Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

Margit, full of joy and ready to share her happiness with everyone, then induced Connoly to pose for a portrait by Kanval, making sure that he paid the artist an advance. These successes, to all appearances minor but minutely observed by his competitors, reinforced the painter’s cachet, and after the opening day flattering notices appeared in the press — except for a newspaper of the extreme right which called Kanval a subversive, an enemy of the national landscape, and, worse, of the beauty of Hindu women.

Margit had been in the capital twice more, and once on a Saturday night he had gone to Agra. Nothing had suggested that she would suddenly stop answering his letters, that she would not pick up the telephone.

He drove through the streets of Delhi, which were empty after the recent rain. A jackal fleeting past loomed yellow in the light; it looked like a little fox. Istvan saw two farther on, jumping nimbly as cats from crates full of garbage and ash. He heard their whining, like the crying of lost children, until it wrung his heart.

Kanval. He wanted, sincerely, to help him. Simply by using his scissors he had been able to alter slightly the tone of the reviews he had sent to the ministry to press a request that the painter be invited to Hungary. There was a chance that he could wheedle a stipend out of them and open the way for him to travel to Hungary and other parts of Europe, where they ought to understand his work and appreciate his originality. From their conversations, from the tone of Kanval’s impassioned requests and sudden rushes of hope, he had gathered that such a journey would be not only the ultimate test, but an escape, a rising to the surface, an extrication from life in the anthill — from the struggle for daily rice, for a shirt for one’s back, for favorable notice for art with a value not measurable in rupees.

Near the ruins of Jantar Mantar, where the enormous stone curves of the royal astrolabe bent into the sky over the tops of palm trees, he was too distracted to notice that a light-colored Citroen was blocking his way until he was forced to stop by the curb. A small man popped out of it, spread his hands in a gesture of welcome, and leaped straight into the glare of his headlights.

“I dreamed of meeting you,” cried Nagar, hugging him suddenly and hard. He clapped him on the back and held him with restless hands, as if Istvan were the trunk of a tree he wanted to climb. “Great news: I predicted it! I smelled it!” he gloated. “I followed my nose.”

“And I am looking for—”

“Everything will be there”—Istvan could not get a word in edgewise as Nagar held him by his sleeve and dragged him after him—“and news, splen-did news,” he reveled in the weight of the words, “and a modest little bachelor dinner. Wait, for this is no less important, the aperitif: a martini with lemon and a drop of gin, but literally only for aftertaste. Perhaps Dubonnet. A cup of turtle broth, from a little turtle, it must be, not those great flat carrion eaters, I know, I know”—he forestalled doubts and reservations—“then quail and a heavy red. I can sniff the wine, and you will give me pleasure by emptying the bottle slowly, very slowly. Nothing is to be left for the servers; they don’t understand wine. The English are boors in the matter of cuisine. Stinking whiskey is enough for them. So who is going to teach the Indians?”

In spite of this stream of chatter and the other man’s quick, clumsy movements, Istvan pulled out a vinyl briefcase and locked the car. The wet branches along the boulevard brushed against their hands. The open house blazed with yellow light. A spotted setter was sitting on the threshold. She had not run up to meet her master; she only gave a wide yawn and casually wagged her tail.

“How are you, Trompette?” Nagar pulled a drooping ear. “A big old mutt, and still stupid. She thinks she will catch a jackal. When they begin to run close to the house at twilight and wail and prowl around the rubbish heap, the bitch goes into a frenzy. She nudges me with her nose, paws at me, and leads me to the gun rack. Straight away she tries to incite me to murder, and when I explain to her that one does not shoot at jackals, she looks at me reproachfully, even a bit contemptuously, for when she walks away she scratches the floor with her hind feet as if she were burying something.”

The small, brightly lit hallway was filled with the aroma of wood burning on a hearth. Nagar squatted and thrust in his hands. His outspread fingers fluttered over the flame.

“I can’t abide dampness.” He pointed to the buffalo and antelope skins that hung on the wall. Between bunches of spears with tufts of horse hair dyed red he had displayed, as if its neck were built into the wall, the horned, majestically ugly head of the Indian rhinoceros. “I bought him,” he confessed. “Isn’t he a fine one? Nature’s tank. I would not have shot him. Fewer of them remain than of us.” He nodded for emphasis.

Two servants with languid movements and liquid glances — men of feminine aspect, flaunting their beauty — took bottles from a carved box. Listening with rapt expressions to the orders their master was issuing in Hindi, they poured the contents of the bottles into glasses and whittled thin slices of lemon, releasing the aroma of the peel. Nagar himself poured in a little gin, counting out the drops with the painstaking care of an apothecary. He tested the drink by sniffing and almost dipped the tip of his nose into the glass. He adjusted the proportions like a connoisseur. The very sight of these rituals aroused not thirst but craving.

The reddish cockscomb of flame trembled deep in the fireplace. As they were holding generous glasses that smelled of herbs and the forest and were garnished with tilted moons of lemon, Istvan heard the chirp of the teletype machine through the dark hall and said diffidently, “You were going to tell me—”

“In a moment. You are insatiable. Is nothing enough for you? You still want anxiety from the world to spice things up?” He cocked his head like a bird who wonders from which side to peck apart a crust of bread. “Only after the twentieth congress did he comprehend,” he mocked, affecting the sober, expository voice of a radio announcer. “‘I understood that the gravity and consequences of the errors are worse than I had thought…The damage caused by our party is significantly greater than I could have predicted.’ Who is saying this? Something for you, Istvan, especially for you. Matyas Rakosi himself, and with beads of sweat on his bald head. For he knows it is his own funeral oration. And he is not sure if they will let him walk away or if they will demand an accounting for those he pushed to the wall. Everyone in the hall knows that those he murdered were true communists. He looks around and sees faces like clenched fists, and though he still sits in the presidium, he is wondering if the guard at the door among the oleanders will protect him or is already waiting to apprehend him. Or so it is said among you in Budapest.

“Rakosi has fallen, the secretary is Gerő, and his deputy is a former prisoner indicted under the imprimatur of Stalin — Kádár. Say now, what am I glad about? You should be glad! Your people at the embassy will only learn about this tomorrow from the newspapers, but in three days, when all the rejoicing is over and you get the official coded message that there are changes, you will see how your Bajcsy begins to realign himself, to set his sails handily for the new wind. But you have the news from me while it is still hot. Take advantage of it: you know how the cards have been dealt. Do you even understand what has happened there? There is another Hungary — you are a representative of a different country than the one that sent you here.” His small face twitched into violent grimaces, like the face of a monkey struggling with a woman’s handbag and its delightful contents, the value of which it feels though it knows nothing about how to make use of them.