Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“I’m very sorry, Krishan,” he began. “We all sympathize with you.”

Krishan raised his forehead. In his dark, narrow face, white, even teeth gleamed in a catlike grimace under his short mustache. He laughed without a sound until his shoulders shook.

“That is why you are letting me go.”

“We know what you have lost—”

“No. She went out because she wanted to. She told me to marry her younger sister because they are poor and there was no money for another dowry. Nothing has changed with me. There was a wife and there is a wife. She even asked me to call her by the dead one’s name, because she loved her. Only where will I find work now?”

With an effort, Terey understood how different the custom of this country was — that death loses its fang of despair when one dies only to return, that the passage beyond the black curtain hardly alarms one. He felt clumsy. He was left with nothing to say, no comfort to offer. He could not muster the ideas he needed; he could not revive their old camaraderie.

“You had expenses connected with the funeral. You see, we do appreciate you. I am going to give you some money. You ought to rest. You ought not to sit behind the wheel right away.”

“How much?” He clutched at the banknote with the ends of his fingers, held it in his left hand as if he were going to let it fall to the ground out of disgust, and took a deep pull on his cigarette, inhaling the smoke. In its red glow his eye glinted as he blinked derisively. “Only a hundred?”

“That’s more than a little, Krishan,” the counselor said hotly.

“Sir, I have one question: If I am summoned before the court, will you give a statement as a witness?”

“I was not with you then,” Istvan reminded him.

“I also ask only if you would like to testify as to who gave me a hundred rupees. Nothing more.” Now he rose nimbly; he was slender and graceful. He tossed away the cigarette butt and stamped on it, raising a little spray of sparks. “And perhaps there will be no hearing in court. Then you will pay me more, much more.”

“I don’t understand, Krishan.”

“If you had understood, you would not have come to me with this paltry hundred rupees. If the ambassador thinks that I am stupid and that any trifle will be enough to shut me up, he is very wrong.”

“But who will bring a case against you? Even the insurance company was not informed. The embassy paid for the repairs.”

He went silent again, then raised a finger toward the sky, where ever-larger stars were shimmering and sinking.

“Kali,” he whispered. “Repeat it to him. Kali and I are thinking of him.” He put his narrow, dusky hand on his chest. Suddenly, in a completely normal voice, the voice of an obliging servant, he asked, “Your car is damaged? Shall I repair it?”

Istvan hesitated to accept this proposition, but decided that he personally would pay him for that service. He wanted to re-establish their old relationship; he had a vague feeling that he had allowed himself to be drawn into something unsavory. The drilling of the cicadas wore on him, intensifying his watchfulness, like a warning. The girl standing in the shadows pressed her hands together; her bracelets jangled dully.

“The left-hand signal doesn’t light up. Perhaps you could check the installation and then drive the car up to my house. All right?”

Krishan seized Terey’s hand with his damp fingers, raised it, and pressed it to his chest. Through the man’s shirt, near his ribs, Terey felt the hammering of his heart and sensed an answering tension in himself.

“Sir, if I am bad, I will be very bad. It is impossible to stop in the middle of the road. The mountain of lies grows even if I do not open my mouth. Tell him that.”

Terey pulled his hand away — pulled far too hard, for Krishan let it go so easily that he was ashamed of the violence of his motion.

“I will check that signal right away.” Krishan almost shouted. “This minute.” But when he took a step toward the automobile, he seemed to grow weak. He propped himself awkwardly against the hood; he slipped, and his nails scratched against it. Then the girl came out of the darkness and with surprising strength, for she was of slight build, took him in her arms and led him, unresisting, into the garage.

“Is he ill?” Istvan asked in an undertone.

“He is weak,” she answered tenderly. “He was smoking.”

At once everything was clear: the strange, uneasy movements, the florid sentences. He was smoking hashish. All the sympathy Istvan had lavished on the driver in the past dissipated. Now he understood the ambassador’s decision. Indeed, they all should be relieved that a genuine disaster had not occurred. Once again it appeared that he had been wrong. Naive goodheartedness could easily have placed them in the hands of a blackmailer. It had been right to let the driver go, to seize the first occasion to sever his tie to the embassy.

It seemed to him that in spite of the light vapors of gasoline and lubricants, he smelled the harsh aroma of cannabis. But everything was masked by the raw animal odor of the girl’s perfume as she came fluttering up through the dimness.

“Forgive him, sir. We have met with great misfortune,” she pleaded, her bracelets clinking. “He is full of sorrow.”

“Is there a way to help him?”

“No. He must have a long sleep.”

He turned on the headlights and drove out onto the road. When he heard the even hum of the motor, he felt relief. He stepped on the gas as if he were running away from something. One curtained window glowed in the embassy, behind a grating. The cryptographer was still working. The directional signal was repaired at the Shell station when he filled the fuel tank.

Connoly felt shunted aside by their reflexive affability, which seemed conspiratorial, though they had induced him to stay for coffee. He gathered up his shaggy tobacco pouch made of deer scrotum and tucked his pipe into its flannel bunting with a cherishing gesture, like a mother fondling her baby. He wrinkled his forehead suspiciously, like a dog that has lost the scent in a chase and now sees the cat stretched flat on a branch too high to reach. He understood intuitively the awkwardness of the situation.

Margit, in a simple ivory dress cut so low that her breasts showed white as they rose with her breathing, was speaking with an unnatural vivacity, as if she were hiding something under the cadence of her brightly turned, empty sentences — sentences which would have been suitable for an official reception but were off key in a conversation between people meeting as friends. From time to time Istvan turned his head in her direction, and neither man could have failed to notice the light that filled her eyes as they met his.

Connoly realized that he was superfluous, though they both held him there as if they were afraid to be alone in the deepening twilight on the spacious veranda of the hotel. He felt, though somewhat vaguely, the bitterness of defeat; in the end it had been the girl, not he, who had made a choice. He had not had a chance, in spite of the will he had mustered. He could not turn back or stop the course of things, he could only slow it down, and because it seemed that they both wanted that, he rose to spite them, rubbed his thinning stubble of hair, said a jaunty “Goodbye,” and left, tall, broad-shouldered. Blotches of light from holes the drought had bitten out of the leafy roof of the pergola flowed over his back. For as long as they could see him, he walked with an exaggerated vigor that belied the effects of a tiring day’s work, the heat, and the elaborate late lunch they had forced on him.

They sat in the rapidly lengthening shadows, so close that their hands could freely have touched, clasped, entwined, but neither made the slightest gesture. If the witness had remained, then they might have done it sooner, out of audacity, out of a kind of defiance, simply as a sign that they were lovers, though that was not yet true.