Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Come on. Come on, sir.”

  “Where now,” he said, sitting up sick and angry. “Let me alone.”

  “Smith’s shop, sir,” the guard said in his loud toneless voice. “Come on.”

  When Itale understood he took hold of the bench with both hands as he sat on it, and said with a kind of gasping laugh, “No, no. I won’t come on. Not there. I won’t—I won’t put my own neck in the collar.”

  “It’s regulations, sir. Has to be done.”

  “No,” Itale said.

  The deaf guard called two others. Adept, and without much brutality, they pinioned Itale, frogmarched him to the prison smithy, held him while the smith welded the loose ankle fetter onto his leg, brought him back to the little, dark, cold room, fastened a short length of chain between the fetter and hasp set into the wall, and left him. He was trembling and cursing, in tears. “Sorry, sir,” the deaf guard said as he left. “You’ll get used to it.”

  III

  Under a grey sky Piera Valtorskar left Aisnar on December 19, 1827; under a grey sky the family carriage lumbered southward over the roads of the Western Marches; and as it passed through the village of Vermare, high in the foothills, the gray sky descended softly all at once in flakes, heavy, thick, silent, filling all the air, whitening the fat rumps of the horses, the fur cap of the driver, hiding the way ahead. With a great push Piera got the window down so that she could put out her hand and feel the cold touch of winter. “Oh my dear we’ll catch our death, oh do put up the window, oh do put on your gloves!” cried Cousin Betta Berachoy, who had gone all the way to Aisnar in the carriage alone to fetch Piera back, since Count Orlant had come down with a very bad bronchitis a week before he was to set off for her and spend Christmas at the Belleynins’, but Cousin Betta was only too glad to go, indeed she was, the idea of that poor child coming all the way alone in the carriage like a pea in a gourd even if old Godin was as trusty as could be—At any rate, Cousin Betta was so upset that Piera raised the window again, only murmuring, “It never snows in Aisnar.”

  “Oh I believe it does, indeed it does I’m sure. I suppose the Warm Fountain quite melts it, wouldn’t that be odd, does it? Oh dear me how very thick it’s coming—if we should be snowed in up in the passes—Far from any house!” Cousin Betta’s eyes shone. From time to time romances, stronger fare than The New Heloise, had been finding their way up to Portacheyka, and Cousin Betta read them, and though the possibility of getting snowbound on the mountain road was neither remote nor pleasant, the phrase “far from any house” sounded so like a novel that it thrilled her. Piera merely said, “The wind mostly keeps the Portacheyka pass clear.” Cousin Betta had discovered already that Piera had become a strongminded young woman at the convent; she was always calm, and doubtless never read romances.

  The snow made little trouble for their horses. It melted as soon as it touched earth after its fall through the soft windless air. Only as they reached Portacheyka at the end of the afternoon was it holding, icing all the roofs and gables of the steep town as a baker ices a dark plumcake. “Oh but look, look,” cried Piera, not calm, “the mountains, look at the snow on the roofs—” and then she fell silent. The golden lighted windows of the little town under the great slopes almost veiled in driving snow and nightfall, the welcome of the lighted windows amongst the strangeness of winter, that was too much for her. All the way down from Portacheyka to the lake she was grateful for the falling snow and darkness that hid from her the orchards, the fields, the mountains, the lake. She did not want to see them. They were not hers to see. Even as the carriage rolled onto the paved court in back of her home, even as she saw her father, bundled up till he looked more like a bolster than a man, coming to her with snow on his shoulders and his arms held out, she was saying in her heart, “Why did I come home, why did I come home!” Then she was in her father’s arms, squashed against his rough coat, the snow off his shoulder cold on her ear.

  “Are you all right, papa—Are you well?”

