Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Perhaps when you return home,” Terey began, “you will find changes.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps,” they assented, but the thought did not seem to please them. They were, after all, from the bureau that efficiently furnished documentation on every charge. I had to ask someone; they will inform on me again, they will throw their own light on our conversation, Ferenc will make notes eagerly, and there will be another document in my file. There must be control, but they should know what they are after — he shrugged — they should at least manage to repeat accurately what they heard from me.

They left one after the other, warmly pressing his hand. They said they wanted to run out to Old Delhi to find presents for their girls. He offered to take them. Visibly uncomfortable, they thanked him, begging him not to fatigue himself; perhaps they did not want a witness while they made their purchases. With relief they left him behind the curtain of vines on the veranda. He heard them send the watchman for a taxi. It drove up immediately, coughing and kicking up a cloud of dust.

The room was growing dark. Beyond the screens loomed the yellow glow of streetlights. Sadness came over him, a bitter feeling of being lost. The drone of the cooling machine was tiresome. He heard the lagging shuffle of the cook in the hall. He guessed what the servant was doing: crouching and peering through the keyhole. There was no light in the room, so he is not sure whether I have gone out or am napping. He will go and ask the watchman if sahib left with the guests.

But the door opened violently and a dazzling light flashed.

“Put that out,” he said a little too loudly. “What do you want?”

“Excuse me, sir — I did not know that you were here.” The cook moved in the darkness, shaking cigarette butts into his hand, for he liked to crumble the tobacco into his pipe. “May I serve the meal?”

“What do you have for dinner?”

“Vegetables and eggs. Meat — no. Fish — no. Before I bring it from the market, it already stinks. I have also a mango on ice, very good. I have papayas. They are very healthy; they cleanse the kidneys. In such heat there is pure salt in the kidneys, because all water is excreted through the skin.”

“Good. Set the table,” he said without enthusiasm.

He turned on the lamp that stood on his desk. A rumpled newspaper lay there, and an open novel by Forster: A Passage to India. He picked up the book, then closed it. He saw a bulging letter hidden under it. At once he recognized his friend Bela’s somewhat childish handwriting.

There were no stamps on the envelope; the couriers must have put it there. Why had they not put it into his hand? They were not supposed to carry private mail, but who would attach any importance to this? Were they afraid of each other? The letter was not sealed. Well, no, so they could examine what was inside, see if Bela was smuggling dollars to me. He smiled wryly, drawing out sheets of ugly paper covered with slanted lines of nervous handwriting and folded twice, so they could be crammed into an envelope that was too small.

He leaned forward, straightened out the sheets and began reading greedily:

Dear Istvan,

When I snatch up the telephone and call you and Ilona answers, I no longer feel panic, thinking it is another wrong number. Yet it is you I want — you, for whom else should I talk to? To the devil with India! Every day now there are events here that I would run to tell you about; I would drag you out for coffee and at last we would chat to our hearts’ content. You will say I could write a letter. Not true. I would have to have time, to have the paper spread in front of me, to be in the mood to write — well, and to be sure the letter would get into your hand.

So many borders; so many prying eyes. A letter will reach you in a week. And everything I have written will be invalid, for there will be new developments. How to register them, as a seismograph registers tremors of the earth’s crust?

Things are abuzz everywhere; there is a feeling of excitement and tension. Suddenly everyone believes that there will be changes. No — not the kind you are thinking of now, smiling skeptically. It was not an idea that was at fault, only the smallness of people who learned to listen to what came to them by fiat; they do not give commands themselves, but for years have repeated the commands of others. They are afraid of freedom, for they would not know how to deal with it. They do not trust the nation, so they spy on it. And we sense that, like a horse whose skin quivers when it spies the whip hidden behind the driver’s back. For it has tasted the lash, it is accustomed to it.

In whispers we used to mention the names of those recently arrested; what the offense was was always decided afterward. We would be drinking coffee and everyone would look around to be sure that no one from the next table was overhearing — that the waitress did not come running over too early with the check, for she might be an informer, and she knew the regular customers.

You remember Tibor M.? We were astonished, wondering why he was arrested. A communist, a staff officer, a patriot. Clean; not intoxicated with power. Universally liked. Perhaps that was the heaviest strike against him. He went down like a stone into water. After two years he floated up at the trial of foreign minister Rajk, charged with treason, with spying for the imperialists, with organizing a coup d’etat. He refused to testify. He said not a word before the court. He behaved with dignity. He was demoted and sentenced to death. He has been released now, and I have talked with him.

He was innocent. He was a lucky devil; they postponed his execution because he was supposed to serve as a witness in trials yet to come. You would not recognize him. He is gray. He speaks as if chewing his words, looking you doggedly in the eye with his hands on his lap, for so he was trained. His lips are pursed; he hardly opens them. His teeth are gone. Yes — what pains him most is that he was beaten by his own, by people wearing the same uniform but lower in rank. And though they spoke the same language, though they were Hungarians, they understood none of what he was trying to explain. No logical argument had any effect. That horrified him, even aroused his pity for them. They were automatons who had to wring from him confessions of crimes he had not committed. They had received their orders and they had listened blindly.

“They were more afraid than I,” he told me with a lifeless smile, “and that gave me strength. They were trembling for the approval of their masters, for promotions, for their careers. I understood how transient those things were in relation to the values they had lost. They had ceased to be Hungarians, perhaps even repudiated their humanity.”

He told how they interrogated him for four days without stopping. He fainted, tortured by lack of sleep and by the lamps that seem to blaze in the brain even when you close your eyes. They beat him in inventive ways and made him drink castor oil to humiliate him, to show him how even his own body was betraying him, weakening, stinking. They told him his friends had turned him in and even then were testifying against him. They shoved prepared depositions under his nose, but Tibor only shrugged his shoulders and hissed through his tight lips, “I always took them for a band of swine. This is no news to me.”

They told him next that they had set a trap in his flat, but the men on guard were not bored waiting for unexpected visitors, because his wife was so very accommodating. They dragged in nauseating details: how she pleased them in bed, what she whispered. “That crackpot — I haven’t lived with her for ages. You can have her. Enjoy yourselves, boys,” he answered. You know yourself how he loved her. But he silenced them with repartee, divining instinctively that it was a pack of lies, that they were only probing for a weak spot. If he had let them see that any insinuation affected him, they would have bored deeper into the open wound.