Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “You’re afraid you’ve entertained Robespierre unawares,” she said, “poor Harry!”

  “But you can see that I can’t afford to associate with these patriot fellows. I made a mistake. I own up to it. So all I’m asking is that you don’t…take him up—make a pet of him out of curiosity the way you do—”

  “Make a pet of him! A bit like making a pet of a cart-horse.”

  “Yes, well, exactly, he’s just not quite our sort. It seemed all right on the coach. But he doesn’t belong here. So that’s all right, we just won’t see him again.”

  “But of course I asked him to dinner tonight.”

  Enrike breathed heavily, defeated once again.

  “He hasn’t anywhere to stay; and if he stays here of course we have to feed him; but I’m sure it will do no harm. No one is coming except Raskayneskar.”

  “Oh my God!” Enrike cried. “You can’t—you can’t have him here with Raskayneskar! Luisa!” But he knew as he spoke that she would do just as she pleased, just as she always did, and that whether he fretted or shouted, it would make no difference at all.

  Meanwhile Itale had set off at random into the warm morning. Sunlight breaking through the mist of the river valley gilded the housefronts, the roofs, the double spire of the Cathedral of St. Theodora, only a few streets away. He made for the cathedral. It was not as easy to get to as it looked. Though rarely losing sight of the spires he involved himself in the crisscross of broad, similar avenues of the Old Quarter, took a wrong turning into Sorden Street and wandered down it between palaces of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries rearing their elegant arrogant façades one against the other. From that sunless, silent grandeur he emerged into the glare and bustle of the Great Market. Men bent double, hauling carts, yelled at him to make way, heavy-shouldered horses pulled their wagons across his path, women selling leeks and cabbages shouted at him to buy leeks and cabbages, young women lugging sacks of gleaming vegetables jostled him with the sacks, old women lunged past him to make a bargain, fishmongers waved eels in his face and to avoid the eels he backed into beef carcases hung round the butchers’ stalls amidst shrilling swarms of flies. Portacheyka’s weekly market would not have filled a corner of it, it went on for blocks, sprawling, displaying, hauling, carrying, bargaining, arguing, selling, buying, stinking, shining, shouting in the young heat of the August sun, and over it all, against the large, quiet morning sky, rose the dun spires of the cathedral.

  He made it safe to Cathedral Square at last. A few old people sat on benches on the west side under plane trees thick with summer dust. He stopped in the middle of the square, letting desultory cabs and purposeful walkers pass round him, and gawked at the cathedral of Krasnoy, the heavy, complex towers, the leap of the spires, the triple portal of carven saints and kings, the great bulk buoyant and serene as a ship under sail. He stood and looked, and the old men on the benches looked at him; they had seen the cathedral before. At last he went forward and entered the church under the north portal, under St Roch, auxiliary patron of the city of Krasnoy, smiling in the ogived shadow his stiff, kind, four-hundred-year-old smile.

  As soon as he came inside the cathedral he felt himself at home. It was home. His family, his people, had lived there for eight or nine centuries. Like the churches of the Montayna the cathedral was dark, bare, its high barrel vaults leaving a great deal of room for God. It was as simple and purposeful as a fort. Low mass was in progress. Lost in the airy darkness of the nave a few people, faceless, separate, similar, knelt on the bare patterned pavement. Itale joined them. The priest droned, like the old priest of St. Anthony of Malafrena, “Credo in unoom Deoom,” and the little old women in black shawls whispered, “Omni-potentem,” and like an unheeding angel or thunder among mountains the organ whispered on above them, rehearsing the high mass to be sung on St Roch’s day.

  Itale did not stay long. Reassured, yet restless, he went back out into the sun’s heat and brightness as the great bell struck ten, vibrating in the stone and in the blood. There was the city, the traffic, the faces of strangers, the streets of stone. He put on his hat and set off striding into River Quarter, without the least idea where he was going.

