Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

None of this was of any concern to Grace. She had changed her sari, which was sprinkled with rain, for a dark blue one, and was sitting in the shadows. Shifting gleams of light played only on the slippery silk that streamed over her knees. The gold of her sandals flashed, and the ruby red of her nails.

“Istvan—” she raised her head as if she were impeded by the burden of her artistically wound hair—“It is good to see you. I think we could renew our old friendship. I know I have become heavy and ugly, but that will pass. We will go riding again. I know I am not attractive to you just now.”

He shook his head and said nothing. He saw her uplifted face, her doe’s eyes open wide, her lips full and unresisting, parted in a wistful sigh. He was not certain if it was for him or for the girlish freedom, the joyous possession of a body free as it had been before marriage. Or perhaps she already felt pain and apprehension about the fate of the one who was growing inside her.

“Something has changed, Istvan.” She spoke like a capricious child. “Margit is not the same, either. When I took her hand and put it here, so that she felt how he moves, she cried suddenly. You have all disowned me, even my father, though you heard him say he does everything for my good, and I don’t even want to think that he sacrificed me for his business interests. They are his only true passion: to have, to possess. Indeed, he does not manage to use even a fraction of what he owns. My husband is like him. They call it prudence, sensible provision for the future, but it is a sickness. The goal is millions of pounds, tens of millions of rupees. Money be damned.”

“But without it — you know how it is. You know life.” The rajah rose and stretched. “You, my love, can allow yourself to disparage money because for us wealth is as much a matter of course as the air he breathes is to a poor man. Do not believe her, Istvan. She flatters you; she dreams of some utopian justice. Well, ask him what his colleagues do in that red hutch of an embassy. Everyone wants to skim off something. No one would say that he has enough, let his friend get a raise, a promotion. The increase of wealth is the very essence of life. You will get everything for money: dignity, honors, justice, and power. No one is immune. True, they will say no, but it is enough to bargain with them and they set their real price. They change their minds.”

She smiled tolerantly, as if her mind were fixed on a different truth. She seized Istvan’s hand and turned toward the rajah.

“And what do you have to reproach Terey with? That he seeks contacts and information, that he wants to earn a living? Perhaps he is immune to your sickness.”

“I? Nothing.” He spread his hands in a gracious gesture of powerlessness. “You forget that he is a poet.” His tone seemed to say: an idler, a person with an impairment, even a cripple. “Istvan, beware — indeed, that is almost a confession of love. I will have to separate you, for she will bring up my son as a communist yet! Don’t frown; after all, every revolution beginning with the French was fomented by jaded sons of aristocrats, bankers, and manufacturers.”

“And the people?” Istvan asked truculently.

“The revolutions need their blood, and their voices, to legitimize the power that is taken over. I can have that power by paying for it with good money, not the false coin of slogans and illusory hopes. You will not convince me that you have equality, and where equality is achieved, it is like a freshly trimmed hedge: mutinous, ready to explode with wild growth.”

“The law of the people is sanctioned lawlessness,” his father-in-law asserted. “He was born a rajah; he must defend his own privileges and those of his children. True equality is in the hands of the gods. They decide where one is born. Perhaps it is just one of the despised, the suffering, the hungry, the cleansed from sin and after death incarnated into a noble race, who now absorbs our blood into his freshly formed heart—”

“No, I won’t have that!” cried Grace, curling up and clasping her hands protectively over her rounded abdomen. “This is no stranger. He began from us.”

“Yes — he is no stranger,” her father affirmed. “He is from here, from India.”

“Don’t believe it, Grace,” Istvan said comfortingly. “We only live once. You are very much a Hindu, Mr. Vijayaveda.”

“What the devil else should I be?”

“You are very comfortable with it, sir,” Terey concluded, raising Grace’s hand to his lips ceremoniously as if apologizing for the words that must have hurt her. “It’s time for me to go.”

“When will we see you?” The rajah walked him toward the door with a friendly clap on the back. “You must not wait for a special invitation. You know we are both fond of you.”

The car stood gleaming wet in the twilight. The fragrance of blossoming trees permeated the early evening air. The luxuriant greenery perspired, full of rustlings, the ticking of heavy drops of water, the sizzling sound of trickling rivulets. The light of lamps with overgrown branches pressing on them seemed to sing with the passionate tremolo of insects. Into this cloud, as it moaned with delight, bats fell like slivers of the deepening night, pricking holes in a drizzling horde of dancing moths, grasshoppers, botflies, and winged vermin that swarmed from under soaked foliage, from puddles, hollow trunks, steaming dung, chinks in old walls, and leaves delicately curled into tiny sheaths.

He breathed in the narcotic aromas of burgeoning plant life, listening to the throbbing of insects and the saucy rattle of large beetles, which shouted straight into his ears and tumbled like pebbles over the body of the car. The glare of the headlights caught a man in white with outspread arms. The watchman was hanging on the wrought iron gate, trying to open both sides of it with one tug.

Margit must be ill or she would not have let it be seen that something bothered her. Why had she been crying? Was she jealous? This meeting with Grace had held no importance for him; he was ashamed of that. Margit had stung him when she had spoken with brutal frankness of “wiping the slate clean,” but now he had plumbed the meaning of the phrase. Grace had only attracted him because of her beauty; she had aroused desire. And now he was immersed in the element of love, which would either save or ruin him.

He did not have the strength to return to his house, to listen to the grumbling of the cook and the insipid effusions of the guard, who would speak of his future with such paeans of gratitude that it would be necessary to lay out a handsome sum for the wedding expenses. That was inescapable. To shut himself into the bedroom with a book, smoke a cigarette and chafe, to review the developments of the last few weeks…Why was she so stubbornly silent? She had been in Delhi several times, after all, and he could swear she had given no sign that she wanted to distance him. He could still hear her warm whisper close to his ear as her hair lightly brushed his cheek: “I am so happy with you.”

They had visited Ram Kanval’s exhibition together. In the dark hall of the club, in spite of the burning lights, the pictures lost their vividness; they looked gray. Potbellied Hindus, turbaned Sikhs with beards shining with pomade, streamed by indolently. Their untucked shirts and creased white trousers created an impression of torpor and slovenliness. They stood before the canvases exchanging malicious comments in whispers, tittering into their hands and fanning themselves with the printed programs. Professors of the Academy gathered around the artist with troubled faces like guests at a funeral.

The greatest interest was aroused by the cards with the inscription “Sold,” and the price named. Until the counselor came with Miss Ward, and, when called as witnesses, they vouched for the painter, the little signs were taken for a shrewd advertising gambit. Hardly any diplomats attended; it was the wrong season, it was too hot. Whoever could had decamped to the mountains. And the exhibit was not to the taste of the Russians, though they had painters of their own who were searching for something novel. Only the Yugoslavians bought two pictures, and the Academy took one large canvas for thirty rupees to keep for a future museum of contemporary art, promising that for the time being it would be hung in a corridor.