Stone Tablets

Chapter VIII

Swollen drops of moisture falling here and there from the trees made rainbow-tinted etchings on air washed clean by the downpour. Greenish light fell through the wide, unfurled leaves. A Tibetan woman who had spread out her wares on the sidewalk cast a leery eye at the sky and rolled up the yellow sheet of plastic that had been covering bowls of old coins, round and octagonal, worn smooth from centuries of use, with holes so they could be strung on leather strips; wooden demons’ masks with grinning teeth; little bronze figures green with verdigris; old knives; boxes full of beads roughly shaped from semiprecious stones; turquoise buttons; and little pellets of nephrite that seemed to be filled with gold shavings: tiger’s eye.

The woman, with her flat, ageless face, with her hair in a mass of braids and silver reliquaries on her necklace, sluiced shining rainwater from the recesses of the plastic covering. Squatting in voluminous red and blue skirts, she arranged figurines and votive censers in even rows.

Istvan walked out of his stifling office, where the fan was stirring the cigarette smoke. It was a relief to breathe in the fragrance of wet earth and fresh leaves. The censors, or rather the Bureau of Film Appraisal, as it was discreetly called here — a commission of lethargic old bureaucrats carelessly dressed — had given him permission for the release to the public of several short informational films about Hungary and two amusing folk tales. They had demanded that one frame showing a playing field with girls in gymnastic costumes be excised as immodest. Every gesture of intimacy on the parts of embracing couples was eliminated; kisses evoked outraged mutters. “Throw it out, get rid of it!” “Scandalous!” the chief of the commission exclaimed, belching garlic into Istvan’s ear as he leaned forward in the dark projection room pierced by a cone of hazy light. No extenuation was of any use; the scissors chattered and with a dry crackle, as when one steps on a centipede, the cuttings of film fell in curls under the editing table.

Yet Istvan had been gratified when nine boxes, each containing three meters of film, were returned to him with the official inscription: Released for distribution in India and Kashmir by the Bureau of Film Appraisal. In his briefcase he had a special memorandum, a photocopy of which was to be sent with the films to the Hungarian-Indian Friendship Society.

Its members had come primarily for lectures, after which a poster announced the film and a cartoon. Papers were read in unctuous voices over the monotonous whir of fans boring through air thick as tallow; from the opening sentence the notables dozed, sprawling in armchairs. When the film came on, the hall revived and no harm was done if the boxes had been packed incorrectly and the reels were out of order; the incongruity between the commentary and the action on the screen set off a strident discussion. Each had understood what he saw in his own way. Yet even out of these dissonances a sense of his country arose — associations and images that would spring to mind when they read about the Republic of Hungary in the newspapers.

He walked along the pavement over wet flagstones the rain had littered with leaves and the remains of flowers. The square of dry red clay that had been covered with plastic glowed in the light; the crowd of oddly shaped figurines intrigued him. The bowls, boxes, and tin cans seemed to conceal unknown treasures. The Tibetan woman smiled with eyes that were narrow slits and beckoned with both hands until her tight braids bounced on her shoulders.

“Cheap, very cheap, sahib,” she cried in a croaking voice like a parrot’s. “Precious stones, beautiful stones, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings. And gods of bronze, stone, wood, clay…”

He leaned over and picked up a figure of the goddess Lakshmi, which was as sinuous as if she were dancing. Spots of verdigris and dried blotches of mud attested that the little statue had been dug out of the ground.

“Very old. Sahib knows to find what I have most precious.” She clicked her tongue approvingly. “Only fifty rupees.”

“What are you looking for, Mr. Terey?” A shadow fell on the little cluster of divinities. Istvan whirled around like someone caught in wrongdoing. Attorney Chandra was standing behind him, smiling indulgently.

“You prefer gods of stone and silver—”

“I can’t resist temptation. I must dig through this garbage heap.” He handed the figurine to the lawyer. “I’m always hoping to unearth a true work of art.”

“Do you like this?” Chandra moved the figurine to and fro casually on his open palm. The woman scowled at him.

“Nice lines, very graceful — and surely old.”

“Smell it.” Chandra pushed the little goddess under his nose. “Notice the odor of hydrochloric acid, the artificial patina. They may even have ancient forms, but the casting is fresh, done for tourists. They rub it with acid to make it green. They smear it with clay. The vendor is so shrewd that she will swear every trifle you choose is a true treasure. Give that back to her. It is a waste of money.”

Istvan put the figure down gingerly.

“You are a man of good judgment,” Chandra commended him. “You know how to profit from good advice, so you will be rewarded. If you wish to buy, and cheaply, a genuine work of art, a few centuries old, take that stone head the peddler woman uses to weigh down the plastic. It has a chipped ear and a dented nose — we can bargain for it — but it is the only piece worth anything. Do not look at it so eagerly. I will buy it for you.”

Chandra asked about a heavy silver necklace, haggled for a moment, then, as if resigned to defeat, reached for a copper lamp that he also rejected as too expensive. Just as he seemed on the point of leaving, he pointed the end of his shoe carelessly at the battered head.

“And how much for that?”

The Tibetan woman did not want to antagonize him by naming too high a price. She was afraid they would go away without buying anything. So she raised both hands and spread her fingers:

“Only ten.”

“Good!” said Chandra. “Take five and be glad of it. This rubbish is not worth that much.”

He did not even bend over, but waited for her to kneel and hand it to him. He frowned as he passed a finger over the nicks in the stone.

“Very well, sahib,” she said. “My loss. Please take for luck. Today I almost give away, tomorrow I make profit. It is from a temple. Very, very old.”

“In that case I will not take it. Do you know that carrying away old sculptures is not permitted? And still you say that you are losing. And I wanted you to sell something, at least. It would have been useful as a paperweight, but I can use any stone for that. No, I will not take it.”

“Sahib will buy—”

“No, for you ought to know that you may be able to swindle someone, but not me. Look: a chip. A dent…”

“Sahib, three rupees.” She held up three fingers on her left hand.

“No. I have changed my mind. Let’s go—” he turned to the counselor.

“Two rupees. One—” she begged. “Take without money, as gift. Do me great favor.”

They stopped and turned back. Chandra took the head with an indifferent air.

“Heavy,” he sighed as if disenchanted, and handed it to Terey. Nevertheless he groped in his pocket, took out two rupees and tossed them to the bowing peddler.

“Gift for gift.” He glanced at her as if with reluctance.

“I am happy.” She bent over, pressing her fists to her chest in Chinese style.

They left. Istvan was delighted as he looked at his prize: the heavy lips in a somnolent smile, the eyes with their tolerant, complacent gaze, the impeccable lines of the elegantly secured hair. The flaws only heightened the charm of the old sculpture. He touched it delicately with his fingertips, as if its wounds could feel pain. A raindrop from a tree fell onto the stone and flowed over one smooth cheek like a tear, leaving a trace of wetness. A beautiful head! Suddenly he felt grateful to Chandra, who was saying in a low, melodious voice:

“There is a great deal of the child in you; you are capable of taking pleasure in anything. Really — do not give me back the two rupees. Rather it is I who should be embarrassed that I took the liberty of offering you such a trifle.”

“You know that the delight this bit of sculpture evokes is beyond price.”

“Some herdsman must have broken it from a temple frieze,” Chandra mused. “He pried at it with a crowbar and chipped the ear. The head fell off and rolled down from the upper floors of the pagoda. It hit the stones and dented the nose. I suspect that the peddler did not pay a penny for it, but received it as a makeweight or gratuity. She did someone a favor by taking it. The thought of buying such a piece of sculpture would never even have crossed my mind. What would I buy it for? So my eyes would always be lighting on that head — that head, which came into being a couple of hundred years before me and will still be here when I am gone, when my ashes mingle with the Ganges slime.”

“But you believe, you should find comfort in it…” Istvan looked at him in amazement.

“Comfort — that beauty can be destroyed by nothing more than a little stupidity and greed? He was not even thinking of the possibility of selling it; he tended goats and he was bored. He climbed onto the temple wall to grapple with the stone figures. He did not even know that he had knocked off a god’s head. Do I believe?” he said meditatively. “In what? That there is something indestructible in me, a breath of immortality, a spark which will return to life, grown over with new and ever-varying flesh? If that will not be myself, Chandra, what concern is it of mine? If I lose the memory of my own acts, merits, and faults, how can they influence my fate?

“The return of the reincarnated,” he mused, “greeting the world with tears and cries, the despair of the infant who has lost its knowledge of itself and must begin all over creating its personality. I tell you, I do not believe, and the moment of fear when the thought of eternal existence rears its head I consider a weakness unworthy of a man. One must have the courage to say to oneself: I am condemned and there is no salvation. Every day gently but relentlessly brings me closer to the threshold of night, the darkness which will finally close over me. That is scientific truth, after all, and you are taught it in school. And you yourself—”

They walked through cascades of sunlight that gushed between the treetops, through the succulent smells of greenery and earth that steamed as if from the breath of an unclean animal above them. Istvan tasted fear. He saw the wise smile of the stone head he was cradling in his hands, and Chandra’s hungry eyes.

“No,” he contradicted the lawyer passionately. “I believe.”

“Certainly.” Chandra was letting him dodge the issue, was offering him a way out. He need do nothing but be quiet and enjoy the gift. “You are a poet. You believe in the immortality of gracefully ordered words.”

“I believe in God.” He was amazed himself at the gravity with which he made the pronouncement. Chandra paused.

“You are right. Each of us can be a god. But that takes courage. That god of yours as well was only a man. You see — I am a god without disciples, for if they are submissive, they are boring. I leave behind those I have won over; I am only attracted by those who resist. I test them, I fulfill their dreams. I try to ascertain whether they truly possess what I could not buy or obtain by request. And what contempt I feel for them when they surrender to me, giving themselves over with the trust of chickens who peck up grain, lured to the feet of the cook even when he does not hide his knife!”

“But you went to Benares seeking purification.”

“So our babbling friend the rajah said. I went because a tale was going around about a pious man who returned from beyond the threshold,” he said pointedly. “I wanted to verify it, and I recognized the deceased.” He laughed silently. “I reminded him of his past, and the liberated one returned with alacrity to his abandoned assets.”

“So he is really the rajah’s brother?”

“If you do not trust the verdict of the court, you must believe God. After all, I myself resurrected him. I. I. I called him out of darkness and if I like, I can push him back into it. That is the cruelty of resurrection: the one who receives the gift of life is also under sentence. He does not want to remember that, but I know the day of his demise and that amuses me.”

“And yet you demand to be paid.”

“But why not, since I rid people of difficulties? I do not need money for myself, but to secure the happiness of others. I enjoy fulfilling their requests, their dreams, and I watch as they stand troubled and helpless with the longed-for gifts of fate, not knowing what to do or where to turn.”

“You are in a very unhappy state, Mr. Chandra.” Istvan looked at him compassionately. “Do you despise everyone? Have you met with nothing worth loving?”

“Nothing exists that I could not buy, obtain, possess, and since I have it, it must not be worth very much. One must be occupied with something. So I decided to be a god on whose will human fate depends, if only some want to believe in me. I serve them, I grant their requests more quickly than that god to whom you must sometimes turn. After all, you want him at your service; you look to him for help and protection. You have no right to pity me. You want to be richer that I am, better than I am.” His smooth, slightly gaunt face constricted suddenly with spite. “You are simply misguided and foolish. You will never be rich.”

Istvan, passing the heavy sphere that was the severed head from one hand to another, thought the lawyer was offended. He considered the entire conversation an oratorical display not to be taken seriously. But Chandra did not go away. He looked in front of him, listening to the bicycle bells and the bleating of motorcycle rickshaw horns. He was ruminating about something, pursing his narrow violet lips.

“I lost my temper unnecessarily, and anger belongs only to God. You are so sure of yourself, then?” He looked sideways at Terey. “I could easily create a small earthquake around you and look on as you reach out and call for help. And, stranger still, you could rely on me, because…No, no, only youth and naivete produce such feelings of power. And health,” he threw out after a pause, as if he had found yet another gate to storm. “You wish to be a poet? A real poet, one of those who count? You must suffer, and suffer a great deal.”

They stood in the shade. A step farther on the air crackled with heat and green parrots crept over the roadway on short legs, picking through dry lumps of horse dung.

“Now I know why I like talking with you.” He looked around with eyes wide open, as if the light could not hurt them. “You are aware of what makes you different, of your little illusions. I found it pleasant to chat with you.”

“So we do not part as enemies.” Istvan sighed with relief.

“Indeed. And in enmity there is the hope that we will be won over, united, embraced, or thrown to our knees. Do you really think it is possible to be an enemy of God? Even those who struggle against Him render Him a service; even hating Him, they seem to confirm His existence. It is enough to do as I do. To feel oneself to be a god. And so it is in the lives of the majority of people, though they do not always have the courage to be consistent.”

He gave Istvan a dry, bony hand. It was cool in spite of the heat.

“May I give you a lift?” The counselor opened the door of the Austin.

“No. Thank you. I have an automobile, one that is even too good. I prefer the rickshaw. I do not like to attract attention.”

Istvan put the stone head on the back seat. He rolled the window down so the heat inside would abate a little. Chandra, in spite of all his cunning, his astute financial manipulations and his legal ruses, seemed to him an urbane madman. He wants to open me to the world with suffering as with jabs of a knife, he thought; or it may be that he noticed my sadness and irritability. My wound is Margit.

He flicked away a locust that had flown through the window with a loud rattle and lodged in his hair. He drove along, tooting the horn and squeezing between groups of cyclists in white or striped linen. When he put the brake on hard, the stone head rolled onto the floor with a loud thump. Obstructed by its chipped ear, it rocked continuously, beating like a bass drum.

He was overtaken by a violent impulse to turn back, pick out the slender figure of the lawyer in the crowd on the street and ask for his help to get Margit back. Yet instinctively he preferred to search out the truth on his own. Chandra seemed a doubtful ally, though Istvan did not believe he could do him harm.

