Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Raskayna was one of the great holdings in Val Altesma, thirty miles southwest from Malafrena. Itale knew the name well. He knew nothing about the landholder, and it was evident that if Raskayneskar had ever visited his estate it had been as no more than a visitor. He was entirely urbane. He was a well-kept man of forty or so, with long, liver-colored lips, a high forehead, and fine dark eyes.

  “So!” he said, leaning back a little, when they had come to the sweet wines. “It’s quite certain the Estates will meet.”

  “Lot of talk,” Enrike growled.

  “Not at all—unless you’re referring to the meetings themselves, in which case I agree with you! But they will be convened. Cornelius will announce it next month, I fancy, and the great event will come off in the autumn of ’27. Ha, ha, ha! Do you know what the emperor said about these diets and assemblies? It rather puts them into perspective. He said, ‘I have my Estates, and if they go too far I snap my fingers at them and send them home…’”

  “Just as Louis XVI did,” said Itale to his plate.

  “Oh, come,” the count said, genial, “the Estates General of France are one thing, our little Assembly is quite another. Its convention is merely an act of courtesy on the emperor’s part.”

  “If the Assembly is rude to him, will he snap his fingers?” Luisa asked.

  “Yes, of course; that is, Cornelius will do it for him, he needn’t be bothered himself.”

  “Has Cornelius that authority?” asked Itale.

  “As the prime minister of the head of the state, the grand duchess, I should think so. Possibly she’d have to do it herself.”

  “Under the Charter of 1412 the Assembly is subject only to the king. There’s nothing that subjects them to the orders of a duchess or her minister.”

  “Nothing but the Austrian army,” Raskayneskar said mildly.

  “If the grand duchess called in the Austrian army to close the National Assembly, that would constitute invasion. We are an ally and protectorate of the Empire, we are not an Austrian province.”

  “Paper truths, Mr Sorde. The Austrian army is here, now, controlling our provincial militias; no Assembly is going to try to lead us into a revolt; or a war if you prefer, against the most powerful state in Europe. The idea is laughable.”

  “That depends on one’s sense of humor,” Luisa observed.

  “True, very true,” said Raskayneskar, who never contradicted directly, but went at it round about. “When the balance of peace is so delicate, when there is the possibility of intervention by one of the great states, Russia perhaps—it’s not so much laughable as terrifying. The war years all over again. One can only respect Metternich for having, in these past ten years, made such a chance remote, a fantasy, rather than an imminent threat. An incredible man, Metternich! He bears the weight of Europe on his shoulders.”

  “If he put it down it might turn out to be able to walk by itself,” Itale said, with a slight tremor in his voice, but clearly. Enrike, whose sense of humor was simple, gave a snort of laughter, and then shut his eyes and turned red.

  “To walk straight into war, I fear,” Raskayneskar said.

  “I’d prefer to walk into war than to be carried into slavery.”

  “My dear young man,” said Raskayneskar, who had no desire to quarrel at Luisa Paludeskar’s table, “I don’t think you know much about war; and I fear slavery has become a fashionable word and so lost its significance. I suppose a black African on a plantation in the Carolinas is a slave, poor brute, but his situation has very little in common with yours or mine.”

  “I don’t know,” Itale said innocently; “the American slave can’t vote, has no representative in the government, and must get his owner’s permission to learn to read or write, or publish, or speak in public, doesn’t he? If he does any of that without permission he can be locked up for life without trial. I’m not sure how far our situations differ in those respects; of course we are allowed to wear frock coats.”

  There was only the slightest pause before Count Raskayneskar added, “And to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

  “If we can find a clandestine edition.”

  The count laughed, indulgently, the laugh of a statesman addressing enthusiastic youth. Enrike shut his eyes again. Luisa laughed very softly, watching Itale. Then she turned to Raskayneskar and said, with all the manner of a hostess easing over a difficult moment, “Which reminds me, count, I am relying upon you for the Paris journals, you must not let me down!”—to which Raskayneskar replied courteously as ever, with a somewhat pinched smile. He cared nothing at all for Itale’s opinions, but he cared a good deal for Luisa’s opinion; and he knew now that he had lost a battle that he had not thought worth fighting.

