Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He came back drunk at three in the morning, singing. He woke too late to shave, and was late to work; after the lunch hour he did not go back to the office. He sat on in the dark simmering bar behind Roukh Palace where he and Ihrenthal had used to lunch together on beer and herring, and by six, when Provin came in, he was drunk again. “Good evening, Provin! Have a drink on me.”

  “Thanks, I will. Givaney said you might be here.” They drank in silence, side by side, jammed together by the press at the bar. Maler straightened up and said, “There is no evil, Provin.”

  “No?” said Provin, smiling, glancing up at him.

  “No. None at all. People get in trouble for things they say, but when they’re shot for it it’s their own fault, eh, so there’s nothing evil in that. Or if they’re just put in jail, all the better, it keeps them from talking. If nobody talks then nobody tells lies, and there isn’t any real evil, you see, only lies. Evil is a lie. You have to be silent, then the world’s good. All good. The police are good men with wives and families, the agents are good patriotic men, the soldiers are good, the State is good, we’re good citizens of a great country, only we mustn’t speak. We mustn’t talk to one another, in case we tell a lie. That would spoil it all. Never speak to a man. Especially never speak to a woman. Have you got a mother, Provin? I don’t. I was born of a virgin, painlessly. Pain is a lie, it doesn’t exist—see?” He brought his hand down backwards on the edge of the bar with a crack like a stick breaking. “Ah!” he cried, and Provin too turned white. The men at the bar all round them, dark-faced men in shoddy grey, glanced at him; the simmering murmur of their talk went on. The month on the calendar over the bar was October, 1956. Maler pressed his hand to his side under his coat for a while and then silently, left-handed, finished his beer. “In Budapest, on Wednesday,” the man next to him repeated quietly to his neighbor in plasterer’s overalls, “on Wednesday.”

  “Is that true, all that?”

  Provin nodded. “It’s true.”

  “Are you from Sorg, Provin?”

  “No, from Raskofiu, a few miles this side of Sorg. Will you come home with me, Mr Eray?”

  “Too drunk.”

  “My wife and I have a room to ourselves. I wanted to talk with you. This business.” He nodded at the man in overalls. “There’s a chance—”

  “Too late,” Maler said. “Too drunk. Listen, do you know the road between Raskofiu and Sorg?”

  Provin looked down. “You come from there too?”

  “No. I was born here in Krasnoy. City boy. Never been to Sorg. Saw the church-spire once from a train going east, doing my military service. Now I think I’ll go see it closer up. When will the trouble start here?” he asked conversationally as they left the bar, but the young man did not answer. Maler walked back across the river to Geyle Street, a very long walk. He was sober when he got home. His mother looked hard and shrunken, like a nut dried around its kernel. He was her lie, and one must keep hold of a lie, wither around it, hold on. Her world without evil, without hope, her world without revolution depended on him alone.

  While he ate his late dry supper she asked him about the rumors she had heard at market. “Yes,” he said, “that’s right. And the West is going to help them, send in airplanes with guns, troops maybe. They’ll make it.” Then he laughed, and she dared not ask him why. Next day he went to work as usual. But on Saturday morning early the woman from Sorg stood at his door. “Please, can you get me across the river?” Softly, not to wake his mother, he asked what she meant. She explained that the bridges were being guarded and they would not let her across since she had no Krasnoy domicile card, and she must get across to the railway station to go back to her family in Sorg. She was a day late already, she must get back. “If you’re going to work and I went with you, you see, they might let you cross…”

  “My office won’t be open,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “I don’t know, we could try it,” he said, looking down at her, feeling himself stout and heavy in his dressing-gown. “Are the trolleys running?”

  “No, they’ve stopped, people say everything’s stopped. Maybe even the trains. It’s going on over there on the west side, in River Quarter, they say.”

