Stone Tablets

Chapter X

Istvan glanced at his watch again. The hands seemed to be dead, though the second hand twitched as it moved around the face. It was seven minutes past three. The work day ended at four, but their “contacts” were only received until three, so the business day was, for all practical purposes, over. But it was not good form to make one’s exit before the ambassador without a definite reason. The boss did not like it.

“As long as I am here, everyone must be at their posts. That is my wish, comrades, and you must abide by it,” he had said in a briefing.

He kept them all in this state of readiness a little out of spite. He preferred his office in the embassy to the tedium of his house. The dinner there was not entirely to his liking, for his wife struggled to have Hungarian dishes served, but the cook could not learn to prepare them. Judit had had to listen to the ambassador’s complaints more than once, and repeated them to Istvan with concealed enjoyment.

The ambassador’s wife, a stout woman, had been accustomed to drudgery from childhood; lately she had put on weight, and, clad in brocade gowns that were too tight, grated on others’ nerves at receptions with her puffy face and her everlasting frown of dissatisfaction, especially when she stood beside supple Hindu women, beauties draped in saris. If one of them were equally heavyset, she looked majestic, never merely commonplace. Diplomats’ wives from the Anglo-Saxon circle called her “the huckster” because of the shrill voice in which she doggedly complimented the refreshments and extolled her husband’s merits. Istvan himself had heard this and was rather ashamed that he had not said a word in her defense.

The servants pretended that they did not understand her broken English and played malicious little tricks on her. They knew she would make no accusations, because her husband and sons would laugh at her. Displaced from her ordinary activities, she wandered around the house with her forehead covered with lemon plasters and her eyes swollen from weeping when no one could see. She suffered from chronic headaches. “With those plasters she looks like a sadhu of some arcane rite,” Kalman Bajcsy would quip. “India is bad for her — the heat, the food, even the smell of the phlox that she ordered to have mowed down in front of the house. Her head always hurts so that when we arrived in Budapest, she had to have a maid. She only recovered her spirits during the days when she had thrown one out and not yet engaged another. She is sick without women’s work. She grumbles about India; she tries to induce me to go home. I explain that our country pays us very well for her aching head, so she should not complain. She has no faith in doctors. She looks to the local healers for help. Her faith in the wisdom of the occult is equal to her stupidity.” He burst out laughing in his hearty bass. “Once again I had to throw out one of those strapping, good-looking masseurs whose specialty is glands. I know those quacks and I know who found him for her.”

The ambassador did not hurry to the residence, as they called the small palace leased from a rajah who had been guilty of some malfeasance involving commodities supplied to the government, and banished from the capital. It was difficult to be certain what Bajcsy did in the afternoons. Ferenc alluded vaguely to scholarly work in the area of economics, as indicated by the underlinings in newspapers — stacks of which were cleared away once a week by the caretaker — and English dictionaries piled on his desk. Judit surmised that it was crossword puzzles. Just prior to his departure the ambassador would be exceptionally active, would give orders, call people in for talks, instruct the staff to act on matters that might have taken another week in the files to be ripe for completion. It seemed that he wanted to keep them working all night, until morning, until the very hour that he reappeared.

He thought — not inaccurately, as a matter of fact — that the moment he crossed the threshold of the embassy and made his way home, the entire operation went slack or, properly speaking, ceased to exist. When he had to go away from Delhi, he hedged their authority and decision-making powers around with so many reservations and conditions that, in effect, all matters waited for his return. Listening to reports, he gloated, “You see! Without the boss, work comes to a halt. I know you complain about me behind my back, but you yourselves know that things do not go well without me. It is better if I take the leadership on my shoulders and on my conscience. Give me those papers.”

Istvan had not seen Margit for a week; she had been called away. Before that they had seen each other often, even if only for a few hours. By now he had grown used to her flying in at two and flying out again to Agra at seven. A week of silence, of unannounced interruption to their meetings, brought back his old uneasiness. So he was electrified when her voice came on the telephone, and even more when she informed him that if she flew into the city with the professor, she should be free to see him around three-thirty. He wanted to drive out to the airport; she preferred that he not do that, and they agreed to meet at Volga.

He had to wait a quarter of an hour. When she was in New Delhi, even if she could not meet him on time, she would let him know where to pick her up. He glanced out the window at the open gates of the garage, but the ambassador’s wide Mercedes stood motionless inside them; its signal lights shone red in the sun.

He sat where he was. What was the man waiting for? he sighed. If he doesn’t come out in five minutes, I don’t care what happens, I’ll be on my way to the city.

Though he could have found ten reasons to go out, it would have been proper to inform the front office and call the ambassador in case he had any urgent assignments. Istvan wanted to avoid that. He knew all too well that he would be summoned and made to listen to a handful of precepts interspersed with reminiscences about the party; he had heard variants of some of those edifying object lessons already. Once they had been about the experiences of loyal comrades with whom the ambassador had been in prison for Horthy. Another time Bajcsy had trotted out anecdotes that demonstrated his own courage or cleverness. He was relieved when he looked through the window and saw the squatty figure of the ambassador. The cryptographer’s son, little Mihaly, toddled beside him. He was telling the ambassador something and waving his hands earnestly. Their shadows fell on the white garage wall that gleamed from under festoons of wisteria.

Suddenly the ambassador stood still, as if the boy’s words had finally penetrated his mind. He turned toward him and asked something. Istvan looked at the little fellow’s uplifted hand as it made circles in the air. He is selling me out — the thought darted through his mind — he will boast about the visits to Krishan. Mihaly was talking; in the end he extended his hands and clapped them together with all his might. He has blurted out everything, the silly little Judas. He has no idea what he is doing. Istvan forgave the child at once. Intuitively he was almost certain that something had happened, and that its sinister effects were unforeseeable. He sat still, stricken with fear and a sense of utter helplessness: nothing could be stopped, salvaged, retracted. It had happened. But what? He heard no words; he could only decipher what was being told from gestures.

Kalman Bajcsy raised his head and looked into the embassy window. Even through the screen he must see me; Terey’s lips tightened. I will not hide. Through the thick wire mesh coated with dust he saw the ambassador’s forehead shining with sweat, saw his bushy eyebrows and his eyes squinting from the painful glare of the sun. For a moment they looked each other up and down. Then Bajcsy waved a hand to summon him.

He ran down quickly. The ambassador stood with legs slightly spread, leaning forward. He was exhaling heavily, as if he were short of breath.

“You go out for chats with Krishan, Terey?” he asked gloomily. “Who told you to do that?”

“You have also been there, ambassador. It is a circus.”

“Be brave enough to tell me to my face.”

“What?” Terey looked at him and recovered the sense of having the upper hand. Bajcsy could do nothing, after all, nothing. In the worst case, they might recall him; the thought came to Istvan like an alien voice, the voice of a coldly calculating person. The thought of losing Margit floated up on a wave of anger.

The other man only wheezed. “Don’t try to jump on my back, Terey,” he said menacingly, raising a finger yellowed from nicotine. “I have halted the careers of better men than you. They have cursed the hour the thought of doing battle with me first lodged in their minds.”

“What do you mean, comrade ambassador?” he said a little too loudly, and reproached himself inwardly for it.

“Don’t be God’s policeman, Terey. You have no proof. None. It is not healthy to know too much. I even liked you, Terey. I spoke to you as to an equal, and I see that it went to your head. Think twice before you do something you would bitterly regret.”

“I don’t understand.” He took a step forward. “What have I done?”

The ambassador moved back a step, rested his hands on the overheated body of his car, then motioned with his head toward Mihaly, who was standing between them. Astonished by the altercation, the boy raised his dark eyes first to one, then to the other.

“If I have stopped you in time, so much the better. You know; keep it to yourself. I am not afraid when I say: Keep quiet. I am not thinking only of your good.” He aimed a piercing stare at the counselor’s composed, suntanned face.

“Is there anything I can do for you, ambassador?”

“No. Go to the devil!” he roared in his deep voice. “I can’t stand a fool.”

Istvan turned, walked the few steps to the Austin, and opened it with his key. He was calm, even gratified that he could leave in time to meet Margit. He will do nothing to me. He will not dare meddle with me. Perhaps it is better that he knows. So I had an enemy in him. Suddenly he heard Bajcsy’s voice almost pleading:

“Terey, what do you suspect me of? It was an accident, really — an ordinary accident. It could happen to anyone.”

He turned around. The ambassador was leaning wearily on his car. His face had lost its bellicose expression; it looked bloated, as if he were unwell. A light breeze ruffled his grizzled hair. The boss — the epithet suited him exactly. Only the dogged, alert eyes seemed to put one on guard. His posture as the toilworn revolutionary grown gray in the fight, prevented only by his character from stepping down from his post of responsibility, won him the indulgence of his Hungarian staff and the young women on whose slender necks he laid a heavy hand, engaging in somewhat insistent caresses which he called “fatherly.”

His merits and faithfulness were much talked of; he himself had put many anecdotes exemplifying them into circulation. He counted on the press of business and the impatience of party activists, for when all was said and done, who had the time and desire to inquire about how it really was under the dictatorship of the admiral? Enemies would, no doubt, but he had pacified them by speaking of his heart ailment, deluding them with the hope that he would soon have an attack that would bring all disputes with him to an end. Why waste energy fighting him when they need do nothing but wait a little? The thick, partly open lips, the shallow breathing suggested that it would not be long. He knew how to awaken the sympathy of those more powerful than himself, that still vague benevolence—“We must be helpful to him, we must accommodate him, for he will not hold out for long”—and he pushed down those weaker by using his connections, by issuing brutal refusals and open threats.

Having struggled to gain an ambassadorship in an important country, in the pound zone, he worked diligently to consolidate his political position. He wanted to be one of those who would not move down in rank, who could only be transferred to other foreign postings. They were conscious of their privileges and aware that to represent communism and the homeland and feather one’s own nest in a wealthy, stable capitalist country constituted true happiness. His sense of advantage gave rise to a gracious superiority with a trace of contempt for the people crowded into buses and tramways or standing in line, running from shop to shop in search of goods. “We must fatigue ourselves a while yet, comrades,” he said indulgently as in his thoughts he escaped with relief to his residence, to his private automobile that was maintained at the nation’s expense, to the cook and the band of submissive sweepers, guards, and gardeners. We are poorly remunerated — he retained an absolving feeling of solidarity with those who labor every day that was in harmony with his most sincere convictions. He could return with equal pleasure to Budapest or to Paris, Rome or London, to say nothing of New Delhi.

Bajcsy seemed to be making a claim on Terey’s pity. He appealed to his sympathy for people who were worn out and prematurely old, for the stigma of illness on the pale forehead. But his eyes harbored malicious flashes like the eyes of a predatory animal in a cage, ready to leap at the throat of the tamer who drove him there.

“I swear that I am innocent,” he panted.

The counselor nodded as a sign that he had heard, that the words of self-justification had reached him. He slammed the car door and started the engine. Before the car moved, the other door opened and Mihaly jumped in.

“I will go with you, uncle,” he said. “I will guard the car.” There was so much guileless affection in his voice that Istvan locked the door and turned the Austin toward the gate. In the mirror he saw a flabby figure leaning heavily against the Mercedes.

“Why were you blabbering?” He was ashamed of the edge of anger in his voice. “Now I’m not going to take you places with me, because you tell everything.”

“You didn’t say it was a secret, uncle.” He raised his arms in fright and curled up, pressing his hands to his chest. “I was only talking about Krishan’s stunts. That’s all.”

“And what were you showing the ambassador?” He took his hands off the wheel, stretched them in front of him and clapped them hard.

The boy looked at him with round, astonished eyes. He could not remember. Suddenly he brightened and cried, “He flew like an arrow!”

“You didn’t talk about the accident with the cow?”

“With what cow?”

Istvan understood. Wishing to show the ambassador that he was not afraid of him, he himself had made it clear that he knew. He had given himself away. If I want to hold him in check, he thought, I must have Krishan’s deposition in writing, certified. He must be convinced that he should not tempt fate for too long; enough of this risk. Let him buy himself a rickshaw; he has a motorcycle. He could earn good money. I must induce his wife to hector him about it. But he will not take her opinion seriously. He will listen to me, he thought as he drove down the wide avenue.

“Are we going to the show?” the boy asked happily.

“I have business with Krishan.”

The barrel-like building throbbed with the vibrating roar of the speeding motorcycle. The din of voices frenzied with delight rose and echoed under the undulating canvas roof. He is riding, he is flirting with danger — Istvan frowned — the sense that he is risking his life has become a narcotic for him. He must be frightened into accepting my advice. I will say that I have come to warn him. That I have had a dream. It would be easy to disable the motorcycle.

He bought two tickets. He wanted to see once more how the machine thundered as it flew around the thick timbers of the barrel. The boy was already gone; he had run onto the ramp leading to the gallery and squeezed between the people leaning through the balustrade.

The motorcyclist was riding downward in a spiral, sailing into swirling blue streaks of smoke. The viewers went mad, stamped, clapped, howled, whistled through their fingers to express their jubilation.

The rider in his black leather costume halted the motorcycle at the bottom of the wooden pit, pushed his goggles down onto his silver helmet, and raised a hand to greet the audience. Istvan watched and was taken by surprise. The motorcyclist’s uplifted face was clearly visible in the sun. It was not Krishan’s.

Little hands tugged at him. Mihaly exclaimed, smiling as if he had played a trick, “That wasn’t Krishan, uncle. Come on.”

They went down. The boy shouted something in Hindi to a group of children who were running out in front of him. They answered in guttural voices, making acrobatic gestures with their hands.

“No. No!” He seized Istvan and clung with a convulsive grip. “Ask at the ticket window, uncle,” he begged. His face was contorted, as if he were about to cry. “They must know there. Those Sikhs lie, they lie…”

The stout cashier only scratched his chest, tilted his head, and stared at them with wide eyes. “You did not see the notice, sir? We have a new champion. Krishan was killed two days ago.”

Terey went cold. Too late, he thought. The lead witness is dead.

“How did it happen?”

“Who knows? He was insured. The underwriting agency took the motorcycle for inspection. They promised to give us a copy of the findings. They do not like to throw money away.”

“And a new man is riding already,” Terey said caustically.

“We always have a few daredevils who want to make some money,” the man said deprecatingly, spreading his pudgy hands. “We pay honest wages. And an accident always draws viewers. We have not been so successful for a long time.”

