Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Do you know me, Gavrey?” she said, mocking and afraid.

  He moved then, took off his cap and ran his hand over his sweaty, dark reddish hair. “Aye, I know you, Miss Laura,” he said hoarsely. “You took me by surprise, sitting there.”

  She patted the hound, which had sat down by her and dropped its head nearly to the ground.

  “Here then, Roshe, get away!”

  He drew a long breath; he was as winded as the dog.

  “Let him be. No game up on San Givan?”

  He shook his head. He sat down on the grass, at some distance from her. “Now I’ve stopped I can’t stay up…Went up this morning before light. To get up high. Where they say the she-wolf is.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “Never a sign.”

  “No one’s ever run her, these five years. I wonder if there really is a wolf, if she’s only a hunters’ dream.”

  She watched him as he sat there, his loose dark hands on his knees, his chest rising and falling as he got his breath, the sunlight glinting in his hair.

  “She’s up there, all right. Your Kass saw her last month. But the dog fell on a deer scent. Led me half over the mountain and back, you fool dog…It must be getting on to noon. Ah! the…” He shrugged, looking over at Laura, a curious, quick, comradely glance. “I lost my last place, in Altesma, for too much hunting. Once I’m on the mountain I could go a week and never know it, same as this fool dog.”

  When he had gone, his hound trotting sore-footed at his heels, she could not get him out of her thoughts, that sharp, frank look of recognition, the half-smile on his face that had always been shut and set. She had caught him off guard, seen him himself, the hunter. She could not forget the moment, and when she met him again she saw that he had not forgotten it. He would not look at her, now. He never had spoken much to her, but he had used to look at her, in his intent, calm way, as if he were looking at a picture in a book.

  After a time she got used to him again, to his not looking at her. They met only at Valtorsa, in company with her parents, Count Orlant, Cousin Betta, Auntie, Rodenne and the rest. When a vist game was in session she would notice Gavrey’s hands, fine-boned, loose, and dark; she knew, without knowing she knew, the angle of his wrist, the position his left hand took half open on the table as he waited for the next card to fall.

  In the autumn she spoke to him again alone. She was at St Anthony’s, bringing flowers for the chapel for the service of All Saints; old Father Klement had kept her there. She was fond of the kind, ignorant, dirty old priest. She was the woman of his life; he did not know it, but she did. He had no assistant, and she had helped him set out the chrysanthemums, dahlias, and autumn daisies she had brought from her garden, flowers colored like fire and ash, crimson, russet, gold, dun and pale. The colors filled her eyes, the fresh rank smell of them clung to her hands, as she knelt in the dark chapel, hardly listening to the priest’s whispering mumble. The few old women who always came for the evening service were there, and Kass, who had been sent to fetch her, and, coming in as the service began, had got stuck with it. He was a young fellow, a bantam, not one to come pray with the old biddies if he could help it. There was another man, and presently she saw from the set of his shoulders and the thick curling hair that it was Gavrey. Had he gone devout? She doubted it, but there was no telling with these silent men. The peasant woman, wrinkled and toothless at forty, who never missed mass, took communion, confessed, boasted of her nephew in the seminary, kissed the priest’s hand, she might tell you, if you asked, that she did not believe in God. “But there’s the Saints, and the holy water is a great thing,” one such woman had said to Laura, rock-sure in her paganism. Then you might come on one of the hard-faced men who called the church a place for priests and women, come on in pain and glimpse a spiritual intensity, a terrible longing for God. They had a name for these crises. “He’s borne down,” they said.—“Why’s Sorentay’s Tomas off at church then?”—“He’s borne down hard, these two months…” Suffering, misery, mystery, what was it that bore them down? They could not say, but they recognised the agony; and so did Laura Sorde. She glanced again across the chapel at Gavrey. Was he borne down? Was the hunter caught? It was a strange thought. Sometimes when she saw a man in church she was strangely moved. A man on his knees, his dirty thick boot-soles sticking up behind and his head bared and bowed, asking for help, used as she was to it it was strange, moving her to a pity very close to shame.