“The ambassador was looking for you,” Ferenc announced with malicious satisfaction. He was hurrying down the corridor with a fistful of documents and a lost expression, as if he were in pursuit of the solution to a problem and it was eluding him.

“But you knew where I was.”

“Yes — there is always a reason to escape the office.” He nodded indulgently. “Go and face him. The weather is stormy in that quarter. What do you have there?”

“An old sculpture.” He turned it in his hand.

“You have too little kitsch in your house? How much did you give for that?”

“Not an anna. It was a gift.”

“Never fear. You’ll pay. They give here in order to gain something, not out of friendship.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I forgot: you have the ambassador’s storeroom at your disposal. There are bins enough there.”

Terey made sure that the caretaker carried the boxes with the films into the storeroom and put them on a shelf under lock and key. He turned the big fan on at full speed, and when the annotated papers on his desk bristled, he placed the stone head on them. It rested there sideways, and he found something disturbing in its open eyes, its lips full as if satiated with delight. So we lie in the dark sometimes, listening to the pounding of our hearts, full of expectation and fear.

The telephone rattled.

“It is I,” came the deep voice of Kalman Bajcsy. “Where have you been off to?”

He had hardly told him about the films when the ambassador broke in:

“How is your car? Running nicely? Get yourself home, pack your grip, and run over to Agra. Give a talk for me at eight tonight. You must leave in plenty of time, for there may be detours; remember, this is the monsoon season. Now there is a road and now there is none, only a raging river. Do not lapse into detailed assessments of our situation. Do not play the prophet when you answer questions; no long-range predictions. I depend”—he hesitated—“I must rely on your good judgment.”

“What about Comrade Ferenc?”

“He is needed at trade talks. And I am flying to Bombay for three days. The deputy minister for trade is coming in. We will return together to sign an agreement. It is an urgent situation.”

“I understand.”

“Well, get moving.”

“Right away, sir, and on that subject — had you announced a theme?”

“Only a general one: Hungary today. But you can take up some issue you’re familiar with. Something from literature, perhaps. Speak freely, enjoy yourself. Give a critique of your fellow writers; they have no specialists in Hungarian culture here, and nothing you say will have repercussions. Between us, the thing is to bore them for an hour so they will not feel that they have been treated disrespectfully.”

“I could talk about painting. I have a color film that isn’t bad.”

“If you feel up to it. That is even better. The talk will begin later. They have arranged an outdoor party and the film will shorten the discussion. Do not criticize socialist realism — that is my only injunction, because what if someone from our sister embassies happens to be there and begins to protest? Why make a spectacle of a quarrel in our camp? Well — good luck! Give me a report on Saturday.”

Terey stuffed his letters and documents into a drawer in his desk and locked it. He looked in the storeroom for the box with the film, checking a few cages in the glare of the light — for the Indian employees often packed borrowed short-feature films in boxes with incorrect stickers — and, his spirits rising, hurried to the car. Even the heat did not seem so oppressive now. The air surging through the open windows of the Austin hummed a high note like wind in a storm, and time after time the saw-like voices of cicadas pierced his ears.

His servants welcomed the announcement of his journey with unconcealed satisfaction, just as he had welcomed the ambassador’s departure. The cook, scratching himself under the arms through his shirt sleeves with their ripped seams, assured him that he would take care of everything. He even wanted to prepare a dish especially suited to the heat. But Istvan only ordered him to sew a missing button on a shirt he had chosen in addition to others more casual and colorful. His thoughts were fixed on Margit. No: this time she would not elude him. He had to learn the truth.

At a gasoline station with a border of cannabis, its purplish-red flowers fleshy as a rooster’s comb, he filled the tank. Glassy streaks in the air over the large fuel pump, now switched off, showed how rapidly the gasoline was vaporizing. The grease-stained bodies of working men glittered with trickling sweat. They moved with maddening sluggishness, with open lips and dull-witted, pained expressions. Istvan’s shirt clung to his back; the sun caught his legs above the knees, burning through his pants. A pair of little clouds scudded over a sullen turquoise sky; how unjust it was that there, high above them, a wind was blowing, while scorching air hovered stubbornly over the earth. The big tin gasoline sign with the yellow-painted Shell emblem emitted a metallic moan under the onslaught of the sun.

He drove out onto the highway. The trucks in front of him churned up red dust; he had to close the windows as he passed them. Barefoot drivers with wet towels on their heads steered trucks piled high with cargo with one hand as they hung out of the windows to their waists, cooling themselves in the rush of air. Even the trees were turning red from the dust, which was soft as talc. Only the sugar cane, which was flourishing after the rain, stood like a wall of dark green. A crowd of monkeys presided over it, breaking off and chewing the stalks that oozed sticky sweetness; the old males ran up to the road itself, shamelessly thrusting out their molting rumps.

Could the British embassy have forbidden her to see me, he wondered. There is nothing secret in the surveys she conducts. She signed a contract; she is a free agent. Apart from her medical duties, she is at her own disposal. Even if they had cast me as a spy and a dangerous subversive, if all she said to me is true, she would have come straight to me and demanded an explanation.

It’s no matter what women whisper — his lips curled with contempt — the electrifying touch of the hand, the yielding lips, the body sweetly accessible, say more than vows. Are other assurances needed? Words mean nothing by comparison with the clear signs of the joy of our being together, breathing the same air, seeing the same landscape. The union of bodies that have no secrets, the smells of skin, of sweat and warm hair, from which arises desire. Assurances of love under the sail of mosquito netting were not necessary. Of course she could tell herself, Enough. No. I will not be there. She could enjoin silence. But her hands are empty, in her sleep she gropes around a rumpled sheet in search of his arms, her breast longs to be pressed down by his, crushed, aching, her breath taken away as delightful expectation surges through her body. Only to run to her again, to have her before me. She will not resist. She must come back.

Shadows of trees and flashes of sunlight played over the hood of the car, beating his eyes numb. The heat was draining. Caravans of tongas rested in the bushes. The drivers had crawled under the wagons and were sleeping with their legs spread in a patch of shade. The white backs of the buffalo were streaked with red dust. Only camels worked their cleft lips with threads of green saliva tirelessly, like rabbits, plucking little leaves from the smaller thorn trees. They reminded Istvan of the plaster figurines in the crèches set on little nests of hay in churches at Christmastime. The warning signal from the horn aroused no tremor from them. They dozed in stone-like repose, utterly still in the fiery air full of the hissing of insects.

The smells of burning, of chicken dung and dried mud hovered among the clay-walled cottages with flat roofs. Collectors for rainwater gleamed as if wax had been poured over them; glare leaped from the surface of the road. The horned heads of buffalo rose like tree trunks out of a flood, smeared with slime. A flock of peacocks bustled across the road, trailing their long, iridescent tails and scolding in screeching voices.

Time seemed to be compressed. Not believing what the hands of his watch told him, Terey pressed it to his ear. Its gears made biting sounds like a bark beetle gnawing the old wooden bed in the alcove in his parents’ blue house. The minutes passed imperceptibly, like a slow leak.

The road fell away behind him.

Tense in every nerve, he turned in at the park gate, where peddlers and snake charmers with baskets full of reptiles had taken up residence, and drove up to the glass-encased reception desk. Looking over the young clerk’s shoulder, he saw the key to Margit’s room hanging on a hook. The Hindu smiled as if Istvan were a good friend: rooms would be vacant later; a few people would be leaving after the siesta, but he was willing to give him the key to Miss Ward’s room. She had been away again for a few days. She had gone to the vicinity of Dehradun. There were many blind people in the villages there. She had gone with orderlies; it was not known when she would return. When she had established an intake point, no doubt.

It began to grate on Istvan that the young man knew so much about Margit. He took the key from his yellowish hand and moved away with an ease that was partly feigned; his heels beat on the brick pavement of the pergola. Feeling as if he were committing a crime, he opened the door and, like a burglar, reconnoitered the room with his eyes. His heart raced as if he were doing something against her wishes and was afraid of being detected by witnesses. Despising himself, he opened a drawer and saw a little frame of hammered silver lying face down at the bottom. He seized it eagerly. If he were not going to meet Margit here, he wanted to assert his presence in her room by setting out his photograph, which she had once mentioned in a letter. But the frame was empty. He clenched his fists as anger swept over him.

Now he must pry, must know for certain who his successor was. He peered into the cabinet, he looked on the shelf and on the little table by the cot under the springy mushroom-like coil of mosquito netting. He found an opened letter but put it aside, for it bore Australian stamps. On top of other papers was a telegram from him, and with a paid reply; he wanted all the more to insult her, to wound her. This, he knew, was petty malice. He stood resting his knees against the bed, confused and uncertain, like a dog that has lost the master’s scent. In the bathroom, water dripped more and more loudly; large drops with an oily sheen spattered on the wet stones.

He knelt and pressed his face into the placid smoothness of the bedspread. He was pained by a barely perceptible fragrance, or perhaps it was only his imagination. There was an odor of insecticide in the air, and a mustiness — the smell, quite simply, of an empty room.

A sense of injury rose in him, a bitterness such as children feel when adults do not keep their promises. Feeling a tightening in his throat, and angry at himself for disturbing the contents of her room — silence, after all, had the force of interdiction — he went through to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His own face, clouded by uncertainty, exasperated him. He washed his hands like a man who wants to erase the evidence that he has broken into a house. The towel was immaculate, freshly ironed. Obviously it had been changed during the occupant’s absence.

Water dribbled from the rusty showerhead in beads that swelled with maddening sluggishness. As they fell he did not see them, only the rainbow-tinted glimmers into which they shattered in the sunlight, wetting a spot on the slippery concrete that was overgrown with fleecy mildew. The tamping sound sent a shiver of dread through him.

He went out, startling the lizards, which flitted in zigzags from the walls to the ceiling. I understand nothing, he thought, like a man who has lost his wits. Now I truly understand nothing.

He informed his hosts of his arrival and handed them the round box containing the film. The meeting would take place in a garden under mango trees covered with fruit like old pear trees. Perhaps a hundred people were expected.

“It is an official agreement,” the old Hindu in the field cap of the Congress Party exulted unabashedly. “The event can be considered absolutely private and no one can intrude, but the family is gathering, and guests will come.”

Because the counselor admired the yellow fruit sprinkled with red, he was given a whole basket for the car so he could suck the mangoes when he was thirsty.

The ophthalmological hospital reeked even at a distance with iodoform and pus, as if the sudden rainstorms had accelerated the rotting process. He held a heart-shaped mango in his hand and sniffed it to counteract the stench. He wanted to talk to Connoly, to ask about Margit. But he found only the tall, slender professor from Sweden.

“You are out of luck.” He distorted his face into a pained expression meant to be taken for a smile. “Dr. Ward is stuck in the very heart of the epidemic. It appears that we will find one more cause for the spread of the sickness, and a classic one: quartz dust.”

“Is it far away?”

“About a hundred kilometers. It is possible to reach the place in a couple of hours, but everything depends on the rains.” He raised a long, bony finger and waved it dismissively. “Do not even attempt it with your car. It will bog down at the first washed-out river ford.”

“I would like very much to see what she is doing there.”

“The fight against trachoma interests you?” He scratched the back of his neck. “If you have time, come with me. I am going there tomorrow morning in our landrover.”

“Professor — you would take me?” Istvan blurted out. “What time should I be here?”

“Five in the morning, if it does not pour during the night. But you must be ready for a two days’ stay, for when the rivers rise…We will form an inspection team and surprise Miss Margit. Are you staying at the Taj Mahal? I will come to the hotel for you.”

“I was not prepared for such an excursion,” he said more reflectively, driving away the large, loathsome flies whose nimble legs were tickling his face.

“I can take a mattress and sheets from here, and we can share food if you are not particularly squeamish.”

“I was a soldier. I can eat what I am given. But I doubt that I will have much appetite when you have shown me your sick.”

“If you want to write about our work”—the scholar moved cautiously toward him—“we can only be grateful. Perhaps you will be interested in methods of combating trachoma. Are there many cases among you?”

“Before the war there were — a few cases in the mountain villages, where there was the greatest poverty. Now even medical students rarely have the luck, so to speak, to observe an instance at close range. There is no trachoma in Hungary. Conditions have changed: people earn more, housing is better, doctors are on call. People listen to the radio, they see educational films. They know by now that they must not dab at their eyes, or treat them with old wives’ remedies, or wait for the ailment to pass, but go to the doctor at once.”

“You have hit on the heart of the matter.” The professor spoke animatedly. “Altered conditions. But for changes to occur, people must truly want something, must do something, not simply wait.”

The damp odor of the hospital and the stench of putrefying bandages, wads of bloody gauze, and papers burning in a fire wafted toward them.

“Hellish climate. It’s disabling. It puts them in a stupor,” Istvan said agreeably.

“And those various faiths…”

“Would it be of any importance to you if an article on the UNESCO team appeared in the Hungarian press?”

“Send me two copies. Publication is important not only because of the statistics, but because someone has written about us in one more language. You have been in India long enough not to be surprised at anything. And thanks to your acquaintance with Dr. Ward, you understand something of the magnitude of our work. I like to talk, only take careful notes, for I will look like an imbecile in the reporting if you garble the technical terms.”

“I will give Miss Ward the English text for her perusal.” He pressed the professor’s hand, full of joy that he had uncovered the man’s vanity and hunger for recognition. To be sure, he was a first-rate doctor, but when he shut himself in his office, it was with the greatest delight that he turned the pages of the thick album in which he had painstakingly pasted all the notices concerning himself, his mission, and the activities of UNESCO. It was his vice.

“Wash your hands now, please,” the doctor instructed, turning on a little tap from an enameled basin on the wall. A violet stream of water mixed with permanganate trickled from it. When he rubbed his cheek as he drove to the evening meeting, he seemed to catch the familiar, barely perceptible scent of Margit’s hands.

