“I want to marry you,” Lisha said. “If you want to marry me, then do, and if you don’t then don’t. I can’t do it all by myself. But at least remember I’m in on it too!”
“It’s you I’m thinking of.”
“No it’s not. You’re thinking of yourself, being blind and the rest of it. You let me think about that, don’t think I haven’t, either.”
“I have thought about you. All winter. All the time. It…it doesn’t fit, Lisha.”
“Not there, no.”
“Where, then? Where do we fit? In the house up there on the Hill? We can split it, twenty rooms each…”
“Sanzo, I have to go finish the ironing, it has to be ready at noon. If we decide anything we can figure out that kind of thing. I’d like to get clear out of Rákava.”
“Are you,” he hesitated. “Will you come this afternoon?”
“All right.”
She went off, swinging the water-jug. When she got to the cellar she stood there beside the ironing board and burst into tears. She had not cried for months; she had thought she was too old for tears and would not cry again. She cried without knowing why, her tears ran like a river free of the ice-lock of winter. They ran down her cheeks; she felt neither joy nor grief, and went on with her work long before her tears stopped.
At four o’clock she started to go to the Chekeys’ flat, but Sanzo was waiting for her in the courtyard. They went up the Hill to the wild garden, to the lawn above the chestnut grove. The new grass was sparse and soft. In the green darkness of the grove the first candles of the chestnuts burned yellowish-white. A few pigeons soared in the warm, smoky air above the city.
“There’s roses all around the house. Would they mind if I picked some?”
“They? Who?”
“All right, I’ll be right back.”
She came back with a handful of the small, red, thorny roses. Sanzo had lain back with his arms under his head. She sat down by him. The broad, sweet April wind blew over them level with the low sun. “Well,” he said, “we haven’t got anywhere, have we?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“When did you get like this?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. You used to be different.” His voice when he was relaxed had a warm, burring note in it, pleasant to hear. “You never said anything…You know what?”
“What?”
“We never finished reading that book.”
He yawned and turned on his side, facing her. She put her hand on his.
“When you were a kid you used to smile all the time. Do you still?”
“Not since I met you,” she said, smiling.
Her hand lay still on his.
“Listen. I get the disability pension, two-fifty. It would get us out of Rákava. That’s what you want?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, there’s Krasnoy. Unemployment’s not supposed to be so bad there, and there must be cheap places to live, it’s a bigger city.”
“I thought of it too. There must be more jobs there, it’s not all one industry like here. I could get something.”
“I could pick up something with this caning, if there was anybody with any money wanting things like that done. I can handle repair work too, I was doing some last fall.” He seemed to be listening to his own words; and suddenly he gave his strange laugh, that changed his face. “Listen,” he said, “this is no good. You going to lead me to Krasnoy by the hand? Forget it. You ought to get away, all right. Clear away. Marry that fellow and get away. Use your head, Lisha.”
He had sat up, his arms around his knees, not facing her.
“You talk as if we were both beggars,” she said. “As if we had nothing to give each other and nowhere to go.”
“That’s it. That’s the point. We don’t. I don’t. Do you think getting out of this place will make any difference? Do you think it’ll change me? Do you think if I walk around the corner…?” He was trying for irony but achieved only agony. Lisha clenched her hands. “No, of course I don’t,” she said. “Don’t talk like everybody else. They all say that. We can’t leave Rákava, we’re stuck here. I can’t marry Sanzo Chekey, he’s blind. We can’t do anything we want to do, we haven’t got enough money. It’s all true, it’s all perfectly true. But it’s not all. Is it true that if you’re a beggar you mustn’t beg? What else can you do? If you get a piece of bread do you throw it away? If you felt like I do, Sanzo, you’d take what you were given and hold on to it!”
