Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Ladislas Gaye and his son walked from the hotel to the old bridge over the Ras; their home was in the Old City, the bleak jumbled quarter on the north side of the river. What Foranoy had in the way of wealth and modernity lay south of the river in the New City. It was a warm bright day, late spring; they stopped on the bridge to look at the arches reflecting in the dark water, each with its reflection forming a perfect circle. A barge came through loaded with wadded crates and Vasli, held up by his father so he could see over the stone railing, spat down on one of the crates. “Shame on you,” Ladislas Gaye said without heat. He was happy. He did not care if he had blubbered like a baby in front of Otto Egorin, the great impresario. He did not care if he was tired and this was one of his wife’s bad days and he was already late. He did not care about anything at all, except the child’s small, firm hand in his, and the way the wind out here on the bridge, between city and city, carried away all sound and left one bathed in warm, silent sunlight, and the fact that Otto Egorin knew what he was: a musician. So far, in this one recognition by one man, he was strong and he was free. It went no further than that, his strength and freedom, but it was enough. The trumpet-tune of his Sanctus sang in his head.

  “Papa, why did the big lady have things in her ears and ask if I liked chocolate? Do people not like chocolate?”

  “They were jewels, Vasli. I don’t know.” The trumpet sang on. If only he and the little fellow could stay here awhile, in the sunlight and silence, between city and city, between moment and moment…They went on, into the Old City, past the wharves, past the abandoned houses built of stone, up the hill, into the courtyard of their tenement. Vasli broke loose, disappeared into a crowd of children brawling, screaming, swarming in the court. Ladislas Gaye called after him, gave it up, climbed the dark stairs and went down a dark hall on the third floor, let himself in the dark kitchen, the first room of their three-room flat. His wife was peeling potatoes at the kitchen table. She wore a dirty white wrapper, dirty pink chenille mules on her bare feet. “It’s six o’clock, Ladis,” she said without looking round at him.

  “I was in the New City.”

  “Why’d you drag the child so far? Where is he? Where are Tonia and Givana? I called and called them, I’m sure they’re not in the court. Why’d you go so far with the child?”

  “I went to—”

  “My back aches worse than ever, it’s the heat, why is summer so hot here?”

  “Let me do that.”

  “No, I’ll finish. I wish you’d clean those gas vents in the oven, Ladis, I must have asked you fifty times. Now I can’t get it lighted at all, it’s filthy dirty, and I can’t go scraping at it with my back like it is.”

  “All right. Let me change my shirt.”

  “Listen here, Ladis—Ladis! Is Vasli down there in the court in his good clothes? Go down and get him right away, how do you think we can afford to get his good clothes cleaned every time he puts them on? Ladis? Go down and get him! Can you never think of these things? He’s probably filthy dirty already, playing with those big roughnecks around the well!”

  “I’m going, give me time, will you!”

  In September the east wind of autumn rose, blowing past the empty stone houses and down the bright troubled river, blowing scant litter about the city streets, blowing fine dust into people’s eyes and throats as they went home from work. Ladislas Gaye passed a street-orator, a little girl crying loudly as she ran down the steep street, a newspaper kiosk where the headlines said “Mr Neville Chamberlain in Munich,” a big stalled automobile around which a crowd had gathered, a group of young fellows watching a fistfight, a couple of women talking earnestly to each other across the street, one standing on the curb and the other hanging half out of a tenement window, wearing a blue-and-scarlet satin wrapper; he saw and heard it all, and saw and heard nothing. He was very tired. He got home. His young daughters were playing in the court, in the well of shadow four stories deep. He saw them in the swarm of girls shrilling around an areaway, but did not stop. He went up the dark stairs, down the hall, into the kitchen. His wife had been stronger lately, as the weather began to cool, but now she was in a vile temper and ready to weep; little Vasli had been caught with older boys torturing a cat, pouring kerosene over it, they planned to set it afire. “He’s no good, he’s a little beast, how could a child want to do a horrible thing like that?” Vasli was locked in the middle room, screaming with rage. Ladislas Gaye sat down at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands. He felt sick. His wife went on about the child, the other children in the court. “That Mrs Rasse, sticking her head in here without even knocking and saying did I know what my little Vasli was up to, as if her brats were something to be proud of, with their dirty faces and pink eyes like a lot of rabbits. Are you going to do anything about it, Ladis, are you just going to sit there? Do you think 1 can handle him? Is that the kind of son you want?”

  “What can I do about it? Are we going to have anything to eat tonight? I’ve got a piano lesson at eight, you know. For God’s sake let me sit down a minute, let me have some peace.”

  “Peace! You want peace, what do you care if the child turns into a brute like all the others here! All right, what do I care either if that’s what you want.” She slapped about the kitchen in her pink mules, getting supper.

  “Little children are cruel,” he said. “They don’t know what it means. They find out.”