The hope that he would see her the next day transformed him. His sense of humor returned; he was playful and witty. The showing of the film went off successfully, though the faces of the actors bulged on the unevenly stretched screen, and time after time moths made darting black spots on the picture as they flew into the white eye of the projector.

The night came on, warm and close. The guests did not want to leave. The fragrance of the flowers in the women’s hair was intoxicating; their silks rustled. The crowd broke up into small groups. People sat on cane chairs or leather cushions or blankets spread on the grass. When conversation died away they disappeared, sinking into the darkness. Only the high trill of cicadas sprinkled down from the tops of the mango trees.

The house observed tradition: instead of alcohol the servants carried around glasses of lemonade, sweetened with cane syrup, garnished with a pair of mint leaves or a jasmine blossom.

The heirs to the property gathered around Terey. Extensive tracts of land belonged to them; they were leased to peasants in return for half their yield. In the humid dusk their clothing gleamed white — shirts, narrow trousers creased in the crotch, dhotis like skirts. They look like spectres without heads or hands. Sometimes a face appeared when a cigarette was lit, hidden by a curved hand to keep a moth lured by the flash from sizzling in the flame.

“How is it possible that you did not know what your security service was doing in Hungary? Today you denounce the abuses, you vindicate those who were hanged. Was there some mechanism for control in your country? Must it not have given signals that there was malfeasance?” they asked in gentle voices. “Mistakes, errors may always be made, but here a fundamental principle was violated. In the Hindustan Times it was written that there were thousands of groundless arrests. Can everything be blamed on Stalin? What of your law guaranteeing freedom to citizens?”

“It was known that there were abuses. It must have been known,” he answered spiritedly. “But it was not easy to live with that knowledge. No one wanted to believe; criticism was taken as having come from our enemies. The stomach produces digestive juices; if it gets no food, it eats itself. It was the same way here. The enormously overgrown investigative apparatus, well paid, privileged, had to make its existence felt. It not only pursued adversaries but created them, to have someone to hunt.”

“And the law? And the courts, which mete out justice?” they pressed him, clasping their knees with warm hands and gazing into his invisible face.

“You forget that there had been a revolution in our country. That is the inevitable price of great transformations.”

“Just so — and were they not too great?” Someone spoke up in a voice smooth as velvet. “For perhaps it is a revolt of the root against the flowers and the fruit. A great extermination of culture and beauty that centuries labored to produce.”

“The gardener prunes the tree so it will bear fruit more abundantly,” he countered, exploiting their love of metaphor.

“He prunes, but he does not cut at random from the most reckless impulses,” someone else retorted. “From a well-judged pruning come laws and codes.”

“All the world is moving toward socialism. The state takes over the very large industries; it limits incomes. You will say that in Western Europe industrialists themselves share their profits with their workers voluntarily. It is because they see that among us the workers also share in the power, in the governance of the state. They must make concessions, must give something in order to delay, for a little, the inevitable process of history,” he explained fervently. “Look how it is with you. Look how much unwarranted harm came to you as a legacy from the English. Great tasks lie before your generation. You have just crossed the threshold: independence.”

“We are a technologically backward country,” they admitted. “We have not yet taken inventory of our own natural wealth.”

“Enormous means are needed, and who will supply them? The Americans, or Russia? And if they help, how will they demand to be repaid?” These voices were full of doubt. “We are afraid of changes that are too rapid.”

“We are used to tradition, religion, old customs.” A bass voice sounded in the twilight, without sarcasm. “We love peace.”

“People are good in our country. They do not want what belongs to others,” intoned a womanly alto, mild and warm.

“If we argue with you, it is not because we are averse to reforms”—they offered him cigarettes—“only in order to know what awaits us.”

“For socialism is coming to us.”

“The Chinese,” hissed the voice of an aged person.

“That is still far away, fortunately. Our peasants are patient.”

“But they demand land,” Terey said tersely.

“To them, land means full bellies, life itself,” someone said, unexpectedly supporting his point.

“And a great deal of land is being given them.”

“And a great deal has already been given them.”

“Peacefully, without violence. Do not sow unease and hate among us. Why awaken hungers which cannot be satisfied, even at the price of blood?”

The sudden flash as lamps were lit behind the white columns of the porch startled the gathering; people turned their heads, shielding their dilated eyes. The light was understood to be a signal that the meeting was ending. Istvan was surprised to see how many listeners streamed toward him from the park. He pressed their outstretched hands and thanked them for their patience and receptiveness. The girls said goodbye to him by bowing their heads deeply and folding their hands as if in prayer.

“We are very grateful.” The host, clad in white as if undressed for bed, shook his hand. “A successful evening.”

Inside the house, as if for a group photograph, the large family clustered together: a diffident band of uncles, aunts, children, grandchildren, and gray-haired residents who had been pushed into the extensive service wing and were eager now for contact with the wider world.

In his hotel room, when he had rinsed off in the shower and shoved the edges of the mosquito netting under the mattress, he reached for a mango, breathed in its fragrance and held the smooth coolness to his cheek. Margit’s knees: the recollection pained him. He did not have long to sleep. Mosquitoes whined and bumped against the soft curves of the netting.

“Two months. Two by now,” he fretted in an undertone, as if he could not trust his own count. “She captured me, she took me as her property. I became rooted in her and now that I am torn away, I suffer.”

The jangling of the mosquitoes blended into a mournful music. He lay half covered by the rough sheet with its fresh, airy smell. An alarming thought came to him: Surely not. No. That last night, when he had bent over her, she had whispered, “You may. It isn’t my time…”

Though he trusted her utterly, a shadow of uneasiness remained. But if something had happened, she would have let him know, after all. And what then? He would have been in Delhi just as she was, with no recourse, both of them thrown on the mercy of the Hindus.

By the pool where they had been sitting that first night, a toad croaked, as if someone were stubbornly shaking an empty gourd with a few pebbles in it — a dull, wooden voice in the distance.

If we had a child — the thought left him unable to breathe — it would mark the beginning of another life. He had simply never taken the possibility into account. No, no — he could not foist off all the responsibility on her, could not say, She knew what she was doing.

No, it is surely not that. He sighed with relief. The embassy must have ordered her not to see me. An Australian woman is under the protection of the English. Perhaps they find our relationship disturbing. In their books I am persona non grata.

He slept, pressing to his cheek the aromatic fruit, which gently absorbed the heat from his body. The mosquitoes’ dirge was like twanging strings, as if the netting itself were growing taut.

A shadow slid slowly from behind the corner of the cottage warmed by the sun. Istvan recognized the figure at once. He waited breathlessly until Margit emerged; he lay in wait to catch her in his arms and surprise her with kisses. But she stood still, as if she suspected an ambush. He raised his eyes and saw with great astonishment the tuft of cut grass on a stick that stood in the hallway — the redtop grass, wrapped in a rag, that was dampened in a barrel and used to sweep out the bread ovens. I didn’t know they had those in India as well. How could I have been wrong?

Suddenly he saw that Margit, dressed in a sari like a Hindu woman, was making her way down to the river. Pyres were burning low on the bank and greasy smoke hovered near the ground. He wanted to warn her. He knew that she was going to bathe — not in that place, the ashes of the dead are sprinkled there! — and he tried to call to her, but a nameless dread constricted his throat. He overtook her when she was standing knee-deep in water with her back to him. She did not turn toward him, though he touched her arm. Then, filled with terror, he saw that her face was not reflected in the water, and he realized only then that Margit was not there. She had immersed herself in the water and was dissolving slowly in the dark gray current full of funnels, streams, and eddies, and some foul life as yet without distinct form.

He seized her hand. Her fist was clenched. He tried to separate her fingers as if everything depended on that, as if that could save her. But his hands were so weak, as happens sometimes in dreams, that he bit his lips with rage. To his despair, she sank. She vanished. He could not understand why only she met this fate, since he, too, had offered himself up to the malign powers. But her hand rose unexpectedly like a plucked flower, cool and moist. He pressed it to his lips and whispered an unfamiliar word he had never uttered before: my love, my cradle. His breath warmed her cold, tight fist and her fingers opened like petals; in the center he saw a tiny round red object. He shook it out onto his own outstretched hand; to his amazement it was a button, sculpted in coral, from a mandarin cap — exactly like one he had seen in a cracked bowl between the Tibetan woman’s rows of figurines on the walk in front of the Janpath Hotel.

He knew that it was beyond price, that he had acquired it in exchange for Margit, and that he had paid for it with the grief that was choking him with unshed tears, with a stifled cry of anguish. All because of Chandra; at last he had found the guilty one. He must be killed, before…and, full of this resolve, he woke.

He gasped for air and slowly came to himself, remembered where he was. He held the mango in his limp hands. What am I going to kill him for? — he exonerated Chandra — he is not my enemy. It is the rajah who has a dispute with him. Perhaps Chandra does envy him his wealth. Of course; he likes to feel himself the dominant one. A silly dream — he rubbed his damp face with the sheet, but could not rid himself of a gloomy premonition that Margit was ill and he should hurry to rescue her.

He remembered an old milkmaid who interpreted dreams; she covered her mouth with her hands and whispered straight into the ear of a girl who blushed fiery red and shut her eyes with alarm at the sinister prophecy. He recalled the signs that were keys to the dream’s meaning: bathing in a muddy river — illness; picking flowers — loss, final separation, death. But the coral button, polished and pulsing with light? He could not intuit its meaning, and perhaps in the old woman’s book of signs there was no such symbol, so it should not have appeared.

Outside the window, through the dense greenery of the pergola, came a dawn the color of mud. He jerked away the mosquito netting, frightening the drowsy mosquitoes, and turned on a lamp. It was a few minutes past four. At once the thought of the upcoming expedition roused him to full wakefulness. He lay for another minute wondering uncomfortably how Margit would receive him — lay at full length, nude, with his fingers locked under his neck. Now the mosquitoes were gathering around the globe of the lamp, warming themselves on the glass, which was yellow as a ripe melon.

He stretched and felt all the strength of his healthy, athletic body. He breathed deeply.

“A senseless bad dream,” he murmured.

Afraid of growing too comfortable and falling fast asleep, he pulled the basket of fruit under the netting and with increasing relish sucked one mango after another. The tangy flavor restored his alertness. He smeared the drops of juice onto his bare chest and thighs so as not to stain the sheet. His hands were so sticky that he pushed the netting aside with his foot. Mango pits big as fists, covered with spongy fibrous pulp, struck dully against the stone floor. A handful of mosquitoes flitted through the rift between the curtains; their bites on his neck stung and itched. Now he was sure he would not sleep again

Bending back the whitish netting with his elbow, he slipped into the shower. The water, warmed in the daytime, smelled like the pond from his childhood — the never-to-be forgotten water, green and gold, with the smell of sweet flag, that left a smoothness as of a fine oil on the boy’s slender arms.

Beyond the window the gray daybreak hovered tremulously. Large morning stars, those least able to fly away, still fluttered unsteadily. He packed an airline bag and opened the door on a black pergola with leaves like wrought-iron garlands in the style of the Vienna Secession. He took his suitcase out of the Austin and pushed his finger over the dew-spattered car, tracing his own initials. He bustled about, drinking tea from a thermos, pacing around the room as if there were not much time — as if he had only begun to understand the significance of the day which was just beginning, and which would reveal a secret he had already begun to guess. Holding the warm top of the thermos in his fingers, he brooded. He looked through the rectangle of the opened door at the awakening greenery on the lawn. The stars were disappearing; large drops of dew began to sparkle on the ends of the supple leaves, and the clinging tendrils twisted into spirals. He felt as if he were detached and floating. He thought he ought to hold his breath and listen to the ardent voices of the starlings and the ripple of leaves swaying in the first breeze, as he would listen to the rustle of the gown of someone passing by who loved him.

The glare of unnerving intensity, the trees and the grass, were a clamorous chorus of immaculate green. The flower bed with its enormous chalice-shaped red cannas seemed to be spurting fire. The whistle of starlings, the tender trills, were lavished on the air like bells set ringing by the earnest, fervent hand of a little boy who knows whose coming they announce, and gives the order to bend the knees and humbly bow the head.

It seemed to him that if he were single-minded in his reverence for this hour, he would discover a simple truth like the truth affirmed by the last trembling tear on the eyelid of a dying man.

But he was startled when the landrover, perched high on six thick tires and with its top still down, drove up in the yard and the professor in a soft linen hat began to shift his thin legs over bundles done up with straps. He sprang up as if he had been suddenly awakened and hurried out to the vehicle.

“Don’t disturb yourself, professor,” he called, throwing his bag onto the seat. “I will turn in the key and we can be off.”

“Good morning,” said the Swede. “Oh, good. This is the time appointed, and you are ready.”

“Good morning, boys.” The counselor shook hands with both the Hindus, the mustachioed driver in his faded army uniform and the orderly, whose sunglasses of arsenic green and spotted turban suggested a fortuneteller or sorcerer from an operetta. Both were more dismayed than gratified by this friendly gesture.

The landrover looked like a metal trough with four seats. It was very roomy, with small benches with mattresses at the sides. Shovels and axes were strapped to the walls, and boards, fastened together with wire like a heavy rope ladder, to put under the wheels if they should be mired down.

Istvan tumbled onto the back seat next to the professor. The automobile leaped forward; the breeze grazed his hair.

“If only the weather will hold.” Salminen’s eyes swept the vacant sky. “We have a two-hour ride on the highway, and then through the bush along the tonga tracks. Then the fun is only beginning. I have brought a shotgun with me to shoot pigeons. Do you like to hunt?”

“No. I’ve done too much shooting.”

“The war fortunately passed us by,” the professor admitted. “I shoot sometimes to test my reflexes. For sport.”

“Roast pigeon is very tasty,” the driver put in.

