“You waited like vultures until she was finished.”
“The comparison is offensive.” Ferenc delivered his censure in his usual unctuous tone. He surveyed the others and the cryptographer signaled his agreement, as if he had swallowed something that had been sticking in his throat. “We proposed that she go to our hospital, we said that an operation was urgently needed, but he didn’t want to hear that, Comrade Terey. He didn’t want to hear that. Remember that we are in India, a capitalist country. We are, so to speak, under fire. We were not free to barge into a household with a troubled history and drag the woman onto the table by force. We cannot violate their cardinal rule: nonviolence. We did what was proper.
“I at least have nothing for which to reproach myself. It was Krishan who abused his own wife; his treatment of her was inhuman. He simply wanted her to die. She herself often said so, in tears. So we have no reason to sentimentalize him. Krishan is dismissed. The month has hardly begun. We are paying him for two, and even that is too much.”
“Krishan is a good driver. The accident could have happened to anyone, especially when cows are ambling all over the streets.”
“If he is really so good, it will be easy for him to find work, so we are doing him no harm.”
The cryptographer’s face brightened, and he nodded. Evidently that point of view suited him; he seemed pacified.
“You are dismissing him,” Istvan pointed out. “It is your affair. Why do you need me?”
“Because I speak too sharply. You, Terey, have the knack for chatting with people, explaining things, seeing a subject from every side. People trust you. Krishan is prepared for this. He already knows. The important thing is only that he not leave here with information about our confidential affairs.”
Seeing Terey’s astonishment, he added, stroking the air with his hands:
“He must not talk about where he drove and with whom. Why should they know who our contacts are and keep lists of those who are friendly to us? Do you understand?”
“Not very well.” Istvan hesitated. “And I wouldn’t believe him even if he swore by Kali.”
“You must convince him that we are well disposed toward him—” Ferenc locked his fingers together “—that after a time he may be able to return to his job here.”
“I don’t grasp this. Then why let him go?”
“You have a strange way of becoming less intelligent when there is something to be done. The ambassador directed you to speak frankly with Krishan. Understand: in India a dead cow amounts to sacrilege. It’s a serious matter. No shadow must fall on the embassy. Talk with him, sound him out, and then the three of us, you and I and the ambassador, will take further steps. It may be necessary to have recourse to a lawyer.”
“When should I speak to him?”
“Well — not today,” Ferenc eased off. “Tomorrow or the day after will be soon enough. In any case, before he begins to look for a new job. I would prefer that he not turn a profit from information about us.”
“These are mysteries to me,” Terey said dismissively.
“But suppose he went to the Americans. They are enlarging their center. Or to the Germans from the Federal Republic. They have modernized their industry and they are pushing their way in here, ready to open branch offices. Look at their information bureau on Connaught Place. They remind everyone that a few of their marks are already equal to a dollar. Whose currency is stronger? Hindus are sensitive to that. Such a driver could suit the Germans’ purposes very well. He would be a credible witness. Two facts will be true and five fictions added, and then a matter is difficult to interpret.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to keep him?”
“Evidently not, since the boss ordered that he be let go. He knows what he is doing. He has drawn up an evaluation of Krishan — a favorable one, but before anyone takes him, they will call us to verify it. Then it will be possible to allude lightly to our reservations if his new employer is not to our liking. People have stopped blindly trusting written references. We can influence the outcome of his search from a distance.”
He spoke casually, as if motivated only by friendliness. He glanced at his oval face in the windowpane and ran a comb through his thick, crimped hair.
“The couriers will be here tomorrow. Don’t forget about the reports,” he warned Terey. As he was going out, the cryptographer rose from his chair and made his way to the door as well.
“Has anything of interest come in the dispatches?” Istvan asked.
“Oh, nothing. I’m the type who, once I have decoded the dispatches, writes them out clean and right away forgets what was in them. No, there was nothing important. Certainly this much, that Rajk was innocent. Though they hanged him, he will be vindicated now.”
“Thank God!” Istvan stopped where he stood and exchanged a look with Judit. “Changes may come in the government. Well — what else?”
“I really don’t remember. I gave them to the ambassador. If he likes, he will call a meeting and inform us. If he has received other instructions, in any case we can read the details on the front page of the Times of India.”
“Well, there will be a stir in our country,” Judit said.
“Won’t there just! And whom will it benefit?” The cryptographer gave a quick nod of his close-cropped head. “It won’t bring Rajk back to life, and it won’t be easier for us, either, because everyone remembers what the papers said, the procurator’s statement, ‘Sentenced according to the law.’ And whom should we believe? Once those graves were tamped down, I’d have left them untouched.”
“But where is justice, man?” Terey cried. “We can’t give him his life back, but we can at least restore his good name. He was no traitor. He was a true Hungarian and communist.”
“You speak as though it was other people who condemned him.” The cryptographer raised a pale, bloated face. He did not immerse it in the glare of the Indian sun; he only sat in his dim room behind armored doors. “I am a simple cryptographer. They took me from the army and sent me out here. I mind my own business. But I see, counselor, that everything we read about, even what is clear and completely visible to the eye, is also a code, and only our children will read it right. It’s too bad a man can’t live to see that. Well, I’m going to my den. When the couriers fly in, they will tell us what the moods are in our country.”
The door had hardly closed behind him when Istvan sat down heavily on the other side of the desk. He looked at Judit’s darkened eyelids. The fan hummed unbearably; it grated on him.
“You’ve heard the voice of a simple man. He has to trust authority in order to hear what it says. And here the effect of everything is to undermine respect.”
“Are you for treading on those graves, Judit?”
“No. And I understand very well what you mean, but I long for a few years of peace and order after what we lived through during the war. And later. Surely my demands are not excessive?”
“Judit, the restoration of honor to a man murdered under the majesty of the law will accomplish nothing in itself. That is hardly the beginning. People will ask: What of the judges, who now appear as assassins? And the comrades who disowned him and the others, who, moreover, condemned him and applauded the false verdicts? I ask, which of them knew that when he cast his vote he was consenting to a crime? Shadows that boded no good for us hid the bloodshed; by now you don’t ask questions, the responsibility is spread around. Even carrying an investigation to the limit would not be any good. We all bear a burden of guilt. In the end, those who would show themselves to be innocent would have had to stand under the gallows back then, as a sign of protest. And who is capable of doing that? I know Hungarians; the nation demands heads, and if it doesn’t get them, it reaches for them itself. You know what can happen then.”