Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  In a bad mood that night, he got into a worse one seeing his brother meet his sullenness with patience, and the “little sister”—Itale’s voice again—grow shy and circumspect. But why couldn’t they let him alone? He could not manage their interest, their affection, their human needs and offerings; he was not able, he had never been able, to live with people. He should leave them and go. But he did not know where to go.

  “I liked your friend very much,” Ladis said, days after Itale had left. They were in the stable yard, he had asked Amadey to help him rehang the gate with a new set of hasps from the smithy in Kolleiy. They had just got it mounted and he was testing the iron latch-tongue, his dark face bent down to his work, as it mostly was. “He wasn’t what I’d imagined your friends there to be.”

  Amadey flooded his hands at the pump to get the rust from the old ironwork off them. “Friends,” he said. “He’s the only person I met in ten years there that I ever think of, here.”

  “Are you planning to stay here?”

  “I think so.”

  “It’s all right,” the older brother said, “you know that. Where I’m concerned, and Givana. It’s your house. But how old are you, twenty-six or seven, this is no place for a man unless you want to come into the farming with me. There’s nothing else here.”

  “You seem to find enough.”

  “I’m a farmer. Also I’ve got a wife. I had to ride sixty miles to court her. You need more than that. What do you want with rye and sheep? That would be to waste your work.”

  “I have no more work to do. It’s done.”

  Ladislas looked up then from the gate-latch. “What do you mean, your books? You’re done writing?”

  “It’s done with me, is the way I’d put it. Finished. Used up and thrown away.”

  Ladislas’ eyes were extremely direct, a steady gaze. “You can’t give up a thing like that,” he said, with certainty.

  “I tell you, it’s given me up.”

  “Ah!” Ladislas said with disgust. “You haven’t changed at all.” That brotherly contempt based upon knowledge and unshakable loyalty, that unanswerable, just, forgiving assessment of character, left Amadey wordless. He felt like a child who has said something very foolish, and he flushed up red as he stood with his arms on the pump-handle, staring at Ladislas.

  That night after supper Amadey spoke not at all to his brother, but more than usual to Givana. He made her laugh; he disconcerted her by praising her understanding, and reassured her again by a blunt correction; he began to describe, for the first time since he had come home, the life he had lived in Krasnoy, people he had known, the fashionable, the literary, the actors, the politicals. It was all the Arabian Nights to Givana. She was enchanted, shocked, fascinated, she begged more detail, more circumstance, her eyes were dark and bright and she said, “I don’t believe it, Amadey. . . .”

  That night in his room in bed Amadey heard her, “I don’t believe it, Amadey!” and saw her round, strong, childish hands clasped across the dark bodice, and cursed himself aloud to get the sound of her voice out of his head, and turned over, and lighted the candle at last. The other one, the older one lay in his bed in the darkness beside her while she slept soundly, and heard her voice, “I don’t believe it, Amadey!” and clenched his hands in anger, jealousy, and savage self-accusation.

  Three more nights passed the same way. After supper Amadey and Givana talked, laughed, played the harpsichord; Givana sang for him, or mocked and admired the bizarre impromptus he played for her. She had become quite at ease with him, and teased him as she never teased Ladislas, ordered him about as if imitating the Krasnoy great ladies he described to her, flirted with him. The idea of the theater fascinated her, she asked endless questions about the stage, the plays, the players, the actresses, women whose lives were in all ways, in all things the opposite of hers: where do they live? how are they paid? what do they do with their money? do they ever have children? on and on, commanding Amadey to answer; and the young man, with his jarring laugh, obeyed her, while Ladislas sat silent beside the hearth.

  The fourth night Ladislas left the house after supper and went down to the sheepfolds. He sat a long time with his shepherds by their fire there, as silent and dour as he had sat by his own fire. But when he came back to the house his wife sat alone sewing by the hearth, looking tired and a little scared. “Where’s Amadey?” he asked in an unnatural tone.

