Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Two clerks hurried in, wiping their mouths from lunch, and then an immensely tall, fat man in the uniform of a lieutenant of the Polana militia. The official with Luisa opened his mouth to speak but she beat to it, saying in a clear voice the words that she had earned the right to say: “Lieutenant, Mr Konevin brings you an order from the High Court, signed by the prime minister, countermanding the sentence of the prisoner Itale Sorde.” The big man put out his hand for the paper which Luisa’s companion offered him. “How do, Mr Konevin,” he muttered, staring at Luisa. “Yes, indeed. Your servant, miss.”

  “Baroness Paludeskar, Lieutenant Glay,” Konevin muttered; muttering seemed to be the natural form of speech here. “You’ll find it all in order, Glay. Immediate release. See there.” They bent their heads over the document and muttered lower. The lieutenant held the paper away from his enormous body as if afraid it would scorch him. “Yes, yes, Larenzay, look up Sorde Itale, entered December ’27.”

  Both clerks raised their heads. On entering the room they had gone one to a table, the other to a desk, and sat down, without speaking and scarcely glancing at Konevin and Luisa. The one at the table had a head that grew straight out of his shoulders, with a warty, grey face. The one at the desk was thin and wiry with long, lank hair and a mouth like a razor-cut. “Sorde?” he said, and the name spoken aloud was startling in this muttering oppressive silence. “Sorde’s dead.”

  “Dead? When?”

  “Last week. End of the week.”

  “I see. We’re having the epidemic, you know,” the lieutenant informed Konevin and Luisa. “Worse than usual this year. Look up the entry, Larenzay.”

  “White ledger. Specially recommended prisoner,” the neckless clerk mumbled in a deep bass.

  “Get the burial list for February, Larenzay. Please to sit down, baroness, please to sit down.” The huge lieutenant brought up a chair for her and dusted it with his sleeve. Luisa did not sit down. She feared to move at all. Her ears sang, a shrill hum. The lank-haired clerk argued, the neckless one mumbled, the lieutenant muttered, Konevin put in an exasperated remark. She heard nothing they said, only their grotesque voices, frogs on the marshes of hell.

  “Please to sit down, baroness.”

  “It may take some time, baroness,” Konevin said.

  She gave in and sat down, letting her silken skirt drag on the floor. Summoning up all her self-control, she said very softly to Konevin, who stood beside her, “Is he dead, then?”

  “Apparently not, baroness,” Konevin replied. Ears here were tuned to whispers: the lank-haired clerk shouted reproachfully as if the others had all been in the wrong, “On the sick list, not the death list,” and the neckless one droned, “Specially recommended.” Luisa shuddered all over and put her hands to her cheeks. The blood which had dropped sickeningly from her head was returning in a hot wave, dizzying her. She sat perfectly still until she knew she could trust herself not to faint and then said in an even voice, smiling a little, to Konevin, “I wonder that a man can stay alive two years in this place.”

  “Much longer than that, baroness,” the official answered stiffly. He had made it clear when she met him at the office of the governor that he did not like the business she was on; since entering the prison he had been completely rigid, wearing a fixed look of distaste and exasperation on his round, ruddy face.

  “What is the epidemic?”

  “Prison fever, I suppose,” Konevin answered, and drew a short breath. He was afraid of infection, Luisa realised, and the thought gave her pleasure.

  “He has been ill, then? Are they going to release him?”

  “Yes, baroness. Look here, Glay, I can’t spend the afternoon here. Tell them to get on with it.”

  “In a minute, Mr Konevin, in a minute,” the huge man answered, cringing yet unmoved; this was his domain, not Konevin’s, and both knew it. The lank-haired clerk was writing, his pen scraping with a loud, hard sound like his voice. The lieutenant went to the table, shifted papers about, muttered with the neckless clerk. There was no clock. Luisa sat turning a ring on her finger, pressing her right hand hard with her left, staring at the watery gleam that ran on the grey silk of her skirt; she could barely hold still, she could not endure to wait any longer, but still the unmarked minutes went by and went by, and there was no telling if the time was long or short or if it was passing at all. There was a noise out in the corridor and a guard in militia uniform came in with a tall, bald man in his sixties. They stopped just inside the doorway. The bald man stood stooped over, staring vaguely; he was wearing shapeless grey trousers and an old coat too large for him, and was barefoot. Realising that he was a prisoner, Luisa looked hastily away from him.

