Stone Tablets

Chapter V

A chalky sky, vacant as far as the eye could see, teemed with glittering dust. Tremors in the air created the appearance of motion, but the yellow, withered leaves and tattered palm fronds, weighed down by the burden of the heat, did not even sway. Together with the glare, which assaulted the eye like fragments of a broken mirror, the nagging rattle of cicadas floated from all directions, rising and falling like the sound of drilling. The insects were rasping furiously; all space seemed to throb with their noise. One could hate this malign aridity which had not changed for months. It made unshaded walls breathe fire. It lay heavily on people, incapacitating them, setting them on edge, making it impossible to work or rest.

In vain Istvan circled the embassy, looking for shade. Finally he parked the Austin by the garage wall with the front end buried in a curtain of vines. Terrified lizards trickled from the colorless leaves.

He was returning from the studio of an Indian radio station, where he had succeeded in arranging for fifteen minutes of Hungarian violin music and folk songs to be played on the air. No doubt it was at least partly because of the gift he had placed on the desk of the silk-clad program director. Good thing she didn’t open the box while I was there. The chocolates must certainly have melted and gone sticky, he thought, smiling maliciously. They had described the music as akin to their own; he had hardly taken it as a compliment, given his familiarity with the whining of the Hindu instruments, the songs like laments with their undercurrents of sadness and pain.

Near the garages he heard a rhythmic chopping. Mihaly was squatting on his heels, almost hidden behind empty crates. With a cleaver from his mother’s kitchen he was cutting boards into long slivers, helping himself by pushing the end of his tongue out of his mouth, not even looking around as the car pulled in. Only when Terey stood over him did he raise his flushed face and rub a drop of perspiration off his nose.

“It’s not too hot for you?”

“No. I have to help, because wood costs so much.”

“And you want to sell it?”

“I’m going to give it to Krishan. I like him very much.”

“Be careful — don’t cut yourself.”

“I am, uncle,” he answered gravely. “Is this enough?”

“For the kitchen, for kindling, that’s enough.”

“I’m chopping wood for a Hindu funeral,” he said, doing squat jumps like a frog.

“A silly game,” Istvan scolded him. “Please stop. Run along home, sit in the shade, take a rest.”

“It’s not a game. I’m really helping,” the child insisted, hitching his crisscrossed suspenders up on his tanned, slender arms. “Will it hurt her?”

“Who?”

“Krishan’s wife. She is completely dead. The old women came and put their fingers on her eyes,” he informed Terey, as if there were nothing unexpected about it. “They will burn her this evening.”

He looked at the boy in consternation. He saw lustrous eyes shaded by the light hat, and brown hands clutching the wooden handle of the cleaver. Its blade cut into a beam of sunlight, scattering sparks. The cicadas jingled as if they had gone mad.

“Is she here?” Terey pointed to the boxlike building where Krishan lived.

“No. They’ve wrapped her in blue cellophane with the ends trimmed, as if she were a sweet, and carried her on a bamboo rack. The musicians came with a drum and fifes. And her younger sister was chasing away the spirits all the time with a bunch of peacock feathers. They carried her to the river. They burn the dead there.”

“Poor Krishan.”

“He was awfully worried that the funeral would cost too much,” Mihaly explained, “so I wanted to help him.”

“You are a good boy.” Terey stroked him on the back of his slender, perspiring neck. “The rest of us will think about how to make it easier for him as well. Now be off home. That’s enough of this chopping.”

The boy straightened up reluctantly, with a deep sigh. The wall exuded heat. Big flies hit it with a metallic banging and spattered off, buzzing furiously. Istvan raised the cleaver to strike at one, but it disappeared into the glare before the blade jabbed the wall.

“It’s sly,” the boy whispered almost admiringly. “The mourners drove them away because they are spirits. There were never flies like that here. They like to squeeze into the ears or the mouth, and then the body moves. And do you know, uncle, that Krishan already has a new wife?”

“Oh, you’re talking foolishness.”

“I give you my word, uncle. I saw him give her bracelets of the dead lady’s and she tried them on in front of the mirror.”

“Mihaly, wipe your forehead. You’re sweaty all over.”

“She came from a village. Mama says a man can’t hold out for three nights without a woman. I heard her. When papa stays in the embassy a long time, mama climbs a ladder and looks through a window to see if he is alone.”

He spoke cheerfully; evidently he did not understand the real meaning of his mother’s grumblings. Istvan felt that he was abusing the child’s trust, but he yielded to temptation and said, “What about me? I have a wife and sons in Budapest, and I am alone so much of the time here.”

“Oh, you talk that way, uncle” —the boy smiled like a little fox— “but I heard that, though you don’t have a wife here, you have a kangaroo. Will you show it to me?”

All right, he thought spitefully, that’s what they wanted, that’s what they’ll have. I live in India; too many eyes. It’s enough to be seen once with a woman and already they know about you. But he drew the boy close to him and whispered:

“I don’t have a kangaroo, sweetheart.”

“It ran away?”

“It is a long way from here.”

Mihaly clung to his hand with his warm, sweaty little fingers.

“Don’t worry, uncle. Maybe it will come back.”

“If it doesn’t come back for a long time, I’ll go and find it,” he said, and suddenly he knew that he would. All he needed was an opportunity. He was overcome with affection for the little fellow who devised pastimes for himself and mimicked adults. He must help him find some enjoyment — take him out for ice cream or to the theater for a Disney film.

He heard a rumbling above his head. Someone was knocking on a windowpane. The sun blinded him; he only saw a curtain pushed aside and a figure summoning him with a gesticulating hand.

“Run along. Give your mama the chopper,” he reminded the boy, and walked into the embassy.

For an instant he felt relief. The nagging jangle of the insects died away, the hall was cool and shadowy. But soon the building felt stuffy. The odors of mosquito repellent, polish, toxic dye from the coconut matting, and smoldering cigarettes were stifling.

He found the staff gathered in Ferenc’s office. Judit’s high chestnut bun was bent above her typewriter and she tapped away doggedly while the secretary dictated, pacing around the room. The short, bald telegrapher-cryptographer sat in a small chair, calling as little attention to himself as possible.

“Well, here you are at last. You must have cut short a chat with your friend,” Ferenc remarked sarcastically. “Talking of ultimate concerns again?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Terey admitted. “Mihaly was telling me about death. A clever boy. I always learn something when I talk with him.”

He noticed that the cryptographer was looking tense, uncertain whether this was praise or mockery.

“Something must be done for Krishan,” the counselor began. “It was said, it was hinted that his wife would die, but no one really believed it. Surely we will make a contribution for the funeral.”

“Why? If we cared to be involved in the funeral of every Hindu who wanted to change his fate, we would go naked and barefoot, and there would be no embassy here, only a crematorium,” Ferenc cut in acidly. “He has rupees enough. I paid him two months’ compensation.”

“At last something sensible has been done,” Istvan said, gratified. “I endorse that decision heartily.”

“And you said that Terey would be of a different opinion,” Ferenc turned to Judit, “though that’s the boss’s wish, and talk changes nothing. Krishan is dismissed as of the first of the month. We part ways and — adieu!” He spread his hands expressively.

“He is a good chauffeur, in any case. Perhaps it was all a little too much for him. Can’t we wait?”

“Comrade counselor,” Ferenc broke in. It’s no good, Istvan thought, their turning to me this way; it means that they want something, they are inviting me to be one of the trusted few, they are banding together and making me a party to a decision taken without my advice. He stood with his head down, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “He was the ambassador’s driver,” Ferenc went on. “He had a bad reputation. The recent accident involving the cow entirely confirms it. We waited too long. But he had a sick wife; it was appropriate to exhibit patience.”

“You waited like vultures until she was finished.”

“The comparison is offensive.” Ferenc delivered his censure in his usual unctuous tone. He surveyed the others and the cryptographer signaled his agreement, as if he had swallowed something that had been sticking in his throat. “We proposed that she go to our hospital, we said that an operation was urgently needed, but he didn’t want to hear that, Comrade Terey. He didn’t want to hear that. Remember that we are in India, a capitalist country. We are, so to speak, under fire. We were not free to barge into a household with a troubled history and drag the woman onto the table by force. We cannot violate their cardinal rule: nonviolence. We did what was proper.

“I at least have nothing for which to reproach myself. It was Krishan who abused his own wife; his treatment of her was inhuman. He simply wanted her to die. She herself often said so, in tears. So we have no reason to sentimentalize him. Krishan is dismissed. The month has hardly begun. We are paying him for two, and even that is too much.”

“Krishan is a good driver. The accident could have happened to anyone, especially when cows are ambling all over the streets.”

“If he is really so good, it will be easy for him to find work, so we are doing him no harm.”

The cryptographer’s face brightened, and he nodded. Evidently that point of view suited him; he seemed pacified.

“You are dismissing him,” Istvan pointed out. “It is your affair. Why do you need me?”

“Because I speak too sharply. You, Terey, have the knack for chatting with people, explaining things, seeing a subject from every side. People trust you. Krishan is prepared for this. He already knows. The important thing is only that he not leave here with information about our confidential affairs.”

Seeing Terey’s astonishment, he added, stroking the air with his hands:

“He must not talk about where he drove and with whom. Why should they know who our contacts are and keep lists of those who are friendly to us? Do you understand?”

“Not very well.” Istvan hesitated. “And I wouldn’t believe him even if he swore by Kali.”

“You must convince him that we are well disposed toward him—” Ferenc locked his fingers together “—that after a time he may be able to return to his job here.”

“I don’t grasp this. Then why let him go?”

“You have a strange way of becoming less intelligent when there is something to be done. The ambassador directed you to speak frankly with Krishan. Understand: in India a dead cow amounts to sacrilege. It’s a serious matter. No shadow must fall on the embassy. Talk with him, sound him out, and then the three of us, you and I and the ambassador, will take further steps. It may be necessary to have recourse to a lawyer.”

“When should I speak to him?”

“Well — not today,” Ferenc eased off. “Tomorrow or the day after will be soon enough. In any case, before he begins to look for a new job. I would prefer that he not turn a profit from information about us.”

“These are mysteries to me,” Terey said dismissively.

“But suppose he went to the Americans. They are enlarging their center. Or to the Germans from the Federal Republic. They have modernized their industry and they are pushing their way in here, ready to open branch offices. Look at their information bureau on Connaught Place. They remind everyone that a few of their marks are already equal to a dollar. Whose currency is stronger? Hindus are sensitive to that. Such a driver could suit the Germans’ purposes very well. He would be a credible witness. Two facts will be true and five fictions added, and then a matter is difficult to interpret.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to keep him?”

“Evidently not, since the boss ordered that he be let go. He knows what he is doing. He has drawn up an evaluation of Krishan — a favorable one, but before anyone takes him, they will call us to verify it. Then it will be possible to allude lightly to our reservations if his new employer is not to our liking. People have stopped blindly trusting written references. We can influence the outcome of his search from a distance.”

He spoke casually, as if motivated only by friendliness. He glanced at his oval face in the windowpane and ran a comb through his thick, crimped hair.

“The couriers will be here tomorrow. Don’t forget about the reports,” he warned Terey. As he was going out, the cryptographer rose from his chair and made his way to the door as well.

