The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume 1: Where on Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Ah,” she said, still not lifting her head, “I don’t understand all that. I’m stupid.”

  “Why did they name you Bruna, when you’re blonde?”

  She looked up startled, laughed. “I was bald till I was ten months old.” She looked at him, seeing him again, and the future be damned, since all possible futures ever envisaged are—rusty sinks, two-week vacations and bombs or collective fraternity or harps and houris—endlessly, sordidly dreary, all delight being in the present and its past, all truth too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable. There is simply no telling what will happen. Kasimir came in with a bunch of red and blue flowers and said, “Mother wants to know if you’d like milk-toast for supper.”

  “Oatbread, oatbread,” Bruna sang arranging the cornflowers and poppies in Stefan’s water-glass. They ate oats three times a day here, some poultry, turnips, potatoes; the little brother Antony raised lettuce, the mother cooked, the daughters swept the big house; there was no wheat-flour, no beef, no milk, no housemaid, not any more, not since before Bruna was born. They camped here in their big old country house, they lived like gypsies, said the mother: a professor’s daughter born in the middle class, nurtured and married in the middle class, giving up order, plenty, and leisure without complaint but not giving up the least scruple of the discriminations she had been privileged to learn. So Kasimir for all his gentleness could still hold himself untouched. So Bruna still thought of herself as coming next after Kasimir, and asked about one’s family. So Stefan knew himself here in a fortress, in a family, at home. He and Kasimir and Bruna were laughing aloud together when the father came in. “Out,” Dr Augeskar said, standing heroic and absolute in the doorway, the sun-king or a solar myth; his son and daughter, laughing and signalling child-like to Stefan behind his back, went out. “Enough is enough,” Augeskar said, ausculting, and Stefan lay guilty, smiling, child-like.

  The seventh day, when Stefan and Kasimir should have taken bus and train back to Krasnoy where the University was now open, was hot. Warm darkness followed, windows open, the whole house open to choruses of frogs by the river, choruses of crickets in the furrows, a southwest wind bearing odors of the forest over dry autumn hills. Between the curtains billowing and going slack burned six stars, so bright in the dry dark sky that they might set fire to the curtains. Bruna sat on the floor by Stefan’s bed, Kasimir lay like a huge wheatstalk across the foot of it, Bendika, whose husband was in Krasnoy, nursed her five-month-old firstborn in a chair by the empty fireplace. Joachim Bret sat on the windowsill, his shirtsleeves rolled up so that the bluish figures OA46992 were visible on his lean arm, playing his guitar to accompany an English lute-song:

  Yet be just and constant still,

  Love may beget a wonder,

  Not unlike a summer’s frost or

  winter’s fatal thunder:

  He that holds his sweetheart dear

  until his day of dying

  Lives of all that ever lived

  most worthy the envying.

  Then, since he liked to sing praise and blame of love in all the languages he knew and did not know, he began to strum out “Plaisir d’Amour,” but came to grief on the shift of key, while the baby was sat up to belch loudly causing merriment. The baby was flung aloft by Kasimir while Bendika protested softly, “He’s full, Kasi, he’ll spill.”—“I am your uncle. I am Uncle Kasimir, my pockets are full of peppermints and papal indulgences. Look at me, whelp! You don’t dare vomit on your uncle. You don’t dare. Go vomit on your aunt.” The baby stared unwinking at Bruna and waved its hands; its fat, silky belly showed between shirt and diaper. The girl returned its gaze as silently, as steadily. “Who are you?” said the baby. “Who are you?” said the maiden, without words, in wonder, while Stefan watched and faint chords in A sobbed joyously on Bret’s guitar between the lighted room and the dark dry night of autumn. The tall young mother carried the baby off to bed, Kasimir turned off the light. Now the autumn night was in the room, and their voices spoke among the choruses of crickets and frogs on the fields, by the streams. “It was clever of you to get sick, Stefan,” said Kasimir, lying again across the foot of the bed, long arms white in the dusk. “Stay sick, and we can stay here all winter.”

  “All year. For years. Did you get your fiddle fixed?”

  “Oh yes. Been practicing the Schubert. Pa, pa, poum pah.”

  “When’s the concert?”

