Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  It took a long time to get the cannon in place and the barrier rebuilt around it. Men kept coming to see it, to give advice on loading and firing it, to touch it. Of all the men behind the Ebroiy Street barricade one in twenty-five or thirty had a gun. Most of the Novesma Verba men were there, but not Karantay; some said he was still with the Assembly, others that he was on the Gulhelm Street barricade. Itale clambered up to the slanting top of the barrier over the cannon and looked down on Roukh Square. In the uneasy dimness of torches, stars, windowlight from the palace, the big cobbled square sloped slightly downward from the iron palisades of the palace, empty. It was empty all night.

  Several men pulled up a couple of the mattresses laid as shot-stoppers on the barricade till they could lie down on then. Sangiusto and Itale lay side by side, their chins on their arms, watching the palace. It was about forty hours since they had had any sleep. At long intervals they spoke to each other.

  “What’s that?”

  On the next barricade north, Palazay Street, there was something going on, something was being set up or put in place.

  “Got another cannon.”

  “No, it sticks up into the air.”

  They could not make out what it was in the uncertain torchlight. Itale put his head down on his arms. He dreamed and waked in starts and waking did not know what he had dreamed; it was like being in a small boat on quiet water, trailing a hand over the edge so that sometimes the waves touch it sometimes not, one does not know if one is touching air or water. Vernoy climbed up beside them. He shook Itale gently, offered him something, bending down his tired, pleasant young face. He had come by a hatful of apples down in the Ghetto. They all sat up and munched apples, were cheered by eating, talked a little. “What d’you think they’ll do come daylight, Sorde?”

  “Wait.”

  “I think they’ll try to blow us up.”

  “The whole city? They’ll do better to wait for the militia. Apple, Francesco?”

  But Sangiusto had gone back to sleep.

  “Not long till light, now,” Itale said softly, and then they were all silent for a long time. Northwest over the roofs a pink glow flickered, faded, flickered again, a fire that had got out of hand; there had been a lot of burning in the Old Quarter and other districts. The pink glow faded. The few lighted windows of the Roukh looked wan. Itale looked up: the sky was grey, it was dawn. He woke wide awake, turned over and sat up on the steep-set mattress, looking eastward over Ebroiy Street that dropped away sharply downhill and over the Ghetto lying many-roofed, jumbled, shadowy, between the barricade and the river. To the left rose the Hill of the University, on the far side of which he had used to live. There on the highest point in the city, the cross on the spire of the university chapel, light struck, trembled, steadied; gold crept down the spire, down chimneystacks and roofs of houses crowded rank above rank on the hill. He turned again and saw the battlements of the palace tawny red, alive against the dead blue-grey of the western sky. It was a fine summer morning. He was no longer tired, only very hungry, and though he was excited his thoughts no longer rushed but came simple, detached, concrete: thoughts of what the men in the besieged palace were probably planning, thoughts of people out in the suburbs going about their business and wondering what was going on inside the city, thoughts of what it would be like to be shot down in the street, the stones against his hands and face. He loved Krasnoy, he loved the steep shadowy roofs beneath which people still lay asleep, the sunlit hill, the old palace fierce red in the sunlight, the streets and the stones of the streets. It was his city; his people; his day. “I wish I could shave,” he said aloud, and Sangiusto nodded and yawned. They stood up, stretching, and balanced on the crown of the barricade between the fortress and the risen sun. With the act of standing up the simplification, the clarification of thought and feeling was perfected. Itale was completely happy, standing there empty-handed beside his friend in the indifferent calm of the morning. He had nothing left in the world but the day’s light, no weapon, no shelter, not future. It was for this he had lived and waited. Almost tenderly he thought of the soldiers sweating inside their stone walls there; what was there to worry about? It was the break of day, and standing up there he could have crowed like a cock at daybreak, in pure joy, in celebration of the light.

  He glanced at his friend and said, with his hands in his pockets, smiling irrepressibly, “Do you believe in God, Francesco?”

  “Of course. Don’t you?”

  “No. Thank God!”