“Has anything of interest come in the dispatches?” Istvan asked.

“Oh, nothing. I’m the type who, once I have decoded the dispatches, writes them out clean and right away forgets what was in them. No, there was nothing important. Certainly this much, that Rajk was innocent. Though they hanged him, he will be vindicated now.”

“Thank God!” Istvan stopped where he stood and exchanged a look with Judit. “Changes may come in the government. Well — what else?”

“I really don’t remember. I gave them to the ambassador. If he likes, he will call a meeting and inform us. If he has received other instructions, in any case we can read the details on the front page of the Times of India.”

“Well, there will be a stir in our country,” Judit said.

“Won’t there just! And whom will it benefit?” The cryptographer gave a quick nod of his close-cropped head. “It won’t bring Rajk back to life, and it won’t be easier for us, either, because everyone remembers what the papers said, the procurator’s statement, ‘Sentenced according to the law.’ And whom should we believe? Once those graves were tamped down, I’d have left them untouched.”

“But where is justice, man?” Terey cried. “We can’t give him his life back, but we can at least restore his good name. He was no traitor. He was a true Hungarian and communist.”

“You speak as though it was other people who condemned him.” The cryptographer raised a pale, bloated face. He did not immerse it in the glare of the Indian sun; he only sat in his dim room behind armored doors. “I am a simple cryptographer. They took me from the army and sent me out here. I mind my own business. But I see, counselor, that everything we read about, even what is clear and completely visible to the eye, is also a code, and only our children will read it right. It’s too bad a man can’t live to see that. Well, I’m going to my den. When the couriers fly in, they will tell us what the moods are in our country.”

The door had hardly closed behind him when Istvan sat down heavily on the other side of the desk. He looked at Judit’s darkened eyelids. The fan hummed unbearably; it grated on him.

“You’ve heard the voice of a simple man. He has to trust authority in order to hear what it says. And here the effect of everything is to undermine respect.”

“Are you for treading on those graves, Judit?”

“No. And I understand very well what you mean, but I long for a few years of peace and order after what we lived through during the war. And later. Surely my demands are not excessive?”

“Judit, the restoration of honor to a man murdered under the majesty of the law will accomplish nothing in itself. That is hardly the beginning. People will ask: What of the judges, who now appear as assassins? And the comrades who disowned him and the others, who, moreover, condemned him and applauded the false verdicts? I ask, which of them knew that when he cast his vote he was consenting to a crime? Shadows that boded no good for us hid the bloodshed; by now you don’t ask questions, the responsibility is spread around. Even carrying an investigation to the limit would not be any good. We all bear a burden of guilt. In the end, those who would show themselves to be innocent would have had to stand under the gallows back then, as a sign of protest. And who is capable of doing that? I know Hungarians; the nation demands heads, and if it doesn’t get them, it reaches for them itself. You know what can happen then.”

“You speak as if you were in the party.” He heard a ring of approval in her voice. “I saw many things and I know people who lived like saints but knew what was concealed in that last apartment, though they pretended that it did not exist. They would have hated anyone who spoke openly about what they knew, forced them to take a position, to make a pronouncement. It is very difficult to blurt out a statement: I erred, I was deceived — to reverse decades of one’s life.

“They lived with socialism, come hell or high water. They endured labor camps, betrayal, torture. They believed that was the inevitable price of laying the foundations. And now it’s clear that it could have been managed without that. Why is the boss shut up in his office? He understands: it’s not a matter of a career, of joining a new group that might take over the management of things; it’s a bitter time of squaring accounts with oneself. The detection of the first concession, that deviation, still in the hope that one could easily put the lapse behind one, that eventually it would no longer matter when one consented to the betrayal of the party — of something that aroused our passion when we were young, and still today is a great aspiration fulfilled, and unfulfilled, before us.”

He looked at her uplifted face. It was full of passion. He had never seen her like this.

“Ferenc, though he is young, doesn’t understand the signal he received today. But the ambassador is an old party man. I know because I was there. I know those scarred, anguished families who choked back their curses with shouts in honor of Stalin. They thought that it was necessary, that that sacrifice would call forth new strengths, hasten the future, assure the greatness of their country. What is left for them now?”

“And so — silence impenetrable as a concrete slab?”

“No. Only I would not rush to judgment. If we have borne with so much, must we burst open like fish from the deep in the glare of the sun? Time is an unbribable judge. It weeds out ruthlessly all false quantities. Patience is not a virtue of revolutionaries, but I am afraid of reckonings, of random blows of the ax.” She dabbed at her eyebrows with the ends of her fingers. “We ought not to be carrying on such conversations, even though we trust each other, for you know how it is here. Every word may come back to harm us.”

“Are you afraid?” He patted her affectionately. “We are far away, after all. I have people to worry about: my wife, my boys — but you have no family in Hungary, have you?”

“Someone might come in, and we will be sitting together and working out who the guilty one is among us,” she whispered fretfully. “And it will certainly not be either Kalman Bajcsy or Ferenc or that other one. I can vouch for that. I’m afraid I will have to disavow our friendship.”

“That won’t be so bad,” he said comfortingly. “Perhaps I exaggerated the mood at home, though I got a few letters from Budapest that gave me plenty to think about.”

The telephone chattered. She picked up the receiver and looked significantly at Istvan.

“Yes, comrade minister, the reference for the driver has been written and counselor Terey will present it to him. Yes, he already knows, he understands your concern.”

She hung up wearily and raised a hand, as if she were afraid of hearing another directive.

“Take this. It’s yours.” She handed him a paper with the embassy’s overprint. “Try to get this business over with.”

“Though it’s not part of my responsibility.” He shrugged as he glanced over the smoothly turned phrases of banal praise that had gone into the evaluation of Krishan’s work. “Why didn’t Ferenc do this? He likes to be grave and magnanimous.”

She looked at Istvan so solicitously that he smiled at her. “Well, don’t be so worried. I can handle myself.”

But she did not smile in answer. He saw that she was preoccupied with something. Her skin, in the cut-out triangle on the front of her dress, glittered with perspiration. The curtained window glowed yellow; the yard would be an inferno.

When he went in under the tent of climbing plants that grew over the veranda, he heard the pitapat of bare, callused feet in the house, and shrieks.

“Sahib! Sahib has come!”

The cook opened the door — a tall figure in a darned shirt which he wore untucked. He had on half-boots which had never had the benefit of brushing or polishing, and for the sake of comfort he had removed the laces. The boots fell away from his legs with delightful ease; that was why Pereira never quite walked but only moved with a dignified shuffle.

“A letter arrived,” he announced. “There were two telephone calls from that painter. He will call again.”

He didn’t even have to ask; the letter lay on the table near his place setting, leaning against a vase that held a flowering branch. It must be from Budapest, from Ilona, he thought, but he was surprised to see that it had an Indian stamp.

Another invitation or request? The letter fell from his fingers onto the table. He went to have a bath first.

Only as he was eating, unhurriedly, the sticky, yellow-green dish of yams, rice, and onion sauce, did he reach for the envelope and open it with a knife. The cook was describing at great length a dispute with the Sikhs next door. They had scattered garbage onto the yard from their roof, and pissed on the freshly planted flower beds.

“And that burns the flowers, sir!” He was ready to send the sweeper for a few limp, spotted phlox as evidence.

Istvan, my dear,

I have set your picture in the old silver frame that I got from Connoly. In the hall of our hotel the passage is flanked by two screens with numbered photos from your congress. There must be a hundred. I found you in a dozen pictures. But “mine” is the best; you are smiling, you look interested. You will not be angry with me for cutting off the lovely Hindu woman who was standing beside you? To tell you the truth, I cut her to pieces. The Tagore congress. You didn’t even tell me what you did at it, or who it was that drew so many pretty women to the event.

Agra is growing on me; I am adopting the local customs. I’ve burned pastilles in front of your photograph; they glow, and give off a fragrance. I put on a record, the Bartok concerto. Every day when I return, the same music, played several times, brings you near. It’s as well that the rooms nearby are empty; my obsession doesn’t startle anyone.

Indeed, I’m moved that a Hungarian speaks so that I can understand him. I thought about this — that I would not understand a word if you spoke to me in your language. When I asked you for a couple of sentences, I wanted to hear the ring of it, the rhythm. You looked me in the eye, you smiled, then you spoke, and it sounded so beautiful. I thought, He is saying something very loving about me…or perhaps it is one of his verses? I didn’t ask. At this moment I think of that again.

You went away suddenly. Did I do badly telling you what happened? But you had to know. It is important to you as well.

He saw Margit curled up in her chair, saw her long legs in the beam of the lamp that stood on the stone floor. He held the limp paper, but the even lines of painstaking writing disappeared before his eyes as a wave of tenderness washed over him.

“At noon today they threw down an old basket and the whole yard was littered with banana peels. They stood on the roof. They did not even hide. How I cursed them!” Pereira jabbered. “When one of those fellows passes by, I will be lurking behind the door and I will thrash him — if sahib will defend me afterward from the older ones.”

“Go away,” Terey said calmly. “Leave me in peace for a while.”

He waited until the door closed, then turned back to his letter.

I am not writing clearly. Everything will depend on the mood in which you read.

The heat is wearing. At night the pillow sticks to my back. I turn it over but that gives no relief. The sheet is thick and scratchy. I can’t sleep. My hair sticks to the back of my wet neck; it’s disgusting. I set the fan to blow straight in my face, but it is impossible to breathe. It’s like a hothouse. My colleagues come to work sleepless and on edge, the sick people are quarrelsome, the help tire us out with complaints. We search the newspapers frantically for the bulletin about the monsoons. The Hindus say, to comfort us, that they will come before long. May those winds drive you to Agra — though I know you are chained to the embassy, you have obligations, as I have to this flock of the blind and those who are becoming blind.

Grace wrote, but I have not mentioned you to her, not a word. How good to have you, to think of you, to wait. If you keep me waiting too long, I will come to Delhi. Don’t be surprised if you find me there one day.

Then you left me. I know you were right to, but…it was enough, that you…

The words were written on the very edge of the sheet. They broke off and he looked for what came after, but found only a signature on the side:

Margit

The envelope was postmarked three days earlier. His first impulse was to take the car and go; then he remembered that he had an appointment. He read the letter a second time, brooding over every sentence. The mention of Grace disturbed him. But he was at a loss as to how to warn Margit, for he wanted to avoid a confession about that wedding night. Grace was like a receding vision, fading, diminishing. Perhaps he had dislodged her from his memory. That evening he must call Agra.

The taste of dust was in the air. At moments the windows quivered from top to bottom and a dull moan came from the panes as the noon heat advanced in a wide wave. He went to his bedroom and slumped into a chair.

Margit — he saw her crown of red hair, remembered its light warm fragrance in the sun; the radiance of her great blue eyes pierced him with sudden delight. She has tasted suffering, she distinguishes the perpetually unappeased hunger of the body from love that leaves one a slave. With what joy we accept its bonds! With secret pride we subject ourselves to the longed-for tyranny. What happiness, to give ourselves with no thought for our own interests and to be assured that submission and lamb-like defenselessness will not be turned against us, for the other also loves.