“Lisha,” he said, “oh God, I want to hold on—Nothing—” He reached to her and she came to him; they held each other. He struggled to speak but could not for a long time. “You know I want you, I need you, there is nothing, there is nothing else,” he stammered, and she, denying, denying his need, said, “No, no, no, no,” but held him with all the strength she had. It was still much less than his. After a while he let her go, and taking her hand stroked it a little. “Look,” he said quietly enough, “I do…you know. Only it’s a very long chance, Lisha.”
“We’ll never get a chance that isn’t long.”
“You would.”
“You are my long chance,” she said, with a kind of bitterness, and a profound certainty.
He found nothing to say to that for a while. Finally he drew a long breath and said very softly, “What you said about begging…There was a doctor, two years ago at the hospital where I was, he said something like that, he said what are you afraid of, you see what the dead see, and still you’re alive. What have you got to lose?”
“I know what I’ve got to lose,” Lisha said. “And I’m not going to.”
“I know what I’ve got to gain,” he said. “That’s what scares me.” His face was raised, as if he were looking out over the city. It was a very strong face, hard and intent, and Lisha looking at him was shaken; she shut her eyes. She knew that it was she, her will, her presence, that set him free; but she must go with him into freedom, and it was a place she had never been before. In the darkness she whispered, “All right, I’m scared too.”
“Well, hang on,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders. “If you hang on, I will.”
They sat there, not talking much, as the sun sank into the mist above the plains of April, and the towers and windows of the city yellowed in the falling light. As the sun set they went down the Hill together, out of the silent garden with its beautiful, ruined, staring house, into the smoke and noise and crowding of the thousand streets, where already night had fallen.
1920
THE
ROAD EAST
“THERE is no evil,” Mrs Eray murmured to the rose-geranium in the windowbox, and her son, listening, thought swiftly of caterpillars, cutworms, leafmold, blight; but sunlight shone on the round green leaves and red flowers and grey hair in vast mild assent, and Mrs Eray smiled. Her sleeves dropped back as she raised her arms, a sun-priestess at the window. “Each flower proves it. I’m glad you like flowers, Maler.”—“I like trees better,” he said, being tired and edgy; edgy was the word he kept thinking, on edge, on the sharp edge. He wanted a vacation badly. “But you couldn’t have brought me an oak tree for my birthday!” She laughed, turning to look at the October sheaf of golden asters he had brought her, and he smiled, sunk heavy and passive in his armchair. “Oh you poor old mushroom!” she said, coming to him. A big, pale, heavy man, he disliked that endearment, feeling that it fit him. “Sit up, smile! This lovely day, my birthday, these flowers, the sunlight. How can people refuse to enjoy this world! Thank you for my flowers, dear.” She kissed his forehead and returned with her buoyant step to the window.
“Ihrenthal’s gone,” he said.
“Gone?”
“For a week now. No one’s even said his name, all week.”
It was a frontal attack, for she had known Ihrenthal; he had sat at her dinner-table, a shy, rash, curly-headed man; he had taken a second helping of soup; she could not blow his name away as if it were empty of meaning, of weight.
“You don’t know what’s become of him?”
“Of course I know.”
She traced the round of a geranium leaf with her forefinger and said in a gentle tone as if to the plant, “Not really.”
“I don’t know whether he’s been shot or simply jailed, if that’s what you mean.”
She withdrew her hand from the plant and stood looking up at the sunlit sky. “You must not be bitter, Maler,” she said. “We don’t know what’s become of him, truly, in the deeper sense. Of him, of all that goes, disappears, is lost to us. We know so little, so very little. And yet enough! The sunlight shines, it bathes us all, it makes no judgment, has no bitterness. That much we know. That’s the great lesson. Life is a gift, such a lovely gift! There’s no room in it for bitterness. No room.” Speaking to the sky, she had not noticed him get up.