  “Yes, of course, I’m fine,” said Count Orlant hoarsely, while the tears ran down his handsome face. He had been quite ill, and was sixty-two this winter. It had occurred to him that he might die. He was not particularly afraid of dying, but he had been afraid of not seeing Piera again. “Well, well, well, what a commotion,” he said, still with his arm around her, and then the others were around them, Eleonora and Laura and Mariya the cook and Miss Elisabeth who lived on at Valtorsa, old Givan and the rest, bandying Piera about and bringing her inside in a flurry of welcoming faces and voices, warmth and light. Guide Sorde had not come outside, and treated the excitement coolly: “Well, contesina, three months away and you see how your value’s risen?” It was true she had been gone only three months, but last summer had been her next to last visit home, this was her last. Guide knew the difference as well as any of them. He consistently called her you, now, instead of thou. None of them forgot that she was to be married, that she no longer belonged to them nor they to her, that this was the last time they would see Piera Valtorskar. When she was in her own in her own room, she lay thinking, and her thoughts were as bleak as her body was comfortable. The last time. Itale had been right, of course, you can’t come back, there is no coming home. She looked over at her bookshelf. There was the book he had given her, the Vita Nova, the New Life, its gold-lettered back winking comfortably in the firelight. But she did not want the New Life. She wanted the old one.

  The next night, Christmas eve, all the Valtorsa people but Auntie, with the Sordes and Sorentays and many people of the estates, went in to Portacheyka for the midnight mass. It had snowed again during the day, clearing after sunset. Carriage-lamps and lanterns crossed yellow beams over the snow, snow on the forests of the mountainsides showed faint in starlight. The church of Portacheyka was crowded from wall to wall as always on Christmas, the little boys of the choir sang shrilly, babies squalled, old men sighed long, horselike, devout sighs and scratched their necks under their holiday white shirts, little old women who went to mass daily muttered the service a word or two ahead of the priest; in the hot candle light the cross shone like molten gold above the altar; now and then one got a dry, clean whiff of the pineboughs that decorated the church, through the smell of packed humanity, or shivered in an icy, inexplicable draft of air creeping along the stone floor amongst all the legs in skirts or trousers. It took the crowd half an hour to come out of the church, and everyone stood around in the street waiting for the rest of the party. Children got lost, horses stamped, snow-dust glittered in rays and shafts of lantern-light and lamp-light. While the older people found the friends and relatives they had brought in or wanted to greet in town, Piera and Laura joined the young Sorentays, who were singing the old carol of the Angels.

  We have heard the angels sing

  Sweetly on the mountainsides,

  And the echoing valleys ring

  With the song that well betides:

  Gloria in excelsis Deo!

  Alexander Sorentay went flat on the Glorias and his betrothed, Mariya the daughter of Advocate Kseney, cried, “Oh, Saandre! don’t sing so loud!” and everybody laughed. On the way home, crammed in the Valtorskar carriage with Count Orlant, Guide, Eleonora, Cousin Betta, Emanuel, Perneta, and the overseer Gavrey, Piera and Laura kept up their carolling until Guide himself joined in his baritone on the Glorias, and Eleonora, looking up into his face as she sat squeezed next to him, said, “Guide, I haven’t heard you sing in twenty years!”

  “I have,” said Laura. “When he shaves, but he always stops in the middle.”

  “Sing on, then,” Guide said, and they all sang; Count Orlant had lost his voice when he was ill, but he thumped time on the windowframe. They all stopped at the Sorde house for the supper and Christmas cake after the mass; the cake, shaped like a log, was twined with holly and ivy; Count Orlant discoursed on hollytrees, standing stones, and druids; nobody went to bed till five. At eleven some of them went to the morning service at St Anthony chapel up the lake-shore. The
pines above the chapel sparkled with melting snow in the wintry sunlight. On the north side of each headstone in the little churchyard snow lay white, though the graves themselves were bare. The words of the service were half lost in the sound of the wind in the forests of San Larenz. After the service Piera and Laura walked in the churchyard, waiting for Eleonora. They separated a little as Piera wandered on reading the inscriptions. All the stones were old, the churchyard was not used any longer. Many of them were small, unmarked, the graves of infants dead a hundred years ago. All the names were familiar names. Itale Sorde, 1734-1810. In te Domine speravi.—She stood still. She looked at the graveyard dappled with patches of snow and shadows of the pines, at the squat stone chapel, its eaves dripping with thawing snow, at the lake lying calm in the winter noon, at Laura coming towards her, tall and pale in her coat and fur-trimmed cap.