  “In his room.”

  “No music tonight, eh?” he said, and winced.

  “The wind’s so bad,” she said. They always said that in the Polana. She looked up at him, and put up her hand to him timidly.

  “You look tired,” he said. “Go to bed.” His voice was very gentle. She went upstairs; he stayed by the fire and did not follow her till after midnight. There was light under Amadey’s door, the thin rayed fan of gold across the worn hall carpeting: he was awake, alone. The older brother stood outside the closed door in the darkness broken by that fan of light at his feet and fought for the strength to be silent, not to speak. —On the other side of the closed door Amadey sat hunched over the scarred writing-table seeking the word, the gift of speech, in an emotionless ecstasy. He had got from Givana what he wanted of her, the excitement of nerves, the uneasy impatient tenacious desire blocked at its own inception, which was his poetic mood. As soon as Ladislas left the house he had left her and come up to his room, rancorous with shame and self-contempt; he sat down to write a letter to somebody, anybody in Krasnoy, he had to get out of here and go back to Krasnoy; as he cut his pen to a new point words appeared in his mind, shifted, stabilised, reshifted: “Here at the ruined tower, the end of hope. . . . Here at the house of desolation, Prince. . . . At the tower at the edge of hope. . . .” The words fell apart, the pattern changed, the resonance returned and filled the universe out to its boundaries and he dipped his half-sharpened pen blindly and began to write, scribbling, crossing out, scribbling again, wrestling the angel skilfully, cleverly, a professional fighter out to win.

  For four days he stayed mostly shut up in his room; when he appeared he was goodhumored and heedless; he ate whatever was put in front of him, answered questions at random, and went back up to work. On the fourth night he came into his brother’s study, a cold shed of a room where Ladislas shut himself up to do his accounting. “Can you spare me a half hour?”

  “Come in! I’m sick of this.”

  “What is it all?”

  “Taxes. Three years running I’ve appealed to Rákava for clarification. They send back the same stupid orders from the administration in Krasnoy. How do they think our peasants can pay this new house tax? Do they want blood? They’ll get blood all right, one of these days, if the Estates can’t change things!”

  “My God, here too! . . .”

  “Taxes make revolutions, you didn’t have to go to the city to learn that,” Ladislas said with irony or self-irony. “What’s that?”

  “Want to hear it?”

  Ladislas sat down at his desk; Amadey, standing, read the long poem aloud in his harsh, clear voice, that scarcely softened even for the most musical lines. It had all the fluent tenderness, the sweetness of sound, that his verse was famous for, none of which was in his voice as he read it, or in the sense of the words, a fantasy or dream-piece on the ruined castle, a flood of somber and precipitous images in darkness ending with darkness, obscure, abrupt.

  When he was done there was silence, then Ladislas in a curious gesture held out his empty hands before his chest and looked from one to the other with a smile. “There you are,” he said in a whisper.

  “No, not I. It, the place, Radiko. Unless I’ve failed.”

  Ladislas looked up at him. “Radiko? In nightmare. . . .”

  “In reality. In itself.” The poet’s voice, now, was softened by the release of feeling after reading the work.

  “The only road across the hills goes to it, and there is only one road to it—it’s like a dream, where you never choose, there are never any choices— I
t is frightening, Amadey,” the older brother said in his grave, diffident voice, and Amadey smiled accepting, for a moment, praise, victory.

