Stone Tablets

Chapter IV

“The meeting took place in a warm atmosphere full of mutual understanding; it became yet another proof that cultural relations are solidifying.” Istvan put down his pen and sighed deeply. Just such orotund, almost meaningless sentences were expected in the reports of all ministries of foreign affairs.

The curtain was not completely drawn; the sun beat through the chink with a white glare that made the eyelids blink and forced the face into a tired grimace. The drone of the cooling machine did not drown out the measured tapping of the drops that gathered at the end of the pipe and splashed into the little tin drip pan, then dried without a trace. The slow spattering measured the time. He raised his eyes irritably to assure himself that the next drop that clung to the copper pipe would swell and lazily detach itself. He urged it on with a look; he almost begged it to fall.

The telephone rang jarringly.

“Be so kind as to bestir yourself and come here. Comrade Ambassador summons you.” It was Judit’s voice.

“Must I come right away? I have just begun—”

“I’d advise you to come. Ferenc is already here.”

“But what for?” He tried for another moment’s delay. His trousers were sticking to his sweaty legs; the leather on his chair was unbearably hot. He didn’t want to get up, to go out into the stifling heat of the hall, to carry on a conversation with an artificial smile.

“Agra,” she said, and hung up.

He rose so quickly that a lizard that had been dozing on the ceiling scampered into a distant corner.

The ambassador stood with his hands in his pockets, resting his broad backside on the edge of his desk and stooping forward with raised eyebrows, like a bull ready to charge. Ferenc, sporting a sheaf of black curly hair and the affability of the leader of a gypsy orchestra, opened his briefcase.

“An invitation to a congress in honor of Rabindranath Tagore has arrived,” he began, as if he were serving a tennis ball.

“How do you feel, comrade?” the ambassador asked Terey solicitously. “The heat has not overcome you?”

“No. I like dry weather.”

“He likes it,” Kalman Bajcsy repeated morosely. “So you will go to Agra. Tagore — that’s your department: a writer, a Nobel laureate. You will represent Hungary!” he added grandiloquently.

“I thought we could pass this up. Tagore is not published in our country. We would escape troublesome questions,” Istvan said as if in self-defense.

“I count on your astuteness. Speak, impress them, but don’t commit us to anything. In personal conversations, unofficially, don’t spare the praise, it costs nothing,” the ambassador coached him. “Who doesn’t like to bask in approval?”

“Comrade Ferenc hasn’t been to Agra yet. He could take the occasion to see the historic landmarks. The Taj Mahal is one of the seven wonders of the world,” Istvan offered. “He could take the car and Krishan, he would be at his own disposal.”

“I will not send Krishan anywhere,” the ambassador bristled. “He is an utter fool. I must keep an eye on him. His behavior is so erratic that it is time to look for a new driver. The accident taught him nothing. You have a car. Drive yourself there. You like the weather so much,” he said ironically. “Run over to Agra for three days.”

“So you are assigning me to do this?” he asked, secretly gratified. “So our presence there is really necessary?”

“I wish you to go,” Bajcsy said emphatically.

“Something is wrong with my eyes.” Ferenc adjusted his sunglasses, which reflected like mirrors and made him look like an exasperated bumblebee. “The sun hurts them. I would gladly go, but there isn’t enough time. Work is pressing. We’ve had word that the couriers will be here in a couple of days. We must prepare the mail, compile the reports. Everything is coming down on me.”

“Very well. I’ll go.”

“The congress begins tomorrow,” the ambassador reminded him, producing an ornate invitation card. “As occasion arises, you will serve as our correspondent. You are really a poet, but that needn’t hinder you from drafting statements in prose. So — acquit yourself well for my sake.” He clapped a heavy hand on the counselor’s shoulder. It was rather like the comradely gesture a commander makes to encourage an officer sent on a dangerous mission.

How naive they are, he thought, rolling up the window as the big gadflies swooped blindly and rattled against the windshield. They thought they were forcing this down my throat, while I was only looking for a chance to dash over to Agra.

The wish to see her is getting the best of me, he thought, finding himself surprised. How I have missed her lately! It’s good to talk with her. She is excellent company on evening walks to Old Delhi and the cinema. Somehow she has inserted herself into the dull rhythm of my life.

The breezes stirred reddish streaks like smoke from the parched, empty fields. Packs of vultures slept fitfully in the bare tops of lonely trees. Nothing was vivid green except the wings of parrots feeding in the road, tottering clumsily as they pecked at dry camel droppings. They darted away just in front of the car; some hit the fender lightly and flew away screeching, but none fell under the wheels.

What do I really want? What am I expecting? he thought. Without answering his own question he smiled, for he saw her as she came up to him — slender, lithe, with a coppery sheen to her hair as it swung with the rhythm of her walk — and caught him in the glance of blue eyes shining like water in a mountain stream in the spring, when the snow melts. Surely she would be waiting. She must have gotten his telegram the day before.

He found himself in villages built of clay, and now empty. Scrawny hens ran away startled, stretching their necks, which were bare of feathers. Only by the well were there women, women in green and orange saris who beat the wet linen with sticks, gossiping cheerfully. At the sight of the car they stopped their work and shielded their eyes with their hands, watching for the bus. Their necklaces and bracelets glittered as if they were wealthy.

As he approached the city itself, he had to slow down. In the shade of the trees around the temple, arbas stood in a circle with their shafts raised. The oxen lay together, lazily munching dry grass. A crowd of the faithful were singing and beating gongs. For the last few minutes he had to steer through the spellbound crowd; it left him tired and irritated.

When he pulled up in front of the hotel — a one-story building replete with shady verandas and pergolas, its horseshoe shape set in a park — he was certain that Margit would immediately emerge from the shade. He even loitered for a moment, raising the hood, checking the oil, glancing at the overheated tires.

His room was reserved.

“Is Miss Ward staying here?”

“Yes,” answered the clerk, shooing a cat from a table. The cat stretched and yawned widely, showing the pale pink interior of its mouth. “Yes, sir, in number eleven, on the right.”

As he signed the register he saw a telegram tucked into the frame of a large photograph of Gandhi. He could read the address: it was his telegram to Margit. He was a little troubled.

“Miss Ward is in?”

The clerk spread his hands helplessly.

“I do not know, sir. The key is not here—” he checked the pigeonhole in a drawer. “Miss Ward is not a tourist. I do not know her schedule.Tourists get guides from us, from the hotel. Perhaps you—”

“I know Agra. I’d be a pretty good guide myself. Thank you.”

Two porters in turbans with gold piping were lurking about, ready to carry his suitcase.

“Number fifteen, the third room past Miss Ward’s. We have no room thirteen; tourists don’t like the devil’s dozen.”

He drove the car into the shade. The metal body was unbearably hot. He followed the porter through a pergola overgrown with a dense screen of wisteria.

The door of number eleven was ajar. He went in without knocking, pleased that he would surprise Margit. The white room felt cool. He looked around: a bed, a table, two armchairs, a wardrobe, a fireplace without adornment. There was no trace of a woman’s presence: no photographs, no flowers. He was thinking that the attendant had made a mistake when he noticed a few pairs of shoes next to the wall; he recognized the sandals they had bought on that first evening together.

He heard the drumming sound of running water in the bathroom.

“Margit,” he called, tapping on the door with his fingers.

The door opened instantly. An old Hindu woman who was on her knees scouring the bathtub, and was obviously startled, answered that Miss Ward had gone out in the car that morning with the gentleman who usually came for her.That pained him as if it had been an insult.

“When will she return?”

“She took a bag of bedding with her. Perhaps she is spending the night away,” the maid said in a languid drawl, tilting her head with a bewildered look.

On the desk lay stationery and envelopes with a little image of the Taj Mahal, which drew multitudes of visitors to Agra. He had pulled out the chair with the thought of writing a few words when suddenly, with unreasoning vehemence, he whispered, “No. No.” He went to his own room, his steps pounding on the brick pavement. He sighed like a dog that has lost the scent.

Where has she been taken? Who comes for her? It seemed odd to him that he felt such acute jealousy at the first suspicion that he might have a rival. Perhaps it was simply a doctor, a colleague from the center.

He washed his hands and face and knotted his tie with abrupt motions. The room smelled of insecticide and fresh paint. He felt a premonition that this first setback was a sign of more to come. Everything to do with the congress became distasteful to him.

He sat behind the wheel and tried to find his way through the streets. They all led to the riverfront, where peasants brought cattle to wade and dead bodies were burned. Through trails of bluish smoke he saw the rhythmic gestures of herders leaning forward with palms cupped, splashing water on the backs of the oxen. White terns flew over the water and, meowing like cats, collided with their own reflections. They shook off the drops and flapped their wings, disappointed that the water was only water and not an abyss of light that would bring them more reflections glistening with silver.

The little map outlined on the invitation was not enough for him. He had to ask directions from passersby, who looked at him and then at the car with great black eyes as if regretting that they did not understand. Here, away from the center of the city, it was hard to find people who spoke English. Suddenly he spied the Peugeot that belonged to the French correspondent and followed it to a large park.

Under the trunks of huge mangroves groups of Hindus stood, engaging in lively discussions. The university — as it was rather pompously called — resembled a Greek temple of harmonious proportions with tympana resting on columns. He had hardly parked the Austin when its representatives came up and welcomed him effusively. They fastened a golden badge to his jacket. On it were a lotus flower and a red ribbon on which he read “Tagore: knowledge, truth, God.”

They spoke with gaudy rhetorical flourishes of the weather, the charming features of the journey, the attractions of the country. When they learned that he was the delegate from Hungary, they tried to determine exactly where that country was. Of course they had a general idea that it was somewhere in Europe.

They conducted him to a building where he was introduced to the director of the institution, who could have posed for a monument to Tolstoy, with his majestic mane of gray hair and luxuriant beard.

There was the ceremonial opening of an exhibit of translations of Tagore. He noticed with pleasure that there were several in Hungarian. He showed them to the director, discreetly declining to mention that they had been issued before the war. Later, infuriated critics had branded Tagore a naive idealist and a woolgathering mystic, making a revival of enthusiasm for his work impossible.

“Is our great writer popular in your country?” asked the director, who had the face of a prophet — a dark face of saintly gauntness framed with white wisps of disheveled hair, and a fiery eye that seemed to pierce Istvan straight through.

Famous? Before the war his books had enjoyed small press runs; the elite read him, chiefly women. Popular? His name was dropped in conversation in salons but rarely mentioned by critics. Certainly he was no less famous there than here, where ninety percent of the people did not have his books within easy reach.

“Of course,” he said warmly. “Tagore is excellently translated. He is numbered among the classic poets. It is impossible to be a cultured person and not know what he was to India.”

“Splendid!” the prophet exulted, and began to recount how some under these old trees had walked with the master, and what he had studied. From that peaceloving, self-abnegating theory that the world could be changed slowly by persuasion and personal example had come the strength to resist British imperialism. Here the core of the Congress Party had formed; here Gandhi had spoken. And it had all begun as friendly meetings, strolls in the shade of old trees, the sharing of views on beauty, progress, and creativity.

The hall was empty at first, and rather cool. Istvan was called to the platform. When his turn came, he was supposed to give a welcoming speech and assure his listeners that Tagore’s thoughts were alive and bearing fruit in Hungary. There were not chairs for all who were gathering in the room; some sat on carpets. The organizers, in untucked shirts, brought in a microphone and tested its sound. Boys with sashes over their chests, wearing floppy sandals, were enjoying themselves under the pretense of keeping order. There were necklaces of strung flowers for the honored guests, but too many had been prepared; the boys searched out beautiful women in the crowd and threw the extra garlands onto their necks.

The ceremonies began with the singing of a hymn to the Mother of India, the words of which had been written by the master himself.

A little girl came running in with a tray. Bowing, she anointed people’s foreheads so their thoughts would turn without distraction to the highest matters. A man spoke with exaggerated fervor in Bengali, sometimes reverting to a few sentences of English to sum up his exposition for the small number of Europeans in the audience. White draped robes and dark upraised arms created an effect like gestures from classical theater, recalling the ancient Greeks or Romans.

“This blather doesn’t bore you?” asked Maurice Nagar, a short, very fragrant man with a neatly trimmed mustache.

“Not yet,” Istvan said with unguarded candor. A Russian professor sitting nearby must have known several Indian languages, for he reveled in the discussion that broke out when the speaker asserted that the finest Indian literature originated in Bengal, and that only because of that had Tagore’s genius found the perfect medium and been able to express itself so freely.