Is it possible to love two women at the same time, each in a different way? he thought with his head thrown backward, feeling the frame of the chair warming and sticking to his back. It is not difficult to accept the possibility when the other one is a thousand kilometers away. My wife, my children: indeed, I am not going to disown them. Ilona in a simple dress with rose-colored stripes, dark as a gypsy; her heavy chignon which took unbearably long to undo; he saw her head crisscrossed by her fingers as if it were in a golden frame, heard the clink of hairpins on the stone floor. It was cool in the old house, and bright; the walls were a good, gleaming white from the painting that had been done for the holidays. The meadow smelled of freshly mown hay which they had been spreading with rakes, for fun, since the dewy sunrise.

“Well, why do you love me?” He looked deep into her eyes.

“Because you chose me.” The shadow of a smile flitted over her opulent lips, the full lips he had smothered in kisses. It was as if she had said, “Because you awoke me; there was a readiness in me, an expectation, but I did not know it yet.” And in that she was like the earth: she belonged to her conquerors, then she took possession of them, lavished herself on them. They were certain of their dominion over her. Earth; earth. When they went away, they carried her image before their eyes. They dreamed of her at night. Even dying, they dreamed of resting in her.

Ilona’s swarthy body was steeped in the beauty of the great steppe. He had even told her, “I would like to live in the twilight of your hair.” He slept — after he had run half naked until he was gasping, when the tall herbs grazed his chest; he still remembered the touch of the moist buds — and woke to her kiss, feeling the precious burden of her head, and then they fell on each other with their lips as the thick, dusky wing came down. Their faces immersed themselves in her hair as in a tent that shut out all the world. “I will be with you always, always, for better and for worse,” she whispered, and it had the ring of a vow. His own voice spoke clearly, “And I will not leave you until death.”

Bees crept over the stems of the spring catkins, with which vases on the altar were filled, until he was sprinkled with dust gold as honey in the sunlight. He did not say that to her when she was bent under a veil as if under the remains of winter hoarfrost, which melts instantly in a breath of warm air. He did not say it before the priests or the witnesses; their mustaches glittered like beetles’ shells and their cheeks were flushed dark from fruit brandy. In those companions of pleasure in the pasture, there was a deepening impatience: they wanted dancing, wine, perhaps even a brawl, which would give vent to pent-up energies, and then an occasion for making up, calling it even, embracing and getting enormously drunk. “And I will not leave you until…” he said, taking God as witness.

Margit did not want to be nothing more than an adventure; she had been honest enough to warn Istvan of that. He felt rather like a man who has usurped someone else’s rights. Her fiance had died as a soldier. But who could know what might have been hidden behind his death? What did he think of in his last moments? Perhaps he blamed himself, wanted to live, whimpered for mercy. Where did his pride end? For to the last he had had his audience before him — his own soldiers, who failed to honor his heroism. But was it decent to suspect him of pride when he had been burned alive? Perhaps he had only tested himself to the limit, discovered strength he had hardly suspected he had.

That was how they remembered him. That is how she remembers him.

And what if some Japanese had cut him down in time? What if he had fallen, scattering sparks, into the hot ashes, dragged himself on to escape the pain that tormented him? What if he had survived, his face scalding and glistening with scars? Margit would have stayed by him. But, seeing himself in the mirror one morning, would he not have shot himself in the head to free her and end all her self-abnegation, devotion, and sacrifice? For that would not have been the old love that they had pledged…Yet it might have been a love unlike what is usually called love, though to those looking on from outside it would have seemed a perpetual hospital duty, a charity.

How dare I accuse him of pride, Istvan thought. Only because I want to take what belongs to him? Am I afraid she might think me inferior, less worthy, greedy for spoils, like a jackal? She writes, “I wanted you to know about him; it is important to you as well.” To know that I come into someone else’s entitlement, into privileges the other man could not enjoy? That I have a chance to show myself a worthy successor? Hero, martyr. Would too much be demanded of me?

He sprang up and rubbed behind his ear; a drop of sweat was crawling like an ant. I want to love her and not to suffer. I must have her, I must — he shook off the thoughts that vexed him — then I will see. Life itself will sort things out.

He wanted to drink. The cook opened the door slightly and glanced in through the chink with one eye to assure himself that his master was sleeping. Taken aback on seeing that Istvan was lounging in the chair and looking him in the face, he shut the door and waited for his summons.

“Well, what is it?”

“The telephone, sir. I didn’t want to wake you, but he was so insistent.”

“Who is calling?”

“The painter who comes here sometimes.”

Istvan rose wearily, stretched, and yawned. Through the receiver he heard Ram Kanval’s low, pleasant voice. He wanted to know if the counselor had left the capital, like most people in their right minds, who had escaped to Dehradun or Shimla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to wait out the harshest season.

Kanval himself was being allowed, free of charge, to exhibit his paintings in a hall in one of the clubs. He was overjoyed at this, and, since the counselor had been such a staunch well-wisher, warmly invited him to visit him and with his critical eye assist first with the choice of pictures that might please Europeans, and then with the varnishing. The fact that members of the embassy corps were in the city had led him to hope that someone would buy a painting. Diplomats were people of importance. Many had gone away on holidays. That was why Istvan’s presence had taken on special significance.

Finally he assured him that he remembered his debt and would repay it, if not with cash, then with a picture. He would not dare make that decision on his own, however, and so he would expect a visit.

“Good. I understand. Yes, certainly, I will be there,” Terey murmured into the receiver. Pereira stood in the doorway to the kitchen, trying to divine from the sound of the words whether he had done well in calling his master to the telephone. In his black hands he held a cup of strong tea. Terey was anticipating it; he smelled the pungency of it, felt already its reviving action, its clearing of the mind. So he beckoned with a hand and listened to exuberant plans for the conquest of New Delhi by innovative art, sipping his tea and inhaling its aromatic vapor. The cook, with a bright face, stood by him like a mannequin, slipping him a saucer on which he finally set his empty cup.

“One more?”

“No. Thank you.”

Those were the words, as friendly Hindus had taught him, that it was not proper to use with the servants. The master’s satisfaction, after all, was thanks beyond measure.

He had hardly spread out his papers at the embassy when Kalman Bajcsy summoned him. He stood, heavy, lumpish, blinking his swollen eyelids, looking out at the courtyard from behind the parted curtains. Involuntarily Terey looked to see what had caught the ambassador’s attention, but apart from trees shriveled by the sun and the road from which red dust rose in columns, he could discern nothing.

“Well, you see.” Kalman Bajcsy clapped him on the shoulder with a white palm and fingers covered with curly black hair. “Here under us, on the roof—”

Terey saw two brown starlings standing motionless with gaping beaks. The feathers on their necks bristled. Their wings hung half spread.

“The heat is exhausting them?”

“No, this is a moment’s pause. Soon they will begin mauling each other again. One will try to catch the other by the throat, choke him and peck out his tongue,” he said gloomily. “Little singing birds! Which one do you bet on? I’ll wager the smaller one on the right will win. Well, bestir yourselves!” he urged them on.

As if at a signal the birds hopped toward each other, pecking, clawing, each beating the resilience out of his opponent. Ripped-out feathers protruded from their beaks. Locked together, they pushed each other into the withering vines with their wings. It was clear that the battle had not stopped, for startled lizards fled from the hot wall.

“Pity we won’t see the end—” the ambassador thrust out his lip—“but I called you in about another matter, as you would have guessed.”

He pushed Terey in front of him a little paternally, steering him with a disdainful motion toward the chairs reserved for guests.

“Let’s sit down. Cigarette? No? Good for you. Heat like this makes everyone feel that his heart is short of oxygen, that his lungs are boiling.”

He sat resting his elbows on the arms of his chair. His hands dangled wearily. His eyelids drooped; his mouth was partly open. Tiny lines of sweat glittered on his thick neck. He looked like a tired old man. Only his dark eyes, full of life, forestalled signs of sympathy, for he might not receive them well — might feel that those who showed them perceived him as prematurely weak.

How old is he? Istvan wondered. Fifty-four, fifty-five — not old, only spent, burned out. He wore himself out in the struggle.

“I had to dismiss the chauffeur,” the ambassador began dispassionately, “even though I like him. A good driver—” he was looking up carefully to gauge the effect of an objective assessment on the counselor, but concluded quickly, “Only he is unstable. Hysterical. Nerves just under the skin, like most people’s in this country. It pains me a little, for the dismissal coincides with his wife’s death, though they attach less weight to death here. So I’d like you to see to it that he gets an extra hundred rupees, but discreetly: don’t say it came from me. I don’t care about gratitude. Have a chat with him, then drop in and see me. I have a premonition that there might be trouble with him. Well, tell me now, what is going on? Have you any news?”

“Nothing in particular. It’s the dead season.”

“Perhaps you will unearth something. What’s good at the cinema? You’re flagging, counselor. Have all the ladies you know left town? Have a word with the cook, he’ll bring you back to life. But in such heat—” he exhaled deeply—“oh, young people, young people, you don’t know how to take care of yourselves.”

He seemed to say it, not reproachfully, but with envy.

“House of Wax starts today at the Splendid. It’s an English film about grave robbers.”

The ambassador looked at him, propping up one thick eyelid with a nicotine-stained finger, as if there might be some hidden meaning in what he had said.

“I know. I saw it five years ago in Geneva. It is sad when more and more is behind you, when you have weighed it in your hands, felt it, explored it, let it go. There are fewer and fewer faces that I would wish to meet, fewer landscapes to see. Those one saw in youth, even on an empty stomach, were more beautiful. The whole world had more vivid colors. Now it is exhausted — stale, like out-of-date merchandise. You say: it’s the heat, the boss is bracing himself to reveal something — now, now, I know you call me that. No, dear counselor, it is the years. I speak of the age I feel myself to be, not the age on my birth certificate. Death holds no strangeness for me. We will meet as acquaintances who have already exchanged salutations. From darkness into darkness. Happy Hindus! He was—” he muttered, compressing his thoughts—“there is not even a dent in the air. He was. Oh, we don’t like to think of that moment.”

As if remembering Istvan’s presence, he opened his eyes wide and rumbled:

“So you have nothing to tell me?”

“Except for the Rajk affair,” Terey ventured.

“And how do you know about that?” the ambassador bristled. “That is strictly confidential.”

“From the journalists. Nagar had the information. Tomorrow all the world will be trumpeting it. But this is only the beginning.”

“You are brave enough to think that way? Well, you had better keep those hopes to yourself. Power always demands victims, and governing is not a parlor game but an exercise in force…though I don’t know what people have been saying…if, of course, one wants to accomplish anything. Certainly it is force to which the nation consents, to which in the end it is reconciled, if it is to have significance in today’s world.”

He breathed heavily for a moment, looked at Istvan morosely, then added, “I don’t like people who dig up graves, poke their noses into prisons, walk around the back walls of buildings, and wail that they smell a stench. There must be a stench. All power, the best power, has its muck. There is no need to ask what’s in the garbage heap, only what was possible for a man, what was done, if there is some guarantee that everything won’t go to the devil, that no one will demolish Budapest as you would plow an anthill under with your boot. And the panic begins, and the running about, and the general helplessness. And perhaps you are one of those who can’t stand to listen to anyone and haven’t the knack of giving commands themselves; such people are the worst! I can smell them a kilometer away.

