Stone Tablets

Chapter II

The big cooling machine gave out a measured drone. Terey was sitting behind his desk, which was swamped with stacks of weekly magazines and documents. The clutter reminded him of the editorial office in Budapest, where he could hardly make room on the table for his typewriter as he plowed through heaps of offscourings from the presses while the clatter of the linotype machines flew up from below like hail on an iron balcony. Men in aprons shiny with grime dropped in and tossed damp strips of galley proof with a sharp smell of ink on his desk. Furious that they hindered his writing, he pushed them onto the floor. Then, distracted from his train of thought, he sprang up, smoked a cigarette, and paced around the crumpled proofs. A moment later he picked them up, spread them out, and read them with an editor’s alert, expert eye.

He was irritated when the cleaning woman tidied up. He was exquisitely conscious of where he had put articles that had to be critiqued, of whose photograph he had hidden in the fat dictionary. In Delhi he tried to carry these habits over. In this respect his conception of his work was quite to the liking of the ambassador, who asserted that he alone could allow himself a clear desk.

No one knocked, but the door opened a crack, and the gentle face of Judit Kele appeared. He pretended that he did not see her, that he was lost in admiration of the bald head of the dignitary in the portrait, so she tapped on the door frame with a pencil.

“Wake up, Istvan.”

“You fly around as quietly as if you were on a broom. Come in. What’s happened?”

“I’m sorry for you. You will surely die young, in obscurity. The envoy extraordinaire, the plenipotentiary, has summoned you.”

He rose lethargically.

“Perhaps you should wait a little. I let an Indian visitor in to see him.”

Istvan liked the ambassador’s secretary. She was warm and genial. Her job as keeper of the ambassador’s threshold gave her certain prerogatives. People attached weight to her remarks; it was whispered in corners that she had confidential assignments now and then, that she threw light on issues and gave opinions about the staff. When Istvan had asked her straight out about these things, she had replied:

“Have I done anything to you? No? Be quiet and don’t meddle in things that don’t concern you. In any case I will not rebut these rumors. It is better for them to be afraid of me.”

She gave him a comradely pat, the kind one gives a horse before it runs toward a hurdle. “Keep your chin up.”

“Is it that bad?” He inclined his head in astonishment.

He stood up and raked two documents into a paper portfolio, for he wanted to take the occasion to secure Kalman Bajcsy’s approval for the screening of a film about rice communes by the Danube. Anyway, the boss liked to be asked for advice. It made him feel important, even indispensable.

The ambassador greeted the counselor with an upward tilt of his heavy chin. Tall, stocky, with small eyes and thin, graying hair that bristled slightly where it was parted, he gave the impression of being a strong man. Once in a rush of candor he had explained to Terey why he had left the management of great institutions named for Stalin and gone into diplomacy.

“I am a man with a heavy hand,” he confessed, “and there were other heavy hands there than my own, so it became necessary to get out of people’s way for a while. You know yourself that with us it is not enough to shout to make the horses go. One must reach for the whip.”

At the embassy he made an effort to win the good will of the staff, to show a fatherly interest in them now and then. He inquired as to the health of wives and children. A few times he promised Terey to have his family brought over, but the issuance of passports was somehow delayed. Ilona had not insisted. Both boys had begun their studies, and there was of course no Hungarian school in New Delhi. They did not know English; before they acquired the rudiments, it would be time to go back, especially with the constant hints of changes to come, the couriers who were awaited with a sense of something like disaster.

“Sit down, comrade.” The ambassador motioned Terey to a seat at a small table, where a lean Hindu was sitting hunched over. He wore glasses; his comb had left ridges in his greasy sheaf of hair. “This is our counselor for cultural affairs. You will arrange the rest with him.”

Terey pressed the chilly palm; its long fingers were stained with violet ink spots. Neither man let it be known that they had already talked. The counselor had not considered it necessary to inform the ministry or even the ambassador of the man’s intention, it seemed so senseless to him.

“Mr. Jay Motal is a well-known man of letters and wants to write a book about us, to give Indian readers a view of the new Hungary of the people — our achievements, our social gains. In fact, he has already acquainted himself with our brochures, but that is not enough for him; he wishes to conduct interviews with dignitaries, to observe our life at close range. You will take his information. A coded message must be sent to the ministry to determine the conditions under which they can accept him.”

He spoke grandiloquently, inclining his head toward the visitor, who nodded in turn, sensing victory at hand.

“How do you envision your stay in our country, sir? What would you like to see?”

“I would like to write a full-length book, so I would have to travel around Hungary for about three months. Surely you would pay for the sightseeing, hotels, necessary expenditures.”

“And your journey?”

“The most direct route would be by Air India to Prague. If it proved too costly, I could return by way of Poland and East Germany. I have made inquiries at those embassies and help was promised.”

“Do you want to write a full-length book about them as well?” Terey asked blandly.

“If I take such a long excursion, it seems to me that I could do it all while I am about it.” The man twirled his palm in a dancer’s gesture. “They are ready to accept me, but they make it conditional upon the payment for a ticket.”

“In what language do you write?”

“In Malayalam. I fled from Ceylon. I was for its incorporation into India.”

“How many books have you written?” the counselor queried.

“Three, not long…”

“With press runs of what size?”

“They did not appear in print. It is hard to find a publisher in our country, and in any case I had to flee. I was being hunted. The English wanted to put me in prison.”

The ambassador, who was listening closely, asked, “How do you support yourself, sir? Not by literature, surely.”

“My father-in-law owns a rice mill. Apart from that, we have been putting out money at a respectable rate of interest.”

“Your clients didn’t repay it?”

“They had to.” The man smiled at the counselor’s naivete. “We took jewelry as security. Strongboxes stood in the office with the deposits.”

“So in fact you have published nothing?” Insistently the counselor returned to the subject.

“I have published a great deal.” He pointed to yellowed newspaper clippings painstakingly glued to cardboard, worn from often being shown, smudged by greasy fingers, like sheets of paper card sharks use at fairs. “Here is an article about Poland, this one is about Czechoslovakia, and this is about you, printed in English. You can see for yourself that I write with warm feelings about Hungary.”

The counselor inclined his head and at a glance recognized whole phrases lifted from a brochure about Hungary’s new education system that had been distributed at a UNESCO convention.

“How do you think information about Hungary might gain a large audience in India? Who will publish this book?”

“It can be published without risk in Madras in an edition of a thousand copies. Because the embassy will distribute them, surely it will buy eight hundred in advance, and pay me an honorarium? Then I could easily find a publisher, for they would not risk anything.”

“How many people speak Malayalam?” the ambassador asked with interest.

“Well — over twelve million. We have a splendid literature. Great poets; a history encompassing two thousand years.”

“Would it not be better to publish in English? Then the intelligentsia of all India…” the counselor reflected.

“I can also write in English,” the man agreed hastily.

“An attractive proposition.” The ambassador tapped the edge of an ashtray with his cigarette. “How much would your honorarium amount to?”

“Two rupees—” Motal looked narrowly at the heavy, bloated face and hesitated, “well, one and a half for each volume sold.”

“Are you counting the copies the embassy would take?”

“Of course.”

“We must get the ministry’s agreement,” the ambassador declared. “I believe, however, that there will be no resistance.”

“So I am going? When could that occur?”

“Your journey around the country must be planned. You will need an interpreter — better yet, a female interpreter,” the ambassador smiled. “Women put more heart into this business. Call on us in a month; perhaps we will know something concrete. Thank you for your readiness to cooperate.”