His statement evoked an instant rebuttal from the Tamil quarter and an unofficial denial from supporters of Hindi, which as the national language was going to displace English. The dispute grew hot in spite of efforts at mediation by the director himself, whose head seemed to rise above the agitated audience like an apparition at a seance. He raised and lowered his hands like a conductor unable to keep pace with a storm of instruments outshouting each other.

Istvan made notes for a report and a press release. The Frenchman looked at him skeptically; he knew that, true to good English custom, they would be handed a release before the end of the session. It would only be necessary to alter it a little, depending on the country to which it would be sent and the typescript of that country. But that was merely cosmetic.

When an intermission was announced, Nagar caught Terey by his sleeve.

“Surely you are experienced enough to know what will come next. Let’s stay here,” he coaxed. “We can have a chat, a smoke.”

They pulled lawn chairs up to a tree with a thick, knotted trunk that looked as if it had not grown out of the ground, but built itself by trickling down and hardening. Clusters of aerated roots hung from its branches. The two men stood in what looked like an unfinished cage.

“What does this remind you of?” Nagar pointed to the motionless ropes of roots. “It looks to me, quite simply, like a noose.”

“And to me, like the ropes in a belfry. I always have an urge to pull on them, to rock the whole tree. I used to envy the altar boys because they could hang onto those ropes and fly up over the floorboards when the bell tilted, and set it ringing through the whole neighborhood.” He nudged the thick, woven mass of whitish roots with the toe of his shoe.

“Be careful.” Nagar’s small, boyish face wrinkled with loathing. “I tried that once and shook a hundred beetles, caterpillars, and red ants onto my head. They stung even though I crushed them with my fingers. It felt as if someone had set me on fire with a match.”

From a distance they heard the voice of the next speaker, assisted by a megaphone. Parrots, shrouded in the leafy arch, quarreled. Huge white branches like gnawed mammoth bones seemed to dissolve into the deep shade.

A two-wheeled tonga rolled down the street. The drowsy gray oxen ambled along; on the heavy shaft between their hindquarters, like a bundle in a soiled bag, a squatting Hindu dozed. The heat seemed to congeal; the air trembled like a vitreous jelly.

“One might think that nothing happens in this country,” Nagar said, motioning to the distant landscape: the empty fields, the clumps of trees with bleached trunks and almost black shocks of leaves blurred by a ripple of hot air. “However, since my arrival — and I am in my ninth year here — there have been enormous changes. They occurred imperceptibly, as if through no one’s volition. The awakening revealed itself in collective action that surprised those who were put off guard by the apparent passiveness of the Hindus.

“A consciousness of rights is growing in the depths of that mass of people, and not even the rights of class, but human rights. If they would go further and take the view that they only live once, that each is unique, that in any case they should act quickly…If that crude definition of religion as an opiate applies anywhere, it applies above all here in India. They suffer calmly as oxen; they accept the yoke of predestination; they trust that for that humility and submission, that lack of rebellion, they will be rewarded in the next incarnation. You know, I would wish for a bloody revolution in this country — if they were at all able to pull it off.”

“You say that?” Terey looked at Nagar’s ruddy, creased face. “I thought you were here to find peace above all else. Your country has had enough to live through: defeat, painful capitulation. Struggles of generals for power, struggles for influence with the Americans and the English, for benevolent patronage. The breakup of your empire: Vietnam, then Morocco and Algeria. When it comes to the point, you’ve had enough of unstable governments, ministerial intrigue, corrupt police and collaborators in high places.”

Nagar rocked back and forth and smiled indulgently, with a hint of irony.

“Peace. There are these years to appreciate it”—he began toying with a cigarette—“and just a little more perseverance to hold out here at my observation post while new forces, still unknown to themselves, try to take power. You are astonished that I love India. A splendid country! Money is worth more here than in Europe; I can get everything for centimes. Where would I find such deferential servants, such lovers—” he winked knowingly. He did not hide his weakness and often let himself be seen in the company of supple young men with crimped hair reeking of brilliantine. “Where would they entertain me so regally, so sumptuously? I am on a first-name basis with the heads of all the government departments, and with people rich as monarchs. What magnificent hunts! And yet I would wish this country and those grass-eating sheep a bloodbath. War…though not many Indians died for England in Africa, Burma, and Italy, war opened their eyes and showed them that England is weak, that the British lion will roar, will behave menacingly, but when one waves the firebrand in front of him, he will back away.”

Nagar was in his element. He had snagged himself a patient listener; he perorated with the gestures of a populist politician. Istvan lit a cigarette and thought of Margit.

“War? It hastened India’s independence. Though the present state of things is very convenient for me, I would be glad to see the next stage: revolution. For just this reason, that in my own way I love these people. You, Istvan, ought to understand me. Quite simply, I feel better when I admit this thought — when I accept internally the changes that the India of today will inflict on me.”

It’s easy for you to talk of being resigned, Terey thought, since you only see the arrival of that moment in the distant future. You are almost certain that it will not affect you.

The cigarette smoke drifted away in the sunlight. The parrots screeched. The rattle of casual applause reached them: the gracious acceptance of the conclusion of someone’s speech.

“Doesn’t it seem to you that there is an unhealthy momentum in business these days, a driven quality? The papers are full of sensational headlines; the country teems with shady transactions. Pity that they are of no interest to anyone outside India. We would have an easy life; I’m thinking of us—” Nagar pointed a thumb at his tight blue striped shirt and the big sapphire bow tie that fluttered like a startled butterfly—“of us, correspondents. Those who have money want to turn it around as soon as possible, to take the profit, hide the income, withdraw the capital. The ground shakes under one’s feet. A foul smell is in the air. One grasps, one wrests what one can, as long as one can. I am not thinking of foreign capital under Indian names, only of no less rapacious Indian nabobs — the workings of instinct,” he reflected, crushing a Gauloise between his fingers, “as with flies, which are the most vexing in autumn, the day before the first chill, which exterminates them.”

“You’re in a good humor,” Terey said, nodding. “You’re galloping on our horse! The threat of revolution — that’s the prerogative of the communists.”

“I could settle for war,” Nagar conceded. “The impulses that unite a nation are needed here. They might equally well come from within as from outside.”

“But who would want to fight them?” Terey said doubtfully. “Winning such a war might be more troublesome than losing. What could be done with those hundreds of millions? How could they be fed and clothed and goaded into rational activity?”

Nagar brooded. “Pakistan could attack them, with the tacit approval of the Americans, if they move too far to the left. Or China, if the Americans instead of the English became overly involved with them. Perhaps war would bring a sudden assumption of power by the army, as happens in newly formed democracies. That was the case in Egypt and Turkey, and not long ago in South Korea. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if momentous developments set in before our stay in India is over.”

“But the Congress Party and Nehru—”

“Tradition still keeps the party going; they wrap themselves in their achievements in the time of the struggle for independence. But by now that is history, a defense of the power the nation bestowed on them, and they know how to make the most of it. Nehru is an old man. He can only ask, like Gandhi, that they respect his gray hair. But every plea, every appeal for restraint and deliberation, may be drowned out tomorrow by an uproar from the impatient crowd.”

They heard the whistle of a locomotive from beyond the river: a long shriek on two notes, like shepherds’ pipes. Maurice listened with his head tilted.

“You take me for a drunken soothsayer, and my throat is dry as pepper. I can’t drink alone. I’d like to get you to slip off with me to the hotel bar. If we take a whole bottle, we can be sure they won’t dupe us with watered-down whiskey, as my valet tried to do. I warn you, they will pour tea into it.”

“That hasn’t happened to me so far,” Istvan laughed. “Maybe it’s because when my friends get together and we start a bottle, we don’t stop until we can see the bottom.”

“Good principle, but it only works at your age. I drink for taste, and more for memory’s sake than for new excitements. Well, let’s go; it was only a sense of obligation that brought us here.” He sprang up and pressed forward jauntily, with the exaggerated sprightliness of old men who pretend when others are watching that they have preserved their youthfulness.

Terey looked around at the pale columns of the building; inside it, voices ascended with a singsong lilt. They felt the mischievous delight of schoolboys playing hooky. Maurice drove out first in his Peugeot and Terey glided quickly after him. They passed peasant carts and squeezed between wagons loaded with young timber. Their cars chased each other like two dogs.

On the narrow road, bursts of wind stirred up red dust full of golden flecks of chaff — the dried, matted straw ground by arba wheels heavy as the vicissitudes of peasant life.

When the drivers of the wagons cringed at the blast of the horn, he imagined that they must take the vehicles speeding by in flashes of glass and nickel, with Europeans lolling on the cushions, for demons in flight. They emerged from a cloud of dust, they hooted, they threatened to smash the carts. They slowed their tires with a moaning noise, almost touching the carts with their gleaming hoods. When an opening appeared for a moment between the ponderous arbas, they jumped unexpectedly, their tires spinning out sand and gravel. They were not automobiles, but monsters from hell, spreading fear.

He smiled as it struck him that to the peasants, the oxen with swarms of flies grazing on their ragged necks, the flat, creaking wheels, the palm tree that had reluctantly fallen off, were part of nature, of the everyday order of things. Those half-naked, dozing wagoners were surely thinking, Where and why are the white men going so fast, to what are they racing? Do they not know that what they acquire they must relinquish, and what they possess they will abandon?

Istvan tried to keep up with the Frenchman, but Maurice drove like a virtuoso. He calculated unerringly the position and speed of a wagon and managed to slip past without snagging his car on the protruding copper-clad axles of the arbas, while Terey became mired in traffic and lost speed. He wanted to pick up the telephone and call the hospital, call Margit, or beat on her door. Perhaps she had returned at last? Although she did not know of his arrival, the very strength of his longing, the returning thought insistent as a cry, ought to draw her back, to impel her to come to him.

As soon as they had parked the cars in the shade of the pergola, Terey told Nagar with apologies that he had to leave him for a moment.

“I’m going to take a piss as well,” the other said with a matey air.

“And I — to the telephone.” The Frenchman’s easygoing ways grated on him, especially when he alluded in raw detail to the young men he consorted with, speaking without braggadocio, like old people confiding in each other about intestinal disorders.

He found the number of the hospital at once; it was underlined several times with colored ink marks. The numbers for UNESCO’s center for ophthalmological examinations were there. Immediately after he heard the ring, a nasal voice spoke in an unknown language. It rose, repeating something emphatically, as if hoping the European would understand somehow.

“Ask for someone who speaks English,” Terey exclaimed edgily. “Doctor. Doctor. Give me a doctor. English!” he barked, with heavy stress on the crucial words.

Worried gasps came from the receiver. The guard or attendant knew only the language of his village.

“Call a doctor,” Terey shouted, but the other man, out of patience and wishing to avoid bother, hung up.

“He didn’t understand, the stupid peasant,” the Hindu clerk said with a flattering smile. “They keep the most awful riffraff there, absolute savages. Perhaps I can help. I will be the translator. Whom am I calling?”

“Miss Ward,” he said in a tone that implied that the desk attendant should have known all the time whose room he had inquired about that morning. He was exasperated by the sight of the dark, slender finger slowly inserting itself into the holes on the dial and carefully guiding its rotations. There was a conversation, then a pause during which the clerk glanced knowingly at Istvan.

“He knows nothing. He went to ask,” he explained. “They are having lunch now. Beggars from all over India are crowding to the hospital.”

The wait was excruciating. The clerk felt no need for constraint; he did not use his hand to cover the receiver, that greedy funnel that seized the sound. The man on the other end of the line did not understand the situation in any case, while the clerk felt a bond with his foreign guests. Even every weakness of theirs that he detected and slyly stored away in his memory was like an initiation. They could allow themselves a great deal, refuse to acknowledge restrictions and laws divine or human, because they had so much money. He would have liked to use his knowledge of English to display his readiness to perform intimate services. A lackey intoxicated with the condescension of the powerful, Istvan thought.

A cat lay on its back, watching a large moth that was fluttering around a cluster of violet wisteria blossoms under a roof of greenery. Terey caught himself inwardly urging the cat to jump, to seize the moth between its jaws, for the insect’s heavy body was breaking off the petals.

“Very well, sir. You may speak.” The clerk bowed. Before he handed Terey the receiver, he rubbed it on his sleeve. “The head physician is there.”

