Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Nothing—I don’t know,” and I backed out, leaving her scared to death, poor girl. But she waited up there while I came back down to Galven; that’s what they’d arranged, the custom of the times, you know, the men were to talk the matter over.

  He said the same thing: “What’s wrong, Gil?” And what was I to say? There he stood, tense and gallant, with his clear eyes, my friend, ready to tell me he loved my sister and had found some kind of job and would stand by her all his life, and was I supposed to say, “Yes, there’s something wrong, Galven Ileskar,” and tell him what it was? Oh, there was something wrong, all right, but it was a deeper wrong, and an older one, than any he had done. Was I to give in to it?

  “Galven,” I said, “Poma’s spoken to me. I don’t know what to say. I can’t forbid you to marry, but I can’t—I can’t—” And I stuck; I couldn’t speak; Martin’s tears blinded me.

  “Nothing could make me hurt her,” he said very quietly, as if making a promise. I don’t know whether he understood me; I don’t know whether, as Martin believed, he did not know what he had done. In a way it did not matter. The pain and the guilt of it were in him, then and always. That he knew, knew from end to end, and endured without complaint.

  Well, that wasn’t quite the end of it. It should have been, but what he could endure, I couldn’t, and finally, against every impulse of mercy, I told Poma what Martin had told me. I couldn’t let her walk into the forest undefended. She listened to me, and as I spoke I knew I’d lost her. She believed me, all right. God help her, I think she knew before I told her!—not the facts, but the truth. But my telling her forced her to take sides. And she did. She said she’d stay with Ileskar. They were married in October.

  The doctor cleared his throat, and gazed a long time at the fire, not noticing his junior partner’s impatience.

  “Well?” the young man burst out at last like a firecracker—“What happened?”

  “What happened? Why, nothing much happened. They lived on at He. Galven had got himself a job as an overseer for Kravay; after a couple of years he did pretty well at it. They had a son and a daughter. Galven died when he was fifty; pneumonia again, his heart couldn’t take it. My sister’s still at He. I haven’t seen her for a couple of years, I hope to spend Christmas there…Oh, but the reason I told you all this. You said there are unpardonable crimes. And I agree that murder ought to be one. And yet, among all men, it was the murderer whom I loved, who turned out in fact to be my brother…Do you see what I mean?”

  1920

  CONVERSATIONS

  AT NIGHT

  “THE best thing to do is get him married.”

  “Married?”

  “Shh.”

  “Who’d marry him?”

  “Plenty of girls! He’s still a big strong fellow, good-looking. Plenty of girls.”

  When their sweating arms or thighs touched under the sheet they moved apart with a jerk, then lay again staring at the dark.

  “What about his pension?” Albrekt asked at last. “She’d get it.”

  “They’d stay here. Where else? Plenty of girls would jump at the chance. Rent-free. She’d help at the shop, and look after him. Fat chance I’d give up his pension after all I’ve done. Not even my blood kin. They’d have your brother’s room, and he’d sleep in the hall.”

  This detail gave so much reality to the plan that only after a long time, during which he had scratched his sweaty arms to satisfaction, did Albrekt ask, “You think of anybody special?”

  In the hall outside their door a bed creaked as the sleeper turned. Sara was silent a minute, then whispered, “Alitsia Benat.”

  “Huh!” Albrekt said in vague surprise. The silence lengthened, drew into uneasy, hot-weather sleep. Sara not knowing she had slept found herself sitting up, the sheet tangled about her legs. She got up and peered into the hall. Her nephew lay asleep; the skin of his bare arms and chest looked hard and pale, like stone, in the first light.

  “Why’d you yell like that?”

  He sat up suddenly, his eyes wide. “What is it?”

  “You were talking, yelling. I need my sleep.”

  He lay still. After Sara had settled back into bed it was silent. He lay listening to the silence. At last something seemed to sigh deeply, outside, in the dawn. A breath of cooler air brushed over him. He also sighed; he turned over on his face and sank into sleep, which was a whiteness to him, like the whitening day.