  “Sorde Itale,” the lieutenant was saying, and the guard was also saying the name, “Sorde, specially recommended!” Sick with disgust and anger Luisa sat still and said, “This is not the man. Will you act on this order of release, lieutenant, or must I come here with the governor of the prison?”

  “Not the man? What ward, Liyvek?”

  “Sick ward,” the militiaman said. “This is him.”

  “Extraordinary inefficiency,” Konevin said, and the lieutenant, suddenly angry and frightening in his anger, swung his great bulk and height towards the militiaman: “Who is this, take him back,” he said, while the militiaman repeated stolidly, “This is him.” The prisoner stood as if indifferent, his empty gaze crossing Luisa’s. He raised his hands to rub his eyes, and with terror she recognised the gesture.

  “It is him, it’s him,” she said in a whisper to Konevin. Again all the others heard her whisper, the lieutenant drew himself up righteous and vindicated, the militiaman stepped back and the clerks muttered. Konevin looked at her coldly. She sat still. It was Konevin who went up to the prisoner, although not close to him, and said, in a stifled and embarrassed tone, “Sorde—Mr Sorde?”

  The man stood patiently, unresponding.

  “We’re here with your release, Mr Sorde. Your sentence is countermanded by the High Court. Do you understand?”

  He came back to Luisa. “The man’s very sick,” he said with nervous distaste. “I have no idea what you can do. An impossible situation. Are you quite certain that you…”

  “Will you have them finish whatever formalities are necessary, please.”

  She did not look at the prisoner.

  “One of our officials is bringing the prisoner’s possessions, baroness,” the lieutenant explained, officious and self-confident now, looming over her. “All his belongings when arrest was effected, they’ve been in confiscation, do you see, baroness, nobody has disturbed them.”

  “Better send, for the blacksmith,” the lank-haired clerk said, and the neckless one snarled, “Don’t need the smith, he’s been in the sick wards,” and the lieutenant muttered, “Has he a fetter, Liyvek?” and the militiaman answered, “No,” while Konevin walked away down the room clicking his tongue in a fit of impatience and disgust. And finally a guard came in with a valise, a string-tied bundle of clothing, and a small parcel wrapped in paper. The lieutenant opened the parcel and spread out its contents on the table with his enormous, white hands: a silver watch and chain, a pair of cufflinks, some copper change, a penknife. “The gentleman’s jewelry and all, you see, baroness, nothing has been touched,” he said. The valise and the bundle were spotted with a soft, bluish mold. “Can we go now?” Luisa said, but there were still papers to be prepared, the neckless clerk was writing something that must be written before they could go.

  “You can’t put the man in your cab, baroness,” Konevin said to her in a low voice as they stood at the desk. “The…state he’s in…”

  “What do you suggest I do instead?” Luisa demanded, and in reaction to Konevin’s pusillanimity she brought herself to go up to the man in grey and speak to him. She said his name and did not know what else to say. He did not seem to look directly at her, nor did he answer directly, but after a while he spoke, in a thin, hoarse voice: “May I sit down?”

 
His body and clothing stank of sweat and sickness. The coat he wore had been red or plum-colored, but was black with dirt. She could not touch him. She pointed to the wooden chair. “Yes, sit down.” He did not move. Once he rubbed his hand hard over his face in that gesture terribly familiar to her, and then stood again, patient, blinking his swollen eyes.

  “The fever, you know, baroness,” the lieutenant was saying as he held out a set of folded papers to her. “Makes ’em dull, no doubt he’ll be better soon. This here is the order of release, this is his passport, Mr Konevin will explain, the guard will take his things out for you. An honor to be of service to you, baroness.”