  In the early light under a grey sky they went together through the long streets toward the river. “They’ll probably stop me,” he said, “I’m only an architect. If they do, you might try to get to Grasse somehow. The trains going east stop there, it’s a suburban station. It’s only five or six miles from Krasnoy.” She nodded. She wore the same bright shoddy dress; it was cold, and they walked fast. When they came in sight of Old Bridge they hesitated. Across the bridge between the fine stone balustrades stood not only the idling soldiers they had expected but also a huge black thing, hunchbacked and oblique, its machine-gun snout poked out towards the west. A soldier waved aside his identification cards, told him to go home. He and the woman returned up the long streets where no trolleys ran, no cars, and few people walked. “If you want to walk on out to Grasse,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”

  The coarse black hair whipped over her cheek as she smiled, bewildered, a countrywoman astray. “You’re kind. But will the trains be running?”

  “Probably not.”

  The colorless delicate face was bent pondering; she smiled a little, faced with the insuperable.

  “Have you children at home, in Sorg?”

  “Yes, two children. I was here trying to get my husband’s compensation, he was hurt in an accident at the mill, he lost his arm…”

  “It’s about forty miles to Sorg. Walking, you might be there tomorrow night.”

  “I was thinking that. But with this trouble they’ll be policing the ways out of the city, all the roads…”

  “Not the roads east.”

  “I’m a bit scared,” she said after a while, gently; no gypsy from the wild lands but only a countrywoman on the roads of ruin, afraid to go alone. She need not go alone. They could walk together out of the city eastward, taking the road up to Grasse and then down among the hills, from town to town on the rolling plain past fields and lone farms until they came in autumn evening under the grey walls, to the high spire of Sorg; and now with the trouble in Krasnoy the roads would be quite empty, no buses, no cars running, as if they walked into the last century and on before into the other centuries, back, towards their heritage, away from their death.

  “You’d best wait it out here,” he said as they turned onto Geyle Street. She looked up at his heavy face, saying nothing. On the stair-landing she murmured, “Thank you. You were kind to go with me.”

  “I wish I could.” He turned to his door.

  In the afternoon the windows of the flat rattled and rattled. His mother sat with her hands in her lap staring out over the flowers of the geranium at the cloud-spotted sky full of sunshine. “I’m going out, mother,” Maler said, and she sat still; but as he put on his coat she said, “It’s not safe.”

  “No. It’s not safe.”

  “Stay inside, Maler.”

  “It’s sunny outside. The sunshine bathes us all, eh? I need a good bath.”

  She looked up at him in terror. Having denied the need for help, she did not know how to ask for it. “This isn’t real, this is insane, all this trouble-making, you mustn’t get mixed up in it, I won’t accept it. I won’t believe it!” she said, raising her long arms to him as if in incantation. He stood there, a big heavy man. Down on the street there was a long shout, silence, a shout; the windows rattled again. She dropped her arms to her sides and cried, “But Maler, I’ll be alone!”

  “Yes, well,” he said softly, thoughtfully, not wanting to hurt her, “that’s how it is.” He left her, closed the door behind him, and went down the stairs and out, dazzled at first by the bright October sunlight, to join the army of the unarmed and with them to go down the long streets leading westward to, but not across, the river.

  1956

  BROTHERS

  AND

 
; SISTERS

  THE injured quarrier lay on a high hospital bed. He had not recovered consciousness. His silence was grand and oppressive; his body under the sheet that dropped in stiff folds, his face were as indifferent as stone. The mother, as if challenged by that silence and indifference, spoke loudly: “What did you do it for? Do you want to die before I do? Look at him, look at him, my beauty, my hawk, my river, my son!” Her sorrow boasted of itself. She rose to the occasion like a lark to the morning. His silence and her outcry meant the same thing: the unendurable made welcome. The younger son stood listening. They bore him down with their grief as large as life. Unconscious, heedless, broken like a piece of chalk, that body, his brother, bore him down with the weight of the flesh, and he wanted to run away, to save himself.

  The man who had been saved stood beside him, a little stooped fellow, middle-aged, limestone dust white in his knuckles. He too was borne down. “He saved my life,” he said to Stefan, gaping, wanting an explanation. His voice was the flat toneless voice of the deaf.