The young man wanted to say something more, but the counselor was already standing up, extending his hand. Ceremoniously he conducted him to the secretary’s office. He exchanged knowing winks with Judit, who was busy at her typewriter.

The writer from Ceylon was not easy to get rid of, however. Mustering his courage, he asked Terey for a packet of Hungarian cigarettes, for his daughter collected the boxes, it was a fad.

“Here you are.” Judit offered a box. “Take mine. It’s almost empty.”

“No, thank you, madam,” Motal said almost rebukingly. “It must be an undamaged packet. As with postage stamps, one little tear and the most valuable specimen is rubbish.”

“Very well; I will give you one.” She reached into a drawer. “Or perhaps you would like a variety? I will give you several kinds of cigarettes.”

“You understand what a joy it will be to the child.” He pushed the boxes into his pockets. “The other girls will envy her.”

In the hall he asked if he might take a few of the illustrated publications that were laid out on a table; he wanted to add to his store of material about Hungary. Terey ordered the office caretaker to prepare a file of magazines.

Just as he thought he had finally finished with the petitioner, Motal returned in a wave of heat that rushed in through the open entrance door and asked with a resentful air, “You will have someone drive me to Connaught Place, will you not? They always do that at the Russian embassy. I got a whole basket of jellies and wines from them for the Diwali festival, and my wife got a shawl, and my daughter was given a big box of all sorts of cigarettes; they remembered our whole family. I like the Russians very much; Russia is a great nation. I like you, too. Be so kind and try to get me a car.”

The counselor summoned Krishan.

The heat was unbearable. The white light was like a load on the shoulders; even as he re-entered the dim interior of the embassy Terey felt the heated fabric of his jacket on his back, as if he had leaned against a tiled stove.

“Until the one o’clock break,” he whispered to Judit. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

He knocked at the door, heard a friendly rumble, and went in. The ambassador looked at him with the eye of a raging bull; he was speaking with someone on the telephone — someone at home, no doubt, for he was speaking Hungarian. At last he hung up the receiver, carefully, as if he were afraid of smashing it with his heavy hand.

“What more do you have to say, counselor?” He began applying pressure to Terey with a long silence. “He came to complain that you have been misleading him.”

Terey listened calmly, not hurrying to defend himself. He took a cigarette and placed it in an ivory holder.

“May I?”

“Of course, smoke. That’s what they’re there for. I’m afraid it’s only in matters like that that you ask my permission, that you remember my existence. If it’s a question of forming friendships or sitting around in clubs at night, my opinion is of no importance. Well — why are you looking at me that way? Say something.”

Terey blew out a stream of smoke slowly. In order to remain unruffled, he had to know first what he would be blamed for; a justification offered too soon might expose a weakness on his side of the argument.

“I think, comrade ambassador, that you are a good psychologist.”

The other man drew himself up behind his desk and looked at Terey suspiciously. But his curiosity came to the fore; he could not restrain it.

“You must have something on your conscience, since you begin by flattering me so coolly. As it is, I know quite a few things. Speak up! Delhi is just an oversized village. Rumors fly around faster than pigeons.”

“You recognized at once, comrade minister, the true value of this hack. He wants, like everyone, to go away, to escape. He makes the rounds of the embassies and begs. The long and short of it is he does not know how to write.”

“And what of the article he showed us?”

“The content is from the promotional brochures.”

“But they print his work.”

“I understood the entire process. Nagar told me. He brings in a text culled from other writings; he shows it to the journalists, promising to cut them in on his earnings. Then he races over here with a clipping and demands an honorarium for shaping public opinion favorably for us, gets thirty rupees, and keeps ten for himself. He is content with the scraps. One thought captivates and consumes him: to go to Europe at our expense, to forget about hardship, about the inquisitive looks of his wife and daughters, the frugal dinner, the carefully counted cigarettes, the embarrassing emptiness in the pocket. You saw through him at once, comrade ambassador, for you asked how many books he had published, and how many copies of each.”

Would he accept the compliment or rebuff it? He ought to remember who asked those questions. Bajcsy frowned and remained silent.

“Poor fellow. But he is useful in some way to the Russians.”

“They give him articles already prepared, which he places under his own name. They pay him, so the firm that publishes the articles gets them free of charge, and the Russians’ stake in the situation remains secret. A rumor without authority. So he himself crosses out the most pointed phrases, and says that the censor expurgated the article.”

“He was an activist for freedom, all the same. The English wanted to arrest him. He fled from Ceylon.”

“I have heard the general opinion on that. It is always necessary to question people from another quarter of the Hindu community; they loathe each other. He went to jail for usury and embezzling security deposits. He himself was not guilty, but his family made him the scapegoat. He escaped, and they blamed everything on him. They had to send him some money to tide him over, but lately those dribs and drabs come very seldom.”

“How do you know all this? Do you have it from credible sources?”

“I wouldn’t stake my life on it, but various small facts confirm it. For example, to let it be known in one embassy that he has connections in another, he takes out foreign cigarettes like those he cadged here, and in this way arouses generosity. It was brilliant, comrade ambassador, how you saw through him. We have gained a month without antagonizing the fellow.

“The hope of an excursion to Europe is a powerful engine. Tomorrow half of Delhi will be talking about it, and he will begin waiting for what he is boasting of to come true. They will sympathize with us a little for allowing ourselves to be duped, or perhaps, conversely, a rival will be miffed and send him so as to get ahead of us — Poles, or East Germans? He has a beat, like a beggar who circulates through his town not too often, trying to milk the inhabitants even-handedly.”

“Why didn’t you put me on my guard? I would not have received him.”

“He announced himself at the secretary’s desk; everything happened over my head. He had had enough of me. He wanted to knock at the door of someone higher up. I didn’t even mention him because — what for? After all, my job is to filter out the truth about people and the country and spare you difficulty.”

The ambassador took his face in his hand. His plump fingers were tufted with dark hair; the folds of his fat jowl oozed between them. His look was saturnine and disapproving.

“Tell me one thing: must you sit around at the club until all hours? I have been told that at Khaterpalia’s wedding as well, everyone had gone and you stayed because the bar was still open. Aren’t you drinking too much?”

“It depends on the circumstances.” Istvan spread his hands.

Bajcsy huffed.

“Give me just one piece of evidence that you are not pulling my leg.”

Terey thought coolly: don’t hurry. Don’t give way. Someone must have been telling tales.

“During that wedding I found out that the law prohibiting the transfer of pounds will go into effect half a year earlier than expected. That will have a serious effect on importing, and will limit the scope of our activities as well,” he flung out as if he were reluctant to speak.

“That is information of the first order of importance,” the ambassador said, raising himself in his chair. “And you only tell me about it now? Is it certain? I don’t ask the name.”

“I looked into it. I sought confirmation. Only as of yesterday am I certain. It checks out. They are barring the doors. My original information came from an officer of the president’s guard. He himself was an interested party. He wanted to get some capital out of the country.”

“Terey, write me a memorandum about this.”

“I have it with me as we speak, but, comrade ambassador, you have not let me get a word in edgewise.” He put a sheet of paper with a few sentences in typescript on the desk.

Bajcsy read slowly, moving his thick lips. Then he looked suspicious, as if it had just occurred to him that he had been drawn into a game against his will. But Terey calmly closed his briefcase and sat unassumingly in his chair, smoking a cigarette.

Exiting, he met Judit’s glance. It was full of camaraderie. He raised a thumb to signal that all was well. She had been waiting behind the door like an anxious mother when her son is taking a test.

“The ambassador asks that you send in the cryptographer.”

