Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

After all, he assured himself, true love could not end in such a ridiculous way.

Yes, it had been just here — there was even the tumbledown house patched together with dung and clay. He knew the worn path into the sugar cane fields and the old tomb, the shrine with the domed top, the old stone overgrown with lichen.

They had driven away from Istvan’s house when Mihaly came up to them unbidden.

“Take me, uncle,” he begged, pressing his lips together drolly.

“Let him come,” Margit took the boy’s part, “he won’t bother us.”

The little fellow slid into the car.

The fringes of the suburbs, overgrown with thorny shrubs, adjoined old cemeteries and the ruins of ancient temples. As they were speeding along, Istvan saw the massive gray hulk of an elephant. It was leaning against the remains of a wall, rubbing the back of its neck until the crumbling bricks fell down. Margit insisted on photographing it. He stopped the car and the three of them got out. Peasants hidden behind trees shouted something in husky voices and waved lean hands like withered branches, but no one paid any attention to them.

Mihaly found a half-crushed stalk of sugar cane on the road and picked it up for “our elephant.” Margit hovered at a distance; the elephant was too large to be photographed at close range, so Istvan stood beside her as Mihaly moved fearlessly, carrying the broken stalk in his outstretched hand, where it dangled like a whip. The shouts stopped. The silence was broken only by the piercing squawks of parrots.

Instinctively the boy slowed down; he seemed to grow smaller as he drew near the ponderously advancing giant, which relentlessly rubbed its neck against the rough wall. They could hear the scraping of the thick folds of skin and the clatter of falling stones. Suddenly the elephant stood still and spread its ears wide; only their edges fluttered lightly. It turned its head. Its eye in its yellow ring looked toward the approaching child with a tormented, furious glare. The elephant took a few steps, crushing weeds and raising a cloud of dust. Just then Istvan noticed that with every movement the animal was sweeping the ground with a broken length of thick chain that was fastened to one hind leg.

“Mihaly, stop!” he cried, and lunged for the boy.

With incredible lightness the elephant turned where he stood and, grunting, broke into a gallop, trampling the bushes. He ran straight for the huddled cottages. The Hindus shrieked and ran like frightened hens, grabbing naked children and trying to hide. Under the stomping of his powerful legs the huts shattered like pottery. Dry thatch and wisps of straw must have fallen onto a cooking fire, for a pale flame burst out unexpectedly. The elephant moved at a lumbering canter, tearing his way through the brush. They heard his trumpeting and the cracking of branches; then nothing remained but the noise of crying and the smoke from the fire.

Istvan seized the boy and ran to the car. “Come on,” he said to Margit. She stood pale and breathless with the camera pressed to her chest.

“Why was he so frightened of me?” Mihaly asked.

Half-naked figures were swarming about. People crept out of ditches and from behind large trees and clustered around the Europeans.

“That is a mad elephant, sahib,” a tall villager wearing a shirt explained in English. “He has killed two people. We warned you.”

“Are there injured people in those ruined houses?” he asked.

“No. But there are heavy losses: burned beds and saris. Give a few rupees, honored sir, madam,” they begged, extending their hands.

Margit shook out all the contents of her bag into their hands. They grabbed eagerly at the ten-rupee notes. On all fours they clapped their hands on the coins that rolled around on the road and fished them up. A clutch of bodies scuffled in the dust.

“You must have gone mad, too,” he scolded her when she clung to his arm. Then he saw that her eyes were wide with fear. “What are you afraid of? He is far away,” he said comfortingly.

“You could have been killed,” she whispered. “He could have trampled you. I was so terribly afraid for you when you ran like that. Istvan, what were you thinking? What were you counting on? That the elephant would be frightened?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and it was the truth. “I wanted to stop the child. It was a reflex.”

“But he isn’t important. Only you!” she cried accusingly, as if she were delivering a verdict on the boy.

“Would you have wanted me to leave him to the elephant?”

“Oh, no, Istvan. No. That’s not what I was thinking. I love you so for what you did. That’s right: it was a reflex.”

“Anyone would have done it. Nothing happened, after all.” He backed the car up and turned it around.

“Nothing at all,” Mihaly declared. “I won’t tell anybody about the trampled houses because my dad would give me a spanking.”

He drove the boy, who by now was drowsy, gorged with cake, to the embassy. Margit stayed in the house; she preferred not to be seen. In the night they clung to each other through long, sleepless hours.

“I got you back. He gave you back to me when He could have taken you.”

“Who?”

“He,” she whispered gravely. “You believe that He exists.”

Then he remembered the elephant as it turned with unimaginable lightness, and its fluid gallop, which made the earth groan.

“I think he was unnerved by the broken sugar cane in the boy’s hand. It reminded him of a whip,” he explained.

“No, they don’t use whips on elephants. You know that very well,” she insisted. “It was a sign.”

They lay in silence for a moment. His heart beat its measured rhythm under her hand.

“It beats,” she whispered almost reverently. “It beats for me.”

“You’re becoming as superstitious as a Hindu woman. It doesn’t know who it’s beating for. And if it does, it beats for itself, as it was formed to do in my mother’s womb,” he said to ease her tension.

But she did not quarrel with him. She kissed him on the mouth so he would say nothing that could cause her pain.

The next day the cryptographer showed him a notice in a newspaper and thanked him effusively, for Mihaly had blurted out the whole story. The counselor read that before soldiers shot the crazed elephant, he had wreaked havoc at a bazaar and trampled two people.

He stopped the car behind the large trunks of trees that were growing beside the road. Behind a stone pillar marking the sacred trail of King Ashoka, grayish-brown cottages stood among the thorn bushes, their walls patched with great clots of clay and dung. Women were cutting dry grass with sickles and using it to fill out the sparse sheaves of thatch on the roofs. Children were shouting in the ruined temple and running around under long strips of fabric — freshly laundered saris — that had been hung over the shrubbery.

“What am I searching for in this place?” he asked himself, looking at the vapor that rose from the thorny, matted vegetation. He knew: he wanted to remember Margit’s eyes half mad with fright, the eyes of a woman who loves.

He walked around the Hotel Ashoka, a modern building like a castle of red stone. He heard the tinkle of music; beach umbrellas pulsed in the breeze like blue and green jellyfish. Excited cries and the din of childish voices rose and fell around the pool when the dark figure of a diver vaulted from the board to flash in the sun and disappear behind the wall. He had no desire to meet strangers; there was too much glare and excitement, and it grated on him. He preferred the dim, expansive interior of the Dinghana Club, with its deep leather chairs and splendidly appointed bar. The smells of insecticide, dust, and cigars drifted together; the breeze drew in the robust odor of horse manure from the stables nearby.