Level fields stretched out around them, planted in soy and peanuts. Sugar cane with violet tassels rose in dark green squares. A well replenished with rainwater hid in a clump of massive trees and white oxen wearing blindfolds turned a treadmill. A naked boy in a great blue turban squatted on a pole like a sparrow and shouted dolefully as he jabbed them with a prod. From a wheel to which reddish clay pots were attached with a cord, a stream of water flowed with a green glimmer into a ditch that irrigated the nearby fields.

“I prefer to hunt for images like that.” Istvan pointed with a hand.

“I do, too. I have a movie camera”—the professor tapped a leather box—“but I only collect oddities. Interesting that a man trusts his eyes most of all, yet so many times they deceive him. When I write to friends in Malmö, they think I have fallen to telling tall tales. But it is enough to show them a film and they are enormously impressed.”

“I send pictures to my sons.”

“You are married? I saw no ring.”

“I took it off. It was too tight.”

“From which year of marriage has it been too tight?”

“My fingers swell in the heat, so I took it off. Do you think I am misleading women?”

“No. They like to be led astray. At least it furnishes them justification for their errors. Some do not even need that.”

His faded blue eyes flashed knowingly.

They passed villages — the chunky gray clay cottages, the blind walls plastered symmetrically with daubs of cow dung dried to opal in the sun; the streets, which were deserted, for the villagers had gone to the fields to hill up the sweet potato patches and feed water into the cleverly contrived system of canals. Only by a well could they see two women in yellow and pale green saris carrying round clay jugs on their heads.

Flies and horseflies swarmed from the trees by the road. Carried on the breeze created by the moving vehicle, they hit the passengers’ faces like pebbles. “Slow down,” the professor ordered, seeing that dogs with mangy, thinning coats lay where they had fallen in the dust, unable even to raise their muzzles to see what was flying toward them with its horn blaring. Even the fleas did not goad them into moving.

They had hardly passed the last cottages when a sickening stench of decay blew over them. In a grassy field they saw a dark mound of vultures pressing against each other, battering each other with outspread wings.

The professor ordered the driver to stop. Aiming his camera lens at the feeding birds, he walked toward them. They moved apart as if something had disturbed them, hissing as purple strips of entrail dangled from their beaks. Their long necks, naked as if their feathers had been freshly plucked, writhed like enormous worms. They jumped about fitfully; their thrashing wings drove the stench of rotting carrion in waves toward the men.

“They look like rugby players in a scrum,” cried the elated professor. “I must see what they are pulling to pieces. A dead swine!” he exclaimed triumphantly, kneeling and jostling the camera against the ripped belly, the spattered skin with stubbly black bristles. “Superb footage for my guests!”

He moved the camera in a curve around the huddle of waiting vultures. The birds turned their heads to look at it. He had just stepped back a little when they began to move slowly, then faster, hopping like children in a sack race. Spreading their wings wide, they raced to block others who tried to approach the kill.

“First a good dinner, a cigar, cognac, and then a sight that reminds us of the sort of world we live in.” The professor’s long, weathered face creased into a sardonic smile. “Why so pale? And you were in combat?”

The carrion stank.

“Let’s be on our way,” Istvan suggested. When they were moving again, he bathed himself in the stream of air until it filled his shirt like a balloon. “A hideous sight!”

“Hideous,” the professor agreed. “That is why I filmed it. You could not work with us. You are too soft.”

“No. No.” He remembered his first autumn after the war: the yellowish-brown fields scarred by tank tracks, with corn stalks broken and in some places burnt out. Bela invited him to visit his father and hunt partridge. The covey they had shot circled as if on a tether and fell among the dry stalks with a loud rattle of wings. His bullet found its mark, and the grayish-brown feathers grazed off by the shot whirled above the rustling twigs. The empty stalks crackled underfoot.

He waded through the bare cornfields. In a thicket, as though under a ragged tent, lay a dead German in high boots. Horseshoes and nails gleamed red in the low beams of the sun. He lay on his weapon with his teeth embedded in clods of clay, in a greenish coat with a black belt that was peeling from exposure to foul weather. Istvan took him by the arm — he felt the loose flesh under the coarse clothing — and turned him over. From under his helmet grinned a grayish face without features, teeming with maggots, and the same stench had burst from that body that now covered Istvan’s forehead with sweat. Beyond the iron barrel of the gun, which lay at a slant, he saw freshly scratched earth and white traces of bird droppings. The partridges were coming here to feed, to peck at the swarming maggots. He let go of the dead man, who settled down as if with relief; one hand fell onto the sparse grass as if he wanted to remember its cushioning softness. And then Istvan heard the fluttering wings of a partridge that had been shot, heard how its body shattered, yet there was still a scratching in the corn. He found the bird and administered the coup de grace, striking its head with the butt of his shotgun.

They informed the administrator of the village and the fallen German was buried under the name given on his military document, which dampness had left curled and swollen. A few days later Istvan ate the partridge with gusto.

“No, I feel no repugnance for your work. Even Margit—”

“Ah, Miss Ward is Australian. That is like a different race,” the professor forestalled him. “They still behave with the hardiness of pioneers. She is quite amazing: she works like a man, and indeed, it is not as though she is compelled to — a wealthy woman, an only child.”

“You are mistaken. She has to work,” Istvan said vehemently. “She would not be herself otherwise.”

“A woman of character, alarmingly intelligent. It will not be easy for her to find a husband. I would be afraid of her in everyday life. She would be closed into herself. A despot.”

“Oh, Dr. Ward is very hard to please,” the orderly declared, clutching his turban as the blast of air struck it. “She works like a machine herself, and does not let the other person take a breath.”

“Yes,” the driver put in, “she is like a young officer. She cannot bear for people to sit still.”

“She has been especially on edge lately.” The professor leaned toward Istvan, displeased that the others were overhearing their conversation. “It is no wonder; the heat and humidity are dreadful for women. This murderous climate breaks them physically and psychically. I was against bringing a female physician here at first. Even the men have sudden attacks of rage that must be alleviated with meprobamate. Or they begin drinking. But she copes. I did not do badly, taking her on. A diehard.”

How little you know her, Istvan exulted internally. Only I can tell how much warmth and tenderness is hidden inside her, how good and accommodating she is. But then the thought of her sudden disappearance cast its shadow — the unanswered letters, the telephone calls, the twittering in the receiver as if the space measured out by the wires were moaning — all ending when the clerk croaked in broken English, “Miss Ward gone out.”

He had asked to be notified if a call came from New Delhi. The man had made a note of the carefully spelled-out name; again there had been long days with no word. No, it was not easy to penetrate Margit’s thoughts; she had secrets, a past that put its badge of black crepe on her life. But today he would meet her face to face. He would demand explanations. Yet, properly speaking, what right did he have to demand anything of her? What could he offer in exchange? He had said, I love you, I love you, but the feeling did not justify his behavior. How egotistical he had been to want to have her as his property, to possess her, to ravage her with desire.

Was it possible to settle accounts in love, to establish conditions like those governing commercial transactions? Is it not subjection, though voluntary, to a bondage not perceived as such? How assign a value to the discovery of joy inaccessible to others, incomprehensible, unfathomable in the unreserved giving of oneself for better or for worse — for even pain inflicted by that hand is only a kind of shock, an awe that we have submitted so deeply to love.

Fields partitioned by clumps of shrubbery stretched to a horizon whitened by small, luminous silver clouds. The slender dark figures of farm laborers bent and straightened rhythmically, partly obscured by the flashing of their wide hoes. Backs the color of brass gleamed with sweat.

“They work hard,” Istvan said.

“Very hard — and not very productively,” the professor added. “They lack fertilizer, tractors, and good seed. It is hard for them to scratch enough from the earth to keep body and soul together.”

“What could help them? They build the simplest machines themselves. They whittle them out of wood. They are proud of their windlasses, which are held together with pegs, without one nail. They are so proud that they put the Ashoka Chakra—Gandhi’s spinning wheel, a form of windlass — on the flag as a symbol of progress. Labor is cheap; life is cheaper yet. Plagues have stopped. The government tries to rescue them from the disasters of drought and locusts, so they reproduce, they multiply with mindless exuberance—”

“Family planning? Here?” the professor exclaimed disdainfully, seizing on Istvan’s point. “The women listen, they assent with gratitude to what they are told, they look at you with good, cow-like eyes — and nothing changes. They have nothing to feed six children and already the womb is swelling with the seventh. All around is the dry clay, baked by the sun. The grass is so depleted it cannot even serve as forage. Only the vultures shift from one leg to the other on flayed treetops. The mother gives herself to the child; the embryo is relentless. Such are the laws of nature. It robs her body. It leeches calcium from her bones. A generation of the sickly. Then there are the precepts of religion, vegetarianism. I have nothing against their refusing to eat meat, as long as they eat something. It is madness to be finicky about food when one is continually on the brink of fainting from hunger. After all, they have cattle enough. Whole herds go roaming around, destroying crops. Insane — this respect for life as an element of the divine. It is not permitted to slaughter them, but to drive a herd into a fenced-in square to die of hunger — that is allowed, and then the conscience is clear.”

The exasperated professor raised his big, bony hands toward the sun, throttled it with fingers yellowed by nicotine, and jerked as if at invisible curtains.

“It is known that they buy no contraceptives. They haven’t enough money for a pot to piss in,” he went on. “They do not use what is distributed for free because they do not believe in it, because it is contrary to their religion, because children are a blessing from the gods. They press on toward self-destruction with no more thought than insects. They were given necklaces with beads marking out the rhythm of the menstrual cycle and the infertile days. Do you think that helped at all? They pushed the beads around as if they were talismen, happy, eager to conceive — which only puts them at the mercy of the mechanisms of natural selection. The weak must perish, and they do. Mothers carry to the riverbank little skeletons in withered skin, to be covered with wood and incinerated. A frenzy of childbearing, for what? For death.”

“Perhaps you must turn to the men,” Terey offered.

“They lie on a ramshackle hammocks in front of their houses, wrapped in sheets and smoking hookahs. They gorge on the smoke in a mindless state of euphoria, drawing energy from the sun,” he said sarcastically, “so as to execute these dozen or so simple movements in the nighttime and beget a new life. They are also happy to be fathers, and then they fly into despair, they scream and cry at the moment of their child’s death. But they do not associate causes with effects. They remain fixed in a fairy-tale world of predestination written as if in stone ages before, of ineluctable fate. So what can be done with them?”

“Wish them a revolution,” he said harshly.

“They have too little vitality and muscle. They do not bear arms.” As he shook his head with a frown of disgust he reminded Istvan of a wire-haired terrier who has choked a rat and does not know what to do with it, where to throw it. “They only know how to achieve unanimity by saying no, to sit and let themselves be cudgeled: passive resistance. Their watchword, No violence, arouses respect. In practice it means no action, or, worse, not even the thought of it.”

“Yet you are profoundly dedicated to their treatment. You instruct them. You work hard to help them. It is not possible to demand too much from one generation, professor.”

“I work because I am interested in the opponent, trachoma. I have genuinely interesting cases here which I would not be able to find in Europe. I heal them, I teach them, and they go out into the same murderous conditions, only to be infected again. I am fully aware that I do not help them very much. But we work for the future. We look for new, easily adaptable methods, simple methods that appeal to common sense — practical antidotes. Someday they will awaken, and then our experience will be useful to them. Perhaps they will even build a temple to us and burn incense.”

“No one can help a man if he doesn’t want to be helped,” Istvan concurred. “Of all the gifts one can give another, free will is the most difficult.”

They sped on, bouncing over the washed-out asphalt in the dusty glare. The honeylike fragrance of blossoming grasses and grain blew toward them from the fields.

“Christianity formed the European character. It instilled the sense that others are our neighbors. We feel a common responsibility for the fate of the other man.” The Swede sneered as if he were chewing something bitter. “We want to defend him if he suffers harm. Marxism dealt with that in a pragmatic way, for no one likes to give up what belongs to him voluntarily, even to give of his excess. I subscribe to the view that sometimes it is necessary to take, to demand, to extort one’s fair share of bread.”

“But one must understand the indignation of people of good will in the West who respond to appeals for assistance when they are presented with images of poverty, hunger, sickness, and ignorance. They give generously, but as they do they wonder, they investigate, they analyze: ‘Why do we in Europe restrain ourselves, limit our birth rates, when those people in Asia indulge themselves, breed, multiply beyond all reason?’” Istvan interjected. “‘Why do we have to pay with renunciation for their unthinking folly elevated to the status of sacred principle?’ That is a problem in Africa and South America as well.” He rubbed his forehead wearily. “In the end this pernicious thought returns — I heard it once from an old peasant: ‘There must be war, for people have propagated too much. For flies there is the frosty autumn night, for people, war.’”

“That is amusingly put, except that now we can disappear, and with us all progress — rockets, penicillin, Picasso and Brigitte Bardot — and by chance these grass eaters may survive, mild as sheep, quiet, multiplying like the herbs of the field and as uncomplaining as herbs when they fall under the scythe. Or locusts,” he amended the comparison. “Locusts in human form, governed by their alimentary systems and their sex organs. By hunger and libido.”

The landrover braked hard.

“What is it?”

“Probably we should turn here,” the driver said worriedly. “The road goes off to the north. Check the map, sir.”

The professor spread the green-veined sheet of paper on his knees and ran his finger over the red dashes.

“Yes. We should be able to turn.”

The vehicle tilted violently, pushed its way into an eroding ditch, and climbed onto a road that led through the fields. They were shaken and thrown about so that they had to hold desperately to the grips. The bundles migrated slowly over the floor, pressing against their legs although their feet were tucked back.

“That was only the beginning. Not bad so far,” the Swede said comfortingly.

“Are you sure we turned at the right place, sir?”