“He…”

“He has been burned. There was trouble with his wife. How many? One adult, two children.” He sold the tickets without interrupting his stream of talk. “She leaped onto his pyre. She wanted to be burned alive. You know, sir, such passion is a rarity today. People pulled her away; she bit and kicked. Anyone with a camera then could have made a lot of money. You understand, sir. Suttee. It would have been an extra on newsstands all over the world.”

Istvan wanted to clench his fist and hit the bloated face framed by a black beard with an oily sheen.

“Where is she? In a hospital?”

“In a hospital? And who would pay? She is over it now. She is calm. She has gone to a woman in Old Delhi. If you like, I will find out where she is. The doorman knows her. You are from the press, sir? Or from an embassy?”

“Krishan was our driver. I liked him.”

“We did as well. Just a moment.” He lowered the window and scrambled out of the cramped booth. He trotted away toward the entrance, his heavy buttocks rippling. Istvan noticed only then that the boy was standing with his face averted as tears ran down his cheeks, forming large drops on his quivering chin.

“I know this is very sad for you, Mihaly.” He put his arms around the boy, stroked the back of his neck and quieted him. “We must find her. She needs help.”

“She took him,” the boy sniveled. “I saw her, too.”

“Who?” Startled, Istvan held his fingers in the child’s pale hair.

“His first wife. Once I saw her standing behind him, and he knew as well that she was near, because he looked around. He was afraid of her. So was her sister.”

“So it seemed to you. You have been listening to fairy tales.”

The boy shook his head.

“Behind the Corso Cinema, third house on the left. Best to go through the Ajmeri Gate, sir,” the portly cashier announced. “Everyone must know her there. The accident was widely reported.”

Istvan thanked him and he and the boy moved toward the car.

He glanced at his watch; it was late. If Margit were there, if she were waiting, if she called, they could spend a long time looking for each other. They would lose an hour. Her time in Delhi was too short.

“We’ll go for ice cream. Would you like that?”

“Aren’t we going to find Krishan’s wife?”

“We will, we will, but not now. I have to meet Dr. Ward. Miss Margit.”

“I know her.”

“Of course you do. I want to take her with us.”

“Maybe she can help us,” the boy agreed.

In the low light and pleasant coolness of the coffee shop, the ceiling fans wafted bluish cigarette smoke around in rings. The lamplight played on silks of wine red and sapphire trimmed with gold. Its gleam wandered over jet black hair gathered into great knots and plaited with little chaplets of fragrant flowers. The hubbub of leisurely conversation, bursts of laughter, soft music, and jingling bracelets on dark wrists and ankles eased his tension, almost lulled him. They wandered among the tables, led on by the glances of beautiful gossiping women. Margit was not there.

“Uncle, here is a table.” Mihaly lunged toward it. His voice was still hoarse from crying.

A pair of young Hindus had just risen, leaving behind saucers, glasses, bottles, and an ashtray full of crumpled napkins with traces of red lipstick that made them look like cast-off bandages.

Istvan ordered coffee for himself and ice cream for the boy. The door-curtain was drawn aside; every flash of sunlight in the entry disturbed him. He looked impatiently at the faces of those who came in. A waiter moved between the tables, showing the guests a tablet with the names of those who were wanted on the telephone. No. No, he did not see his name.

Mihaly licked his ice cream from his spoon with growing concentration. His cheerful smile was returning; his eyelashes, still sticky from his tears, were drying quickly. His was a happy age, when one feels with equal pain the loss of a beloved toy and the death of a friend, and with equal ease forgets them. At that age everyone is immortal, and the heart is a spring with inexhaustible resources of feeling. It is easy to rationalize the deaths of other people: age, sickness, accidents, mortality, reach for others and touch them, not us, who since awakening from a calm, deep sleep have been nurtured by the measureless, benevolent waters of time…Istvan smiled gently as the little fellow blinked with delight and leaned over the stemmed silver compote that was foggy from the cold.

“Good — you’re here!” Margit called, making her way quickly to their table. “I’m late, but I have news for you, Istvan. Perhaps you’ll even be pleased—” she made a face like a little girl who by chance has found the place in the garden where the hens lay eggs, or spied the first violets of spring, which still smell fresh and cool, and carries them triumphantly to those she loves. “Give me a little coffee. No, pour it into yours.” She pushed the cup toward a glass flagon that hung on a stand, signifying that in Volga the coffee was strong and aromatic, prepared as if in an alchemist’s workshop.

“Order another portion of ice cream for Mihaly. Let him share our joy.”

“Well, don’t wait. Tell us what happened.” He looked lovingly at her.

“Nothing certain as yet.” She drank a little coffee. “It will all be clear in a few days. The professor has given me an appointment as a lecturer for a university course. My subject will be epidemiology, teaching young doctors how to fight trachoma.”

“In Delhi?”

“For a whole month. Perhaps longer,” she said jubilantly. “You don’t even look happy. Why are you two so glum?”

“I am very happy,” he whispered. “But there is serious news.” He leaned forward and told her about the driver’s death; she listened, absorbed in the story. He did not explain why he was in such a hurry to leave the coffeehouse, and he said nothing about the automobile accident. But she understood without words that they ought to go, and was already rising from her seat.

“Thank you,” he said, depositing money on the marble table.

“I have caught you!” They heard a warm, low voice. “You do not see the world around you. I nod, I make gestures, and they are as oblivious as if they were bewitched. Ah, Istvan, Istvan, it is not nice of you to lure my friend away,” Grace said, leaning over the table. Her loosely fastened sari concealed her condition, but her movements were ponderous as those of an apple tree with branches bent under the burden of their fruit.

“Why didn’t you come over before? You were spying on us, you wily thing, and we met by chance.” Margit kissed her.

“A happy chance. I saw how he watched for you,” she said sullenly. “Well, sit down. Margit, you have something on your conscience, for you have simply been avoiding me.”

They were taken aback and said their goodbyes hurriedly. Margit, peeping at Istvan, explained that she had an appointment with Professor Salminen at the clinic and a flight to Agra immediately afterward, and assured Grace that she would visit her at the earliest opportunity. She kissed the Hindu woman, who had suddenly grown somber, on the cheek. There was so much visible joy in Margit’s movements as her figure dissolved in the blaze of sunlight from behind the heavy curtain Terey obligingly opened that Grace’s lips tightened. It seemed to her that she had been dispossessed, lost her beauty, been affronted. She went pale. Standing by the vacant table, she looked around at the place settings and suddenly saw a trace of pink lipstick on the cup. They had drunk from one cup: it pained her. She had visible proof that her suspicions were not unfounded. Her heart beat hard. She raised a hand and put it on her abdomen; the mother’s angry agitation was communicated to the child.

The Austin rolled slowly amid a dense throng of pedestrians torpidly trailing along in the middle of the road. The blast of the horn did not hurry them. They paused and turned their amazed faces toward the car. At the last minute they leaped away like startled birds, their dhotis fluttering.

Istvan drove impassively. After the blue twilight of the coffee shop, the sun hurt his eyes. He disliked sunglasses and rarely wore them. Once he had gotten dark shades from Judit, but on a visit to the Indian Ministry of Culture he had conveniently forgotten them and they had disappeared.

“Best not tell Grace about us,” he said. “The fewer people who know, the better.”

“Who would have thought she would be roaming around the coffee shops in her condition? Surely it won’t be long.”

“No. I was certain that she had gone away from Delhi to the rajah’s estate near Benares.”

Beyond the fortified Ajmeri Gate they drove into a cluster of rickshaws between the vendors’ carts. A warm odor like garlic came from the crowd. Men carried flat wicker baskets piled high with yellowish shocks of camels’ hair on their heads. Istvan turned aside near the wall, plowing through the crowd, which parted grudgingly. Curious faces surrounded them; anxious dark eyes scrutinized them. People offered their services, proposed to serve as guides and bodyguards in the labyrinth of congested streets. A leper came rolling up on a squeaky cart and held out a coconut shell on hands without fingers; the appalling disease had eaten away his lips and tongue. His low, painful mooing attracted no one’s attention. Europeans had arrived; they were important because they had the habit of paying for services. The sight of them aroused the hope of easy earnings.

“Madam, madam, I will show you where there are silk shawls with gold and silver,” mumbled a slender young man with pitch-black eyes and artfully crimped hair. “And perhaps jewels, precious stones, rubies, emeralds from Ceylon.”

“No. Not today.”

“Or perhaps the temple of the monkey god.” Another man pushed his bewhiskered face close to them. He would have looked like a henchman of Ali Baba if it had not been for his meek, filmy eyes and languid voice.

“There.” He showed Margit the large, chipped letters filled with red light bulbs: CORSO. Above it, secured with wires to the walls and to the sills of windows that were never closed, were gigantic cardboard figures garishly painted: a dancing girl with full thighs and showy hips gleaming enticingly through muslin pantaloons finished with disks and bells at the ankles; beside her, two men stabbing each other with stilettos as streaks of blood half a yard long dripped from the balconies.

They walked in the road, squeezing between baskets of fruit as the sellers napped amid the clamor, hawking their wares almost involuntarily with their eyes closed.

“The third house. That must be it.” He pushed Margit into a passageway sticky with soap suds. Their feet sank into piles of ashes and peelings, bitten cores of vegetables, and ragged bags made of fronds. Behind a tenement, workshops covered with rusty tin huddled, and broken-down bicycle rickshaws stripped of their wheels. They heard whistles, the banging of a hammer, the insistent wailing of a child calling for its mother. Starlings in a cage screeched and emitted astonished chirps as they jumped tirelessly from bar to bar.

The first man to whom they spoke — half-naked and bespattered with oil paint as if he had wiped an artist’s brush on his brown, sunken chest — knew no English. But soon they came upon three children, and one — a little girl with large crimson bows in her hair — feeling deeply the importance of her mission, explained in charming pidgin English that the stunt rider’s widow lived in a room behind the tailors’ workshop. So they followed the cadenced hum of sewing machines and the grating of scissors. The tailors sat cross-legged on the floor, turning the cranks of their hand-operated sewing machines, hardly raising their heads to follow the new arrivals with astonished glances. Their backs were bent with hurry; they were paid by the piece.

“Here.” The girl curtsied and drew back a patched curtain. The breeze rolled wads of clipped thread along the floor, and scraps of fabric seemed to dart about like mice.

The room was small, and dark, for the head of a cardboard girl covered the windows. A bed stood in the center — the only piece of furniture, doing service instead of a table or chairs. Next to the wall, on a metal trunk, they saw a photograph of Krishan on a motorcycle, with wings streaming from his arms: the flight in the clouds. Other pictures were set in a half-circle in slits made with a knife in wooden bobbins; they bent slightly, like lesser divinities before a greater one. In a small bowl of water a dahlia floated, glowing like a votive lamp in a narrow shaft of sunlight.

An old woman in a washed-out, faded sari, which had been blue long before but today was the color of smoke from burning stalks, was kneeling and baking little flat cakes on a tall copper spirit stove that crackled with a violet fire and hissed malevolently. A heavy aroma of boiling coconut oil lingered in the air. “Namaste ji,” she said, bowing and setting a mug with a thin cake on the floor. “She is not asleep. She is drawing him to her. Durga, Durga—” she called in a shrill voice, lengthening the vowels like herdsmen on the pastures.

The girl lay with her arms bandaged from hands to elbows and folded lifelessly on her breast. The smooth brown skin on her bare belly could be seen from under a short jacket. Several pink scars were covered with gauze soaked with grease; flies hopped nimbly over the bandage. When he leaned over and looked into her black eyes, which were dimmed with pain, he smelled the sickening odor, familiar to him from the war years, of burned hair. He could not see it for the shawl in which her head was swathed.

“Durga, a lady and gentlemen have come to help you. Friends of Krishan.” Only at the sound of his name did she seem to recover a measure of consciousness.

“Oh, sir,” she turned her head slowly, “he liked you.”

“Tell me: what can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I need nothing.”

“How will you manage?” He looked at her mouth. On the thick, high upper lip, which gave the young woman the expression of a capricious child, he saw whitish blisters from the fire. She had thrown herself onto the flaming pyre, had tumbled hands first into the blaze. Her face had been in the flames before the attendants dragged her out. He seemed to hear the sizzling of the living body and the flames springing to entwine themselves in her hair. He felt an enormous pity for her.

“I will stay here,” she answered in a resigned voice. “I will not return to the village.”

“She will stay here,” the old woman affirmed sympathetically, pouring dough onto a chattering skillet. “She has no money. Everything went for the motorcycle. There are still payments to be made.”

“What about damages?”

“I do not know if the insurance was in order. That was the responsibility of the Sikhs who own the circus. And they are in no hurry to give money away.” It was obvious that she was intimately acquainted with Krishan’s affairs. “Durga has no money to return to the village. A gentleman promised to get her a place in a dancers’ house here. Durga sings like a lark.”

“And these burns?” Margit asked.

“They are forming scars, but what is most important is that her face is as pure as a baby’s,” the old lady said caressingly. “She will be successful. People will remember Krishan for a long time. Suttee. Suttee,” she clucked with approval. “Not many women love so much that they jump into the fire after their husbands. True love attracts men.”

“Did I understand her correctly?” Margit said, aghast. When Istvan nodded, she whispered, “It’s monstrous! How they can speak so calmly about steering her into — it is worse than suicide.”

“She is a widow. According to the old custom, she died as well as her husband. Her heart, at least,” he said, confirming her ominous inference.

Mihaly moved close to the woman. “Durga, why was Krishan killed?”

“He was angry, as he usually was before his appearances. He shouted at me that my cooking was bad. It was true. I had brought him chapati. He threw it at me. The boys were standing in a group by then. They helped him. He liked the way they led him out with an excited shout. He remembered that there was not much gasoline in the machine. He went to get the canister. The lid of the gas tank was unscrewed. The boys were peeking into it. They were smaller than you. They were licking sweets on sticks. They laughed and I laughed. One of them got another to put his stick in and measure how much gasoline there was. It amused him that the smaller boy listened blindly and would be licking a lollipop with the taste of gasoline. Then Krishan pushed them away, though he liked children and very much wanted some of his own. He poured gasoline in and said to me, ‘I must be done with this.’ He put his hands here,” she raised one bandaged hand and pointed to her arms.

“The boys were already pushing the motorcycle to the ring. Then the curtain closed. I have always listened to the roar of the engine and I understood what it was saying. I knew when he was climbing up the walls and when he began riding down. I waited. I could not breathe. I prayed that everything would be all right. Suddenly the motor died. I could not hear when he crashed. I only heard people shouting — a different kind of shouting, like the roar of a beast that was eating him. I was so weak, so entirely without strength; it was as if all my blood had soaked into the ground.” She spoke slowly, in a singsong voice.

