Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Farming’s the hardest work, they say.”

  “I don’t mind the hard, it’s the muck I mind.”

  “Is there a village near?”

  “Well, it’s halfway between Verre and Lotima. But there’s neighbors, everybody within twenty miles knows each other.”

  “We’re still your neighbors, by that reckoning,” Stefan put in. His voice slurred off in mid-sentence. He felt irrelevant to these two. Kostant sat relaxed, his lame leg stretched out, his hands clasped round the other knee; Ekata faced him, upright, her hands lying easy in her lap. They did not look alike but might have been brother and sister. Stefan got up with a mumbled excuse and went out back. The north wind blew. Sparrows hopped in the sour dirt under the fir tree and the scurf of weedy grass. Shirts, underclothes, a pair of sheets snapped, relaxed, jounced on the clothesline between two iron posts. The air smelt of ozone. Stefan vaulted the fence, cut across the Katalny yard to the street, and walked westward. After a couple of blocks the street petered out. A track led on to a quarry, abandoned twenty years ago when they struck water; there was twenty feet of water in it now. Boys swam there, summers. Stefan had swum there, in terror, for he had never learned to swim well and there was no foothold, it was all deep and bitter cold. A boy had drowned there years ago, last year a man had drowned himself, a quarrier going blind from stone-splinters in his eyes. It was still called the West Pit. Stefan’s father had worked in it as a boy. Stefan sat down by the lip of it and watched the wind, caught down in the four walls, eddy in tremors over the water that reflected nothing.

  “I have to go meet Martin,” Ekata said. As she stood up Kostant put a hand out to his crutches, then gave it up: “Takes me too long to get afoot,” he said.

  “How much can you get about on those?”

  “From here to there,” he said, pointing to the kitchen. “Leg’s all right. It’s the back’s slow.”

  “You’ll be off them—?”

  “Doctor says by Easter. I’ll run out and throw ’em in the West Pit…” They both smiled. She felt tenderness for him, and a pride in knowing him.

  “Will you be coming in to Kampe, I wonder, when bad weather comes?”

  “I don’t know how the roads will be.”

  “If you do, come by,” he said. “If you like.”

  “I will.”

  They noticed then that Stefan was gone.

  “I don’t know where he went to,” Kostant said. “He comes and he goes, Stefan does. Your brother, Martin, they tell me he’s a good lad in our crew.”

  “He’s young,” Ekata said.

  “It’s hard at first. I went in at fifteen. But then when you’ve got your strength, you know the work, and it goes easy. Good wishes to your family, then.” She shook his big, hard, warm hand, and let herself out. On the doorstep she met Stefan face to face. He turned red. It shocked her to see a man blush. He spoke, as usual leaping straight into the subject—“You were the year behind me in school, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You went around with Rosa Bayenin. She won the scholarship I did, the next year.”

  “She’s teaching school now, in the Valone.”

  “She did more with it than I would have done.—I was thinking, see, it’s queer how you grow up in a place like this, you know everybody, then you meet one and find out you don’t know them.”

  She did not know what to answer. He said good-bye and went into the house; she went on, retying her kerchief against the rising wind.

  Rosana and the mother came into the house a minute after Stefan. “Who was that on the doorstep you were talking to?” the mother said sharply. “That wasn’t Nona Katalny, I’ll be bound.”

  “You’re right,” Stefan said.

  “All right, but you watch out for that one, you’re just the kind she’d like to get her claws into, and wouldn’t that be fine, you could walk her puppydog whilst she entertains her ma’s gentlemen boarders.” She and Rosana both began to laugh their loud, dark laughter. “Who was it you were talking to, then?”

  “What’s it to you?” he shouted back. Their laughter enraged him; it was like a pelting with hard clattering rocks, too thick to dodge.

  “What is it to me who’s standing on my own doorstep, you want to know, I’ll let you know what it is to me—” Words leapt to meet her anger as they did to all her passions. “You so high and mighty all the time with all your going off to college, but you came sneaking back quick enough to this house, didn’t you, and I’ll let you know I want to know who comes into this house—” Rosana was shouting, “I know who it was, it was Martin Sachik’s sister!” Kostant loomed up suddenly beside the three of them, stooped and tall on his crutches: “Cut it out,” he said, and they fell silent.