The professor leaned aside suddenly so as not to bump Terey with his head and whispered with childish cunning:

“You cannot find roads on this map. Except for first-class highways, nothing corresponds to the terrain. I am sure they have a sense of direction like jackals; they know instinctively where to turn. They only wait for my permission in order to foist off responsibility. This way we will get there in the end.”

The road disappeared in a fan-shaped maze of deep wheel ruts, so they drove cross-country, passing pits full of water that were overgrown with clumps of small flat-topped trees like giant mushrooms. They rolled on, startling flocks of parrots that hovered over them with legs tucked in, like a handful of yellow-green leaves. Then they were on a road again. The motor whined as it jerked the wheels from the deep ruts, spattering water.

Thorny branches scratched and snagged the equipment fastened to the outside walls. Red ants were shaken out of them, and stung the men hard. Whiskered scarab beetles crept over Istvan’s legs and began to buzz on his knees. He shuddered. The professor held out a pill in his open hand and shook it gently.

“It is for seasickness. Too much shaking.”

“Thank you. I’m all right.”

But a moment later he felt a spasm when the orderly hung over the side of the car and threw up, snipping off a crystalline thread of saliva with his hand. The man turned away his face, which was the color of an unripe lemon, and apologized, rolling his enormous dark eyes.

They drove into a ravine with furrowed violet banks. Its bottom was washed with water which, milled by the wheels, splashed high and trickled from the talus.

“Be careful not to let us bog down,” the professor warned.

“I see the end of the trap.” The driver grinned, showing white teeth under his dark mustache. “I will push hard on the gas so it does not suck us down.”

The vehicle scrambled out onto the bank, its body streaming with watery mud. A plain overgrown with dense bushes lay before them. A flock of sheep scurried away down a dark gray rivulet. The shepherd, sheltered from the sun by a large sack, held a spear under his arm and clasped the base of a water pipe in both hands. Its smoke spiraled around him in a blue cloud. The driver and then the orderly shouted to him, but he only sucked the mouthpiece and looked distrustfully from under his three-cornered hood. They passed so close to him that he stretched out a hand and touched the mud-streaked vehicle as if he could not believe his eyes.

“A dark peasant,” the driver said contemptuously. “He does not understand what is said to him.”

“Perhaps he was afraid of us?” Istvan suggested.

“He?” The chauffeur laughed. “He did not move back one step. That kind, when they get angry, may even kill. They throw a spear and run away. They fear nothing but spirits. Stupid peasants.”

The car began to quake rhythmically. It was as if they were riding over a washboard. They shook until their teeth shattered.

“Damned roadless backwater!” the counselor complained.

“We are coming to a village or watering place. The buffalo stamp out ruts like these,” the professor said. “Stop.” He nudged the driver’s arm. “Turn off the engine.”

With unexpected alacrity for his age he jumped out, holding up a shotgun. He pointed to a pair of coffee-colored birds.

“Pigeons.”

The driver fastened on a revolver in a holster made of sacking and moved out behind him. They vanished into the bushes between clumps of cane and grass. When the motor had quieted down they heard the voices of the bush: the whistle of birds, the deep-throated cooing of pigeons, the jingle of innumerable crickets.

Istvan got out to stretch his legs, and suddenly stood as if he had turned to stone. From the grass, which was knee-high, rose a flat head covered with scales. Narrow, shrewd eyes looked doggedly at him. He glanced around for a stick; he was ready to run away. The unknown creature stood on its hind legs and tail like an antediluvian reptile, its forelegs resting on the springy grass. It stared at him angrily.

“That is a lizard, sir.” He heard the orderly’s voice. “A mud lizard. Not poisonous.”

“That large?”

“There are even larger ones. They do not bite. Their skin is good for handbags and shoes.”

He snatched a spade from its mounts and handed it to Istvan.

“Hit it, sir! Stun it!”

But the amphibian understood the danger it was in and took a long leap, bending the tufts of grass and then gliding into them until it was lost to view. Only the zigzag waving of the rushes showed which way it was darting. The grass, which rose taller and taller until it was waist-high, hobbled the men’s feet as they ran, and the spongy, quaggy ground brimmed with water.

“It got away. Careful! It’s a bog.” The orderly grabbed at some branches. “Best go back.”

They heard faint blasts of gunfire muffled by the incessant, piercing jangle of insects. They counted: two, and after a moment two more.

“Four, perhaps even five pigeons.” The orderly puffed out his lips and pushed wisps of hair back under his turban.

He was not mistaken. Wading through the bubbling, miry meadow, they saw the professor with his shotgun on his shoulder and the driver, who triumphantly brandished a shock of freshly killed birds.

“Congratulations!” Terey clasped his hands above his head and waved them.

“It is nothing. They are so trusting; it is like aiming in a shooting gallery. A slaughter, not a hunt,” the professor demurred. “I wanted us to have them for this evening — if they do not go bad. The heat is unbearable.”

They wiped their perspiring faces with handkerchiefs to remove the tiny midges that were creeping over them. They ripped away clinging spider webs, nearly invisible but elastic and sticky, and daubed at the yellow dust from the blossoming grasses.

Satisfied with the results of the shooting, they fell onto the hot oilcloth seats. They welcomed the bass whirring of the engine with relief. It slightly dulled the numbing rasp of the cicadas and the hissing of grasshoppers — annoying sounds whose shifting timbre made them impossible to ignore.

The vehicle tore itself out of the bushes and grass that had become entangled in its axles. They rode up the slope of a gentle hill toward two oblique red ruts that crossed the grassy ridge. Again they came to a road.

The orderly pulled open the wings of the pigeons Salminen had shot and peeled away bird ticks as big as peas from between the feathers. Istvan saw how the breeze inflated the shirt on the professor’s hunched back, and how it clung again until dark stains of sweat appeared. There was a ringing in his ears; he swallowed thick saliva. He dreamed of a thermos of strong tea with slices of lemon and lumps of half-melted ice, of the first sip that would run down his throat as he felt the cool breath of the roomy interior of the jug on his face.

“I do not like those clouds.” The professor pointed to the sky, blinking in the glare. “Too many clouds like that have given us a drenching.”

“Let us go over to the old bed of the Yamuna,” the driver urged. “The sands begin farther on, and the rain will not be so dangerous.”

Air sticky as oil, carrying the stifling smell of the swampy meadows, brushed their faces. Large, sunny fields were still opening around them when with a dull humming, a lashing of leaves, and a tumult in the sky, the first spears of rain cut through the air. The Hindus leaped to put up the roof, but the professor commanded, “Drive on! A momentary shower. We will press forward.”

But when water splashed them, when their shirts were wet and their trousers clung to their legs, he himself raised the steel frame that supported the canvas roof and put the catches in place. The rain rattled on the canvas as if it were a drum.

“Well — we are having an adventure,” the professor scowled. “From the beginning that sun today looked too bright to me. The proverb rightly says, ‘In the season of monsoons, do not lose sight of home.’”

They did not ride so much as dive into the water that poured from blue sluices. Innumerable flies and tiny moths with unerring instinct sought shelter with them under the moving roof. They attached themselves to the canvas or, frightened by the patter of the rain, flew about, beating against the men’s foreheads or clinging with their wings to their sticky skin.

The landrover rolled on at a slant. One side lodged in a deep rut, churning up and driving before it a red wave of rain water. Below them a village appeared: a dozen or so scattered cottages plastered together with clay. Their flat roofs with high railings had openings at the corners, and on each roof a kind of gutter had been made from the halves of a split stick of bamboo. Streams of water fell from them in full, foaming arcs, with loud splashes. The few trees bent and shuddered under the burden of the rain.

“Drive on.” The professor tapped the driver on the back. “Perhaps we will still make it through to the other bank.”

The village was deserted. Only a pair of black buffalo with enormous horns raised their wide muzzles joyfully toward the waves of rain that lashed their backs.

On one side of the road the cottages were shut up tight, the wood already darkening from the splashing water. On the other they saw squatting figures in an unlit room, colorful skirts and feet stained by clay now washed away. Smoke purled above inquisitive faces and dispersed below them in a sour whiff of smoldering cow dung.

They rolled on, sliding about in a bumpy stream the color of blood that was washing along the roadbed. Even before they reached the bank, they knew it was too late. Below it, a swollen, turbulent river full of swirling currents and eddies was advancing at menacing speed. Purplish red water, thick and silty, with scraps of foam like pieces of ripped-out lung, pushed steadily forward.

The roof of the car was streaming, and sagging under the weight of the rainwater. Without leaning out from under it, they measured the rumbling river with their eyes, roughly calculating its velocity and force and the distance to the far bank, which they saw blurred, even half obliterated by spurting water. The deluge was bearing down; where meadows had been moments before, the current was spilling greedily, stirring up and scrambling the underlayers of soil and depositing rose-tinted foam. The deluge moved on. Rivulets ran noisily on the road, dislodging hunks of clay. Tufts of uprooted grass floated about. Broken branches seemed to creep sluggishly but with dogged persistence toward the river, as if predestined to find their way there.

“We can forget about crossing for today,” sighed the driver. His wet turban was coming undone; water trickled from the untucked end.

“We must stop for the night,” the professor decided. “Though we are not far away now.”

“Do you think we will be there tomorrow?” Terey asked worriedly.

“If it doesn’t pour.” Salminen shrugged. “The river rose in a quarter of an hour. We will see when it will fall. We must find a cottage with enough space for us. We will turn back.”

It was easier said than done. The automobile surged forward; the ground beneath it was covered with water in which the wheels spun. The engine whined at high speed. The landrover shuddered, tilted, and began to crawl up the sloping shoulder of the road.

They drove up to the open door of a cottage that stood apart from the others. Above them stood the village, a scattering of houses sheltered by a low hill, and a dense thicket of acacia with thorns as long as a man’s finger. The familiar domestic smell of smoke mingled with the odors of wet straw, milk, and a trace of dung. They jumped from the vehicle one by one and walked into the dim interior, calling out words of greeting. In the haze of a smoldering fire Terey spied a cluster of children sitting cross-legged, a woman who covered her face — only her eyes flashed curiously in his direction — and an old man. His bare thighs, thin and gnarled, and his knees covered with scars gleamed as if he were a bronze statue. On the bed, covered with a large cloth, lay a form like a cocoon, coughing and quivering.

There was nothing to sit on, so they settled down on the floor. Unlike the old man, who remained motionless with the gravity of the very weary, the children were poking at each other, chatting in squeals and bursting into titters like birds on a branch before they fall asleep. Through the open door the hum and clatter of the frothing water made the quiet house feel snug and sheltering. In the other half of the room, separated by a small gutter, two cows rested, chewing tranquilly.

“Will we stay here?” Terey looked around blankly.

“It would be the same anywhere. There are a few children too many, but we will sleep well enough through the night. Anyway, they will leave the house to us; you will see. They are, quite simply, afraid of us. We are beings from another world from which they expect no good,” Salminen assured him. “Who is lying there?” He pointed to the bed. “Ask,” he ordered the chauffeur. “A sick person?”

A few sentences were exchanged and the driver translated, “Not a sick person. A very old woman. His grandmother.” He pointed to the dejected peasant.

They tried to overcome the dour distrust of their hosts. Terey offered the men cigarettes. The peasant reached for one slowly, looked it over, sniffed it, and put it on the ground by his bare feet. The whole family looked at Terey closely, with wonder.

Salminen opened a tin box of biscuits. They smelled of vanilla and bore the imprint of a smiling face. He held them out to the woman and the children. They took them and held them in their hands; their eyes were round with suspense, so he began to munch one, showing them by this pantomime what to do with them. One scraped it with his teeth and, shamefaced, burst into giggles. Others held the little discs and regarded them from both sides like pictures, obviously grieved at the thought of eating them.

“I told you they were afraid of us,” the Swede said in a low voice. “We have certainly come the wrong way. If our team had passed this way, they would have behaved differently toward us. Ask him.” He nudged the orderly.

“No. They have not seen an automobile, nor any English people, or so he said,” the orderly translated proudly. “Stupid peasants. He has never stuck his nose out of his fields. Even on pilgrimage he only went to the temple near the river.”

“Tell him who we are.”

“I told him,” the orderly smiled, “but here, doctor means witch doctor. He asked if we had come with the police who are in the village.”

“Tell him no.”

“I told him.”

“Why have the police come?”

“He says he does not know. He heard shots before the rain.”

“Perhaps it was when you were shooting pigeons?” Istvan asked. “But could they be holy birds?”

“No,” the driver rejoined, and moved closer to the old man in order to hear more. “They wanted to catch a dacoit. They shot rifles,” he explained. “That is why the peasants are so frightened. A dacoit is a bandit, a robber. He comes from this village, but he has done no harm to anyone here. He went far away for his plunder. Often he disappeared for half a year. He knows him because they are related. It is good that they did not catch him.”

“Do you understand any of this?” the Swede asked, rolling the empty tin biscuit box over the floor of straw and clay toward the children. A little girl pushed it back, laughing. The professor repeated the maneuver and then they rolled the box back and forth to each other. They were too absorbed in the game to notice that the rain had stopped. It only trickled from the roof. The sky cleared and brightened and the earth began to steam heavily.

It seemed to Istvan that the silly game with the box had broken the ice. The atmosphere changed and the woman brought an earthenware vessel with cool sour milk.

“Are you going to drink this?” Terey asked the professor uneasily. “Aren’t you afraid of brucellosis?”

“They give it, we drink it, and then take sulfaguanidine.”

He swallowed the cool, clotted liquid with relish, and Terey and the driver followed his example. Only the orderly waved his hands as if to say, No, thank you.

“He knows there are such things as bacteria and viruses,” the professor said sympathetically. “Yet he does not recognize the simple truth that what is crucial is to maintain a balance in the organism, to keep up its ability to fight off infectious agents. Excessive sterilization, inordinate hygiene, take away our resistance. And one must live amid contagion, one must breathe, eat, touch. Do not look at me that way. I guarantee that if the expectation of sickness itself does not bring on aches and pains, nothing will happen to you. Well, little ones, eat.”

