Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  “I meant loyalty. Taking somebody in as part of your own life. Either you do or you don’t. We did. I was disloyal. You let me go, but you aren’t capable of disloyalty.”

  He came back to the chair facing her and sat down. Now she had the courage to look at him, and made sure that his face had not in fact changed; it had been eroded, erased, by sickness or hard times: not change, only loss.

  “Look, my dear”—that word was most comfortable to Mariya, though she knew it was only the expression of his general kindliness—“look, my dear, no matter how you put it, you’re trying to go back. There’s nothing left to go back to. In any sense.” And he looked at her with that kindness, as if he wished he could soften the facts.

  “What happened? Will you tell me? Not now if you don’t want. Sometime. I talked to Moshe, but I didn’t want to ask questions about you. I came here thinking you still lived in the house in Reyn Street and…all the rest.”

  “Well, during the Pentor Government we published some works that got the House into trouble when the R.E.P. came back into force. Bernoy, if you remember him, Bernoy and I were tried that fall. We were in prison up north. They let me out two years ago. But of course I can’t work for the state now in a responsible position, and that cuts out working for the House.” He still called it “the House,” the publishing firm Korre and Sons, which his family had owned and run from 1813 to 1946. When the firm was nationalised he had been kept on as manager. That had been his position when Mariya met him and married him and when she left him, and she had never imagined the chance of his losing it.

  He took the cigarette end out of his shirt pocket, took up a matchbox from a table, then hesitated. “Well, what it amounts to is that where I am now isn’t where I was during our marriage. I’m nowhere in particular, you see. And we’re well out of it. Loyalty really isn’t relevant, at this point.” He lit the cigarette and very cautiously got a mouthful of smoke.

  The table-lamp had a purple, ball-fringed shade to it, something left over from another world. Mariya fiddled with this, tugging at the dusty purple balls as if counting them around the shade. Her face was knotted in a frown. “Well, but where does loyalty count except in a tight place? You sound as if you’d given up, Pier!”

  Silence gave assent.

  “I haven’t been in trouble or in jail, and I have a job, and a room to myself. I’m much better off. But look at me. Like a lost dog. You can at least respect yourself, no matter what they’ve taken from you, but what I’ve lost is just that—self-respect.”

  “You,” he said, suddenly white with anger, “you took away my self-respect eight years ago!”

  This was not true, but she did not blame him for believing it. She persisted: “All right, then neither of us has any, there’s nothing to prevent our meeting.”

  Silence gave no assent.

  Mariya counted off nine cotton balls, then another nine. “What I mean, I ought to say it, Pier, is that I want to see if we can meet again; if I can come to you. Not come back, just come. I could be some help to you, as things are. I was just coming begging, but I didn’t know—I can get transferred to a school here. At least we might find a couple of rooms, and when you’re ill it’s a help to have somebody to look after things. It would be a better arrangement than this, for both of us. It would be more sensible.” Her face began to contract with tears again. She could not keep from crying, and got up to go. Her sleeve caught in the ball-fringed shade and pulled the lamp down with a smash. “Oh I’m sorry I came! I’m sorry!” she cried, picking up the lamp, struggling to refit the shade. He took it from her. “The bulb broke, see, the shade clamps onto the bulb. Don’t cry, Mariya. We’ll have to get a new bulb for it. Please, my dear. It’s all right.”

  “I’ll go get the new bulb. Then I’ll go.”

  “I didn’t say go.” He moved back from her. “I didn’t say come, either. I don’t know what to say. You go off with that bastard Givan Pelle, divorce me, and then come back to tell me loyalty’s the only thing that counts. Does it? Did mine? You told me then that fidelity is a bourgeois pretense invented by married people who haven’t the courage to live free.”

  “I didn’t say that, I repeated it, couldn’t you tell I learned it from Givan!”