  They stood side by side there for a minute.

  “I can remember him standing in front of the south windows. I had to reach up to hold his hand. He seemed so tall…”

  “He died the year after I was born.”

  “It’s strange, how when Itale and I die, there won’t be anyone, anyone in all the world, who ever saw him, ever knew him. Till then he’s not really dead. But after that…”

  “But there’s an afterlife,” Piera said timidly.

  “Perhaps,” Laura said, still looking at the grave.

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No.”

  They spoke simply and thoughtfully.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Laura said. “In te Domine speravi…Just for it to be all over, all gone; air and earth and sun. Would that be so bad?”

  “But—but I was just thinking—Your grandfather, he was young, a young man, seventy years ago. Young, like—like any young man now—like us. And then we get old. And maybe he was in love. Of course he was, with your grandmother, and they got married, and they lived, and had two sons, and they thought, and talked, and wanted things, and there was wind and rain and sunshine on the snow and they saw it, and…now…It seems so strange. And there were the people before them, and now us, and the people that come after us, and we can’t know any of them, because time keeps going on and on. What was my own father like, when he was twenty? Does he even remember himself?—I have to believe in the afterlife, I think. It would be so strange and senseless without it—never to understand—” She looked around the graves streaked with sun and shadow, and her light voice shook a little. “Why were they ever young?”

  Gavrey came round the corner of the church. “Your mother was asking for you, Miss Laura,” he said, standing cap in hand by the wicket-gate.

  Piera walked home with him and Cousin Betta. He had proved a good, reliable manager, and had taken the onus of running the estate from Count Orlant, but he had never spoken to Piera more than civility required him to do. They did not speak now; but Cousin Betta did. Piera escaped from her to Count Orlant’s study, where, a bit tired by the long Christmas night, he sat beside his fireplace bedecked with garlands and Cupids and a few stray French horns carved in the same greyish native marble as the headstones in St Anthony churchyard; there was a bright fire on the hearth; Piera sat down next to him, and they talked. Count Orlant had discovered, this past summer, that he could talk to his daughter. It was very like talking with his wife, in the old days; after all she had not been much older than Piera was now. They rarely said much, but somehow it was very pleasant. In fact it was the pleasantest thing he knew; especially now, in this winter cold. He had spent some desolate hours the past month when he was ill. He foresaw and accepted his loneliness when Piera should be married and gone. But the comfort of her presence, now, outweighed it all. He was content.

  Piera herself was not content, but was happy, as she sat with her father before the fire; happier, at least, than she had ever been last summer. All those weeks at home had been a time of strain, suspense, toneless and colorless. She had been waiting, waiting, for what? It must be for marriage, for love. She was home but not home for good, betrothed but alone, in the middle, suspended, waiting. It had been all wrong. She had written Givan Koste every post, a dull note once a fortnight. Writing them had been a chore, as bad as her compositions for Miss Elisabeth, the Duties of the Young Female…If Givan loved her why was he not there? She had left home, gone back to Aisnar, with relief. Had she been happy then this autumn, in Aisnar? Of course, but still it had been waiting; now the waiting was over, now time went fast and she clung to the moments, treasured them. Everything now was for the last time. She would not think either back or ahead.

  Twelfth-night came and passed bringing snapping cold, clear weather. The roads were frozen so the horses’ hooves rang like bells, the sun was bright in a sky of dark, blazing blue. Laura and Piera rode in to Portacheyka for the mail, and the overseer Gavrey, having business at the mill, went with them, still saying nothing. The girls went on to the Golden Lion leading his horse, as the Lion served as tavern, hotel, coaching station, post office, and livery stable; as they went Piera said, “Of all the close-mouthed men in the Montayna that one’s the closest.”

  “He can talk,” Laura said, indifferently.

  “I doubt it. He guards his tongue as if it were golden.”