  Few cities in 1825 had much of a sewer system; this oldest quarter of Krasnoy had none at all, beyond paved or unpaved trenches in the middle of the narrow streets that wound down towards the river. The stench of River Quarter was a mighty presence in itself, more impressive even than the steep darkness of the streets between houses toppling their upper stories across the way as if in conspiracy against the sky, and the noise of voices and the constant press and passage of people around the tenements. Out of these choked alleys shot up the fragile towers of old churches; from the noisy crowding at a ragged street-market one came suddenly into a silent square, to a covered fountain brimming with cool water and typhoid fever, and looked up to see on one hand the cathedral spires, on the other the pointed windows of the university on its hill, another world. In such a square Itale stopped. He was frightened. He was lost, had lost himself in the streets, the crowding houses, the dank archways leading to brawling courtyards, the voices, the smells, the swarms of children, women, men all nameless, so that he was nameless, knowing none of them, lost. He stood there holding onto his left wrist with his right hand, combatting panic. He sat down on the stone seat by the wellhead and gazed persistently at the pavement at his feet. On one stone was a smear and curl of human excrement. He gazed at it; at the stones beneath and around it, square bluish cobbles grained, and glazed with dirt; at the thread of water gleaming in the jointure between two of them. This is all here, he thought; I am here; I cannot be lost. At last he looked up, looking slowly round him, and discovered, that he shared the bench with another man.

  This one wore broken shoes without stockings and some kind of coat or cape, shapeless and colorless, wrapped carefully around him despite the warmth. He was old, the skull showing in his face. Out of webbed sockets his eyes stared straight at Itale, a terrible stare, until Itale realised he was blind.

  “Hello, granddad,” he said huskily.

  The old man munched and stared. Abruptly he spoke; Itale did not understand the wheezing voice and the strong dialect. “A long way from home,” he seemed to have said.

  “That’s true. Do you know of a street called Magdalen’s Tears, granddad?”

  The old man went on staring, muttering, “Eya, eya, eya, eya…” He stood up, gathering the decrepit coat around him. “Come on!” he said.

  “Is it nearby?”

  “Mallenastrada, how can I tell you, come on!” Wheezing and muttering but moving fairly quickly he set off down an alley, and Itale followed. Children screamed, playing or fighting in a courtyard as they passed. The old man cursed at them and waved his hand muttering, “Had a stick, had a stick…Eya, eya, eya…” Evidently he had some sight, for he picked his way without hesitation, and kept closer to Itale’s side than was agreeable to Itale, for he stank. He talked as they went, and Itale understood about half of it: he had been a tailor, till his eyes went bad and they turned him out of the shop, there was a brother-in-law who had done him wrong, a story about costs rising and shop rents; his voice cracked and grated, he chopped his rigid hands in the air and screamed, “Dirty Jews! Dirty Jews!” He felt or saw Itale sheering off from him and hurried his gait pathetically. “Almost there, young sir, almost there. That big church that’s Sankestefan, the basilisk, now this way, young sir.” They were at the base of the Hill of the University; streets shot up the hill in crazy angles and flights of steps. “Thought I was blind, eh, thought I was blind, eh!” The hobbling guide stopped. “This is it, Mallenastrada, this is it.” The street name Frenin had sent was the Street of the Tears of St Magdalen; Itale could see no sign or token along the narrow way or at the corner, but he was ready to get free of the old man. He gave him a quarter-krune, putting it into the rigid hand; trying to get it into some pocket or hidingplace in his ragged coat, the old man dropped it, and Itale picked it, up for him, for
he stood blind and groping, unable to bend down to the pavement, and his hand was too arthritic to close on the little coin.

  Number 9, opposite the pawnshop, Frenin had written. There were no numbers, but there were two pawnshops. He tried across the way from the first one. A fat woman met him in the dark hall, which had a rich, sharp, feral stink of its own. She sent him up the stairs, which were alive with thin, scabby cats, all of them more or less white. He knocked on the door of the first landing, and Frenin opened it.

  The square, hard face, the familiar voice saying his name, were a tremendous relief and pleasure. They embraced like brothers. “It’s good to see you, it’s good to see you, Givan!”

  “Come on in.” Frenin began to repress his own pleasure. “Don’t let those damn cats in. Why didn’t you write you were coming?”

  “I came on the same coach the letter would have come on. Last night.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Fellow I met on the coach. Paludeskar.”