They introduced themselves. Now he knew: he could not count on seeing Margit today. He might not see her at all. She had gone for an audit with the entire team. Where? The doctor could not say; everything depended on the volume of established cases. They had gone into the back country, they would travel around the villages, a hundred miles or more. The doctor was an Englishman, so he measured in miles. He invited Istvan to visit him at the hospital. Istvan laid a rupee on the desk for the clerk and scratched the cat on its fluffy throat. The little Adam’s apple trembled under his fingers in a rhythmic purr of satisfaction.

He did not have to hurry anywhere. He heard the jingling of insects in the blossoming roof of the pergola, the plaintive call of the seller of nuts, and the rattle of the magician who stood near the entrance gate with shallow baskets of reptiles, looking longingly for someone to summon him with a motion of the hand. That he could step through the wide-open gate never crossed his mind. The training of the English sahibs was still in his blood. The fakir lifted the rattle high above his head; the harsh noise shattered into an echo that rang from the wall of the hotel. Terey waved dismissively. No, he had no desire for this spectacle. Not now. Not today.

If my boys were here, he thought with a sudden longing for his sons, it would be worth it to show them the snakes’ dances. I think too little about the children; I imagine them as though they had not changed, not grown, as though when I return I will find them exactly the same as when I told them goodbye. Ilona? The delay with the passport was an indignity — yet another proof that I am viewed as suspect, untrustworthy, and they are holding the stakes. Or are they? One of the most trusted, when he defected and it was thrown up to him that he had left his family in the country, answered insolently, “I have taken my family out with me. I will never be separated from them,” and insinuatingly patted his crotch.

Without a sound Terey walked along the thick carpet, which brought him straight to the bar. The long paddles of the ceiling fan turned idly. The Frenchman crouched on a high stool with his knees bent. The whiskey in the glasses had a golden glint.

“Well, at last!”

“You should have begun alone.”

“You know very well that I get no pleasure from alcohol. It’s a conversation starter. I like having a listener. Loneliness? It’s possible to feel it only in Asia, in the human sea, the indifferent mass. We melt into oblivion here. We are lost atoms, utterly alien and dispensable.”

Terey sat on a stool and raised his glass invitingly. They drank under the solicitous eye of the bartender, who with obliging readiness brought forward a square bottle and a silver jigger for measuring the liquor.

“But you feel more at ease here.”

“Yes, for my income, in the face of the universal poverty, is worth twice as much. I can even allow myself the luxury of extolling the merits of revolution, of thinking seriously about improving the lot of human beings, and about the rights of citizens. Those, however, are purely theoretical reflections. In my country, the lower echelons have grown bitter; they are exerting pressure. The working classes feathered their nests and nothing would quiet them down. You turned their heads, they got a hankering to take over governments. That is to say, they wanted to gain ground, to liberate themselves from the complexes of their class. At my expense, obviously.”

“If I were in your place, I shouldn’t trust India too much.”

“Well, there are changes. I myself haven’t spoken of them except when it was necessary. I’ll wager that when we meet ten years from now, the greatest difference will be in the price of whiskey; of course it will go up,” he prophesied, leaning comfortably on his elbow and looking into his glass as he swirled it gently. “The Americans are no more adept than the English. Even their help causes offense.”

“Your French don’t go about things very wisely, either,” the counselor baited him. “Remember Dien Bien Phu and the Organisation Armée Secrète in Algeria.”

“Say what you please. Apart from a liking for true culture, and that I only find in the cuisine, nothing much connects me to France.”

“You speak as if you didn’t consider yourself a Frenchman.”

“I am a Frenchman. I am. Only before that I was an Austrian, and I was born in Sosnowiec—”

“Where is that?”

“In what was Russia, then Poland, then Germany, and now Poland again. My birthplace also changed national allegiance.”

Terey looked stealthily in the mirror at the small, wizened face of the journalist, which was covered now and again by the white blotch that was the bartender’s back. It seemed to him that he saw in Nagar the embodiment of the most harassed nation to which providence never gave a respite. He thought with sympathy of the perpetual rootlessness, the flight from death.

“Is your family still alive?”

“Father? Mother? That was so long ago and so terrible that sometimes I think my life began from the time I supported myself. I don’t delve farther back into my memory. I feel as if I gave birth to myself. Do you think I didn’t take a look there just after the war? There was no one. Even the wooden house painted the color of gingerbread, the beams full of housebugs—” he smiled, but his eyes were full of grief. “Above the window, to indulge the artistic sense, wooden cutouts such as you find all over Russia as far as Vladivostok. Don’t correct me: in czarist Russia.”

“The Germans burned the house?”

“That would have been too great an honor. They simply ordered the Jews to clear it out. It was demolished and a street was built there.”

“No one was saved?”

“Not even memories of them. Now there is another neighborhood. Other people live there.”

“Do you still speak Polish?”

“A little. We are clever. We have to be in order to live. I would even have learned Hungarian in nothing flat. By now I manage fairly well in Hindi. I don’t like to stand out. I want peace. Nature endowed us abundantly; we always find ways to prosper. We have to learn more; we have to work at night. We want to consolidate our position, but they only let us have money. If you have acquired that, people don’t forgive you. That’s why I prefer Asia. Here no one points the finger at me because I am Jewish. Perhaps they don’t even notice. If they hate me, it’s because they hate all Europeans. That’s a relief. I can breathe.”

“When did you go to France?”

“Just in time. I went to Algiers for six months before the defeat. I waited there for the Americans and de Gaulle to arrive. Then I was on the radio with de Gaulle once. Among the Americans there were a fair number of us. If you asked in Yiddish they would be irritated, but they helped on the quiet, arranging things, furnishing contacts. They would put you on the right track, they would whisper in your ear. And what is a journalist? A fellow who knows where to look for information, how to get access, and then writes something else entirely. I was no star; I just sent the usual dispatches, but they valued me. What Nagar sent was sacred. And I rather like you.”

He leaned forward and clinked their glasses with friendly solicitude.

“If you’re in a jam, come straight to me; don’t hesitate. Nagar has a head, not a big one, but it holds much, and much of value. Oy, many would pay well to shake everything out of it, like money out of a strongbox.”

He looked at Istvan and winked wearily.

“I have a soft spot for you. Take advantage of it. My grandfather used to plant his thumbs in his vest pockets and say, ‘Well, Maurice, the good hour has struck. Speak, perhaps you’ll get something. Ask, only ask wisely.’ And sometimes he gave me twenty kopecks. That was money. Nothing to laugh at. And sometimes he took me by the hair on the side of my head, wrapped it around his fingers, and pushed my head back and forth until it hurt. ‘You, you crazy boy, you mischief-maker, what do you fancy?’ For I had cadged five kopecks out of him to go to the peep show and see the big world. Oh, my luck! Now I sniff out what stinks from Rio de Janeiro to Hong Kong, and nothing surprises me. What I take a liking to I can have, and I don’t feel pleasure. There is no one to impress. In our business you hardly open your mouth to speak before everyone interrupts: they were there, they saw, they know better. They don’t let you get a word in.”

They drained their glasses. Other participants from the congress began to come in; a crowd was gathering at the bar. “Off we go,” Nagar said. “We should do some work. You listen to those, I’ll listen to the others. We’ll sit together at lunch and exchange information.”

He clutched Terey’s hand in his hot, dry paw and shook it as if he were giving him a signal.

“Thank you for the chat,” he whispered, “though I was the one who went in for confidential disclosures. If I were a little more honest, I would say: Thank you for your silence, for being willing to listen to a garrulous old man.”

Terey looked at him as he squeezed between the tables. Everyone here knew him, and greeted him in a friendly way. Why did he feel isolated? Did he see everyone else as more powerful than himself? Was he trying to win over everyone in his environment? He pretended that he was someone else, he played the sybarite, the gourmand, the affluent Frenchman exchanging pleasantries with a lady reporter, for it created the illusion that he had his place in the churning mill of events. If he himself had no influence on them, at least he knew about them. But that knowledge rarely proved useful. It was a burden — and it could easily bring ruin on him.

Better not to know. And if by chance you were a witness to something, don’t be complacent and say, I know the truth, for that is an indictment. Nagar certainly knows a great deal, knows much too much. It would be better for him to shout from the housetops: I have grown so accustomed to India that I want to stay here.

The luncheon, with English dishes, was intimidating. From the kitchen came the cloying aroma of mint sauce; the flat black slices of lamb had been drenched with it. A Yugoslavian journalist, a tall mountaineer with a scar on his forehead, beckoned to him with an upraised hand. One of the uniformed waiters, who looked like barefoot generals from an operetta, pulled out a chair.

“Do you have Indian dishes?” Terey asked hopefully.

“Yes, sir, but vegetarian only.”

“With curry?”

“With hot curry or mild?” The waiter had a black mustache rakishly twirled up and a starched white turban with notched ends that stuck out like tufts of feathers. “Mineral water? Coca-Cola? Orange juice? Perhaps a beer from the can?” He concluded the ritual, “We have it fresh from Germany.”

“Water, please.”

It was more expensive than the other drinks: real Vichy, brought in crates from France. The foggy bottle, the dewy little glass of sparkling water, aroused thirst.

“Will you drink some of this?” he asked the Yugoslavian.

“Yes, indeed. It reminds me of the springs in our caves, unforgettable water. Especially when I swigged it down after running for my life from the Germans, it tasted like life itself.”

“What were they talking about at the congress?”

“Rabindranath Tagore as a watercolorist.”

“What was their assessment?”

The journalist shrugged. He reached for a radish; it had been disinfected in a potash solution, and left violet spots on the plate.

“When someone is counted a saint, everything about him is seen as perfection, even the shirt he wore. The faithful call for relics.”

“But according to you?”

“It’s enough to cite other opinions. There is no shortage of authorities.”

“It’s as bad as that?”

“He dabbled in painting, and now they are trying to build a cult around it. I will give it a paragraph and let it rest. There is a party this evening — dry, unfortunately. Too spiritual a crowd.”

The Yugoslavian’s grimace when he spoke of the party was amusing to Terey. The room hummed with tired voices. A burly Italian journalist was extolling the beauty of Indian women with such delight that he might have been scanning the verses of d’Annunzio. A black-skinned man dressed in European style sat down near them, attracted by the Italian dishes.

“I am the delegate from Ceylon.” He introduced himself without extending his hand. “It will not annoy you gentlemen if I eat according to our custom?”

He kneaded the rice with his right hand. As he squeezed a handful, the yellow sauce leaked from between his fingers. He licked it with childish enjoyment, unashamed. His thick bluish lips parted in a greedy smile.

“Try it. Rice with curry should be eaten as nature intended. In the hand one can savor the thick paste it makes. And how do you gnaw the chicken? The fun of it is to hold it in the fist, like our forefathers. And crabs? Without hands and teeth, applying all your arsenal of pincers, chisels and hooks, eating was transformed into a gynecological operation and lost its primordial beauty. At every party in London I horrify people, but I am immovable on this point. I will not deprive myself of the delight of traditional eating. They can scowl, they can pretend to be disgusted, but I know that they envy me, for I am utterly myself, while they are imitations of others.” Again he vigorously sopped the sauce from his plate with his forefinger and absorbed it eagerly with his thick lips.

“I also have eaten with my hands, when I had to,” the Yugoslavian shrugged. “I was not impressed, but it did not bother me much. It was in the partisan battles in the oak forests of Velebit.”

Istvan was not even listening. He remembered corn roasted in the campfire, the smell of smoke in the stalk, chunks of meat charred on the surface and half raw in the center, rubbed with gray cattle salt and garlic — all washed down with sour red wine drunk breathlessly in great swallows from a round bottle.

“You didn’t wait for me.” Suddenly he felt Maurice Nagar’s hand on his shoulder. “And rightly, for they wouldn’t let go of me there. I say, could you send my dispatch when you send your own? I’d like to doze off for a while. I feel tired. The racket is making me sleepy.”

“I’d be most happy to.” He took the papers, which were covered with writing in a perfectly even hand. “I was just going to the post office.”

They made their way among bowing servants toward the exit. In the shadow of the pergola a hot breath of air brushed their faces, carrying dry leaves, dust, and the fragrance of blossoming vines.

“I like you,” Nagar said unexpectedly. “And I worry about you a little.”