  The next day he told a fellow bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance that the convocation of the Estates was not entirely an empty gesture, since certain fashionable salons were openly cultivating patriotic sentiments. “Silly fads,” the colleague said, but Raskayneskar, pinching his long lips together significantly, murmured, “National pride…” as if it were the name of a horse he thought of backing.

  Itale left the Paludeskars as early as he could decently do so, and found his way past the cathedral, around the Hill of the University, behind the basilica of St Stephen, through the frightening crowds and more frightening emptinesses of the River Quarter, to the narrow street where he was to live. He went to bed, and lay there on the pallet they had fixed up, his eyes on a crack of light under the door; Frenin was up, writing, in the front room. The night was warm and filled with voices and inexplicable sounds, the swarming city atmosphere. There was no silence. Itale thought of the garden of the Paludeskar house, roses in the dark, the fountain, the golden light on Luisa’s throat, and these images changed to yet more tormenting ones: vivid, unbearable: the roofs of Portacheyka, the neat, mountain-shadowed yard of Emanuel’s house, the lake, the window of his room above the lake. Never had he felt such anguish of homesickness. And among those glimpses of the lost beloved there were faces, all the faces he had seen in the streets, the sweating carriers, old women praying, the endless faces of the city, of the poor, and a rednosed, greyhaired man crying, “My mistress, Liberty!” and the bony, swollen bare legs of the old blind man who had guided him.

  III

  “By the assistance of the Dog, man was ennerbled—”

  “Enabled.”

  “Enabled to hunt such animals as were neces-sary to preserve his own extents—”

  “Existence.”

  “Existence and to destroy those which were no-shows and the greatest enemies of his race.”

  “Noxious. Very good. Vasten, go on please.”

  Itale stood leaning his arms on the lectern, watching the three copies of Buffon pass from hand to hand, the fifteen serious faces. The youngest pupil was twelve; the eldest, Isaber the pupil-teacher, was sixteen. As each boy read, Isaber looked at him with fierce and pleading eyes. The bell of a nearby church struck noon, little Parroy gabbled through his reading, and Itale dismissed them. As the others left, Isaber came up to him.

  “Don’t look so worried, Agostin. They’re doing very well.”

  “It’s Vasten, sir, he won’t apply himself…”

  Itale watched the boy with patient affection, his long thin throat in which the adams-apple bobbed up and down as he spoke, his big, red hands and clear eyes. Isaber never laughed, and smiled only when he thought Itale wanted to smile.

  Another teacher looked in. “Hold on, Brunoy, I’m coming,” Itale said, and soon joined them. “Poor Isaber, what a conscience the boy has! Come on, I’m hungry. Oh God, how I am coming to hate the noble Buffon as translated by the noble Prudeven as executed by aspiring youth…” They left the gloomy halls of the derelict grain storehouse, now occupied by the Ereynin School, where Itale had been employed as a teacher for six weeks. Someone at the Cafe Illyrica had mentioned the place, he had investigated, and found himself hired to teach Reading, Composition, and History five mornings a week before he had ever hea
rd of the Lancaster system or Pestalozzi’s works on education. Ereynin, a philanthropical grain-speculator, had founded the school; fifty boys, sons of day laborers and artisans, were enrolled in it, some paying a low tuition, some none. It was the only lay school in the city where a poor man’s son might learn to read and write. In hiring Itale, Ereynin had given him a three-hour lecture on education, but that was the last anyone had seen of him: the rumor was that he had found a new hobbyhorse to ride. So far, by nagging Ereynin’s secretary, the three teachers had managed to draw their salary, but there was no money for books, chalk, coal, and so forth. Brunoy, who taught the younger boys, was philosophical. “It’s lasted over a year,” he said, “I never thought it would last so long.”

  As they came out into the sweet air of the October noon Brunoy coughed and laughed. “You like Isaber, do you?”