  “In Roches Street? The rutabaga baron?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Well, you’re certainly coming in at the top.”

  “I don’t really know who they are. On the coach—”

  “They’re in Brelavay’s scandal-sheet every issue.”

  “Brelavay’s what?” Frenin’s manner irritated Itale a little; like everybody here, he seemed to know everything.

  “He’s working for a weekly society tattler, the Krasnoy Scurrility he calls it. Money, mistress, our Tomas is doing well.”

  Frenin’s tone was unpleasant.

  “Big place you have here,” Itale said. The room was low but long, and the almost complete lack of furniture made it seem vast.

  “Four of these rooms. Dirt cheap, even for the River. It’s too big, I’m getting out end of the month. Try this chair. The back falls off that one.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Odd jobs for a Catholic monthly, and reading proof for Rochoy, the publishers. I get by. What are your plans?”

  “Find work, first.”

  “Work? What for?”

  It seemed to Itale, perhaps unfairly, that Frenin’s question was disingenuous.

  “What does one generally work for?”

  “Depends who one is.”

  “I have twenty-two kruner. That’s who I am.”

  He felt himself to be disingenuous. But it was not easy to talk about not having money. He got up and wandered around the shabby room, looking out the windows. “Your windows could use a wash.”

  “No help from home, eh?”

  “No.”

  Frenin, the son of a wealthy Solariy merchant, was as used to having cash in his pocket as Itale was, but he was also used to talking about money, both the having and the wanting, and that gave him now the advantage he always sought over his friend, and seldom gained.

  “Your father doesn’t approve of your coming here, I take it.”

  “Right.”

  “Is he an Austrianiser?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Family quarrel, eh?”

  “It’s immaterial, Givan.”

  “Twenty-two kruner, eh. About two weeks’ worth. Well, what can you do?”

  “What anybody else can do—how do I know?” Itale said. His anger satisfied Frenin, who dropped his cool superiority of manner and said with a grin, “All right, all right. Are you looking for a place to live, or have you settled down with the rutabaga queen?”

  “I don’t know—my bag’s there—I don’t want to stay there.”

  “Why not? It’s free.”

  “I can’t…” Itale waved his hands. “Footmen at breakfast.”

  “How’s the young baroness at breakfast?”

  “I don’t know. Very polite. It’s—” He waved his hands again. “I shouldn’t be there.”

  Frenin grinned again. “Well, come here, if you like. It’s not Roches Street, or an estate on Lake Malafrena; but then it only costs fifteen kruner a quarter. We can share for a bit.”

  “That is very good of you, Givan,” Itale said with warmth and gratitude. His deafness to Frenin’s gibes exasperated the latter and at the same time disarmed him. He had never succeeded in establishing between Itale and himself the social barrier that his jealousy asserted to be there. At the same time a barrier did exist between them, despite all Frenin’s efforts to break through it: that of Itale’s careless, impervious personal reserve. Itale would not allow him to humiliate either of them; his flashes of anger were not followed by any grudge or punishment; he offered a simple, steady friendship. Frenin wanted more of him, though he did not know what more. What good was friendship? He wanted to get at defenseless man, understand him, change him, and could not do it. It was perhaps for Itale’s sake, to keep in touch with Itale, that Frenin had conceived the plan of coming to Krasnoy.

  “We’ll settle it with the Catwoman. She was downstairs, wasn’t she? Mrs Rosa she calls herself. Listen, Itale. I’ve been here two months and nothing has happened—nothing is happening. There is no radical movement here.”

  Itale sat down at the table which, with three decrepit chairs, constituted the furniture of the room. “There has to be,” he said.

  “I haven’t found it.”

  “But the Cafe Illyrica—”

  “Old men and fifth-rate poets. And Austrian agents.”

  “There are secret societies—”

  “There were; they’re dead. Years dead. The Friends of the Constitution, yes, that’s still going, a lot of retired army men in the east, in the Kesena and Sovena, but not here. Nothing here. Unless you count Amiktiya.”

  “Well, then it’s up to us! A publication—what we talked about in Solariy.”

  “What’s the good? A literary monthly—”

  “Who won our bet concerning the power of the written word?”

  “Who got put under house arrest?”

