they walked out to the open verandas and on to the dry grass of the yard. Terey exhaled deeply, as if he wanted to dispel the stench of something foul from his lungs. He looked at the women’s clothing, at the copper vessels they used to wet their hands as they washed them symbolically before eating. He asked anxiously:

“Are these diseases contagious?”

“Very,” Connoly muttered without taking his cigarette from his lips.

“Why let in this mob of visitors?”

“At home in their villages they are also in contaminated places. The resistance of the organism is the crucial factor; after all, there is no hygiene. They might as well at least watch, learn the rudiments of changing the dressings, treating the eye — that much, anyway. We don’t want to think too much. We treat them, we send them away to their homes, to the villages, into the same conditions, where they are sure to be reinfected. We’re ladling out water with a sieve to put out a fire.”

“How to save them, then?”

Blowing smoke from his lips, the doctor looked at the crowds camped in the shade of the veranda.

“Are you an expatriate, or are you from here?”

“I am from Hungary.”

“I tell you, another six months here and I will go mad. I will be a communist. There must either be enormous, immediate reforms here, or revolution. Those in power must either give, give as they would to themselves or their own, munificently, without counting, or the people themselves must take. Otherwise all our treatment, no matter how dedicated we are, is just stirring the water in a flood — philanthropy for the fun of it. Only it is not an issue for doctors, but for you.”

“For us?” Istvan said quizzically. “You want to leave it all to the communists?”

“No. To those who can set the imagination on fire, move hearts. I’m thinking of writers.”

They went toward the car; the dry grass crumbled under their feet. It was painful to Terey that he had not managed to show the admiration their work deserved.

“You are a true enthusiast.”

“Me?” Connoly said in amazement. “I think I understand now the futile, heroic labors of the saints who want to convert sinners. I simply treat people, because that’s what I was trained to do. I try to help the suffering. They’re so docile and defenseless that it drives you into a rage. Certainly they are more deeply grounded in moral principle than people in our society; they are like plants subject to the laws of vegetation, very good, very tractable.”

“Have you been in India long?”

“I signed a contract for a year. Hardly anyone sticks it out longer. One begins to rebel, and then comes the desire to escape. Then desertion.”

“Will Doctor Ward stay here long?”

“Ah, Margit!” Connoly said with visible delight. “There’s a doctor with a true vocation. She loves the sick — not, like Professor Salminen, just the complicated cases of trachoma.”

“It is not too solitary for her here?” Istvan asked, stung that the other man had spoken of her intimately, by name.

“We do our best.” Connoly spoke with the cockiness of a soldier stepping out three paces ahead of his line — as if he were certain of his importance to Margit. “But there’s not much time to get away from this place. There’s a fleabitten cinema here; there are lizards on the screen. There’s one decent hotel bar. They fleece tourists there, but at least they serve real whiskey. You have to find yourself a hobby. One person collects bronze statuettes of gods, another wooden masks, another snake skins, but after a month they’ve had enough. They lose the passion. Only work is left, and exhaustion. I fall onto the bed and lie there in a stupor. I’m supposed to play bridge and I don’t go. I know a shower is all I need, but I don’t have the strength to drag myself to the bathroom.”

“There is still coffee,” Terey smiled. “It gives the heart a jolt.”

“Or the ampule with morphine. That has to be guarded. I saw how people died in the war only because there was no control and they had too ready access to the medicine box, where the narcotics were kept.”

“You must run over to Delhi now and then. Look me up. Margit knows the address.” He could not resist this reference to their relationship.

“With pleasure. We’ll be happy to come when time permits.” Looking him keenly in the eye, Connoly gripped his hand too hard; there was something challenging in their handshake, and both knew why.

With deft movements of the steering wheel he passed wagons drawn by oxen. The rank smell of the animals’ sweat and dried manure was in his face. The responsiveness of the automobile delighted him; it was as if he and the Austin were one.

Is he pursuing her? he reflected coolly. I am really going mad. Perhaps nothing has happened yet. She herself said, after all, that she has had lovers. She told me to stay. She is a sensible woman. I shouldn’t complicate matters. Perhaps today it will be settled.

Gravel crunched under the wheels. He parked the car beside the others, shrewdly calculating which way the shade would move. Tangled gray roots hung like stalactites from the enormous trees; some roots had grown into the red earth, creating still more trunks, which supported masses of branches.