“So you say Nagar had this information? One can believe him. The worst of it is that what comes to us only in snatches rebounds a hundredfold in echoes from the world, and creates confusion for us. And I would so have liked to live out the days I spend in Hungary, when I return every few years, in peace — to see how things progress, how much has been built. That gives me great relief, for in the foundation are my labor and anguish and sleepless nights. And I beg you,” he changed the subject, resting his belly on the tabletop, “speak a few warm words to Krishan. It’s always better that we part as friends. I count on your tact.”

He sank into a chair as if he were breaking down. He slouched and covered his face with his hand; his fingers crept down around his fleshy nose. He grimaced and began fussing with the hair that protruded from his nostrils. Terey saw that his presence was superfluous. He slipped silently out of the room.

The arrival of the couriers enlivened the torpid atmosphere. Typewriters rattled more vigorously; footsteps quickened in the corridor. The Hindu workers shuffled documents and rustled creased carbon paper like birds cleaning their wings with their beaks. As usual it appeared that, though reports had to be completed, under the watchful eyes of the ambassador some expressions took on equivocal shades of meaning. He set Ferenc and Terey to the urgent task of executing together the final stylistic amendments.

The couriers were alike as brothers: tall, with a military habit of standing at attention. Their faces were frank and open, full of a mindless sincerity that inspired confidence. Their wide eyes were not devoid of a spark of shrewdness. One could tell at once from which school they had come, could discern the stamp of the office in which, until recently, they had worked.

As they themselves had hinted in a rush of unthinking candor, behind their promotions to the foreign service were hidden some unnamed offenses to which they never alluded, though they were attributed to them as merits. The authorities simply thought it expedient to keep the two out of the public eye. Such journeys as these, taken regularly — although they always came as a pair, like gypsies or nuns guarding each other from mishap or temptation — furnished opportunities for a little business, for profits on the side, became an overt reward for blind obedience previously demonstrated. Even full exposure to foreign cultures, infusions of the magnificence of Paris or Rome, could not sow doubt in these minds, but rather awakened their contempt and a kind of pride that, in spite of renunciation and poverty, they were faithful, they were among the elite who moved between both worlds.

They tossed salami onto Istvan’s desk. In its white coating it was thick as a man’s arm, and smelled of home. He had to invite them to his residence, though it was not proper for a counselor to maintain social relations with them because of their low rank. They both came, wearing their navy blue suits as though they were uniforms. They answered questions briefly, in generalities, each looking at the other to assure himself that his statement was the correct one and did not deviate from the obligatory formulas Istvan knew from the first page of Szabad Nep.

But the whiskey they downed as they munched salted peanuts took the edge off their alertness. Lulled by Istvan’s permissiveness, they took off their jackets, loosened their ties and unfastened their limp collars.

They vied with each other to assure him that all was peaceful in Budapest. “People work, earn their money, enjoy themselves. The outlook for the harvest is not bad. No particular shortages are felt. There is enough meat. Perhaps earnings are a little too low. But when has a man not wanted more cash?”

“And the mood?”

“Rather good. Discipline is a little on the decline; a degree of apathy has set in since Stalin’s death. People aren’t as committed as before.”

“You know our country, counselor; it needs the whip,” the other added eagerly, plucking at his mustache, which was clipped short like a small brush. “Now our leaders want to ingratiate themselves, to loosen the reins. When there is a temporary shortage of something, right away people say that the Russians took it, that for the good of the partnership it is necessary to make sacrifices.”

“And when we were in Moscow, I heard again that it was necessary to tighten the belt to give something to us and the Czechs and the Poles, to keep everyone in the camp. Such talk is bound to rankle.”

“Do you see dissatisfaction, then, or not?” Istvan persisted.

“There is the expectation of change, the hope that there will be new appointments, even in the government itself. But which direction change will take, or where the new people will come from, no one knows.”

“A thaw,” he offered.

“So they call it in Moscow. But what does that mean in practice? Everyone points to the Soviet example, and indeed Rakosi and Gerő studied government there. They won’t do anything foolish, they won’t agree to any compromises.”

“Well, and what will happen with regard to the Rajk affair? What about those who were innocently sentenced to death?”

They were troubled. They looked questioningly at each other. They raised their glasses and dawdled between sips of the amber liquid. The sunset flamed in the sky, full of fierce blood red and coagulating violet. The colors were disturbing. They riveted the eye; they threw a copper-tinted reflection on the walls and the faces, with their altering expressions.

“Well, perhaps sometimes we have been hasty in branding someone an enemy. But one must remember what the situation was, what forces were closing in on us. When the Russians left Austria, we found ourselves in the forefront,” the older one pointed out. “All the pressure from the West was bearing down on us.”

“And enemy propaganda? And Szabad Europa radio, which abused the government unrelentingly? I don’t even find it surprising that there were those few verdicts. Not for nothing is it said that the ideological front, like the front itself, can’t do without cannon fire. Was there a lack of victims from our side?”

“Perhaps when you return home,” Terey began, “you will find changes.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps,” they assented, but the thought did not seem to please them. They were, after all, from the bureau that efficiently furnished documentation on every charge. I had to ask someone; they will inform on me again, they will throw their own light on our conversation, Ferenc will make notes eagerly, and there will be another document in my file. There must be control, but they should know what they are after — he shrugged — they should at least manage to repeat accurately what they heard from me.

They left one after the other, warmly pressing his hand. They said they wanted to run out to Old Delhi to find presents for their girls. He offered to take them. Visibly uncomfortable, they thanked him, begging him not to fatigue himself; perhaps they did not want a witness while they made their purchases. With relief they left him behind the curtain of vines on the veranda. He heard them send the watchman for a taxi. It drove up immediately, coughing and kicking up a cloud of dust.

The room was growing dark. Beyond the screens loomed the yellow glow of streetlights. Sadness came over him, a bitter feeling of being lost. The drone of the cooling machine was tiresome. He heard the lagging shuffle of the cook in the hall. He guessed what the servant was doing: crouching and peering through the keyhole. There was no light in the room, so he is not sure whether I have gone out or am napping. He will go and ask the watchman if sahib left with the guests.

But the door opened violently and a dazzling light flashed.

“Put that out,” he said a little too loudly. “What do you want?”

“Excuse me, sir — I did not know that you were here.” The cook moved in the darkness, shaking cigarette butts into his hand, for he liked to crumble the tobacco into his pipe. “May I serve the meal?”

“What do you have for dinner?”

“Vegetables and eggs. Meat — no. Fish — no. Before I bring it from the market, it already stinks. I have also a mango on ice, very good. I have papayas. They are very healthy; they cleanse the kidneys. In such heat there is pure salt in the kidneys, because all water is excreted through the skin.”

“Good. Set the table,” he said without enthusiasm.

He turned on the lamp that stood on his desk. A rumpled newspaper lay there, and an open novel by Forster: A Passage to India. He picked up the book, then closed it. He saw a bulging letter hidden under it. At once he recognized his friend Bela’s somewhat childish handwriting.

There were no stamps on the envelope; the couriers must have put it there. Why had they not put it into his hand? They were not supposed to carry private mail, but who would attach any importance to this? Were they afraid of each other? The letter was not sealed. Well, no, so they could examine what was inside, see if Bela was smuggling dollars to me. He smiled wryly, drawing out sheets of ugly paper covered with slanted lines of nervous handwriting and folded twice, so they could be crammed into an envelope that was too small.

He leaned forward, straightened out the sheets and began reading greedily:

Dear Istvan,

When I snatch up the telephone and call you and Ilona answers, I no longer feel panic, thinking it is another wrong number. Yet it is you I want — you, for whom else should I talk to? To the devil with India! Every day now there are events here that I would run to tell you about; I would drag you out for coffee and at last we would chat to our hearts’ content. You will say I could write a letter. Not true. I would have to have time, to have the paper spread in front of me, to be in the mood to write — well, and to be sure the letter would get into your hand.

So many borders; so many prying eyes. A letter will reach you in a week. And everything I have written will be invalid, for there will be new developments. How to register them, as a seismograph registers tremors of the earth’s crust?

Things are abuzz everywhere; there is a feeling of excitement and tension. Suddenly everyone believes that there will be changes. No — not the kind you are thinking of now, smiling skeptically. It was not an idea that was at fault, only the smallness of people who learned to listen to what came to them by fiat; they do not give commands themselves, but for years have repeated the commands of others. They are afraid of freedom, for they would not know how to deal with it. They do not trust the nation, so they spy on it. And we sense that, like a horse whose skin quivers when it spies the whip hidden behind the driver’s back. For it has tasted the lash, it is accustomed to it.

In whispers we used to mention the names of those recently arrested; what the offense was was always decided afterward. We would be drinking coffee and everyone would look around to be sure that no one from the next table was overhearing — that the waitress did not come running over too early with the check, for she might be an informer, and she knew the regular customers.

You remember Tibor M.? We were astonished, wondering why he was arrested. A communist, a staff officer, a patriot. Clean; not intoxicated with power. Universally liked. Perhaps that was the heaviest strike against him. He went down like a stone into water. After two years he floated up at the trial of foreign minister Rajk, charged with treason, with spying for the imperialists, with organizing a coup d’etat. He refused to testify. He said not a word before the court. He behaved with dignity. He was demoted and sentenced to death. He has been released now, and I have talked with him.

He was innocent. He was a lucky devil; they postponed his execution because he was supposed to serve as a witness in trials yet to come. You would not recognize him. He is gray. He speaks as if chewing his words, looking you doggedly in the eye with his hands on his lap, for so he was trained. His lips are pursed; he hardly opens them. His teeth are gone. Yes — what pains him most is that he was beaten by his own, by people wearing the same uniform but lower in rank. And though they spoke the same language, though they were Hungarians, they understood none of what he was trying to explain. No logical argument had any effect. That horrified him, even aroused his pity for them. They were automatons who had to wring from him confessions of crimes he had not committed. They had received their orders and they had listened blindly.

“They were more afraid than I,” he told me with a lifeless smile, “and that gave me strength. They were trembling for the approval of their masters, for promotions, for their careers. I understood how transient those things were in relation to the values they had lost. They had ceased to be Hungarians, perhaps even repudiated their humanity.”

He told how they interrogated him for four days without stopping. He fainted, tortured by lack of sleep and by the lamps that seem to blaze in the brain even when you close your eyes. They beat him in inventive ways and made him drink castor oil to humiliate him, to show him how even his own body was betraying him, weakening, stinking. They told him his friends had turned him in and even then were testifying against him. They shoved prepared depositions under his nose, but Tibor only shrugged his shoulders and hissed through his tight lips, “I always took them for a band of swine. This is no news to me.”

They told him next that they had set a trap in his flat, but the men on guard were not bored waiting for unexpected visitors, because his wife was so very accommodating. They dragged in nauseating details: how she pleased them in bed, what she whispered. “That crackpot — I haven’t lived with her for ages. You can have her. Enjoy yourselves, boys,” he answered. You know yourself how he loved her. But he silenced them with repartee, divining instinctively that it was a pack of lies, that they were only probing for a weak spot. If he had let them see that any insinuation affected him, they would have bored deeper into the open wound.