She recites the story of Krishan’s death as if it were a ballad, Istvan thought, and suddenly felt ashamed that at such a moment he could think of art.

“The first one pulled back the curtain. She was in a white sari. Then a pack of boys stormed out of the building, and the people who were carrying him. And I knew he was dead, for she went before the bearers.”

“Durga saw her all the time,” the old woman interjected. Removing the pan from the stove, she said something to the girl in their language; they understood that she was trying to persuade her to eat. The sick girl made a motion of refusal with her bandaged hand and the old woman began by herself to chew the heavy, half-done cake, pouring cane syrup over it.

“Durga saw her, too,” Mihaly whispered, staring.

“Whom?” Margit asked.

“Her dead sister,” answered the old woman. Cocking her face like a cat biting a fish head, she smacked and licked the ends of her fingers and the inside of her hand, onto which a few drops of the sticky syrup had leaked. “She came to take him.”

Istvan cursed himself for his cruel curiosity, like that of a surgeon probing a wound. It had been strangely gratifying to listen to this duet, with the musical accompaniment of the shifting hum of sewing machines in the neighboring room, a hammer beating metal in the yard like a broken bell, and the twittering of bicycles below, all mingling with the mournful, pleading, hopeless calls of vendors sitting on the edge of the sidewalk. This suffering was satisfying to him, was the food that nourishes the beginnings of poetry: the threnody of the Indian widow. It seemed to him that he had been led here for a purpose, as if a higher power, aware of every step, had ordered him to abandon all sympathy and only absorb, remember — that he would commemorate the fate of the one who had perished, and the young woman who was receding into the teeming multitude that was India. A few days yet and she would dissolve amid the flickering of silk saris, the jingle of gramophone music, and the throbbing of the drum, though today she was bleeding with the pain of her loss.

“They laid him down. They took off his leather clothing. The manager rolled it under his arm immediately and took it away. And I so wanted him to be burned in that costume. He liked it,” she recalled in an undertone. “The police took the motorcycle. I saw the bent metal body. I felt as if my bones were broken. And Krishan lay with his head to one side, looking toward me. I tried to straighten him and then I felt that this”—she pointed to the top of her head with her bandaged fingers—“was completely soft. Suddenly a few drops of blood leaked from one of his nostrils.” The memory sent pain sweeping over her. “More and more people came running up. They shoved me in the back with their knees. The ones who were near were silent. The others in the back were shouting to be let through. But as soon as they saw, they were quiet — as quiet as he and I.”

The sewing machines whirred. The hammer beat. The blackbirds whistled as if in astonishment. The old woman stopped eating and finally turned toward them. Without bothering to conceal her curiosity she scrutinized Margit, her red hair, her white plastic handbag.

“Didn’t Krishan leave any papers?” Terey inquired. “Didn’t he tell you the name of the village where they had the accident with the cow?”

“No.” Durga raised herself, looking troubled. “There, behind the photograph, is his wallet. Look, sir.”

The old woman bestirred herself and brought him the wallet. It was dark from sweat, and bent inward; it preserved the form of the chest that was now a scattering of ashes. In its compartments old identification papers were tucked, and a lottery ticket, a couple of receipts, and some slips of paper covered with serpentine Hindi writing. Discouraged, Istvan let them fall onto the bed. Perhaps it is better this way, he thought; it keeps me from being tempted. If I really wanted to, I could write to the office of the governor; they would give me what I am looking for. And if I have to stay in the background, I can put Chandra on the scent.

He shivered with disgust. What am I looking for? Do I want the information in order to feel more secure myself, or will I insist that justice be done? Leave that to Him Who reaches out alike to the defenseless, the oppressed, the small — the cadence of the gospels leaped to his mind — and the great. He reached into his pocket and drew out a wad of rupees — not many, but it seemed to him that he should show a willingness to offer support. Margit also contributed.

“No. I do not need it,” Durga demurred.

“Thank them for their kindness,” the older woman admonished her, shoving the banknotes into the wallet and replacing it behind the photograph, on the metal lid of the trunk, which gleamed like cut lead.

“What papers were you searching for?” Margit asked when they had gone out into the yard.

“Not now. When we have taken the boy back.” He looked into her large eyes and was charmed by their lustrous clarity: eyes like an angora cat. “It is for your ears only.”

“If you don’t feel comfortable telling me,” she smiled gently, “don’t. You will have more peace of mind. And I really don’t have to know. Sit by me, Mihaly. Let’s leave Mr. Terey alone.”

Blowing the horn without letup, they drove into a crowd of cyclists. Slowly they pushed their way toward the glowing red brick gate of the old fortified city. He could see, in spite of what Margit had said, that she was hurt by his silence, for she rested her hands on the arm of the front seat and began to speak.

“I was a little older than Mihaly when a fire broke out in our pasture. Not only did the bunkhouse with the shepherds’ belongings burn; so did the stone storehouse that held the wool from the shearing. The tramps who had caused it to happen were soon found — drunks who were sleeping in some bushes. Our people went into a towering rage and dragged them off and threw them into the ashes, deep ashes full of smoldering fire. They were roasted alive. Some of our people are very hard.

“Don’t be shocked. They had put in a whole year of backbreaking work and their earnings were wiped out, because everyone shares the profits from the sheared wool. I didn’t see it happen, only Stanley did, and he made me swear on his knife to keep the secret. I was terribly afraid; he said he would cut out my tongue. He was a devil, not a man”—there was a ring of approval in her voice. “My father didn’t know, and I knew, and kept my word. Today I am telling the first person I have ever told — you.”

“How could that have happened?” he stormed. “No one saw the burned bodies? Was there no investigation?”

“The coroner conducted an inquiry, but the workers all testified that the fire started in the shed where two vagrants had slept on the wool. They had caused the fire and they had burned up in it. They were guilty and they had brought the punishment on themselves; what more was there to investigate?”

“Oh, the school of hard realities! That’s a nice upbringing they gave you!” His eyes flashed.

He did not drive up near the embassy itself, but let the little boy out on the corner of the avenue. “Mihaly, remember!” He put an admonitory finger to his lips and the boy nodded comprehendingly. “You were with me, having ice cream.”

The boy pulled up his leg and scratched his calf. “The tailors’ shop was full of fleas,” he complained irritably. “Uncle, do you think we will be able to investigate? Will we find the clue?”

“Be a smart boy.” Margit stroked his hank of blond hair.

“Uncle, who killed Krishan?”

“We don’t know yet what the police will say. They took the motorcycle to inspect it. But it was an accident, I think — bad luck. Go now. Run along home.”

The boy scampered away, jumping like a goat, borne along by his own energy. He did not even look around as they drove away.

Evening colored the sky a deep purplish red. Great leaves quivered as buoyantly as feathers in the breeze. As they stopped in front of his house, Istvan heard the calm gurgling of water pouring from the open hydrant; the dry season had come again, and the lawns must be watered.

“Everything is in order, sir,” the watchman announced, striking the ground with his bamboo stick. His Mongolian face with its good-natured smile gleamed from under the drooping brim of his canvas hat. “Sir, I am getting married,” he declared joyfully. “The cook promised to help me.”

“Mind he doesn’t help you too much. The cook is clever,” Terey warned with a chuckle.

“Yes — clever. I will not give him cash in hand. We will go together to buy things for the wedding feast.”

They had hardly gone into the house, into the dimness of the hall, when he took Margit in his arms with a firm grip and began to kiss her.

“Do whatever you must to come to Delhi. I need you so.”

“I want to as well.” Gently she ruffled his short hair, which was coarse as a brush.

“You don’t even know what a joy it would be to see you every day, to hear your voice. You must be near me.”

“Don’t throw good sense to the winds.” A little dove’s note of excitement rippled in her voice.

“Margit, I am uneasy. I feel instinctively that — cook!” he shouted, as from the partly opened doorway a black hand protruding from a white shirt cuff discreetly appeared and reached for the light switch. Before he could stop the man, a harsh light flashed on. Lizards flitted around the ceiling, seeking shade under a large blade on the motionless fan. He released Margit and found himself somewhat amused by having been caught off guard.

“I am listening, sir.”

“Serve us something to eat, and quickly.”

Pereira stood in the half-open doorway. His graying hair fell in wisps on his forehead; his eyes were filled with friendly indulgence.

“Good fish, raisin sauce, salad…” he counted the items on his fingers, which were ashy gray on the undersides.

“Don’t talk, just bring it. Hurry!”

The cook saw the cheerful glint in Terey’s eye and was not alarmed by the raised voice. Bowing and loudly shuffling through the hall in his flopping shoes, he made a great show of haste and obedience.

“What is bothering you?” Margit asked as she walked into the bathroom to wash her hands. “Can’t you tell me?”

“I can.” He waved impatiently. “I just didn’t want to say anything in front of the child.” He described the accident involving the cow, and the peasant’s death. He told her about the words he and the ambassador had had. She listened alertly, mechanically wiping her hands with a towel though they were already dry.

“It’s not good.” She looked troubled. “If he thinks you are a threat to him, he will want to have you out of the embassy.”

“Oh, no. Krishan is dead, after all. There is no witness who knows which of them was driving then, and there is a report written by the police that says the driver was Indian. The case is closed and I will not touch it. Who would benefit? I will not sit in judgment on him.”

“Istvan”—she swung her head with its heavy helmet of hair—“I worry so about you. This concerns not only you, but both of us.”

“I know,” he answered after a long silence

“We must be careful. The world is not on our side. Who will help us? There are a few people who would feel great satisfaction if things did not go well for us.”

“Oh, yes. But we will not allow ourselves to be separated.” He spoke with bumptious assurance. “He won’t dare touch me. I know too much.”

“You are a child. You build an unreal world for yourself. It’s more comfortable for you. But the one we live in is different: jealous and cruel. Don’t be a poet.” She laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Be a poet, be yourself, but I have a premonition that difficult moments are in store.”

With a quick, impatient drumming of fingers on the door the cook tactfully signaled that the table was set.

“Yes. And remember about Grace.”

“Why?” She stopped and then, as if penetrating to the depths of his silence, pulled up the truth. “She loves you?”

“No!” He denied it vehemently. “She does not love her husband. She married him out of obedience. She has no one.”

“She will have a child.” Her voice rang with something like envy.

They sat down to the table. Istvan poured grapefruit juice with ice cubes. The cook stood in the door with his hands crossed on his chest, looking satisfied, like a matchmaker. At a rebuking glance from Terey he disappeared into the kitchen, emphasizing his presence there with a clang of the frying pan, which he threw onto the floor for the sweeper to wash.

“Grace told me that you cried when she told you about it…”

“What could she understand?” Margit said with a wry look. “Too much was happening at once. A letter from Melbourne, from my father: my stepmother is expecting a baby. He was so glad, it cut me to the heart. Happy Grace, who put my hand on her belly so I could feel how the little one was kicking, and my situation — well, you know how it was then.”

“I understand.”

“You don’t understand anything. Only women know, women who have counted the days as I did. No man knows what it’s like to keep a watch on your own body, to feel as if you are pleading with it.”

“But you could have come to me.”

“And right away you would have felt trapped, hemmed in. I’m not one of those who beg and whimper for sympathy. Don’t deny it. Could you have helped? Would you have held my hand and watched me cry? I could have done, well, anything, even break my contract, abandon the sick and go home. They would have taken care of this for me there; I have doctors as colleagues. Or I could give birth there. I may yet decide to do that. Well, don’t look at me like that. I’ll tell you; you have the right to know.”

He gazed at her intently. She came of hard, stubborn stock; he surveyed the boldly drawn eyebrows, the lines of her chin, her open look. She belonged to a race of women who knew what they wanted, who stood shoulder to shoulder with their men when they compelled respect for their property rights with guns in hand, defending their freedom as settlers. He felt enormous gratitude that she had yielded to him, that she had chosen him. His attachment to her was powerful. He was moved by the outline of her lips, not just because they were his for the taking, but because of their varying expressions; by the gleam that wandered over her hair when she shook it impatiently; by the pure, trusting blue of her eyes, in which he bathed as in a mountain stream.

“Why didn’t you trust me then?” he whispered reproachfully.

“Because I don’t really know you. I don’t know what you are like when you are tested. I don’t know where my imagination ends and you begin — the real man, with your own past, which is pushed aside, relegated to forgetfulness, but will return in dreams. There are whole landscapes of your life, and they are important, for they reveal things about you as a poet, and they are impenetrable to me. Your creations. Don’t frown, I will put it more modestly: your writings, your verse. I’m jealous of it all; I can’t be your companion in it, the first to hear it as you read. Couldn’t you write in English? You speak it, after all, so fluently, so properly.”

“Yes — properly. Of course I could write in English, but it would always be a translation from Hungarian. I am bound to that language. I named the grass under my feet in it, and the stars over my head. I know it is the language of a small nation, that it hedges me in from the world, but it is my language. I feel every tremor, I express everything in it, and I am certain that I speak it unerringly even to you in our closest moments.”

“You’re wrong.” She blinked at him archly. “As often as I can remember, you have whispered to me in English — and very prettily.”

“I was translating involuntarily,” he admitted with embarrassment.

“You were translating,” she said broodingly, putting a hand to her lip. “If neither you nor I noticed that, I swear that the language barrier can be crossed, can disappear. Only you must really want that. You must not avoid speaking, not keep things from me. Oh, Istvan! I would be so happy if I saw your poetry published, even in the Illustrated Weekly of India.”

He felt her joy.

“I promise to try to translate it myself, but you must help me. You must look it over with an editor’s unsympathetic eye.”

“You can’t even imagine what a great moment that will be for me.” She rose, gratified. “A step closer to you.”

They went back to his office and settled comfortably into armchairs. The lamplight fell on the stone head; its polished surface seemed to smile sleepily. Istvan thought of Chandra, their disturbing conversation, the grimace of pride on that sleek, undampened face when he had handed Istvan the gift: “…one must summon the courage to say, ‘I am a god…’” It was interesting to think what fate would overtake him. The only truly evil person I have met here. A man who, as a kind of mockery, tries to do people good. He wants to be bad, while others who know they are in error struggle, suffer, and grieve.

He looked at Margit. Her hair was almost black in the dim light; her hands, fixed in a gesture of weariness, looked as if they were sculpted in dark gold. There is no hesitancy in her; she is happy, though she knows she is taking a risk. She is counting on me.