He encouraged the children with gestures, and at once they began scraping the biscuits with their teeth like squirrels, looking intently at him.

The professor took a small box from his pocket, pushed aside a leather flap, and ran his finger over its contents until a shrill, breathless jazz rhythm erupted. The children gazed at him as if they were bewitched. Even the prone figure raised itself on one elbow and a gleaming bronze head with a few wisps of grizzled hair looked out from under the gray sheet.

“A Japanese transistor radio. They have better ones than we have. I bought it in Hong Kong.”

Shadows darkened the doorway and two policemen came in. They wore shorts, shirts with sleeves rolled up, and red turbans, and stooped slightly as they crossed the threshold. Then they stood erect, one leaning on his rifle. The other, wearing sunglasses and with thumbs thrust into his burlap belt, which had twisted under the weight of his Colt revolver, was trying to understand whom he was dealing with and what attitude to assume. Should he treat the unannounced arrivals as intruders, take a hard line from the start, or — since, after all, they were white foreigners — be polite to them? The professor was still amusing the children by rolling the box. The police did not speak the ceremonial words of greeting, so no one welcomed them.

The officer squatted with a reflective air and when the box rolled near his feet, pushed it adroitly. “Who are you, gentlemen?” he began. “What do you want here?”

“I am with the UNESCO mission from Agra. We want to wait out the rain.”

“But why here?”

“Because fate willed it,” the professor smiled, and the policeman nodded comprehendingly.

“Is one of you a doctor?”

“I am.”

“We have two wounded. Are you willing to treat them?”

“I am an eye doctor, but I will do what can be done. Where are they?”

“Not far from here, but we will not go in the automobile. We are on horseback.”

“I am well able to walk.” The professor rose and directed the orderly to take his medical bag. To the disappointment of the others in the room, he put the radio, which was still playing, into his pocket and went out in front of the cottage.

“You will go with me? Do you want to go in such mud? You are not obliged to,” he pointed out.

“Certainly we will go together. This is interesting.”

He bent down and stepped across the threshold, where the box of biscuits had come to a stop. They walked in a stream of noisy music that lured the curious from the neighboring cottages. Istvan surveyed the havoc the rain had caused. The water was washing over the shoulder of the road, cheerful, coffee-colored, gleaming. They passed brimming floodplains fringed with bristling sticks, tufts of torn-up grass, and leaves as thick as if they had been cut from linoleum. Inebriating smells rose from the fiercely steaming earth. Clouds trailed over the sky like rapid chalk strokes. The storm had swept by; its traces were barely visible. The sun blazed and the angry roar of the swollen river could be heard, though only distantly.

“Where was he wounded?” the professor asked.

“In a tree,” the officer answered gravely.

“But I am asking, where is the wound?” He pointed his open hand toward his chest.

“In his head. He is unconscious. But he speaks continuously, so surely his condition is not very bad.”

“And the other man?”

“A peasant, stabbed with a knife. Not serious.”

Outside the village they waded into the tall, streaming grass. Quail darted from under their feet with a loud sputtering of wet wings.

“Pity I did not bring my shotgun.” The Swede’s eyes followed the birds gliding among the bushes.

“When were they wounded?” Istvan asked.

The orderly translated. “In the evening and later at night.”

“And why were people still shooting this morning?”

The policeman looked gloomily at the counselor, then shrugged.

“We did not know how many of them there were. Best to be careful.”

“And he was alone?”

“Alone.”

“You have him?”

The policeman walked quickly. The legs of his short pants, wet from the grass, brushed loudly against each other. The mud on the path made sucking noises under their feet.

Finally the officer spoke. “No.” He almost spat out the word. “He got away.”

“Does he have a weapon?”

“Only a knife. We will get him and take him before the court. He will be sentenced to hard labor. It is worse than death.”

Clouds of droning mosquitoes hovered over a swamp overgrown with reeds and rushes. They saw a few horses with coats darkened by the recent downpour and saddles covered with transparent plastic that sparkled in the sun. A dark gray cottage with a flat roof surrounded by a thick, low wall of flax looked from a distance like a bunker among banana trees with young leaves in a luminous green glow. Farther on they could see a mango tree, tall and spreading, with a white trunk and roots like ropes growing into the earth.

Beside the horses stood a policeman with a rifle slung on his shoulder, barrel down. A man sat against a wall as though he were a puppet, with bare legs wide apart and straight out. In the middle of his chest a bandage was held in place by a cross of adhesive. An old woman crouched beside him, holding up a copper vessel from which she poured a stream of water onto her hand and lapped at it, then after a moment sprayed it from her mouth into the wounded man’s face. Wet hair hung on his forehead; his eyes were closed in a lassitude like death.

“Not even bloody,” the officer said belittlingly, passing the man on his way to the door. A policeman lay on a piece of oilcloth; two more sat by him. Squeezed into a corner, hunched over with her arms around her knees, sat a young girl with fiery, wrathful eyes. Her hair was thick and disheveled; her deep bosom, hardly lighter than her arms, could be glimpsed through her torn bodice. It was clear that she had been working nude to the waist in the fields.

The professor bent over the man lying on the oilcloth. His head was wrapped in a thick bandage black with congealed blood. The doctor raised one eyelid, looked into the eye, then lifted a limp hand. He felt the pulse and, as if dismayed, let go. The hand fell onto the clay floor with a muted bumping sound.

“He is beginning to stiffen.”

The orderly set about fastening the flaps of the bag with the sign of the Red Cross.

They left the house with its smell of a cooling fireplace and wet clay. Bristling clusters of dried red pepper pods hung by the doorway, rattling lightly at each breath of wind.

“He has already died?” the officer asked incredulously.

“A couple of hours ago.”

“That is impossible! A moment ago he was still warm.”

“When you lay him on the fire, he will even be hot. But that is a corpse. It can be burned.”

Then he went to the wall where the half-naked peasant sat wounded in the chest. He took out the twisted tubes of his phonendoscope and listened to the man’s heartbeat.

“How did this happen?” he asked the elderly woman who was clutching the copper jug.

“How did this happen?” the orderly repeated. “Tell the truth.”

She began rapidly; his translation could hardly keep pace. From time to time he stopped to search for a word, but when the professor urged him forward with a wave of the hand, he persevered.

“He was with us for two days. He ate and drank. My son received him like a brother. It all happened because of that she-devil.” She pointed to the young woman, who by then had crept near the threshold and was leaning on it with both elbows. Her wrists glittered with bracelets of silver wire, and she sniffed like a dog as she looked at the distant clumps of shrubbery.

“He wanted vodka. He sent my son to the village — not to this one, to the one farther away, by the river. He gave him a few bracelets to sell. He said he would repay us. My son had to go, for the man had a gun and a knife. He boasted that he had killed two policemen and cut off the nose of a spy who was hunting him down. He was a terrible man, worse than a demon, but she liked him. My son had hardly left when she climbed up to the roof where he was, for he had called her. I know what they were doing. I strained my ears. I know every sound. I heard something different: she was beating her heels into that swine’s backside. I called to her to come down, but she would not. She only shouted, ‘Mother, come here,’ so I would see that she had him and the accursed girl could laugh at me.”

“It is not true!” the girl shrieked from behind the threshold. “I called to you for help! He was raping me!”

“And my son learned at the silver merchant’s that they were already looking for that bandit, that the police were abroad in the villages, and that he might descend on us. He was afraid they would charge him. When he met the patrol, he told him who was in our house.”

“The reward tempted him!” the girl shouted. “He sold out a friend, though he paid him back for every handful of rice!”

The man sat motionless, his head propped against the steaming wall on which Istvan saw bulletholes. His eyes were half closed, as if the world were of no interest to him. He seemed conscious only of what was happening inside him.

“The police approached the house very quietly,” the old woman went on.

“Because the betrayer was leading them. But the horses snorted and jostled each other in the dark,” the girl said. “And on the roof we did not sleep. We were stargazing.”

“Quiet, bitch! They rolled around the whole roof. She lured him on and played fast and loose with him. She gave him no rest. She was insatiable. I heard everything. If I had had his gun down below, I would have shot, but he took it up with him, the coward—”

“Because he is nobody’s fool,” the girl cut in.

“When they began to close in, he fired from the roof. The police stopped and began firing as well. Then my son shouted for us to run away, and the police would kill that other one. But they came down from the roof and tied me up and gagged me. She helped him.”

“How do you know that I did that? It was dark.”

“It was very dark, and one policemen climbed a tree so he could see all over the roof, and shot over and over until he wounded that bandit in the leg.”

“He did not wound him!” The girl beat her fist on the doorsill.

“Then why did he scream?” The old woman craned her lean neck toward the door.

“For joy. He shot the policeman in the tree and heard him drop his rifle and fall through the branches.”

“The bandit was happy!”

“There were many of them and one of him. He was the bravest.”

The policemen smoked cigarettes, looking indifferently at one woman and then at the other. Only the scrawny chest of the wounded man quivered as he sighed briefly.

“Another policeman went into the tree and shot again and again, until they had to hide inside. Then other officers came running up to the house and gouged out holes in the walls — with sticks, for the clay crumbled easily. They pushed their gun barrels in and shot. He was lying with her under the place where the barrels pushed through, and he paid no heed to the shooting.”

“He pushed you aside, too, because he did not want you to die!” the girl cried. “Mother, you traitor! You are ungrateful!”

“And when they started to make holes from the other side, she began shouting to them not to shoot because she was coming out.”

“Because he was afraid for me. He did not want them to kill me,” the girl corrected her angrily.

“And then she gave him her skirt and shawl. She lay there just as she is doing now. She shouted, she howled on the threshold like a dog, ‘Don’t shoot, it is I, Lakshmi.’ And that one, that wicked creature, went running out. My son thought it was she and leaped out to meet her, and he stabbed him with the knife and got away…got away, though they shot at him. The police waited until morning before they had the courage to go in. And that one never told them they could; she only cried and cried. I could not tell them. I had a rag over my mouth and I was tied up.”

“It is not true! I did not cry! I laughed. I thanked Kali that he was saved.”

“And my son will not live.”

“He will live — translate that—” the professor said to the orderly—“if there is no damage to the trachea. The lung is pierced but the heart is whole. He should live.”

“Better if he had died,” the young woman said with calm cruelty. “For my Mandhur will come and kill him as punishment. He must kill him for betraying him. It would be better if he had died.”

The mother could not endure this. She raked the earth with her nails and leaped up. She sprinkled a handful of mud in the girl’s face, blinding her, struck her in the head with all her might, then kicked her where she lay.

Istvan moved toward the girl, but the professor stopped him.

“Best not to interfere.” He pointed to the police, who had watched the entire incident with complete detachment. Cigarette smoke swirled tremulously and horseshoes clicked on the soaked ground. The horses whisked their hindquarters with their tails.

“I will go to the council of elders. They will punish you!” shouted the mother-in-law, flailing aimlessly like a drowning swimmer.

“Mother,” the son said suddenly.

The hoarse voice restored her presence of mind. She fell on him and, kneeling, stroked his temple with its high hairline and caressed his ear. He raised a hand from his thigh and pointed to the door. He shook his head lightly as if to say, No. No.

Then the young woman darted from the shadowy interior and ran with her bare feet pattering toward a sugar cane field next to a clump of thornbushes. The police rushed out in pursuit, but the girl, in full flight like a frightened animal, was nimbler than they. One officer tore the plastic from his saddle and leaped onto his horse, but as he plunged into the thornbushes, he saw that the barbed mesh was impenetrable.

“Stop! Stop or I will shoot!” he called, rising in his stirrups and aiming into the thicket, from which they could hear the crackling of branches; she must have been creeping along the bottom like a lizard.

But he did not shoot. The police returned to their commander, who gave them orders as to how to redeploy themselves.

“Let her be. She will guide us to him,” he said. “Surely they have agreed on a meeting place. She has lost her husband and now she will lose the object of her infatuation,” he added calmly. “She is crazed with love.”

Crazed with love: the words sank into Istvan’s mind. He too was insane, evading obligations and trying to find Margit against her will. Love…with equal ease it creates and destroys.

It was well that the policeman had not fired. Terey knew he would have had to throw himself on the man. He breathed deeply and slowly recovered his equanimity. Would I so passionately have taken the part of the girl who had trodden on all the bonds of family? She was following a voice that I know. She is wild — he thought, but the word took on an unaccustomed meaning: genuine. She had the courage to be herself.

“What will you do with him?” He pointed to the wounded man whose mother was holding him up. “He ought to go to a hospital.”

“Travel on horseback, and even more by tonga, would be bad for him. In any case, we need to question him,” the officer said, leaning toward the man. “Would you like for us to take you away?”

“Yes!” the mother replied vehemently. “Save him!”

“No, I will wait here.”

“You want to wait for her?” cried the outraged old woman. “She will be back, but with him. She ran away to him. Do you hear? She will be back to watch while he kills you. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” he whispered. He moved his limp fingers, which were half-buried in the wet ground.

“We cannot take him, then,” the officer sighed with relief. “He does not want that, so he does not go.”

“I will let you have the vehicle if it is needed,” said the professor.

Fear seized Istvan: would this be the end of the expedition? Would they go back without his ever seeing Margit again? If only the officer would end the haggling! Let the wounded man stay where he was.

“After all, he has hardly any blood on him,” the officer persisted.

“The blood collects inside, in the pleura.” The professor swung his phonendoscope. “There may be complications.”

“There may, but there may not,” Istvan said so eagerly that he was embarrassed at the sound of his own voice, which showed no regard for the injured man. “What could you do for him in a hospital?”

“I might try pressure to slow the movements of the lung. But the clots that form there themselves stop up the wound and create pressure.” He reached for the orderly’s bag and Terey, certain now that they would travel on, drew a long breath. “I will leave him a little codeine.” He dug out a small bottle. “Tell her to give him a couple of drops with water if he begins to cough. He must not lie down. He must sit just so.”