Then he had one interrogator — the one with the longest assignment to his case: a year and a half of investigation, if you could call it that. A year and a half of writing biographical data that achieved the scale of a novel, full of subtexts, implications, suspicions, of threats and pleas to induce him to denounce his partners. Depositions had been prepared long before. This investigator waited for a moment of weakness to obtain his signature, his confession of guilt.

“After several hours of fruitless effort, the investigating officer looked at me with such exasperation and disappointment that I was sorry for him,” Tibor told me in his throaty whisper, “because he must have been in such anguish, since he knew as well as I did that I was innocent. After all, they could have hanged me without my confession, but the appearance of justice was less important to them than breaking me down, destroying me psychologically. The investigator tore up the deposition papers without reading them and said in an impassive voice, ‘You are lying. You are lying. We know the whole truth. You are a traitor.’ He put a file of documents and a pencil in front of me and commanded, ‘Write from the beginning,’ and he himself broke into English, from time to time repeating the words mindlessly and looking at me with a face full of misery.

“‘Friend,’ he begged as dawn broke, ‘I must have your depositions. My future hangs on it. Look how my temples have gone gray. I do not sleep. I have disorders of the stomach.’

“‘And I?’ I ran my fingers over my whitened temples; my hair had not been cut for a long time and was coarse and brittle. ‘And I?’ I pulled aside my lip and showed my colorless, toothless gums. ‘What have you made of me? If I resist, it is only for your good, so you will know that not all men are worthless. So you will finally catch a glimpse of that unattainable level of development: human dignity.’”

The interrogator was not offended. In fact, an intimacy ensued between them. They knew each other so well, reached such a level of familiarity, that the officer asked the prisoner to quiz him when he was practicing his English.

Suddenly one day Tibor reached the end of his endurance; he had had enough. “I have made up my mind,” he declared to the astonished officer. “Call the clerk. I will give my deposition.”

“You will testify against your partners at last?” he asked incredulously.

“I will give one name. I will not be tormented any longer.”

“One — that is good,” the investigator said with zeal. “What is that name?”

“Yours. What are you gaping at? You are a traitor. I’m going to squeal on you.” Tibor jabbed him with a finger.

“But that is nonsense!”

“Not at all, because as I sat here, I recruited you into the intelligence service. You were getting five hundred dollars a month, and that tempted you. You were paid for the same set of interlocking investigations. And you were in contact with workers at the American embassy. You yourself handed the report over to me, did you not?”

“This is an insane lie!”

“Certainly not,” Tibor continued, maintaining his composure. “And what were you doing five months ago, November fourteenth, at seven in the evening?”

“How should I remember? Perhaps I was at the cinema. Perhaps I was working here.”

“Then I must remember. Because you told me that you were at the Beke cinema, at the last showing, and that you gave a box of matches to a strange man who asked you for a light. He gave you another box, because a warning was hidden in yours — a warning that someone was going to escape — and an excerpt from the documents in my case.”

“It’s all a fabrication. I wasn’t in any cinema. I never gave anyone a light.”

“You will remember. You will have time enough in a cell. And I will remind you of certain details you told me. You carried out everything according to my instructions. And perhaps you aren’t hiding a wad of dollars at home?”

“I have no dollars!”

“Your wife has already managed to clear them away? She will have to be grilled; she will let the cat out of the bag. Anything to give the investigators a start. We’ll see what she has to say about you.”

“But you have no evidence against me. Not a shred of evidence—” he beat his fist on the table. It seemed that he would collapse with a heart attack.

“You’re wrong. I have.” Tibor clutched a notebook with English words written in it to his chest. The officer leaped like a man demented. He was the stronger of the two; he snatched the glossary away.

And at that moment he understood the depths to which he had sunk. Indeed, he was at the prisoner’s mercy. This weak, ill-treated rag of a man could destroy him. It would be enough to give the deposition he had threatened. The investigator knew well that he had rivals who were only waiting for him to make a slip. He saw that he was trapped. Tibor could get revenge, take the officer down with him. Then he wept — a terrible sobbing without tears. He explained that he had a wife and child. He begged Tibor not to bring ruin on them.

“And I?” Tibor asked.

Then the man was forced to feel the cruelty of the machine in which he had been one of the cogs.

When Tibor declared that it had been a joke, that he was not thinking of giving a deposition in order to frame him — that it was only an object lesson — something in the other man gave way. He said that if Tibor would only hold out longer, they would not do anything to him. He even called Tibor’s wife and gave her the first information she had received about his health, ensuring anonymity by using a pay telephone on the street. Something in him had broken, and the interrogations became a mere formality.

Tibor was transferred to another prison where there were several others in his cell. His glasses were returned to him; he could read books. Then one day they heard the scream of factory sirens and the clanging of bells, and they thought that it was the alarm, that war had broken out. Only that night did the soldier patrolling the corridor — one of the chosen, the most worthy of trust — strike the metal-clad door with his fist to wake them and call, “Be brave; endure. Stalin has died. Soon Rakosi will go to the devil.” He wasn’t afraid to shout at the top of his voice, though there might have been an informer in the cell.

“Then,” Tibor said, “I felt a wave of love for that soldier from whom I was separated by that door with its metal fittings, for my prison guard. I was ready to die for him. The unity of the nation filled me with ecstasy. I was truly happy.”

A month later he was given teeth. He was force-fed. He even got a sun lamp; his skin was no longer the color of plaster. He thought they were grooming him for another trial. Meanwhile he was called to headquarters. They gave him a uniform, shook his hand, and sent him home. A member of the security police was occupying two rooms in his flat; he is still there, in fact, though he promised to leave. He asked Tibor to put in a word to help him get a flat, for they have to do something to oblige the one “unjustly sentenced.” This man, from the most powerful office, is looking to the former prisoner for patronage.

And Tibor remains in the army. He was given back his party card, which had been confiscated and attached to the indictment. It is on such people as Tibor that the kind of socialism we will have depends. Imagine: He said to me, “How fortunate that we still have comrades who have stood the test, faithful to the cause and to our people. Remember Janos Kádár; he is still in prison.” We talked openly in a coffee shop about his ordeals, feeling quite secure. Tibor mentioned you as well; your name was dropped during the investigation. He set you up as an example of loyalty, reliability, cooperation. He asked me if it were true that you had filed a deposition against him. I hotly denied it. He was very glad, for he is starving for people to trust.

Istvan swallowed hard. Yes, he reflected bitterly, our behavior, the motives of which we ourselves do not understand clearly, can be turned against us when they want to bring charges. Tibor has the advantage because he has passed through hardships and I have not. He felt a rush of fear. Tibor has it behind him by now. Pray God I don’t have to—

A dark hand, almost violet in the harsh lamplight and cut by a white shirtsleeve, crept over the table. “Sahib, dinner was served long ago,” Pereira said coaxingly. “I beg and remind, and sahib sleeps.”

“I am not sleeping.”

“Sahib was so far away that I was afraid. The son of a babu in our village fell ill at his studies in Calcutta and the father worried himself sick about him. Then he, too, went out of himself. Though he was in his body, you could stick pins in him and he sat like a dead man.”

“You’re being tiresome. I was reading a letter and was lost in thought. I will eat very soon. You may leave.”

“When I tell you the real truth. He returned to himself and cried. And then he said that his son had died, and the next day a telegram came—”

“Go.”

He raised his eyes to the uncovered window. Yellow and greenish beams from the distant streetlights marked out the square. He longed so for Budapest that it gnawed him like a physical pain. He took up the last page of the letter, eagerly absorbing the words in uneven rows.

…for he is starving for people to trust…That I read. We spoke of his ordeals with complete freedom. We did not concern ourselves about who might be there, though the coffee shop was full of customers. Tibor has crossed the boundary; he has stopped being afraid. One cannot tighten a screw into infinity, for it bores through and instead of holding, loosens. Something of that sort has happened with us. “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”: for whole years we didn’t think of that. Suddenly the scales fell from everyone’s eyes; now they talk of changes as if they had already occurred. And indeed the security police are here. Agents are writing reports. Surely card indexes are full to bursting. But we don’t hear of new arrests. It is as if all this gathering of information had lost its effectiveness, even its meaning. So far no one has said that Rakosi should step down, but he is already looking for successors, as if he had been buried with Stalin.

Every day fresh evidence of cruelty comes to light, of criminal mindlessness and folly. An eighty-six-year-old peasant woman was freed from one of the security police’s cellars. She was confined there because she had not delivered the milk on schedule! The old woman had written Horthy to ask for a pardon; she didn’t even know who was ruling Hungary now. She had been accused of economic sabotage and the matter became a political case.

You should be sorry that you are not with us. It is a momentous time. The atmosphere is charged, yet full of gravity — I would even say grandeur. There is an Eastern proverb: When a wronged man sighs, hardly a leaf stirs, but when a nation in anguish sighs, a gale springs up that sweeps the powerful away. I feel its sigh. You hear — this is not literary affectation, in which you suspect me of indulging. I wanted you to be able to understand a little of what is happening in our Budapest.

Affectionately — Bela

Istvan sat at the table, listlessly eating the rice Pereira put before him. He drank cool tomato juice; he scraped the mango halves on ice with his spoon. The mushy fruit dissolved on the tongue with a bland taste rather like carrot.

One of the couriers must have concealed the letter. The envelope was open; no doubt he had not been able to resist reading it in some hotel in Austria, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan. Yet he had delivered it. So those most dedicated also had their uncertainties? Did they feel a solidarity with the people from whom they had been culled, and to whom they had been taught to feel superior? Were they, too, amenable to new leadership? A decent fellow, Bela; he pressed his clasped hands together angrily. He must have had access, he had regained their trust, or they would have taken it straight to the embassy and handed it over. No, they did not want to risk it. Private mail? Who knows what significance this information could have? And perhaps Ferenc has already read the letter, and therefore the ambassador as well, and it was planted here as a test, to see what he would do next? Loathing crept over him.

“It’s impossible to live this way.” He clenched his fist. “Impossible.”

Pereira regarded him anxiously. It seemed to him that the counselor had a fever. When Terey went out to the bathroom, the cook strained his ears suspiciously, then raised the whiskey flask to the light and critically estimated how much was gone. He evidently determined that only a little was missing, because he poured together what remained in the couriers’ glasses, topped it off from the bottle and lapped it up, blinking as he tasted it full strength, then slipped noiselessly away to the kitchen.

Istvan paced around the room, too restless to sit down. A stray cricket had gotten into the house and was chiming timidly in a corner of the room. The motor in the cooling machine whirred. The full glare of the lamp fell on the rumpled sheets of letter paper covered with green handwriting.

What the letter communicated was staggering. He wanted to share the news, and his homesickness, with someone. He walked to and fro, wondering to whom he could go so late in the evening. There were two people who would receive him at any hour, friendly people but distant enough that he did not have to be on guard with them. One was Nagar; the other was Judit. Agitation burned in him like a torch passed from the homeland on another continent. He was hungry for conversation, eager to share thoughts, calculations, predictions.