“I know.” Istvan pressed the man’s small, dry hand. He looked down at the journalist’s balding crown, which was tanned and gleaming. “What clouds are gathering over me?”

“No. It’s bird flutters. A premonition. Too many times I’ve had to throw everything over and run away because I didn’t heed the signals. Something bad is in the air.” He raised the regretful eyes of a Pierrot and smiled slightly.

“Until this evening. I’m going to have a rest.”

He walked with short, prim steps down the brick path toward the guest rooms. Istvan went to his car. The shade was gone; the metal surface blazed with heat and reeked of gasoline. He opened the doors on both sides before he was ready to sit down. At once a light sweat covered his back as in an attack of malaria. He knows something, he thought, but he doesn’t want to tell me. Surely this was a warning. But what was it about? Margit? Has some gossip from the embassy reached him?

The Frenchman’s act of entrusting him with the text to be sent off was evidence of his confidence and kindness; he could take advantage of it, select from Nagar’s piece what seemed useful for his own dispatch about the congress. To be sure, his mission placed him outside the circle of professional journalists. He was not really a competitor, so the friendly gesture had not cost Nagar much.

The guests had already left the dining room. He wanted to be alone. He turned on the engine and slowly drove toward the open gate.

The afternoon session was devoted to Tagore’s metaphors. He could hardly wait to escape, if only to the Taj Mahal. The perfection of the mausoleum, the dome like a peeled onion, and four minarets like spears of white asparagus against a background of powder blue sky, made him think of a cheap Air India poster. The immaculate beauty of it was tedious.

“Ah, so the emperor’s love created this,” exclaimed a slender Englishwoman, looking at the tomb with wry admiration. “I wonder — was she beautiful?”

“She had nine children,” said her companion, reading from a red-bound guidebook. “I hardly see how she could have preserved her beauty after such an output.”

“Perhaps that is why she preferred to die.”

Terey watched as the sightseers made their way, awestruck, over the level stones. The pools, unruffled by fountains, reflected the harmonious façade of the mosque like mirrors. Cypresses and arbor vitae stood against the white walls like moulded iron. Into the polished marble the hand of the sculptor had hammered the ninety-nine names of Allah in a black zigzag, honoring him and praising his might. From a distance the inscriptions looked like a fanciful piece of fretwork.

The sky was growing red; weightless veils drifted across it at various depths. The dome of the mausoleum shone with a violet luster. The landscape reminded Istvan of Persian miniatures; only riders on white chargers were missing, draped in scarlet cloaks, brandishing golden bows as they chased the nimble spotted panther.

Enveloped in the falling twilight, forced into the role of a mute spectator, he felt cut off from the world and intensely lonely.

I came to India because I imagined a completely different country. I thought I would tell them about my homeland — after all, we have a common past: my people came out of Asia. But how can one establish friendship here when they have no desire for it? Europe for them is only England. Technological progress does not impress them, only tradition, established social norms, the observance of segregation even in the pub — well, and the queen.

Why should we be of interest to them? To the contrary: revolution fills them with fear and disgust. Violent changes, a need to act, even the business of choosing a course of action, urgency — no, that is not for them. How much better it is to be swathed in tulle and sit on a warm stone bench, to gaze at changing lights on smooth slabs of marble, to plunge oneself in somnolent dreams of things that have vanished — not to hear the hoarse cry of the beggar, not to see the leper’s stumps raised beseechingly, not to think about hunger and the undeserved suffering of children. To float away, to drown in delight at the beauty of evening, to reconcile oneself completely to what is and what will be, to whisper submissively: Fate, do as you must, as the condemned man, unresisting, bends his head under the executioner’s ax.

No; he shuddered at the thought. I am from another world, a world differently constituted. To live — that means not simply to adapt to the world as it is, but to hasten change, throw out those in power, and build. I would lead those famished people, that staggering mass of shadows, to full shops, I would let them be satiated for once. I would push weapons into their hands and strike the dry ground like a drum with my heel, calling on them to fight for the rights of man. But they would look at me with mild cows’ eyes, not comprehending what I was calling them to. The knife would fall from their apathetic fingers, clanging like a false note on the stone steps of the temple. They would take me for a madman, perhaps for one of the demons that Ganesh, the god with the head of an elephant, rammed with his body in the depths of hell.

The sky was streaming with scarlet; his eyes were riveted to it. A painter who imitated it would have been criticized for his lack of restraint. Only nature could allow itself this lavishness, this delirium of achingly vivid color.

“Wonderful! That is really exciting.” Behind him he heard the voices of Englishwomen. He turned his head, but saw little; the fire in the heavens still filled his eyes. Slowly he accustomed himself to the duskiness of the fortified tower.

In the spacious passage, four naphtha lamps shone with a yellow glow. By their light he could see something like a stage: a frayed mat spread on stones. An animal was jumping. It looked like a marten. In the center an enraged cobra lifted its distended flat head. Its eyes, glittering in the lamplight like drops of molten copper, were fixed on the dancing predator. It hissed; its head like a broad spear it held level, ready to strike.

Istvan went nearer and nudged the fakir, who pushed a flat basket toward him. “Give me five rupees, sir,” the man said in English.

Just this sort of duel takes place in reality, only much faster, he thought. Pity my boys can’t see this; in any case they would have read The Jungle Book.

The reptile leaned forward, poised to glide from the lighted arena into the friendly darkness. The two tourists retreated with cries of fear.

He threw two rupees into the basket.

“Is this real?” asked the thin Englishwoman.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he answered. “Obviously it is a live cobra.”

“But does it have venom? Is the bite fatal? It’s said that they pull out snakes’ teeth and extract the poison glands.”

“Put it to the test, madam,” the fakir challenged her. “Please give me your hand.”

“Oh, no! No!” She recoiled. “I thought it was all an act, a spectacle for tourists.”

The mongoose, which had numbed the snake with its monotonous hopping, suddenly broke the rhythm of its hunting dance, leaped onto the back of the cobra’s neck, and shoved it to the ground with its muzzle, squealing. Its white teeth gnawed into the scaly skin like a tiny saw. It held its victim like the winner of a wrestling match who wants not only the judge but the spectators to acknowledge his supremacy. Then it jumped away, stretched itself, and lay down in the basket. The cobra shook with revolting spasms of powerless rage. It hissed and with wide open mouth moved toward the viewers. Then the bare black arm of the fakir emerged from the darkness and seized it adroitly by the head.

“Why didn’t he let the mongoose bite it to death?” the Englishwoman asked. “He duped us!”

“Thirty rupees for biting to death,” said the snake tamer gravely. “This is an exceptionally cunning reptile.”

“I will pay.” She dug nervously in her handbag. “I want to be certain that it will be killed. Here is the money!”

The Hindu, eagerly taking what she offered, let a smaller snake out of a bag. It was more venomous than the cobra, he boasted, yet the mongoose made quick work of it, biting it into three parts and then, in revulsion, scratching with its hind feet.

“It’s a swindle!” The Englishwoman pouted. “I paid for the cobra.”

The Hindu was displeased.

“I am honest,” he cried. “It had to be a poisonous snake, bitten to death, and it lies on the mat. There had to be death, and there is death.”

“If everyone paid them for a cobra killed, they would catch them and exterminate them themselves,” the tourist muttered, “and India would soon be a pleasanter place.”

“No one demands that the animal tamer in the circus shoot his lion,” Terey said in the man’s defense. But the Englishwoman persisted rigidly:

“I paid for the cobra.”

“The cobra is a holy serpent.” The Hindu spread his hands. “To kill it for amusement is not permitted.”

“With you everything is holy — monkeys, cows, snakes,” she stormed, working herself into a rage. “That’s why a human being meets the fate of the beasts.”

The gaunt Hindu gazed at her as if he understood, though he hardly knew even the words he needed to gather an audience. His dry, shriveled face glistened like old ivory. He crouched behind the departing woman as if he wanted to leap onto the back of her neck.

Something could be done with these people yet — Istvan clenched his fist — only there would have to be powerful incitements. They fear the loss of dignity more than the loss of life. That is their strength.

He walked between the huge trees. Thick leaves, curled and crackling, rustled under his feet. The sky was sprinkled with stars. He looked at the glowing hands on his watch: it was time to change into his dinner jacket and put in his appearance at the reception.

The time dragged by. He waited, half unconsciously deluding himself that he would meet her, that she would appear unexpectedly among the chatting groups of guests. Margit…There was a moment when he thought he saw her reddish hair. He was moving across the withered lawn when suddenly the woman turned her head and he saw an elderly, violet face and flabby dewlaps like a turkey’s.

He was surprised to see Chandra, the lawyer, at this evening party. The modest title on the man’s business card—“philanthropist”—had lodged in his memory. They greeted each other and again Chandra made Istvan a present of a cigar.

“Are you wondering what I am doing here? Tagore is my real passion,” the Hindu mocked unblushingly. “Only on this occasion can I meet people who adore him as I do, exchange opinions, enrich my intellect. Well, don’t flinch. Of course I am here on business. But it is a rallying cry: Tagore!”

He abandoned Istvan for a magnate in a long white shirt and tight, creased knee-length pants, who wore so many rings that his hands seemed to hang helplessly under their weight.

“My dear fellow,” said Nagar, who knew almost everyone, “don’t demand too much of your friends. Chandra is a dangerous man, for he is clever and without conscience. He really did come to deliver a paper on Tagore. He will be rewarded for it. In Delhi it is possible to underestimate by a hundredfold the value of a meeting with the elite here — in Delhi, or in the rest of India — yes, perhaps in the rest of the world.”

“But how?”

“Don’t be naive,” Maurice scolded. “A first impression is important. So is the place of meeting, and the people who keep company with him. Later he will allude to the acquaintance formed here, discreetly emphasizing its intimate character, and it will be difficult not to receive him, to refuse him a favor, since he commented so beautifully on Tagore’s prose. The name of the dead writer can be used like a master key.”

“What door will it open for him? I would give a lot to know.”

“What for? If you know about wrongdoing, you ought to denounce it. If you don’t, you become complicit. Why the devil be involved with him against your inclination unless you have something in particular to gain? Better to keep your distance. Let it be enough that I know him, and I don’t vouch for him.”

“Exactly where and for whom does he work?”

“Work?” Nagar reflected, frowning playfully. “Not the most apt way of putting it. Chandra is an artist at business. He must find it entertaining. He likes risk. If I were looking for the dominant trait in his character, I would say: pride. He undertakes things that seem hopeless out of perversity, to show himself and the world that he can bring them off, that he can win. Of course he doesn’t do it for free; rest assured of that.”

Their eyes followed him until he was lost in the crowd.

Mocking himself a little, Istvan began the next morning by strolling through the pergola and knocking on Miss Ward’s door. He listened outside, feeling like a boy on a date. He looked around furtively to see whether anyone from the staff had noticed him.

At the morning session he wrote letters under the guise of making notes on the speeches. He drew, spitefully, a gallery of portraits, knowing they would amuse his crony in Budapest. A letter to Bela would be read aloud to their colleagues in the editorial office.

He wrote his sons in a mysteriously macabre tone about cobras and fakirs and the white tomb of the empress. He thought with satisfaction of the pleasure such stories would give them. They would see the India he had come to this embassy to see, and had not found: the India of tales from a bygone age.

When he dropped in for lunch at the hotel and noticed a jeep with a red cross painted on it, he knew Margit was there. Immediately the clerk hurried up to him from the doorkeeper’s lodge and announced:

“Miss Ward has returned. She is in her room.”

He walked with a quick step through the shady tunnel of blossoming vines. Branches moved, stirred by jumping lizards. A maid in a whitish sari met him, touching her inclined head with folded hands.

“Miss Ward is having a bath,” she whispered.

He gave her a tip, but the fact that many people were aware of his impatience to see Margit was disturbing to him.

Margit had already bathed, for as he stood before her door, feeling an inexplicable agitation, he did not hear the sound of water, only a Bartok concerto. The rapid tempo of the orchestra seemed to urge him on, to accelerate the rhythm of his heart. The music stopped; it seemed to him that the girl felt him there, that she would hurry to him. But after a moment he heard the melody again. She had only turned the record over. He was in no rush now. He had her near him, just a step away. They were only separated by a flimsy door painted brown, with peeling varnish. He was happy, and he wanted this state of joyous certainty to continue, to be fixed in time. He knocked lightly.