The mother squeezed the bottle in her hand and looked distractedly at them. She had one arm around her son, who seemed to be dozing with his head drooping helplessly.

“Shall I show you the way back, gentlemen?” the officer asked.

A policeman held two horses, which were stamping and jerking at their reins. The departure of the rest of the patrol had made them restless.

“Thank you. We will find it ourselves.”

The officer wrestled with the horse for a moment with one foot in the stirrup before he jumped into the saddle and, with a casual salute, rode off at a trot.

When they came to the wet meadows, Istvan turned around, casting a farewell look at the pair huddled by the reddish wall of the cottage. The mother crouching by the limp body of her son he could imagine to be a cruel mockery of a Gothic Pieta.

The professor reached into his pocket and reflexively turned on his radio. But the boisterous voice of the saxophone blared like sacrilege in the vastness of the open landscape — among the tall grasses and thorn trees, the swelling choir of dissonant voices, the ringing and rasping of millions of insects with drying shells, now saved from the flood and praising the sun. He turned it off.

“Do you think she will return to her husband?” Terey mused. “What is he hoping for?”

“That his wound and his defenseless condition will arouse her caretaking instinct. That in the end she will come to the one who most needs her help. He calculates wrongly, for his mother is with him. That is enough to soothe her conscience. She went after the other man because he is lonelier. The whole world is against him. So he will prize her all the more, and they will cling to each other all the more tightly in the night. They are condemned to be together. As long as he lives, until they shoot him, she will have him exclusively to herself as she could have no other man.”

“And apart from that, he is a man,” Istvan laughed, “at least judging from what the old woman said. No ox was ever so numbed from work as her husband.”

“Must a loving, faithful husband always arouse compassion?” The professor lit a cigarette. “Somehow I cannot sympathize with him.”

“He betrayed the other man, and from greed. You could find a hundred justifications, but neither you nor I have any sympathy for him, because we approve of honest struggle and, like all the world, we don’t like informers. Say what you like, he was tempted by the bounty on the head of a boyhood friend. Sometimes it’s necessary to use the services of Judas. Then one pays him, but doesn’t shake his hand or sit at the table with him.”

“Are you trying to convince me, then, that we are both on the side of that robber?” the professor asked reprovingly.

“No. But we do not approve of the axiom that the end justifies the means. Though it may achieve results, it destroys those who apply it.”

“Do you prefer knightly gestures? Do you believe in the duel between the transgressor and the noble policeman who must put himself at risk, as in Graham Greene’s novels?” the professor teased him through a nimbus of cigarette smoke. “And could you dare to say, I never betrayed anyone? I do not say for money, but for position, to avoid a conflict, for peace and quiet? Have you never contradicted the truth? I am old now and I can claim the privilege of being candid. In another sense, of course, I am not much better than that Hindu whom fate so promptly repaid. He can be happy that his account with himself is settled; our sins still cry out for justice.”

“I hate such conversations,” Istvan flared, “because they absolve all wickedness. I may seem a boor to you, but I am on that woman’s side. She has the courage to be herself, to be guided by passion, by her heart.”

“She is carried away by her physical longings.” The Swede threw his cigarette into the grass. “She is thinking from below the belt.”

“She is a woman.”

They walked through the steaming grass without speaking. Large grasshoppers fluttered from under their feet with a rustle of bright red wings; then they fell like dried pods and jangled triumphantly as they sank from sight into the underbrush.

Above the trees the sky blushed rose and the clouds, weightless tulle spread high above them, began to be suffused from below with the deepening colors of the sunset.

“I am hungry,” the professor said at last, in a conciliatory voice. “We must bestir ourselves and cook something.”

“We have the pigeons,” the orderly reminded them.

When they emerged onto the road between the cottages, where groups of half-naked children were dabbling in mud and building a dam, the professor turned on his radio. They heard music, then an English bulletin from New Delhi. They listened curiously. The children did not move away at their approach, but clustered around them and looked importunately into their faces, astonished by the music no less than by the voice from the professor’s pocket.

Suddenly, at the conclusion of the newscast describing the meeting of Premier Nehru with a delegation of Sikhs demanding autonomy; a fight against rampant tigers in northern Vietnam; and a fire on a cotton boat in Calcutta, Istvan heard an announcement from Europe, pushed to the end of the program and condensed to one sentence. Budapest: The government has declared amnesty for political prisoners, claiming abuses by the security service; authoritative sources estimate that approximately four thousand will be freed. Istvan clenched his fists; he wanted to learn more, to hear some commentary. But he was in the middle of Asia and the attention of the listeners was absorbed by Asian affairs, not by what had happened on the other side of the globe in a small country of nine million: Hungary.

“Did you hear? Amnesty in Hungary!”

The professor had been too preoccupied to have any attention to spare for the news. “I was waiting for a weather report,” he confessed. “I did not even hear the dispatches. Is it important?”

How to explain it to him?

The driver announced that he had arranged for beds, taken linen from the vehicle, and hung mosquito netting. The owners of the cottage had voluntarily vacated it and moved in with neighbors, as Salminen had predicted.

The orderly reached for the pigeons. The feathers yielded softly to the plucking; the skin was torn away. The fingers stuck to the spongy meat as if it were clay.

“Throw them away,” the professor ordered. “They stink. Take the tinned meat and make tea. We will go to the shore to see if the river has fallen.”

The street was swarming with people. Flutes chirped; measured slapping brought moanings from a drum. They looked out from the cottage. The body of the policeman, wrapped in a sheet, was being carried to the shore for burning.

Terey lay covered with mosquito netting, feeling under his back the thick plaited ropes stretched across the frame of the peasant bed. Time after time a reeling flash of distant lightning could be seen through the open door.

“There will surely be good weather,” the driver said to reassure the professor before mumbling “Good night” and beginning to chuff and whistle in his sleep.

They left the door open to create an illusion of moving air. The night noises were disturbing. Istvan heard a loud tread: something passed by with a slow step and scraped against the door frame until flakes of dried clay fell off. In the fitful glare of lightning he made out the long black snout of a pig scratching itself. It moved on a step and took a long piss, snorting with satisfaction. The voices of cicadas pealed, piercing as alarm bells. The villager singled out to be the guard walked around the Land Rover, coughing and muttering. The river hummed below them. Mosquitoes on the screen sang their threnody of hunger, begging for a drop of blood.

The white-draped form that had made its mournful way to the river bank haunted him. Trailed by shrill dirges, it had taken the shape of a phantom. In the evening, when they had gone down to the water, the pyre was already going out. The black, rushing river was swallowing the shining red scales of fire. Two peasants, hunched over, were raking up the unburned branches with rods; a handful of sparks flew toward the low sky.

A policeman. Yesterday he had ridden out on his horse, swaggering, certain of his power, with a gun, with comrades, and in a moment his ashes would whiten the muddy current. He had been, and now he was no more. And his wife still did not know that she was a widow. She was putting the children to sleep, squabbling with her neighbors, perhaps daubing the edge of her ear with perfume or buying a prosperous future from a traveling fortuneteller.

The wounded man was sitting in front of his cottage, resting against the wall. An oil lamp standing on the ground threw a wavering yellow glow on the bottom of his face and the cross of adhesive tape on his gaunt chest. It seemed to be marking out the target for a bullet. He did not feel the mosquitoes that bit him and then, satiated, sizzled in the flame of the lamp. The policemen converged on the village for the night. Their horses whinnied close at hand: it was a homelike, familiar sound. “Do you know”—the driver, an old soldier with an affinity for weapons, had mulled over the day’s events that evening—“that when that bitch escaped, she took the dacoit’s gun?” There had been more wonder in his voice than condemnation.

And I am running away to Margit. I am living, I am breathing in the hope of meeting her. If the river falls…Not Ilona, not the children; the one I would will to come to me is the red-haired girl. A few months ago I did not know her; if she had been in Australia, I would not even have known of her existence. In India, too, we might not have met. He felt a stabbing pain at the thought. How has it happened that she is closer to me than anyone else? Not to know her — it would be as if she had died, or as if she had never been. He felt despair in this wandering on the brink of sleep, then smiled as he thought, If I had not known her, I could not have longed or suffered. The bulletin from Budapest repeated itself: the freed prisoners took their rumpled clothes, sprinkled with shining flakes of camphor, out of bags and looked doggedly, inquisitorially at their troubled guards: “Well — and who defended socialism, you or we?”

And into the well that was the prison yard, with its sharp odor of tar and privies, the intoxicating aroma of summer was bursting. The whizzing of automobiles, the grating of tramways, the hallooing of children, was beating against the wall topped with barbed wire, into the windows covered with rusting tin baffles, through the chinks open to a sky full of twittering tongues. The breath of free life filled the air. One could walk, not only three paces from the next man, but as many as one liked. A scraping of the gates and one’s vision reached to the bridges over the Danube, the burnt castle on the high bank of Buda, the innumerable lights spread wide, wide as arms that want to embrace the recovered capital, and more: the homeland.

Whom will they set free? Everyone? He thought of the journalists and writers he knew who had been arrested. He was saddened at the thought that he would not be there to share their joy. No doubt someone would telephone, and Ilona would answer, “Istvan has been at the mission in India for a year.”

Tomorrow I will see Margit. No: there is nothing more important. I am not a good husband; a feeling of guilt suffused his heart, and the words took on a new tenor, as if someone standing by had said, He is not a good Hungarian, he cannot be trusted. With relief he recognized Ferenc’s voice, with its tone of obliging readiness. He breathed deeply, and in spite of his remorse and rancor peace returned, for he knew he had only been dreaming.

Morning began with the plodding of buffalo, the groanings of a herd streaming with watery mud. The peasants were driving the animals from the miry, flooded river banks to the meadows.

Istvan shaved with his head at a slant so as to see the edge of his cheek in the mirror, which gave off such a glare that the sun itself, the source of the brilliant weather, seemed to pulse from it. The little band of children would not leave him. Thin girls dandled big-bellied tots, bracing them on their hips. They chattered like sparrows and flicked away the flies that crawled on their parted lips and wide eyes. The villagers brought the men cheese and milk; they were too dignified to accept payment.

The river had receded visibly, leaving a bright silver strip of thin silt more than a dozen kilometers long. Two boys in water up to their knees were sounding the stream in front of them with poles, shouting to keep up their courage. Their reflections were chopped by a murky wave and snatched away by the rapid current.

Inserting plucked branches with tufts of quivering leaves into the river bottom, they marked out a new ford. A lane as wide as the Land Rover appeared behind them, lined by the branches, which swayed with the current. The vehicle would have to roll down onto the river bed, turn upstream almost in the center of the freshly deposited, hard-packed sandbar in order to reach the shale sill a hundred meters on, and travel over the shale to the other bank. The chauffeur, wading in the turbid water, scrutinized the route.

“I will try to drive through.”

But the professor preferred to wait until noon, and ordered that two pairs of oxen be prepared in case the engine died. The villagers had already transferred the baggage to the other bank, pulling it from each other’s hands, making a game of moving the vehicle’s contents. Terey entrusted a bundle of clothing to a little boy, and he himself swam with the current. Two young fellows set off after him, pounding the water, but could not catch up. The river had a yellowish sheen; the bathing was refreshing.

Sliding into muck greasy as lard, he scrambled out onto the shore. His legs seemed to be covered with red lacquer. He washed them for a long time, cursing. Finally he agreed that six Hindus should carry him onto the grass. There they were happy to smoke the cigarettes he offered them as treats.

All the village came down to watch the expedition. They cheered the driver on by shouting rhythmically, in chorus. The Land Rover rolled along slowly, accompanied by a pack of boys who clung to its sides. In an excess of zeal they even waded ahead of the hood, showing that the bottom was even.

They managed the fording without incident. It appeared that the oxen waiting at the ready had not been needed.

“As of today I pronounce you captain,” Istvan said to the professor as he climbed into his seat in the Land Rover. “You cut a splendid figure in the automobile in the middle of the river, just as if you had been on the bridge of a sinking ship.”

“Thank you. We made it,” Salminen muttered. “You know, I loathe rivers. They always remind me of cemeteries. And custom, to say nothing of parsimoniousness, leaves some remains unburned.”

On the other bank, as if a new journey had begun, they rode along with no difficulty. After an hour they came upon a column of tongas loaded with sacks. The wheels, hewn from thick boards, whined mournfully.

“What are they carrying?” Istvan asked the orderly.

“Sand. They are swindlers. They are making good money.”

The heads of the swaying oxen hung low; the animals breathed heavily. The drivers shouted rather from habit than from hope that they would move faster.

“Sand from the old river bed. The funeral company sends it in small bags to devout emigres so they can mix the ashes of their dead with it before they scatter them into strange African rivers. There are a couple of firms in this business,” the orderly explained matter-of-factly. “This sand is whiter and more beautiful than sand from the Ganges. The living like it better, it reminds them of their old dreams, and the dead do not complain. It is all the same to them.”

The hot breath of the desert blew into their faces. A sparkling white ocean of sand ran in delicate ripples to the horizon. The glare from the dunes hurt the eye. Grains of sand spun about on the wind, as if a light smoke were rising from the tops of the dunes, then scattering onto the perpetually shifting ridges. The desert, in spite of its lifelessness, seemed full of sinister motion.

They had to wait their turn. A line of tongas stretched ahead of them, moving in the opposite direction, and a horn tooted from a stray truck painted with flowers and elephants.

Istvan saw that the wheels of the Land Rover were rolling over black strips sprinkled with sand — two iron tracks laid in the very heart of the desert.

“During the war the English built this railroad,” the driver explained. “The tongas will make way for us and we will cut over to the village. To our Dr. Ward.”

“I feel as though we have come terribly far from Delhi,” Terey said reflectively, “and hardly a day has passed.”