  Sangiusto shook his head. He was exhilarated but not exultant, being busy with a premonition amounting to certainty that he was going to get killed today. Freedom was freedom, and often enough he had honestly wished for the privilege of such a death, and yet now it came to the point he was bitter that he could not die for his own country, on his own ground; he was homesick.

  “The light shineth in the darkness,” Itale sang aloud, “and the darkness comprehendeth it not!” Sangiusto laughed at the words and the cockcrow tune. Brelavay climbed up beside them, looked around, sat down and took off his shoe. “Had a rock in here all night,” he explained. “Look at that hole in my stocking.”

  “You ought to marry. Get your stockings darned.”

  “Not till I can marry a countess, like young Liyve,” Brelavay said, cocking his sharp, dark face up at Itale. “Or a baroness at least.”

  “She won’t darn your stockings. Look there!”

  On the Palazay Street barricade a long pole had been set up, and on it hung, almost unmoving in the quiet air, a red and blue flag. All the men looked at the flag. None of them had seen it raised for eighteen years. Most were too young to remember ever having seen it.

  “I’m going round to see if Karantay’s at Gulhelm Street,” Brelavay said. Itale stopped him as he started to climb down: “Listen, if you find Givan tell him we should all try to meet tonight—At the Verba office, I suppose.”

  “That’s no good if things go badly.”

  “At Helleskar’s, then. All right?”

  “That should do. See you in half an hour. Don’t wait breakfast for me!” Brelavay went off, the others stood talking, waiting. A third of Roukh Square now was sunlit.

  Since he could not cross the square Brelavay had to make a long semicircle to get round to Gulhelm Street; coming up it, two blocks from the square, he ran into a crowd: civilians surrounding men in uniform. Brelavay could see the white and gold of militia uniforms, but could not make out how many soldiers there were. Evidently a detachment had been sent from the garrison at Basre to make contact with the Roukh guards. A lieutenant and a captain argued with the chiefs of the barricade; the men around Brelavay were pushy and restless, crowding in thicker every moment, itching to get their hands on the soldiers’ guns. They shouted at their spokesmen and at the officers. There was an effort to clear a passage down the street, away from the palace, and Brelavay heard one of the barricade chiefs, a workingman in his forties, telling the captain with exasperation and despair, “Get your men out now, get them out!” The captain took offense. “We shall march on to the palace,” he said in his German accent, and turned to give the order. Brelavay was knocked right off his feet and carried forward some way, suffocated by the pressure of the mob, kicking out like a horse and grabbing for any support. What he had hold of when the pressure lessened was a militiaman’s shoulder strap. He and the soldier stared at each other, their frightened faces six inches apart, while a tremendous continuous noise and the rocking, swaying pressure they were caught in confused them both. “They’re firing,” the soldier said, staring at Brelavay. He tried to break away, and as he did Brelavay wrenched the musket out of his hands. Using the gunstock as a ram to clear his way, he got out of the thick of the crowd. “I’ve got a gun, by God!” he yelled in triumph. He saw nobody to shoot at, and presently it occurred to him that he had no powder and shot. There was no more firing, the mob was scattering. What had happened, what had become of the troop of soldiers, Brelavay did not understand. He sa
w men lying on the street, a dozen or more of them; there were white uniforms. There was the captain’s gold braid on a body crushed together like a crumpled rag, beaten to death and trampled. Brelavay stood staring at that terrible body. The crowd was streaming on up Gulhelm Street towards the barricade. They would have ammunition. He ran after them in a state of wild excitement, shouting, as several others were shouting, “Wait!”

