Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

His servants welcomed the announcement of his journey with unconcealed satisfaction, just as he had welcomed the ambassador’s departure. The cook, scratching himself under the arms through his shirt sleeves with their ripped seams, assured him that he would take care of everything. He even wanted to prepare a dish especially suited to the heat. But Istvan only ordered him to sew a missing button on a shirt he had chosen in addition to others more casual and colorful. His thoughts were fixed on Margit. No: this time she would not elude him. He had to learn the truth.

At a gasoline station with a border of cannabis, its purplish-red flowers fleshy as a rooster’s comb, he filled the tank. Glassy streaks in the air over the large fuel pump, now switched off, showed how rapidly the gasoline was vaporizing. The grease-stained bodies of working men glittered with trickling sweat. They moved with maddening sluggishness, with open lips and dull-witted, pained expressions. Istvan’s shirt clung to his back; the sun caught his legs above the knees, burning through his pants. A pair of little clouds scudded over a sullen turquoise sky; how unjust it was that there, high above them, a wind was blowing, while scorching air hovered stubbornly over the earth. The big tin gasoline sign with the yellow-painted Shell emblem emitted a metallic moan under the onslaught of the sun.

He drove out onto the highway. The trucks in front of him churned up red dust; he had to close the windows as he passed them. Barefoot drivers with wet towels on their heads steered trucks piled high with cargo with one hand as they hung out of the windows to their waists, cooling themselves in the rush of air. Even the trees were turning red from the dust, which was soft as talc. Only the sugar cane, which was flourishing after the rain, stood like a wall of dark green. A crowd of monkeys presided over it, breaking off and chewing the stalks that oozed sticky sweetness; the old males ran up to the road itself, shamelessly thrusting out their molting rumps.

Could the British embassy have forbidden her to see me, he wondered. There is nothing secret in the surveys she conducts. She signed a contract; she is a free agent. Apart from her medical duties, she is at her own disposal. Even if they had cast me as a spy and a dangerous subversive, if all she said to me is true, she would have come straight to me and demanded an explanation.

It’s no matter what women whisper — his lips curled with contempt — the electrifying touch of the hand, the yielding lips, the body sweetly accessible, say more than vows. Are other assurances needed? Words mean nothing by comparison with the clear signs of the joy of our being together, breathing the same air, seeing the same landscape. The union of bodies that have no secrets, the smells of skin, of sweat and warm hair, from which arises desire. Assurances of love under the sail of mosquito netting were not necessary. Of course she could tell herself, Enough. No. I will not be there. She could enjoin silence. But her hands are empty, in her sleep she gropes around a rumpled sheet in search of his arms, her breast longs to be pressed down by his, crushed, aching, her breath taken away as delightful expectation surges through her body. Only to run to her again, to have her before me. She will not resist. She must come back.

Shadows of trees and flashes of sunlight played over the hood of the car, beating his eyes numb. The heat was draining. Caravans of tongas rested in the bushes. The drivers had crawled under the wagons and were sleeping with their legs spread in a patch of shade. The white backs of the buffalo were streaked with red dust. Only camels worked their cleft lips with threads of green saliva tirelessly, like rabbits, plucking little leaves from the smaller thorn trees. They reminded Istvan of the plaster figurines in the crèches set on little nests of hay in churches at Christmastime. The warning signal from the horn aroused no tremor from them. They dozed in stone-like repose, utterly still in the fiery air full of the hissing of insects.

The smells of burning, of chicken dung and dried mud hovered among the clay-walled cottages with flat roofs. Collectors for rainwater gleamed as if wax had been poured over them; glare leaped from the surface of the road. The horned heads of buffalo rose like tree trunks out of a flood, smeared with slime. A flock of peacocks bustled across the road, trailing their long, iridescent tails and scolding in screeching voices.

Time seemed to be compressed. Not believing what the hands of his watch told him, Terey pressed it to his ear. Its gears made biting sounds like a bark beetle gnawing the old wooden bed in the alcove in his parents’ blue house. The minutes passed imperceptibly, like a slow leak.

The road fell away behind him.

Tense in every nerve, he turned in at the park gate, where peddlers and snake charmers with baskets full of reptiles had taken up residence, and drove up to the glass-encased reception desk. Looking over the young clerk’s shoulder, he saw the key to Margit’s room hanging on a hook. The Hindu smiled as if Istvan were a good friend: rooms would be vacant later; a few people would be leaving after the siesta, but he was willing to give him the key to Miss Ward’s room. She had been away again for a few days. She had gone to the vicinity of Dehradun. There were many blind people in the villages there. She had gone with orderlies; it was not known when she would return. When she had established an intake point, no doubt.

It began to grate on Istvan that the young man knew so much about Margit. He took the key from his yellowish hand and moved away with an ease that was partly feigned; his heels beat on the brick pavement of the pergola. Feeling as if he were committing a crime, he opened the door and, like a burglar, reconnoitered the room with his eyes. His heart raced as if he were doing something against her wishes and was afraid of being detected by witnesses. Despising himself, he opened a drawer and saw a little frame of hammered silver lying face down at the bottom. He seized it eagerly. If he were not going to meet Margit here, he wanted to assert his presence in her room by setting out his photograph, which she had once mentioned in a letter. But the frame was empty. He clenched his fists as anger swept over him.

Now he must pry, must know for certain who his successor was. He peered into the cabinet, he looked on the shelf and on the little table by the cot under the springy mushroom-like coil of mosquito netting. He found an opened letter but put it aside, for it bore Australian stamps. On top of other papers was a telegram from him, and with a paid reply; he wanted all the more to insult her, to wound her. This, he knew, was petty malice. He stood resting his knees against the bed, confused and uncertain, like a dog that has lost the master’s scent. In the bathroom, water dripped more and more loudly; large drops with an oily sheen spattered on the wet stones.

He knelt and pressed his face into the placid smoothness of the bedspread. He was pained by a barely perceptible fragrance, or perhaps it was only his imagination. There was an odor of insecticide in the air, and a mustiness — the smell, quite simply, of an empty room.

A sense of injury rose in him, a bitterness such as children feel when adults do not keep their promises. Feeling a tightening in his throat, and angry at himself for disturbing the contents of her room — silence, after all, had the force of interdiction — he went through to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His own face, clouded by uncertainty, exasperated him. He washed his hands like a man who wants to erase the evidence that he has broken into a house. The towel was immaculate, freshly ironed. Obviously it had been changed during the occupant’s absence.