The folds of the letter, like the pleats of an accordion, caught the lamplight. He read the first sentence once more and put it down. The gentle semicircular glow warmed to brilliance the green and rust motifs of the blossoming trees in the carpet. He remembered how he had resisted being pushed into purchasing it. An exquisite rug. It reminded him of Margit. He would have liked to see her on it, nude, as she waited, leaning on her elbow, smoking a cigarette, the white of her flesh lightly touched with violet — to see her tawny hands, long legs, and rust-colored, tumultuous hair. A boyish dream of a woman from a Matisse illustration he had come across somewhere. He gave a self-pitying shrug. The refrain of a Hindu song crossed his mind: “Everything we desired and possessed was taken from us. Everything for which we do not stretch out our hands, yet is worthy of pursuit, lures. Do not wrest things from the world, and the world will give itself to you. Do not seize greedily, and you will have. You will realize.”

No; he would not resign himself to that. A wolflike rapacity was growing in him, an urge to lay hands on, to grip, to bite open, to devour. Even to tear to pieces. To have, in order to feel release.

He opened the door to the hall. He heard the cook shouting at the sweeper and the cadenced knocking of the brush on the flagstone floor. They were scrubbing the kitchen.

He lifted the receiver and dialed the operator’s number. A girl answered; her speech was full of excessively proper Anglicisms, like a recording from a language course. He asked for Agra, for the Taj Mahal hotel. He stood there, catching the distant static, the traces of voices on the line. He wanted a cigarette, but he was afraid to step away and search on his desk, for the hotel receptionist might answer just then.

The uproar from the kitchen was unbearable — the slopping of water, the nasal commands of the cook, who lorded it over the other servants because he was the only one with a fair knowledge of English and could invoke, in his statements to the rest of them, the authority of the master. I must correct his behavior, Istvan mused. His head has been turned completely. Moreover, he allows himself familiarities.

But he did not hush the servants because it would have drawn their attention. They would be quiet soon, and they would overhear his conversation. Yet perhaps he would manage to exchange a few warm words with Margit, to catch a change in the tone of her voice. He might even find out when she would come to Delhi or invite him to Agra.

He knew there were no telephones in the hotel rooms, yet his face contorted with impatience when the clerk, hemming and hawing, said that he would call Miss Ward to the telephone right away. As he scratched the wall mechanically with his fingernail, drawing slanted lines that resolved themselves into her initials, he seemed to hear the rasping of the cicadas hidden in the dusty festoons of blossoms on the pergola.

The time it took to summon her was unendurably long, a sickening void. He really had little to say to her apart from the one word which would explain his worry and longing. But he knew that he would not say that word, that the sentences would be as dead as plaster moldings. He thought of the multitude of ears that would be listening in on their conversation, the mute witnesses, bored but inquisitive. He saw girls with jingling necklaces and receivers clinging to their hair, which would be moist from sweat and fragrant oil; they would be on the line to assist the callers, and by accident.

He heard Margit’s voice, unfamiliar, distorted by the distance.

“Hello! Hello,” and then with a hearty note of recognition, “Is that you, Grace?”

“This is Istvan. You weren’t expecting—”

“No. Not you. Oh, how wonderful that you’ve called! Thank you.”

He said nothing. She offered, “Perhaps you are coming? When will I see you?”

“Saturday evening.”

“Four more days? That’s awfully long. May I call you?”

He did not answer. He still wanted to hide his relationship with her, to shield it from view like a miser, to keep it to himself. He saw obstacles mounting, saw avalanches hanging over him which could easily be sent thundering down.

“I got your letter.”

“Ah, that prompted you to call. And I thought that you yourself — that you really missed me.” He felt rather than heard a trace of disappointment in her reply.

“It’s true.” He licked his sticky, suddenly taut lips.

“What’s true?”

“I miss you, Margit.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be calling. You would be with me.”

“I can’t just now.”

“Evidently you don’t miss me enough.”

He was stricken. He did not speak; he could not contradict her.

“I’m sorry,” she said hastily. “I’m a capricious only child. I’m used to having what I want. You know that even waiting gives me joy I’ve never known until now. Istvan, are you there?” she asked, suddenly anxious. “Hello — can you hear me?”

“Yes,” he answered fervently. “I hear everything.” He seemed to be saying: You touch my heart, I understand, I am hanging on your words. Speak on.

But men’s voices were coming through the receiver, calling Margit impatiently, nagging her. It pained him; for an instant he even imagined that their exchange had been a clever sham.

“Wait. I’ll be right back.” Then he heard her say to those in the room, “This is Grace, my friend from Delhi.” Picking up the telephone again, she explained a bit defensively, “I’m having a little party. It’s too hot to go anywhere, so we’re sitting here, listening to Bartok. We’ll drink, but only a little. It’s just our group. Don’t be jealous. The professor is here, and Dr. Connoly, whom I promise to bring to you, since you invited him.

“I would so terribly like to see you,” she said in a completely different tone. “And now, quickly, tell me something pleasant that I can remember just before I fall asleep.”

He hesitated, then, amazed at the strength of his own emotion, whispered, “I’ll be there Saturday evening.”

“I already heard that. Say something more…”

“That’s all,” he said, turning around suddenly, for he had spied the cook’s long shadow on the wall, and the sweeper’s head hung down just over the threshold. They had been watching and listening.

He was furious. But then words that pacified him flowed from far away: “I understand. Thank you very, very much. Until Saturday.” There was a rattle as she hung up the receiver. The next instant the impersonal voice of the operator came on.

“Will you speak longer, sir?”

“No. I’ve finished.”

“Thank you,” she breathed, and the telephone jingled briefly, just once, as if there were a tremor of the heart in its bell.

He caught his breath like a swimmer emerging from deep water. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his hand. Instinct warned that he was in the power of an element the strength of which he did not know. He would have to dislodge the other man she had loved, to push him into the dark. Where would the contest take place? Certainly not amid the disheveled bedclothes, where subduing the shadow would be easy.

“Finish your work,” he said to the cook.

“Yes, sahib — but we would not have wanted to make noise,” Pereira answered earnestly. On the wall Terey could see the shadow of the cook’s thin foot nudging the sweeper. A second later he could hear the rhythmic scraping of the brush as it made its way in circles around the kitchen floor.

He went into the living room and sat down in an armchair. When he lit a cigarette, his fingers trembled. Lamplight glowed on the sheets covered with green writing. A sudden pain pierced him, for he was certain that Margit would never understand all that Bela’s letter conveyed, and what it meant to him. Though she loved and was loved, she would not be one of them.

Late the next afternoon, as dust gathered in the air and hovered just above an earth that exhaled fire; as the dry, yellow grass crumbled even when the grasshoppers trampled it; as the clamor of the cicadas in almost leafless treetops rang in the air like a great complaint, Terey drove up to the embassy garage. One of his directional signals had gone out, and even after the bulb was changed it refused to light up. Instead of the stocky Premchand he found only Krishan, whose clothing made a blotch of bright white as he sat on his heels by the wall, like an ordinary peasant resting at dusk. His hand, holding a smoking cigarette, almost touched the red ground. He seemed to be napping with his head down.

He did not move a muscle when the Austin pulled in not far from him and the counselor got out. The yellow glare reflected from the sun, which was now buried behind the houses, streamed over the white of Krishan’s narrow trousers, his dark, dangling hands, and the long lines of his fingers crossed by a white cigarette. He did not raise his dark head with its waves of greased hair even when he heard Terey’s greeting.

“Good evening, Krishan.”

“Good evening, sir,” a gentle, girlish voice answered from the dim interior of the garage.

Though she was too abashed to walk out, Istvan, seeing the outline of her figure, could tell that she was young and pretty. She must have clasped her hands in front of her chest, for he heard the jingle of silver sliding over her wrists. He sensed that there was something between them, though the driver did not turn his face toward her, and the girl did not assert her right to his attention. She only looked out with large, solicitous eyes, which gleamed with a moist luster in the dusky garage.

“Krishan, what is it?”

“Nothing, sir. I do not work at the embassy anymore.”

Terey was sorry for him; he remembered the ambassador’s instructions. He leaned against the hood and lit a cigarette. He heard the sigh of the cooling motor, the bell-like chirp of crickets, and the dry whisper of leaves from the plants that grew on the embassy walls.

“I’m very sorry, Krishan,” he began. “We all sympathize with you.”

Krishan raised his forehead. In his dark, narrow face, white, even teeth gleamed in a catlike grimace under his short mustache. He laughed without a sound until his shoulders shook.

“That is why you are letting me go.”

“We know what you have lost—”

“No. She went out because she wanted to. She told me to marry her younger sister because they are poor and there was no money for another dowry. Nothing has changed with me. There was a wife and there is a wife. She even asked me to call her by the dead one’s name, because she loved her. Only where will I find work now?”

With an effort, Terey understood how different the custom of this country was — that death loses its fang of despair when one dies only to return, that the passage beyond the black curtain hardly alarms one. He felt clumsy. He was left with nothing to say, no comfort to offer. He could not muster the ideas he needed; he could not revive their old camaraderie.

“You had expenses connected with the funeral. You see, we do appreciate you. I am going to give you some money. You ought to rest. You ought not to sit behind the wheel right away.”

“How much?” He clutched at the banknote with the ends of his fingers, held it in his left hand as if he were going to let it fall to the ground out of disgust, and took a deep pull on his cigarette, inhaling the smoke. In its red glow his eye glinted as he blinked derisively. “Only a hundred?”

“That’s more than a little, Krishan,” the counselor said hotly.

“Sir, I have one question: If I am summoned before the court, will you give a statement as a witness?”

“I was not with you then,” Istvan reminded him.

“I also ask only if you would like to testify as to who gave me a hundred rupees. Nothing more.” Now he rose nimbly; he was slender and graceful. He tossed away the cigarette butt and stamped on it, raising a little spray of sparks. “And perhaps there will be no hearing in court. Then you will pay me more, much more.”

“I don’t understand, Krishan.”

“If you had understood, you would not have come to me with this paltry hundred rupees. If the ambassador thinks that I am stupid and that any trifle will be enough to shut me up, he is very wrong.”

“But who will bring a case against you? Even the insurance company was not informed. The embassy paid for the repairs.”

He went silent again, then raised a finger toward the sky, where ever-larger stars were shimmering and sinking.

“Kali,” he whispered. “Repeat it to him. Kali and I are thinking of him.” He put his narrow, dusky hand on his chest. Suddenly, in a completely normal voice, the voice of an obliging servant, he asked, “Your car is damaged? Shall I repair it?”

Istvan hesitated to accept this proposition, but decided that he personally would pay him for that service. He wanted to re-establish their old relationship; he had a vague feeling that he had allowed himself to be drawn into something unsavory. The drilling of the cicadas wore on him, intensifying his watchfulness, like a warning. The girl standing in the shadows pressed her hands together; her bracelets jangled dully.

“The left-hand signal doesn’t light up. Perhaps you could check the installation and then drive the car up to my house. All right?”