  “You were always my best reader, Ladis.” He sat down and they faced each other, Ladislas dark and watchful, Amadey, dressed as always carefully and formally, his reddish hair well cut and combed; he crossed his legs, tapping his knee with the rolled-up manuscript of the poem. “It was a dream, of course. This isn’t the place itself, it’s a dream—a vision of it—months ago. Last July. I don’t know if I can describe it. I hadn’t done anything for weeks, hadn’t written anything for months. One night in July I went back. . . . I went back to a house I used to go to, a woman. . . . You know that story. I’d broken with her more than a year ago, I was beginning to respect myself again, working with Sorde and his lot, I was— So I went back to her, and she took me in, of course, it amused her a good deal, she sent away her current lover to make room in the bed for me, I got drunk and cried and she turned me out again finally, it was . . . I went around the city all night, I remember parts of it. . . . Got home in the morning and went to sleep. I got up in the evening. It was hot, July in Krasnoy. I was sick of course, it was . . . it was farther down than I’d been. . . . I sat at my window for a long time. I kept those rooms five years because of that window, looking out over the park, down the mall to the Sinalya. The big chestnut trees under my window, and then the lawns and the mall full of people and carriages in the slanting light on an evening in summer, and behind all that the façade of the palace, long and regular behind the trees, a kind of dreary splendor, a melancholy, the end of something. . . . Well, I sat there where I had sat ten thousand times, with the warm wind blowing in over my table, and the light getting broken up in dusty shafts between the trees, not thinking anything, run out, run dry at last, empty. . . . And then I had this dream, if that’s what it was. I wasn’t asleep. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what it was about, even. . . . In the novel, I tried to write about a man who couldn’t get away from his destiny, all he did was part of it even when he thought he was acting freely. The dream was like that. I saw my own life—behind me and ahead of me. As if it were a road, lying along the hills. But I wasn’t on it. I could see it, and the hills, I could see places I knew, but had I known them before or did I recognise them because they have always lain ahead of me? And that—that’s all, I can’t describe it, I can’t bring it back.” He sat poised, as if listening. “No use,” he said, and shrugged. “But then, when I came to write this,” and he tapped the paper on his knee, “when I came to the passage about the castle at night, then I realised I was describing one of the things I had seen in the dream. Radiko at night, in the rain, in the dark, before sunrise. I saw that. I saw it in broad daylight two hundred miles away. Why? How? What does it mean? I don’t know, I’ve given up asking. I have no right to ask. I’ve forfeited my rights. I lived in my mind, in my emotions, in my vanity, I lived in the world I made, and made the rules for it. I chose to dream. But then when you wake up you have lost your citizenship in daylight. You have forgotten what real things mean. You have forfeited your rights. . . .”

  “Had one ever any rights?”

  Amadey sat silent. Ladislas stood up, solid and stocky in the sheepskin vest he wore for warmth in the cold room; he walked up and down the room a couple of times. “When I was twelve and you were six we went over to Fonte for the Easter Mass. Do you remember that?”

  “We did that most years, didn’t we, when mother was alive?”

  “But we came back by the old road, by Fasten and Radiko, that time, because the bridge over the Garayna was out. It took all night to come back. We passed below Radiko a while before sunrise. I remember it, because you woke us all up, you were wide awake at the window trying to get it open and saying, ‘Look at the castle, look at the castle!’ And father gave you a cuff and we all settled down again. But I remember waking up suddenly like that and seeing the tower looming up on the sky, with the darkness just lifting behind it. Exactly as in your poem. You are describing that moment.”

  “I don’t remember it at all. Twenty years ago! Queer how the mind works, isn’t it?” Amadey said; his hands were shaking uncontrollably. This moment of his childhood which his brother could remember but which he could not, this was no explanation, no answer, but an abyss. From it he turned away in terror. “It’s cold in here, Ladis,” he said. “Let’s go in by the fire.”

  “Go on,” his brother said. “I’ve got to finish this.”

  III

  Winter settled down over the Polana with cold and rain and the endless east wind blowing. At evening under a ragged iron-grey sky the flocks came in over the hills to the great paddocks of Esten. The fields lay grey and poor, the forest was grey, leafless. Givana and Ladislas followed a steady routine, the girl as methodical in her housework as the man in his farmwork. Amadey lapsed into listlessness, finding nothing that needed his doing. At times he found it impossible to get up, cross the room, and trim a guttering lamp. The ounce of energy was lacking; he sat still. His need to make poetry had been his master; having lost his master, he had lost his freedom. Like a tree grown up on a hillcrest where the wind always blows the same he had grown all in one direction, trunk and branches shaped to the wind, and the wind had ceased to blow. He would stand at the window for an hour at a time, looking out at the rain-lashed garden and yards, staring, not thinking, not wondering even why he had come here and why he stayed here in this winter of boredom, this waste, this prison.