She did not answer. He was seized with a fear that he had appeared too late — that she was not alone, that he had been supplanted, displaced by someone who was here, in this place, at hand. She did not love the other man, he could swear it, and the other man could not love her — he only wanted her, desired her, was seducing her, taking possession of her with his hands and lips.

He pressed the latch and the door opened quietly. The music goaded him.

Margit lay on her back with her head tilted sideways, resting on her hands. Her rust-colored hair streamed in a luxuriant wave. From inside her open bathrobe, he saw her bare legs, saw the skin above her knees, all golden from the tropical sun. A sandal dangled from one foot as it hung off the bed; the other sandal lay on the floor, its upturned sole smooth and gleaming. The record turned over quickly and the melody gushed like a fountain. He felt her coolness and his throat contracted. She was alone.

He understood that he had slipped in like an intruder, had caught her at a moment when she was unaware, undefended, exposed to his eyes. He knew he should knock with his fingers, even on the open door, offer the usual greetings, perhaps a little more loudly, to hide his emotion. He wanted time to stop. He drank in the slow movement of the upraised arm, the palm, the fingers entwined in her hair. She sifted it sleepily. He heard the plaintive notes of the piano. She must have felt the glare from the open door, for she shook off the sandal that hung from her big toe and immersed her foot in the sunlight as if it were a stream of golden water.

The record whirled too fast; the sounds of the orchestra broke, wailed mournfully, then died away. The girl leaned over to turn off the gramophone. In this catlike, lazy stretching that nearly caused her to tumble from the bed there was so much beauty that he advanced two steps and caught her by the ankles in a strong grip.

Suddenly the squawking of frightened parrots could be heard in the room.

The girl coiled herself with a movement like a lizard. Her blue eyes flashed with fright.

“It’s I, Margit,” he whispered. “It’s I…it was open.”

She raised herself a little, still crouching, covering her knees with the edges of her robe. Its dark green pattern, now splashed with sunshine, shimmered with color.

“Terry—” she extended her hand. When he bent to kiss it, she shook his collegially and rose briskly from the bed.

“You’ve caught me in a lazy moment, but I’m entitled to a little rest. I just got back from the villages; we did an absolutely punishing statistical survey. After that misery, even a bath isn’t enough. I loathed myself for having spent so many years living well, for being healthy and strong. I had to key my ear to a different music. They only whine to the sky. They beg for mercy. Their flutes and their slow song are a complaint without hope.”

She spoke hurriedly as if she wanted to hide something, not letting him put in a word, avoiding questions. With a movement almost like a dancer’s she pulled a dress from a chair and disappeared through the bathroom door.

“I’ll be there in a minute, literally,” she called. “I didn’t expect you. When did you arrive?”

“I’ve been here two days.” Reflexively, as if they had been partners in some misbehavior, he adjusted the blanket on the disheveled bed linen. “Were you expecting someone?” He barely restrained himself from adding: someone for whom you didn’t have to dress?

“Why, no! At most, friends who were out knocking around the countryside with me might drop in. You must meet them. That would certainly be great fun for you; they believe that they are reforming India. You have already infected me with self-distrust. Well, I’m ready. I feel like a different woman.”

She walked out of the dim light in a simple dress of peasant cotton in an uneven print. She sat down near him and looked warmly into his dark eyes.

“Are you staying here overnight? Will you be here for another couple of days? You don’t even know how glad I am. Sometimes I missed you so—”

“But you didn’t manage to write.”

“It’s the way I was brought up. If you have to write a letter, better to send a telegram: you’re less likely to say something stupid. If you intend to send a telegram, better to call; and if you’re going to call, be brave enough to meet and speak face to face.”

“I would have had to wait a long time,” he sighed. He found her extremely alluring, stretched out in a wicker chair and smoking a cigarette.

“Something has come up: a chance to pop back to Delhi for a few days. If you hadn’t come here, I’d have been with you sometime this week.”

“Surely my arrival didn’t prompt this change in your plans.”

“Certainly not. I’ve been longing to see you. I have so much to tell you.” She pursed her lips as if for a kiss; he understood that she had become accustomed to those evening rambles around Old Delhi during which they talked, sought each other’s advice, exchanged confidences, and he felt himself favored.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” she called, but no one hurried to open the door. Margit started to get up, but Istvan reached the door first. An elderly chambermaid with dark skin beneath her gray hair bowed against the light of the sinking sun.

“Excuse me, miss—” she folded her hands as if in prayer “—but the clerk told me to come and take your dresses to the laundry. He did not know you had a guest.”

Under the old woman’s lowered eyelids her dark eyes were rolling, scanning the bed, the room. She knew perfectly well about me, he thought, but they wanted to check, to see what sort of bond we have, friendship or deeper intimacy; this hotel is known as a hideaway for lovers.

“Go on, take them. I threw everything into the basket in the bathroom.”

“Perhaps tomorrow. I do not want to disturb you.”

Istvan looked at Margit. They understood each other without words.

“No, take them now. Count them and write it down. You are not disturbing us at all.”

In reality they were both more at ease because the maid was standing in front of the half-open door. Her presence changed the atmosphere of their meeting, freeing them from the necessity for intimate gestures, words, perhaps even confessions, that might cause them regret. At last she left with the bundle, carrying it on her head after she had crossed the threshold.

They felt an urge to escape. It was too early for dinner. Terey decided to surprise the girl and take her to the city of spirits, Fatehpur Sikri.

Large trees with leaves that might have been cut from leather stood tall and motionless, like theater decorations. Vacant fields, yellow and red, dozed in the sun. In spite of the glare, the sky was pallid and hostile, oppressive to the sight. They were relieved to see a gentle knoll and the toothed line of red stone that was the city wall.

As he drove up under the great gate, which stood partly open, walls appeared above them, exhaling fire, enclosing a haunting emptiness. The city and its palaces slept, bearing no traces of human inhabitants, undamaged by any siege. Swarms of monkeys had taken them over. They sat on ledges between statues, looking like statues themselves; sometimes they climbed indolently, shaking their silver crests and showing their yellow teeth in grimaces of disgust. The silence was still more arresting, for not even a cicada chattered within the walls. There was something malevolent in the air; it lurked, it waited. So Margit felt, at least. An echo multiplied their footsteps and mimicked their voices. In spite of themselves they walked lightly and spoke softly.

Suddenly they heard a melodious cry. They saw a slender black silhouette on top of the wall. A man was standing there. He wore a red sash that seemed to cut him in two; from that distance he looked like a phantom.

He took a step and stretched out a hand toward them as if he wanted to stop them, then leaned out awkwardly and, with legs drawn up, fell. They heard a howl of despair, then a splatter, as if a body had struck the ground.

“My God,” Margit moaned. “He’s killed himself!”

A low wall with statues concealed the place where he had fallen. They ran, their echoing steps clattering as if an unseen crowd were hurrying along with them.

They could not see a body.

“He jumped when he saw us. Why?”

“He wanted an audience,” he said, enjoying her fright.

“You really are dreadful,” she sniffed. “Oh, God!” She stopped, horror-struck. “He fell into the well!”

Clutching Istvan’s hand, she looked into the shaft. The stone casing was dark with spattered water. She stirred the mossy green coating of plants below them, which had been torn in the center by the falling body.

“He drowned,” she whispered. “Horrible. He hit the water from three stories without bracing himself — that’s enough.”

Then from under the ragged layer of water plants, something emerged: the round shape of a head, pushing apart the tattered greenery that covered its eyes. It grinned, showing white teeth, and shouted joyfully.

After a moment the man crawled out. He came toward them exuberantly, making wet tracks on the red stone and pressing water from his slender body with his hands.

“That was a jump in honor of this respected lady, to entertain her!” he exclaimed. “Only five rupees, sahib. I can repeat it so madam can take a photo.”

When he had gone, Margit stood in front of Istvan with clenched fists.

“You knew all the time. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to spoil it for you. He is the guardian of the dead city. You give him great pleasure if you experience his death. That’s his theatrical stunt. You remember how he fell? It looked like a real accident. A good acrobat! He deserves his payment. He might have missed the well, and if he had turned in the air, he would have broken his neck on the shaft and been dead as a rabbit.”

“Stop!” She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t even want to listen to this. You’re appalling.”

They walked side by side. The echo marred the rhythm of their steps. Shadows fell on the red walls. Shriveled lizards, turning up their tails, ran in a grayish-green stream over the stones. A bright sky, clear as if it had been swept, lighted a palatial room from end to end. How she charms me, he thought. How pretty she is when she is provoked. She reminds me of an angry cat, though she would certainly not claw, only beat like a little boy with her fists. Her hair is a little stiff; it will blow freely in the hot wind, and the reddish gleams will show. The magnitude of these empty buildings quiets these thoughts, inspires brooding, feeds the heart with sadness.

They went in by the stairs to the galleries. They passed spacious rooms where the radiance of the low sun lay on the floors like golden carpets. The air smelled of arid rock and dried bird droppings, though their movements did not start up a single bird. At moments they heard the voices of monkeys and a sound like the patter of bare feet. But when they went out to the terrace, monkeys with long coats like silver tippets were sitting on the neighboring roof, just across a narrow street, observing them with mischievous yellow eyes — attending them from a distance, like guards in disguise.

“From this porch the emperor surveyed his provisions. There was his harem. Counting only one wife per apartment, which is doubtful, for they were probably domiciled by twos or threes, it would amount to something modest: thirty women. You see those paved squares in the courtyard — the giant chessboard on which he played with living people as chessmen. Legend has it that he always won from the time he beheaded one of the rajahs who dared to play with him as with an equal, and might therefore have become a political rival.”

They went into the dooryard and stood still, overcome with delight. Against a red wall, three cupolas in the shape of lotus buds rose from a small temple of white marble. Their walls — marble leaves and branches — gleamed in the rose-tinted sunset, rubbed smooth by the hands of the sculptors and of the faithful, who prayed clinging to the stone plaitwork, begging favors from the saint buried inside under an unpolished block of white stone. The little shrine was reflected in a shallow pool used by pilgrims for the ritual washing of the feet before they went in by the steps.

“Tell me; why did the people go away from this place?” She turned her bright eyes toward him. “It is beautiful here, after all.”

“Shall I tell you the truth or the legend?”

“I prefer the legend, so you don’t spoil the charm. We have the city in the palms of our hands.” She took off her sandals and carefully, gathering her skirt up, walked into the water.

“It’s hot!” She nearly whistled. “Surely this is allowed? I’m not committing some sacrilege?”

Her legs were dappled with light as she waded toward the steps, disturbing the white reflection of the three cone-shaped roofs.

He sat on the polished flagstones of the yard, his arms around his knees, and looked at her with undisguised yearning. It is not just because of the heat, he thought, nor the sensuous sigh of India, nor my own isolation, that I desire her. I could peel her dress from her here, in the middle of this courtyard, and have her on these stones that are exuding heat. But he did not move or call her to him. He was lost in contemplation of the musical lines of her neck when she shook the wave of her hair impatiently, her straight back, the curve of her hips. She raised both hands and lodged them in the woven stone work; she tried to look into the shadowed temple. She looks like a Hindu woman at prayer, he thought, and perhaps she is asking for something, not only for herself, but for us.

“Listen! It’s full of red strings, all attached.” She plucked at the yarn that was wound around the sculpted shoots and leaves and unraveled it.

“Don’t disturb it — those are pleas for a child,” he exclaimed in a warning tone. She bent down and replaited the yarn, tying up the ends. Like a terrified little girl she came back to where he was, leaving wet footprints.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“You didn’t wait. The emperor was the ruler of a great state, the most beautiful women from the remotest part of Asia were brought to his harem, but he had no offspring. He tried various medicines and spells, but to no effect. Then he turned for help to a saintly old man. The old man ordered him to fast in solitude for twenty days, then fed him lavishly and sent for his favorite wife. That night she conceived. The emperor was then twenty-two years old. He wanted to thank the elder for this firstborn, this heir, so he asked him what he desired. The holy man replied, ‘I want peace, for that is more precious than anything in your treasury; I want silence.’ And the emperor, so the saint’s meditations would not be disrupted, ordered the people to leave the city and went away himself, with all his court. Three years later he died, wounded by a poisoned arrow.”

“That’s rather far-fetched.”

“Of course,” he conceded lightly. “But the man who jumped into the well is a descendant of the old wizard. Only that one family lives in Fatehpur Sikri. It guards not only the walls but the abandoned palaces. It opens the gates at dawn and closes them at dusk. At night the town is under the sway of the spirits.”