  “I don’t care where you learned it, you said it, to me!” He gasped for breath. He looked down at the lampshade askew over the socket, and after a minute said, “All right. Wait.” He sat down, and neither spoke. A golden beam slid imperceptibly up through the air of the room as the sun’s end of it slid down towards the quiet plowlands west of Aisnar. She saw his face through a dust of gold. He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness.

  That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.

  A gilt-framed mirror hung over the clothes-chest, and she went to it to repair her braids. It reflected the brown air of a parlour long ago dispersed, the walls torn down: but in the mirror the blinds were still drawn. Her face was there only as a blur among many silvery plaques of blindness. She looked behind the curtain and saw a kerosene stove, a cot, a couple of packing-boxes serving as pantry and bureau. She looked at the cot and thought of the oaken bedstead in the house in Reyn Street, white sheets open and the white coverlet thrown back, on hot mornings of summer waking to the sound of fountains through windows left open to moonlight and now radiant with sunlight, the white curtains blowing a little; summers of marriage.

  “Ouf,” she sighed, squeezed so flat between past and present that she could not breathe. “There should be some place to go, some direction to things, shouldn’t there…Pier, what happened to Bernoy?”

  “Typhus. In jail.”

  “I remember him with that girl, the one who dropped her pearls in the wine, but they were imitation pearls.”

  “Nina Farbey.”

  “Did they ever marry?”

  “No, he married the eldest Akoste girl. She lives over on the east side now, I see her now and then. They had two boys.” He stood up, rubbing his face, and now came past her to get a necktie and comb from the box by his bed. He made himself neat, peering into the mirror that refused to see him.

  “Listen, Pier, I want to tell you something. A while after we married, Givan told me that one reason he’d wanted to marry me was he knew I couldn’t have children. I don’t know, he said a lot of things like that, they didn’t mean much. But it made me think, it made me see that perhaps that’s really what made me leave you. When I found out I couldn’t have children, after the miscarriage, you know, it didn’t seem so bad. But I kept on feeling lighter and lighter, as if there was nothing to me, I didn’t weigh anything, and it didn’t matter what I did. But you were real, what you did still mattered. Only I didn’t matter at all.”

  “I wish you’d told me that.”

  “I didn’t know it then.”

  “Come, let’s go on.”

  “I’ll go; it’s cold. Is there a shop near?”

  “I want to get out.” They went down the rattling stairs. At the first breath outside he gasped like a diver into a mountain lake and fired off a short volley of his coughs, but then went on all right. They walked fast because it was cold and because the cold and the golden light and blocks of blue shadow exhilarated them. “How is so-and-so,” she asked of various old acquaintances, and he told her. He had not slipped out of the net of friendship, acquaintance, alliance by blood, marriage, work, or temperament, woven over a hundred and thirty years by his family and their House, secured by his status in a provincial city, and enlarged by his own sociable character. She had thought of herself as one born for few, passionate
friendships, out of place at the polite and cheerful dinnertables and firesides of his life. Now she thought she had not been out of place, only envious. She had begrudged him to his friends, she had envied the gifts he gave them: his courtesy, his kindness, his affection. She had envied him his competence and pleasure in the act of living.

  They went into a hardware shop and he asked for a forty-watt light bulb. While the man was finding it and filling out the Government sales forms for it, Mariya got the money ready. Pier had already put money on the counter.

  “I broke it,” she said in an undertone.

  “You’re a visitor. It’s my lamp.”

  “No it’s not, it’s the Panins’.”

  “Here you are,” he said gracefully, and the man took his money. Cheered by this victory, he asked as they left the shop, “Did you come by Reyn Street?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled; his face was vivid, the low sun shining full on it. “Did you look at the house?”

  “No.”

  “I knew you hadn’t!” The reddish light kindled him like a match. “Come along, let’s go look at it. It hasn’t changed at all. Would you like to?—if you don’t, please say so. I couldn’t go past it, when I first got back.” They were now walking back together the way she had come alone. “That, of course,” he went on quite light-heartedly, “is my reef, my undoing. Yours is isolation. Mine’s owning. Love of place. Love of one place. People are not really important to me, you know, as they are to you. But after a while I saw the trick, the point, just as you did; it’s the same thing, loyalty. I mean, ownership and loyalty don’t actually depend on each other. You lose the place, but you keep the loyalty. Now I like to go by the house. They used it for a Government office for a while, printing forms or something, I’m not sure what it’s used for now.”