  On the Ebroiy Street barricade, they had heard from the left the small dry sound of shots and then a dull roar like flooding water heard far off; then they saw a confused dark tide come boiling up over the Gulhelm Street barrier and into Roukh Square, now white with sunlight. As the crowd spread into the square it thinned and looked sparse, aimless, like grasshoppers jumping in stubble, Itale thought, but it was hard not to join them as other barricades began to spill over and feed running men back into the square. At the same time he was yelling, “Keep back! Keep back!” to the men who after waiting all night in the streets had heard gunfire and noise and pressed forward trying to see or get onto the square. “Keep back, keep the line!” His teeth jarred together and he thought he was falling. “What was that?” he said to Sangiusto and then realised that the cannon, almost under his feet, had been fired. “Too much powder,” Sangiusto was growling in the smoke. Young Vernoy pushed between them, leapt down from the barricade, and vanished into the mob that now swarmed black across the square and against the iron fence around the palace. Another man tried to do the same but Itale blocked his way and pushed him back and down with all his strength. “Keep back, damn you, hold the barricade!” he shouted in fury, turning constantly to see what was happening in the square. The mob at the iron fence seethed, scaling it, swarming over it, smashing the gates, jamming at the palace doors. “They’re in!” men shouted, and now Itale crouched ready to jump down, to join, he could not hold himself back any longer. But as he paused there the whole scene seemed to pause. Little puffs of smoke which had appeared a moment ago at the windowslits of the palace were evaporating quickly in the sunlit air. The enormous steady crowd-roar continued the same, but there was some change in the crowd’s motion, a swaying and scattering, men still pouring in from the barricades but also a counter-movement, a press back towards the barricades, heavy and disordered, under the white puffs of smoke. Then there was a noise that seemed to stop everything so that Itale crouched motionless, paralysed: the cannons of the Roukh. Nothing now but clambering men around him, men running, and the monstrous, endless sound. Then it ceased and he heard human voices again and saw the square emptied out. The crowds had shrunk away into separate swarms at each barricade; at the iron fence and on the sloping cobblestones men were lying down here and there as if waiting for something. Around the heads of some of these were streaks and blotches of bright red, and a man that came clambering up the barricade at Itale had a great smear of the same red stuff, like paint, over half his face and in his hair. “Leave your guns here at the barricade,” Sangiusto was saying, quiet as a butler taking coats, and several of the fugitives who had muskets handed them obediently to him. “Here, here, take it,” he was telling Itale, and Itale took the gun and shotbag. Red coats, of that same bright paint color, now appeared filing rapidly out of the doors of the palace, which hung open like a black mouth. Sangiusto lay down on their mattress and loaded his gun, aimed it, and fired it; reloaded, aimed, fired. Itale imitated him, but had trouble with his gun, an Austrian army musket; he had never shot anything but a hunting-piece. Presently he lowered the loaded gun, got up, and said, “Come on, Francesco.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ve gone over the Palazay Street barricade, they’ll be coming around behind us. Let’s head down toward the river.”

  They started down Ebroiy Street.

  Brelavay had lost his gun and been knocked down twice getting out of Roukh Square. He was now on a rooftop overlooking Palazay Street midway between the Roukh and the Sinalya, along with six other men and a heap of paving-blocks and furniture. The throng below were all civilians, angry after panic but aimless in their anger; the palace guard had turned east and south to isolate the barricades and join up with the militia. Brelavay scanned the crowd constantly, looking for a short dark man and two tall ones, Karantay, Sorde, Sangiusto. They could be anywhere. They could be lying dead on Roukh Square. He was sore, sick, and wrathful. A dozen times he thought he saw one of their faces, then lost it or saw it was a stranger’s. A spatter of gunfire from the south; he listened and watched. If he believed those three were dead he would give up, run, run home. He looked about the quiet rooftops in the morning sunshine, hating the impassioned, hysterical city, the crowds below him. If Sorde and Karantay were dead he would as soon throw himself over with the paving-blocks they had carried up here to dump on the soldiers when they came by. It was not hope that kept him there, in control of himself and of his little rooftop mob; it was the thought of his friends. He had a hopeful spirit, but deeper in him than any conviction lay loyalty, and on that bedrock, obstinate and ironic, he waited.

  Hooves were clattering by on Ebroiy Street, while Itale and Sangiusto stood in the darkness inside an arched doorway in the courtyard of a tenement block. The squad passed by, going up the street towards the Roukh. As Sangiusto and then Itale came out of hiding a stooped young woman appeared in the court, two little children huddling close to her. She stood still, looking at them.