  “He would,” Stefan said. “That’s what he’d do.”

  He left the hospital to get his lunch. Everybody asked him about his brother. “He’ll live,” Stefan said. He went to the White Lion for lunch, drank too much. “Crippled? Him? Kostant? So he got a couple of tons of rock in the face, it won’t hurt him, he’s made of the stuff. He wasn’t born, he was quarried out.” They laughed at him as usual. “Quarried out,” he said. “Like all the rest of you.” He left the White Lion, went down Ardure Street four blocks straight out of town, and kept on straight, walking northeast, parallel with the railroad tracks a quarter mile away. The May sun was small and greyish overhead. Underfoot there were dust and small weeds. The Karst, the limestone plain, jigged tinily about him with heatwaves like the transparent vibrating wings of flies. Remote and small, rigid beyond that vibrant greyish haze, the mountains stood. He had known the mountains from far off all his life, and twice had seen them close, when he took the Brailava train, once going, once coming back. He knew they were clothed in trees, fir trees with roots clutching the banks of running streams and with branches dark in the mist that closed and parted in the mountain gullies in the light of dawn as the train clanked by, its smoke dropping down the green slopes like a dropping veil. In the mountains the streams ran noisy in the sunlight; there were waterfalls. Here on the karst the rivers ran underground, silent in dark veins of stone. You could ride a horse all day from Sfaroy Kampe and still not reach the mountains, still be in the limestone dust; but late on the second day you would come under the shade of trees, by running streams. Stefan Fabbre sat down by the side of the straight unreal road he had been walking on, and put his head in his arms. Alone, a mile from town, a quarter mile from the tracks, sixty miles from the mountains, he sat and cried for his brother. The plain of dust and stone quivered and grimaced about him in the heat like the face of a man in pain.

  He got back an hour late from lunch to the office of the Chorin Company where he worked as an accountant. His boss came to his desk: “Fabbre, you needn’t stay this afternoon.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, if you want to go to the hospital…”

  “What can I do there? I can’t sew him back up, can I?”

  “As you like,” the boss said, turning away.

  “Not me that got a ton of rocks in the face, is it?” Nobody answered him.

  When Kostant Fabbre was hurt in the rockslide in the quarry he was twenty-six years old; his brother was twenty-three; their sister Rosana was thirteen. She was beginning to grow tall and sullen, to weigh upon the earth. Instead of running, now, she walked, ungainly and somewhat hunched, as if at each step she crossed, unwilling, a threshold. She talked loudly, and laughed aloud. She struck back at whatever touched her, a voice, a wind, a word she did not understand, the evening star. She had not learned indifference, she knew only defiance. Usually she and Stefan quarrelled, touching each other where each was raw, unfinished. This night when he got home the mother had not come back from the hospital, and Rosana was silent in the silent house. She had been thinking all afternoon about pain, about pain and death; defiance had failed her.

  “Don’t look so down,” Stefan told her as she served out beans for supper. “He’ll be all right.”

  “Do you think…Somebody was saying he might be, you know…”

  “Crippled? No, he’ll be all right”

  “Why do you think he, you know, ran to push that fellow out of the way?”

  “No why to it, Ros. He just did it.”

  He was touched that she asked these questions of him, and surprised at the certainty of his answers. He had not thought that he had any answers.

  “It’s queer,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “I don’t know. Kostant…”

  “Knocked the keystone out of your arch, didn’t it? Wham! One rock falls, they all go.” She did not understand him; she did not recognise the place where she had come today, a place where she was like other people, sharing with them the singular catastrophe of being alive. Stefan was not the one to guide her. “Here we all are,” he went on, “lying around each of us under our private pile of rocks. At least they got Kostant out from under his and filled him up with morphine…D’you remember once when you were little you said ‘I’m going to marry Kostant when I grow up.’”

  Rosana nodded. “Sure. And he got real mad.”

  “Because mother laughed.”

  “It was you and dad that laughed.”

  Neither of them was eating. The room was close and dark around the kerosene lamp.

  “What was it like when dad died?”