  “Sometime in October. Plenty of time. Poum, poum—swim, swim, little trout. Ah!” The long white arms sawed vaguely a viol of dusk. “Why did you choose the bass viol, Kasimir?” asked Bret’s voice among frogs and crickets, across marshbottoms and furrows, from the windowsill. “Because he’s shy,” said Bruna’s voice like a country wind. “Because he’s an enemy of the feasible,” said Stefan’s dark dry voice. Silence. “Because I showed extraordinary promise as a student of the cello,” said Kasimir’s voice, “and so I was forced to consider, did I want to perform the Dvorak Concerto to cheering audiences and win a People’s Artist award, or did I not? I chose to be a low buzz in the background. Poum, pa poum. And when I die, I want you to put my corpse in the fiddle case, and ship it rapid express deep-freeze to Pablo Casals with a label saying ‘Corpse of Great Central European Cellist.’” The hot wind blew through the dark. Kasimir was done, Bruna and Stefan were ready to pass on, but Joachim Bret was not able to. He spoke of a man who had been helping people get across the border; here in the southwest rumors of him were thick now; a young man, Bret said, who had been jailed, had escaped, got to England, and come back; set up an escape route, got over a hundred people out in ten months, and only now had been spotted and was being hunted by the secret police. “Quixotic? Traitorous? Heroic?” Bret asked. “He’s hiding in the attic now,” Kasimir said, and Stefan added, “Sick of milk-toast.” They evaded and would not judge; betrayal and fidelity were immediate to them, could not be weighed any more than a pound of flesh, their own flesh. Only Bret, who had been born outside prison, was excited, insistent. Prevne was crawling with agents, he went, even if you went to buy a newspaper your identification was checked. “Easier to have it tattooed on, like you,” said Kasimir. “Move your foot, Stefan.”—“Move your fat rump, then.”—“Oh, mine are German numbers, out of date. A few more wars and I’ll run out of skin.”—“Shed it, then, like a snake.”—“No, they go right down to the bone.”—“Shed your bones, then,” Stefan said, “be a jellyfish. Be an amoeba. When they pin me down, I bud off. Two little spineless Stefans where they thought they had one MR 64100282A. Four of them, eight, sixteen thirty-two sixty-four a hundred and twenty-eight. I would entirely cover the surface of the globe were it not for my natural enemies.” The bed shook, Bruna laughed in darkness. “Play the English song again, Joachim,” she said.

  Yet be just and constant still,

  Love may beget a wonder . . .

  “Stefan,” she said in the afternoon light of the fourteenth day as she sat, and he lay with his head on her lap, on a green bank above the river-marshes south of the house. He opened his eyes: “Must we go?”

  “No.”

  He closed his eyes again, saying, “Bruna.” He sat up and sat beside her, staring at her. “Bruna, oh God! I wish you weren’t a virgin.” She laughed and watched him, wary, curious, defenseless. “If only—here, now—I’ve got to go away day after tomorrow!”—“But not right under the kitchen windows,” she said tenderly. The house stood thirty yards from them. He collapsed by her burying his head in the angle of her arm, against her side, his lips on the very soft skin of her forearm. She stroked his hair and the nape of his neck.

  “Can we get married? Do you want to get married?”

  “Yes, I want to marry you, Stefan.”

  He lay still awhile longer, then sat u
p again, slowly this time, and looked across the reeds and choked, sunlit river to the hills and the mountains behind them.

  “I’ll have my degree next year.”

  “I’ll have my teaching certificate in a year and a half.”

  They were silent awhile.

  “I could quit school and work. We’ll have to apply for a place . . .” The walls of the one rented room facing a courtyard strung with sooty washing rose up around them, indestructible. “All right,” he said. “Only I hate to waste this.” He looked from the sunlit water up to the mountains. The warm wind of evening blew past them. “All right. But Bruna, do you understand . . .” that all this is new to me, that I have never waked before at dawn in a high-windowed room and lain hearing the perfect silence, never walked out over fields in a bright October morning, never sat down at table with fair, laughing brothers and sisters, never spoken in early evening by a river with a girl who loved me, that I have known that order, peace, and tenderness must exist but never hoped even to witness them, let alone possess them? And day after tomorrow I must go back. No, she did not understand. She was only the country silence and the blessed dark, the bright stream, the wind, the hills, the cool house; all that was hers and her; she could not understand. But she took him in, the stranger in the rainy night, who would destroy her. She sat beside him and said softly, “I think it’s worth it, Stefan, it’s worthwhile.”