“We are around a hundred and twenty kilometers from Agra.” The professor measured the distance with his fingers on the outspread map. “Under normal conditions, on a good highway, it is a two-hour trip.”

Above the blinding white dunes they saw a pole with a long, writhing tatter of orange fabric. Low cottages appeared, and a large water tank painted white. A windmill, flashing in the sun, pumped water without stopping. Mats were stretched over the entrances to the cottages to provide what shade they could. Women draped in red and blue went with jugs for water. Suddenly they caught the smell of smoke and a nauseating odor of human excrement. This was the village they had labored to reach.

Istvan thought his heart would burst with anxiety. He moistened his dry lips. He did not know how he would be received. What would he hear? He was like a prisoner awaiting a verdict.

“I see them!” the driver cried suddenly. “Madam Doctor!”

He began honking the horn like a man possessed, forgetting that from that distance no one in the village would hear.

They sat erect; searing heat blew into their faces, drying their sweat. With blinking eyes they gazed at two small figures in white as they passed between the cottages, blurring in the light, flashing in the shadows, then disappearing.

“How much longer will she be here?” Istvan asked the professor.

“A week. Ten days. But I would like to look over the results, glance at the bacteria culture, and start back — to get away, for if high winds set in, we are trapped.”

Like the black skeletons of unknown beasts or the bold outlines of modern sculptures, half-buried tree trunks with a few branches chopped off protruded from the ground, polished by the sand to a shining ebony.

They drew near the low cottages and sheds knocked together from pieces of tin barrels and crates. There were more than a dozen houses, clustered like shrewd hens alarmed by a hawk. White, glassy sand trickled through the wattled fences.

The vehicle drove up and stopped near a jeep covered with oil-stained canvas strapped to pegs. Istvan jumped out, landing up to his ankles in a pile of gravel that scorched him through his shoes like ash from a smoldering fire. A low breeze made the canvas flap and blew the odor of gasoline vapor, lubricants, and overheated iron into their faces. The drivers were chatting, tracing a route in the sand with their fingers. It appeared that if they had gone thirty kilometers farther and turned onto a road through the fields, then toward the river, there would have been not only a ford but even a ferry.

“The professor ordered, above all, that we find the tracks,” the chauffeur told his colleague to justify himself, “and we arrived here successfully.”

Istvan had already seen the white flag with the red cross on one of the sheds. He walked toward it first, then slowed down so the professor could catch up to him. The desert heat surged toward them in an unbroken burning wave. He saw Hindus lying inside the cottages, almost naked and wet with perspiration, arms outspread. Two dogs with dingy coats pawed through a rubbish heap, raising clouds of ash. As the men approached the sheds, Istvan spied the three-cornered muzzles of jackals. They scurried away one after the other, moving in their own shadows along the dazzling white slope of a dune.

A girl came out of one of the buildings, led by her mother in a voluminous skirt and unfastened caftan. The woman’s long, heavily suckled breasts looked like dying tumors. They greeted the men diffidently as they passed. Istvan noticed the child’s swollen, oozing eyelids and the streaks tears and pus had left on her cheeks. Enormous desert flies sat on her face, crawling and grazing with legs hairy as spiders’. She did not even try to whisk them away.

“Hello, Miss Ward!” the professor called impatiently. “At last we have waded through to this hell.”

He saw Margit. She was a little slumped as she walked out, but immediately held herself upright as an old campaigner at the sight of his general.

“Salve dux.” She raised a hand with forced cheerfulness. “So you have exhumed me from the sand!”

Asserting the privilege of his age, the professor took her in his arms and kissed her cheek.

“Hello, Margit,” Istvan said, timidly reminding her of his presence.

“Istvan!” She held a hand out to him joyfully, as if there had not been almost two months’ ominous silence between them. He pressed her hot, slightly sticky fingers and his heart contracted with emotion.

“I couldn’t wait,” he whispered. He wanted to look at her. He raised his dark glasses but the sun streamed into his eyes, unexpectedly blinding him.

“We have arrived!” Salminen was infused with new life. “But after such adventures! A real dacoit and a full-blown murder with a fresh corpse. Give us something to drink and we will tell you everything.”

“I only have tea in a thermos. The water is foul here. It’s ghastly even for washing.”

“Give us tea at least. And I was dreaming of a glass of whiskey with ice,” he sighed.

“Where would ice come from? From this blast furnace? Here even I want to cry for myself and my stupidity,” she said with rueful jocularity. She led them between the cottages into a tent that glowed inside with a honey-colored shimmer. Its walls were distended like the gills of fish thrown up on shore.

She walked in front of them. It seemed to Istvan that she carried herself like a more mature woman. She had lost weight. Only the hair he so loved, covered with a light, flat cap woven of straw, seemed more richly alive, took on a fiery sheen against the white of her apron. She was beautiful in this lassitude; even her loose apron of starched linen could not hide the contours of her body. He knew that body — knew it intimately — and now it seemed distant, unattainable.

“As you predicted, professor,” she said as she poured the tea into mugs that had been set into the sand and covered with a napkin, “the course of the disease is different here, and much more aggressive. The mechanical irritation caused by grains of sand accelerates the formation of pus. Everyone here is infected.”

“By what path?” The professor looked around, but saw only one chair and a box serving as table. He huffed resignedly and seated himself on the ground. “As usual, their own fingers?”

“Fingers. The edges of mothers’ skirts. They rub their own eyes with them when they cry as well as the children’s. Well, and the big flies. I think the strain of bacteria may also have a more active mutation. It must be checked in the hospital. For the time being I’m teaching a few willing villagers how to assuage the symptoms; I can’t call it treatment.”

“And how are you feeling?” He inclined his head, fanning himself with his crumpled linen hat as if it were a succulent leaf.

“Well,” she murmured coolly. “Very well by now.”

“Do you have specimens?”

“I have some prepared. I rather thought you would be coming.”

“I will tell you now what happened to us on the way. First a deluge. Surely it rained here?”

“Yes, but the rain evaporated before it touched the ground.”

I will not find a moment to talk with her if she does not want to help me. How to get rid of this jabbering old man, Istvan thought. He was close to despair. Stealthily he intercepted a glance and asked her, begged her with his eyes.

“Where should I bring the things?” the driver called from the road.

“Here. Will you stay overnight?” she asked.

“That depends on the weather.” The professor shifted, rose, brushed off his sandy hands, and turned on the radio. “I must show them what to unload or the simpletons will not bring in the cases that are most important to me.” He went out reluctantly into the sun, slowly pulling on his droopy hat. Now, Istvan thought. Before the music draws gawkers.

“I must talk with you.”

“Good. Later,” she said almost unwillingly.

“Surely I have a right to know.”

“Indeed you have.” She smiled bitterly. “If you care to.”

“Why were you avoiding me?”

She sat with her darkly tanned legs and sandaled feet extended, burrowed deeply into the white sand that glittered like shattered glass. She hung her head and said nothing.

“I telephoned. You were never there. Did you get my letters and telegrams?”

“I got them.”

“What does this mean? What has separated us? Speak to me. Please.”

She raised her dark glasses wearily. Now he could see that her eyes were very pale and ringed with deep shadows.

“A child. Yours.” She hastily corrected herself: “Ours.”

The voices of those carrying the cases and the professor’s remonstrations could be heard close to the tent. Istvan was stunned and silent.

“How did that happen? After all, you said yourself…” he whispered helplessly after a moment.

Music — the chirp of the flute and the moaning of two-stringed violins — filled the tent and, echoing off the canvas, wandered around the village. The driver carried in a long box; fortunately he backed into the tent, for Terey’s face, like a mirror, reflected his shock and despair.

The professor was kneeling, searching for keys to the padlocks. “I have a surprise for you here,” he began. The radio standing beside him wailed plaintively.

Terey rose from the ground suddenly and made his way toward the doorway. He felt the force of the sun with all his body, as if he had been drenched with boiling water. He moved forward, squinting. He took a quick breath and smelled the fusty odor of the open cottages, the smoke of fires burning low. He passed little shops with jars of colorful sweets and hanging bunches of dusty red pepper strips. Two boards propped on empty gasoline drums, and there was a market stall; a leaky roof of stalks had been patched together to cover it. Grains of sand rode on the wind, tumbled from roofs, beat him in the face, and roamed around his skin like ants.

I’ve taken a hit…he dragged his pain behind him as a wounded animal, fleeing, carries the bullet that has struck him. He had been appalled when he saw her defenseless in the ruthlessly denuding Indian sun. Nothing could be hidden here; she would be given away. They would not be able to keep silent. She must be taken from here, she must go to Bombay or Calcutta. Already you want to be rid of her, he accused himself, and you have not even gotten her back. No, no, he defended himself as he waded in the soft, sinking sand, his feet swollen and burning from the heat. Get rid of it while it is still possible, the coward in him whined. But that, he remembered, was against the law. A doctor who agreed to perform the procedure would be a criminal. They must be prepared for everything, even for blackmail. All at once he was terrified as he saw images of curettes not disinfected, specula wiped with pocket handkerchiefs, turbans, hairy faces, unwashed hands, and self-confident dilettantes who bought not only their practices but often their diplomas as well.

You would be risking her health if not her life. It is wrong; you have no right to push her into this. Be brave enough to see her through it. She has demanded nothing from you, after all, and you are already looking for faults in her, accusing her. Speak now, blurt out what you have to say: I love you, I love you…

He drew himself erect. His face was tight with anger. He felt as if he had been slapped in the face. No! No! I have the courage to repeat to all the world what I whispered with my face in your hair, when we enfolded each other in the darkness and I was one with you: Margit, I love you. It will be as you wish.

The sand was grinding under his feet with a dry, unpleasant biting sound. The entire plain was gradually shifting, alive with dust, enveloped in a fine drizzle of grains flying on the wind.

“She must feel that I am beside her,” he whispered. “But why did she say nothing? Why did she hide it from me?”

When in the evening he managed to get Margit out for a walk among the dunes, under a sky full of fire like the mouth of a gigantic furnace, he repeated the question. She turned her face toward him; it was covered by her black glasses.

“And what would you have thought of me?” she said bitterly, even a little contemptuously. “A doctor, and I didn’t know? Those would have been your first words. I’m an adult. I know what I’m doing. I had to deal with it myself. I didn’t want to involve you.”

She went on a few steps and he heard the mournful sizzle of the scattering sand, the glassy music of the desert. They walked side by side, but far apart.

“You shouldn’t speak that way. I really didn’t deserve it. I’m asking you honestly: What shall I do? What do you expect from me? Surely you know—” his voice broke like a child’s, as if he were about to shout at her and threaten her. Only with difficulty did he control himself.

He took her in his arms. He kissed her lips, which were dry and salty and dear, dear, dearer than anything.

“Let me go. They will see us.”

“Let them!”

“Let me go. I’m dirty and sweaty. You can’t even wash properly out here.”

He held her close and rocked her as if she were a small child. “That’s nothing. Nothing. I couldn’t care less. I only want to know: Do you love me?”

She raised her face toward him and moaned with parted lips, “This is terribly hard for me, Istvan.” She kissed him on the neck. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

When he was holding her, now yielding and his once more, the caressing word from his dream returned to him. “My darling, my—cradle,” he whispered into her ear, “remember, we’re together.”

“You see, Istvan, it was bad of me not to tell you at once. But you came with the professor in that blinding sun, so strong and sure of yourself. You came for me as for something of your own. I must have…so cruelly…I am bad, bad. Istvan,” she whispered with her lips on his chest so that he had to strain to hear the words, “for almost two months I have been living with this: that I will have a child. Only for three days…I still tremble at the very thought that…I could not kill your child. I knew that. I ran away. You might have thought that I wanted to use the child to bind you to me, and that that was why I told you.”

“But what was the reason?”

“I don’t know, though I have a dozen explanations by now, all plausible: change of climate, a different type of work, full of tension, and you. Well, yes: you. Inhibition caused by the fear of passing time, for that affects one: fear paralyzes. Days passed and I was frightened when I counted them.

“I was in torment. I ordered the pregnancy test to be done. I gave another name, a Hindu name. They were not careful in the laboratory. They bungled it. It takes six weeks to be sure.” She gripped his hand. “And I had to go away without knowing the result. I wanted to preserve appearances, to act as if nothing were happening. Nothing. Istvan, forgive me. A few hours have been enough for you, and I lived through two months of this. So many days and nights. Now you understand me better.”

“This has happened for the best,” he said, looking into the frenzy of color that was deepening in the sky, tinting the waving sands cherry-red that languished to violet. “It is a reminder that we ought to decide what we really want. We are not Hindus.”

In the distance they heard the professor calling, then the blare of the Land Rover’s horn. “Coming!” Istvan shouted back. “We must be on our way. He is obviously possessive about you.”

“Be serious.” He heard such a happy new lilt in her voice that it moved him.

Two jackals scampered among the dunes, sweeping the sand with their fluffy tails. In the sheds fires winked red and from far away they heard the professor’s radio as it spewed Hindu music full of complaint and resignation. A drum rumbled as if beads of lead were falling on the tightly stretched skin, measuring time.

“I thought you two had gotten lost,” the professor said crossly, “or that the jackals had eaten you. There are plenty of them running around here.”

“Now, now. We were standing on top of the dunes and you saw us all the time.”

“True. I did not let you out of my sight,” he admitted. “Well, you will have something to write about.”

Istvan lowered his head.

“And in the meantime we must load. The bulletin is warning of rain again. Before night we will go along those iron rails, by another and, I promise, nearer road. I called you, however, so we can eat something before our departure. And perhaps have a drop to drink.”

“That won’t hurt,” Terey murmured.

“When I look at these people wearing themselves out here, I cannot fathom why they insist on living in the middle of this frying pan.”

“They were always here,” Margit pointed out. “The desert came to them. It engulfed them.”