  Nothing was said, then or later, to the mother or between the two brothers, about Ekata Sachik’s having been in the house.

  Martin took his sister to dine at the Bell, the cafe where officials of the Chorin Company and visitors from out of town went to dine. He was proud of himself for having thought of treating her, proud of the white tableclothes and the forks and soupspoons, terrified of the waiter. He in his outgrown Sunday coat and his sister in her grey dress, how admirably they were behaving, how adult they were. Ekata looked at the menu so calmly, and her face did not change expression in the slightest as she murmured to him, “But there’s two kinds of soup.”

  “Yes,” he said, with sophistication.

  “Do you choose which kind?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You must, you’d bloat up before you ever got to the meat—” They snickered. Ekata’s shoulders shook; she hid her face in her napkin; the napkin was enormous—“Martin, look, they’ve given me a bedsheet—” They both sat snorting, shaking, in torment, while the waiter, with another bedsheet on his shoulder, inexorably approached.

  Dinner was ordered inaudibly, eaten with etiquette, elbows pressed close to the sides. The dessert was a chestnut-flour pudding, and Ekata, her elbows relaxing a little with enjoyment, said, “Rosa Bayenin said when she wrote the town she’s in is right next to a whole forest of chestnut trees, everybody goes and picks them up in autumn, the trees grow thick as night, she said, right down to the river bank.” Town after six weeks on the farm, the talk with Kostant and Stefan, dining at the restaurant had excited her. “This is awfully good,” she said, but she could not say what she saw, which was sunlight striking golden down a river between endless dark-foliaged trees, a wind running upriver among shadows and the scent of leaves, of water, and of chestnut-flour pudding, a world of forests, of rivers, of strangers, the sunlight shining on the world.

  “Saw you talking with Stefan Fabbre,” Martin said.

  “I was at their house.”

  “What for?”

  “They asked me.”

  “What for?”

  “Just to find out how we’re getting on.”

  “They never asked me.”

  “You’re not on the farm, stupid. You’re in his crew, aren’t you? You could look in sometime, you know. He’s a grand man, you’d like him.”

  Martin grunted. He resented Ekata’s visit to the Fabbres without knowing why. It seemed somehow to complicate things. Rosana had probably been there. He did not want his sister knowing about Rosana. Knowing what about Rosana? He gave it up, scowling.

  “The younger brother, Stefan, he works at the Chorin office, doesn’t he?”

  “Keeps books or something. He was supposed to be a genius and go to college, but they kicked him out.”

  “I know.” She finished her pudding, lovingly. “Everybody knows that,” she said.

  “I don’t like him,” Martin said.

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t.” He was relieved, having dumped his ill humor onto Stefan. “You want coffee?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Come on. I do.” Masterful, he ordered coffee for both. Ekata admired him, and enjoyed the coffee. “What luck, to have a brother,” she said. The next
morning, Sunday, Martin met her at the hotel and they went to church; singing the Lutheran hymns each heard the other’s strong clear voice and each was pleased and wanted to laugh. Stefan Fabbre was at the service. “Does he usually come?” Ekata asked Martin as they left the church.

  “No,” Martin said, though he had no idea, having not been to church himself since May. He felt dull and fierce after the long sermon. “He’s following you around.”

  She said nothing.

  “He waited for you at the hotel, you said. Takes you out to see his brother, he says. Talks to you on the street. Shows up in church.” Self-defense furnished him these items one after another, and the speaking of them convinced him.

  “Martin,” Ekata said, “if there’s one kind of man I hate it’s a meddler.”

  “If you weren’t my sister—”

  “If I wasn’t your sister I’d be spared your stupidness. Will you go ask the man to put the horse in?” So they parted with mild rancor between them, soon lost in distance and the days.

  In late November when Ekata drove in again to Sfaroy Kampe she went to the Fabbre house. She wanted to go, and had told Kostant she would, yet she had to force herself; and when she found that Kostant and Rosana were home, but Stefan was not, she felt much easier. Martin had troubled her with his stupid meddling. It was Kostant she wanted to see, anyhow.

