Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Istvan swallowed hard. Yes, he reflected bitterly, our behavior, the motives of which we ourselves do not understand clearly, can be turned against us when they want to bring charges. Tibor has the advantage because he has passed through hardships and I have not. He felt a rush of fear. Tibor has it behind him by now. Pray God I don’t have to—

A dark hand, almost violet in the harsh lamplight and cut by a white shirtsleeve, crept over the table. “Sahib, dinner was served long ago,” Pereira said coaxingly. “I beg and remind, and sahib sleeps.”

“I am not sleeping.”

“Sahib was so far away that I was afraid. The son of a babu in our village fell ill at his studies in Calcutta and the father worried himself sick about him. Then he, too, went out of himself. Though he was in his body, you could stick pins in him and he sat like a dead man.”

“You’re being tiresome. I was reading a letter and was lost in thought. I will eat very soon. You may leave.”

“When I tell you the real truth. He returned to himself and cried. And then he said that his son had died, and the next day a telegram came—”

“Go.”

He raised his eyes to the uncovered window. Yellow and greenish beams from the distant streetlights marked out the square. He longed so for Budapest that it gnawed him like a physical pain. He took up the last page of the letter, eagerly absorbing the words in uneven rows.

…for he is starving for people to trust… That I read . We spoke of his ordeals with complete freedom. We did not concern ourselves about who might be there, though the coffee shop was full of customers. Tibor has crossed the boundary; he has stopped being afraid. One cannot tighten a screw into infinity, for it bores through and instead of holding, loosens. Something of that sort has happened with us. “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”: for whole years we didn’t think of that. Suddenly the scales fell from everyone’s eyes; now they talk of changes as if they had already occurred. And indeed the security police are here. Agents are writing reports. Surely card indexes are full to bursting. But we don’t hear of new arrests. It is as if all this gathering of information had lost its effectiveness, even its meaning. So far no one has said that Rakosi should step down, but he is already looking for successors, as if he had been buried with Stalin.

Every day fresh evidence of cruelty comes to light, of criminal mindlessness and folly. An eighty-six-year-old peasant woman was freed from one of the security police’s cellars. She was confined there because she had not delivered the milk on schedule! The old woman had written Horthy to ask for a pardon; she didn’t even know who was ruling Hungary now. She had been accused of economic sabotage and the matter became a political case.

You should be sorry that you are not with us. It is a momentous time. The atmosphere is charged, yet full of gravity — I would even say grandeur. There is an Eastern proverb: When a wronged man sighs, hardly a leaf stirs, but when a nation in anguish sighs, a gale springs up that sweeps the powerful away. I feel its sigh. You hear — this is not literary affectation, in which you suspect me of indulging. I wanted you to be able to understand a little of what is happening in our Budapest.

Affectionately — Bela

Istvan sat at the table, listlessly eating the rice Pereira put before him. He drank cool tomato juice; he scraped the mango halves on ice with his spoon. The mushy fruit dissolved on the tongue with a bland taste rather like carrot.

One of the couriers must have concealed the letter. The envelope was open; no doubt he had not been able to resist reading it in some hotel in Austria, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan. Yet he had delivered it. So those most dedicated also had their uncertainties? Did they feel a solidarity with the people from whom they had been culled, and to whom they had been taught to feel superior? Were they, too, amenable to new leadership? A decent fellow, Bela; he pressed his clasped hands together angrily. He must have had access, he had regained their trust, or they would have taken it straight to the embassy and handed it over. No, they did not want to risk it. Private mail? Who knows what significance this information could have? And perhaps Ferenc has already read the letter, and therefore the ambassador as well, and it was planted here as a test, to see what he would do next? Loathing crept over him.

“It’s impossible to live this way.” He clenched his fist. “Impossible.”

Pereira regarded him anxiously. It seemed to him that the counselor had a fever. When Terey went out to the bathroom, the cook strained his ears suspiciously, then raised the whiskey flask to the light and critically estimated how much was gone. He evidently determined that only a little was missing, because he poured together what remained in the couriers’ glasses, topped it off from the bottle and lapped it up, blinking as he tasted it full strength, then slipped noiselessly away to the kitchen.

Istvan paced around the room, too restless to sit down. A stray cricket had gotten into the house and was chiming timidly in a corner of the room. The motor in the cooling machine whirred. The full glare of the lamp fell on the rumpled sheets of letter paper covered with green handwriting.

What the letter communicated was staggering. He wanted to share the news, and his homesickness, with someone. He walked to and fro, wondering to whom he could go so late in the evening. There were two people who would receive him at any hour, friendly people but distant enough that he did not have to be on guard with them. One was Nagar; the other was Judit. Agitation burned in him like a torch passed from the homeland on another continent. He was hungry for conversation, eager to share thoughts, calculations, predictions.

The folds of the letter, like the pleats of an accordion, caught the lamplight. He read the first sentence once more and put it down. The gentle semicircular glow warmed to brilliance the green and rust motifs of the blossoming trees in the carpet. He remembered how he had resisted being pushed into purchasing it. An exquisite rug. It reminded him of Margit. He would have liked to see her on it, nude, as she waited, leaning on her elbow, smoking a cigarette, the white of her flesh lightly touched with violet — to see her tawny hands, long legs, and rust-colored, tumultuous hair. A boyish dream of a woman from a Matisse illustration he had come across somewhere. He gave a self-pitying shrug. The refrain of a Hindu song crossed his mind: “Everything we desired and possessed was taken from us. Everything for which we do not stretch out our hands, yet is worthy of pursuit, lures. Do not wrest things from the world, and the world will give itself to you. Do not seize greedily, and you will have. You will realize.”

No; he would not resign himself to that. A wolflike rapacity was growing in him, an urge to lay hands on, to grip, to bite open, to devour. Even to tear to pieces. To have, in order to feel release.

He opened the door to the hall. He heard the cook shouting at the sweeper and the cadenced knocking of the brush on the flagstone floor. They were scrubbing the kitchen.

He lifted the receiver and dialed the operator’s number. A girl answered; her speech was full of excessively proper Anglicisms, like a recording from a language course. He asked for Agra, for the Taj Mahal hotel. He stood there, catching the distant static, the traces of voices on the line. He wanted a cigarette, but he was afraid to step away and search on his desk, for the hotel receptionist might answer just then.

The uproar from the kitchen was unbearable — the slopping of water, the nasal commands of the cook, who lorded it over the other servants because he was the only one with a fair knowledge of English and could invoke, in his statements to the rest of them, the authority of the master. I must correct his behavior, Istvan mused. His head has been turned completely. Moreover, he allows himself familiarities.