  “Look here, 1789 didn’t rise unpremeditated from the breast of the people, it was the writers—”

  “All right, but we haven’t got any Rousseaus here.”

  “How do we know? Besides, we do have Rousseau, and Desmoulins, and all the French and English and American writing of the last hundred years to draw on. Why else is the government so afraid of print? Listen, I found something Gentz said recently, I’ve taken it for my guide, my inspiration—he said, ‘As a preventive measure against the abuses of the press, absolutely nothing should be printed for years. With this maxim as a rule we should soon get back to God and the Truth.’”

  “God and the Truth,” Frenin related softly in awed disgust, and they were both silent a minute. The opinion of the Chief of the Austrian Imperial Police was undeniably impressive.

  “All right,” said Frenin. “Assume a journal is the thing. How do we finance it, first, and who’ll dare print it, second?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “All right. Let’s go meet some people…”

  Itale got back to the Paludeskar house at six, having spent the afternoon with Frenin at the Cafe Illyrica, which despite Frenin’s strictures was still, and would be for twenty-five years more, a meetingplace for radicals of all degrees. There they had met their friend Veyeskar from Solariy, a dark young man named Karantay who wrote stories, a pair of Greek refugees, a ranting alcoholic old poet who talked of his mistress Liberty, a group of students; the talk had been of Greece. As Itale walked up Roches Street he was telling himself that if nothing could be done here he would go to Greece, as Lord Byron had gone, to the plains of Marathon where they still laid down their lives for freedom. He was drunk with Greece and strong coffee and strong ideas, and was not sobered even by entering the large, rich, cold house. He strode up the marble staircase as if he owned the place, and hearing music in the room at the top of the stairs stopped a moment to listen, as if the music was for him.

  “Mr Sorde,” said Luisa Paludeskar at the piano, another splendid piece of gold and rosewood like the on
e downstairs, the evening sunlight striking gold through the long windows across her hair, music rippling under her long hands.

  “Baronina,” he said with untroubled resolution, “I must be leaving. May I thank you for your kindness, and hope that I will have the privilege of making some return for it.” The formal provincial turns of speech came ready to his tongue and he never wondered what conceivable return of hospitality he could make from a cat-haunted tenement in the River Quarter; he still spoke with his feet planted on the shores of Malafrena.

  “But you’re not leaving, Mr Sorde? We thought you would make our house yours for a few days at least!”

  She seemed dismayed, disappointed; he grew embarrassed. “It’s very good of you, baronina. An old friend of mine is here, he wants to put me up—”

  “But you can’t always desert new friends for old ones, and Enrike will be very disappointed.”

  “It’s very good of you—”

  “We know people, quantities of people, I had thought we really might be of some use to you.”

  “It’s very—” He had said it was very good of her twice already. “You’re very kind, baronina, but I—” He did not know what to say; his resolution dissolved like wet sugar.

  “At least you dine with us tonight? I do claim that much!”

  “Of course, with great pleasure.” Damn the woman! As he went down the hall the house resounded to the abrupt brilliant harmonies, played very deftly, of a Mozart presto.

  After her talk of quantities of people, he had expected another large party, and was surprised when he went down to dinner (in his black coat well brushed by Robert) to find a partie carrée: himself, Luisa and Enrike Paludeskar, and a Count Raskayneskar. Baroness Paludeskar, a lady in waiting to the grand duchess, was dining at the palace. This dinner was, presumably, in Luisa’s style: intimate, elegant. The four French doors of the dining room stood open to the August night. Stars hung thick in the black sky, an intermittent wind moved in the shrubbery of the walled garden; the murmur of a fountain, the stir of leaves, the smell of damp earth and roses, the unease and subtle darkness of a summer night all entered and mixed strangely with the conversation at the candle-lit table. Luisa, at the head of the table, was so beautiful, so much more beautiful even than she had appeared last night or in the morning, that Itale was afraid of her; he vaguely felt himself to be in the presence of a dangerous force of nature, a forest fire or a maelstrom; it occurred to him that when poets called a woman a goddess sometimes they meant exactly what they said. Enrike wore an anxious, surly look and said very little, and Luisa and Raskayneskar ignored him.