“Did he give you a dressing down?” Her tone was solicitous.

“For what? I live modestly, I do my work. You see me like a goldfish in a bowl. What do I have to hide?”

“You know very well.” She wagged a cautionary finger. “Be careful not to get yourself in trouble.”

In spite of the wheezing of the big fans, agonizing moans made their way in through the windows. His face contorted as he heard them.

“Who is wailing so?”

“Krishan’s wife. Go through to Ferenc’s office. It’s enough to break your heart, the way that woman is wearing herself down.”

“What’s happened? Is she sick?”

“I don’t know. Krishan only laughs and shows his teeth. A bad lot, that one.”

“Perhaps we could look in? We can’t let her suffer like that.”

“What do you want to drag me along for? I’m afraid of sickness. To my taste, life is too short here. I detest the way fourteen-year-old girls become mothers. Children bearing children.” She shuddered. “Every smell here carries a waft of something putrid, a stench of burning bodies. No, I will not go.”

He stepped out of the embassy and was immersed in a thick suspension of dust and sunlight. At once his skin was covered with sweat. He blinked: the air was filled with rainbow-tinted sequins. They rose and pulsed as if in rhythm with the contractions of a breaking heart.

He walked around the corner house with its clumps of trees brandishing vermilion torches; their dark green leaves held sprays of blossoms garish as flames. A large lizard, covered with iridescent scales, stood on his hind legs, gazing at Terey with a sharp, unfriendly yellow eye. The spikes on its back bristled at every breath. It looked like an antediluvian monster in miniature.The old gardener, in an unbuttoned shirt, threw a clod of earth at it. It only hissed and disappeared up a tree.

“It spits, sir,” he warned. “You can go blind.”

The light cut through his mesh shirt, glancing off his ribs and the back of his wrinkled neck. His legs were black and covered with clots of dried mud like rusty iron.

“Sir goes there?” He motioned toward a building in which the ground floor rooms had been made over into quarters for the servants. “She calls for death — such a pretty, plump woman,” he mumbled. “For the second day she prays to Durga.”

“But what is the matter with her?”

“Who can know?”

“Has a doctor been here?”

The old man leaned on his hoe. The edge, worn to silver, threw specks of bright light onto his lean, knotted calves. He looked at Terey; his dull, cloudy eyes were full of sorrow.

“And why a doctor? A yogi was here. He broke the spell, but now he does not want to look in. He only gave her an herb, and then she slept all night. Death alone will help in this case.”

“Blithering nonsense! We have to make sure Krishan takes her to the hospital.”

“She has been there, sir. They were going to cut her. But she doesn’t want to be burned bit by bit, but all at once. For then where would she look for the next birth?”

The moaning could be heard more and more distinctly; Terey could distinguish pleading, singsong cries of prayer. The white walls in the house blinded him; the masonry trapped the sultry air. The door had been taken off its hinges and carried away to the garage. In its place hung only a muslin curtain, tied back.

On a bed a stout woman dressed in a sari lay with her legs spread. He saw her feet, which were painted red. A roll of fat was exposed at the waistline above her distended belly. The navel, with a small piece of colored glass set into it, peeped out impudently. A little girl was sitting beside her, waving a fan of peacock feathers to chase away the flies that crawled insistently into her eyes and nose and pushed themselves between the lips open in moaning.

“To die!” the woman howled.

“But where does it hurt you?”

“Here—” she touched her abdomen “—and my head, my head is splitting.”

“You must go to the hospital,” he urged. “To a proper doctor. The embassy will pay.”

“No. I want to die or give birth.”

She raised her flushed face. The dyed mark on her forehead was dissolving in perspiration and running into her eyebrows like blood. The parting of her hair, which was colored red according to the custom of married women, looked like an open wound.

Istvan recalled dying people, shot in the head by snipers, but they had not screamed with such despair; they expired quietly. At first he had been relieved to come in under a roof, but now he was unable to breathe. He was choking on the sour smell of smoldering manure under the little clay stove, on stifling perfumes and the odor of sweat.

Feeling himself at his wits’ end, he went back to the embassy. He knew the customs here; nothing could be done by force. The sick woman did not want to take his advice — that was her right, to make her own determination. No physician would touch her; he had no right to. Probably the woman would lose consciousness, and even then her will was binding if it had been clearly expressed.

Krishan was squatting beside the car, smoking a cigarette. He was having a rest; the cries from the house did not disturb his siesta. The sun glinted on his frizzy, greased hair. On his hand he had a tattooed monkey that was covering its eyes. (May they not see what I do, ran the illustrated prayer.) On his fingers he wore a heavy gold signet ring, a gift from his wife. It was hard to think of him as one of the poor.

“Krishan, is your wife giving birth?”

He lifted his triangular face. His little catlike teeth showed from under his mustache in a smile like a grimace.

“Don’t trouble yourself, sir. She gives birth this way every month. The spoiled blood does not want to come out of her, and it hits inside her head. She has a tumor, but if it is cut out she will not be able to bear a child, and what do I want with such a wife?”

“Krishan — she is exhausting herself!”

“And I am not? For the second day I have not had a moment to breathe. Let her die or get well; then this will not be a hindrance to life or to work. She knows that, so she doesn’t want an operation. She loves me; the fortunetellers said that she would have a child. Perhaps this will pass and she will heal? My uncle had a tumor, and then the holy man came and pierced the place that hurt with a fork. It made a little wound that ran for three weeks, and that was the end of the tumor. It depends on what a person’s fate is. My horoscope commands me to avoid sweets. I don’t eat them.”

Terey went to the secretary’s desk to drink tea from a thermos. He bathed his hands in the stream of air from the large fan. Judit listened to his report.

“Beast,” she said, referring to Krishan.

She drew a flat bottle from the medicine chest and poured half a glass of cognac.

“I’ll give her a swallow.”

“You will kill her. Her husband will charge you.”

“It’s the old English way. When I was in London—”

“Or in Siberia?” he broke in.

“There as well. If someone’s period was late — for no cause of her own making — she took a glass of something strong and — to the bath! Here we all have a bath, but without the liquid incentive. It will work; you’ll see.”

She walked through the corridor with a firm step.

“I must pour it in myself. She loves Krishan so, she would leave the cognac for him.”

She went down the corridor slightly hunched, looking at the surface of the golden liquid in the little glass.

Istvan was left to his own thoughts; he sat down and, feeling relieved, lit a cigarette. He relived his conversation with Bajcsy, thinking of more adroit responses, more resourceful ways of making his case.

“Calm down; quit thinking like a second-rate actor,” he scolded himself and began looking over the mail. Invitations to lectures had arrived, and letters asking when an exhibit of Hungarian handicrafts was coming to Kampur, and several notifications of receptions, including one from the vice minister of agriculture.

Among the magazines lay a long brown envelope that Judit had brought him. He shook out photographs and spread them fanwise on the table.

They were all there — beautiful girls seized by the unexpected, ruthless glare of the flash. In the slender, flexible bodies, the dancing gestures, he discovered again the joy of that evening hour. Light bulbs in the background appeared as luminous flecks, like stars too near. What would be the fates of those blooming young women? What awaited them? The flash appeared to hold them in suspension, to fix them, to shield them from the liberating, destructive force of time. But how briefly! These photographs will still have meaning for me, will evoke the sultriness of Delhi at night, he thought — but for my sons?

