Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“He is.”

  “He reminds me sometimes of you. When you were fresh down from your mountains.”

  Itale smiled a little forcedly, and she realised that she had hurt him by the comparison.

  But everything hurt him, it seemed, and he was afraid of everything. He dodged away, evaded, withdrew; he would not commit himself, would not participate. The only person he had sought out for himself was the Lutheran pastor of the village, an amateur mathematician, an uncouth elderly misogynist. He and Itale would sit out in the garden with a book or two, the pastor explaining, Itale listening, a lesson in gibberish—calculus, binomials, God knows what. When Luisa’s impatience expressed itself in mild sarcasm, Itale explained stiffly that he had tried to occupy his mind with mathematics “before he was ill,” and finding he knew very little had wanted very much to learn more. “I can do that now,” he said. She had to let him and his pastor be. But he could not sit forever in the garden pretending to be a schoolboy again, evading all the problems about which he had been so passionate, the cause for which he had suffered, avoiding her.

  There was a houseful of guests; in the evening, when once again Itale escaped again as early as he could, she felt some resentment or humiliation, and said to Laravey-Gotheskar, “If only I could interest him in all the things that meant so much to him!” The young baron, deaf to her self-pity and tolerating no criticism of the hero, frowned. “We talk, we talk, why should he listen? He has lived’ what we talk about!” Luisa was pleased. Itale had used to scold her that way, but no longer; Laravey-Gotheskar was the first man in years to give her a moral rebuke. “I’m afraid it was my disappointment speaking,” she answered meekly, “I miss him when he hides himself away.” —“Of course,” said the young man, and brooded, sunk in an awful tangle of enthusiasm, admiration, and jealousy, exactly where Luisa wanted him.

  It was the trouble with him. For all his unpredictable pride, she could put him where she wanted him. There were only two men whom she had never been able to bend to her whim, though one had twice asked her in marriage and would ask her again if he thought it any use, and the other had been her lover: George Helleskar and Itale. Helleskar had taught her all she had ever known of fidelity; Itale had given her, a few times, for a little while, fulfilment. He had freed her, then, as she had freed him.

  Why was that not enough, to be free and set free, to unlock the doors?

  When her guests had left, and she must face again the long days of silence, a seeming intimacy that was increasing estrangement, she found herself angry with Itale, impatient; it was time he pulled himself together. “Why will you not talk to them?” she demanded. “They believe all you used to believe—do you hold yourself above them?”

  He looked at her with an incredulity that shamed her for a moment.

  “What can I say to them?” he asked, in the diffident tone she disliked in him.

  “Have you lost your faith in the power of words, then? Or in the Constitution, and impartial law, and all the rest of it, all you went to jail for—has that become unimportant to you, like everything else?”

  “Like everything else?”

  “You are indifferent to them, to me, to everything.”

  He had no answer.

  “You won’t even speak. How am I to know anything of you, or you of me, after this—this time—”

  “What can I say?” he repeated, rigid, obdurate, and she realised with horror that he was holding nothing back from her: that he was in fact unable to speak. He was hard, Emanuel Sorde had said, but it was the hardness of rock, without resilience, mere ultimate coherence like a rock that is itself until it is broken. She could break him. He had no defense. He could do no more than resist her, withstand her, who had freed him and was now his jailer.

  On St John’s Eve the wide horizon of the night flared with scattered bonfires. Every village, every outlying farm had its fire. Bagpipes droned by the crackling, lurid stacks of heath and straw, the young men and women danced, the old men drank; the night was full of voices, noises, half-lit, running figures. Luisa stood with her maid in the zone between darkness and firelight, and watched the girls of the village tuck up their skirts and leap across the coals, in the rite as old as the fields they worked, the leap across the fire from barrenness to fertility. The older women watching laughed and shouted obscene encouragement. Men were quarreling already over by the big fire, working up to the fight that always followed drinking. Luisa watched, repelled, excited, envious, contemptuous, until Agata, who found it all frightening, made her come away. When she was back at the house she felt stifled indoors, and went out again at once to walk in the garden, watching the distant glare and dying of the fires.

  “Luisa.”

  She stopped short. He stood not far from her, on a path by an overgrown hedge which made a mass of blackness in the cloudy moonlight; she could not see his face.

  “I didn’t want to startle you.”

  “You didn’t,” she said, though he had. “Who could be afraid on a night like this? Were you out to see the fires?”

  He came towards her and stopped again. He was bareheaded in the warm night. He stood there tall and patient, and again she saw the grotesque and pitiful figure of the warders’ room. Why must he look like that, why must he stand like that?

  “They were dancing at the bonfire in the village, it was exciting to see. The peasants here are pagans, underneath all their sour Lutheran twaddle. They’re not civilised at all.”

  “May I talk to you a moment, Luisa?”

  “Nothing would please me more!”

  “I think I should leave soon.”

  “I see. Well, that would certainly prevent any further conversation. . . .” She could not control her irritation, more than irritation, a blind anger with him.

  “You know that I am grateful,” he said very low.

  “For God’s sake, Itale! It’s not your gratitude I want. If you want to stay, stay, if you want to go, go. You’re free, you don’t seem to realise it. All I want is for you to realise it, to behave like it.”

  They walked on to the end of the path side by side. The moon, some nights past full, stood over the low black lands eastward. To the south four fires reddened the smoky darkness.

  “Your wanting to go implies, I gather, that you’ve decided we are no longer to be lovers.”

  He stopped and faced her. “I have decided? Luisa—” His voice shook. He took a breath, and with painfully evident effort said, “It has been decided for us.”

  “Nothing is decided for me. I make my own choices!”

  “Can you choose to want to touch me?”