  Outside the dreams, outside the walls, the city Rákava stood still in daybreak. The streets, the old wall with its high gates and towers, the factories that bulked outside the wall, the gardens at the high south edge of town, the whole of the long, tilted plain on which the city was built, lay pale, drained, unmoving. A few fountains clattered in deserted squares. The west was still cold where the great plain sloped off into the dark. A long cloud slowly dissolved into a pinkish mist in the eastern sky, and then the sun’s rim, like the lip of a cauldron of liquid steel, tipped over the edge of the world, pouring out daylight. The sky turned blue, the air was streaked with the shadows of towers. Women began to gather at the fountains. The streets darkened with people going to work; and then the rising and falling howl of the siren at the Ferman cloth-factory went over the city, drowning out the slow striking of the cathedral bell.

  The door of the apartment slammed. Children were shrieking down in the courtyard. Sanzo sat up, sat on the edge of his bed for a while; after he had dressed he went into Albrekt and Sara’s room and stood at the window. He could tell strong light from darkness, but the window faced the court and caught no sunlight. He stood with his hands on the sill, turning his head sometimes, trying to catch the contrast of dark and light, until he heard his father moving about and went into the kitchen to make the old man his coffee.

  His aunt had not left the matches in their usual place to the left of the sink. He felt about for the tin box along the counter and shelf, his hands stiff with caution and frustration. He finally located it left out on the table, in plain sight, if he had been able to see. As he got the stove lighted his father came shuffling in.

  “How goes it?” Sanzo said.

  “The same, the same.” The old man was silent till the coffee was ready, then said, “You pour, I got no grip this morning.”

  Sanzo located the cup with his left hand, brought the coffeepot over it with his right. “On the mark,” Volf said, touching his son’s hand with his rigid arthritic fingers to keep it in the right place. Between them they got their cups filled. They sat at the table in silence, the father chewing on a piece of bread.

  “Hot again,” he mumbled.

  A bluebottle buzzed in the window, knocking against the glass. That sound and the sound of Volf chewing his bread filled Sanzo’s world. A knock on the door came like a gunshot. He jumped up. The old man went on chewing.

  He opened the door. “Who is it?” he said.

  “Hullo, Sanzo. Lisha.”

  “Come on in.”

  “Here’s the flour mother borrowed Sunday,” she whispered.

  “The coffee’s hot.”

  The Benat family lived across the courtyard; Sanzo had known them all since he was ten, when he and his father had come to live with Albrekt and Sara. He had no clear picture of how Alitsia looked, having seen her last when she was fourteen. Her voice was soft, thin, and childish.

  She still had not come in. He shrugged and held out his hands for the flour. She put the bag square in his hands so that he did not have to fumble for it.

  “Oh, come on in,” he said. “I never see you any more.”

  “Just for a minute. I have to get back to help mother.”

  “With the laundry? Thought you were working at Rebolts.”

  “They laid off sixty cutters at the end of last month.”

  She sat with them at the kitchen table. They talked about the proposed strike at the Ferman cloth factory. Though Volf had not worked for five years, crippled by arthritis, he was full of information from his drinking companions, and
Lisha’s father was a Union section-head. Sanzo said little. After a while there was a pause.

  “Well, what do you see in him?” said the old man’s voice.

  Lisha’s chair creaked; she said nothing.

  “Look all you like,” Sanzo said, “it’s free.” He stood up and felt for the cups and plates on the table.

  “I’d better go.”

  “All right!” Turning towards the sink, he misjudged her position, and ran right into her. “Sorry,” he said, angrily, for he hated to blunder. He felt her hand, just for a moment, laid very lightly on his arm; he felt the movement of her breath as she said, “Thanks for the coffee, Sanzo.” He turned his back, setting the cups down in the sink.