  But Kostant wanted to talk about Stefan.

  “He’s always out roaming, or at the Lion. Restless. Wastes his time. He said to me, one day we talked, he’s afraid to leave Kampe. I’ve thought about what he meant. What is it he’s afraid of?”

  “Well, he hasn’t any friends but here.”

  “Few enough here. He acts the clerk among the quarrymen, and the quarryman among the clerks. I’ve seen him, here, when my mates come in. Why don’t he be what he is?”

  “Maybe he isn’t sure what he is.”

  “He won’t learn it from mooning around and drinking at the Lion,” said Kostant, hard and sure in his own intactness. “And rubbing up quarrels. He’s had three fights this month. Lost ’em all, poor devil,” and he laughed. She never expected the innocence of laughter on his grave face. And he was kind; his concern for Stefan was deep, his laughter without a sneer, the laughter of a good nature. Like Stefan, she wondered at him, at his beauty and his strength, but she did not think of him as wasted. The Lord keeps the house and knows his servants. If he had sent this innocent and splendid man to live obscure on the plain of stone, it was part of his housekeeping, of the strange economy of the stone and the rose, the rivers that run and do not run dry, the tiger, the ocean, the maggot, and the not eternal stars.

  Rosana, by the hearth, listened to them talk. She sat silent, heavy and her shoulders stooped, though of late she had been learning again to hold herself erect as she had when she was a child, a year ago. They say one gets used to being a millionaire; so after a year or two a human being begins to get used to being a woman. Rosana was learning to wear the rich and heavy garment of her inheritance. Just now she was listening, something she had rarely done. She had never heard adults talk as these two were talking. She had never heard a conversation. At the end of twenty minutes she slipped quietly out. She had learned enough, too much, she needed time to absorb and practice. She began practicing at once. She went down the street erect, not slow and not fast, her face composed, like Ekata Sachik.

  “Daydreaming, Ros?” jeered Martin Sachik from the Katalny yard.

  She smiled at him and said, “Hello, Martin.” He stood staring.

  “Where you going?” he asked with caution.

  “Nowhere; I’m just walking. Your sister’s at our house.”

  “She is?” Martin sounded unusually stupid and belligerent, but she stuck to her practicing: “Yes,” she said politely. “She came to see my brother.”

  “Which brother?”

  “Kostant, why would she have come to see Stefan?” she said, forgetting her new self a moment and grinning widely.

  “How come you’re barging around all by yourself?”

  “Why not?” she said, stung by “barging” and so reverting to an extreme mildness of tone.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Why not?”

  They walked down Gulhelm Street till it became a track between weeds.

  “Want to go on to the West Pit?”

  “Why not?” Rosana liked the phrase; it sounded experienced.

  They walked on the thin stony dirt between miles of dead grass too short to bow to the northwest wind. Enormous masses of cloud travelled backward over their heads so that they seemed to be walking very fast, the grey plain sliding along with them. “Clouds make you dizzy,” Martin said, “like looking up a flagpole.” They walked with faces upturned, seeing nothing but the motion of the wind. Rosana realised that though their feet were on the earth they themselves stuck up into the sky, it was the sky they were walking through, just as birds flew through it. She looked over at Martin walking through the sky.

  They came to the abandoned quarry and stood looking down at the water, dulled by flurries of trapped wind.

  “Want to go swimming?”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s the mule trail. Looks funny, don’t it, going right down into the water.”

  “It’s cold here.”

  “Come on down the trail. There’s no wind inside the walls hardly. That’s where Penik jumped off from, they grappled him up from right under here.”

  Rosana stood on the lip of the pit. The grey wind blew by her. “Do you think he meant to? I mean, he was blind, maybe he fell in—”

  “He could see some. They were going to send him to Brailava and operate on him. Come on.” She followed him to the beginning of the path down. It looked very steep from above. She had become timorous the last year. She followed him slowly down the effaced, boulder-smashed track into the quarry. “Here, hold on,” he said, pausing at a rough drop; he took her hand and brought her down after him. They separated at once and he led on to where the water cut across the path, which plunged on down to the hidden floor of the quarry. The water was lead-dark, uneasy, its surface broken into thousands of tiny pleatings, circles, counter-circles by the faint trapped wind jarring it ceaselessly against the walls. “Shall I go on?” Martin whispered, loud in the silence.