“There’s room for everything. Too much room. Ihrenthal was my friend. Is his—is his death a lovely gift?” But he rushed and mumbled his words, and she did not have to hear them. He sat down again while she went on to prepare supper and lay the table. “What if I’d been arrested instead of Ihrenthal?” he wanted to say, but did not say. She can’t understand, he thought, because she lives inside, she’s always looking out the window but she never opens the door, she never goes outside…The tears he could not cry for Ihrenthal strained his throat again, but his thoughts were already slipping away, eastward, towards the road. On the road, the thought of his friend still was with him, the imagination of pain and the knowledge of grief: but with him, not locked inside him. On the road he could walk with sorrow, as he walked through the rain.
The road led east from Krasnoy through farmlands and past villages to a grey-walled town over which rose the fortress-like tower of an old church. The villages and the town were on maps and he had seen them once from the train: Raskofiu, Ranne, Malenne, Sorg: they were real places, none over fifty miles from the city. But in his mind he walked to them on foot and it was long ago, early in the last century perhaps, for there were no cars on the road nor even railroad crossings. He walked along in rain or sunlight on the country road towards Sorg where at evening he would rest. He would go to an inn down the street from the stout six-sided tower of the church. That was pleasant to look forward to. He had never come to the inn, though once or twice he had entered the town and stood beneath the church portal, a round arch of carven stone. Meantime he walked along through the weather, with a load on his back that varied in weight. On this bright autumn evening he walked too far, till the coming of darkness; it got cold, and fog lay over the dark hollow fields. He had no idea how much farther it was to Sorg, but he was hungry and very tired. He sat down on the bank of the road under a clump of trees and rested there a while in the silence of nightfall. He slipped the packstrap from his shoulders and sat quiet; cold, grieving, and apprehensive, yet quiet, watching mist and dusk. “Supper’s ready!” his mother called cheerily. He rose at once and joined her at the table.
Next day he met the gypsy woman. The trolley had brought him east across the river, and he stood waiting to cross its tracks while the wind blew dust down the long street in the long light of evening. Standing beside him she said, “Would you tell me how to get to Geyle Street?” The voice was not a city voice. Black hair, coarse and straight, blew across a colorless face, skin over delicate bone. “I’m going that way,” Maler said after a pause, and set off across the street, not looking to see if she came with him. She did. “I never was in Krasnoy before,” she said. She came from the plains of a foreign land, windswept plains ringed by far peaks fading into night as nearby, in the wild grass, the smoke of a campfire veered and doubled on the wind over the flames and a woman sang in a strange tongue, a music lost in the huge, blue, frozen dusk. “I’ve never been out of it, not to speak of,” he answered, looking at her. She was about his age, her dress was bright and shoddy, she walked erect, quiet-faced. “What number?” he asked, for they had come to Geyle Street, and she said, “Thirty-three,” the number of his house. They walked side by side under the streetlamps, he and this delicate foreign wanderer, strange to each other, walking home together. While getting out his key he explained, “I live in this building,” though that really explained very little.
“I’d better ring,” she said, “it’s a friend of mine that lives here, she’s not expecting me,” and she looked for the name on the mailboxes. So he could not let her in. But he turned from the open door and asked, “Excuse me, where do you come from?” She looked at him with a slight smile of surprise and answered, “From Sorg.”
His mother was in the kitchen. The rose-geranium flared bright in the window, the asters were already fading. On edge, on the edge. He sat in the armchair, his eyes shut, listening for a step overhead or through the wall, the light step that had come to him not across foreign plains with gypsies but down the familiar road in twilight, the road from Sorg leading to this city, this house, this room. Of course the road led westward as well as eastward, only he had never thought of that. He had come in so quietly that his mother had not heard him, and seeing him in the armchair she jumped and her voice rang with panic: “Why didn’t you say something, Maler!” Then she lit the lamps and stroked the withering asters and chatted.
The next day he met Provin. He had not yet said a word to Provin, not even good morning, working side by side in the office (Drafting and Planning, Krasnoy Bureau of the State Office of Civil Architecture) on the same plans (State Housing, Trasfiuve Project No. 2). The young man followed him as he left the building at five.
