Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Then someone leaped through the cordon — a young man in a loosely wound dhoti and a shirt hanging from under a European sport coat. Dark, slender legs moved piston-like in shoes that were too large. He shouted something to the crowd, but was drowned out by commands issuing from a megaphone. The crowd swayed and began to flow, peacefully forming itself into a procession.

“I know him. He is a communist delegate,” the painter said. “He has given them his pledge of support.”

It seemed to Istvan that he saw a familiar face among the deputies — sallow, ageless, the face of Chandra, the attorney. Others, talking and debating, were gathered around him. Slowly the large building of rose-colored stone swallowed them all.

The philanthropist, Terey thought with a bitter smile. He will take care of them.

A haphazard, iridescent river of women drifted along. Songs started up here and there and mingled; the melodies drowned each other out. The noise and the twanging of instruments grew louder. The pleading calls repeated themselves in the twilight with a hollow sonorousness, but could not penetrate the thick walls behind which the decision would be made.

They walked down to the grass. In front of them the blind moved in rows with short steps, shuffling. Those on either end of each row held onto long bamboo rods that served as fences on both sides of the marchers. Little boys led them, shaking tambourines, hitting them against their close-clipped heads and jumping cheerfully about, unaware of the seriousness of the demonstration. A pale memory of sunset shone in the sky.

“A Breughel painting, indeed!” Margit shuddered.

“A hundred times over — for that is India,” said the painter, not without pride. “The government must deliberate well before it extricates itself from this ruling. It is easy to pass a law, but how can it be implemented sensibly, without adverse effects? What the women were shouting is the truth: resettlement is a sentence to death by starvation. They have nowhere to go back to. They earn what they can to maintain their families, they put up dowries for their sisters, the younger ones for whom they find husbands — the affianced virgins, submissive, resigned. The one knows only the arts of the bed, the thousand-year-old prescriptions and recommended methods of lovemaking, but love itself she will never know. The other is ready to love anyone her family designates, or fate or the matchmaker presents.”

They looked at the procession streaming slowly between the huge trees. Behind them, like sheepdogs driving their flocks along, the policemen walked unhurried, their red turbans glowing in the rapidly falling darkness. Others climbed into the covered backs of trucks. The bluish smoke of the first cigarettes, well earned after a long stint without them, floated out from under tarpaulins and formed a mist against an apricot-colored patch of sky.

The odor of musk and the spicy smell of heated bodies lingered in the air, but cars were already moving. They forced their way through the traffic, trumpeting angrily, flashing their yellow headlights, demanding the right-of-way with long blinks. Streaks of dust and exhaust bleared the stream of lights. This was the scented twilight of a city in the tropics.

“There is a cruel curiosity in the human being,” Margit whispered. “One forgets that they also desire and suffer. One would like to lay bare their secrets, learn how they live, what makes them happy. Though I know that knowledge is no good, since I can’t help them.”

“What they have they value very much. They even think that fate singled them out: they have enough to eat, they wear silk saris, they bask in adoration and desire. Some find permanent admirers. Not only do they receive gifts, they share them with their own families,” the painter shrugged. “The rules of your world, which you would try to impose on them as if for their good, they would not consider liberating. We cannot better their condition, and, worse, we do not want to share with them, to give up wealth. The deputies only institute demands, judge and contemptuously condemn these women’s way of life and of earning a living, the only one available to them.”

“Have you ever been — with them?” she asked, moved by the anger in his voice.

“Certainly. There is nothing shameful in that. In our world, matters of the body are hedged around with so many prohibitions that they continually distract and disturb us. Even those little boys who are running around near the women — though they are kissed and petted because they remind the women of the brothers and sisters they left behind — see nothing that would corrupt them. What we see there is what we are told in a poem about gods’ struggles for love, or by statues in temples — entwined bodies, which for those accustomed to look at them from childhood become almost like the linear motif of a frieze. Certainly I have been there. This is not like prostitution in your world — the debasing purchase of a body, which because of that is only a body, for someone demands it, so it must dehumanize itself. Here there are not prostitutes exclusively, but dancers, singers, tellers of magical tales whose art involves physical movement. True artists are found among them, artists whose way to the stage was blocked by poverty and peasant origins.

“In front of a crowd of men sitting on the floor, they dance to the birdlike whistle of the flute and the dove’s cooing of the drum, expressing the love of the earth goddess for the sun god. They bend the naked torso, part the thighs, tremble, surrender to an unseen lover. The dance is like a primordial prayer, like a compressed history of the world, a creation of what is alive.

“Everyone sees what he desires: one sees poetry, grace of movement, and the traditional school of sacral gesture; another is fascinated only by the pretty young girl who taps the floor with her bare feet dyed red as her bells clink like hail. And she is inaccessible, though everyone present is panting with lust, his mouth hanging open with delight. They have forgotten about their cigarettes, which are burning their fingers. One man alone will have her that night. The others can only envy him.

“That one takes out a banknote, moistens it with saliva, and sticks it on his forehead. The dancer has already seen him; she approaches him with catlike steps, her hips swaying. She sits by him, exuding warmth and scents, for we have special methods of enhancing the effects of perfume — the temples, underarms, and nipples are all moistened differently, and the knees, and the insides of the thighs. So she bends, she leans over her admirer like a branch heavy with fruit, she gives off the scent of a body heated from the dance. She brushes against him lightly, like a moth against the reflection of a lamp in a mirror. She is not permitted to reach for the banknote with her fingers, only with her lips, for he is supposed to press it to her bosom, which is gleaming with sweat. When she removes it, that is consent. So — you did not know this — the woman has a right to choose. She conquers in order to be bought. With this one lover she goes to an alcove, and the remaining men return home. They are aroused; they will take their own wives, still seeing in their minds the other woman with her serpentine movements, the woman who was coveted, desired.”

“How dreadful!” Margit clenched her fists in front of her chest as if to defend herself. “Don’t you understand that?”

He smiled at her indulgently.

“I would not say so. It is the pursuit of the unattainable, for quite a few of those men were poor, were street vendors. Each could pay for entrance, but not for the woman. But sometimes she rewards a man’s perseverance, responsiveness, and strength of feeling. Why kill dreams? Why should people not have longings? For all those men whose decision to marry was dictated by the family council in order to increase their capital, unite clans, gain patronage and influence — who married women they did not desire, women chosen for them by others — here is a temporary escape, a change from the everyday tedium. With their wives they will have children; the families demand nothing more. There they can seek fulfillment, delight, beauty, I dare say even cleansing from the sins marriage perpetrates against love. But you cannot understand that…”