  The guard who had brought Itale in was gone, and Konevin would not help her; the clerks and the lieutenant were watching, malevolent. She had to take Itale’s arm to make him move, to make him come with her, out of the warders’ room, under the stone arch; he shuffled, lame and unsteady. When they came out onto the cobbled yard into the clear, cold sunshine of a day of March he stopped and put his hands up over his eyes in pain.

  “Come on, come with me,” she coaxed him. The guards at the prison entry, the guard at the outer gate, stood watching, curious and without sympathy. What she was doing was wrong, was against what they wanted, what they stood for, what they stood there for keeping the gates looked and the doors shut. What she had imagined and anticipated a thousand times as the moment of triumph was humiliating and grotesque. The driver of the cab that she had kept waiting stared at the shambling man with her and said, “Not inside,” and she had to give him ten kruner before he would let Itale ride inside the cab. Then she must climb into that cramped box with him and sit beside him, in uncontrollable aversion from and fear of his misery, his illness, his abjectness. He sat crouching, the hairless head nodding when the cab jolted, the hands lying lax on his thighs very large and dead white, like the hands of the lieutenant in the warders’ room.

  Konevin, who rode with the driver, proved most serviceable when they reached the hotel. She had planned to spend the night at the hotel and then take Itale on in her carriage to her Sovena estate, fifty miles to the north; the first part of that plan was dropped without discussion. Konevin found her horses and a landaulet, and got the hotel people to make up a bed in Luisa’s carriage. When this was done it was late afternoon. Itale in her carriage, and she in the landaulet with her maid, set off one behind the other, down the steep streets of Rakava, out the old north gate, past the factories, onto the long downslope of the highroad north.

  Roads were bad after the March rains. The Ras was in flood, and they had to go thirty miles out of their way to Foranoy, to cross at the bridge, and thirty miles back to the north road, so they were three nights and two days getting to their destination. The sick man continued most of the time in the same lassitude and indifference, asleep or in stupor, but when they arrived in the early morning he was feverish and could not walk at all. Luisa’s letter to the housekeeper had suffered the usual mail delay, so the house was half ready and half in cold disorder. It was raining. Luisa had the sick man put to bed, and sent for the doctor; but before he arrived she went to bed herself, worn out, and slept for twenty hours.

  The doctor, a sour man of the veterinary-barber-physician breed, said the patient was suffering a relapse brought on by the cold and discomfort of the journey. “Cold and discomfort,” Luisa repeated sarcastically, thinking of the walls of St Lazar; but she made no explanations to the doctor, having learned already, from the guards at the prison gate, from the cabdriver, from her maid, from her own feelings, not to mention jail. If the doctor knew, or could admit that he knew, where his patient had spent the last two years, he would consider both the man and the woman whose house he was in with contempt. He would take her money of course and provide his services, but he would hold himself superior. Good men do not get put in jail.

  Why was it like this, why was all her triumph turned to shame and mere, wretched inconvenience? He lay there sick and stupid day after day. He had never even clearly recognised her, never said her name, he was utterly out of reach, his mind gone. She did not dare ask the doctor if that blank stupor was caused by the disease or not, if it might lessen if the disease were cured, what hope of recovery there was. She looked into the sickroom once a day. She was unwilling to admit to herself that the sight of Itale now frightened and disgusted her, the bald head (shaved for lice, the doctor said), the blank look, the bony, yellowish body restless and yet slack. If she must look at that sick body it would take the place of the remembered lover, the young man in his strength. Those few nights, those few hours that she held to be the chief treasure of her life, the only time she had ever touched another person, would be tainted, degraded, with the prison taint, the smell of sickness and mortality. She would have nothing left at all. She must cling to the past, and to the future, when he would be himself again. But this was the future that she had dreamed of so long: Itale freed, the two of them here in the lonely house in the returning spring.