If his boys were to exhume from a drawer the file of glossy thick papers with images of exotically dressed beauties, they would lean forward eagerly, they would snatch them out. Perhaps they would allude to him with some vulgar, boyish word of admiration that would suit their notion of man-to-man complicity. Dad: he knew how to get the girls! They would consider Grace’s beauty with detachment; they would look at the wide Hindu eyes, the full lips. How much of what he had experienced was it possible to transmit? How could the surging of the breath and the nails clawing on the carpet, the fragrance of the hair his face was buried in, be preserved in words? How to capture that excitement which even now made the heart pound? He wrote poetry. He had published two volumes that had received measured praise, that were not easily understood. Perhaps, then, that wedding night, which had not been his wedding night, would be revived in verse.

Toward Grace, however, he felt a thankfulness slightly tinged with aversion. He was even gratified that she had gone with her husband to Jaipur to be introduced to the rest of his family and shown her new estate. Though it had the ring of a romance from a century ago, she had to receive homage from the subjects to whom the young rajah was not only a master, a figure of authority, but an object of affection. They spoke of him with concern and respect; they had known him since he was a child. Istvan was relieved at not having to meet the rajah, to look him in the eye, to smile, to press his hand — at being spared all that. Though, of course, he could have managed to lie, if one could describe as lying the resumption of the friendly gestures that had passed between them before the event he would have preferred to erase from his memory.

He was grateful to Grace that she was not in Delhi. He felt the cowardly satisfaction of an accomplice who sees his partner in crime and does not feel their act as a betrayal, but thinks indulgently of himself, feels his guilt mitigated, and absolves them both.

A past to hide, to bury. Would that mad, reckless act not be punished some day? Would not justice demand that it be reflected on once again, apart from the violent spasms of the flesh and the singing of the blood?

He shuddered. He began to listen intently. The cries outside the window, so monotonously repeated that he had almost become accustomed to them, suddenly stopped. She died, he thought with a mixture of sorrow, relief, and disgust at the imbecility of Krishan’s wife. But did he have a right to judge her? What could she have done? Krishan had long since squandered her dowry. To be barren is to be cursed. He would send her back to her parents in the village to be a laughingstock. Perhaps it was better, instead of letting oneself be spayed, to accept the verdict of death.

When he left the embassy after work, he met Judit returning from the servants’ quarters. Her face glistened with sweat, but she was smiling triumphantly.

“It went well. It flows,” she whispered in his ear. “She had never touched alcohol before; that is the Hindu religion. The cognac worked a miracle.”

“Not for long.”

“No miracle exempts one from death,” she said soberly. “In any case, she is not suffering now. We have a month to get her to a surgeon.”

Terey looked into her dark, somber eyes, now, in the glare of the sun, lighted from inside like amber. He could see that she was moved.

“You don’t allow yourself a show of emotion.”

“Do you want me to cry over her? I hate pious stupidity. If she will not listen to us, too bad, let her die. I’m afraid a month will seem terribly long to her. She has so much time yet. The day after tomorrow she will forget that she was calling for death to free her from suffering. When I know people better, even when I look at you, it seems to me that each is to himself both hangman and victim. There is no salvation.”

“It will be a hollow victory for you that you predicted the course of events. You need only be patient and wait a little.”

“Yes, Istvan,” she nodded, “but surprises happen sometimes. A couple of times I was so fortunate as to happen upon — a man.”

“Well, and what about it? Were you happier?”

“This is not the time to talk about it. You are coaxing confidences about lost love from me. Believe me, for those few people, and I can count them on the fingers of one hand, it was worth it to live.”

Out of the embassy walked Lajos Ferenc, still immaculate and fresh after a day’s work, with the bow tie between the points of his starched collar perfectly straight. His long, wavy hair was slightly tinged with silver. He had the good looks of a mannequin in a clothing store window.

“Will one of you be in town today? I have a little work to do, I must be at home, and I have films to pick up.”

He would never have admitted that he wanted to lie down, to look through the magazines or play bridge with his wife and neighbors. No — he always had to sit down to work, to attend to something, broaden his knowledge; he never broke free of work, but he achieved his goals.

He avoided meetings with friends; when everyone agreed to meet at Volga just for ice cream, he turned up as well, but ate ice cream at a different table, on the watch for an interesting contact that would add to his understanding of the political situation in the country to which he had been posted.

“I will be at an exhibition of children’s painting. Old Shankar invited me to be on the jury. I can pick up the films,” Istvan spoke up.

Ferenc handed him the receipts for the films and thanked him effusively. He walked with perfectly erect posture down the path toward his house.

“I’ll take you, Judit. Wait.” Istvan drove the car out of the slightly shaded parking space. “Oh, what an oven!”

Even through its linen cover, the plastic seat was hot on his back. He slowed down as he passed Ferenc and with a gesture invited him to get in the car. But the secretary only thanked him, slightly raising his Panama hat. It occurred to Terey that they wore hats like that at the Russian embassy.

“Do you know what he said today when I asked him if he weren’t bored sometimes?” Judit began. “‘A man who works with integrity has no time to experience loneliness.’ I tell you, he will go far.”

“And he will not get on anyone’s bad side,” Terey agreed, “not because he has no opinions — but why should he express them, since one can simply repeat the ambassador’s weighty pronouncements?”

“Confess: do you envy him?”

“No. I prefer to be myself and have time to experience loneliness.”

“And I prefer you that way. Well, goodbye. If you go to the cinema this week, think of me — an hour’s kindness to an aging woman,” she joked cheerlessly, tapping his hand.

He didn’t drive away in a hurry. He watched her as she went down a path under enormous trees with leaves that seem to be lacquered.

I know very little about her, he thought. And she also covers over the lacunae in her biography. If she learned languages before the war, she could not have been from the proletariat. Who is she, really? She says that kindness is a form of weakness…

In front of Terey’s house stood a two-wheeled cart with a pony harnessed to it. The cart was loaded with rolled carpets; a fat trader was sleeping on them. The hiss of the braking tires woke him. He started up like a spider emerging from its hole when its web twitches, nudged by its prey.

“Babuji,” the man called, “I have brought carpets.”

“Not today,” Terey said roughly as he passed him. “Another time.”

“A week ago sir also promised. After all, I want nothing. I only ask you let me show you my treasures from Kashmir.”

“I will not buy.”

“Who said buy? Sir don’t have time to look at the whole collection. I brought only one carpet I chose special for you. We don’t talk about money. I have one dream; I want to spread it out for you in a room. You like it, it stay. If no — in a week I bring another one until we find the right one. No. Not a word about money. Is important my little joy when sir pick out something. All right? Please, do me favor,” he begged, holding out his hands.

The watchman blocked his way, holding a thick bamboo stick crosswise.

“Not today. I don’t have time,” Terey rebuffed him.

“That is bad for sir. Americans take the best, but do they know carpets? And I was so happy. Let me spread under feet one rust color, short pile, flower pattern. A true treasure. I saved special for sahib.”

The clusters of climbing plants were parted by dark hands and the vulturine head of the cook in his starched blue turban appeared.

“Sir,” he advised, “it costs nothing. His rugs are beautiful, old. Let him spread it out.”

Istvan suddenly felt tired. So the trader had suborned the cook to aid in the entrapment! The watchman, too, was looking around, making a barrier, with a theatrical gesture, of the bamboo stick. The trader had a pained expression on his face such as one rarely saw even at a funeral. The pony gave a quick shake of its close-clipped mane; horseflies stung him and he stamped the cracked red clay until clods spattered. They were waiting. Can I disappoint them all? he thought. In a couple of days I will tell him to take the carpet away. I am under no obligation because he unrolls it today.

“All right. Show it.” He waved assent. “But quickly. I have no time.”