  “You were there,” Stefan said.

  “I was nine. But I can’t remember it. Except it was hot like now, and there were a lot of big moths knocking their heads on the glass. Was that the night he died?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What was it like?” She was trying to explore the new land.

  “I don’t know. He just died. It isn’t like anything else.”

  The father had died of pneumonia at forty-six, after thirty years in the quarries. Stefan did not remember his death much more clearly than Rosana did. He had not been the keystone of the arch.

  “Have we got any fruit to eat?”

  The girl did not answer. She was gazing at the air above the place at the table where the elder brother usually sat. Her forehead and dark eyebrows were like his, were his: likeness between kin is identity, the brother and sister were, by so much or so little, the curve of brow and temple, the same person; so that, for a moment, Kostant sat across the table mutely contemplating his own absence.

  “Is there any?”

  “I think there’s some apples in the pantry,” she answered, coming back to herself, but so quietly that in her brother’s eyes she seemed briefly a woman, a quiet woman speaking out of her thoughts; and he said with tenderness to that woman, “Come on, let’s go over to the hospital. They must be through messing with him by now.”

  The deaf man had come back to the hospital. His daughter was with him. Stefan knew she clerked at the butcher’s shop. The deaf man, not allowed into the ward, kept Stefan half an hour in the hot, pine-floored waiting room that smelled of disinfectant and resin. He talked, walking about, sitting down, jumping up, arguing in the loud even monotone of his deafness. “I’m not going back to the pit. No sir. What if I’d said last night I’m not going into the pit tomorrow? Then how’d it be now, see? I wouldn’t be here now, nor you wouldn’t, nor he wouldn’t, him in there, your brother. We’d all be home. Home safe and sound, see? I’m not going back to the pit. No, by God. I’m going out to the farm, that’s where I’m going. I grew up there, see, out west in the foothills there, my brother’s there. I’m going back and work the farm with him. I’m not going back to the pit again.”

  The daughter sat on the wooden bench, erect and still. Her face was narrow, her black hair was pulled back in a knot. “Aren’t you hot?” Stefan asked h
er, and she answered gravely, “No, I’m all right.” Her voice was clear. She was used to speaking to her deaf father. When Stefan said nothing more she looked down again and sat with her hands in her lap. The father was still talking. Stefan rubbed his hands through his sweaty hair and tried to interrupt. “Good, sounds like a good plan, Sachik. Why waste the rest of your life in the pits.” The deaf man talked right on.

  “He doesn’t hear you.”

  “Can’t you take him home?”

  “I couldn’t make him leave here even for dinner. He won’t stop talking.”

  Her voice was much lower saying this, perhaps from embarrassment, and the sound of it caught at Stefan. He rubbed his sweaty hair again and stared at her, thinking for some reason of smoke, waterfalls, the mountains.

  “You go on home.” He heard in his own voice the qualities of hers, softness and clarity. “I’ll get him over to the Lion for an hour.”

  “Then you won’t see your brother.”

  “He won’t run away. Go on home.”

  At the White Lion both men drank heavily. Sachik talked on about the farm in the foothills, Stefan talked about the mountains and his year at college in the city. Neither heard the other. Drunk, Stefan walked Sachik home to one of the rows of party-walled houses that the Chorin Company had put up in ’95 when they opened the new quarry. The houses were on the west edge of town, and behind them the karst stretched in the light of the half-moon away on and on, pocked, pitted, level, answering the moonlight with its own pallor taken at third-hand from the sun. The moon, secondhand, worn at the edges, was hung up in the sky like something a housewife leaves out to remind her it needs mending. “Tell your daughter everything is all right,” Stefan said, swaying at the door. “Everything is all right,” Sachik repeated with enthusiasm, “aa-all right.”

  Stefan went home drunk, and so the day of the accident blurred in his memory into the rest of the days of the year, and the fragments that stayed with him, his brother’s closed eyes, the dark girl looking at him, the moon looking at nothing, did not recur to his mind together as parts of a whole, but separately with long intervals between.