Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Listen,” he began gravely. “Do you like being in my house?”

Pereira folded his hands prayerfully and beat them against his scrawny black chest until it rumbled.

“Sir, you know that you are my father and my mother. I and my family live in your shadow.”

“What happens in this house remains between you and me. It is enough that the two of us know. I have a diamond ring, and you should be happy that you have a rich master. Do you understand?”

The black eyes glittered from under raised eyelids. He understood.

“But not everyone must know of it, for there are many who are jealous and greedy.”

“Oh, yes, sir, there are many bad people.”

“So if I hear from my friends, who hear from their servants and they from you, that you are talking about my ring, the price of which you do not know, you may not return to the kitchen again, even if the door is open. I will take another cook who will work for me and be silent. Do you understand?”

The cook looked at him attentively, broodingly.

“And if the sweeper — for he is able to enter the rooms — and the watchman — he walks around the house at night and sleeps on the threshold like a dog — if they let the cat out the bag?”

“Warn them that I will dismiss everyone, for I like peace and quiet. And you know, cook, that I do not speak for the pleasure of hearing my own voice.”

“Yes, sir,” he said worriedly. “What time should dinner be?”

“At nine. Make the bed in the spare room. Milady is my guest and will spend the night here,” he said with quiet emphasis. “You are a wise man, not young. Remember what you said after you welcomed her: ‘That is a real lady.’ That is what I want you to say even when she leaves this house in the morning.”

He saw beads of sweat on Pereira’s forehead. A diagonal shadow slashed the blind yellow wall of the yard. Large tin bins gave off the bitter smell of fermenting peelings; big winged cockroaches whirred under the lids.

The concrete had been wetted down and was drying unevenly. Istvan smelled the sickening sweet odor of manure from open sewage ditches. Languid, throaty voices came from beyond the wall, and, from farther away, the tinkling of bicycle bells. The hour was approaching when people would swarm out of work and the road would be overrun with packs of cyclists, arms round each other, pedaling lazily.

“Should I serve dinner at the table?”

“Yes. Only wash your hands. You’ve been leaning on the ground,” he commanded, and went to his room for Margit. She greeted him with a conspiratorial lowering of the eyelids and parted her lips as he poised above them like a hawk.

“Come: a ‘very aromatic cup of tea’ awaits you,” he said invitingly, mimicking the cook. “You can even spoil the taste with a spoonful of fresh cream.”

“Don’t let my unexpected arrival disrupt your schedule for the day,” she said, munching toast with orange marmalade over melting butter. “I’ll gladly wait for you here. But I’d be happy if you could take me with you, so we wouldn’t be separated, if only—”

“I was supposed to visit the painter — Ram Kanval — but I can call that off at a moment’s notice. You know him. He was at Grace’s wedding. He helped us buy the sandals.”

She looked at him with eyes alight.

“It would be nice to pay Grace a visit. After all, you are friends.”

“I don’t know if the rajah has taken her off somewhere,” he said, wishing to defer such a meeting. “They are always traveling.”

“Find out. Call. She would be hurt if she knew I was in Delhi and didn’t look in on her. I wonder if marriage agrees with her. Has she changed much? She’s really an Englishwoman, not a Hindu.”

“So I thought, but you will not know her now. She is an orthodox Hindu. From the very day of her wedding I’ve lost contact with her,” he hedged. “With him as well. He stopped spending time at the club.”

“Confess.” She wagged a finger. “You were a little in love with her. Nothing strange about it; she’s lovely. If I were a man…”

“I didn’t know you then,” he said, seizing on a sincere justification.

“If her marriage pained you that much, we mustn’t go there,” she agreed easily. “Only take me with you now. Will that painter tell the whole city about our visit?”

“I don’t think so.” Better an excursion to old Delhi than an evening at the rajah’s, he thought. He was afraid for Grace and Margit to meet, afraid of the sparkle of happiness in Margit’s eyes and the little, impulsive gestures of intimacy that a jealous woman understands at once. “Good. We’ll go to Kanval’s studio.”

All the servants were sitting by the blind wall of the yard, carefully observing their departure. So they saw at a glance what was happening, and cleared out of the house after finishing their duties to leave us at our own disposal, he thought, and was pleased. Well, we will see; if he manages to make them the guardians of our secret, I know how to reward their silence.

As he drove the Austin, passing cyclists hurtling along in fluttering white pyjamas with a swinging motion like butterflies in flight, he saw Margit’s hands in a patch of sunlight shining through the windshield. They lay so near that he could hardly keep from taking a hand off the steering wheel and stroking them. He had to slow down on the old stretch of road; the car floundered among the tongas, whose drivers did not give way, though the blare of the horn disturbed them. They rose and looked around helplessly but had nowhere to move, so they huddled down again on the stout shafts between the withers of the slow-moving long-horned oxen. The odor of laboring beasts seeped into the car together with the smell of manure and the acrid smoke from the fires burning in front of clay huts.

Then the real houses began, four- and even five-story houses, and a few trees, which in spite of the long drought had not lost their leaves. A new neighborhood was growing up, its streets as yet unnamed, but, as usual in India, all the inhabitants knew each other, knew even too much about each other.

He spotted Ram Kanval from a distance, standing on the curb — tall, slender, turning his head like a hen who has lost her chick. He shouted imperiously at the tongas that were bearing down blindly on the braking car, converging with a creaking of axles and lowing of oxen. The painter settled into the back seat with relief, pushed his head between Istvan and Margit, and showed Istvan how to maneuver the car to his house. The road had been dug up in a few places for the laying of water pipes and cable.

Groups of children were playing on the road; the car attracted their attention. They ran behind it, gathered around it, and stroked its heated metal body as if it were a cat. The painter appointed two boys from the neighborhood to guard it. They shouted at the girls not to smudge the fenders with their fingers.

“We live on the third floor, Miss Ward,” he explained as he walked across the threshold. “We have four rooms. My studio, however, is on the roof, in the barsati. I have more light on the roof. Perhaps you will come in for coffee?”

The doors of all the apartments opened onto the staircase. Children ran in, calling to their elders, who looked with curiosity at the Europeans.

“They are envious of such a visit,” Kanval explained, obviously flattered. “I must whisper a word to them about whom they have the honor of seeing. I really had lost hope that you were coming. Diplomats are so quick to promise, and then they disappoint. I am a painter, not a merchant or an official. I do not count in the scheme of things. I am not important to anyone.”

The cramped stairs, splattered with chewed betel nuts as if with clotted blood, led them toward the aromas of kitchen spices and scalded coconut oil. Children clung to the banisters, hoping to brush against the European clothing, which was a novelty to them.