Then something inconceivable happened. The diffident merchant shouted imperiously; the watchman leaned his stick on the low wall and jumped to lift a thick roll of carpet on his shoulder. The cook disappeared into the house; his commands floated out as he prodded the sweeper, and together, with scraping noises, they pushed a table out of the way, dragged chairs about and cleared a place.

“Who of us has time to lose, sahib?” sighed the merchant. “But worth it to look a moment at this carpet. I go away. Sahib look at it today, tomorrow sit in chair, smoke cigarette, and think why this carpet now the nicest place in the room. Not only nice for the eyes, needs bare feet. Take time and decide. I don’t push. I go away.”

Heavy, sweaty, his puffy, starched white trousers rustling, he walked to the gate as if the outcome of the inspection were of no concern to him.

“Sir—” he turned around as if making a confession with tenderly half-shut, lachrymose eyes “—I cannot make profit off sir. I know sir’s soul. It hungry for beauty.”

Soul? What can he know of me? Istvan wondered. He questioned the neighbors, he got some opinions, he made sure I can pay. He has nothing to lose. He promised the servants a handful of change, he drew them into the scheme. They worked out the tactics and the timing.

He went inside. In that short instant, when he opened the screen door, a little swarm of flies squeezed in and glided around, following the alluring aromas from the kitchen.

The cook and the sweeper stood chatting with their heads hung down like two parrots in a cage, admiring the carpet. It was handsome: rust and brownish-green, with a small, bluish motif of a tree and yellow-green blossoms. The tones were soft, harmonious, the pattern the work of no common artist. The rug pleased Terey, and that exasperated him. The trader must have been a good psychologist, or perhaps they had let him in on the sly, and he had glanced around the walls, spied out Terey’s favorite combination of colors in the pictures.

The sweeper squatted and with a gnarled hand stroked the short nap of the carpet, as if he were afraid he would wake the dyes from sleep.

“The merchant admitted,” Terey said on a hunch, “that he gave you five rupees each to show him the house.”

“He is lying, sahib,” the cook said indignantly. “He only promised me half a rupee. He had to give the watchman twenty naye paise at once or he wouldn’t let him in at the gate. I have still gotten nothing.” His speech had a reproachful ring as he looked with his black eyes from under bristling, grizzled eyebrows.

“So you only have to be promised half a rupee to betray my trust and intrude on my privacy? Aren’t you getting enough?”

“Sahib, I wanted to do the best for myself. We will take out the carpet in two days.”

“Serve the dinner. If you don’t like working for me, you can quit any time and be that merchant’s helper, since you know so much about rugs.”

The cook stood as if stricken by a thunderbolt. His jaw dropped at the thought of leaving the house. There were tears in his eyes. Istvan was sorry for him.

The sweeper had vanished some time before; on hearing angry words, he preferred to disappear.

Terey pulled off his shirt, which was clinging to his back, and removed his sandals. With relief he immersed himself to the neck in the water that was waiting for him in the tub, and relaxed. A few minutes had hardly passed when Pereira was scratching discreetly at the frosted glass in the bathroom door.

“Sahib, dinner is on the table,” he said coaxingly. “Today we have chicken with rice and raisins.”

When he drove the car toward the center of New Delhi at six, the heat had subsided in a golden dust; the softened asphalt smacked under the wheels. He passed slow-moving two-wheeled arbas pulled by docile white oxen. Birds sat on their pale necks and combed through their coats with their beaks, searching for ticks. The drivers, nearly naked, dozed squatting on the shafts. Half asleep, they emitted cries and made disjointed motions, prodding the animals’ hindquarters with sharp sticks. At the sound of the horn they woke and tugged at the strings attached to copper rings in the beasts’ wet nostrils. But before he had passed the arbas their heads had already fallen onto their meager chests, which gleamed with trickles of sweat.

The bare, stony hills around the city looked as if there had been fires on them not long ago, with their dark red, glowing rocks and ashy white bristles of dry grass. The wind raised columns of reddish dust; it powdered the foreheads of pilgrims shrouded in white who moved with small, determined steps as their hands rested on shepherds’ staffs.

Figures like those in Doré’s copperplate etchings in the old Bible, Istvan thought. The world of a thousand years ago.

Huge trucks, with raised coops on their flatbeds, wobbled as they moved along, loaded with sacks of cotton. The hoods painted with stars and flowers reminded Terey of the tops of boxes made by peasants from the region around Debrecen. They passed each other, exchanging joyful blasts of their horns. Some drivers had fastened copper trumpets with red rubber bulbs, two or even three, to their vehicles. They drove the trucks with one hand and with the other played the whole scale of squeals and whines. Passengers casually picked up, sprawling as best they could on the freight, raised lean, twiggy hands in friendly salutes.

In a flutter of dhotis like great skeins of white unrolling, breathless cyclists came riding up in swarms, a little dazzled by the glare, their dark knees moving up and down like levers on a machine. Their unlaced boots dangled from their bare, callused feet. At this time of day the streets were a pulsing mass of bodies; the return from work had begun.

Terey made his way under the viaduct, with difficulty passing the tramways plastered with clusters of people hanging on, and turned into Connaught Place. Motionless clumps of trees and blossoming branches gave off a smell of blighted greenery and dust. The silence startled him. Bicycle bells in the distance chirped like cicadas. Cows, sacred to Hindus, slept in the shade; beside them were whole families of peasants seeking a semblance of coolness and relaxation.

He put on the brakes.

The colonnade of Central Delhi spread in a wide arc of separate shops which even had glass windows. It was possible to walk all the way around it in the shade, under arches supported by light-colored columns. Here sat sellers of souvenirs hammered out of heated horn into the shapes of chalices and lamp shades; a potbellied fellow hawked a stack of sandals; the colorful covers of cheap American detective novels were displayed on a piece of plastic. A peddler discreetly pushed forward a collection of pictures of sensuously entwined couples — an imitation of a frieze from the Black Pagoda, produced somewhere among the bordellos of Calcutta or Hong Kong.

From a little stove under a pillar came the smell of roasted peanuts. A hand studded with rings was extended, offering the nuts in a horn formed by twisting a large leaf. He looked with pleasure into the woman’s beautiful eyes, but shook his head.

“Not today,” he said, so as not to leave her without hope.

He collected Ferenc’s films and was driving to Volga for iced coffee when he caught sight of Miss Ward — her slim figure, her graceful legs. Her chestnut hair glistened red in a streak of sunlight. She was so absorbed in examining some homespun cotton printed with little horses, buffalo heads, and dancing goddesses that he overtook her without her noticing. He stood close behind her, watching the hands through which a cascade of linen poured, before saying in a laughing voice:

“Hello, Margit.”

“Hello,” she flung back. But no sooner had she thrown him a sharp glance with her blue eyes than her face lighted in a friendly smile. “Ah, it’s you.”

“You have forgotten my name? Istvan. Why have you given no sign of life? I thought you were stuck in Agra.”

“For the time being they are keeping me in Delhi. I have four hours’ work at a clinic. I’m learning the language, the indispensable phrases, ‘Be calm,’ ‘This won’t hurt,’ ‘Look to the left, to the right,’ ‘Don’t move,’ ‘Everything will be all right.’”

“Are you staying long?”

“Till the end of the month.”

“What do you do by yourself?”

“How do you know that I am by myself? Do you think I’m bored?” the girl laughed. “True, Grace is in Jaipur. I was counting on her to initiate me into this world, but now I see that I can take care of myself very well. I make the rounds of the shops, I see more than I buy. Folk crafts cost nothing here! Embroidery, peasant prints like this”—she shook out a strip of material printed with galloping horses. “Sandalwood figurines. I must take something home to each of my women friends to prove that I thought of them even in India.”