  “Who does talk, here, but us women? I suppose men jabber all the time, down there?” Laura often teased Piera about the sophisticated ways and customs of Aisnar, it was a game between them, but just now there was a sting in her words. Piera knew she had in some way been tactless, and said no more about Gavrey. They greeted the old hostler of the Lion and gave him the horses, and after his due bit of conversation went on in and greeted the innkeeper’s wife in her shining domain of oak and brass; she was ready for them, handing three letters across the bar, one for Piera, two for Laura. “Ah!” said Laura, coming alive. “Thank you, Mrs Karel!”

  “Oh aaye, from Dom Itaal, I saw it this mornin’ first thing in the sack, I know his black writin’ ,” said Mrs Karel with a smugness that declared mere illiteracy no handicap. After her due bit of conversation the girls set off for Emanuel’s house. “Come on, Peri,” Laura said, “hurry up, I want to read it. What’s this other one I wonder, it must be for uncle. And yours is from…?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Piera.

  “Itale’s still has the return address in Rakava on it. That’s why we haven’t heard from him for a month. The mails must be slow in the east. It’s such a long way.” Walking at twice her usual pace, and studying the cover of the letter, which she would not dishonor by opening on the street, Laura strode down the cobbled streets and steps, Piera in her wake, to Emanuel’s house. He was out; Perneta received them, and without wasting any more time she and Laura opened Itale’s letter and read it standing, while Piera retired into a chair by the window that looked out northward through the pass, and read her letter from Givan Koste. It was a quiet, fond letter, husbandly. Little Battiste enclosed a note written in a round clear hand: “Dear Countess Piera, the preserved ginger was very good although it was very hot so that I ate a little at a time, but I have eaten it all. I hope you are well. Father is well. I am well. My rabbits are well. They like to eat oat meal as you said. With all good wishes for a happy New Year, I am your loving friend, Battiste Venseslas Koste.”

  She wanted to show the child’s note to Laura, and yet did not do so. It was so queer, that is, it would seem so queer to Laura, that this child was to be Piera’s child, her stepson. Here he was, seven years old, eleven years younger than Piera, your loving friend Battiste Venseslas Koste—well, Laura was not used to the idea, as Piera was. No need to embarrass her. “What does Itale have to say?”

  “Read it, my dear. Now, Laura, you’ve read it twice, let Piera have it. What’s that? Another letter?”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot. Look: ‘For Mr Sorde of Val Malafrena, Portacheyka, Mont. Prov.’—now who’s it for? Father or uncle?”

  “Emanuel will know. I must look after my baking, I’ll be back.”

  Laura perched on the
arm of the chair and reread her brother’s letter as Piera read it.

  “Rakava, 18 November 1827.”

  “Look at that!” said Laura, “two months to get here! Even in winter and clear across the country, how can it take two months? His first letter from Rakava only took two weeks!”

  “Now hush,” said Piera, reading.

  “My dear family: I’m sorry I missed last week’s post, and trust that you have not given me up for lost. I have been busy ever since I arrived here, and my quiet week at Esten seems several centuries in the past. My impression of Rakava remains much the same as when I last wrote: I still dislike the city, and still find it exceptionally interesting. The misery of the poor here is beyond anything I have seen. I am glad not to be alone in a place where it is very easy to become discouraged. Young Agostin has put up a pair of red curtains to cheer up our rooms and save us washing the windows. My contribution to the domestic economy has been a large box of Gossek’s Wonderful Powder. I would not myself call it wonderful. The Prussians eat it up enthusiastically, no doubt thinking it a thoughtful gesture on the part of a stranger.”

  “The Prussians?” said Piera.

  “Cockroaches. Eva always calls them Prussians.”

  “Oh! I thought he meant people. Let me read that over.”

  “—of a stranger. I wish they would all die in awful agony, but I don’t think they will.

  “If my letters are delayed, please don’t be alarmed. The State mail service has existed for only three years in the Polana—the Polana is historically disinclined to do anything the other nine provinces are doing—and I am assured that it is as slow and as untrustworthy as any censor’s heart could desire. Agostin and I will probably take the Krasnoy coach during Christmas week, and when I am back in Mallenastrada you can trust my letters to come regularly again. And what’s much more I can look forward to receiving yours. I have not heard from you since the week before I left for Esten (I am not accusing, you know, only lamenting) and feel rather as if I had made my way to the nethermost pole of the Earth.”