  “Why not?”

  He walked on. She cried, “Stop!” He had walked into the water up to his knees; he turned, lost his balance, careened back onto the path with a plunge that showered her with water and sent clapping echoes round the walls of rock. “You’re crazy, what did you do that for?” Martin sat down, took off his big shoes to dump water out of them, and laughed, a soundless laugh mixed with shivering. “What did you do that for?”

  “Felt like it,” he said. He caught at her arm, pulled her down kneeling by him, and kissed her. The kiss went on. She began to struggle, and pulled away from him. He hardly knew it. He lay there on the rocks at the water’s edge laughing; he was as strong as the earth and could not lift his hand…He sat up, mouth open, eyes unfocussed. After a while he put on his wet, heavy shoes and started up the path. She stood at the top, a windblown stroke of darkness against the huge moving sky. “Come on!” she shouted, and wind thinned her voice to a knife’s edge. “Come on, you can’t catch me!” As he neared the top of the path, she ran. He ran, weighed down by his wet shoes and trousers. A hundred yards from the quarry he caught her and tried to capture both her arms. Her wild face was next to his for a moment. She twisted free, ran off again, and he followed her into town, trotting since he could not run any more. Where Gulhelm Street began she stopped and waited for him. They walked down the pavement side by side. “You look like a drowned cat,” she jeered in a panting whisper. “Who’s talking,” he answered the same way, “look at the mud on your skirt.” In front of the boarding house they stopped and looked at each other, and he laughed. “Good night, Ros!” he said. She wanted to bite him. “Good night!” she said, and walked the few yards to her o
wn front door, not slow and not fast, feeling his gaze on her back like a hand on her flesh.

  Not finding her brother at the boarding house, Ekata had gone back to the hotel to wait for him; they were to dine at the Bell again. She told the desk clerk to send her brother up when he came. In a few minutes there was a knock; she opened the door. It was Stefan Fabbre. He was the color of oatmeal and looked dingy, like an unmade bed.

  “I wanted to ask you…” His voice slurred off. “Have some dinner,” he muttered, looking past her at the room.

  “My brother’s coming for me. That’s him now.” But it was the hotel manager coming up the stairs. “Sorry, miss,” he said loudly. “There’s a parlour downstairs.” Ekata stared at him blankly. “Now look, miss, you said to send up your brother, and the clerk he don’t know your brother by sight, but I do. That’s my business. There’s a nice parlour downstairs for entertaining. All right? You want to come to a respectable hotel, I want to keep it respectable for you, see?”

  Stefan pushed past him and blundered down the stairs. “He’s drunk, miss,” said the manager.

  “Go away,” Ekata said, and shut the door on him. She sat down on the bed with clenched hands, but she could not sit still. She jumped up, took up her coat and kerchief, and without putting them on ran downstairs and out, hurling the key onto the desk behind which the manager stood staring. Ardure Street was dark between pools of lamplight, and the winter wind blew down it. She walked the two blocks west, came back down the other side of the street the length of it, eight blocks; she passed the White Lion, but the winter door was up and she could not see in. It was cold, the wind ran through the streets like a river running. She went to Gulhelm Street and met Martin coming out of the boarding house. They went to the Bell for supper. Both were thoughtful and uneasy. They spoke little and gently, grateful for companionship.

  Alone in church next morning, when she had made sure that Stefan was not there, she lowered her eyes in relief. The stone walls of the church and the stark words of the service stood strong around her. She rested like a ship in haven. Then as the pastor gave his text, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help,” she shivered, and once again looked all about the church, moving her head and eyes slowly, surreptitiously, seeking him. She heard nothing of the sermon. But when the service was over she did not want to leave the church. She went out among the last of the congregation. The pastor detained her, asking about her mother. She saw Stefan waiting at the foot of the steps.