“Do you know what’s missing here?” Her eyes ran over the walls. “A clock. A big clock that would chatter and grumble. In the hall of our house there’s an old clock in the shape of a woman, with a clock face instead of a woman’s under a wooden hat. Don’t laugh. I know it’s an extraordinary eyesore even if it is an antique. My great-grandfather plundered it from some Dutch brig. But just listening to that unhurried ticking makes the silence of the evening delightful. Anyway, you will hear it and find out for yourself.”

“Are you sure?”

She lowered her eyelids in confirmation.

“How nice.” She clasped her hands under the back of her neck; the light glowed on her trim bosom. She listened to the distant jangle of cicadas outside the window. “I don’t want to go anywhere else, to see anyone else’s face. I will have some leisure. I will forget about the sick, treatments, quarrels with Connoly. What peace!”

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

“In a few days I will come to Delhi to stay. We must think about where I will live.”

“Why not with me?”

“Be sensible. I want to have a room for myself, probably at the Janpath Hotel. It is the most comfortable. Not cramped. So I will be here; why are you irritated? Suppose I want to meet with someone from the Ophthalmological Institute, or the professor arrives and wants to find me? At your house? And Grace? She will be so angry that I didn’t stay with her, for it was she who induced me to come to India.”

“I would prefer—” he began, carefully lighting a cigarette.

“I also,” she interrupted him, “will remember the twenty-third of October. From this date we begin to count our days. We will be together. I will go away for a little. I will collect my things and return.”

“Perhaps I could drive you?”

“No. You have been running around Agra with me too much. What do you think — that in Delhi they don’t know about us? Three hours by car is no distance at all to the gossips. How I shall enjoy these evenings when we sit across from one another! You can even read the paper. I will be preparing a lecture, and whenever I look up, I will see that you are there. I don’t need much to be happy. And there will be a long night before us, and we will not be at all in a hurry to go to sleep.” Her bare knees, her slender legs when she stretched them, filled him with an immeasurable tenderness.

Someone’s fingers ran over the door with a tapping sound.

“Come in!” he called. But no one entered. They only heard the cook’s voice through the door.

“Telephone, sir.”

He opened the door; there was no one in the dimness. He looked questioningly at Margit, uncertain if he could trust his senses.

“I don’t hear it ringing,” she said.

“Sir,” the cook spoke up from the corridor, “the telephone rang a long time, so I picked up the receiver. Mr. Nagar insists that it is urgent.”

With one jump he seized the telephone. “Hello. Terey here.”

At once he heard the rapid, excited sentences: “Come immediately! The dispatches are so hot, my fingers are burning! You should be here now!”

“Tell me in two words!” he shouted, full of anxiety.

“An uprising in Budapest. They are sending all the Western agencies. No joke; this is a regular revolution. You don’t believe it? Turn on the radio. There will be a newscast from Delhi any minute. They have to put out something. But I’m getting it firsthand. Well, what, then? Terey, are you locked up somewhere?”

“I’ll be there right away.”

He stood as if paralyzed and unable to breathe. He was still holding the receiver. It had begun. Hungary. The capital. He felt a coolness on his face, like the fateful breath of events yet unknown. The boys. Ilona. What will happen to them?

Margit was half reclining with her long legs in the golden glare of the lamp. A shadow covered her face. He went over to her and buried his lips in her crisp, lightly fragrant red hair.

“I must go right away.”

She curled up, grasped his hand and pressed it to her cheek. The way Krishan’s wife had told him goodbye when he went to the arena, he thought.

“I’ll wait. I won’t go to bed. I’ll read,” she said tranquilly.

“I may be back very late.”

Only then did the tension in his voice strike her. She looked up. “Is something wrong?”

“A disturbance in Budapest. That was the bureau chief of Agence France-Presse.”

“I’ll go with you. I’ll wait in the car.” She got up, but he put his hands on her arms and seated her in the chair.

“No. Stay here.”

Suddenly she felt that there was a barrier between them, that he had set a limit to what they would share. She huddled in the chair. “I’ll wait,” she said stubbornly. “Even till morning. Go, then.”

He ran out of the room. He did not even close the door behind him. She heard a whir; the reflection of the Austin’s lights played over the walls of the neighboring villa. She listened to the drone of the motor until there was only silence. She went to the desk and turned on the radio. A Delhi station was broadcasting a program in Hindi, an unintelligible torrent of words. She realized that she would be equally incapable of understanding the Hungarian bulletins. She wandered around the dial and by chance found a Calcutta station. English: she sighed with relief.

“The unrest that broke out at noon today in the capital of Hungary is growing. It began with academic rallies and workers’ demonstrations and has ended with lynchings, disarming of police, and takeovers of government buildings. There were even exchanges of gunfire with the Soviet garrison quartered there under the Warsaw Pact. Today in Budapest flyers have been circulated with the speech Gomulka made at the rally in Warsaw. The attention of the world was focused on Hungary…” The speaker went on to report that there had been protests over the kidnapping of five leaders of the Algerian Liberation Front, whom a pilot had handed over to the French after landing at a military airport. The Moroccan and Tunisian ambassadors had been recalled from Paris. There had been a sharp letter from Nasser and the king of Jordan.

None of it interested her. She stood dejected, with her hands in the harsh light of the lamp. Only now did the gravity of the news dawn on her. She began searching feverishly for information. She heard a polyglot din punctuated by frequent repetition of the word “Budapest.” Her cheeks tightened at the sound of it as if the name were a frost.

“I will not give you up.” She leaned with all her weight on the edge of his desk. “You will not take him from me.” She moved the hand over the dial, eliciting hoarse, hurried sentences shouted in Arabic, nasal voices from Asiatic stations, as if one were fingering impatient strings, and Portuguese cadences, darkened with pathos, from Goa. It seemed to her that humanity’s entrails were heaving with alarm, that it sensed the rhythm of cause and effect leading to…

As a race horse feels tension in its muscles before its run, she knew that a test awaited her, and suddenly she saw her great opportunity, never to be repeated: I will have him. I will. She bit her lip. A new hope presented itself: that all Istvan’s past might be obliterated, that he would have nowhere and no one to return to and would settle on this shore alone, a shipwrecked man rescued from the elements, with the terrible freedom of those who possess nothing. All bonds with that unknown city that was her rival would be severed. And then, bringing love as a dowry, he could make his entrance to a new continent, Australia, where he would live, to a new language in which he would create, to money and connections that would free him from feelings of strangeness and from the necessity of living on charity and donations. He would become a citizen of her world. He would be, very soon, a person of importance, would feel himself to be at home.

Blue streaks of smoke curled in the lamplight. The stone head looked on with wide, unseeing eyes, with the shadow of a smile that seemed to speak of the evanescence of all human beings’ desire to possess everything over which they exercise power and everything they set as a goal of conquest. A hatred of this broken piece of sculpture came over her because it seemed to mock her — to know what awaited her, and already to pity them both.

Several cars stood in front of Nagar’s villa. By the time Istvan got out, one had started up. Istvan recognized the Tanjug correspondent; they liked each other. He was sure that when the man saw him he would come over for a moment’s conversation at least, but the Yugoslavian, unsmiling and absorbed in thought, only greeted him in passing. “Damned partisan,” Istvan thought with exasperation as the man’s automobile moved back onto the road, its tires whining.

He passed the speckled setter, who beat her tail on the floor to greet him. Irritated that he did not pet her, she got up and ambled along behind him.

“You’re here at last.” Nagar ran up to him with short steps, seized him by the arm and shook him with his left hand, shouting excitedly and holding coils of tape torn from the teletype tightly in his right.

“You’ve done a good deal of mischief there, haven’t you? Your Hungarians have gone mad! They may shoot each other, but why be so quick to burn the museum? I remember what a splendid Breughel was there — The Crucifixion — and what Dutch paintings! The devil knows what was left…They could have shot at people through the windows — there are plenty of them — but not burned the pictures.”

“Tell me: what happened?”

“Not ‘happened’; it is happening,” he cried, nearly beside himself, tottering in place like a child who needs to relieve himself but does not want to leave his play. Terey would have caught him by the nape of his neck and shaken him like a rabbit if it would have gotten the full story out of him.

For Nagar this was only information. He was in his element, basking in his role as a journalist. He was one of the first in Delhi to be informed of important developments; he could impress others, arouse their admiration.

“A big rally today at the Bem monument. Who the devil is Bem? Why a rally there?”

“A general of the revolution. A Pole.”

“Of what revolution?”

“In ’48.”

“In ’48 I was in Hungary, and I never heard of any revolution.”

“Have a heart. In 1848. A hundred years ago.”

“Whom did he fight?”

“The Austrians and the army of the czar,” Istvan explained in an agony of suspense, trying to snatch the teletype tapes away from Nagar, who was hiding them behind his back.

“The Russians!” Nagar exulted. “At last I understand. After a hundred years you still remember that.”

“Maurice, I have a family in Budapest!”

“All right. Listen.” He grew serious, but he wanted the pleasure of recounting everything himself too much to let the tapes go. “They tried to disperse the crowd. The police fired. Gerő had to appear and speak, unfortunately, and then the disturbances began.”

“Did he make threats? What did he say?”

“Rational things: that they should sit calmly and make no noise, for he would lock them up. But as he could not do that, why talk that way? Button it, keep mum. Since it was not possible, it should have been he who sat quietly and did not exasperate the people. When they got weapons, they attacked the radio station. Then their call went out not only to the street, but to the whole country. They took control of the Capital City National Committee; the secret police defended themselves, but they killed them to the last man. A mob is a raging beast. It doesn’t pick and choose. The blood goes to its head. It is merciless.”

“And the army?”

“The soldiers put down their arms or joined the people on the street. Gerő threatened to bring in the Russians; he called them in to help.”

“Was the government in control of the situation?” In an agony of suspense, Istvan seized a fistful of communiqués as if he did not believe Nagar.

“Here — read the slogans they are writing on the walls: Court-martial Farkas stop Free all political prisoners stop Expel Rakosi from the party stop Call a plenary assembly of the Central Committee stop Disclose the contents of the trade agreements stop Examine the investment plan stop. Modest enough demands,” he added mockingly.

“Monsieur Nagar”—the Hindu assistant leaned in—“the manager of the Hindustan Standard asks that you come to the telephone.”

“They all flock to me as if I were a rabbi. Nagar ought to know, and Nagar knows,” he exclaimed excitedly. “Here. Read. Read.” He raked the rest of the dispatches off the table and pushed them at Istvan. “All the world pricks up its ears at the news from Budapest.”

A huge weight fell onto Terey’s shoulders; he had a terrible sense of impending danger. He knew what these developments would bring. If the West seized the opportunity, they would have speedy access through Austria. Civil war…he felt a tremor as if tanks were rumbling by. Civil war. But perhaps everything would take its course as it had in Poland. Gerő and Rakosi would have to back down. The machine would cleanse itself and punish those who had committed abuses and unlawful acts. Perhaps everything would still turn out for the best. Shooting on the streets of Budapest. At whom? Children, a wife, two streets away from the city committee headquarters.

“Yes.” He heard Nagar squealing. “Yes, skirmishes broke out almost simultaneously in Győr and Miskolc. All Hungary is in the grip of revolution. Yes! I have confirmation.”

The journalist’s exuberance drove Terey to fury. He is enjoying this. There, people are dying. Our blood is being spilled.

He sat with his hands dangling between his knees, holding the ribbons of paper with bulletins in short, dry sentences. By now he had almost memorized them. Trompette sauntered up drowsily, her claws thumping, and put her heavy head on his lap. She raised an expectant yellow eye, waiting for him to scratch her ears.

“Go away!” The sound of his own voice made him tremble; he was speaking to the dog in Hungarian. No. Nothing will happen to them. He clenched his fists. Geza and Sandor are sensible boys. Ilona will not let them out on the street at a time like this. But it will be hard to keep them in. Boys are carried away by the music of gunfire; it is alluring to them. That wild, devouring curiosity to see where the shooting is. The rattle from machine guns. He could hear the whistles, the cat’s meow of a projectile deflecting from the pavement, vanishing into a cloud that spread from above the Danube. And the trees in the park are full of red and yellow. The earth, sprinkled with leaves, exudes scents: an acrid fermenting smell mixed with the sour odor of explosions and the stifling smoke of distant fires. How well he knew it from there, from the front on the Dnieper, and later from the winter battles when the ring of the Soviet offensive had closed in around the isolated capital. They would not sit at home.

“Sandor…Geza,” he whispered, his throat tight with fear. The bitch looked at him with mournful eyes and, disappointed in her hope of being scooped up by a friendly hand, sighed like a human being. She walked away, quite offended, to warm herself by the waning hearthfire.

“Too bad, Terey.” He heard a voice behind him; he turned to see Trojanowski standing in the doorway and a stout, balding blond man from Tass.

They shook hands without a word. There was sympathy and comfort in their masculine grip; he was assured that they shared his anxiety and wanted to see him through. Yet he turned his face from them because he was afraid of their searching looks. He knelt, threw a pungent-smelling log on the fire, and raked up the ashes. The wrought iron tongs rang on the stone, startling him. He blew patiently, as if the revival of the earlier fire were of great concern to him.

“Do you have family there?” Misha Kondratiuk was bending over him.

“Very close family.”

“Istvan, this had to come. You know yourself, this is the storm that cleanses,” Trojanowski said by way of consolation. “A few days ago it seemed that there would be bloodshed in our country as well. There were those who shoved guns into the hands of the workers and baited the Russians, but the instinct of loyalty to the nation triumphed. You will see; everything will happen as it should. Be calm. Those you love will be in no danger. This is not a war against women and children.”

“I understand you, Comrade Terey.” Kondratiuk spoke soberly. “For injustice, for criminal actions, it would have been sufficient to bring the guilty before the courts. Stalin did not like distinguished party activists; he preferred provosts. It is time to drive those people away, but if you begin to beat the big drum and declare holy war against socialism…”

Istvan looked up attentively and tried to guess the other man’s thoughts. Did he know more than he was saying?

“At the moment no such thing is happening,” Trojanowski snapped. “There is more complaining and searching for omens than foresight. But the West is raising a hullabaloo because it sees an opportunity to drive a wedge. You will see. Tomorrow they will begin to give you instructions—” he turned to Terey. “We have it behind us. We know.”

“Those who are willing to incite others always manage to extricate themselves,” Misha admitted. “But everything depends on how Hungarians behave — on whether a political row is to your liking.”

“Everything depends on how the Russians behave,” Istvan said defensively.