  “It is. We’ll borrow. We’ll beg, we’ll steal, we’ll filch. I’ll be a great scientist, you know. I’ll create life in a test-tube. After a squalid early career Fabbre rose to sudden prominence. We’ll go to meetings in Vienna. In Paris. The hell with life in a test-tube! I’ll do better than that, I’ll get you pregnant within five minutes, oh you beauty, laugh, do you? I’ll show you, you filly, you little trout, oh you darling—” There under the windows of the house and under the mountains still in sunlight, while the boys shouted playing tennis up beside the house, she lay soft, fair, heavy in his arms under his weight, absolutely pure, flesh and spirit one pure will: to let him come in, let him come in.

  Not now, not here. His will was mixed, and obdurate. He rolled away and lay face up in the grass, a black flicker in his eyes looking at the sky. She sat with her hand on his hand. Peace had never left her. When he sat up she looked at him as she had looked at Bendika’s baby, steadily, with pondering recognition. She had no praise for him, no reservation, no judgment. Here he is; this is he.

  “It’ll be meager, Bruna. Meager and unprofitable.”

  “I expect so,” she said, watching him.

  He stood up and brushed grass off his trousers. “I love Bruna!” he shouted, lifting his hand; and from the sunlit slopes across the river-marshes where dusk was rising came a vague short sound, not her name, not his voice. “You see?” he said standing over her, smiling. “Echoes, even. Get up, the sun’s going, do you want me to get pneumonia again?” She reached out her hand, he took it and pulled her up to him. “I’ll be very loyal, Bruna,” he said. He was a small man and when they stood together she did not look up to him but straight at him at eye level. “That’s what I have to give,” he said, “that’s all I have to give. You may get sick of it, you know.” Her eyes, grey-brown or grey, unclear, watched him steadily. In silence he raised his hand to touch for a moment, with reserve and tenderness, her fair parted hair. They went back up to the house, past the tennis court where Kasimir on one side of the net and the two boys on the other swung, missed, leapt and shouted. Under the oaks Bret sat practicing a guitar-tune. “What language is that one?” Bruna asked, standing light in the shadow, utterly happy. Bret cocked his head to answer, his misshapen right hand lying across the strings. “Greek; I got it from a book; it means, ‘O young lovers who pass beneath my window, can’t you see it’s raining?’” She laughed aloud, standing by Stefan who had turned to watch the three run and poise on the tennis court in rising shadow, the ball soar up from moment to moment into the level gold light.

  He walked into Prevne next day to buy their tickets with Kasimir, who wanted to see the weekly market there; Kasimir took joy in markets, fairs, auctions, the noise of people getting and selling, the barrows of white and purple turnips, racks of old shoes, mounds of print cotton, stacks of bluecoated cheese, the smell of onions, fresh lavender, sweat, dust. The road that had been long the night they came was brief in the warm morning. “Still looking for that get-em-out-alive fellow, Bret says,” said Kasimir. Tall, frail, calm, he moseyed along beside his friend, his bare head bright in the sunlight. “Bruna and I want to get married,” Stefan said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  Kasimir hesitated a moment in his longlegged amble, went on, hands in his pockets. Slowly on his face appeared a smile. “Do you really?”

  “Yes.”

  Kasimir stopped, took his right hand out of his pocket, shook Stefan’s. “Good work,” he said, “well done.” He was blushing a little. “Now that’s something real,” he said, going on, hands in his pockets; Stefan glanced at his long, quiet young face. “That’s absolute,” Kasimir said, “that’s real.” After a while he said, “That beats Schubert.”