“I’d like to spend the night here,” she whispered. “When the moon is full, it must be exquisite.”

“Just as it was among the movie sets during the shooting of The Indian Tomb. Unfortunately they haven’t allowed anyone to stay here since some American tried to break off the statues and lower them on a line down the wall.”

“You’ve said so many times that everything is allowed here if only one pays well.”

“Because it is. But what do you want to find here? Haven’t you had enough thrills? I will tell the man to jump into the well again for you, if you like.”

“No. No.” Her hands fluttered as if to repel the suggestion.

“The legend of the healing of the impotent king lures infertile women. They come, they whisper beseechingly through the plaited marble, and then they tie in a red thread.”

“What for?”

“So they will not bleed. And you know how effective that is.”

“You’re terrible. You manage to spoil everything.” She sprang to her feet and picked up her sandals. “Why did they really go away from here?”

“Look at your feet. Touch them. They are rough from salt. Beds of it are underneath us. The water is not fit for drinking or for crops. The place is easy to defend, beautifully situated — but treeless, with only desert plants. It is simply impossible to sustain life here. Come. You have completed your pilgrimage, you have attached a red thread. Let’s go home.”

The western light kindled on the battlements at the tops of the walls. Long shadows fell from the towers. The first bats trembled in the air, squeaking, blackening the light, and scattering again into the dimness of the city’s interior, where they wheeled in the air as if to summon the night.

Margit stood in the sun, at a loss, embarrassed. She was ready to shake off her sandals, run to the pool, and tear away the thread. But she saw that Istvan was teasing her and, feeling annoyed, made her way to the gate.

“Silly superstitions,” she shrugged. “I’m a doctor, I appreciate the influence of desire and expectation on biological processes. That may interfere with a woman’s rhythms, but it will not give her a child.”

A trumpet could be heard in the distance: we are closing — like the signal that tells people strolling in city parks that they must leave.

“Because of that custom, there are descendants of the saintly old man.” He took the girl by her arm. “Thanks to their very simple practices, tradition endures, and instances of women receiving the gift of children increase. And women make journeys to this grave.”

“You’re a monster.”

“After the first child, a wife makes a pilgrimage of thanks, performs her acts of devotion here, and is blessed with the next offspring. This is a miraculous place, haunted by spirits extremely well disposed toward women.”

Before they walked into the deep shadows of the tower, they looked around them. The black contours of palaces and temples loomed against a fiery sky. A cry of despair seemed to come from the light; the night rose from the ground like a vast silence.

The guard waited at the half-open gate, squatting above a myriad of small elephants, monkeys, buffalo, and tigers carved from camphor wood. Margit squatted, too, and set about choosing some animals. When he leaned down to advise her, he smelled the warm exhalation of her body, the aroma of camphor and the odor of slime from the acrobat’s turban, which was still not dry.

The Hindu packed the statues into a bag of woven palm leaves and handed it to Margit with his compliments. Istvan held out money, but the girl nudged his hand away.

When they had gone down from the knoll, he had to turn on the headlights, though there was still a glow in the sky. Night was rising in the east; stars swarmed overhead, first large, then blinking, as if the sky had been sown with golden sand.

“Are you satisfied?”

“With this excursion? Yes. Thank you very much.”

“And with me?”

“Don’t talk so much. Look out — don’t let us run into an arba. I’ll be grateful to you if you get me back in one piece.”

As he stood in the dusky pergola in front of her door, he was sure they would go to dinner together. The sound of people bustling about, the jangle of glass and silverware, could be heard distinctly from the dining room. The buzzing of cicadas made his ears ring. Leaves rustled. Lizards, not yet sated, were feeding on them. The red ends of burning cigarettes flashed far away in the twilight; evidently the participants had returned from the conference. Margit felt for his hand in the darkness and tucked the bag with the carvings into it. He thought she was looking for her key, but the door was open, for the pungent smell of insecticide blew in his face.

“I’m tired. Forgive me — I’m not coming to the restaurant.”

“Eat in my room. You will drink whiskey on the rocks and get a second wind.”

“I’m half asleep.”

Their hands met. Their fingers entwined.

“Go yourself. Drink to my health. I know you’d like to see your friends.” She spoke in an undertone, a little sleepily. “I got the animals for your boys. But perhaps you’ve already sent them some?”

“No,” he admitted, feeling ashamed.

“Ah, you see. I’ve taken up too much of your time.”

They were silent for a moment. The cicadas were like drills in his ears.

“When will I see you?”

“Not anymore today.”

“Till tomorrow, then. Good night.”

“I’ll show you the hospital. You will meet our doctors. Good night.”

Her fingers slid from his palm. In the heavy dusk he did not see, but felt, that she disappeared, and when he reached out, he touched a closed door.

He shrugged. He was thrown back on himself, and he felt exasperated. What had happened to her so suddenly? Did I offend her in some way? He recalled every word, but he could find nothing for which to blame himself. With closed eyes he saw her, graceful, leaning over in the sunlight, her neck golden brown, her hair bright with copper glints. Her blue eyes, brilliant to their depths, blinking in the glare. Freckles around her nose, winsome as a little girl’s freckles. The full, sensitive lips that called his name.

He threw the bag on the neatly made bed. The mosquito netting, bound into a knot, fluttered in the twilight like the mushroom cloud they painted on posters exploiting the fear of war.

“A woman. Yes, a woman,” he repeated with relief — as if that discovery cleared up all disquieting uncertainties.

Like a lighthouse the reception desk, with its obtrusively bright glass panes, marked out a path. He passed Margit’s room, keeping himself under tight rein. One must have a little dignity, he admonished himself. She said no. If she had wanted, we would have been together, so don’t force yourself on her. How can I know what happened during the time we were separated? A beautiful, dangerously smart and self-aware woman: such a woman cannot be alone for long. She reminded me clearly enough where my place is: buying toys for my children. Could anyone say more forcefully, Don’t cry, you have your own life.

A group of his acquaintances stood by the bar, which at that moment had few other customers. Little Nagar was gesticulating animatedly, while Chandra, the philanthropist, received praise with ingratiating modesty.

“You should be sorry that you didn’t hear that speech. Everyone here toots his own horn, after all; Rabindranath Tagore is only the pretext. They clamber up his monument to be seen better themselves. But here was a surprise: subtle analysis, dreamlike motifs in his watercolors, the subconscious, the faiths of childhood, things heard of, unclear, but accepted as one’s own, incarnated in art. A case study in the observation of genius from inside.”

“Why, I only know a little about the texts, and I have studied the watercolors that are on exhibit,” Chandra parried, inclining his head. “Anyone who wants to think properly about the writer would stop in and have a look at them.”

“That is precisely the point,” Nagar said, clapping and shifting about on a tall chair. “What I appreciate most in you is your ability to think boldly, to make associations. You know how to look at things.”

“What is your pleasure, gentlemen?” The bartender leaned forward. He wore an enormous white turban stiff as meringue. Nagar’s clapping had lured him to the group.

“Nothing for me,” Nagar demurred. “Pardon me for the sake of my age — the hoary head, you know,” he added, coquettishly stroking his raven-black, sleek but thinning hair. “Where have you been? I don’t dare ask with whom.”

“With a beautiful woman,” Chandra interposed.

“You saw?” Terey found the rejoinder disturbing; suddenly it seemed quite probable that the omniscient philanthropist might have been moving furtively among the ruins, observing them from palace windows. “Were you also at Fatehpur Sikri?”

“You passed me when you got out of the Austin. I was standing not far away, smoking a cigarette. You talked a moment longer and I tried to imagine who the lady might be.”

“You also were not alone,” he retorted in a knowing tone.

“Oh, no—” and he laughed abruptly. “I didn’t mean to be inquisitive. Fatehpur Sikri is in the style of socialist urban design: a whole city all at once, a tour de force, handsome façades — and uninhabitable, because they forgot to investigate whether there was water. Humanity hasn’t learned much. There is truly no progress except in killing. And it doesn’t do to nurse any particular bias against that occupation; it is so universal and so well accounted for by science that it is even difficult to discern who is guilty. Knowledge of the law and clean hands: that is my maxim.”

“Well, come clean: whom were you with?” Nagar leaned toward Istvan with an insinuating wink. “You can be sure I won’t be jealous where a woman is concerned.”

“I was with Miss Ward. Surely you know her: a doctor. She is fighting to eliminate blindness,” he answered casually.

“A very risky business,” Chandra said with a crooked smile. “Life in India is easier for the blind than for those who see. Why open their eyes? I knew of a couple of cases in which blind men whose sight was restored committed suicide. One became convinced that his brothers were cheating him; the other found that his beloved wife, who was quite devoted to him, had skin that was speckled like a panther’s. Loss of pigment: to this day we don’t know the cause of this illness.”

The gong was vibrating languidly, so they finished their whiskey and passed through the double row of bowing servants into the dining room.

During the conversation the thought of Margit returned to Istvan time after time, like a bad toothache, until he was exasperated. He expected to see her enter the room with some man whose company she preferred. He was dispirited and impatient; he left early to go to his room.

If she had a light on, I would still drop in for a moment, he told himself to avoid admitting defeat.

The cone-shaped tent of mosquito netting reminded him of a snow-covered mountain peak. He began to undress lethargically. Through the thick wire screen that covered the bathroom window he heard what was taking place in the neighboring room; someone wheezed and snorted in the shower, and then he heard a call like the meowing of a cat:

“Darling”—he heard the English word—“how long do I have to wait?”

The voices irritated him. He didn’t want to hear them, and not only was he hearing them, but in his imagination he saw the indistinct outlines of bodies tumbling under the wavy netting.

Mosquitoes stabbed his bare feet; it was like a fire. He remembered something Chandra had said: “Since they built a swimming pool here for the Americans, which they don’t use anyway because it is overgrown with algae, the hotel has had mosquitoes.”

He crawled under the netting and pushed hard to secure the ends of it under the mattress. His pillow reeked of camphor; beside it the bag of carved animals lay where he had tossed it. An attendant had spread blankets on the bed, but he had not dared to rearrange anything.

He did not want to get out of bed. He scratched his ankles with satisfaction. He licked a finger and moistened the swollen bites. He thought of Margit, then of his boys; he wanted to show them the ruins of a temple, but they were not listening to him. A herd of horses, black and bay, came running up in a cloud of dust, panting from their warm muzzles. But that was already a dream, and he looked for Sandor and Geza in the shaggy hair on the horses’ necks, in the forelocks, in the flying legs and beating hooves; horses, he saw in his dream, were trouble.

He woke early, rested and calm. All trace of disquieting dreams he seemed to rinse away in the shower, and he was whistling as he shaved, when he heard a tearful feminine voice unexpectedly near:

“Darling, there is someone in our bathroom—”

He smiled at the traitorous screen in the little window under the ceiling and called affably:

“It’s me. Good morning!”

He heard shuffling steps, then the sound of a man relieving himself. A gravelly bass voice assured the woman that the bathroom was empty, that its only door led to their bedroom.

The day sparkled with sunshine. The dew-sprinkled grass and the vines on the pergola blazed with rainbow-tinted fire. The greenery beguiled the eye with a freshness which in an hour would be sullied by brick-red dust rising from under the wheels of automobiles.

Istvan was delighted with the sky, which was not yet discolored — with the vast reaches of pure air. Though the door to Margit’s room was open and the familiar cat from the reception desk was sitting on the threshold, he walked from the brick path into the still-benign sun and busied himself with the car. He had hardly raised the hood and glanced at the motor when he found two young men beside him. Curious, they touched the nuts, ready to help, willing and friendly.

The motor hummed quietly. The freshly wiped windshield gave him a view of the white columns of the pergola, clusters of orange flowers tinged with gold, and the red road with barely visible ruts.

“Hello! Have you already eaten breakfast, Terry?”

Margit stood near him, exuding a freshness like spring. Her eyes as she looked at him were frank and warm.

“I’m getting the car ready for the road.”

“When are you leaving?”

He heard a slight dismay in her voice.

“The congress ends at noon. There is no need for me to be at the farewell reception. I’m leaving as early as possible. A mountain of work is waiting for me at the embassy.”

“Isn’t it better to travel at night? It’s cooler, and the road is freer.”

“I agreed to be here for three days. They have places reserved for a Cook’s tour. I wanted to vacate the room for them.”