“And I tell you, what is most important is what the West will do,” called Nagar, hearing the end of the conversation. “It can stir the waters, create a situation in which one side or the other moves too fast. Then something will go wrong. If it were only a struggle for power…quiet!” He waved to calm Terey, who was indignant. “I know: justice, freedom, sovereignty — catchwords. The serious question is, who will govern? You would bluster, you would shoot, some would be locked up, others would go on the lam; somehow order would be restored. Even if this were a conflict between the Russians and the Hungarians, some solution would be found, for in the end this is an internal matter to — what do you call it? The peace camp. As a camp, it must have order.” He lowered his voice. “But when other forces, external forces, get into the game…For the time being they have put Nagy on the committee, that philosopher Lukacs, and Kádár. Nagy was the premier. What is he like? Can he do the job?”

Istvan reflected. “In recent years he has been deprived of influence. Rakosi expelled him from the party.”

“That is why the street supported him. Clearly they count on him to be different from the others,” Trojanowski said thoughtfully. “They have put their hope in him.”

“He is different. A man with a heart,” Terey put in.

“That is not good.” Nagar twisted his birdlike head. “What is needed is a brain, a coolly calculating one that will not allow itself to be carried away. In politics one must think with the head and the stomach and engage the heart least of all. The heart is not a good counselor.”

The Hindu appeared in the doorway again, his neck swathed in a woolen shawl. The night was cool for him; from the open door to the garden drifted a mild autumnal tranquility.

“What now?” Nagar stood up.

“They want you on the telephone again.”

“Quite a night!” He rubbed his hands like a monkey hulling a grain of rice. “The whole world is staying awake, listening to hear what is happening in Budapest. Gunfire there!”

“Are you expecting fresh dispatches?” Trojanowski asked the Hindu, who was warming his hands over a lightbulb from which he had removed the shade; it gave the blood in them a rose-tinted glow and vividly etched the dark lines of the knuckles.

“I will stay awake, but I do not expect anything before six in the morning. Radio Delhi broadcasts the first news of the day at five-thirty. There will be no information, but we are interested in the commentary. The international pressures will set in.”

“Yes.” Misha looked sadly at Terey. “What for you is freedom, justice, an outpouring of patriotism, for others is a playing card that can be seized to begin a new round of bidding.”

Disturbed by the movement of those who were rising from their seats, Trompette let her muzzle droop onto her front paws and gave a wide yawn.

“There is nothing to wait for,” Trojanowski said. “We are going. Terey, you must sleep for a few hours.”

“It is nearly midnight.” Misha showed him his watch. In his “Good night” Istvan seemed to hear a trace of involuntary malice.

They went out. The dog accompanied them only as far as the threshold. Lifting her muzzle to sniff the aromas of fall, she was put off by the cool of the dew and returned to her place under the table.

“Everyone is asking if it is true that the Hungarians are fighting the Russians.” Nagar poured some vodka. “There is a repugnant curiosity in this. Is it possible? It would be a hopeless struggle, after all. Would anyone take your part, offer you support? Would it not set off a wider conflict? Drink, Istvan. You know I rarely urge you, but vodka will do you good today. It has grown cool somehow, and one doesn’t feel like sleeping yet.”

The mournful whining of jackals floated in from the garden, as if an abandoned infant were setting up a wail. Trompette moved her head, pretending not to hear. With her muzzle snuggled on one front paw, she wheezed. Istvan held his glass high. The amber liquid gave off a smell like fermenting yeast. “Are they really fighting there?” he asked.

“Not exactly. There were a couple of skirmishes. Tanks were burned with accelerants — bottles of gas — so some divisions withdrew to the suburbs, where they are waiting in readiness. The new premier, Nagy, promised to carry on talks about getting them out of the capital completely. The protesters say that the presence of the Russians does not lessen the tension, but aggravates it. It brings back memories of the war.”

“Old times. Eleven years ago, who would have thought of this?” Terey took a pull at the whiskey.

“And where were you then?”

“I was defending Budapest. I was wounded.”

“Fighting for the Germans?”

Istvan nodded.

“Well, you see. You see yourself,” Nagar said worriedly. “There are thousands like you. They remember. It is fixed in their minds. Good thing you are here. You would have been shooting by now.”

“No.”

“So one says.” He huffed skeptically. “But it seems to me that you would shoot. Believe me, it’s easier to shoot than to think.”

“No. No.”

“No, what?”

“I wouldn’t shoot at the Russians anymore.”

Nagar turned this statement over in his mind as if he were conducting an investigation. “They overran you, after all.”

“Not so long ago we encroached on them. I was on the Ukrainian front for nearly two years myself. Villages burned…a hellish winter. Frosts of forty degrees below freezing. Burning a cottage was a death sentence for the women we drove into the snow. When we were retreating I saw curled, shrunken figures in snowdrifts. My soldiers shot partisans — anyway, who knows who they were that were caught? I didn’t issue the command to fire only because I had half a liter of plum vodka and I bought my way out of it. A friend went with the platoon to carry out the execution. Do you know why I paid him off with the vodka? Not for conscience’ sake. Only because he didn’t want to drag himself out of the cottage in such a frost.

“My mother instilled in me with prayers that where there is guilt, there must be punishment, and if there is not, one should tremble, for the future will bring something worse. When there is still no punishment, mete it out yourself: atone.

“To love Hungary. Do you think that means to close our eyes to our past? I am one of the guilty. Because of that, I am afraid.”

With both hands Nagar stroked the glass he was resting on his bony knee. “That is magical thinking. It smacks to me of India. Well, then, let us assume, my champion of justice, that you would not shoot. But people would shoot at you. Unfortunately, history does not seek out the guilty. It favors collective responsibility, and sometimes grandchildren pay for the fantasies and grandiosity of their forefathers. Yes, that is the way it is.” He blinked with lashless eyelids.

“Do you think there is hope?” Terey held out a pleading hand.

“Quiet. There is always hope. What we have before us is only hope. Get some sleep, Istvan. This is the advice of an old, wise”—he hesitated for moment, then said, smiling apologetically and with large eyes reddened as if from weeping—“Frenchman. We will not be able to think this out just now. It is night there as well. We must wait.”

Istvan emptied his glass at one draught. Around the light of an unshaded bulb set low on a wall, deep shadows played over the sides of the room and the ceiling; the horns of the antelope loomed large and the head of the rhinoceros seemed to burst from the wall like a tree trunk gnawed bare by a river.

“Please—” he began, but Nagar flapped his upraised hands.

“I know what family means, though I have been alone in the world. I will remember. I will call you, good news or bad.”

The shrubs, which were dripping with moisture, muffled the echo of Istvan’s heavy steps on the tiled walk. The Austin’s engine had cooled; for a long time it refused to start. At last the motor began to hum. Drops of water crept over the steamed windshield as if it were weeping. He set the wipers going and drove the car almost involuntarily. He was gripped by an uncomprehending astonishment that was charged with grief and fear. How could this be? Battles on the streets of Budapest? Budapest in flames?

In the glare of the headlights he saw a pair of lean, naked old men with slender staves in their hands lurching forward into the light with their eyes wide open. When he pressed the horn, they stopped and extended the bamboo rods as if they were insects’ tentacles. Only then did he realize that they were blind. Large turbans exaggerated the size of their heads; their necks, muffled in long strips of fabric, appeared thick. Their bare legs looked like charred sticks. Where have I seen them? Something took form as if in a dream: the picture of launderers carrying bundles of soiled linen on their heads that Ram Kanval had painted. That ill-fated gift to Grace on her wedding night. Blind. They walk through the night which for them lasts forever. He stopped. Their watchful inertia, a torpor like that of insects, fell away. The shadows of canes riddled the white stream of glare from the headlights as they moved forward. They found the automobile with their groping fingers, and passed by. He almost felt their hands moving over the quivering metal body, which was wet from the dew.

Margit. For so many hours he had not even thought of her. She was not there; she had vanished. But — I love her, he assured himself. Yet the sudden exclusion of her from his thoughts vexed and pained him. How could I forget about her? Blind men, indeed. Still, the thought that she was waiting for him, that he would have to tell her what he had learned, to repeat everything, made him impatient. He would have preferred to be alone.

He left the car in front of the gate. He did not want to raise the shades in the garage. From a distance he saw a yellow light in the window of his living room glowing through the curtain. He felt vaguely guilty that Margit’s vigilance rather displeased him.

He walked into the dark grotto that was the veranda and bumped against a body. Shuddering, he searched his pockets and finally found some matches. In the rosy flame figures loomed, lying curled up on mats. He saw a hat clutched tightly in a fist and recognized the watchman, who in his sleep protectively embraced a girl slender as a child. Their intertwined bodies were covered with a thick, Nepalese blanket of beet red.The man’s brown hand in its gesture of love seemed to rebuke Istvan.

He saw the dusky gleam of long, tangled hair. Just then the match, with its bent red head like a stamen, went out in his hand. He groped his way to the door, opened it as far as the bodies guarding the threshold allowed, and squeezed inside. He walked along a bright shaft of light that shone from under the door of the living room. Margit was sleeping like a child with both hands nestled under her cheek. He took off his shoes and walked without a sound over the rust-colored carpet. He turned off the radio, which was still pulsing with scattered, tantalizing squeals from the shortwave transmitters. He was moved when he saw the ashtray filled with pieces of extinguished cigarettes with lipstick stains. She had worn herself out with worry. She had waited.

He reached for a soft blanket that lay folded on the edge of the couch and covered her, pushing her, or so it seemed, into deeper darkness. He heard her sigh lightly, but she did not waken, and he was grateful. He wanted to light a cigarette, but he put down the pack; the scraping of the match might rouse her. He sat utterly absorbed in his thoughts, racked by tremors of weariness.

Surely his boys were also sleeping. Perhaps there was no great danger. Could the power be slipping from the government’s hands from hour to hour? There are people there, after all, who can think, who will not steer the country toward disaster. What is at stake is not one life or even a hundred, but the welfare of the nation, all we won through the transformations that cost us so much. Liberation — the word had a bitter ring. But it will still take years to forget what we lived through. Once again we are calling down thunderbolts on our own heads. There will have to be discussions, accusations, cries for the gallows. Our guilty will have to be dragged by their necks to the wall. All that — so long as in the hurly-burly of justice meted out in anger, like revenge, corrupted by blind hate, festering with the sense of injuries suffered, the overriding good of the nation is not forfeited, the republic itself is not jeopardized.

Who has the courage to confront a street ringing with cries of righteous indignation and give an order for silence? To issue commands that can win the obedience of those who in madness are ready to kill and destroy — who even believe they are storming the gates for freedom? How can a blind element be converted to an intelligent force that will help the cause of progress for years to come?

He chewed the butt of the unlit cigarette. Dispatches would come tomorrow; at such a moment the ministry would not forget the embassies. Perhaps he could manage to get a telephone connection, to hear the boys’ voices, to order them to listen to their mother. To threaten and to promise…They must not go out of the house. Or, better, should they go to their grandmother, escape from Budapest? I do not even know what is happening in our neighborhood. Where has the fighting taken place? What has burned besides the museum? In the bulletins, burned homes have not been mentioned.

Homes — opulent interiors, outmoded Vienna secession furniture, portraits of grizzled drunkards with rakish mustaches. Sideboards filled with dishes used only a few times a year. Old Meissen porcelain crunching under boots, green slivers of broken windowpanes glittering, wads of stuffing protruding from armchairs ripped open by grenade fragments. Photographs mounted on millboard scattered, dry and slick, spilled from a family album covered with faded plush. Faces long dead but more enduring than those that were still alive yesterday but today are one with the earth, their forms no longer like those of human beings but staved in by tons of steel and the caterpillar wheels of a tank pushing into the brick rubble. The remains of children, of women, denuded without shame in the crumpled remains of their clothing — lying in tatters, twisted like empty husks, body fluids pooled like wax, exposed by the surfeit of light pouring in through great holes in walls beaten in by artillery fire. Someone had begun to bandage wounds, but he had thrown away the dressings, for they were expiring, slumping helplessly in the arms that held them. A brick under the ear or a volume of Jókai served as pillows for the last sleep. Reed roofing with clots of plaster hung from the ceiling. A mirror, undamaged and unseeing as a pool of water hardening with winter’s first ice, reflected the dead emptiness of the ruined dwelling.

He crawled with his grenade gun to a balcony. Its crumpled balustrade had been pushed aside by an explosion. Below, through streaks of smoke, he could see the pavement slippery with dew and quivering tramway cables now severed and reaching the ground. In the distance he heard commands barked hoarsely in German. He saw burned-out ruins, the reddish wreck of an automobile eaten away by fire, its wheels stuck in black pools of rubber: its melted tires. From far off came bursts of submachine gun fire. The street was filled with the stench of smoldering rags, hair, bodies in the rubble of buildings, invisible to the eye, and the odor, exasperating as spider webs in the face, of war.

No. No, he pleaded, shielding his eyes with his hands. Not Budapest in ruins. Save the city. How I hate war! How I hate those who bring it on.

Under his lowered eyelids he felt the pulsing of a fire. A mane of flame pushed outward from the window of a building. It roared. It devoured the house from inside with insatiable violence. The hellish days of service to foreign occupying armies lived on in him. Images pushed into forgetfulness had seized on his first moment of vulnerability to reappear in an ominous vision, to frighten him in his dreams. That was the past. It was over. But for him and millions of others, years later, the dark residue from the war still trickled into the memory like venom. He pressed his eyelids, pressed toward the radiating pain, as if to obliterate the hateful visions. He rested his forehead on the broad arm of his chair and breathed deeply, inhaling a familiar odor: a heavy infusion of cigarette smoke mingled with the saccharine smell of insecticide.

“Papa—” he heard the despairing voice of his son so close by that he sprang to his feet, listening. His heart beat hard. The barely audible breathing of the sleeping woman seemed to deepen the silence in the room. Slowly he regained his awareness that the child’s voice was only a bad dream; from the turbulence in his mind had risen a premonition that something alarming had happened to Sandor. The leaping, throbbing fire subsided into its sources — the glare from beneath the shade of a lamp nearby and a large moth fluttering near it, beating in a soft bass key and throwing spots of shadow onto the wall — and he slowly grew calmer.

He glanced at his watch: twenty after five. Instinctively he roused himself in time to listen to the first news reports. He switched the radio on and lit a cigarette. One thought absorbed him.

