Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“You speak as though it was other people who condemned him.” The cryptographer raised a pale, bloated face. He did not immerse it in the glare of the Indian sun; he only sat in his dim room behind armored doors. “I am a simple cryptographer. They took me from the army and sent me out here. I mind my own business. But I see, counselor, that everything we read about, even what is clear and completely visible to the eye, is also a code, and only our children will read it right. It’s too bad a man can’t live to see that. Well, I’m going to my den. When the couriers fly in, they will tell us what the moods are in our country.”

The door had hardly closed behind him when Istvan sat down heavily on the other side of the desk. He looked at Judit’s darkened eyelids. The fan hummed unbearably; it grated on him.

“You’ve heard the voice of a simple man. He has to trust authority in order to hear what it says. And here the effect of everything is to undermine respect.”

“Are you for treading on those graves, Judit?”

“No. And I understand very well what you mean, but I long for a few years of peace and order after what we lived through during the war. And later. Surely my demands are not excessive?”

“Judit, the restoration of honor to a man murdered under the majesty of the law will accomplish nothing in itself. That is hardly the beginning. People will ask: What of the judges, who now appear as assassins? And the comrades who disowned him and the others, who, moreover, condemned him and applauded the false verdicts? I ask, which of them knew that when he cast his vote he was consenting to a crime? Shadows that boded no good for us hid the bloodshed; by now you don’t ask questions, the responsibility is spread around. Even carrying an investigation to the limit would not be any good. We all bear a burden of guilt. In the end, those who would show themselves to be innocent would have had to stand under the gallows back then, as a sign of protest. And who is capable of doing that? I know Hungarians; the nation demands heads, and if it doesn’t get them, it reaches for them itself. You know what can happen then.”

“You speak as if you were in the party.” He heard a ring of approval in her voice. “I saw many things and I know people who lived like saints but knew what was concealed in that last apartment, though they pretended that it did not exist. They would have hated anyone who spoke openly about what they knew, forced them to take a position, to make a pronouncement. It is very difficult to blurt out a statement: I erred, I was deceived — to reverse decades of one’s life.

“They lived with socialism, come hell or high water. They endured labor camps, betrayal, torture. They believed that was the inevitable price of laying the foundations. And now it’s clear that it could have been managed without that. Why is the boss shut up in his office? He understands: it’s not a matter of a career, of joining a new group that might take over the management of things; it’s a bitter time of squaring accounts with oneself. The detection of the first concession, that deviation, still in the hope that one could easily put the lapse behind one, that eventually it would no longer matter when one consented to the betrayal of the party — of something that aroused our passion when we were young, and still today is a great aspiration fulfilled, and unfulfilled, before us.”

He looked at her uplifted face. It was full of passion. He had never seen her like this.

“Ferenc, though he is young, doesn’t understand the signal he received today. But the ambassador is an old party man. I know because I was there. I know those scarred, anguished families who choked back their curses with shouts in honor of Stalin. They thought that it was necessary, that that sacrifice would call forth new strengths, hasten the future, assure the greatness of their country. What is left for them now?”

“And so — silence impenetrable as a concrete slab?”

“No. Only I would not rush to judgment. If we have borne with so much, must we burst open like fish from the deep in the glare of the sun? Time is an unbribable judge. It weeds out ruthlessly all false quantities. Patience is not a virtue of revolutionaries, but I am afraid of reckonings, of random blows of the ax.” She dabbed at her eyebrows with the ends of her fingers. “We ought not to be carrying on such conversations, even though we trust each other, for you know how it is here. Every word may come back to harm us.”

“Are you afraid?” He patted her affectionately. “We are far away, after all. I have people to worry about: my wife, my boys — but you have no family in Hungary, have you?”

“Someone might come in, and we will be sitting together and working out who the guilty one is among us,” she whispered fretfully. “And it will certainly not be either Kalman Bajcsy or Ferenc or that other one. I can vouch for that. I’m afraid I will have to disavow our friendship.”

“That won’t be so bad,” he said comfortingly. “Perhaps I exaggerated the mood at home, though I got a few letters from Budapest that gave me plenty to think about.”

The telephone chattered. She picked up the receiver and looked significantly at Istvan.

“Yes, comrade minister, the reference for the driver has been written and counselor Terey will present it to him. Yes, he already knows, he understands your concern.”

She hung up wearily and raised a hand, as if she were afraid of hearing another directive.

“Take this. It’s yours.” She handed him a paper with the embassy’s overprint. “Try to get this business over with.”

“Though it’s not part of my responsibility.” He shrugged as he glanced over the smoothly turned phrases of banal praise that had gone into the evaluation of Krishan’s work. “Why didn’t Ferenc do this? He likes to be grave and magnanimous.”

She looked at Istvan so solicitously that he smiled at her. “Well, don’t be so worried. I can handle myself.”

But she did not smile in answer. He saw that she was preoccupied with something. Her skin, in the cut-out triangle on the front of her dress, glittered with perspiration. The curtained window glowed yellow; the yard would be an inferno.

When he went in under the tent of climbing plants that grew over the veranda, he heard the pitapat of bare, callused feet in the house, and shrieks.

“Sahib! Sahib has come!”

The cook opened the door — a tall figure in a darned shirt which he wore untucked. He had on half-boots which had never had the benefit of brushing or polishing, and for the sake of comfort he had removed the laces. The boots fell away from his legs with delightful ease; that was why Pereira never quite walked but only moved with a dignified shuffle.

“A letter arrived,” he announced. “There were two telephone calls from that painter. He will call again.”

He didn’t even have to ask; the letter lay on the table near his place setting, leaning against a vase that held a flowering branch. It must be from Budapest, from Ilona, he thought, but he was surprised to see that it had an Indian stamp.

Another invitation or request? The letter fell from his fingers onto the table. He went to have a bath first.

Only as he was eating, unhurriedly, the sticky, yellow-green dish of yams, rice, and onion sauce, did he reach for the envelope and open it with a knife. The cook was describing at great length a dispute with the Sikhs next door. They had scattered garbage onto the yard from their roof, and pissed on the freshly planted flower beds.

“And that burns the flowers, sir!” He was ready to send the sweeper for a few limp, spotted phlox as evidence.

Istvan, my dear,

I have set your picture in the old silver frame that I got from Connoly. In the hall of our hotel the passage is flanked by two screens with numbered photos from your congress. There must be a hundred. I found you in a dozen pictures. But “mine” is the best; you are smiling, you look interested. You will not be angry with me for cutting off the lovely Hindu woman who was standing beside you? To tell you the truth, I cut her to pieces. The Tagore congress. You didn’t even tell me what you did at it, or who it was that drew so many pretty women to the event.