“Bring your things to my room instead of cramming them into a suitcase,” she said simply. “In the evening you will leave. I haven’t yet been able to make the most of your being here.”

“It isn’t my fault,” he pointed out, a little aggrieved. “You were tired yesterday.”

“I really was tired yesterday. But what were you imagining? Stop spending time with the car and spend time with me. Let’s go to breakfast. Then you’ll drive me to the hospital. The congress begins at ten; there’s enough time for me to show you what I’m doing.”

“Go. Take a table. Only don’t order the sickening porridge for me. I’ll wash my hands and be right there.”

Standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, looking himself in the eye, he thought with a hint of impatience: Is she trying to patch things up with this proposal? Yesterday she pushed me away, today she holds me. Is it a trick to entice me, a game? Or perhaps she is simply saying what she thinks, without subterfuge or calculation.

He gathered his shaving gear, threw his rumpled pajamas into his suitcase, and carried his jacket on a hanger to Margit’s room. As he hung it in the closet, he found himself stroking her dresses so tenderly that he was frightened.

“I am checking out,” he told the clerk at the reception desk. The young man wore an immaculate white shirt; his starched linen made crunching noises. On his swarthy, boyish neck was poised a handsome head. Nagar would have been enchanted with him. But the young Hindu did not understand, was not conscious of these priceless gifts — youth, beauty, a slightly effeminate grace — or what they could do for him, since he believed that he would return in innumerable incarnations. We must whip them into impatience, into a frenzy of desire. We must act quickly, we live only once, and our life is terribly short.

He put a tip on the desk and pressed the clerk’s hand, which must have pleased the young man even more, for a joyous smile brightened his face.

“I hope you will come to us again soon, sir.”

“I hope so, too,” Istvan affirmed, and made his way to Margit’s table.

In a warm camaraderie, bantering like the best of friends, they drove up in front of the sprawling two-story building that was the hospital. Under its walls, on the tin-roofed verandas, where peasant women in green and beet-colored saris had settled in for long stays, it was colorful and buzzing with voices. When he had parked the car, stifling odors blew into his face: disinfectants, pus, blood, and the sweat suffering wrings from human bodies.

He followed Margit. He had to step over the thin black legs of the village women. Their heavy silver anklets clinked on the concrete floor.

Margit was well liked here. Women greeted her, folding prayerful hands and wailing blessings. Half-naked little boys clung to her hands and raised their faces to her trustingly, looking at her with one eye while the other was covered with a wad of soiled gauze fastened with a pink bandage, like a broken window boarded up crosswise.

“It’s worse inside,” she said, anticipating his thought as she made, with difficulty, a path for them. “We have no room for all the sick. They’re lying in the corridors on nothing but mats. We don’t want anyone who’s dragged himself here to leave without our being able to assess whether the treatment is working. That’s why there’s such a crowd. Even in hopeless cases when the sight can’t be saved, it is possible to provide some relief. We try to teach them how they should care for the eyes.”

“Are all these people sick?” Shocked, he pointed to groups of villagers with wives and children who were making their way toward the hospital.

“No. Those are families visiting our patients. They are bringing them food. It is difficult for members of each sect to provide themselves with the obligatory ritual cuisine. We allow the close relatives of the sick to feed them. They come with children, with kinsfolk; such an expedition to the hospital is an event. Some of the sick have never lain on a bed before they came to the hospital, never in their lives eaten until they were full. They believe in spells more than in medicines. Their systems are not accustomed to the pills we take without thinking; here every day something as commonplace as aspirin or pyramidon can work miracles, to say nothing of the signs the head physician himself makes on their chests with a gentian solution.”

“He uses spells? Suggestion?”

“Suggestion doesn’t help much with trachoma,” she answered sadly. “He marks them with their initials and writes a case identification number.”

They went into a ward where, though the windows were open, the sticky-sweet smell of decomposing pus nearly choked him. The chatter, the weeping, the moaning of prayers stopped and a swell of greeting started up. He was moved by the sight of children who, in spite of the dressings on their eyes, played contentedly with little clay pots, rag dolls, and coconut shells. It was enough that they felt no pain and had already forgotten about the disease that threatened them. They picked the gauze away with their fingers and looked at the people moving around the room from under inflamed eyelids, with glassy, clouded eyeballs.

“Put on a gown. You don’t have to fasten it — just throw it over your shoulders. I want to show you the outpatient department.”

Two doctors came toward them, one tall, balding, and with nearly white hair, the other young, energetic, and sporting a crew cut.

“Professor Salminen, I would like to introduce Mr. Terey, a poet from Hungary. He is here for the Tagore congress.”

“Dr. Connoly, from the Ford Foundation.” The young American shook his hand vigorously.

“Do you want to write about us, sir?” the professor asked anxiously. “Dr. Ward is not conversant with all the hospital’s affairs. Perhaps Connoly will tell you more.”

I am not going to write about the confounded hospital, Istvan vowed to himself. Margit is already being pulled away from me, and I won’t be able to get out of here.

They went to the outpatient department. A young woman was sitting by the door, holding a bowl in her hands. An orderly was standing over her. Pulling out her swollen eyelid, he plucked out her lashes, which were heavy with pus and plastered together with it, as calmly as if he were pulling feathers from a slaughtered chicken. If the eyelid bled, he reached wearily for a tuft of cotton, wet it with an acrid-smelling liquid, and dried the eye. In the bowl, which the woman was holding with great care, lay bloody tatters of cotton and eyelashes sticking to the edge like fish bones pushed to the edge of a plate. Big flies crawled around the dish and beat against the window screens. Two sheets of flypaper dangled from the ceiling, black with insects. Istvan heard their long, desperate buzzes.

“I am preparing the case for madam doctor.” The orderly opened the peasant woman’s swollen eye. “I did not know madam was here already.”

Margit washed her hands, rinsed them in a bowl that was lavender from permanganate, and put on a pair of rubber gloves that were floating in it. Over her forehead she wore a round mirror that looked like a silver star. When she was leaning over the woman and peering into the diseased eye, Istvan saw a reddish-blue tangle of veins and yellow grains of encysted pus like boiled barley. The skewed reflection of them, magnified in the mirror, hung above Margit’s lips as she pursed them in concentration. It was repugnant; somehow he wanted to protest.

“Go, Terry,” she said tenderly. “Connoly will tell you about our base of operations. You see, they’ve already caught up with me. Don’t be angry.”

“Good luck,” he half-whispered, as if the wish were for himself, not for her.

“Good luck.” She raised a hand; it looked alien and dead in its rubber glove. “We’ll meet this evening. Wait for me.”

“If you need statistical data,” the doctor said invitingly, “we’ll go to the records room.”

The nauseating smell of the hospital was on Istvan’s lips.

“Perhaps I will seem rude,” he began cautiously, “if I speak frankly: no. Let’s go out to the yard. I’d like to smoke.”

“But here we can—” then, noticing beads of sweat on Terey’s forehead, Connoly added quickly, “You’re right. A cigarette doesn’t taste right in here. Let’s go into the open air. The senses can be numbed in here — and you are a poet!” he concluded with a mock frown.

With relief they walked out to the open verandas and on to the dry grass of the yard. Terey exhaled deeply, as if he wanted to dispel the stench of something foul from his lungs. He looked at the women’s clothing, at the copper vessels they used to wet their hands as they washed them symbolically before eating. He asked anxiously:

“Are these diseases contagious?”

“Very,” Connoly muttered without taking his cigarette from his lips.

“Why let in this mob of visitors?”

“At home in their villages they are also in contaminated places. The resistance of the organism is the crucial factor; after all, there is no hygiene. They might as well at least watch, learn the rudiments of changing the dressings, treating the eye — that much, anyway. We don’t want to think too much. We treat them, we send them away to their homes, to the villages, into the same conditions, where they are sure to be reinfected. We’re ladling out water with a sieve to put out a fire.”

“How to save them, then?”

Blowing smoke from his lips, the doctor looked at the crowds camped in the shade of the veranda.

“Are you an expatriate, or are you from here?”

“I am from Hungary.”

“I tell you, another six months here and I will go mad. I will be a communist. There must either be enormous, immediate reforms here, or revolution. Those in power must either give, give as they would to themselves or their own, munificently, without counting, or the people themselves must take. Otherwise all our treatment, no matter how dedicated we are, is just stirring the water in a flood — philanthropy for the fun of it. Only it is not an issue for doctors, but for you.”

“For us?” Istvan said quizzically. “You want to leave it all to the communists?”

“No. To those who can set the imagination on fire, move hearts. I’m thinking of writers.”

They went toward the car; the dry grass crumbled under their feet. It was painful to Terey that he had not managed to show the admiration their work deserved.

“You are a true enthusiast.”

“Me?” Connoly said in amazement. “I think I understand now the futile, heroic labors of the saints who want to convert sinners. I simply treat people, because that’s what I was trained to do. I try to help the suffering. They’re so docile and defenseless that it drives you into a rage. Certainly they are more deeply grounded in moral principle than people in our society; they are like plants subject to the laws of vegetation, very good, very tractable.”

“Have you been in India long?”

“I signed a contract for a year. Hardly anyone sticks it out longer. One begins to rebel, and then comes the desire to escape. Then desertion.”

“Will Doctor Ward stay here long?”

“Ah, Margit!” Connoly said with visible delight. “There’s a doctor with a true vocation. She loves the sick — not, like Professor Salminen, just the complicated cases of trachoma.”

“It is not too solitary for her here?” Istvan asked, stung that the other man had spoken of her intimately, by name.

“We do our best.” Connoly spoke with the cockiness of a soldier stepping out three paces ahead of his line — as if he were certain of his importance to Margit. “But there’s not much time to get away from this place. There’s a fleabitten cinema here; there are lizards on the screen. There’s one decent hotel bar. They fleece tourists there, but at least they serve real whiskey. You have to find yourself a hobby. One person collects bronze statuettes of gods, another wooden masks, another snake skins, but after a month they’ve had enough. They lose the passion. Only work is left, and exhaustion. I fall onto the bed and lie there in a stupor. I’m supposed to play bridge and I don’t go. I know a shower is all I need, but I don’t have the strength to drag myself to the bathroom.”

“There is still coffee,” Terey smiled. “It gives the heart a jolt.”

“Or the ampule with morphine. That has to be guarded. I saw how people died in the war only because there was no control and they had too ready access to the medicine box, where the narcotics were kept.”

“You must run over to Delhi now and then. Look me up. Margit knows the address.” He could not resist this reference to their relationship.

“With pleasure. We’ll be happy to come when time permits.” Looking him keenly in the eye, Connoly gripped his hand too hard; there was something challenging in their handshake, and both knew why.

With deft movements of the steering wheel he passed wagons drawn by oxen. The rank smell of the animals’ sweat and dried manure was in his face. The responsiveness of the automobile delighted him; it was as if he and the Austin were one.

Is he pursuing her? he reflected coolly. I am really going mad. Perhaps nothing has happened yet. She herself said, after all, that she has had lovers. She told me to stay. She is a sensible woman. I shouldn’t complicate matters. Perhaps today it will be settled.

Gravel crunched under the wheels. He parked the car beside the others, shrewdly calculating which way the shade would move. Tangled gray roots hung like stalactites from the enormous trees; some roots had grown into the red earth, creating still more trunks, which supported masses of branches.

The congress was easing toward its close. The attendees were going out for cigarettes and, notwithstanding efforts to summon them back by the bearded moderator in the tunic of Biblical cut, were in no hurry to return to the hall.

A large group drove out to visit a model collective farm, the strong point of which was not only agriculture and dyed fabrics, but, as Nagar informed him, that its workers had even managed, without coercion, thanks to four years’ persuasion and patient advocacy, to divert to a field a stream of liquid manure that for ages had flowed straight to the well. The drinking water was no longer fouled and fewer people fell ill with typhus — a genuine achievement, he concluded satirically.

Only a few dozen white figures in academic headdress could be seen in the hall. A poet with splendid eyes and hair curly as a woman’s falling to his shoulders recited verse to the accompaniment of three-stringed violins. He wore a wide-sleeved shirt fastened with a scarlet ribbon in front, and black and gold slippers with turned-up tips.

“A good poet,” attorney Chandra, sitting by Istvan, whispered in his ear. “Pity they don’t print his work.”

“The police prohibit it?”