Just after the hymn in which the prayerful voices of the Indian choirs built to a jarring crescendo, a young, cheerful voice announced that the weather would be sunny and cool with a wind from the northeast. A summary of Krishna Menon’s speech before the United Nations, defending the Algerian people’s right to self-determination and warning against putting pressure on Egypt, dragged on interminably. A gathering of French and English warships near Malta…Everything is more important to Hindus — he clenched his fist — even the appearance of locusts, than developments in Europe.

Margit awoke and gazed around with wide open eyes. He moved to the sofa and laid his hand on her feet, which were hidden under the blanket. Without exchanging a word, they waited until the world news came on.

Suddenly they heard the word: Hungary.

In spite of a call to lay down arms, the fighting was continuing. The government was not in control of the situation. The people were demanding that Gerő resign. The laborers would not work. At the rallies they were choosing factory councils. Armed citizens’ patrols had taken up their posts at government buildings.

A crowd had torn down a bust of Stalin. The five-pointed star had been pulled from the public buildings and had disappeared from flags and soldiers’ caps. Premier Nagy had called on all the people to preserve the peace, and received a delegation of youth. The hunt for officials of the state militia and the lynchings were still going on. Throughout the nation the situation was grave, and the tension was growing. In the village of Magyaróvár the secret police had shot into a crowd gathered in the market square; the crowd had attacked a building and tried to disarm them. Many victims had fallen. Further deployment of armored Soviet units circling Budapest had been observed. This meager information, he thought, was encouraging. The less that was happening, the better. He breathed deeply. Nothing had been said of fighting in the streets of the capital, of fires and destruction. So the night had passed peacefully.

“I fell asleep,” Margit lamented. “I couldn’t hold out until you got back. Why didn’t you wake me?”

He looked at her pleadingly and stroked her feet; he could feel their warmth through the blanket. “I had to be alone.”

Parrots screamed outside the window. Inside the house, people were beginning to move about.

Whenever Terey tried to get a telephone connection to Budapest during the two hours a day when the British cable was in service on “the other side” of Europe, the answering voices tinkled with polite hopefulness, “There is no connection to Budapest today. Please call tomorrow.”

He begged the London operator to find out if the number did not answer — if the customer was not there — or if there had been some serious damage to the line. He even heard a garbled fragment of conversation in Hungarian. “This is the military operator,” someone seemed to say, and he called into the telephone that he was a member of the staff at the embassy in New Delhi speaking in an official capacity. But the sound grew faint and gave way to senseless gibberish reinforced by amplifiers. At last the friendly voice from London informed him that Budapest was closed to international calls.

His colleagues as well were trying to establish contact with the ministry. When they met early in the mornings he saw their discouragement, and rage and despair choked him. His premonitions grew worse: he saw his home with burnt walls and blank windows. He saw the charred bodies of his children buried with others in a pit with a metal plaque bearing the inscription “Unknown Victims of the Uprising.”

On the third day of the unrest the Indian press began publishing photographs. In the embassy people tore newspapers from each other’s hands. The pictures were more horrifying than the bulletins; corpses of members of the secret police hung from streetlights, terribly mutilated, their uniforms ripped away. Who had they been? Perhaps completely innocent people — simple soldiers whom chance had made the targets of revenge.

The faces of a crowd, stony masks of hate and anger — they looked at young boys in civilian clothes, with weapons, standing on a tank and waving a tricolored flag with a hole where the star had been torn out. Istvan looked with numb foreboding at a group of women pressing handkerchiefs to their noses, stifling cries of pain and disgust and perhaps shielding themselves from the odor of putrefaction, for a row of bodies raked by a volley of gunfire lay at their feet. The women had come to identify their kin, fathers, husbands, and sons, who had wanted to take up arms, to capture the barracks. Below that was a picture of a captured AVH commander with his soldier’s coat unfastened. He sat with his prematurely bald head on his chest, with a blank but concentrated look, as if he had grown impatient at waiting so long to be shot. Behind him stood a Hungarian soldier with the cockade of a revolutionary on his cap, placing cartridges in the chamber of an automatic pistol.

“See, see!” Ferenc pushed an illustrated magazine toward him. “This is the way it really looks.”

The picture filled a page: a Soviet tank blown up and standing on end. The half-burned body of a soldier under a wall, spattered with glass from shattered windows. He knew that stiffening of the body, when death gives the command. The last Attention! He grieved for the young soldier with light hair tousled by the wind. He grieved terribly for Budapest.

The Nagy government’s call for anarchy to be brought under control had the ring of a desperate appeal. But how could one make the argument for reason to an armed, infuriated crowd? Too many injuries had festered, too long a silence had been forced on the people, for them to be quiet now. Those freed from prison reminded everyone of the false charges leveled against them. They showed the scars of their torture. They lifted above the throngs gathered in the squares hands from which the nails had been pulled during interrogations. No one remembered the services rendered by the leaders, the gains made by the people, the rapid modernization of the country. They remembered the special shops, the limousines, the informers. The mob was demanding blood; it was not a question of justice but of revenge. And its revenge was murderous in its cruelty. It was enough to shout, “Secret police!”, “Collaborator!”, “Toady of Moscow!” for a man to be beaten to the ground and trampled to a bloody pulp (so the Western agencies crowed triumphantly).

They gathered in Ferenc’s office, analyzing correspondence and reportage, looking anxiously into each other’s eyes and asking wordlessly: What next?

“The Austrian border causes me the most concern.” Ferenc showed them a drawing in the Times. “They could push in agents and insurgents that way.”

“You think in old paradigms.” Terey spoke loudly and testily. “Why the devil are they going to send anyone when the whole country listens to Radio Free Europe because we are afraid to tell the truth?”

Ferenc looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Locks of wavy hair dangled on his forehead; he pushed them away with an impatient motion of his head, like a colt shaking its mane. They were quiet, mulling over unspoken accusations. Mistrust was growing between them. Judit gazed anxiously into their angry faces.

“And what does the ambassador say to all this?” Istvan asked. “After all, for the love of God, we have to take a position! Journalists called me in the night, demanding comment. I think I’ll go mad; they understand literally nothing of what is happening in our country. We must call a press conference, explain, offer some assessment of the situation.”

“And do you understand what is going on in our country?” Ferenc retorted. “I would not take it upon myself…”

“Are you waiting to see who wins?”

“I am waiting for an official communiqué from the ministry. We are functionaries; it is not for me to amuse myself with crystal-gazing and prophecies.”

“We are Hungarians,” Istvan elongated his words for emphasis, “and a struggle for our independence is going on there.”

“For socialism,” the secretary corrected him, adding his own emphasis.

“To me it’s the same. But one has to believe in this socialism, not just fashion slogans for the naive — the uninitiated — and commit oneself beforehand to vassalage, to a lackey’s obedience.”

“Mind your words,” Ferenc snapped. “You will answer for them!”

Judit raised her plump, shapely arms and sighed profoundly. “Is there anything to quarrel about? We cannot influence anything this way. We must wait. Bajcsy wanted to inform himself about the situation today, to meet with the Soviet ambassador—”

They both looked up.

“—but the Soviet ambassador said he had no time.”

Ferenc made a wry face and rubbed his forehead impatiently.

“Perhaps it was true that he had no time.”

But Judit was not through. With wise eyes like an owl she looked around forbearingly, as if to say: Please let me finish.

“Then the boss called the Chinese”—she drew out her words to underscore the gravity of this information—“and the ambassador will receive him today”—she glanced at her narrow gold watch—“in an hour.”

“What do you make of that?” Istvan leaned toward her.

“Perhaps the Chinese will support us?” She looked around as if she were at a loss.

“No more of that ‘us’!” the secretary exclaimed. “What ‘us’? There is the government — and we must listen to it — and a hostile, rebellious mob. There is no ‘us’ when Hungarians are shooting each other. People must choose. We must be on one side or the other”—he shoved a hand toward Istvan—“one sees that at once. And that will have consequences. We cannot allow anarchy, even in a small enclave. We must not forget what powers it falls to us to represent. An employee is obligated to be at the disposition of the ministry.”

“Especially when there is none.” Terey mimicked the man’s unctuous tone.

“Until there are new instructions, we are bound by the old ones. Otherwise there would be anarchy here as there is in Budapest.”

“I wonder what the boss is looking for from the Chinese.” Judit brooded. “What can they tell him?”

“They will offer a declaration of friendship with the full ritual of the heating of jasmine tea,” Ferenc said carelessly.

“It’s not unimportant. The boss won’t feel so isolated then,” Terey pointed out.

“Don’t quarrel. Please.” Judit’s voice was weary.

“Well, ask yourselves — won’t he still be on our hands for a little while?”

“Why do you come to me for an opinion?” Istvan asked truculently.

“Because it is my duty to ask you, as it is yours to answer my questions. I must know whom I have by me.”

Terey clenched his fists. In a sudden spasm of anger he lashed out, “Do you know what they’re doing with people like you in Budapest?”

“Fortunately this is not Budapest, and you are not leading a gang of rebels.” With perfect posture and measured steps, Ferenc left the room.

“Well, why did you exasperate him unnecessarily?” Judit hunched her shoulders deprecatingly; her swarthy body with its matronly embonpoint exuded a maternal warmth. “He will remember this. He saw the photographs of the people who were shot. He feels threatened. Why make him count you as one of his enemies?”

“I was carried away,” he confessed. “It’s difficult. I said so.”

“You have your share of worry as well. I know. Your wife. Your children. And nothing, nothing can help. I know that. But I was alone, and you will have your family. Remember, in spite of everything, one must live. When I was by the Kama, I was jealous of my family because they were living in Budapest. And in May of ’44 the Germans took everyone to Auschwitz, put them in the gas chambers and burned them. And I am alive.”

“Yes. But you must not forget that it was the Germans who did that. We sheltered Jews. Only when it came to light that we were ready to capitulate to anyone except the Russians did the Szalasi faction carry out a coup—”

“They were Hungarians as well,” she said bitterly. “I don’t know myself why I was so bent on being one of you. I have no home or kin in Budapest, not even in a cemetery. But nothing connects me to Israel, either. Although you barely tolerate me, I am a Hungarian, for I want to be one and no one can forbid me. Be careful about these wrangles over who is the greatest patriot.”

“I said nothing against you. I’m truly fond of you.”

“And what does that count for when you do not understand my feelings? You are certain that you had to do these things — first to go with Hitler, then to hand us over.”

“What do you want from me? I was in the army. They mobilized everyone.”

“Listen, Istvan. I had a friend. He was also in the army: a professor at the conservatory, a pianist. He was not given a rifle, only a shovel. The Jews were segregated; they formed battalions of ‘combat engineers.’ The ones with rifles were the ones who kept watch on them. Those better Hungarians! Only there did he feel himself to be a Jew.”

“But he survived. He was not at the front. He didn’t take a Russian bullet,” he cried despairingly.

“He survived, but his hands…he will never manage to play a chord. He has the hands of a laborer because of that shovel. And a hundred of his companions are buried there. Shot to bits for nothing; a csikos from the plains fired at professors, doctors, lawyers. He killed the Hungarian in those who survived. Istvan, I tell you about this because I am fond of you as well. Don’t ask me to cry for you because you have family in Budapest. Your family will pass through this. You will have them. Mine are gone.”

As if he had just met her, entire expanses of pain and loneliness in her soul opened before him. He did not know whether to embrace her and beg for forgiveness, or walk out as Ferenc had done, visibly offended. But she sat looking at him hard — a large woman, warm and worthy of the deepest sympathy. He bowed his head. “I’m sorry, Judit,” he whispered.

“For what? I only wanted you not to be wearing your troubles on your sleeve. Everyone here has his share of pain, though it may not always show.”

He almost ran to his office, humiliated, stinging with guilt. He took shelter behind his desk. Hunching over, he plunged into the daily pile of press, trying to gather information.

The tone of the bulletins was favorable to the uprising. The correspondents emphasized its anti-Soviet character and wrote approvingly of the lynchings of communists. Nagy’s calls for the Russian armies to leave Hungary made headlines everywhere. The dispatches also carried a warning from the temporary Air Force Command that if the march of the Russian columns toward the capital was not halted, they would be bombarded.

The Times did not predict that there would actually be armed conflict between Hungary and the Soviets. The commentator acknowledged that talks between Nagy, Suslov, and Mikoyan might lead to resolution of the difficult situation in which Hungary found itself. He dwelt on the question of what Nagy was like — whether he would display the necessary moral strength and political acumen.

The West had not shown itself inclined to shift the established spheres of influence and military deployments — the so-called “balance of threat,” which in the East was commonly called “peace.” He was relieved to immerse himself in these considerations. He made special mention of them in the report he was preparing for the ministry. Bent over his work, he sighed with hope that the conflict would quiet down, that further bloodshed would be avoided. He almost did not hear the knock at his door.

“Come in,” he muttered, thinking that his colleagues or the caretaker were opening the door without announcing themselves. He was surprised to see Mihaly, with a face full of distress. Something serious must have happened for the boy to have stolen so far into the building in spite of his father’s instructions.

“May I come in, uncle?”

“What do you want?”

“The police took her away. She has been arrested,” he said cryptically.

“Who?”

“Krishan’s new wife. Someone sprinkled sugar in the gas tank and that caused the accident. They think that she—”

“Impossible!”

The boy looked at him with profound gravity. His eyes flashed with tension. “They really did take her this morning. The driver told me.”

“Why would she have done that? The charge is idiotic!” He beat his fist on the desktop, not so much talking to the boy as thinking out loud. “She loved him.”

“They said it was revenge because he bullied her sister. He took all her silver and sold it to buy the motorcycle.” The boy repeated this information in a reproachful whisper.

“They know nothing.”

“But Durga confessed right away,” Mihaly insisted. “‘It was my fault,’ she cried. ‘I did not take proper care of him. You can kill me. I deserve it.’ So they took her. Uncle, is that what you think?”

“No.” Istvan took the boy in his arms. “I’m sure Durga is innocent.”

“Will you go there? Will you save her?” The boy’s voice was so full of hope and pleading that Istvan promised to intervene.

“We must defend her. Now run along before you get a hiding.”

The boy looked around the desk and reached for a two-tone colored pencil, then made a chain of paper clips.

“May I take these? They would come in handy for me.” He wrinkled his forehead, which could be seen from under his parted bangs.

“Take them and get going.”

The boy reached the door, then turned around. “Uncle — you promised,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll have a talk with the police.”

Mihaly scraped the floor with one foot and bowed vigorously, then left the room.