“Mr Eray, let me speak to you.”
“What about?”
“About anything,” the young man said easily, knowing his own charm, and yet dead serious. He was good looking, bearing himself gallantly. Defeated, smoked out of his refuge of silence, Maler said at last,-“Well I’m sorry, Provin. Not your fault. Because of Ihrenthal, the man who had your job. Nothing to do with you. It’s unreasonable. I’m sorry.” He turned away.
Provin said fiercely, “You can’t waste hatred like that!”
Maler stood still. “All right. I’ll say good morning after this. It’s all right. What’s the difference? What does it matter to you? What does it matter if any of us talks or doesn’t talk? What is there to say?”
“It does matter. There’s nothing left to us, now, but one another.”
They stood face to face on the street in the fine autumn rain, men passing around them to left and right, and Maler said after a moment, “No, we haven’t even got that left, Provin,” and set off down Palazay Street to his trolley stop. But after the long ride through mid-town and across Old Bridge and through the Trasfiuve, and the walk through rain to Geyle Street, in the doorway of his house he met the woman from Sorg. She asked him, “Can you let me in?”
He nodded, unlocking the door.
“My friend forgot to give me her key, and she had to go out. I’ve been wandering around, I thought maybe you’d be home around the same time as yesterday…” She was ready to laugh with him at her own improvidence, but he could not laugh or answer her. He had been wrong to reject Provin, dead wrong. He had collaborated with the enemy. Now he must pay the price of his silence, which is more silence, silence when one wants to speak: the gag. He followed her up the stairs, silent. And yet she came from his home, the town where he had never been.
“Good evening,” she said at the turning of the stairs, no longer smiling, her quiet face turned away.
“Good evening,” he said.
He sat in the armchair and leaned his head back; his mother was in the other room; weariness rose up in him. He was much too tired to travel on the road. Bric-a-brac from the day, the office, the streets milled and juggled in his mind; he was almost asleep. Then for a moment he saw the road, and for the first time he saw people walking on it: other people. Not himself, not Ihrenthal who was dead, not anyone he knew, but strangers, a few people with quiet faces. They were walking westward, towards him, meeting and passing him. He stood still. They
looked at him but they did not speak. His mother spoke sharply, “Maler!” He did not move, but she would never pass him by. “Maler, are you ill?” She did not believe in illness, though Maler’s father had died of cancer a few years ago; the trouble, she felt, had been in his mind. She had never been sick, and childbirth, even the two miscarriages she had had, had been painless, even joyous. There is no pain, only the fear of it, which one can reject. But she knew that Maler like his father had not rid his mind of fear. “My dear,” she murmured, “you mustn’t wear yourself out like this.”
“I’m all right.” All right, all right, everything’s all right.
“Is it Ihrenthal?”
She had said the name, she had mentioned the dead, she had admitted death, let it into the room. He stared at her bewildered, overwhelmed with gratitude. She had given him back the power of speech. “Yes,” he stammered, “yes, it’s that. It’s that. I can’t take it—”
“You mustn’t eat your heart out over it, my dear.” She stroked his hand. He sat still, longing for comfort. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, the soft exultation coming into her voice again. “There’s nothing you could have done to change things, nothing you can do now. He was what he was, perhaps he even sought this, he was rebellious, restless. He’s gone his own way. You must stay with what is real, what remains, Maler. His fate led him another way than yours. But yours leads home. When you turn your back on me, when you won’t speak to me, my dear, then you’re rejecting not only me, but your true self. After all, we have no one but each other.”
He said nothing, bitterly disappointed, borne down by his guilt towards her, who did depend wholly on him, and towards Ihrenthal and Provin from whom he had tried to escape, following an unreal road in silence and alone. But when she raised her arms and said or sang, “Nothing is evil, nothing is wasted, if only we look at the world without fear!”—then he broke away and stood up. “The only way to do that is go blind,” he said, and went out, letting the door slam.
Orsinian Tales Page 7