  Gavrey came out of the chapel directly after her, and spoke. Young Kass was waiting for her, Father Klement would follow. Well defended, she felt bold, curious, wanting to provoke the man who would not look at her. “What brought you out here tonight? Are you borne down?”

  “I came to see you,” he answered.

  She thought she had stopped, there on the steps, but found herself walking on beside him.

  “What for?” she said at last, and winced at her own words and tone, hypocritical, false.

  “How do I know? I came to see you. That’s all.”

  “Very well, you’ve seen me.”

  He stopped and faced her, by the wicket gate of the churchyard. They were the same height, their eyes met straight. “Did you ever look at me?”

  She glanced round at Kass unhitching the horse, at the old women chatting on the path. He had spoken aloud as if they were alone in all the world, in a passionately resentful voice; but self-defense was a strong habit in him, and her movement roused it. He half turned from her and spoke lower. “Why did you ask me was I borne down? What’s that to you?”

  Laura, with a wolf by the tail, said, “I’m sorry I said that.”

  “Aye, sorry. Will you leave me alone? Will you leave me alone?” He was gasping for breath as when he had stood above her in the orchard six moths ago. He broke away from her, strode off into the dusk along the road under the pines of San Larenz.

  As they drove home with Kass, Father Klement asked, “What was Berke Gavrey telling you, then?” The old priest had a piping voice. Laura felt that every ear in Val Malafrena, every beast in the dark woods, could hear him piping, “What was Berke Gavrey telling you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Eh?”

  “Nothing, I said.”

  “Oh aye? I thought he was telling you something.”

  Laura kept silent.

  “He’s a good fellow,” the priest said, pipy and sententious. “As good as need be no matter what they say of him.”

  “I never heard anything against him,” Laura said, and at once accused herself of complicity with him.

  Father Klement was delighted: new ears for old gossip, irresistible. He never considered what was suitable for a priest to repeat, whether the gossip he relayed was offensive or malicious; to him it was all words, stories, the savor of existence. “Why, now, you never heard what that Val Altesma woman had to say?” And he went on to tell Laura that Gavrey had left Val Altesma because he had got a girl pregnant, a peasant freeholder’s daughter at Kulme. “She had nobody but womenfolks and an old granddad, the Altesma woman said, so there was nothing she could do but tell the story, and she did that, and so he got away and went to Raskayna where he was under-steward, and they say he was a terror among the young women there as well.”

  “That’s stupid, a stupid story,” Laura said. “If all that was true Count Orlant would never have taken him on.”

  “Why not?” the old priest asked, puzzled. “It’s true enough, but so’s it true that he don’t make trouble here. He’s a good man and a good steward, none ever said different in Val Maalafren.” He sought a suitable moral and said at last with satisfaction, “Young men will be wild, before they settle down.”

  What do you know about it, you fat old capon? thought Laura; and she upbraided the priest for gossiping. Father Klement got flustered and looked beseechingly at the gentle, tall, soft-voiced girl who had suddenly turned on him as stern and hard as her father. “But I did say he’s a good man!” he appealed.

  “A
good man! If he’s done what you say, what right have you to him good? I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  All the trees of San Larenz were listening, and Gavrey the hunter hidden amongst them listening, understanding.

  What was terrible to her was that, with nothing said, with hardly a word and no touch between them, for they had never touched, yet she understood him, and he her. There was no place to hide.

  She had believed that only in the spirit is there true understanding: flesh is the darkness that hides the light, the barrier to communion. Now all that unquestioned belief fell away from her. It is the spirit that is alone, she thought with a kind of horror of certainty, and the spirit that dies. Only in the body do we know communion, and hold fast to the present, which is eternal. The shadows will not wither away to leave the child soul bathed in light at last: what last, what endures, is the darkness, the opacity and weight of shadow-casting body; the breath of life is breath itself. One night in November she was sewing after supper with her mother, and rose to refill the bronze oil-lamp at her elbow. She poured in the oil too fast, overfilling the lamp; the flame on the wick sputtered, flickered, went out, drowned in the fuel that fed it. She watched in fascination. The oil spilled on her fingers, on the table, “Why, look what you’re doing, Laura,” her mother said, “don’t get it on your dress!” The girl stood staring at the lamp, the drowned wick, a little black scrap. The shadows had closed in about her. She turned to her mother, and Eleonora got up, spilling her sewing things about her—“Laura, what is it?”

