Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“My youngest sister.” Kanval introduced a petite girl in a cherry-red sari, who bowed demurely. “Will you have some cake? I did not send for cakes while I was still uncertain that you were coming. They are only good if they are fresh.”

Terey knew what this really meant: the painter had not been able to afford to arrange a party. If the guests had failed to appear, his family would have reproached him bitterly for wasting their money.

“No, thank you,” he answered for himself and Margit. “We have just had our tea.”

“But you will not refuse coffee? It is just heating,” Kanval said, catching the aroma. “Allow me to introduce a few members of my family.” They were clustered in the doorway of the apartment as if they not only had no intention of inviting the visitors in, but were unwilling even to let a curious glance get past them.

“My father, the mayor emeritus.” He presented a grizzled elderly man. “My brother-in-law is a real estate broker; he sells building lots. Oh, he makes money!” he added proudly, though the tired wisp of a man in a sport coat and a dhoti with rumpled skirts, from which spindly legs protruded above his sandals, did not look wealthy. There were two sisters, both married — as the two brunette heads bent, the partings of the hair blazed red with dye — and “my younger brother, a translator, who is working just now on a commissioned translation of Crime and Punishment. The author is Dostoevsky,” he said, happy to display his knowledge.

The brother wore wire-rimmed glasses. He had the pale complexion of a man shut up in darkness for a long time and a thin mustache that grew in tufts near the ends of his lips.

“Do you know Russian, sir?” the counselor asked, grasping his soft, sticky hand.

“No. My brother translates from Bengali to Hindi,” the painter interposed.

“With the help of an English version,” the translator explained in a surprisingly deep bass. “I also cast horoscopes, but only for pleasure. Perhaps one of you would like—”

But Ram Kanval forestalled their responses.

“Another brother-in-law. A merchant, the owner of a large shop in Old Delhi. He could have one at Connaught Place, but there is less turnover there.”

The powerfully built man moved majestically, as if to make others feel his wealth and importance. He pressed their hands and rebuked his wife, who was tittering, pointing to Margit’s red hair, and whispering something to her sister.

“We will go up. There is a beautiful view from there,” Kanval said to his family, as if he were a little disappointed by the turn the visit had taken. “Send us coffee.”

“Is that the whole family?”

“Oh, no,” he laughed, as if he had heard a good joke. “There are still my wife’s parents, my wife, and too many children to weary you with counting. I have four myself, three sons and a daughter.”

They climbed the steep stairs. They were relieved to emerge onto the flat roof, into the sun.

For economy’s sake two buildings had been constructed together. Only parapets separated the roofs, forming enclosures like coops in which children were chasing each other. The barsati, a small room without a front wall that had been added onto the building like an unfinished toy, was intended to serve as a bedroom for servants in the summer. The painter had fitted it out as a studio. In place of a door he had nailed up a roll of matting. Apart from easels and bundles of pasteboard leaning against the wall, the only furnishings were a broken wicker chair strewn with a few magazines and a bed frame covered with a net of string. They walked to the edge of the roof and looked into the smoky space beyond it. The warren of buildings that was Old Delhi was darkening unevenly like a great rubbish heap. Beyond it they saw the red stony hill and the withered foliage of parks, through which the widely overflowing Yamuna glimmered with a shifting brilliance that was disconcerting.

On the flat roofs of the six-story buildings around them groups of women sat, inquiring intently about their neighbors’ lives and commenting on events like a Greek chorus. A crowd of children sat on the parapet, pointing to the extraordinary visitors. As the painter approached they fled as lightly as startled sparrows.

“Those little imps,” he said ruefully. “They have to sleep here. I am preparing for an exhibition, and they climb onto the roof and turn everything over, steal my brushes and paints and start painting themselves! I find traces of their frolics not only on the walls of the barsati, but on my own canvases.”

“Can’t you press them into service, use them as models?” Margit suggested. “Draw them into your work.”

“I have tried. The whippersnappers are indefatigable with their tricks. They spy on me, they mimic me. Neighbors complained that two sheets had gone missing, that someone had cut them up and put them on a canvas. Inevitably I was suspected. It was hell for me, for of course the little devils had hidden them among my pictures.”

He threw an old bathrobe onto the chair. It was streaked with paint; brushes had been wiped on it.

Margit, seated by the barsati wall, was finding it difficult to keep her attention focused on the paintings as he showed them; her eyes wandered over the rose and yellow walls of the distant houses, the clumps of trees, the palms with their arcing, jagged fronds lazily brushing a washed-out sky in which a few vultures hung motionless.

Terey sat by her on a pile of English magazines and old albums with ornate covers. The painter brought out paintings two at a time, leaning against the railing and looking uneasily at his guests, trying to read their responses in their faces before hearing their trite expressions of praise. The small fry crowded on the low wall between the roofs greeted each new painting with a chorus of laughter and applause, which must have irritated him greatly, for he turned toward them several times, pleading and threatening — or so at least it seemed to Istvan after the tension in the man’s voice reached a nearly hysterical pitch. Only the presence of foreign guests, a rare occurrence, restrained Kanval from chasing the mischievous little rabble away.

The pictures, in a serene spectrum of gray and rose or vivid juxtapositions of ocher, yellow, and white, contained distorted outlines of houses and human figures, or perhaps only masses of human forms draped in gray sheeting. From them came the moan of warm earth devoured by drought, and the melancholy of sudden twilight.

“He doesn’t know how to draw,” a little girl squealed in English, hopping about on the wall. The little bells around her ankles jingled like sardonic laughter.

The viewing of the pictures, the choice of some for the upcoming exhibit, seemed a torment for the painter. He switched the canvases more and more quickly, astonished when Terey stopped him. This was real painting, perhaps more genuine because it had no market in the city. Even among the artist’s own kindred and acquaintance it was seen as a wasteful obsession. To his overworked brothers-in-law, who were forced to chase every business opportunity that could bring in a few coins, the artist himself seemed an offensive idler maintained by their charity, and they were quick to make him feel it. Once in a gloomy moment he had confided to Terey that they had also turned his wife against him: she had refused to give him a carefully hoarded rupee for paints and paper.

“What do you think of this?” Margit asked in a whisper when Kanval had disappeared into the barsati. “It’s good, isn’t it? It would be cruel to praise it if you don’t believe in his art.”

“It is very good,” he answered sincerely. “This one, for example, with a girl in a green sari, covered to her eyes, and the pairs of slender figures leaning toward each other, almost transformed into a pattern of plants — everything lighted from below by the fading orange fire that always burns in this country. I’d like to buy this picture.”