  She shrugged. Vasli was sobbing now behind the door; he knew his father was home. Presently Ladislas Gaye went into that room, sat with the child in the half-dark. In the third room, where the grandmother lay in bed, dance music blared from the radio; Ladislas had bought it secondhand for her, it was her sole amusement and she never talked now of anything but what she heard on the radio. Vasli clung to his father, not crying any more, worn out. “You mustn’t do anything like that with the other boys, Vasli,” the father murmured at last. “The poor beast is weaker than you, it can’t help itself.”

  The child was silent. All cruelty, all misery, all darkness present and to come hung around them in the dark room. Trombones blared a waltz in the next room. He clung to his father, silent.

  In the thick blaring of the trombones, thick as sweet cough syrup, Gaye heard for a moment the deep clear thunder of his Sanctus like thunder between the stars, over the edge of the universe—one moment of it, as if the roof of the building had been taken off and he looked up into the complete, enduring darkness, one moment only. The announcer talked, a smooth excited gabble. When Gaye went back to the kitchen he said to his wife, over the shrill voices of the two girls, “The English Prime Minister is in Munich with Hitler.” She did not answer, only set the food down in front of him, soup and potatoes. She was still overwrought and angry. “Eat and don’t talk, you, shameless!” she snapped at Vasli, who had forgotten it all and was squabbling with his sisters.

  As Gaye walked down the hill, across the bridge over the Ras in late dusk, a tune he had written was in his head. It was the last of seven poems he had set, all in a burst, in August; he kept wondering if that was enough to copy out and send to Otto Egorin in Krasnoy. But the last verse of the poem bothered him now, the one that meant, “It is Thou in thy mercy that breakest down over our heads all we build, that we may see the sky: and so I do not complain.” He had muffed that last line; it should go thus—Gaye sang it to himself, sang the whole verse over, heard the accompaniment. There it was, that was it. Pray God his pupil would be late so that he could work it out on the piano at the Schola before the lesson. But it was he who was late. When the lesson was over his head was full of Clementi exercises and though the melody was set now he could not get the accompaniment clear; as he had heard it on the bridge it had been purer, more certain. He tried the verse, the whole song, over and over, but the janitor was through cleaning and wanted to close the building. He started home. The wind was strong and cold now, the sky empty, the river black as oil under the arches of the bridge. He stopped there on the bridge a while, but could not hea
r the music he had heard.

  Back at home he sat down at the kitchen table with the manuscript of the song, but with the weaker version before his eyes and no piano at hand he lost even the mood of the accompaniment he wanted; it was all out of reach. He knew he was too tired to work but nonetheless tried, doggedly, angrily, to hear and to write down. He sat half an hour motionless, never moving his hand. At the other end of the table his wife was mending Tonia’s dress, listening to some program of talk on the grandmother’s radio. He put his hands over his ears. She said something about music, but he did not listen. The total impossibility of writing was a choking weight in him, like a big chunk of rock in his chest. Nothing would ever change, he thought, and in the next moment he felt a relaxation within him, lightness, openness, and certainty, utter certainty. He thought it was his own song, then, raising his head, understood that he was actually hearing this tune. He did not have to write it. It had been written long ago, no one need suffer for it any more. Lehmann was singing it,

  Du hold Kunst, ich danke dir.

  He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, “You are irrelevant”; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, “Listen.” For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

  Gaye put away the scribbled, ruled sheets of paper the little volume of poetry, the pen and ink. He stretched and yawned. “Good night,” he said in his soft voice, and went off to bed.

  1938

  THE

  HOUSE

  THE sunlight of any October lay yellow across her way, and hundreds of dry, golden afternoons rustled under her steps. Only their great age kept the sycamores from being importunate. For blocks she was pursued by the familiarity of shadows, bricks, and balconies. Fountains spoke to her as if she had not been away at all. Eight years she had been gone, and this stupid city had never noticed her absence; its sunlight and the sound of its many waters hung about her like the walls of her own house, her home. Confused and offended, she passed the house at 18 Reyn Street without a glance at its door or garden wall, though something, not her eyes, saw that door and gate were locked. After that, the city began to let her be. Within a block or two it did not know her. The fountains talked to someone else. Now she was differently confused, recognising none of these crossings, not one doorstep or window of the shops and houses. She had to ask her way ignominiously of street-signs and house-numbers, and when she found the place she sought, a tenement with several entrances, she had to enter and inquire at open doors. Rumpled beds, family quarrels and partly buttoned dressing-gowns sent her up to a fourth-floor room, where her knock was answered only by a pencilled card tacked on the door. F.L. PANIN, it said. She looked in. A dormer room, jammed with the hefty sofas and tables of a dismantled house; a stranger’s room, sunny, stuffy, defenseless.

  Across from her was a curtained doorway. She said, “Anybody here?” and was answered from behind the curtain by someone half awake, “Hold on a moment.”

  She held on.

  He came across the room, himself, as wholly himself as the stones and sunlight of the city after these eight years: the reality of her wretched dreams in which he and she stopped at inns on roads leading up into grey mountains and could not find, down cold corridors, each other’s room: the original of all the facsimiles who, in Krasnoy on winter evenings, crossed a street with his walk or looked round with his turn of the head: himself.