How to defend her? He saw Krishan’s catlike, cunning face, the small teeth gleaming white under the mustache. After all, his horoscope had told him that sugar would harm him, Istvan remembered with astonishment. All his life he had not eaten sweets, thinking that he had a weak stomach, that it was hyperacidic. And he had not escaped; sugar had been his doom, only, as if in a bitter joke, sugar burned in the pistons.

Horoscopes are rubbish. They provide yet another opportunity to foist off the responsibility for one’s life on fate, to tell oneself that what is going to happen will happen as it is written in the stars. But there is a cruel mockery in what befell Krishan, since he never put sugar to his lips.

Durga is most certainly innocent, though in her despair she is ready to accuse herself, and the police are eager to seize on her statement. Suddenly he recalled what she had said in the narrow room full of the whirring of sewing machines about the boys crowding around their hero. Like a revelation it came to him: a lollipop on a stick. The little boy who at a friend’s command put a candy into the liquid — the gasoline must have washed it off. He pulled out the bare stick. Istvan was certain that it must have happened so; he marveled that it had not occurred to him at once. He looked out through the dusty screen to the yard. He wanted to call Mihaly; the child remembered every word. He had open eyes and a mind like a sponge. One had to be careful around him, for he repeated everything with an undesigning ruthless candor.

Below his window the new driver, a Hindu, was polishing the ambassador’s Mercedes with a chamois. The boss must have returned. With what had the Chinese regaled him?

The telephone rang. He heard Nagar’s excited voice. “Turn on your radio. There is extraordinary news. You surely have a radio there?”

“I have. But tell me — what is happening in Budapest?” he demanded, his tension rising.

“Peace is near. Hungary is on the back burner; there is a new bombshell. Armored forces from Israel have struck on Sinai. The Egyptians are fleeing — as fast as they can flee on camels. Nasser is announcing that he will defend his territory to the last round of ammunition, which is to say, not for long. He is calling in help from Yugoslavia and Moscow. Ben Gurion fired off a speech about how that Arab rabble would not give him a moment’s peace. He listed the border incidents, the boycott of goods, the arrest of Jewish bankers in Cairo. Naturally he assured the world that the goal of this expedition was simply to maintain order and that the tanks were on the move for no reason except to secure peace in the canal area.”

“Do you think they will be successful?”

“Israel? They have the best army. They have modern equipment. They will rout the Egyptians. They will reach the canal tomorrow. France and England have sent an ultimatum to Egypt and Israel demanding that both sides cease fire immediately and withdraw ten miles from the canal. It is too vital an artery to be interfered with by acts of war. The canal will be protected by English and French troops; do you understand their game?”

“And the Americans?”

“Behind their backs Eden and Mollet are trying to take back the canal.”

“You said that Israel…”

“It is the third shareholder. It has no stock on deposit; it must put in the blood of its soldiers, thus creating a reason for intervention. A beastly role, but very remunerative. Turn on your radio; you will learn the details. And drop in at my place, because everything is at the boiling point just now, and that uprising of yours will no longer be the private affair of Hungarians.”

“Has the deal-making begun?”

“The devil only knows. But you must take into account that from this morning you have become a bargaining chip. The tacit assent of the West. Let each keep order in his own back yard. You know what that means. You were a soldier.”

“Call me, Maurice. I’ll be there this evening.”

“What am I doing just now? Am I not calling you?”

Still holding the receiver as if expecting to hear something more, he remained bent over his desk, gazing at the pile of newspapers and cuttings clipped together. Global developments were jeopardizing the struggle for change in his country.

Someone knocked at the door. This time it was the caretaker, who poked his head in and announced that comrade secretary was summoning the staff to a meeting with comrade ambassador, but had not been able to reach Istvan on the telephone. Terey replaced the receiver angrily.

He found them all in the ambassador’s office, but his tardy entrance attracted no one’s attention, for they were all riveted to the radio, hearing about the crushing force of the armored divisions that were invading the Sinai Peninsula. The ultimatum of both great powers had been met with condemnation by the Arabs; the commentator expressed the hope that the Soviet Union and the United States would be able to restrain the aggressors and prevent a widening of the conflict.

The speaker had sympathetic remarks for Egypt. Nasser, having resolved to fight, was appealing to the conscience of the whole world. Everyone knew that Israel alone would be able to defeat him, let alone two imperial powers such as England and France. But violence should not be allowed to become the deciding factor in international relations.

Budapest was calm; the workers’ demands had come before the Central Committee, which was meeting in continuous session. Flyers were being distributed to the Russian armies: “Soviet soldiers, do not fire on Hungarian workers and farmers! Our revolution ousted Rakosi and Gerő and opened prison gates…”

Istvan noticed that Bajcsy bridled with irritation and looked alertly at the faces of his staff. But they were listening with praiseworthy composure.

“Comrades,” Bajcsy began, breathing deeply and straightening himself as if his self-confidence had just returned, “the government of Premier Nagy has announced a series of reforms which are necessary for the good of the people. Peace prevails in our country. We must not believe the imperialist propaganda that tries to stir the waters — not only to push us into a fratricidal struggle, but to embroil us in conflict with our allies in order to divert attention from the aggression at the Suez. The dispatches which I have received from Budapest say that the situation is completely under control. The party and the government…”

The cryptographer was stealthily manipulating the knob on the radio in an effort to lower the voice of the speaker to a barely audible whisper. Ferenc jostled his arm and he turned around. From the radio came a harsh cry, “The Russian armies, which steadily grow in numbers, invoke the Warsaw Pact. ‘If they do not withdraw voluntarily, we are prepared to renounce that pact and declare neutrality,’ warns the Hungarian premier.”

Everyone turned toward the radio. Kereny shrank back like a man convicted of a crime.

“Turn it off!” Ferenc shouted. When the cryptographer moved too slowly, he jerked the cord from the socket. Bajcsy suddenly bent over and went pale, as if a fist had battered him under his heart. He swallowed loudly and stammered something through lips too sticky to part. The office went quiet. Judit handed him a glass of water. He drank it in great gulps with his swollen eyelids half shut.

“Comrades,” he said softly, “the international situation may push us…but perhaps this government…I ask you to avoid unnecessary disclosures. The more distance we keep from the Americans and the English, the better. And from the French,” he added after a moment. “On the other hand, I am directing you to meet with diplomats from our camp, especially from the Soviet Embassy. I myself approached…” with a limp hand he rubbed his sagging, carelessly shaven chin—“understand: according to these”—he reached for a newspaper, flipped noisily through its pages, then crumpled it—“they may be keeping an eye on our behavior, watching for treason. Use good judgment. Better to feign stupidity, even to appear a coward, than to make a remark that causes something to blow apart for us. What I am saying is confidential.”

They stood waiting for more precise instructions, but the ambassador sat heavily in his chair and signaled with his hand that they should leave.

He had been stricken, though he was trying hard to hold the rudder, to pretend he had foreseen these events. Had it occurred to him after that bulletin that he might suddenly find himself with no place to return to? A new Hungary was being born; would he find the strength to reinvent himself again, to condemn his own earlier behavior, to renounce what until now had been ascribed to him as merit? But perhaps the only road that remained to him was the one taken by those who left under a volley of curses — those whom a wall of bayonets had saved from being brought to court.

“Comrade ambassador”—he leaned across the desk—“this evening I will be at Agence France-Presse. So that nothing can be misconstrued between us, I want to know…”

“What I said does not apply to you, Terey,” the ambassador wheezed. “I also want to know the whole truth. I am in the dark enough as it is.” He seemed deserving of pity, close to breaking.

After noon, though he was tired, Istvan did not give way to the enervating drowsiness. He lay down, then got up, searching for news on the radio. He telephoned Kondratiuk, who assured him that an agreement had been negotiated in Hungary, that the movements of the armies were evidence that the old garrisons were being evacuated, and that only troublemakers could see in them a stratagem to encircle Budapest. He alluded to Nagy’s private conversations with Mikoyan, who had the power of a special plenipotentiary and who had expressed to journalists his satisfaction with the outcome of the meetings.

“Do not worry, Comrade Terey. We have reassuring signals. The workers will not hand over the factories and the farmers will not let the land out of their hands. The propaganda of the reactionaries was misleading.”

But from Radio Calcutta he heard that the Soviet armies had taken over the airports and barred Hungarian pilots from approaching their planes.

“Sir, Agra is calling,” the cook shouted desperately, holding the receiver with his fingertips as if it were burning them.

He heard Margit’s voice from far away. “How are you? Have you had news from home?”

“No. I’m calmer, though. The situation is becoming clearer.”

“Do you need me?”

“Yes!” he said fervently. “You know I do.”

“Do you really want me there?”

“I’m waiting. When will you be here?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll fly in on the evening plane. Perhaps you will come for me. I’ll be alone.”

“And you’ll be here for good? Will you stay in Delhi?”

“That depends on you. Till tomorrow, then.”

“I’ll be at the airport. Here’s a kiss.”

“I wanted to beg your pardon again.” The words came to him from a great distance. What could she have done? That night he had abandoned her, pushed her away. In the face of the uprising, the threat to his family, she had become dispensable; worse yet, it had been as if she had not been there at all, had ceased to exist.

“For what?”

“I thought badly of you.”

“I took a breath of air…it was nothing. This is foolish. Clearly I deserved it.”

“No. It is not foolish. I thought you didn’t love me.”

“I love you. Doesn’t that bore you yet?”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Sleep well. Think: only one day.”

“That’s terribly long. A whole day.”

“Think of what I said.”

“I remember, but it doesn’t make it any easier for me at all. I’d like to be with you.”

“You are always with me.”

After what seemed to be a moment of reflection he heard a whisper full of bitterness, “You are happy if you believe that.”

“Goodbye, my sun.”

Pereira stood in the doorway to the kitchen, his bristling gray hair sprinkled with glare from the lightbulb, listening for orders. “Miss Ward will come tomorrow?” he inquired, wiping the salad bowl, breathing on the glass and rubbing hard to polish it.

“Tomorrow evening.”

“I will make an anise cake,” he said dreamily. “Very good.” Suddenly he aimed a cunning glance at Istvan and said, “Is it true, sir, that the English are making war on Muslims? They said so at the bazaar.”

“No. They do not have the power they had formerly. They are only frightening them.”

“The English were true gentlemen. It was an honor to serve with the officers of the queen. If one of them was angry, he might throw a boot at me, but how he paid. Well, and everything was cheaper then; rice costs three times as much since they left. I cannot imagine how such a power could allow itself to be driven from this country. Surely it was a trick. They must have something clever in mind.”

“Don’t you remember how rice was carried away to Africa, and peasants here died of hunger in their thousands? Do you still miss the English?”

“I lacked for nothing. And today there is not enough rice for everyone. One has, another has not. So it was and will be, whether the English are here or not.”

“And which do you prefer now: the Russians or the Americans?” Istvan treated him to a cigarette. The cook did not dare light it in his presence. He tucked it behind his ear and averred with a wink:

“Hungarians. After the English went away the Hungarians took me, and by now I am accustomed to them. One goes away, transfers me to the new one, and I can live. If you have to, sir, please recommend me—”

“You think that I will go away before long?”

“Who can know? For me such an arrival is like birth, and a departure like death. I live because you allow me to live. All depends on the master’s generous hand. I remember. I try with all my might.”

“For the time being I am not thinking of leaving,” the counselor shrugged.

“There are changes in Hungary. They said so on the radio.”

“Only at the very top. In the government.”

“It begins at the top and ends at the bottom. The stone from the summit draws the avalanche down. The ambassador’s driver whispered to me that he heard”—he laid his hand on his chest and bowed his head with an expression of fatuous humility—“that there are going to be big changes. I thought right away—”

“He didn’t understand.” The counselor laughed dismissively. He moved away so impatiently that the cook, wishing to placate him, said, “I will serve the dinner now.”

“Eat with the watchman. I’m going out.”

At Nagar’s he found several correspondents; it was like a stock exchange where news was the commodity, where short, shrill Maurice first called out what he had for sale. On the hearth a fire blazed, fed with crumpled teletype tapes and carbon copies. Streaks of bluish cigarette smoke hovered under a lamp. All the chairs were occupied except one on which the spotted Trompette lay snarling, and the Frenchman allowed no one to drive her off it. Misha Kondratiuk was sitting there, and Trojanowski, and the representative of Xinhua, smaller than Nagar, looking like a polite schoolboy in a blue uniform fastened modestly at the neck. Jimmy Bradley sprawled on the sofa, his legs on a pile of waste paper.

“I give you my word that they are attacking without our consent, behind our backs. They did not ask for advice,” he said as categorically as if he were under oath. “This is France’s doing. They want to repay themselves for Vietnam and save Algeria for the sake of the metropolitan area. The Israelis rushed things a little. They burst in along the old Mosaic route.”

“This is not only about the Suez,” said Kondratiuk. “If the English are not succeeding in removing Nasser, they want at least to intimidate him, to reduce him to a role as the head of a temporary government that will be in their pockets. They do not like him in the role of a politician who unifies Arabs.”

“I tell you, the French have done this to spite us,” Bradley insisted, handing his glass to a servant to be filled. “They know that we will be their successors.”

“Sit down, Istvan. Well, find yourself a seat—” the hospitable host looked around helplessly. The Chinese correspondent was ready to give up his place, but as if remembering what a prestigious nation he represented, sat stiffly with his untouched glass resting on his lap.

“Don’t disturb the dog. She bites,” Nagar warned. “She even bares her teeth at me.” But Istvan gave the bitch a friendly pat and scratched her behind the ear until she rose, yawning, and jumped down onto the carpet with a gracious wag of her tail.

“Does she have fleas?” Trojanowski asked.

“So many of you come here that I cannot say for sure…” Nagar threw up his hands.

“What news?”

“Not many killed, for the Arabs dispersed, while the Israelis took almost two thousand prisoners. There was an exchange of telegrams between the Kremlin and the White House. Neither side wants the conflict to escalate. The Americans are looking out for the Arab oil, and the Russians have trouble enough with Poland and Hungary. The diplomatic maneuvering, however, is backed by force. And they are ready to mediate, to appease. Such mediations enhance their importance,” Nagar added quickly. “In the States they are displeased that the French have been proceeding on their own. It is an opportunity to punch them in the nose, to bring Eden to heel, and to refuse to allow Khrushchev to appear as the only defender of the Arabs. The bargaining is coming: do as you like in Hungary, and we will occupy the canal.”

“You know nothing of Polish affairs. Be quiet,” Trojanowski silenced him, his blue eyes glittering like a bird’s. “On the other hand, there will be real trouble with Hungary.”