  She left, and Volf left a minute later, working his way down the four flights of stairs to the courtyard where he would sit most of the day, hobbling after the sunlight as it shifted from the west to the east wall, until the evening sirens howled and he went to meet his old companions, off work, at the corner tavern. Sanzo washed up the dishes and made the beds, then took his stick and went out. At the Veterans’ Hospital they had taught him a blind-man’s trade, chair-caning, and Sara had hunted and badgered the local used-furniture sellers until one of them agreed to give Sanzo what caning work came his way. Often it was nothing, but this week there was a set of eight chairs to be done. It was eleven blocks to the shop, but Sanzo knew his routes well. The work itself, in the silent room behind the shop, in the smell of newly cut cane, varnish, mildew, and glue, was pleasant, hypnotic; it was past four when he knocked off, bought himself a sausage roll at the corner bakery, and followed another leg of his route to his uncle’s shop, CHEKEY: STATIONERS, a hole in the wall where they sold paper, ink, astrological charts, string, dream-books, pencils, tacks. He had been helping Albrekt, who had no head for figures, with the accounting. But there was very little accounting to be done these days; there were no customers in the shop, and he could hear Sara in the back room working herself up into a rage at Albrekt over something. He shut the shop door so the bell would jangle and bring her out to the front hoping for a customer, and strode on the third leg of his circuit, to the park.

  It was fiercely hot, though the sun was getting lower. When he looked up at the sun, a greyish mist pressed on his eyes. He found his usual bench. Insects droned in the dry park grass, the city hummed heavily, voices passed by, near and far, in the void. When he felt the shadows rising up around him he started home. His head had begun to ache. A dog followed him for blocks. He could hear its panting and its nails scratching on the pavement. A couple of times he struck out at it with his stick, when he felt it crowding at his ankles, but he did not hit it.

  After supper, eaten in haste and silence in the hot kitchen, he sat out in the courtyard with his father and uncle and Kass Benat. They spoke of the strike, of a new dyeing process that was going to cost a whole caste of workmen their jobs, of a foreman who had murdered his wife and children yesterday. The night was windless and sticky.

  At ten they went to bed. Sanzo was tired but it was too hot, too close for sleep. He lay thinking again and again that he would get up and go down and sit in the courtyard where it would be cooler. There was a soft, interminable roll of thunder, seeming to die away then muttering on, louder then softer. The hot night gathered round him swathing him in sticky folds, pressing on him, as the girl’s body had pressed on him for a second that morning when he had run against her. A sudden chill breeze whacked at the windows, the air changed, the thunder grew loud. Rain began to patter. Sanzo lay still. He knew by a greyish movement inside his eyes when the lightning flashed. Thunder echoed deafening in the well of the courtyard. The rain increased, rattling on the windows. As the storm slackened he relaxed; languor came into him, a faint, sweet well-being; without fear or shame he began to pursue the memory of that moment, that touch, and following it found sleep.

  Sara had been polite to him for three days running. Distrustful, he sought to provoke her, but she saved her tantrums for Volf and Albrekt, left the matches where Sanzo could find them, asked him if he didn’t want a few kroner back from his pension so he could go to the tavern, and finally asked him if he wouldn’t like somebody to come in and read to him now and then.

  “Read what?”

  “The newspaper, anything you like. It wouldn’t be so dull for you. One of the Benat children would do it, Lisha maybe, she’s always got a book. You used to read so much.”

  “I don’t any more,” he said with stupid sarcasm, but Sara sailed on, talking about Mrs Benat’s laundry business, Lisha’s losing her job, where Sanzo’s mother’s old books might have got to, she had been a great reader too, always with a book. Sanzo half listened, made no reply, and was not surprised when Lisha Benat turned up, late the next afternoon, to read to him. Sara usually got her way. She had even dug out, from the closet in Volf’s room, three books that had belonged to Sanzo’s mother, old novels in school editions. Lisha, who sounded very ill at ease, started in promptly to read one of them, Karantay’s The Young Man Liyve. She was husky and fidgety at first, but then began to get interested in what she was reading. She left before Sara and Albrekt came home, saying, “Shall I come back tomorrow?”

  “If you want,” Sanzo said. “I like your voice.”