  The new year came, and in a burst of energy he wrote all his friends in Krasnoy, Itale, Karantay, Helleskar, Luisa, that he was coming back as soon as the roads were fit to travel. He wrote them long letters full of crazy puns and jokes. He would come back to the city in April or in May, when the lindens would be flowering along the Molsen Boulevard, and the chestnuts in the park, and the pretty women on the mall; he would leave behind him at wind-beleaguered Esten all his cobweb notions, his self-torment, the last, senseless tatters of his adolescence. For that was all the trouble. Given up to his imagination, to the drunkenness of words, he had never taken time yet to become a man. It was time to face the real world.

  “What would I be running from?” he said angrily to the night, as if denying a grave, heedless accusation; and the wind went on in its tremendous tides to the west, to the sea, under Orion standing bright above the January hills.

  He thought of his boast and promise scratched in the stone of the tower of Radiko: I shall conquer: the word now remaining both lie and truth, as enduring as the stone of the tower itself that ignored, in its solitude, all conquerors and all defeat.

  When Ladislas and Givana called on their wide-scattered neighbors he went with them, and they had people come in as often as they could, perhaps in an effort to entertain him; he was aware of their shy attempts to offer him work or talk or simply mute companionship, though he was not able to make adequate response. The evenings with other people were easier. The visitors did not really want him to talk. They were daunted by him as a poet, a famous man, a city man, and wanted at best to look at him, then to turn back to one another and discuss sheep, weather, neighbors, politics. The political arguments got hot; he kept out of them, listening with a sense of detachment and disloyalty. Ladislas was a strong reformer and constitutionalist, and was supported by the parish priest of Kolleiy; most of the other domey and farmers combatted his opinions, but not out of love for the government. Things were not going well in the country. Taxation fell heavy on those who had no cash to pay it, police investigations and arrests were becoming common even in small towns, and the eastern provinces, where independence and conservatism were so extreme as to deserve the name of anarchism, were in a resentful, stormy temper. So Ladislas and his neighbors argued and grumbled; and Amadey was silent, always with that vague sense that his silence betrayed something or someone; and when there were no other women, kept home by the bitter weather and the foul roads, Givana also was silent, busy with her handwork and with looking after th
e tea, the supper, and so on. She was pregnant, and beautiful in pregnancy. She had gained in self-possession; she was gentle, reasonable, timid in manner, yet Amadey saw in her now also the unshakable strength, the assurance of her womanhood. She knew her way. She was happy. He watched her, without envy or hope of participation. Ladislas and two neighbors were going at it hammer and tongs; she came over to the harpsichord, near which Amadey was sitting, sat down, and with a smile of mockery began to play very softly. He came to stand beside her. “Oh, they are so boring,” she said joyously. “They’ll never even hear this, it won’t bother.” And she played and sang, half under her breath,

  From out my tower window

  I saw the red rose and the may,

  From out my tower window

  I saw the red rose and the thorn.

  Who rides beneath my window

  Before the break of day,

  Who rides beneath my window

  Before the morn?

  “Go on,” said Amadey, who knew it from childhood, the ballad of Death who carries the girl away, but Givana smiled and said, “I can’t sing, I’m so shortwinded,” and went on playing one of her quaint old sonatinas. When she was done she tuned a couple of the wires, which forever needed tuning, and then sitting back on the bench asked him, “Do you still mean to leave in April?”

  “I don’t know,” he said absently, his gaze following the design painted on the front of the harpsichord, a wreath of roses and hawthorn, chipped and faded on the cracked varnish. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I know it’s a mistake, so I do it.”