  “Of course.”

  “He worships you.”

  “That’s his age. You have to make a hero out of somebody, at sixteen. If there’s any purpose in this education business, it’s enlarging their world enough so that they find proper heroes, real ones, instead of makeshift and tinsel.”

  “Why shouldn’t you be his hero?”

  “Because my heroism consists, first, in my educated accent—he thinks it’s educated, you think it’s provincial—and second, in the fact that I stand six feet tall. Discrimination,” Itale said, waving his arm, “discrimination is the purpose of education!”

  Brunoy smiled; they walked on a little way, and Itale broke out afresh, “I admire your patience so much, Egen,—I get cross with them—How do you stay patient?”

  “I have nothing but patience to fill the gap between my old ideals and my actual achievement.”

  “That gap—that gap between what we want to do and what we do—you call it patience, I call it waiting for God. It’s in that gap, that gulf, that creation occurs. But I haven’t the strength to wait, I leap in and try to play God. And spoil everything.”

  “Eleven,” Brunoy said to a short, dark, spectacled man walking briskly past them.

  “Thirteen,” Itale added.

  The man nodded, said, “Seventeen,” and went on past. When he was around the corner Itale released a stifled snort and said, “This life is crazy!”

  The short man in spectacles was the third teacher in the Ereynin School, a mathematician who believed that the secret of human destiny was written, codelike, in the sequence of the prime numbers. An atheist, he was offended by Brunoy’s and Itale’s inert Catholicism, and did his best to convert them to the mystery of the primes. The salutation they had just exchanged gave him a good deal of pleasure.

  “You don’t belong in it,” Brunoy said gently.

  He was a thin, brown-haired man in his early thirties, with a look of ill health and a mild manner. At first Itale had seen in him the signs of disillusion, enthusiasm soured, which he had learnt to expect from men of the generation before his who had given themselves to hopeless efforts of reform or innovation in education, economics, or politics in the century’s first two decades: old liberals, old radicals, still haunting the Illyrica, still breaking out with gusts of defeated passion, honest ineffectual ghosts. Very soon he realised that Brunoy was not this sort at all. A watchmaker’s son who had gone through the university on scholarship, unmarried, solitary, poor, Brunoy had not turned sour or cynical; he had merely accepted silence as his lot, silence until the end. Yet he had let Itale break that silence.

  “Nor do you,” Itale said as they went into the workmen’s tavern where they took their midday dinner.

  “All I ever wanted was to teach.”

  Itale brought their mugs of beer to the table. “Listen, you said you’d written something once, a theory of education.”

  Brunoy nodded.

  “Can I see it?”

  “I burned it.”

  “Burned it?” Itale said, shocked.

  “Years ago. It was unpublishable; the censors would never have let it pass. And the ideas are mostly current now in other men’s works.”

  “You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t burn your ideas—Could you rewrite it?”

  “No. The ideas are common now. And anyhow, why? There’s nowhere to publish anything of that kind.”

  “Yes, there is. Will be.”

  Brunoy cocked his head.

  “I am asking you for a contribution to the first issue of Novesma Verba.”

  Still Brunoy said nothing.

  “How do you like the name?”

  “‘The newest word’—I like it very much. But whose word?”

  “Ours. Me, Brelavay, Frenin, you—the country—Europe—mankind…I’ll tell you,—the name is my idea, the others like it, it sounds right, but I’ll tell you what it means to me. We have something to say, and we haven’t said it yet. We stammer. We try to learn to speak, like infants. We don’t know how. We say a little of what we have to say sometimes, in different languages, in a painting, in a prayer, in an act of knowledge. Every so often we learn a new bit of it, a new word. The newest word is the word Freedom. Maybe it’s no more than a new way of saying one of the old words. I don’t think so. It’s new. Still we’re a long way from being able to say the whole thing yet. But we must learn the new words, all of us, we must all be able to speak them. They’re no good if you don’t say them aloud…”

  “O Prometheus,” Brunoy said very softly.