  “Oh, Mother, I’m borne down,” Laura said, and began to laugh, then cry; then she got control of herself, all within a minute, and would say no more to Eleonora except that she was overtired.

  She went to bed and lay awake, trying to exorcise from herself, from her body, by sheer force of will, the presence of the man who obsessed her. She did not pray.

  In the end she found her help in the knowledge that had undone her in the first place, the knowledge that he was as helpless as she. His desire, which conquered her, put him at a disadvantage: he was driven by it, but unwillingly, afraid to trust her. When his chance came he missed it. They spoke together, having met by chance, by the lake-shore in a red December dusk.

  “I’m leaving Valtorsa,” he said, “going away.”

  The sunset light was on his face, making it ruddy, vivid.

  “Going away? Why?”

  “For the same reason I left Altesma.”

  “I thought you were fired, there.”

  She knew how to hurt him. “Fired? Who told you that? I left of my own will.”

  She looked scornful and said nothing.

  “And to get away from a woman that wouldn’t let me alone,” he said in his rancor.

  “Shall you go back and marry her, then?”

  “Not I! Why the devil should I? Do I look the marrying kind?”

  “Better than to burn,” the girl said, weak with hatred of him, spite, fear, yearning. “No matter what kind you are.”

  “Oh aye! and no doubt you’d have me, to save me from the fire?”

  He flushed up crimson in the red light, and took a step backwards. Trapped and self-destructive, afraid, he said hastily, “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “You torment yourself, Berke,” she said, looking at him and speaking with her old natural gentleness. He did not know he was her equal, and she was never going to tell a man who did not know it without being told.

  “And you?” he muttered.

  “Maybe, but what’s that to you?”

  And she smiled at him; but he did not answer, standing wordless and helpless. When she saw that she was ashamed of him. “You should stay here,” she said calmly. “You’ll run out of places to move to. Besides, you owe something to Count Orlant, I should think.”

  “Aye, that I do,” he said. He spoke almost submissively. She longed to be away from him. She pitied him and wished him gone, out of her sight.

  “I talk of going, but I’ll stay, no doubt,” he said.

  “I suppose you will,” she answered indifferently.

  She no longer looked at him, but out over the lake, where the red light was fading into obscure brown-violet dusk. She was desolate. Now he came to her, reached out to touch her, and she allowed him: because he must have it that she allow him, that she permit him, that she be the lady and he the servant, that there not be between them any honesty, but only this game of owner and beggar. He felt her unresponsiveness and let her go, saying, “It’s no good—why do you make a fool of me?”

  She looked at him then. “You are a fool, Berke,” she said. “It’s not my doing. If you haven’t got the courage to walk this road then you’d better go back to Val Altesma, to the first girl you ran away from.” She turned and went down the shore away from him, towards the promontory. He let her go.

  That was the end of it, she told herself, and so it was, though he did not leave Valtorsa. When she had to be with him she spoke to him as little as possible, ignoring his cringing, questioning look and her own humiliated, defiant longing for a kind word from him, the touch of his hand. She could not shake him off. He was the first man to waken her. No other took his place. The weeks and months went on, and without knowing it Laura nursed the sterile desire, tried to keep it alive. There was so little in her life, and he was the only man who had ever touched her. She let herself dream of some future reconciliation and understanding, as if there were anything left to reconcile or explain.