“Don’t buy them here.” He took the fabric printed with blue and vermilion out of her hand. “I will show you real peasant saris. Have you been to Old Delhi?”

“No. I go around the neighborhoods I know. Mr. Vijayaveda advised me not to venture there. Would you have time to go with me some day?”

“It would be a pleasure to take someone there for the first time, to hear their cries of rapture and admiration — to look at India again through other eyes.”

“Do you have your car? I sent away the one from UNESCO. I wanted to walk around a bit when the heat let up.”

Angular rays of sunlight invaded the tiled passage under the arcade. Motes of dust sailed in the glare. The seller of fabric unfastened his shirt to the navel to cool his bulging, shaggy chest with a palm leaf fan.

“How do you feel — being here?” Terey took the young woman by the hand.

“Well, even very well. Look how I’ve tanned.” She showed him a supple arm. Her skin had a golden tint. There were freckles on it, which made him smile.

“Shall we begin with coffee and ice cream? Or go on a souvenir hunt first?”

“Can one risk eating anything here? So many times they’ve frightened me with talk of amoebae, dysentery, typhus.”

“Look — they all eat, and they are still alive.” He pointed to peasant women in orange skirts who were camping under the trees.

“But there are such multitudes of them, and only one of me,” she laughed.

“One must eat what they eat,” he explained when they were sitting in the coffee shop. In its dim interior, electric lights created an artificial night. In spite of the fragrances of strong coffees set out in containers attached to stands, and the breeze from cooling machines, hardly any buzz of conversation could be heard. Glum Hindus sat at the tables, resting their heads on their hands. Women with lovely eyes toyed with flowers or crumbled cake with their spoons. A Chinese musician beat out jazzy rhythms. He noticed Istvan and, inclining his head, played part of a march by Radetzky — the only melody he associated with Hungary.

“Start with this cake,” Terey suggested, pouring them coffee.

“What is sprinkled on it?” Her finger hung over the tray of cakes.

“Real silver. It was hammered so long that it broke into flakes. They dissolve and the system absorbs them. People here consider silver a supplement essential for emotional well-being.”

She put some on the end of her spoon with comic distrust, and with an air of concentration took a bite. She had luminous eyes, as dolls have sometimes. She wrinkled her little freckled nose with humorous charm. She was certainly not a beauty in the classic sense, but she attracted attention; he saw glances aimed at her, he heard whispers, and they gave him pleasure. A new face, a woman about whom everything was not yet known.

“I don’t feel the silver,” she exulted. “It is utterly delicious. And the green at the bottom is edible as well?”

“Pistachio paste.”

“You will have me on your conscience — I’ve forgotten your name again!”

“Istvan.”

“It’s hard.”

“You will remember it if you repeat it often. Especially just before you go to sleep.”

“Istvan. Ist-van,” she said, pronouncing it with an English inflection, like a polite little girl learning a lesson. “Couldn’t I change it to Terry? I had a dog by that name.”

“I will accept whatever name you give me.”

“Grace was right to put me on my guard against you. You like to trifle with people’s hearts.”

“No!” he contradicted her with zeal. “You said yourself that you have been left on your own. It’s no particular sacrifice on my part to share your solitude. I’ll give you my home telephone number. Perhaps one day we can go to the cinema? Or I’ll take you to a hunt? We can take a trip by car and I will show you an authentic village. The country people are good, hospitable. There’s nothing to be afraid of. As long as you’re here.”

“So many ideas, Istvan! I’ll hold you to your word.” She looked at him warmly. “You must be bored if you find even a lady doctor’s company diverting. But perhaps you have me confused with Grace?”

He looked at her through bluish cigarette smoke, at her graceful head, her candid, unpainted lips — nude, he thought jocularly — and her eyes, so crystalline and full of blue lights that they were disturbing.

“I certainly do not have you confused with Grace.”

He felt a great friendliness toward her. It was pleasant to appear in public with a woman who was good-looking, well dressed, and young.

“You don’t even know what I’m like. Perhaps after one stroll you’ll have had enough of me.”

“No.” He shook his head; he was certain of that. She smiled perversely, emphasizing the dimples in her cheeks. She looked a little arch, as if she knew a good deal about him. He grew uneasy: had Grace whispered something to her?

“Let’s get out of here.” He rose suddenly, touching her hand, for the double curtains that served as doors had parted, and in the unforgiving blaze of the sun he spied Judit with two acquaintances from Bulgaria.

They rose and exchanged greetings with the new arrivals, motioning them to their vacant table, for which a bearded Sikh had been lurking in wait. Terey did not fail to notice that Judit discreetly raised a thumb, a sign that she endorsed his choice. They went out into the sun, blinking.

The Austin exploded with heat. They rolled down the windows frantically. The blast of air scorched their faces.

“Why did you take fright when that woman came in?” Margit adjusted her dress, which had been pulled askew by the wind.

“She is the ambassador’s secretary. They’ll be talking straight away. And what concern is it of theirs?”

“Oh, Terry, Terry, you must have gotten into a lot of mischief here. I already know whom to ask about your past if you don’t tell me yourself: Dr. Kapur lives not far from us.”

“No doubt he will charge you like a patient coming for consultation. Only you must remember that he is a clairvoyant. He will tell you of future matters, things that have not occurred yet.”

“You are afraid of Kapur?” She clapped her hands. “A fine how-do-you-do! Grace has gone away and I am thrown back on your evasions, with no defense! Who will reveal to me what you really are?”

On the road, climbing up a bare hill, stretched a caravan of wagons pulled by oxen and camels. The big wheels, made of boards nailed together, creaked loudly. The drivers shouted. The great horns of the oxen drooped with weariness in the red sun; the camels moved in stately procession, their heads swaying.

A girl in a green sari, with a bulbous vessel on her head, knelt in the middle of the road and elevated her hands in a movement full of grace. Her bracelets threw off fire; bells fastened around her ankles chimed. Terey blew the horn. She looked around, startled, and fluttered to the edge of the road.

“Stop. I’d like to photograph her,” Margit requested. “She danced so beautifully.”

“I’d rather you looked at her from a distance, but try approaching her. See what she does.”

He stopped the car beside the road and watched with roguish satisfaction as Margit made her way to the girl, showing by signs that she wanted to take a picture. The girl resisted, covering her face with fierce determination; the pot fell and dark shards scattered over the road.

“I warned you.” He opened the door. “You’d be better off listening to your elders.”

“She was gathering ox dung with her hands. She packed it into the pot on her head. Yet she seems like a princess in a fairy tale, she has so many jewels.”

“Bamboo hoops studded with sequins and colored glass. She was gathering fuel. She will mold it into cakes and stick them to the wall to dry in the sun. Who would want to cut these bushes with those tough branches full of thorns? Manure mixed with straw burns well. Look: there they are carrying away whole bags of dry manure.”

Low mud huts clustered densely along the road. On roofs covered with pieces of rusty tin, pigeons walked. Women squatted next to smoking bonfires, frying cakes in pans. Naked children with large eyes ran along behind automobiles that flew humming down the road, or sleepily sucked bits of sugar cane. Streaks of bluish smoke hung in the air, violet against the scarlet sky.

“Remember that pungent smell,” he told her. “It’s the smell of India at supper time.”

They turned off the road. The Great Mosque, an enormous red building, seemed to menace the sky with its toothed walls. Vultures dozed above the gate, each on its turret, like adornments cast in bronze. Innumerable market stalls huddled by the steps leading to the fortified entrances.