Krishan seized Terey’s hand with his damp fingers, raised it, and pressed it to his chest. Through the man’s shirt, near his ribs, Terey felt the hammering of his heart and sensed an answering tension in himself.

“Sir, if I am bad, I will be very bad. It is impossible to stop in the middle of the road. The mountain of lies grows even if I do not open my mouth. Tell him that.”

Terey pulled his hand away — pulled far too hard, for Krishan let it go so easily that he was ashamed of the violence of his motion.

“I will check that signal right away.” Krishan almost shouted. “This minute.” But when he took a step toward the automobile, he seemed to grow weak. He propped himself awkwardly against the hood; he slipped, and his nails scratched against it. Then the girl came out of the darkness and with surprising strength, for she was of slight build, took him in her arms and led him, unresisting, into the garage.

“Is he ill?” Istvan asked in an undertone.

“He is weak,” she answered tenderly. “He was smoking.”

At once everything was clear: the strange, uneasy movements, the florid sentences. He was smoking hashish. All the sympathy Istvan had lavished on the driver in the past dissipated. Now he understood the ambassador’s decision. Indeed, they all should be relieved that a genuine disaster had not occurred. Once again it appeared that he had been wrong. Naive goodheartedness could easily have placed them in the hands of a blackmailer. It had been right to let the driver go, to seize the first occasion to sever his tie to the embassy.

It seemed to him that in spite of the light vapors of gasoline and lubricants, he smelled the harsh aroma of cannabis. But everything was masked by the raw animal odor of the girl’s perfume as she came fluttering up through the dimness.

“Forgive him, sir. We have met with great misfortune,” she pleaded, her bracelets clinking. “He is full of sorrow.”

“Is there a way to help him?”

“No. He must have a long sleep.”

He turned on the headlights and drove out onto the road. When he heard the even hum of the motor, he felt relief. He stepped on the gas as if he were running away from something. One curtained window glowed in the embassy, behind a grating. The cryptographer was still working. The directional signal was repaired at the Shell station when he filled the fuel tank.

Connoly felt shunted aside by their reflexive affability, which seemed conspiratorial, though they had induced him to stay for coffee. He gathered up his shaggy tobacco pouch made of deer scrotum and tucked his pipe into its flannel bunting with a cherishing gesture, like a mother fondling her baby. He wrinkled his forehead suspiciously, like a dog that has lost the scent in a chase and now sees the cat stretched flat on a branch too high to reach. He understood intuitively the awkwardness of the situation.

Margit, in a simple ivory dress cut so low that her breasts showed white as they rose with her breathing, was speaking with an unnatural vivacity, as if she were hiding something under the cadence of her brightly turned, empty sentences — sentences which would have been suitable for an official reception but were off key in a conversation between people meeting as friends. From time to time Istvan turned his head in her direction, and neither man could have failed to notice the light that filled her eyes as they met his.

Connoly realized that he was superfluous, though they both held him there as if they were afraid to be alone in the deepening twilight on the spacious veranda of the hotel. He felt, though somewhat vaguely, the bitterness of defeat; in the end it had been the girl, not he, who had made a choice. He had not had a chance, in spite of the will he had mustered. He could not turn back or stop the course of things, he could only slow it down, and because it seemed that they both wanted that, he rose to spite them, rubbed his thinning stubble of hair, said a jaunty “Goodbye,” and left, tall, broad-shouldered. Blotches of light from holes the drought had bitten out of the leafy roof of the pergola flowed over his back. For as long as they could see him, he walked with an exaggerated vigor that belied the effects of a tiring day’s work, the heat, and the elaborate late lunch they had forced on him.

They sat in the rapidly lengthening shadows, so close that their hands could freely have touched, clasped, entwined, but neither made the slightest gesture. If the witness had remained, then they might have done it sooner, out of audacity, out of a kind of defiance, simply as a sign that they were lovers, though that was not yet true.

The dust above the trees was rapidly turning blue; Margit’s hair looked almost black. Far beyond the gate, with a sound of ungreased axles like cats’ meowing, the thick, bare wooden wheels of tongas rolled along. The white coats of the oxen in their harnesses gave off a violet shimmer.

I must remember — it returned to Istvan like a soothing melody — remember the smell of dry leaves, dust, and straw matting. Voices: the singing calls of drivers squatting on the shafts in enormous turbans, swaying like wilting poppies. The light of a few lamps, not yet a glare, but daubs of yellow between the trees, marked the advance of night. Its first breezes rippled through the air, bringing relief. A moment more and, like the quick blow of an ax, the semitropical darkness would fall.

She was also looking at Agra. The town was transformed by garlands of colored lights — the evening illumination calculated to entice tourists to the little shops full of ivory and sandalwood, embroidery, lace, and scarves of batiste with drawn-work delicate as frost, though frost had never been seen here.

He glanced stealthily over her neck, her flawless profile, her lips, slightly parted and a little swollen from the heat. She looked for a long time without blinking, as if the sudden onset of night like the rising of a river were disturbing to her. In that moment of quiet brooding she seemed captivating to him. He wanted her, wanted to feel the burden of her head in his hands, to feel her hair flowing in coppery streams through his fingers. To hang over her lips, not to kiss, only to mingle his breath with hers, to prolong the moment of yielding. She also felt no hurry. The silence of the receding day was accompanied by a peaceful certainty that they belonged to each other, that before long they would be together, not by virtue of predestination or indefinable fate, which might deprive them of their rebellious joy — that they had chosen each other and each would take the other as a gift, because they truly desired each other.

Large beetles droning in bass voices flew over the disheveled festoons of climbing plants, then suddenly lost their balance and fell with a dry crackle, as if someone in hiding were trying to break the silence by throwing pebbles. They heard an angry snorting, and both turned their heads. The cat from the reception desk beat with an outstretched paw at a fallen beetle, crunched its shell with her teeth, and shook the crushed insect out of her muzzle with revulsion.

The summer night had settled in. The darkness seemed to engulf the girl. He reached out and put his hand on hers in order to feel the joyful certainty that he had that privilege. When he felt her warm touch, he thought he also smelled the delicate fragrance of her perfume, or perhaps it was only that she had turned her head and he was catching the scent of her warm hair.

“Come,” she said, and their fingers linked.

He stood up in a passion of readiness, like an obedient pupil. She did not steer them under the arcades of the pergola, however, but into the depths of the park, to a pool half dried up by the heat. Lawn chairs stood propped against the wall of an empty bathhouse; they found them easily and sat down beside each other. By now the pergola was twinkling with lights. They had escaped just in time, for a waiter wearing a starched napkin like a crest atop his red turban was already beginning to gather up cups, and the servers were moving about in the yellow light of grottos dripping with leaf-covered stalactites.

They sat side by side without a word. The water gave off a breath like the air in a swamp. A handful of stars in a shimmering, fluttering tissue like a dragonfly’s wing seemed to fly toward the earth. In the pool, where no one was swimming, in thick, turbid water that seemed to be covered with a soggy clotted mass, other stars trembled, now and then nearly blotted out, violently shaken by drowning insects that had fallen splattering into the water.

In the bushes little lights soft as a fine rain twinkled. They flew about unsteadily, leaving shiny streaks behind them. All space, from the sky to the earth, was full of movement and instability. A small green flame floated calmly in the air and spiraled down; opposite that one another swam out, reflected in the viscid mirror. They seemed to run toward each other, drawn by an irresistible force, to join for a moment as if in a kiss and then disappear — to drop into the darkness or separate because of some perceived error, one soaring up, the other falling deep into the black water.

“You see?” she asked in a voice not like her own, low and a bit fearful. “The birth and death of worlds. An eerie night.”

He was silent, at one with nature, profoundly calm.

“What are you thinking about? It seems that you have left me, that you are very far away.”

His first impulse was to deny it, to seize her hand, cover it with his own and whisper, “I am thinking of you.” But he told the truth, caught off guard by her intuition.

“I was recalling a night like this in my childhood.”

“Everything that is and will be between us reminds you of something? And I wanted us to…You don’t understand that you have become a whole world for me, still undiscovered. I envy those who were with you when you took your first steps, the first girl you kissed, the friends you told who you wanted to be when you were still in the making. I even envy the dogs who walked by your feet, put their muzzles on your knees, and looked into your eyes attentively, intelligently.

“If you think I’m mad, you’re not mistaken. I am mad, mad—” she repeated rapturously, more and more loudly, as if even now she were not quite sure of herself. “You must tell me everything, so I can recover the parts of your life that I’ve missed. Tell me about your parents, your country, the books you loved, your dreams. When I’ve thought about you, I’ve had to tell myself every minute: I don’t know, I don’t know, and what joy the little word ‘yet’ brought me! I felt like a little girl in front of the locked door of a room in which nice surprises were being arranged. I told myself: He will tell me. He will let me into his life. What joys and discoveries I have to look forward to…”

He said nothing. He breathed deeply, passively observing the nuptial dances of the fireflies in the half-empty pool and the stars low in the sky. They seemed to fly toward the earth, for they dilated enormously in eyes that brimmed with tears from the strain.

“Tell me what you were thinking about,” she begged him. “I want to be your companion even in the things that were only yours.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“I wanted us to be alone, completely alone. Dinner will be served soon. The staff will disappear, the guests will sit down, and then we can go. The whole wing of the hotel is empty because of the end-of-season painting. I looked out for myself. Moving wasn’t necessary; they refurbished the room while I was out in the villages. We must wait.”

The duality of her thinking took him by surprise — the shrewd calculation, the avoidance of risk, the adaptation to local customs, then this sudden outburst of pent-up feeling, the predatory acquisitiveness, the desire to possess him with all his past, for she must already have taken the future for granted.

“We’ll go soon,” she whispered, enjoying the impatience with which he waited for her; at least that was how she had understood his question. She reached out and put her hand on his temple, outlining the edge of his ear with her fingertips until he trembled all over with desire. She bent over and the frames of their chairs tapped each other; she wanted to say something or to kiss him, but they heard the crunching of gravel nearby. Two men emerged from behind a corner of the building and came toward the edge of the pool, their footsteps tapping loudly on the tiled walk. They stopped for a moment, watching the fireflies at their frolics. One threw away a cigarette; its red fire, crudely material and inharmonious, made an arc in the air and went out. The other twice dug up a fistful of gravel and dashed the reflections of the stars to bits. They seemed to be speaking Italian, which here in India had a familiar ring for Istvan, though he did not understand it. They walked away unhurried. They did not see the pair lounging in the chairs.

The fingers Margit had put on his lips Istvan held lightly in his teeth. He moved his head and cradled it in her hand; he smelled the faint odors of medicine and nicotine and the fragrance of her skin.

In front of them velvety greenish lights rose and fell, making illegible signs in the air. The image of wide pastures returned: the grass, the barely perceptible smell of smoke, or rather of white ashes from burnt stalks, for the campfire had gone out long ago.

“Very well. I will tell you,” he began, deliberating over his words. She embraced him warmly and removed her hand. She pressed her fingers under his arm and rested her cheek against his shoulder.

