“Where are you taking me?” she asked drowsily.
“Nowhere.” Frightened, he hastily corrected himself, “Nearer to dawn…Perhaps you will want to come back?”
“I have nothing to come back to.”
It was growing cool. The bent grass, trodden down by foot traffic, gleamed with the early morning dew. The sky was going white; behind clusters of huge trees a fiery fissure split the night.
They drove up to the hotel. He waited for her to let him follow her, but she motioned to him to stay where he was. Two sleepy bellhops, yawning and scratching under their arms, went to get her suitcases. He got out of the car and opened the trunk.
“You ought to eat something,” he reminded her, but her look silenced him.
He had not had a bite all the previous day, but he felt no hunger, only bitterness — the slimy dregs of bile. As they were passing the gardens outside the city, he stopped the car. In spite of her protests he called an old man from a shed with watering cans all around it and asked him to cut some roses.
“How many?” he asked, rubbing the scratchy stubble on his face and yawning until the yellow incisors flashed in his otherwise toothless mouth.
“A lot,” Istvan shouted impatiently. “All of them.”
The man brought a sheaf of buds. They were almost black, with stiff leaves; they smelled of the freshness of the night and of wet mown herbs.
“What are they for?” She fixed her eyes on the fleshy petals sprinkled with dewdrops. She held them apathetically on her knees.
The road crawled along, curving gently through arid hills. They came upon a sadhu who had abandoned everything to follow the truth he sought.
And then the airport appeared. The corrugated aluminum roofs of the hangars gave off a white glare. Travelers surrounded them: women with children, carrying bundles with pots tied to them. A megaphone chattered in a foreign language, the voice compelling attention and then wearying the listeners, for they could understand nothing. A beautiful girl with enormous earrings served them coffee from a machine. They drank it and looked mutely at each other.
A mustachioed clerk asked Miss Ward the weight of her luggage and noted it on her ticket. Istvan seemed to feel the girl in his arms — his arms, which had carried her, cherished her. The rising roar of engines could be heard like the voices of winged beasts surging into the air. A bass voice called, “Flight to Nagpur. Change there for Bombay and Madras.”
A stewardess with slim thighs, wearing an iridescent blue sari, raised a bare arm and beckoned to them with long fingers. They left the hall, which rumbled like the inside of a barrel, and walked down to the wide, flat, grassy airfield. He noticed that it was a beautiful, sunny day.
The airplane was white in the light. The stairs had been rolled up to it.
Margit pressed the prickly armful of roses, which only now were taking on a red tint. She did not give him her hand and he did not dare reach for it. He saw her face, wan and looking older than her age, her blue-veined eyelids and her eyes, which mirrored despair itself.
“It’s wrong, Istvan,” she whispered through colorless lips. “Even a dog doesn’t deserve this.”
She turned around and almost ran toward the plane so he would not see her burst, trembling, into tears. The stewardess took her by the arm and led her inside as if she were ill.
Before the steep stairs were rolled away, the Indian woman appeared once more and put Margit’s roses on the little platform. He remembered the prohibition against traveling with plants and fruit: fear of contagion.
The left engine roared first, then the right. The airplane turned where it stood. A hard breeze jerked at the white skirts of the barefoot attendants who bent over and pushed away the stairs.
He gazed at the round windows; the sun blazed on them as on a row of mirrors. The plane moved slowly, hopping lightly. The odor of exhaust hit him in the chest. The breeze ruffled his shirt and nipped at his pants legs like a dog. Clouds of dust drifted about and grit beat his forehead. He shielded his eyes and when he lowered his hands, the plane was a speck sailing into the glistening blue. Then it was lost as if in the depths of the ocean.
When he was sitting in the Austin, unable to put a hand on the wheel, Mihaly’s cicada began to sing in its box as if it were insane. He undid the thread, raised the lid and shook it out onto the grass. He saw that its wings glinted like glass as it flew toward the tops of the trees, from which came a rasping as of metal gears: the overture of the advancing heat.
Her bag with a yellowed newspaper, the tightly twisted little paper horn in which peanuts rattled — she had held them in her hand. He sat unable to breathe. A cry rose in his throat; he wanted to turn his head away, to beat it against the car. He missed that golden hand, the eyes beaming like the sky after the first snow, looking trustfully at him from under waves of coppery hair. Margit is gone. Gone. And I am alone.
I am alone.
A dull pain grew and settled at the bottom of his sickened heart. It wandered through his pulse, then tightened around him. He parted his lips and gasped for air. He closed his eyes; he saw the dry grass bending in the warm breeze, the red stony hills, the sun filling the vastness of space, lashing it with brooms of flame.
Chronology
April 14, 1916: Wojciech Zukrowski is born in Krakow. At the time, Poland is partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
1918: World War I ends, and Poland gains independence for the first time since it was first partitioned in 1795.
September 1939: World War II begins with Germany’s attack on Poland. Zukrowski serves in the Polish horse artillery and is wounded in his right leg.
1940: With political and economic ties to Germany, Hungary joins the Axis and fights as an ally of Germany. Hungarian troops participate in the invasion of Russia; some fight in Ukraine, like the fictional Istvan Terey in Stone Tablets. Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy seeks to negotiate a peace with the Allies, but Germany coerces Hungary to remain in the war by kidnapping Horthy’s son and imprisoning Horthy himself.
February 1945: As World War II draws to a close, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meet at Yalta in Crimea to plan for postwar Europe. Again Poland loses its independence as the Yalta Agreement places it, together with Hungary and other East European countries, in the Soviet Union’s “sphere of influence.” On May 8, Germany surrenders, ending the war in Europe. On August 14, Japan surrenders, ending World War II.
August 1947: India, under the leadership of Gandhi and Nehru, gains independence from British rule. Nehru becomes India’s first prime minister. Independence leads to the creation of Pakistan as an independent state and to revisions to business and currency regulations which will affect characters in Stone Tablets.
March 1953: Stalin dies. Throughout the Eastern bloc, political prisoners are released, and citizens in Russia’s client states hope for new political freedoms.