A crowd surrounded them. Itinerant barbers, cleaners of ears, sellers of vegetable soup, and swindlers with monkeys dressed as soldiers, all shouted. Leaning on the horn, Terey cut his way with difficulty through the mass of people. They stepped aside reluctantly and peeped eagerly into the car, beating their fingers on the windows. All around rose the racket of voices hawking merchandise — old pots, wires, screws, spread out on newspaper. Every kind of rubbish thrown away in a European neighborhood was looked over three times here; anything might come in handy. Some objects could be sold, others bartered, if the buyer lacked the small change to pay for them. Homeless loiterers, gawkers, moved along the stalls among the odds and ends, hoping that if they spoke favorably of someone’s wares, they could add their voices to the bargaining, be useful as intermediaries, and perhaps by flattery cadge a few paise.

Terey cleared a path through the crowd and parked the Austin. So many people gathered around the car that Margit hesitated about getting out.

“Well, brave it,” he prodded. “They will make way for you, they will move back. You wanted to see real life, after all.”

Half-naked boys jumped forward, raising their hands like diligent pupils.

“I will mind the car!” they called. “I will be watchman!”

He appointed two so they could keep each other company; they would guard both sides of the car. They shouted to passersby, proud of their employment.

Margit seized Istvan’s hand tightly, as if she were afraid the crowd would separate them — that it would pull them into the narrow, crooked little streets and they would never find each other.

The odor of drains, of rotting peelings and steaming urine, beat into the nostrils. The three-story houses, solidly built below but with casually knocked together upper floors, pulsed with life. Lamplight leaked through chinks in the walls, along with the sounds of gramophones and sewing machines run by impatient hands, singing, and the crying of babies. Smells of heated coconut oil and smoldering sticks of incense, placed in clusters in vessels filled with votive ash, rode on the air.

On roofs barely secured with railings made from poles, children chased each other, squealing. Terey and Margit squeezed slowly through the crowd that breathed in their faces, reeking of spices, sweaty clothing, and pomade. Gaunt, perspiring peasants tried to catch up with Istvan. They touched him familiarly, saw that he was a European, and hastily pulled away. In front of the white-skinned pair the crowd was sparser; behind them came a growing mass of those who would not retreat but went on staring, discussing Margit’s beauty at the tops of their voices, admiring her dress and high heels.

“Goldsmiths’ shops. Look!” He pressed her hand.

A peasant woman in an elaborately gathered orange skirt and a tight green bodice pulled a scarf from her black hair, wound it around her hands, and stood with one foot on a stair. With caressing gestures an apprentice placed a heavy ring of silver around her ankle. An acetylene torch hummed with a clear flame. The silver ornaments shimmered. Delight showed on the woman’s face; she must have coveted the anklet for a long time. Leaning on a counter, a master craftsman with a fat, almost female chest shouted to a young man, who quickly heated a thin silver wire and with light strokes of a hammer secured the anklet so it could not be removed. Two mustachioed peasants with very dark skin, wearing sun-bleached robes unfastened and dangling loose, picked coins out of a red kerchief and stacked them on the counter. Touching them with their fingers, they counted them several times. Chains, necklaces, and buckles, hanging on wires from a ceiling invisible in the dimness, revolved slowly, alluringly. Flashes from the torch threw darting shadows; the glow from little lights trickled as if in drops around the ornaments.

“How beautiful she is,” Margit whispered. The crowd pressed in on them; they felt its warm, spicy breath on their necks. The peasant woman was alarmed. She tried to pull her skirt around her slender calf, but the blows from the hammer went on ringing.

“That can’t come off, can it?”

“No. She will be the guardian of the treasure she wears. When they run short of money, she will come to this street and put her foot on the step, and the goldsmith will hammer the wire apart or saw through the anklet. He will throw it onto the scale and then he will repay her — only for the silver by weight, not for the anklet as an ornament, a work of art. That is his profit.”

The woman gazed around with huge, splendid eyes that were clearly troubled. The craftsmen had made a mistake in their reckoning. One of them wiped the tip of his beak-like nose with his thumb. The goldsmith raised his bloated body and in the flutelike voice of the castrated invited the foreigners, if they would be pleased to come in, to look at his wares. He lifted the lid of an encrusted box and, like one who feeds poultry, sprinkled a fistful of unset stones on the counter.

“Perhaps you will go in and choose something for yourself? I warn you, they are not worth much. The real jewels are hiding deep inside the house. He would show them escorted by assistants, would do the honors, would tell the histories: how he acquired them, in whose hands they had been previously, and what luck they had brought their owners. Apart from their value, stones are highly esteemed for their magical properties.”

But Margit was already moving down the street, her sights fixed on a tall Hindu with a black mane of greased hair. On his forehead was a yellow and white three-toothed sign. He walked aloof, as if he saw no one. The crowd parted before him. He was naked; his muscular body gleamed warm bronze. A sheath embroidered with beads covered his maleness, rather defining than concealing it.

He passed them, looking over people’s heads into the red sky full of the fire of evening.

“A holy man. A devotee of Vishnu.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A saint. For him the world is an illusion, as dreams are for you. He is awakened to eternity.”

She shook her head, signaling that she did not comprehend, until her hair shone like copper.

A little girl lifted a baby who had been straddling her hip and blocked their way, watching Margit with rapt attention. She asked for nothing; she did not notice when the crowd pushed her toward a wall. She only went on looking greedily, astonished at the color of Margit’s hair, her blue eyes, and her clothes.

A cow with a floppy, lopsided hump on the back of its neck made the road impassable. The faithful, smearing their hands with red lead, pressed their fingerprints on its flaxen-colored back. Beaded rosaries rattled around the animal’s creased neck; a glass ring stuck on its horn gave off a greenish shimmer. It poked its friendly muzzle, wet with saliva, into a vegetable seller’s basket and plucked a carrot from a bunch. The weak, emaciated man did not cry out, was not angry, did not strike. He only folded his hands as if begging a favor and tried to persuade it to walk a step farther, to move toward the other stalls.

The cow’s muzzle worked sluggishly; it seemed to be cogitating deeply. The carrot vanished between its dark lips. Its black eyes, like those of the Hindus, were full of melancholy.

Suddenly it stood with legs wide apart, raised its tail, and pissed voluminously. Margit looked on astonished as an old woman in a sapphire-blue sari pressed her palms together and caught the stream. Piously she washed out the eyes of a girl who was keeping her company.

“A sacred cow,” he explained, “so magical forces are latent in everything that comes from it.”

The human river flowed by until they were dazed by the gaudy turbans, fiery scarves, saris edged with gold, faces of piercing beauty, full lips, and deep looks from artfully made-up eyes.

“Does their gorgeousness affect you, Terry?” she asked. “I feel terribly commonplace here.”

A smile played on his face. He leaned toward her ear.

“There are no eyes like yours. Only now, against the background of this crowd, have I seen you. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“You console me a little.” As if struck by a sudden discovery, she added quickly, “Did you see how many here have diseases of the eye? Painted — and running with pus. Beautiful — and threatened with blindness.”

“You suffer from occupational fatigue. I see only their shape and luster. Fortunately, I am not an oculist.”

They turned onto a side street that was still more crowded; it was full of little silk shops. Whole sheaves of orange and yellow shawls hung from rods, like banners of the hot summer. Sellers, sitting cross-legged at tables, poured through their bare hands limp veils, diaphanous as mist, with glittering gold and silver threads.

“Shawls from Benares for the most beautiful…blessed shawls,” they called patiently.