  They were soon walking on the dry leaves of sycamores between the walls of gardens and the calm, ornate fronts of old houses. The wind of the autumn evening smelled very sweet. They stopped and looked at the house at 18 Reyn Street: a gold stucco front; an iron balcony over the door that opened straight onto the street; a high, beautiful window to either side of the door, and three windows above. A crab-apple tree leaned over the wall of the garden. In spring the windows of the east bedrooms opened on the froth and spume of its flowering. In the square before the house a fountain played in a shallow basin, and standing near the gate in the wall they heard the small babbling reply of the little naiad-fountain in the garden. When the windows were open in summer the murmur of water filled the house. Against the locked door, the locked gate, the drawn blinds, she remembered open windows filled with moonlight, sunlight, leaves, the sound of water and of voices.

  “Property is theft,” Pier Korre said dreamily, looking at his house.

  “It looks empty. All the blinds are drawn.”

  “Yes, it does. Well, come along.”

  After a block or two she said, “Nothing leads anywhere. We come and stand in the street like tourists. Your family built it, you were born in it, we lived in it. Years and years. Not just our years, all the years. All broken off. It’s all in pieces.”

  While they walked, separated sometimes by a hurrying man or an old woman pushing a barrow-load of firewood, as the narrow streets of Aisnar filled up with people coming from work, she kept talking to him. “It’s not just human isolation, loneliness, that I can’t stand any more. It’s that nothing holds together, everything is broken off, broken up—people, years, events. All in pieces, fragments, not linked together. Nothing weighs anything anymore. You start from nothing, and so it doesn’t matter which way you go. But it must matter.”

  Avoiding a pushcart of onions, he said either, “It should,” or, “It doesn’t.”

  “It does. It must. That’s why I’m back here. We had a way to go, isn’t that true? That’s what marriage is, it means making a journey together, night and day. I was afraid of going ahead, I thought I’d get lost, my precious self, you know. So I ran off. But I couldn’t, there was nowhere else to go. There’s only one way. At twenty-one I married you and here it is fourteen years and two divorces later and I’m still your wife. I always was. Everything I ever did since I was twenty has been done for you, or to you, or with you, or against you. Nobody else counted except in comparison, or relation, or opposition to you. You’re the house to which I come home. Whether the doors are open or locked.”

  He walked along beside her, silent.

  “Can I stay here, Pier?”

  His voice hardly freed itself from the jumble of voices and noises in the street: “There are no doors. No house left.”

  His face was tired and angry; he did not look at her. They reached his tenement and climbed the stairs and came into the Panins’ flat.

  “We could find something better than this,” she said with timidity. “Some privacy…”

  The room was dusky, the window a square of void evening sky, without color. He sat down on the sofa. She put the new bulb in the socket, fixed the ball-fringed shade on it, switched it on and off again. Pier’s body as he sat awkwardly relaxed, stripped of all grace and of the substance that holds a man down heavy on the earth, was like a shadow among the shadows. She sat down on the floor beside him. After a while she took his hand. They sat in silence; and the silence between them was heavy, was present, it had a long past, and a future, it was like a long road walked at evening.

  People came heavy-footed into the room, switching on the lamp, speaking, staring: an ugly, innocent-looking couple in their twenties, he lank, she pregnant. Mariya jumped up smoothing her braids. Pier got up. “The Panins, Mariya,” he said. “Martin, Anna, this is Mariya Korre. My wife.”