  “Main problem is finding a place to live, of course, but if I can borrow something to get started on, Metor still wants me for that project—we’d like to do it straight off—if it’s all right with your parents, of course.” Kasimir listened fascinated to these chances and circumstances confirming the central fact, just as he watched fascinated the buyers and sellers, shoes and turnips, racks and carts of a market-fair that confirmed men’s need of food and of communion. “It’ll work out,” he said. “You’ll find a place.”—“I expect so,” said Stefan never doubting it. He picked up a rock, tossed it up and caught it, hurled it white through sunlight far into the furrows to their left. “If you knew how happy I am, Kasimir—” His friend answered, “I have some notion. Here, shake hands again.” They stopped again to shake hands. “Move in with us, eh, Kasi?”—“All right, get me a truckle-bed.” They were coming into town. A khaki-colored truck crawled down Prevne’s main street between flyblown shops, old houses painted with garlands long faded; over the roofs rose high yellow hills. Under lindens the market square was dusty and sun-dappled: a few racks, a few stands and carts, a noseless man selling sugarcandy, three dogs cringingly, unwearingly following a white bitch, old women in black shawls, old men in black vests, the lanky keeper of the Post-Telephone Bar leaning in his doorway and spitting, two fat men dickering in a mumble over a pack of cigarettes. “Used to be more to it,” Kasimir said. “When I was a kid here. Lots of cheese from Portacheyka, vegetables, mounds of ’em. Everybody turned out for it.” They wandered between the stalls, content, aware of brotherhood. Stefan wanted to buy Bruna something, anything, a scarf; there were buttonless mud-colored overalls, cracked shoes. “Buy her a cabbage,” Kasimir said, and Stefan bought a large red cabbage. They went into the Post-Telephone Bar to buy their tickets to Aisnar. “Two on the S.W. to Aisnar, Mr Praspayets.”—“Back to work, eh?”—“Right.” Three men came up to the counter, two on Kasimir’s side one on Stefan’s. They handed over. “Fabbre Stefan, domicile 136 Tome Street, Krasnoy, student, MR 64100282A. Augeskar Kasimir, domicile 4 Sorden Street, Krasnoy, student, MR 80104944A. Business in Aisnar?”—“Catching the train to Krasnoy.” The men returned to a table. “In here all day, past ten days,” the innkeeper said in a thready mumble, “kills my business. I need another hundred kroner, Mr Kasimir; trying to short-change me?” Two of the men, one thickset, the other slim and wearing an army gunbelt under his jacket, were by them again. The smiling innkeeper went blank like a television set clicked off. He watched the agents go through the young men’s pockets and feel up and down their bodies; when they had gone back to the table he handed Kasimir his change, silent. They went out in silence. Kasimir stopped and stood looking at the golden lindens, the golden light dappling dust where three dogs still trotted abased and eager after
the white bitch, a fat housewife laughed with an old cackling man, two boys dodged yelling among the carts, a donkey hung his grey head and twitched one ear. “Oh well,” Stefan said. Kasimir said nothing. “I’ve budded off,” Stefan said, “come on, Kasi.” They set off slowly. “Right,” Kasimir said straightening up a little. “It’s not relevant, you know,” said Stefan. “Is the innkeeper really named Praspayets?”—“Evander Praspayets. Has a brother runs the winery here, Belisarius Praspayets.” Stefan grinned, Kasimir smiled a little vaguely. They were at the edge of the market-place about to cross the street. “Damn, I forgot my cabbage in the bar,” Stefan said, turning, and saw some men running across the market-place between the carts and stalls. There was a loud clapping noise. Kasimir grabbed at Stefan’s shoulder for some reason, but missed, and stood there with his arms spread out, making a coughing, retching sound in his throat. His arms jerked wider and he fell down, backwards, and lay at Stefan’s feet, his eyes open, his mouth open and full of blood. Stefan stood there. He looked around. He dropped on his knees by Kasimir who did not look at him. Then he was pulled up and held by the arm; there were men around him and one of them was waving something, a paper, saying loudly, “This is him, the traitor, this is what happens to traitors. These are his forged papers. This is him.” Stefan wanted to get to Kasimir, but was held back; he saw men’s backs, a dog, a woman’s red staring face in the background under golden trees. He thought they were helping him to stand, for his knees had given under him, but as they forced him to turn and walk he tried to pull free, crying out, “Kasimir!”

  He was lying on his face on a bed, which was not the bed in the high-windowed room in the Augeskar house. He knew it was not but kept thinking it was, hearing the boys calling down on the tennis court. Then understanding that it was his room in Krasnoy and his roommates were asleep he lay still for a long time, despite a fierce headache. Finally he sat up and looked around at the pine-plank walls, the grating in the door, the stone floor with cigarette butts and dried urine on it. The guard who brought his breakfast was the thickset agent from the Post-Telephone Bar, and did not speak. There were pine splinters in the quicks of his nails on both his hands; he spent a long time getting them out.