  “All right, that’s all my notions. The point is, it is now possible that we may actually publish this journal. And I am asking you to contribute to the first number. Since the first number will very likely be the last, my request gains urgency…”

  Brunoy raised his beer-mug, gestured to Itale to do the same, and touched mugs in salute. “To Novesma Verba, long life!” They drained their mugs.

  “So?” said Itale, triumphant, setting down his mug.

  Brunoy shook his head.

  “Why not, Egen?”

  The older man looked down, was silent for a minute. Their food was served. Itale began to eat, shoveling it in, though he continued to watch Brunoy in puzzlement and hope. Brunoy looked at his plate, did not eat, and said finally, “Fear.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Not fear of the Censor, fear of the police. If that was all I had to fear…”

  He made some pretense of eating, set his fork down again.

  “In order to do what you’re doing, Itale, one must believe in it entirely, passionately. One must believe in the importance, the necessity of it. That belief is wealth, strength…health…”

  “I don’t know that we’re doing the right thing, Egen, or doing it the right way. I am doing all I know how to do—all I can find to do—It may all be useless, worse than useless.”

  “You know it is not.”

  “I hope it is not. And you, too.”

  “I do not hope. I do not have time for hope. I am a poorer man than you know, than you’re able to know. You have no idea what poverty is, Itale.” He spoke with open affection, tenderly, so that Itale, confused between what he had said and how he said it, did not know what to reply.

  “I gave up all I had,” he said at last, painfully.

  “You gave up all you could. It’s not your fault you’re rich!”

  “What I care about—What I care about most in the world, it’s no use talking about it here, I didn’t know it myself, until I gave it up. That’s what’s so stupid, I keep going ahead, working for the time to come, that’s what I care about, you say. But what I know is that my home is behind me, that I’ve lost it—let it go.”

  “Your home?”

  “My home, no metaphor, I mean the land, the place, the house I was born in—the dirt, the stupid dirt! I am tied to that land like an ox tied to a stake…”

  “If you don’t know where your home is, how shall you be a pilgrim?—You’re a hypocrite, Itale, you wouldn’t trade your homesickness for all the freedom in the world.”

  “But I am ashamed of it.”

  “Shame is t
he conscience of the rich.”

  “Oh, come on, Egen, write for us!”

  Brunoy coughed, smiled, shook his head.

  “You’re not afraid.”

  But his friend only smiled, luminous, elusive.

  When he left Brunoy Itale set off to see Brelavay, going some blocks out of his way to walk through the Eleynaprade. It was a sunny, hazy autumn day, the city grey and golden; leaves drifted underfoot in the walks of the great park. Itale liked the chestnut alleys and long lawns of old Queen Helen’s Fields, but the new “English” addition, with ruins, grotto, and so-called waterfall, struck him as contemptible. He thought of the caverns of Evalde over Malafrena, caves where sensation was drowned in the enormous, ceaseless thunder of an emprisoned stream plunging through darkness till it broke out torrential into sunlight and leaped to the lake a hundred feet below; what price plaster grottoes? He crossed the river on Old Bridge and headed out towards the Boulevard Prussia. All this section of the Trasfiuve had been built up in the last twenty years: long, straight streets of row houses, row after row after row. Because they were all alike there seemed no reason for any one of them to be there, and there also seemed no reason why they should ever cease, they might run on forever house after house, row after row: but if one walked on far enough, they ceased, stopped being, and with them the city ceased to exist, giving place to a field of burdock and mullein and shards, a dirt road going nowhere, perhaps a decaying shack or warehouse, and the hazy eastern hills. Walking those long dreary streets gave Itale the feeling of being caught in a stupid dream, and, as befitted the dream, when he got where he was going Brelavay was out. He left a note and started back. Crossing Old Bridge he leaned a while on the parapet to watch the silky bluish water running quietly to the south, reflecting the lindens of the Molsen Boulevard on the west bank. At the end of the parapet stood a stone figure of St Christopher, his large, stiff hand with fingers all the same length raised in benediction over all pilgrims and traffic of the bridge.