  “Sorry, I was asleep.”

  “I’m Mariya.”

  He stood still, and his coat hung on him as on a coatrack. Seeing that, she saw that his hair had gone a kind of dull grey—that his hair was grey. He was thin, grey, changed. She would not have known him if she passed him on the street. They shook hands.

  “Sit down, Mariya,” he said, and they both sat, in large shabby chairs. Across the bare floor between them lay a bar of Aisnar’s unalloyed, inimitable autumn sunlight. “I have the alcove, but the Panins let me use this room while they’re out. They both work the day shift at the GPR.”

  “That’s where you work too—evening shift? I was going to leave a note.”

  “Usually I’d be on the way to work by this time. I’ve had some days off. Flu.”

  She should have expected him not to ask any questions. He disliked answering them, and seldom asked them. It was his self-respect that prevented him, a self-respect so entire that it included all other men and women, accepted them as responsible, exempted them from question. How had he survived so long in this world of the public confessional?

  “I have a two-week holiday,” she said. “I work in Krasnoy, teaching. In the primary schools.”

  It confused her to see his smile on the face of a man she did not know.

  “I’m divorced from Givan.”

  He looked down at the sunlight on the floor. She answered the next question he did not ask—“Four years ago.” Then she took out her cigarettes in self-defense. But she summoned up courage, before laying the smokescreen, to offer him one, reaching out to him across the sunlight: “Smoke?”

  “Yes, thanks.” He looked at the cigarette, smelled it, and leaned forward happily to the flame of her match. He inhaled the smoke and burst into a cough, a hacking, whacking cough, a series of explosions like heavy artillery, the most noise she had ever heard him make in his life. All through it he held on to the cigarette, and when he had got his breath back he took another draw, not inhaling.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” she said helplessly.

  “Haven’t been,” he said. Sweat stood out on his forehead, even in his hair, which she now saw was only partly grey. Soon he put the cigarette out with care and stowed the unsmoked end in his shirt pocket. This he did with grace and ease, but then he looked at her with apology. She had not been with him during the years when he learned to save cigarette butts, and so might be embarrassed; and she tried to look impassive, knowing how he disliked causing embarrassment.

  The strangers’ room, the furniture of some other house, stood silently around them.

  “Mariya, what did you come here for?” The question, which would have been any other man’s, was not his, nor the voice; only the eyes, clear, frank, and obdurate.

  “To see you. To talk to you, I mean, Pier. It got so that I had to. I’m lonely. I mean, more than that, I’m alone. By myself. Outside. There’s nobody in Krasnoy that I can say anything to, they don’t need me. I used to think, while we were married, you know, that if I were by myself, on my own, I’d find a lot of interesting people, friends, and be on the inside, do you know what I mean? But that was all wrong. You had friends then and I expect you do now. You have a place to stand on when you meet people. I never did, I never made friends. I never have reached another person, except you. I suppose I didn’t really want to reach anybody. But now I do.” She stopped, and with the same horror with which she had heard him cough, heard herself sob loudly. “I can’t stand it very much longer. Everything is falling apart. I’ve lost my nerve.” She went on as fast as she could. “Are people here buying salt? You can’t get salt any more in Krasnoy, people buy it all and save it, they say if you wrap yourself in a sheet soaked in salt water it will cure radiation burns. Is that true? I don’t know. Is everyone here scared? But it’s not just the bombs, there are the other things they talk about, germ warfare, and how there are too many people and more all the time, so soon we’ll all be like rats in a box. And nobody seems to really hope for anything good any more. And then you get older, and you think about dying, and in a time like this it seems so mean and pointless. Living and dying both. It’s like being alone at night in
the wind, it just blows right through me. I try to hold myself up and have some dignity, you know, but I can’t believe in it anymore, I feel like an ant in a swarm, I can’t do it alone!”

  To spare her or himself he had gone to stand at the window, and with his back still turned he spoke, gently. “Nobody can,” he said. “But you can’t turn back, my dear. Nobody can do that either.”

  “I’m not trying to turn back. Truly I’m not. I’m just trying to meet you, now, here, don’t you see? Here where we are now. Because you’re the only person I ever have met. All the others are on different roads, they live in other houses. Didn’t you ever think I’d have to come back to you?”

  “I never once thought it.”

  “But I never left you, Pier! I only ran away because I knew I belonged to you, and I thought the only way I’d ever be myself was to get free of you. Myself, myself, a lot of good myself was. All I did was run like a stupid bitch till I got to the end of my leash.”

  “Well, leashes have two ends,” he said, leaning forward as if to gaze through the glass at a rooftop, a cloud, a remote grey mountain-peak. “I let go.”

  She tried to smooth her hair, which escaped in fierce tendrils from the knotted braids, red-blonde. Her voice was still shaky, but she said with dignity, “I wasn’t talking about love, Pier.”