  By the third afternoon she was quite caught in the spell of the long, gentle, romantic story. Sanzo, bored and yet at peace, listened patiently. She came to read two or three afternoons a week, when her mother did not need her; he took to being at home by four, in case she came.

  “You like that fellow Liyve,” he said one day when she had closed the book. They sat at the kitchen table. It was close and quiet in the kitchen, evening of a long September day.

  “Oh, he’s so unhappy,” she said with such compassion that she then laughed at herself. Sanzo smiled. His face, handsome and rigidly intent, was broken by the smile, changed, brought alive. He reached out, found the book and her hand on it, and put his own hand over hers. “Why does that make you like him?”

  “I don’t know!”

  He got up abruptly and came round the table till he stood right by her chair, so that she could not get up. His face had returned to its usual intent look. “Is it dark?”

  “No. Evening.”

  “I wish I could see you,” he said, and his left hand groped and touched her face. She started at the very gentle touch, then sat motionless. He took her by the arms, a groping touch again but followed by a hard grip, and pulled her up to stand against him. He was shaking; she stood quiet in his arms, pressed against him. He kissed her mouth and face, his hand struggled with the buttons of her blouse; then abruptly he let her go, and turned away.

  She caught a deep breath, like a sob. The faint September wind stirred around them, blowing in from the open window in another room. He still did not turn, and she said softly, “Sanzo—”

  “You’d better go on,” he said. “I don’t know. Sorry. Go on, Lisha.”

  She stood a moment, then bent and put her lips against his hand, which rested on the table. She picked up her kerchief and went out. When she had closed the door behind her she stopped on the landing outside. There was no sound for some while, then she heard a chair scrape in the apartment, and then, so faint she was not certain it came from behind that door, a whistled tune. Somebody was coming up the stairs and she ran down, but the tune stayed in her head; she knew the words, it was an old song. She hummed it as she crossed the courtyard.

  Two tattered beggars met on the street,

  ‘Hey, little brother, give me bread to eat!’

  After two days she came again. Neither of them had much to say, and she set to reading at once. They had got to the chapter where the poet Liyve, ill in his garret, is visited by Countess Luisa, the chapter called “The First Night.” Lisha’s mouth was dry, and several times her breath stuck in her throat. “I need a drink of water,” she said, but she did not get it. When she stood up he did, and when she saw him reach out his hand she took it.

  This t
ime in her acceptance of him there was one obscure moment, a movement suppressed before it was made, before she knew she had resisted anything. “All right,” he whispered, and his hands grew gentler. Her eyes were closed, his were open; they stood there not in lamplight but in darkness, and alone.

  The next day they had a go at reading, for they still could not talk to each other, but the reading ended sooner than before. Then for several days Lisha was needed in the laundry. As she worked she kept singing the little song.

  ‘Go to the baker’s house, ask him for the key,

  If he won’t hand it over, say you were sent by me!’

  Stooping over the laundry tub, her mother took up the song with her. Lisha stopped singing.

  “Can’t I sing it too, since I’ve got it in my ears all day?” Mrs Benat plunged her red, soap-slick arms into the steaming tub. Lisha cranked the wringer on a stiff pair of overalls.

  “Take it easy. What’s wrong?”

  “They won’t go through.”

  “Button caught, maybe. Why are you so jumpy lately?”

  “I’m not.”

  “I’m not Sanzo Chekey, I can see you, my girl!”

  Silence again, while Lisha struggled with the wringer. Mrs Benat lifted a basket of wet clothes to the table, bracing it against her chest with a grunt. “Where’d you get this idea of reading to him?”

  “His aunt.”

  “Sara?”

  “She said it might cheer him up.”

  “Cheer him up! Sara? She’d have turned him and Volf both out by now if it wasn’t for their pensions. And I don’t know as I could blame her. Though he looks after himself as well as you could expect.” Mrs Benat hoisted another load onto the table, shook the suds off her swollen hands, and faced her daughter. “Now see here, Alitsia. Sara Chekey’s a respectable woman. But you get your ideas from me, not from her. See?”