  1965

  THE LADY

  OF MOGE

  THEY met once when they were both nineteen, and again when they were twenty-three. That they met only once after that, and long after, was Andre’s fault. It was not the kind of fault one would have expected of him, seeing him at nineteen years old, a boy poised above his destiny like a hawk. One saw the eyes, the hawk-eyes, clear, unblinking, fierce. Only when they were closed in sleep did anyone ever see his face, beautiful and passive, the face of the hero. For heroes do not make history—that is the historians’ job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.

  She was Isabella Oriana Mogeskar, daughter of the Counts of Helle and the Princes of Moge. She was a princess, and lived in a castle on a hill above the Molsen River. Young Andre Kalinskar was coming to seek her hand in marriage. The Kalinskar family coach rolled for half an hour through the domains of Moge, came through a walled town and up a steep fortified hill, passed under a gateway six feet thick, and stopped before the castle. The high wall was made splendid by an infinite tracery of red vines, for it was autumn; the chestnut trees of the forecourt were flawless gold. Over the golden trees, over the towers, stood the faint, clear, windy sky of late October. Andre looked about him with interest. He did not blink.

  In the windowless ground-floor hall of the castle, among saddles and muskets and hunting, riding, fighting gear the two old companions-at-arms, Andre’s father and Prince Mogeskar, embraced. Upstairs where windows looked out to the river and the rooms were furnished with the comforts of peace, the Princess Isabella greeted them. Reddish-fair, with a long, calm, comely face and grey-blue eyes—Autumn as a young girl—she was tall, taller than Andre. When he straightened from his bow to her he straightened farther than usual, but the difference remained at least an inch.

  They were eighteen at table that night, guests, dependents, and the Mogeskars: Isabella, her father, and her two brothers. George, a cheerful fifteen-year-old, talked hunting with Andre; the older brother and heir, Brant, glanced at him a couple of times, listened to him once, and then turned his fair head away, satisfied: his sister would not stoop to this Kalinskar fellow. Andre set his teeth, and, in order not to look at Brant, looked at his mother, who was talking with the Princess Isabella. He saw them both gla
nce at him, as if they had been speaking of him. In his mother’s eyes he saw, as usual, pride and irony, in the girl’s—what? Not scorn; not approval. She simply saw him. She saw him clearly. It was exhilarating. He felt for the first time that esteem might be a motive quite as powerful as desire.

  Late the next afternoon, leaving his father and his host to fight old battles, he went up to the roof of the castle and stood near the round tower to look out over the Molsen and the hills in the dying, windy, golden light. She came to him through the wind, across the stone. She spoke without greeting, as to a friend. “I’ve been wanting to talk with you.”

  Her beauty, like the golden weather, cheered his heart, made him both bold and calm. “And I with you, princess!”

  “I think you’re a generous man,” she said. There was a pleasant husky tone, almost guttural, in her light voice. He bowed a little, and compliments pranced through his mind, but something prompted him to say only, “Why?”

  “It’s quite plain to see,” she replied, impatient. “May I speak to you as one man to another?”

  “As one man—?”

  “Dom Andre, when I first met you yesterday, I thought, ‘I have met a friend at last.’ Was I right?”

  Did she plead, or challenge? He was moved. He said, “You were right.”

  “Then may I ask you, my friend, not to try to marry me? I don’t intend to marry.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I shall do as you wish, princess.”

  “And without arguing!” cried the girl, all at once alight, aflame. “Oh, I knew you were a friend! Please, Dom Andre, don’t feel sad or foolish. I refused the others without even thinking about it. With you, I had to think. You see, if I refuse to marry, my father will send me to the convent. So I can’t refuse to marry, I can only refuse each suitor. You see?” He did; though if she had given him time to think, he would have thought that she must in the end accept either marriage or the convent, being, after all, a girl. But she did not give him time to think. “So the suitors keep coming; and it’s like Princess Ranya, in the tale, you know, with her three questions, and all the young men’s heads stuck on poles around the palace. It is so cruel and wearisome…” She sighed, and leaning on the parapet beside Andre looked out over the golden world, smiling, inexplicable, comradely.