Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

So Bela signaled the temper of things correctly, Istvan thought with elation. Changes are going forward, great changes…

“Well? Well, what do you say?” The old reporter waited to hear Istvan’s transports of joy. “Still not enough for you? Comrade Number One has no more cards up his sleeve, and people still living, because they suffered, don’t feel the ache in anyone’s back except their own.” He beat his thin, sunken chest with a clenched paw, as if he himself had been in prison, been beaten by interrogators. “It’s a healthy pain, a blessed pain, because it reenfranchises those on the bottom, who are forgotten. He can’t see them through the memoranda on the production of steel, aluminum, corn. They disappeared because a black swarm of statistics effaced them.”

“I knew that there was a congress. I had some sense of the mood—” The counselor tried to catch his breath.

“And you thought it would be a meeting of old apparatchiks, a row of plaster busts against a background of four profiles, the last of which veils those older ones as violence muffles the hopes of philosophers. And today they are separated from their natural constituency by a triple cordon, inaccessible. They listen graciously to applause and watchfully measure the volume of it.

“They have told me about it. I know as if I were there. They had a separate smoking room; each had his own coffee, which was examined by a doctor and heated by the trembling hands of the colonel himself. Instead of conversations with the nation for whose benefit they were trying to make decisions, out of those rooms came arrangements made in fear of the inevitable cleaning out of that — heroic, I don’t deny — room full of dusty junk by young, prudent professionals. By engineers, economists, who have the courage to ask how much this will really cost, whose interest it will really serve. If young people begin making decisions about the future, people who are not encumbered by their pasts, who have no grievances, who are passionate in their fields of study — people who are not for sale and who see an opponent as someone who can be persuaded rather than having to be bought off — then Hungary can move forward.”

He gazed into the fire, sipped his cocktail carefully and licked his lips, savoring it. He chewed the lemon peel for a moment, and when it became too bitter, spat the rest deep into the hearth, where it sizzled.

“The race with capitalism. Why should I be happy for you? How does it concern me? I don’t want to race, I want to live”—he smacked his lips twice—“no more poorly than I do today, but I will refuse no one the right to such a life. By all means, strive like Nagar and you will have…”

Istvan had just grasped the significance of this new information. Rakosi’s exit marked the beginning of an avalanche. His heart pounded. He foresaw enormous change: in Moscow, Khrushchev; in Warsaw, Gomulka; in Budapest…Who would have the courage to stand before a roaring crowd, tell the truth, and shoulder the burden of leadership without a feeling of contemptuous superiority toward workers, the indigent, the stubborn farmers? It must be someone free of the pride of the initiated, someone inured to every humiliation and to the fickleness of those who chanted his name, ready to lift him higher than their heads today, to serve him self-effacingly, as ready as they had been yesterday to tread him down with the vengeful rumblings of a thwarted herd of animals.

Trompette gave a sudden leap and squeal in the dusk of the garden and began to bark, romping under the bushes. They heard a machine clacking in the large room, striking its lever. A long tape filled with information unrolled in spirals, then stopped.

Like a miller awakened from dozing by the scraping of the sluice gate, Nagar rose briskly, put down his glass, and ran, shoulders hunched, down the corridor. Istvan saw him crouch by a machine and pass strips of type through his hands, then throw them around his neck like a snake charmer.

Just then he noticed that a young Hindu in a white shirt with a blue-speckled bow tie handed Nagar more tapes, and scissors, which the older man pushed away impatiently and then tore off the crisp paper with his fingers. With one determined smear he glued the printed strips together; he was doing his night’s work.

Istvan would willingly have helped him, would have hovered beside him, seized the finish printouts of the news and read them greedily over his shoulder. As it was, courtesy dictated that he wait. Nagar knew both sides of the divided world; he had been forced to coexist, to survive concurrent tests of humanity’s capacity for survival, but he belonged to the other side.

He returned with a long strip of paper hanging around his neck to his knees, perspiring lightly and wearing the complacent smile of the tailor who has conducted a successful fitting and knows that the client should be satisfied.

“A ‘bloodless revolution,’” he mocked, reaching for his glass. “Gerő is already boasting that there was, fortunately, no Poznań there, though some writings in the West—” he drummed on the glass with his fingers until it rang jarringly—“our writings, ours, tried to describe some incidents in the Petofi club by calling it ‘little Poznań.’”

“Agents of Western imperialism must have been at work in Poznań!” Terey bridled.

“And in the Petofi club were old comrades, even some from the Spanish underground, and Rajk’s widow cried out to them to be brave enough to demand that the honor of her murdered husband be restored.” He prodded him with his finger. “No doubt imperialist agents were there as well, yelling in the hall, ‘Stalin sent us hangmen. Court martial for Rakosi!’ ‘Those people of Stalin’s sow suspicion of treason and hate among us, comrades — whatever will keep them in power.’ ‘The struggle for freedom is the struggle for socialism.’ Yes, those are certainly the voices of agents provocateurs. One hears the crackle of the dollar in them,” he said sardonically.

“My dear fellow, unity of authority in the nation — that is no easy matter, and reports are no substitute for knowledge of the collective fate. Well, ask them: When was the last time they walked the streets of Budapest like normal people, drank a glass of wine in a tavern, not at a party, under the eye of the plainclothes police? When did they themselves buy something? You can mock the queen of the Netherlands because she rides a bicycle, but, well,” he laughed unaffectedly, “I’m a bit of a demagogue myself. Holland to me is a great country. I imagined Khrushchev on a bicycle, as if he were already gone. Of course he must use that jet that is the bane of the continent whose fate is being decided.”

Two servants took turns coming in and setting plates and little porcelain dishes with covers on the table. The smell of roasted meat mingled with the scents of wine and smoke from the fireplace. From the open door came the hum of rain. The dog ran in, wet and out of breath, shaking herself irritably. Flushed from under the trees by the downpour and lured by the light, moths flew in, whirring around the lamps, and lay on the white tablecloth like fuzzy buds broken off by a child.

“Justice, Istvan, is best left to God. At least I, an old Jew — or Frenchman, if you like, for that’s more elegant — prefer to leave it to Him. Only sometimes He loses patience, He also becomes fed up, and entrusts the execution of it to people. He does not return life to the dead; broken human beings cannot be repaired like broken pots. So the guilty must pay. And if they are all shielded by the new leaders in whom people are now vesting power in order to secure, at last, this justice of theirs, there can be trouble if it takes too long.” He spoke passionately until the light, throat-tickling, mouth-watering fragrance of turtle soup reached him. Then he rose from the stool by the hearth, bumped into the dog, who looked at him reproachfully, and sat down at the table. He lifted the lid of one of the cups without handles and sighed with relief.