  “Can you give us water?” Itale said.

  She nodded, returned in silence with the children to a dark staircase, and came back with a dipper so that the two men could drink from the covered well in the courtyard. She stood watching them, her face quiet, and when Itale thanked her she said, “Go to Mendel’s, the butcher’s, the men have gone there.” So they went, and found in the yard behind a kosher butcher shop, under silent shuttered tenements and the blank back wall of a synagogue, a couple of dozen Jews planning the Ghetto’s part in the insurrection. They were calm and methodical. One, a man in his thirties with beautiful weary eyes, dominated the discussion by natural authority and because he had a good supply of powder and shot for their empty guns. Itale heard him called Moyshe, and called him so, never learning his last name. Under his direction they occupied a block of rooftops on Ebroiy Street. Presently a file of the red-coated guards appeared coming down from the Roukh, on shining restive horses. The men on the roofs opened fire, a dry clatter of cracks and bangs, foolish and exciting to hear as firecrackers. There was shouting, horses galloped, others with empty saddles neighed, ran down the street, stopped with their reins dragging and looking nervously, peaceably around. In the pause that followed Itale said to Moyshe beside him, “Where did you come by all this ammunition?”

  “Last night, when we burned the old armory on Gelde Street.”

  “What are you in this for, Moyshe?”

  “Because where we stand any change is for the better,” the Jew said, tapping his flask to loosen the packed powder. He glanced aside at Itale. “I could ask, what are you in this for?”

  “I like the open air.”

  “It’s a game to you.”

  “No. It’s not a game.”

  “Eight,” Sangiusto said, counting the men they had killed in the firecracker burst. His mouth was tense and he squinted a little, so that he did not look like himself.

  Far up at the head of the street where the mounted troop had retreated, on the broken barricade, several small figures had appeared. One raised a megaphone and they heard a thin, bawling voice: “Lay down all weapons and proceed to your houses…four hours…proceed to your…general amnesty is granted for four hours…” Shots were fired from a rooftop, the small figures vanished.

  During the morning the Ghetto was not cut off, and men came through constantly with news of fighting on Palazay Street and around the Eleynaprade. For a long time after noon nothing moved on the streets below Moyshe’s group, no one came from north or south. They waited, and their isolation became more and more certain and unbearable, driving them to reconnoiter recklessly, to try
to provoke attack. Roukh Square was now full of militiamen from the garrison downriver, and evidently was supplying troops to the northern part of the city. Moyshe’s group at last worked their way back to the rooftops over the barricade and began shooting. The troops got below them and fired the houses on the north side of Ebroiy Street. The wooden tenements burned like haystacks. Women, the women who had been in hiding all day in the courts and rooms, ran out into the street, threw their belongings from windows; as they ran down the plank stairways, the insurgents passed children huddled waiting on the landings, and Moyshe paused to call some urgent question to an old man, who for answer only shook his fist at them and cursed them with impotent hatred. They ran on, out of the buildings, across the sun-bright, crowded street, full of men and women, scared horses, broken bedsteads, falling beams of fire. Moyshe led them in and out of the warren of the Ghetto, coming back always to one place or another on Ebroiy Street, now deserted, scoured by troops of the mounted guards, where they could hold up for a while at the windows of deserted rooms and shoot; but their shot was running out. There were always fewer of them at each run for cover, and in the last they scattered; only Itale and Sangiusto kept together, following Moyshe, and ran straight into a squad of militia, face to face, before any of them had time to lift a gun and fire. They clubbed their muskets, fought through, ran under fire, dodged into a house, through a courtyard, ending up in the butcher’s shop from behind which they had started that morning. They were not pursued. They waited there in hiding. Sounds from the street grew fewer, quieter. An hour went by. Itale got up from his crouching half-doze and went to the door of the shop. It was evening. The sky was clear greenish-blue at the upper end of the street, where he could see the squat north tower of the Roukh. Gutted facades of houses across the way stared calmly at nothing. The air was smoky, warm, and sweet. At his feet lay a bundle of clothing and an old shoe, dropped by a family fleeing the fire.