  It went on raining. They could not keep the house warm. The old housekeeper was ill and querulous; the steward of the estate came daily with questions she could not answer intelligently and justifications for loans, purchases, and sales he had made which she knew nothing about. The doctor came and went, silent and sour, with his bottle of fat black leeches. She rode out daily on one of the stiff-kneed old horses; there had been no hunters or riders to keep up the stables for many years. The peasant tenants went about their business, indifferent to the presence or absence of the landowner. She knew no one any longer in the town, six miles away, where her grandfather had laid the foundations of his fortune speculating on wartime food prices, and had been a great man. Bored and wretchedly lonely, Luisa felt as she had when she was a child here: shoved aside, forgotten. Yet it was she who had isolated herself, telling no one her plans, so that she and Itale could be alone for once…She wrote to Enrike, in Vienna, that he must take his leave early and come spend it at the estate. “I must have you here,” she wrote. “I am at my wits’ end.”

  Never had the trials and setbacks, the affronts and efforts of her long siege on the Krasnoy government so exhausted and defeated her as had these two weeks since she went with the order of release to St Lazar. She knew now how much she had enjoyed that siege, the strategies and flatteries, the slow building-up of her influence, the outwitting of the malicious and outpacing of the stupid. She had, always with the single goal, though she might not speak or even think about it for days or weeks, made herself a considerable figure in the politics of the capital. She had done small and great favors for men and women less astute than herself; she had got her brother his diplomatic post in Vienna; she had become a friend of the grand duchess, and a friend of the rabble-rousing deputy Stefan Oragon; Prime Minister Cornelius came to her house on Roches Street for conversation with clever and discreet people; the new minister of finance, Raskayneskar of Val Altesma, had proposed marriage to her as a speculation that would profit them both. The Krasnoy Intelligencer was full of gossip about her, but no one had made a slander, personal or political, stick to her name. She had used all her gifts, used them gallantly, and made a complete, recognised conquest of her aim. She had conquered. And the conquest won by that brave career through the rooms and offices of the powerful, was this.

  The sight of the sick man, the memory of the sight of him, tormented her. Why must she be punished? Had she not worked to set him free, had she not succeeded? What was freedom, then? This desolation?

  The doctor had supplied a woman from town to look after Itale. One night when this nurse was downstairs eating her dinner Luisa went into the sickroom, driven by an angry restlessness. There was no light but that of a bright fire. She thought the sick man was asleep, but as she came near the bed he spoke: “Who’s there?”

  “I am,” she said. “Luisa. Do you know me?” She went up close to him, and spoke aloud, impatient and challenging. She could not see his face.

  He answered; his voice was weak but natural, his own voice
. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Where’s Amadey?”

  She went cold and the breath stuck in her throat.

  “He is not here,” she whispered at last.

  The sick man paid no attention. He turned his head a little. The red firelight shone on the dry curve of his cheek. He lay there gazing straight ahead. Luisa went to a chair at the foot of the bed and sat down; she was shaky now, and soon stood up cautiously to leave the room. As she did so he gave a long sigh and murmured something, then spoke two words clearly: “The snow,” and lay silent again.

  She hurried out of the room, went to her own room, and stood at the window that looked out over the front garden. Between running clouds the full moon shone and faded. She saw the road, a straight, light streak between dark fields, leading away from the front gate. When she was a child she had seen that road, on which adults, visitors, her parents, came and went, as freedom: to be hers, her way, when the time came. She would be free to go, to come, as she liked, dependent upon no one. She went on that road now as she liked, she had her freedom. The word had lost its meaning, like the word love. Had she not loved Itale? and he her? But she did not know who he was. She had worked to free a man, and he was not that man who lay sick in the room in this house. What did it mean, that they had been lovers? What had she been to him? He did not know her. He had not said her name. He had asked for a dead man, and he had said, “The snow.” The memories, accretions, complexities, affections, anxieties, the trivial and immense world of which she had for a while been one element, she could hear fragments of that if she wanted to listen to his mind wandering in fever, but then where was she? Astray in a strange place, the world as Itale knew it, his world, of which she was not and had never been the center. To accept the limitless richness, the independence, of a being not her own, was to lose herself. She could not do it. She had never been able to do it but those few times, those hours, which she now denied. What was the good of that, of love so-called, of hands and bodies touching and meeting, all that, when this was the truth, this miserable isolation of the dying body—the sick animal?