  Now she had lost even that pretense, the last bit of warmth in the cold. She wondered at first if he had proposed to Piera simply in order to hurt her, Laura. She told herself that that was mere self-flattery. He was afraid of Guide Sorde, and not afraid of Orlant Valtorskar, that was the principal key—perhaps. Perhaps he wanted Piera more than he had wanted her. She told herself she must accept this possibility, but she did not. It was because he did not desire Piera as a woman that he was bolder, able to propose the marriage that he had not dared even envisage with Laura, the hunter caught in his own trap: of this she was certain, and then she called herself a fool for her certainty, for her vanity, for clinging to the love he had never even offered her. And now he had succeeded in dividing her from her friend. She was not jealous of Piera. She was envious, she always had envied Piera, envy was part of the rock their friendship was built upon; that was no harm. But he had spoilt the frankness between them, prevented the unreserved conversation that was the one relief to Laura’s essential loneliness. She had never told Piera of the sensual storm she had gone through, never said anything about Gavrey at all; partly through inability, lacking the very words to speak of that middle ground, that obscure country, between the vocabulary of animal sex which she as a farmer’s child of course knew but was not, as a lady, to speak, and the vocabulary of love and sentiment; partly also because she had felt no need to speak. Now that she wanted to, in order to clear the air and restore the trust between her and her friend, she could not. She was ashamed to. She was ashamed of the meanness of the story, ashamed of herself for wanting to tell it, even.

  And this was the wisdom and strength of her womanhood, of her twenty-three years…

  The worst of it was the fear of losing Piera. That she could not bear, and it was not many days before she set her teeth on her humiliation and told her friend as much of the story as she could. She did it awkwardly and unclearly, so that Piera did not understand at first, asking in dismay, “But you mean you love—you loved him, Laura?”

  “No,” the older girl answered steadily, “I mean I could hardly keep my hands off him. And it was the same with him. For a while.”

  She saw Piera climbing up over that fence, looking at the strange lands on the other side. She felt herself corrupted, corrupting. But Piera said simply, after a little while, “No wonder you understood about Givan Koste.”

  Laura was afraid to speak.

  “We came at it different ways. You found too much of what I didn’t find enough of…But what’s wrong
with Berke, what was he afraid of?”

  “It wasn’t his fault.”

  “You; he was afraid of you,” Piera said, brooding. “Not of me. Because I’m not as strong as you; because he’s not in love with me. So it’s me he proposed to. How stupid he is! How stupid it all is!—I thought of accepting him, Laura. That night. I knew I could get him to ask again. He’s a very good overseer. I was afraid he might leave. And I can work with him. I’m beginning to learn what to do and how to do it, how the estate should be run. He’s taught me most of that. So—” She smiled rather bleakly.

  “Why should you not marry him?”

  “Because if I am marrying for practical reasons, Sandre is a much better match.”

  “Why should you not marry Sandre?” Laura asked in the same tone.

  “Why should I marry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They talked now quietly and openly, no shadow between them.

  “I don’t understand it,” Piera said. “I don’t really understand what happened between you and Berke. I don’t understand what love is, or what it’s supposed to be. Why is it supposed to be my whole life?”

  Laura shook her head. She looked up at the golden slope of grass above the boat house.

  “Itale always said the time will come. But we wait, and we wait. What are we waiting for, Laura? Why does he have to be in jail, why do men have to be such fools, why are we wasting our lives? Is love the answer to all that? I don’t understand, I don’t understand…”

  PART SIX

  The Necessary Passion

  I

  The way into the St Lazar Prison was through a twelve-foot gate in an iron fence, across a strip of cobbled yard, through a second gate in a second fence and under a tunnel of naked stone formed by the four-foot-thick walls of the building, and so into a corridor off which a large, vaulted room opened to the right, the warders’ room. The air in the corridor and the warders’ room was damp, with a sweet, musty odor. Windowless, the room was as silent as a wine-cellar or a cave, yet a queer, disagreeable rumor just beneath the range of hearing suggested that behind the further walls and doors the place was not silent, not empty, but crammed full, jammed, swarming. Luisa Paludeskar kept her head high as she and the official who accompanied her waited in the warders’ room for the prison clerk. She held her silk skirts in one hand to keep them from the moist, filthy floor. She did not look about her, did not speak. This was her hour of victory. She had worked for it for twenty-six months.