“I lay on the ground — not on the grass, for it had been trampled away to nothing. Only on the ground. It was not hard at all. It was like a body, like flesh. I felt at one with it, as if it were a dog’s belly and I her puppy. Around me the grass that was not pressed down by my weight bristled like an animal’s coat, a pelt smelling lightly of the earth’s perspiration and giving off a vapor under my warm hand. The dew had fallen. The herdsman was dozing not far away, but was so cut off from the world by his peaceful sleep, so oblivious to a call, that it was as if he were not there. In the deep dusk I heard only the steps of horses, the dry clicking as their teeth cut the grass, their snorting and sighing. At moments they pressed so near that I felt the turf tremble as their hooves struck it. I smelled their odor, wild, bracing as the lash of the willow switch on our naked calves and thighs when we rode bareback, driving the galloping herds to bathe in the river.”

He turned his head toward her and spoke into her dry, fragrant hair. Only now, with his lips, did he feel its firmness and buoyancy.

“Aren’t you afraid of the stars? Raise your head and look. They hang over us in the vastness of the sky, in space the mind can hardly encompass. They may have already gone dark, but the blue fire of their light will flow toward us for centuries. During the day they retreat. At night they take advantage of the time when we sleep and are not watching to come closer to the earth.

“Everyone has his own star. It waits for him. Everyone — and you, and I. Its wings flutter like a crystal hawk’s and give off sparks. When someone dies, his star falls like a spider down its thread somewhere on the horizon. They threaten, they warn. They spin their beams into the eye, into the heart, which feels the omen and beats with agitation.

“To travel between them, to climb with the eye, higher and higher…Don’t you feel the earth under you fall away as you hang like dandelion fluff tossed about on a light breeze? How hard it is to return from those intoxicating heights, from that dizzying flight toward the earth, into cramped, sleepy, torpid flesh!

“I looked for a star that would give me a sign, stand out from the rest, wink as if to greet me. I looked until the tears came. I felt the rotation of the earth, the circulation of my blood, the sap in the plants. Sometimes it seemed that I would fly up, weightless, drawn by them with irresistible force, and never return. The earth would awake and forget about me as if I had only been a dream. I clutched at the grass. I clung to the sod with my arms spread. Under my back I felt every node, every lithe stem. The trampling of horses close by, striking the ground as if it were a drum, and the dull pulse of the prairie soothed me. I slept with a feeling that I had been rescued — not that day, but it would surely come, surely…”

She trembled and clung to him, pressing with her fingers, burying them in his arm. All around them the fireflies’ little green flames moved in their puckish orbits, and on the surface of the pool below, the reflections of drowned stars quivered.

“I don’t want,” she said like a small child, “do you hear, I don’t want—”

He took her in his arms and kissed her hungrily, avidly. She did not resist. He nestled his face in the hollow of her shoulder and pressed his cheek to her neck. He absorbed her with every breath; he satiated himself with the fragrance of her skin, which immediately went moist and clung to his as if there were no boundary between their bodies. Their breaths mingled. Their mouths opened deeply; their tongues met.

Through the dusky park, now outlined with pulsating lights, rolled the boom of a gong. It throbbed with a hard, painful note. Suddenly she pushed against Istvan’s chest and struggled free of his arm.

“Please — let me go.”

Reluctantly he obeyed. They lay beside each other like swimmers carried onto a shoal washed by waves. They knew that the next tide would engulf it, and that night was before them; that in this joining, long and splendid as a battle for life, they would draw near each other, deepen their intimacy and, finally, be one. The night was warm and thick as a black fleece in which they would be hidden until dawn came like a silver mirror, full of light, color, and twittering hubbub.

They heard the voices of guests hurrying to dinner. Figures in white moved about in the glow of lights half hidden among sprays of leaves. They lay with hands barely touching, every nerve vibrating.

At last the bustle at the hotel died away completely, and such a silence ensued that they could hear the jingling tick of the watch on the hand that cushioned her head.

“I was afraid,” she accused herself. “You are forgetting that this is India and they can hear us.”

“Who?”

“The dancing gods who jeer, mock, revel in tormenting their adherents, and are extremely jealous of human happiness.” She raised herself a little and leaned over. Suddenly, to his consternation, he felt her warm, moist lips pressed to his hand.

“What are you doing?” he bridled. He would have been less startled if she had put out a lighted cigarette on his skin.

“Istvan, I’m happy.” She rolled her head over his hand, sweeping it with her hair, warming it with her breathing. “You’ll never understand. I’ve found myself—”

His heart beat violently. Its pounding, not in his chest but in his throat and ears and through his body, and the dull muted roar of the surging blood, were like the blows of a hammer.

They started away, unhurried, keeping even more than a normal distance between them. Walking on the dry lawn, they passed the illuminated pergola and the doorkeeper’s lodge, which was shining like a lighthouse. They made their way straight into the darkness of the long veranda and toward the door of her room. As she groped for her key, Margit felt his hot hand on her fingers. He had remembered that the lock was stubborn, and that gesture of readiness to help open the door revealed his tension and impatience.

Inside, a little lamp had been lighted by a maid. Its low beam fell on the neatly made bed. The coiled mosquito netting hung over it like a white turban.

“Wait,” she said in an undertone, restraining him with a hand that he pressed to his cheek and touched with his lips. She looked at him with immeasurable tenderness. She was filled with a peaceful joy; I have him. He is mine.

“Shall I turn it out?”

“No. For you I would undress in the middle of Delhi.” She tossed her head provocatively. Her hair rippled onto her shoulders.

He followed her with his eyes to the door of the bathroom. He heard the light rasp of a zipper, the hiss and flutter of silk pulled quickly down. He undid the knot of mosquito netting; it uncoiled with sudden force and its white wisps lashed him in the face, releasing a smell of mouldering fabric, dust, and insecticide. The netting dropped, and veiled the whole bed; in the low light it looked like a transparent tent that had fallen to the earth.

He began to hurry. He threw off his sandals and tore away his shirt. His tie lay twisted like an injured snake. He heard the changeful hum of water as it beat on flesh and on the stone floor. He reached under his arm and noticed the pungent smell of sweat. Accursed India; he shook his head with a wry look. I must rinse off.

He waited. He lifted the thick white mesh and knelt on the bed, which gave under his weight. He waited, resting his hands on his thighs. His breathing was labored. It seemed to him that he filled the tent with the heat his body exuded through his bronze skin and black hair.

After all, this had happened once before — had certainly happened — he had been through it already. He had come to this room just as certain as he was tonight that Margit would be his, but he had left chastened. She had returned in his dreams, and he had had her, had taken her with all his might. And when he had raised his head in delight, it had seemed that their time was measured by a great pendulum sizzling in a fire. He knew that pendulum, knew it so that it filled him with pain and loathing. Don’t call him back, forget, a voice admonished. Life belongs to the living. Hating himself, he triumphed over that other man. He was alive with male force: his torso glinted with veins of sweat, a different sweat than torture had drawn from that man’s body.

He did not hear her step; she was barefoot. Only when she appeared leaning on the drooping net did he see that she was naked and wet. The partition bent at the touch of her hand and fell away. He looked through the netting and saw the rising of her breasts, the lines of her hips and the dark triangle between her thighs. He moved toward her on his knees and rested his hands on hers. She was his already; only the dusty froth of white netting separated them. He wanted to kiss her, but the trace of mustiness and insecticide in the air put him off. He wanted to have her leaning on his chest, to press her until she lost her breath, until it hurt, and she would leap and toss in the circle of his arms like a fish caught by the gills. He raised the netting and saw her uncovered. Knees. Thighs. The eternal tremor that fills a man when he brings womanflesh out of hiding — familiar and mysterious, worthy of scorn, yet desired. The dream of boys. The lust of the eyes.

He threw off the netting above her head with one tug so that it flew behind his back, and then he encircled her, caught her in his arms, settled her on the sheet and explored her body with his lips, learning its parts by memory. He found her breasts docile to his hands; he took possession of her flat belly, nipped at her knees with his teeth as if they were apples. He divided her into sections with his looks: she was there — and then in an instant he forgot about her, lost in delight at her cool, refreshing skin, where perfect beads of water lingered, at the taste of that skin, which he knew now for the first time.

With his cheek he caressed the insides of her thighs, which were far smoother than the lips of a foal. He felt an overpowering joy in this voyage of discovery when she gave herself to him as if she were running out impulsively to meet him, then clung to him and trembled. He was, consciously, making his appeal to her body, not to her, and she was participating. He had bought off the resistance with caresses, by conspiring with the crew in spite of the commander, who might still be ready to mount a defense. The understanding between eager lips and the summits of her breasts; the absorption in her body, which did not annihilate but restored him; the shape of the ear remembered by the mouth; the fingers combing the flame of hair, the plucking of the fruit…

He stole a glance at her eyes, glowing with points of light, at her lips, half open in defenseless receptiveness and altered, unfamiliar, swollen with delight. She did not see him. She closed her eyes, she forgot him, though he felt her hands playing over him, grazing him, stroking him timidly, like swallows’ wings stirring sparkles from the smooth blue surface of a pond. Almost sleepily she drew up her knees and opened them with a movement like a butterfly; in that unashamed, desirous yielding he saw a beauty that choked him. His arms to the elbow were under her back. His face was tangled in her crisp, fragrant hair. The coolness of her skin, pressed against his chest, vanished, and by now he did not know, could not feel, where his body ended and hers began as he passed beyond the boundary he had abolished with such joy. He enclosed her, he drew her into himself, and she was entwined with him; he was under her, on her, and in her.

“I want you so, Margit,” he said, reeling as if something had struck him.

“You have me.” He heard the words as if from a distance, from the depths of drowsiness, and he thought that he would never conquer her, never possess her heart, her imagination. That is why he had sought to reach an understanding with the inner secrets of her body, the interior of smooth moist satin, the sweet shell, as he whispered to her — true to the custom of conquerors naming each part of the new land as they please — in the mysterious language, like incantations, of the rites of love.

Unceasing entry: flight into clouds. And she understands, feeling the weight of him, seeing his uplifted head, his tanned neck bent outward, she knows that in this moment, though she is the cause of all his exultation, he has almost forgotten her, he has soared and is far away. Margit rocks wildly, like a wave in a boat’s wake, squeezes and curls.

She moans — a moan that is the delight of a man, like the last voice of an expiring enemy. Her teeth are parted, her lips thick, her eyes swimming, too clouded to receive the light. It is as if she were in agony, and her face should frighten but only delights him. At last he has what he so doggedly pursued, has it, though he wishes this flight would go on forever. And by now she is conscious of him again, making certain that he is there, blushing as if caught sleeping, ashamed that she abandoned him for a moment to be enclosed in herself, happy now that she could have made him such a gift. Suddenly, as he wrings his tense hands and falls on her breasts with his warm lips wide open and creeps toward her neck, Margit whispers in his ear, “Ay-ker.” She pronounces it in English, “Ay-ker,” and after a long moment of mild stupefaction, he comprehends: Icarus. He only smiles.

They lie beside each other under the white cone of mosquito netting, their bodies, slippery with sweat, resting like animals herded into a shelter, animals who know and trust each other. Margit’s fingers wander around his chest. Her lips touch it lightly and brush his arm. He takes her hand, puts the ends of her fingers to his lips and whispers:

“Thank you.”