On the upper floors behind gratings made of flimsy wooden slats appeared a multitude of rouged faces. They were strangely cheerful. This sudden atmosphere of pleasure, the provocative cries, the laughter like the gurgling of pigeons and the jangle of music Margit found disquieting. She looked around the clusters of heads on the porches. Women pointed fingers at her, emitting birdlike cries of astonishment. She raised a hand to them and fluttered it in greeting. A roar of merriment answered her.

“Is that a school?”

“No. A brothel.”

She looked down the street. Gramophones were playing; radio speakers blared. Girls who seemed identical, all with jewels in their hair, leaned out of innumerable windows.

“How is it possible? All those houses?” She could not conceive of it. “The whole street? There must be hundreds here.”

“Thousands,” he corrected her. “They don’t have an easy life. Every Saturday the father comes from the country to collect money for rice for the family.”

“Have you ever been here?”

“The very poorest come here, those who cannot afford a wife. This is not for a European.”

The noise in the alley mingled with the strumming of music. Someone called from a roof and clapped his hands to attract their attention. There was a pungent smell of incense.

They walked one behind the other like straying children, holding hands. The paving was uneven and slippery from dishwater and fermenting peelings.

“Oh, wait” —she caught hold of his arm— “something’s wrong. I’ve broken a heel.”

“Go barefoot — I don’t care,” he laughed. “Half the people here do.”

“Let’s go back to the car. Really, I don’t know what you find so amusing.” She was limping.

“You’re hopping like a sparrow.”

Suddenly it seemed to Margit that from all the houses, from roofs and porches, they were looking at her and laughing. Even the throng moving about in the street seemed to have become a mob of scoffers. Her whole body was covered with perspiration. What concern are they of mine, she scolded herself. I’ll get into the car, I’ll go away, disappear. It will be as if I died. I am from another world.

“Good evening,” someone behind them said in English.

They stopped. Ram Kanval had overtaken them. Nothing distinguished him from other men in this neighborhood: not the unfastened shirt over a slender chest glistening with sweat, the sandals on feet without socks, or the black eyes with the somnolent, hungry look.

“Perhaps you would like to visit me?” he suggested. “I live not far away, by the Ajmeri Gate. I will show you my new pictures.”

“That would be nice, but not today. Miss Ward has broken a heel. She must buy some sandals.”

“My acquaintance has a shoe shop not far from here. I will take you there.”

Through a murky yard littered with barrels, beside a little restaurant where strips of cake were being fried in an enormous pan, they squeezed past a gate and came out on another street.

The red reflection in the sky was not enough; the interiors of the shops burned with glittering lights. Thousands of colored bulbs blinked.

When chairs had been pulled up and they were seated, the painter disappeared for a moment into the labyrinth of rooms and partitions from which the rattle of a machine and the noise of hammering issued.

The owner had put a jacket on over his untucked shirt. He was a bearded Sikh with a fleshy nose. He ordered coffee to be served. They sensed that their presence had aroused his hopes and that large purchases were surely expected.

Two men knelt by Margit. They took off her shoes. A low lamp placed on the ground beside her threw a bright beam on her narrow bare feet. Bundles of varicolored sandals were brought. A large finger unfastened a strap and grasped her instep obliquely. In full light Istvan saw her legs, slender, graceful, exposed. The motions of the kneeling men, whose shadows played on the ceiling, seemed to transform the measuring of the shoes into a mysterious ritual.

“The shop is a real discovery!” Margit was elated as she walked out with three pairs of sandals. “I feel different already!”

On the street, night was falling. The air was still and heavy, choked with scents. “Just a moment — please wait — I will accompany you in a moment,” the painter said, then edged his way back into the interior of the shop.

“What are they quarreling about?” Margit was listening intently. “Did the Sikh cheat us?”

“Don’t pry,” Terey said. “You were not supposed to notice this scene. The painter is pressing his claim for a percentage because he brought them customers, and good ones, who didn’t haggle over prices. Understand: this is not greed. He is struggling to live. To live — that means to eat, and where does the money come from?”

“I had no intention of injuring his self-respect. Look — now the street is like a scene from an opera.”

In spite of the host of lights and winking neon signs, figures swathed in garments like sheets swarmed about in the golden dusk. They had embroidered openings for their eyes, like specters. The Muslim women were returning from the mosque. The slender figures in saris, with their beautiful eyes, moved with stately grace. Flashes of colored light dotted the men’s white shirts. An intoxicating aroma came from inside the shops: the smell of spices, insecticide, and incense. Bands of carefree, giggling children raced about in the crowd.

Ram Kanval returned with a boy who took the parcel of sandals from Margit. “I had to see to it that your purchases were put away in the car,” he said.

The little watchmen raised a joyful clamor on receiving half a rupee. The painter said his goodbyes, inviting them to come again and look at his pictures.

The walls of the Great Mosque reached the nearer stars. The minarets were like spears thrust into the sky. “Are you satisfied?” Terey turned to Margit as the beams from their headlights sent the white figures scampering.

“I felt that I was a drop in that relentless river of life, imperceptible, insignificant. We, white people, consider ourselves very important, as if the world would collapse without us. Newspapers, films, and our limited range of acquaintance feed that sense of superiority. Here I felt how terribly full of living things this country is. They multiply, they teem, they are on the march. One would like to know, where is this march going?”

Terey listened with an indulgent smile: the enchantment with India! She is still carried away with the spiritual life, the philosophy of renunciation. And then she will notice the effects. She will understand.

“I will show you where that river ends.”

He grew somber. They passed the last homestead. They drove down along the Yamuna. Its water flowed through a slimy bed and wove itself into a riffling current under a railroad bridge. A guard with a rifle paced up and down, whistling a doleful tune.

Dozens of fires blazed on the bank. Some were overgrown with bristling heaps of stone; others simply glowed red when light breezes from the water drifted over them.

“Why have you brought me here?”

From a clump of trees, cicadas strummed so gratingly that it was like a drill in the ears.

“Do they burn the dead here?” she whispered.

“And there is the cemetery.” He pointed to the water spotted with starlight. Streaks of smoke wandered above its surface. Over the bridge rumbled a line of tiny lighted squares: the windows of the southbound train to Bombay.

He took Margit’s hand and guided her among the burning pyres. A dry crackling came from the flames. Two fire tenders covered the stones sparingly with kindling, forming a meager bed of sinewy sticks for a body shrouded in a white cloth. A woman in white brought a small brass vessel and poured a little melted butter on the remains. The pyre, kindled with a torch, burned laboriously, reluctantly.

There was no singing, no funeral speech, only the dry snapping of the swaying flames, the smell of butter and another smell that evoked dread in Terey — the odor, well known to him from wartime, of burned, bombarded cities, of charred corpses.

The writhing bed of fire — the pyre beside which they were standing — moved from inside, as if the dead body were trying to rise. Among the flaming branches a blackened hand thrust itself out, its palm open as if in pleading. Tatters of linen were burning on it.

“What’s that?” Margit huddled close to Terey.

“The spasm of a muscle in the fire.”

One of the funeral attendants pushed the protruding hand with a pole and held it in the thick of the flames until it blackened and fell down.

“This is where the course of the river that so delighted you ends. Without seeing this place you could understand very little about India.”

Up to their waists in thick smoke, they started back to the car. The dead were being carried down on flimsy palls.

“Where do you want to go now?”

“Home, Terry, home,” she whispered submissively. “You teach me humility.”

“Not I. They.” He pointed to the long, flickering fires as if they were warning signs.