Between them, his body curved as if he were bowing, lay the old sadhu. His forehead rested on the ground. Both hands were pressed to his chest as if he had wanted to hold to himself something very precious which was slipping away from him. A few steps farther on were a gourd with black holes, decorated with glass and bits of crushed tinfoil stuck on with a resin, and a common flute of the type used by snake charmers, beggars, and sellers of peanuts.
“Please do not come near.” A policeman stopped them. “We are waiting for the photographer.”
“What happened to him?”
“He is dead. He was a rich man. He was an important person in these parts. There will be trouble.”
“Especially for the family,” another officer grinned, his white teeth gleaming under his mustache with its twirled-up ends, “when they try to establish the amount of the inheritance.”
“Accident? Suicide?” Istvan demanded. The wind stirred the gray wisps of hair on the dead man’s sunburned neck.
“He is holding both hands on the haft of a knife, but that might simply be a reflex: someone may have thrust it in and he wanted to pull it out, and fell as you see. We would all have preferred that it be suicide. He had extensive business interests, not always above board. But a believing Hindu does not commit suicide. Even those in misery endure hunger and difficulty beyond human strength. They wait for the end; they want to be purified by suffering and attain a happier life. To be born into a wealthy family,” he explained sourly.
Fishermen stood on the talus, which exposed tangled masses of brown palm roots. They surged and pushed to get a better view. Suddenly the bank gave way with a dull ripping sound and the ground opened. Dark, slender figures sprang onto the sand.
The officer put his whistle to his bluish lip, but already the police were brandishing clubs. The fishermen were shouting and running in all directions to escape the bamboo cudgels. Those who crawled along the bank, hiding behind the palm trunks, snorted with laughter like boys being chased.
“Wait.” Margit held on to Istvan. “Here is the photographer.”
He fixed his tripod in place, took various views of the remains, then knelt, lay on the sand, and seemed to be prostrating himself before the dead man. Finally the corpse was turned over. The legs straightened as if with relief, the hands dropped and the black handle of the knife with its copper decoration showed from under the ribs.
“We can go,” Margit breathed. “Did you see how they looked at me? As if they had never seen a woman. I was sorry all the time that I didn’t have a beach coat.”
“What were you waiting for?” They waded through the loose sand. “Perhaps he sent those runaways to paradise.”
“A worshiper of the sea. I thought of that at once. Would you like to know why I stayed? I had to see the knife. You went out during the night; in my sleep I felt the coolness of your skin when you came back. And you didn’t give me back the lancet.”
“Do you think…I could have…”
“You believe it is your calling to hasten the verdicts of justice,” she said with emphasis. “If you had been certain that the old man was responsible for the deaths of those defenseless people and might evade judgment because he was a sadhu, because he was rich and the police preferred not to fall afoul of him, you wouldn’t have spared either yourself or those you love. I know you.”
He looked at her set lips. She was walking so fast that a red hank of hair that had escaped from under her aqua bathing cap swept her back. The sand parted under her narrow feet.
Before they went under the shower to rinse away the saltiness of the sea, he took her in his arms and turned her toward him. They stood that way, breathing rapidly. Her eyes were full of a cold fire.
“What do you want?” she asked. “You’ve killed, after all. You said so yourself.”
“It was war then.”
She tilted her head and suddenly he understood that she was like him: hard. She had been able to hate. She had come to India. She wanted to help people in misery. She had come to have her chance at life, to challenge fate. Well — she had had him. She had plunged into love, into the measureless element, but he knew by now that he was the stronger of the two.
“You don’t need a knife to kill,” she said pointedly. “Now let me go.”
She went into the shower and pulled down the straps of her bathing suit. A hail of bright drops beat on her breasts, which were paler than her arms. She immersed her face in the silver stream and closed her eyes: beautiful and distant.
“Sahib!” Daniel called from the veranda. “Murder on the beach! He was not a good man. Sahib, I have filled the petrol cans. He left a fortune. There are sandwiches in the basket and a mountain of oranges. They will probably arrest his nephews, since they would inherit it.”
They saw a dried red starfish on the hood of the Austin.
The rains, the monsoon downpours, had not destroyed the roads. The beds of the mountain rivers were not flooded. The wheels of the car churned shallow, sparkling water; they could imagine that the tires were relieved to settle into the swift current that made streaks in the yellow sand on the bottom. They plowed their way between mountains with dark brownish-red walls like clotted blood. The slopes were overgrown with matted, thorny bushes. Patches of earth parched from drought, lashed by winds, scratched and swept bare, gleamed over cracked subsoil. The sky had retreated upward and was empty, marked at long intervals by a black cross — a hawk that circled slowly and escorted them without bothering to move its wings.
A dry wind blew in the hollows. Invisible dust floated on the air; its vapid taste was in their mouths and it soaked into Istvan’s sweat-stained shirt, turning it red. Air streaming through the lowered car windows, heated as if by a stove, rippled through Margit’s light dress. She responded by removing one by one, with a little struggle, her underthings. Sighing, she lounged against the hot back of the seat and pulled her dress open at the top. Her hair, stiff with dust, swathed her forehead in a lusterless sheath.
They stopped beside a little brook and threw off their sandals. The water flashed cheerfully. A school of small fish scattered like shadows. Istvan raised the hood of the Austin and put water into the radiator. The steep wall of the gorge gave no shade; lizards scurried over it, shriveled as if the red clay had parched them. They panted with open mouths, looking stupefied.
Margit took a stick and picked out incrusted wasps and grasshoppers that the wind had blown into the cells of the radiator. Lost in thought, she turned the shimmering wings of a butterfly over in her fingers. Istvan poured gasoline into the tank; its vapors formed a trembling mist in the heat.
They hardly spoke to each other. They sat dazed by the noon heat, holding their bare feet in the briskly flowing stream. They smoked cigarettes that tasted bitter and gave no pleasure. They gazed blankly at the swarm of little fish that came swimming up until the water seemed to boil with them. The fish beat against their feet, fluttering as if there were an electric current in the water.
“We have to push on”—he threw a cigarette butt into the water—“and get to Hyderabad if we’re going to stay the night in a decent hotel.”
“Good. Only let me have a dip.”
She threw off her dress, knelt, and shattered the glare that lay on the water, splashing her skin with sparkling droplets. Her slender body took on the golden gleam of the late afternoon. She sank down softly with a deep sigh, half reclining on the sandy bottom of the shallow river. Around her the water was stained rose from the dust that washed off her skin.