Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

He knew that it was beyond price, that he had acquired it in exchange for Margit, and that he had paid for it with the grief that was choking him with unshed tears, with a stifled cry of anguish. All because of Chandra; at last he had found the guilty one. He must be killed, before…and, full of this resolve, he woke.

He gasped for air and slowly came to himself, remembered where he was. He held the mango in his limp hands. What am I going to kill him for? — he exonerated Chandra — he is not my enemy. It is the rajah who has a dispute with him. Perhaps Chandra does envy him his wealth. Of course; he likes to feel himself the dominant one. A silly dream — he rubbed his damp face with the sheet, but could not rid himself of a gloomy premonition that Margit was ill and he should hurry to rescue her.

He remembered an old milkmaid who interpreted dreams; she covered her mouth with her hands and whispered straight into the ear of a girl who blushed fiery red and shut her eyes with alarm at the sinister prophecy. He recalled the signs that were keys to the dream’s meaning: bathing in a muddy river — illness; picking flowers — loss, final separation, death. But the coral button, polished and pulsing with light? He could not intuit its meaning, and perhaps in the old woman’s book of signs there was no such symbol, so it should not have appeared.

Outside the window, through the dense greenery of the pergola, came a dawn the color of mud. He jerked away the mosquito netting, frightening the drowsy mosquitoes, and turned on a lamp. It was a few minutes past four. At once the thought of the upcoming expedition roused him to full wakefulness. He lay for another minute wondering uncomfortably how Margit would receive him — lay at full length, nude, with his fingers locked under his neck. Now the mosquitoes were gathering around the globe of the lamp, warming themselves on the glass, which was yellow as a ripe melon.

He stretched and felt all the strength of his healthy, athletic body. He breathed deeply.

“A senseless bad dream,” he murmured.

Afraid of growing too comfortable and falling fast asleep, he pulled the basket of fruit under the netting and with increasing relish sucked one mango after another. The tangy flavor restored his alertness. He smeared the drops of juice onto his bare chest and thighs so as not to stain the sheet. His hands were so sticky that he pushed the netting aside with his foot. Mango pits big as fists, covered with spongy fibrous pulp, struck dully against the stone floor. A handful of mosquitoes flitted through the rift between the curtains; their bites on his neck stung and itched. Now he was sure he would not sleep again

Bending back the whitish netting with his elbow, he slipped into the shower. The water, warmed in the daytime, smelled like the pond from his childhood — the never-to-be forgotten water, green and gold, with the smell of sweet flag, that left a smoothness as of a fine oil on the boy’s slender arms.

Beyond the window the gray daybreak hovered tremulously. Large morning stars, those least able to fly away, still fluttered unsteadily. He packed an airline bag and opened the door on a black pergola with leaves like wrought-iron garlands in the style of the Vienna Secession. He took his suitcase out of the Austin and pushed his finger over the dew-spattered car, tracing his own initials. He bustled about, drinking tea from a thermos, pacing around the room as if there were not much time — as if he had only begun to understand the significance of the day which was just beginning, and which would reveal a secret he had already begun to guess. Holding the warm top of the thermos in his fingers, he brooded. He looked through the rectangle of the opened door at the awakening greenery on the lawn. The stars were disappearing; large drops of dew began to sparkle on the ends of the supple leaves, and the clinging tendrils twisted into spirals. He felt as if he were detached and floating. He thought he ought to hold his breath and listen to the ardent voices of the starlings and the ripple of leaves swaying in the first breeze, as he would listen to the rustle of the gown of someone passing by who loved him.

The glare of unnerving intensity, the trees and the grass, were a clamorous chorus of immaculate green. The flower bed with its enormous chalice-shaped red cannas seemed to be spurting fire. The whistle of starlings, the tender trills, were lavished on the air like bells set ringing by the earnest, fervent hand of a little boy who knows whose coming they announce, and gives the order to bend the knees and humbly bow the head.

It seemed to him that if he were single-minded in his reverence for this hour, he would discover a simple truth like the truth affirmed by the last trembling tear on the eyelid of a dying man.

But he was startled when the landrover, perched high on six thick tires and with its top still down, drove up in the yard and the professor in a soft linen hat began to shift his thin legs over bundles done up with straps. He sprang up as if he had been suddenly awakened and hurried out to the vehicle.

“Don’t disturb yourself, professor,” he called, throwing his bag onto the seat. “I will turn in the key and we can be off.”

“Good morning,” said the Swede. “Oh, good. This is the time appointed, and you are ready.”

“Good morning, boys.” The counselor shook hands with both the Hindus, the mustachioed driver in his faded army uniform and the orderly, whose sunglasses of arsenic green and spotted turban suggested a fortuneteller or sorcerer from an operetta. Both were more dismayed than gratified by this friendly gesture.

The landrover looked like a metal trough with four seats. It was very roomy, with small benches with mattresses at the sides. Shovels and axes were strapped to the walls, and boards, fastened together with wire like a heavy rope ladder, to put under the wheels if they should be mired down.

Istvan tumbled onto the back seat next to the professor. The automobile leaped forward; the breeze grazed his hair.

“If only the weather will hold.” Salminen’s eyes swept the vacant sky. “We have a two-hour ride on the highway, and then through the bush along the tonga tracks. Then the fun is only beginning. I have brought a shotgun with me to shoot pigeons. Do you like to hunt?”

“No. I’ve done too much shooting.”

“The war fortunately passed us by,” the professor admitted. “I shoot sometimes to test my reflexes. For sport.”

“Roast pigeon is very tasty,” the driver put in.

Level fields stretched out around them, planted in soy and peanuts. Sugar cane with violet tassels rose in dark green squares. A well replenished with rainwater hid in a clump of massive trees and white oxen wearing blindfolds turned a treadmill. A naked boy in a great blue turban squatted on a pole like a sparrow and shouted dolefully as he jabbed them with a prod. From a wheel to which reddish clay pots were attached with a cord, a stream of water flowed with a green glimmer into a ditch that irrigated the nearby fields.

“I prefer to hunt for images like that.” Istvan pointed with a hand.

“I do, too. I have a movie camera”—the professor tapped a leather box—“but I only collect oddities. Interesting that a man trusts his eyes most of all, yet so many times they deceive him. When I write to friends in Malmö, they think I have fallen to telling tall tales. But it is enough to show them a film and they are enormously impressed.”

“I send pictures to my sons.”

“You are married? I saw no ring.”

“I took it off. It was too tight.”

“From which year of marriage has it been too tight?”

“My fingers swell in the heat, so I took it off. Do you think I am misleading women?”

“No. They like to be led astray. At least it furnishes them justification for their errors. Some do not even need that.”