They nodded in agreement, and Misha sighed heavily. “I was there with Tolbukhin,” he said. “The Romanians surrendered. The Bulgarians came over to our side, but not the Hungarians. They fought to the end. Budapest fell and they still held the Austrian border without flinching.”

“Does that surprise you?” Istvan thrust out his lip. “At that time Szalasi and his supporters had taken over our government. And the impression you made was hardly encouraging. There was no liberation, only subjugation. No doubt you remember.”

“You are right,” Kondratiuk said after a pause. “In the end we were coming onto enemy territory. There were many Ukrainians with us; they had passed over scorched earth, they had heard what the women said, what your retreat from the Dniester had been like.”

“Friends — don’t quarrel. These are bygones.” Nagar spoke up placatingly. “What should be of interest to us is whether today the leaders of Hungary can still exercise influence over the impulses of the general population.”

The Chinese correspondent followed them silently with a cunning look, inwardly repeating — or so it seemed — every opinion expressed by the others.

“Fortunately there is peace in Hungary,” Kondratiuk put in. “One wonders: what is the cause of this anti-Soviet frame of mind? Indeed, we Russians have nothing against you, comrade Terey. The Germans also fought against us; they have much more on their consciences, and we make an effort to find common ground with them, to educate them, to win them over, though for many years it was repeated that the only good German is a dead German. In a week we will celebrate together the thirty-ninth anniversary of the revolution. Everything will be amicable and we will drink lavishly to friendship.”

Li-Chuan looked at him attentively.

“I know what galls you,” Kondratiuk said, winking. “We beat the pants off you. Such a shabby-looking army: ragged dull gray coats, quilted jackets covered with stains, unable to stay in formation, tottering like ducks, but going forward. Humiliating to be defeated by such slovenly scarecrows, eh?”

“We fought well.” Istvan turned toward him.

“Very well, even,” Kondratiuk admitted. “Only why boast about it? What did you want from us? The Romanians dreamed of a heritage from the Romans — that I still understand — but you? We did not even have a common border.”

Terey’s expression softened. He understood that the Russian was not mocking.

“After the closing down of the encirclement near Stalingrad, when we took Marshal Paulus…”

“Wait!” Nagar broke in. “Now, something for the soul.” He raised his hands with his fingers pressed together, like a conductor focusing the attention of his orchestra. “Eat while they are hot.”

“That is for you,” Trojanowski corrected him. “Words are for the soul.”

“Oh! You were poorly brought up, Marek.” Their host shook his head sympathetically. “This is too small and too good to be counted as something for the body. This is, in one bite, delight itself. Do you smell the garlic? And the crust light as fluff? Oh, Trojanowski, Trojanowski, you do not know that whole nations are fed only on a word, and they are content, though they do not grow fat—”

“He has silenced you. Sit down: you’ve been bested.” Istvan waved him away. “Well, go on,” he said to Kondratiuk.

“We were going along in a snowstorm. Near Stalingrad. Battered tanks streaked with soot, painted with crosses: steel coffins. The dead lying under a dusting of ice crystals, with faces that seemed to be cast in iron. Ammunition boxes and gasoline barrels with bullet holes that the wind whistled through until chills ran down the spine.”

“You’re right, we should pour some whiskey. Maurice, shame on you; are you out?” Bradley broke in, peering toward the sideboard under the head of the rhinoceros.

“It was a blizzard. We saw a dark line of soldiers walking in rows of four in front of us. They were surely not our men. Different uniforms. Prisoners — they had no weapons. I caught up to them in a jeep; they were Hungarians. An officer approached me, saluted, and asked, ‘Are we going in the right direction?’ ‘And where do you mean to go?’ ‘To Siberia. When they captured us, they said we were going to Siberia.’ I confess that I was dumbfounded; no, it was not funny at all. They impressed me. They were marching in line, listening to their officers. They looked better than the Germans. I pointed out the way to the crossing, for at the Volga there was a checkpoint where prisoners were sorted out.”

“Was no one in charge of them?” Bradley was amazed. “Didn’t they try to escape?”

“Where to?” Kondratiuk laughed. “The front had moved a hundred and fifty kilometers west. There was no escaping from where they were. Going in a group, they would have been turned back by the first patrol; going one by one, they would have been killed by villagers. Where could they flee without knowing the language, in cold that froze the eyelids together and nipped like pincers? They had lost; they had to go as captives to where they were sentenced. A fine army. Such a shame that they were with Hitler.”

“The Soviet army was better when it beat the Germans,” Li Chuan remarked.

“They went in en masse,” Istvan said dejectedly, “with no consideration for losses.”

“We were in a hurry, not only to win, but to return to our country, where we went the day the war ended, because we knew that you”—he turned to Bradley—“would play your game. You would want to establish yourselves in Europe.” Leaning on his elbow, Kondratiuk ran his hand through his hair until it bristled. “But when I think of the war, often it seems to me that the women won it — our mothers, wives, and sisters. They carried on the fight, without praise, through years together. And there is no worthy monument for them.”

“A woman’s mission is to give birth,” Li Chuan said serenely. “It is a great happiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s fatherland. If there is victory for the people, communism attaches no significance to the losses.”

“If one has little, there is little for him to lose.” Bradley frowned. “It’s easy to die then. Our people are not so eager for death. They only risk their lives if they are repaid a hundred times over. Like racing drivers or acrobats — those, for example, who walk tightropes over Niagara. If they succeed, there is money and fame. Even if not, the family will get so much that papa will be remembered as Santa Claus.”

“But you pushed into Korea and Siam, and you have made South Vietnam your buffer zone.” The Frenchman in Nagar was aroused. “You were everywhere.”

“We are a true democracy. If you cannot attend to everything yourself, give it to someone who has the desire, and sufficient strength; true, Misha?” Bradley still lay stretched out on the sofa. “It is not people who decide these things, but technology: atoms, rockets…”

“People will always be the most valuable,” said the Chinese journalist. “It is they who make the bombs and the rockets.”

“I didn’t like Germans, though they have many fine qualities,” Trojanowski recalled.

“And who likes you?” Nagar asked sarcastically. “Arrogant, obstreperous, not inclined to keep promises. Messy…”

“Women like Polish men,” Misha said. “They know how to get around the ladies — puffed up like turkeys. A Pole gazes into the eyes, he sings his own praises, he bends over the little hands and before the girl can look around she has him under the covers. To learn that from them — to learn—”

“It’s an insane world,” Terey said gloomily. “You’re all good fellows; each of you experienced the war in his own way. Each took his losses. Nagar’s family were all cremated at Auschwitz. Jimmy’s brother was shot at Dunkirk, where he walked into the sea. Li Chuan fought against the Japanese and was wounded twice, then was sent as a volunteer in a new war between the Americans and Korea. There is no need even to talk about the Russians; Kondratiuk was squeezed into a trench near Lake Balaton when his division was trying to stop the Panzer Armies. The Germans were marching to the relief of Budapest. The Russians kept them back, but at what a price. Today tanks are plowing desert sand again, people are dying, and the stench of it is in the air. And it’s made light of, because that’s the style of the crafty old guard of journalism, which cannot be astonished or terrified by anything.”

When they scattered to their cars after emptying another bottle of Nagar’s whiskey, Trojanowski, a little the worse for the evening’s drinking, stopped Terey and pressed his hand, whispering, “There are ordinary-looking boxes on the streets of Warsaw, and passersby are throwing in money for medicine and food for Budapest. People cannot be sure exactly what it is about, but they feel intuitively that it is a great issue, a matter of life and death.”

“Thank you.” Terey patted him hard. “I think all the world understands.”

“Not all. Not all.” The Pole shook his head. “There are divergent interests.”

The other cars moved away. They stood in darkness illuminated by a row of lamps half-screened by leafy trees.

“Do you think we will come out intact?”

“And do you think they will crush you as an example, a warning to others? Not in these times, my dear friend!” Trojanowski’s hand cut the air. “Khrushchev’s dealings with Poland confirmed that it is possible to reach an agreement on anything.”

“We have only ourselves to rely on.”

“You have, after all, enlightened people as your leaders. Scholars, writers.”

“It is those who never saw the world beyond Stalin who cry loudest for freedom today. Already they are pushing to the head of the parade.”

“You do not believe that people change?”

“I believe it, I believe it,” he said bitterly, “especially those who want to maintain their positions. You know that when all is said and done, there cannot be a neutral Hungary. To jump from the socialist alliance is to fall at once under the protection of America, which will make Hungary a beachhead. It is important to see that clearly.”

“Many think as you do. They will hold the crazy ones in check. You will see; everything will arrange itself. You are not alone,” Trojanowski said reassuringly. “In Warsaw the workers are donating blood for your wounded. If anyone would take mine here, I would as well—” he pushed out his left hand and made a fist.

Istvan felt a cool breeze on his face: his jaw set. This Pole was not speaking of brotherhood, but he was offering blood. Blood counted.

The warm Indian night was singing with a whisper of wings, with the rustle of moths lured by the blazing headlights of the Austin. Istvan Terey wandered in that night, an atom of Hungary lost on the Asian continent.

The excited voice on the radio the next morning announced that the English air force had bombarded Cairo, Port Said, and Alexandria. A French warship had sunk an Egyptian frigate, and cannon fire over the water had shattered the boats with the rescued sailors. Smoke hung over the bombed cities; there was extensive damage, and the attacks had claimed many victims, chiefly among the poorest populations. Fleeing crowds had been shot by aircraft strafing the area. The international situation had undergone a sudden change for the worse — the speaker’s voice was dark with foreboding — and the peace of the world was hanging in the balance. It was as if Budapest had been forgotten. There are no new developments in Hungary, Istvan thought with relief.

Thank God, he breathed, we may be misguided when we look for connections between the uprising and the raid on the Suez.

The fiery red of the railing cut across the broad, grassy field that was the airport. In the distance the setting sun was yellow as if it were cooling; feathery palms looked like paper cutouts against it. Istvan sat at a small table to which a warm breeze brought the smells of dry meadows, cooling concrete, gasoline, and lubricants. Little moths fluttered up from the grass in a cloud, swirled for a moment in the diffuse yellow light, then dissolved into the sky. Terey crumpled a straw in his fingers and sipped a Coca-Cola. Behind him the big hangar was disconcertingly quiet. Two women in red sat hunched beside their bundles — they were certainly not passengers, for their feet were bare and callused and stained violet by dried clay. Probably they had come to visit relatives who worked at the airport, or perhaps only to stare with dreamy eyes at the departing planes.

The song of the cicadas had died away; it would return after a while with its monotonous insistence, which was amplified by the eaves of the aluminum roof. A great calm filled the wide space around him. With no announcement from the megaphone an airplane wafted unnoticed onto the grassy plain, then roared as it wheeled along the concrete runway. Moths rose from the grass in a sudden swarm like gray smoke and tried to flee, but swarmed back, sucked into the rotating propeller.

Istvan waited. This was not the plane from Agra, though that plane was already a quarter of an hour past due. No one in the office could explain the cause.

A group of passengers approached, led by a stewardess who looked strangely awkward in a European uniform. He took a few steps toward the gate; it did not occur to him that he might meet someone he knew. From the interior of the airplane, as if in anger, someone was throwing out suitcases and linen bags done up with straps.

“Hallo! Mr. Terey!” called a portly, dignified man, waving a parasol. Istvan recognized Dr. Kapur.

“Where is that plane from?”

“From Bombay.” The dark face had a bronze sheen in the sunset; the distended cheeks were overgrown with wisps of black hair. “But I am returning from the vicinity of Cairo. There are fires; the airport is not receiving flights. Haifa also refused; they ordered us to turn away because there was shooting. Some boats on the sea even opened fire on us — I saw only flashes below us and white points of light moving upward so slowly that we managed to escape.” He gesticulated vigorously. “Only Basra — from there to Karachi and Bombay…I saw war. I saw real war.”

“From a distance, fortunately.”

“No, very close. In Karachi a few Jewish shops had been damaged. The Muslims are enraged. They may well raise the cry for holy war. Because of the attack by France and England, Nasser has suddenly gained supporters. He has taken on new stature. Oh, they are bringing my things. The rascals let the trunks crush them.” He ran and tugged at a stack of linen bags, which threatened to collapse. “Enjoy the peace of evening. Who knows whether it will be for the last time?”

The megaphone boomed, announcing the plane from Agra.

He saw Margit from a distance. She walked erect in a flame of rust-colored hair. A little boy in wrinkled white preceded her. The rest of the travelers were stopped to allow a group of people with garlands in their hands to greet him. They bowed, sinking at his feet, and he, obviously bored, allowed them to place the garlands around his neck. Immediately he whisked them onto the arm of a servant, which was bent like a hook.

“Please wait.” A guard blocked Terey’s way while letting through a big Cadillac that sped across the landing field, bouncing on the grass.

“It seems there is a ban on entry to the airport,” the counselor said, surprised. “The gate is closed.”

“He has the golden keys that open all gates.” The guard seemed to be counting on his fingers. “That is the Nizam of Hyderabad. It was he who caused the delay.”

“I know, I just found out, who is accompanying you.” He kissed Margit on the lips. “I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. He has cars like that and he can’t be on time?”

“He was napping and no one dared wake him. His secretary said, ‘Fly when you must, but have another plane ready for my master.’ And because there was no other, we waited. Anyway, he is a nice little fellow. He was constantly turning to me and sending fruit by way of the servant.”

“And you are enchanted.”

“Yes”—her eyes brightened—“because I see you.”

He handed over the baggage checks. The attendants took them and a moment later dragged the suitcases to the car. Istvan took Margit’s hand and looked at the sky; it was drooping under its burden of purple. The intoxicating lavishness of violent tints drifting above them also moved the Nizam; he stopped the Cadillac and leaned out without alighting. Two doors were opened wide and held in place by servants in uniforms fit for field marshals.

Istvan felt the girl’s fingers, which he was holding tenderly, entwine themselves tightly with his. Reflected purple light fell on her face, tingeing with lilac lips parted in delight.

“Look. Lose yourself in the madness of the sky,” he whispered. “Those fires mean wind tomorrow, strong, hot wind. Do you know what is happening in Cairo? There are glows in the sky there as well, but it is man’s doing. Look there, Margit. The sky seems to sing with flame.”

She turned toward him. The sky was nothing to her. He saw an enormous devotion in her eyes.

“Listen: if war breaks out…would you have to go back? Or perhaps you all would be interned here,” she said as if thinking out loud. “India will be on our side. Then you would stay with me.”