“No. There is no money for printing. And there are no people keen to purchase; they do not yet know how to read.”

“What about records? Every little shop has a gramophone. What do you say to that — as a philanthropist?”

“Not a bad idea,” Chandra admitted, raising his hand as a sign that he wanted to listen to the musical intonations of the poet.

“What is he talking about?”

“He is speaking of the joy of knowledge, of bathing in the sun of truth,” Chandra whispered.

“Aha!” Istvan nodded with feigned approval. “I understand.”

He took advantage of the ovation to slip toward the door, culling publications from a table on the way. He settled into a wicker chair under a tree and smoked a cigarette, gazing into the dome of leaves drenched with light.

This is nice; I’m suspended in heat like an insect in amber. I completely forgot about Delhi and the embassy. I sent a dispatch, and I feel like a man in a boat with the ropes cut, drifting with the current. I loathe my own passiveness and acquiescence. I’ve become like the Hindus: let it be as it must be — he laughed and threw away the cigarette butt, then thought of Margit — provided it is as I desire!

At four he called the hospital. Again he could not get a connection, so he sat in the bar and chatted lazily with guests waiting for a bus before he summoned the clerk. Margit called to tell him to eat dinner alone — not to delay it, for she would be coming later. He should get the key to her room, not stand on ceremony, rest.

“I’ll get the car right away and come out for you.”

“No. It’s not necessary. I don’t want you to wait here. Fred will drive me.”

“Perhaps I should go back to Delhi. Perhaps something has changed?” He was angry, and still angrier at the few seconds of silence that passed before she answered:

“No. Stay. Then you will do as you like.” She threw in the last phrase with a smile, as if she realized that she had promised too much. “I still want to see you, Terry, so much.”

He hung up the receiver heavily and left, followed by the clerk’s watchful glance.

A wasted afternoon; why is she keeping me here? An angry obstinacy rose in him, and an urge to assert his independence. He did not reach for the key, though to the staff the very permission to take possession of her room was evidence that they enjoyed a close relationship, and he could have savored a moment of easy triumph in her confirmation of it. He bided his time in a corner of the bar, slowly sipping whiskey. He waited it out, stiffening internally with resentment and vowing to even the score with her for leading him on.

But it was enough that finally she appeared, simply herself, her hair almost dark in the dim light, and affectionately extended her strong hand. It was reddened from its recent scrubbing and from the disinfectants. He was disarmed.

“Why didn’t you take the key? You didn’t want to compromise me? And what do I care about all of them? I see that you’ve been drinking a little. Well, why are you sitting here in such a mood? I had to perform treatments, then write my notes on them while it was all fresh. Order a double for me. I won’t spoil your dinner with tales of my cases. Cheer up—” she raised her glass with its goldish liquid. “I made Fred hurry, and when I knocked on my door, I thought you were asleep. Then I got the key. I was sure you were angry at me, and had left. I turned on the light, I waited a while, and finally I came over here, as befits a doctor, to enjoy a glass of something. Then I saw your car and I wasn’t worried anymore.”

With wide eyes she took a swallow from her glass, then looked at him with great tenderness, or so he thought. They went together to the dining room, which was almost empty. They were immediately surrounded by waiters in red and gold who set out huge trays of sliced meat and a profusion of vegetables cut with masterful precision, some sculpted into flowers. There were toothed spirals of turnip, radish roses, red starfish made of carrots, frizzly lettuce.

“You’re not afraid of amoebae?” She munched a cool spear of white radish.

“They’re washed in a potash solution. Anyway, a drunken amoeba can’t hurt you.”

He looked at her with delight. “If only you knew how beautiful I find you!”

“Perhaps I know. I had proof of that today, when you cleared out of the hospital. But now, after the whiskey, I can even believe it—” she chaffed him, touching his hand. “You like me, a person who does not exist. The Margit invented by you. For what do you know about me? You haven’t even looked at my passport. Perhaps I have a husband, children.”

“No. After all, you said—” he went steely all over.

“How old are you? Do you still believe what women say? They create themselves all over again for every new man. Well, don’t look at me like that. I’m not lying. Why did I keep you here? I don’t know myself. Perhaps you mean something to me and that’s why I wanted you to stay.”

“But yesterday—”

“Maybe I was afraid. Today at least I’m certain that you’re capable of going away. And probably you should. That would be better.”

She spoke in an undertone, rather as if she were lost in thought and talking to herself. Suddenly she slapped his hand and demanded, smiling, “Put down that cigarette. Eat.” She herself set about eating fried fish with such an appetite that he found it infectious. After a while they were chatting like a pair of students skipping their lectures.

“Shall we have coffee in my room?” she asked simply.

He followed her, gazing at her hair, which was swept up and fastened high on her head. He wanted to plunge his fingers in it, to seize her, turn her toward him and kiss her.

“You’ve done your hair differently.”

“Oh, you noticed.” She turned her head. “You must be in love.”

When they were immersed in the deep twilight of the pergola and the leafy roof curtained them from the star-strewn sky, he felt every accidental touch of her body. There was something furtive in his step, like an animal ready to spring onto its prey. In front of her door he put his arms around her and kissed her on the lips. Inside the room he tried to kiss her again, and she yielded without passion. The fragrance of her skin, her hair, disturbed and inflamed him.

“Let me go,” she whispered.

He felt that she was resisting. He still held her in his arms; he touched her, not with his lips, but with his breath.

“I asked you,” she reminded him, so he let her go.

She turned on a little lamp.

“Sit down.”

He saw the rippling hem of her skirt, the graceful legs, almost bare, in Indian sandals. She went into the bathroom; he heard the rushing of water from the tap. He breathed uneasily. He imagined that she was pulling her dress over her head, washing, perhaps dabbing on perfume. He felt a stinging disappointment when she returned, not in the least altered, with a mug in her hand, and turned on the electric machine. She checked with a circular motion of her hand to be certain it was warm and put it on a tile. Then she sat hardly two steps away — but terribly far — pulled up her knees and clasped her hands around them.

“Do you feel very disappointed?”

“No.” After a moment he ventured, “There was no joy in your kisses.”

“You felt that. I invited you for coffee and a moment’s conversation, an important conversation,” she said with emphasis, “at least to me.”

“But you let yourself be kissed.”

“I’m not made of wood. And I didn’t want to hurt you.”

They looked at each other wordlessly. Fear swept over Istvan. Where is this leading? What does she want from me?

“Istvan, I love you. That’s all,” she said heavily. “Perhaps you’ve heard that many times from other women, but to me it’s — rather a revelation.”

He breathed deeply.

He knelt by her, held her with his hands and put his head on her breast. He heard the beating of her heart. She stroked him gently, with a motherly motion.

“Oh, that’s good,” he said in a voice so full of relief that he was ashamed.

“I’m not sure of that.”

She pushed him away lightly, not with aversion, but very tenderly.

“Well, sit still. Listen.”

“That’s not all?”

“No.”

He kissed her eyelids and sat obediently in an armchair. He watched as she busied herself with the coffee, for the water had just heated. She sprinkled Nesca into the cup and mixed it with sugar.

“Let me have it.” He took the cup, holding the handle in a handkerchief, and poured in boiling water. He was calm; he had time. He knew that he had won her. She would be his. There was no need to hurry. He looked at her legs as she shifted and stretched them, at the rising and falling of her bosom, which was only lightly covered by the thin fabric of her dress, at the outline of her face in a stream of lamplight as she turned it toward him. So a general would have looked at a city in a valley that he would take in battle.

“Drink some coffee. It will do you good. You will be driving at night, and you have a little alcohol in your blood.”

He looked at her attentively. She had gone silent; it was as though she had forgotten him. She was distant — or perhaps she was only pretending to be indifferent.

“I had a fiance,” she began, speaking very low, looking straight ahead with her head slightly raised.

“I know. The Japanese killed him.”

“You know nothing,” she interrupted calmly, almost dreamily. “Let me finish. They sent him on patrol. The regiment was in retreat; everything was in disarray. The men were utterly exhausted. Stanley volunteered. Seven went with him; they didn’t want to be outdone. They went through a swamp, and they cursed him. Every step forward made it less likely that they would return. It was night. It was real jungle, not like the thorny underbrush here. You know how darkness chatters, how it frightens you?

“They were caught in an ambush. The Japanese wounded two of them and, to save themselves trouble, finished them off at their officer’s command. He ordered Stanley to point out the regiment’s location on a map. The soldiers said, as he had instructed them, that they were from a division that had wandered away from the regiment, and only the leader of the patrol knew where he was taking them. Stanley refused to tell them what they wanted to know. He was always stubborn. From the time he was little he did as he liked.” She brooded as if she were searching in her own childhood for that young man.

“They tortured him?” he asked, wishing to make it easier for her to omit the worst, which he had already guessed.

“Yes. They bound the soldiers’ hands behind their backs and set them in a row so they would see what awaited them. They tore Stanley’s shirt off and tied him by his feet to two young trees that were bent to the ground. When the trees sprang back up, he hung with his head down. His hands were tied and touched the grass. The Japanese lighted a fire and with one kick the officer set that living pendulum swinging. Do you understand? They roasted him alive. He tried to shield his face, and then to scatter the flames with his bound hands. His hair caught fire—” she spoke with a terrible calm. “He howled with pain, but he never said a word. The officer deliberated a long time before he shot him.”

Istvan could hear the dripping of water in the bathroom, the nagging rattle of the cicadas outside the window. The poor girl. He felt enormous pity for her, and he was like an empty vessel. All the haze of alcohol vanished as if he were under a spell. What can I give her, he thought. What words can console her?

“Stanley never betrayed the regiment. The ones who watched him in torment revealed everything. Each tried to speak before the next.”

“How do you know?”

“The one who brought me the information — my first,” she sniffed contemptuously, “was looking for absolution from me. He didn’t do badly out of it. Well, you know already.”

She sat hunched over, bent with pain. Her hands, resting on her lap, looked as if they had been cut off.

What can I do? he thought in despair. Caress her, cuddle her like a puppy whose paw someone stepped on? Why did this have to happen to me? He felt aggrieved and resentful. Why did she tell me this now?

“Margit,” he began hesitantly, “that was thirteen years ago.”

“Thirteen years ago you stood by those Japanese. You were the enemy.”

He tried to defend himself. “That was long, long ago. Don’t you see, we were forced into that! Hungarians didn’t want it. Margit,” he pleaded, “forget that. I love you!”

“Don’t lie. You want me. You can have me. Today. Tomorrow. Any day you like. Don’t speak now. That way you won’t regret anything. For I truly love you. It’s terrible. I know you have a wife, sons. I accept that. Though I will fight for you if I believe you love me. So think about it, you have time. I’ll certainly not run away from you.” There was desperation in her voice. “I’m not looking for easy comfort from you. Understand: you are my life.”

He was silent, shaken, stunned as if by a blow.

“Go,” she whispered. “This isn’t easy for me, either. You understand why I’m defending myself from you.”

He felt utterly helpless. Instinct warned him not to say anything equivocal; every word would ring hollow.

“Well, I will go,” he muttered, taking her limp hand and kissing it with dry lips.

She nodded. She did not raise her eyes when he closed the door behind him noiselessly, raising his suitcase like a thief.

He started up the engine and drove away. For a moment he imagined that she would open the door and look after him, but the pergola was still black; no light flashed.

As he passed Agra, he turned on his headlights. He sped away like a man escaping something.

“Margit. Margit,” he moaned. “What can I do—”

He knew that she grasped the truth. If he loved her, he would be able to throw off the past, to erase his memories. They would be shadows, perishable shadows. Her prescience told her that. That virginal love was precious to her. It revived the hope that she could experience transcending joy, that she could lose herself in happiness. It would not be enough, after that, to satisfy the restless flesh, to sleep in a man’s embrace. She is honest. She is warning me.

His mind was clear. He remembered his own behavior; he thought of himself with anger and contempt. He saw the girl curled up in the chair and, again, the other man thirteen years ago, a living body with bound hands clawing at the embers of a fire until the sparks fluttered onto the squatting prisoners and each waited until at last he died — to join in betraying the regiment.

In the glare that streamed from the headlights, innumerable insects flew like sparks. He had to slow down. He blew the horn. A column of wagons drawn by white oxen with horns like lyres moved slowly down the middle of the road. The huge, mild eyes of the animals burned with violet fire. The drivers, burrowed in between sacks of cotton, slept heavily.