  “What do you mean,” she said, terrified.

  He stood still, and she knew that he could say no more, and that it was the simplest thing in the world to prove him wrong: all she had to do was take his hand, touch his cheek, touch him. Or let him touch her.

  She took a step back from him.

  “It isn’t fair,” she said in a whisper. “It isn’t fair!”

  After a while he said, “I don’t know very well what’s fair any longer. I don’t want to cause you pain, Luisa. I never wanted to. And never did much else.”

  “Why must it be so stupid!” She looked at herself in the dim light, her shawl and the heavy skirt and flaring sleeves of her dress, her hands. “Why am I like this, why am I trapped in this? Why can’t I be free, free of it? Why can’t we do what we like?”

  “O my dear,” he said in shame and pain, and he held out his hands to her.

  “I wish I was dead,” she said, and turned, and walked away from him.

  In the morning when they met she was calm and polite. “Well, what shall we do, Itale?” she said. “Shall we effect a joint triumphal entry into the capital, or shall we go back one by one? How soon do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you well enough to ride, do you think?”

  He nodded.

  “I think I must stay for Laravey-Gotheskar’s party. He invited Duke Matiya
s, I should love to see that old man. . . . Do you want to stay for that? it’s in two weeks. If not I don’t know why you shouldn’t go when you choose. Take old Sheikh, I suppose he’s the likeliest one of the old nags to last all the way to Krasnoy.”

  His gaze was on her, unhappy, the blue eyes.

  “Then I’ll follow in mid-July. Enrike goes back to Vienna then, I may go with him. I’ve learned not to stay in Krasnoy in the summer. It’s dead. Dead center of a defeated country. I hate defeat.”

  She looked at him as she spoke, and he looked down.

  “When shall you go, then?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “Very well.”

  “I haven’t much to take,” he said, getting up. “And all of it your gift. You know that, Luisa. The horse, the . . . the shirt, the life. . . .”

  But she would accept no comfort; not from him.

  He left in the early morning. She bade him farewell in the house, downstairs; he went out to the stables, she up to her room. She stood at the window and watched him ride out the gate and straight away down the straight road between the level fields. He looked back once, half turning in the saddle. She did not lift her hand.

  III

  Itale rode down from Grasse in late evening of the last day of June. Tired, on a tired horse, he rode through the drab fields of burdock, shards, shacks, tramps, sour earth, and into the long streets of the Trasfiuve, and crossed Old Bridge under the statue of St Christopher of the Wayfarers, remembering the morning of the autumn equinox three years ago. He put up at a small inn just off Molsen Boulevard, ordered dinner, and went to bed very soon after he had eaten. He would look up his friends, take up his life, tomorrow; tonight he wanted only to sleep. The room was small and with the curtains drawn very dark. He got up again at once and drew back the curtains, opened both the windows wide to the warm, noisy city night. He had almost fallen asleep when the bell of the cathedral, a few streets away, struck ten. After that he lay wide awake in the darkness suffering all the memories and presences of his time in Krasnoy from the moment when he had first heard that bell strike, the two years in which so much life had been compressed that they seemed to lie like a fiery bar of sunlight between the remote, long, quiet years in the shadow of the mountains and the unimaginable but immediate past, the twenty-seven months of darkness.

  As he breakfasted in the hot morning at a street cafe in the River Quarter he debated going back to the inn, lying low for another day. He had not got much rest; he mistrusted himself, his energy, his strength. What would he have to face, here? Riding from the Sovena he had been very nervous at first, avoiding every town entry and possible check-point that he could avoid, dreading the request to show his papers. That dread had lessened as he was, at one point and then another, checked cursorily and passed. But what was the situation here? He did not really know, and was apprehensive. However, he had to take Luisa’s horse to the Paludeskar stables in Roches Street; and he was going to have to get some money. He could not afford another night at the inn. Emanuel had loaned him fifty kruner, of which he had sixteen left in his pocket; less than he had arrived with the first time, five years ago. Less all round, he thought, coming back down from Old Quarter to the river and walking up the boulevard under the trees by the bright water. Less cash, less strength, less time to live; less of a man to stand up against the storming of the human world and the universe at his mind and body, the storm of light and wind and sensation and passion that never ceased, never rested, until death; for the walls of a building, a prison, were dust in that storm. He felt peculiarly slight, light, insubstantial as he walked up the wide street by the river, a flickering thing, exposed, uncertain. This mote, this speck between the sun in its gulfs of light and the earth with its long shadow, this was himself, Itale Sorde, and he was supposed to withstand the entire universe in order to remain himself; not only that, to do his job; to be a part of it. It was a strange business to be a man walking in the sunlight, stranger than to be a stone, or a river, or a tree holding up its branches in the July heat. They all knew what they were doing. He did not.

  He passed two little girls hurrying with their hard-breathing nurse towards the far mirage of a sherbet-vendor’s cart. He saw their pigtails bob on their thin shoulders. How long since he had seen a child? He had reached the office of Novesma Verba. He turned to the parapet and leaned his hands on it, watching the bright Molsen go towards the sea. So far to go from this inland country, my shoreless kingdom Amadey had called it in the Ode, so far to go for a bitter end, and nameless. . . . Come on, he said to himself, come on, Itale, and straightened up, turned, crossed the street, went up the stairs to the journal’s office. In his determination, and out of old habit, he did not knock but went straight in. A young fellow stepped out in front of him from behind the table: “What d’you want?”

  “Who’s here?” Itale said stammering, unnerved; he did not know whether he had forgotten this man, or never known him.

  “Mr Brelavay is busy with a visitor. I’m Vernoy.”

  He was young, twenty at most, and shone with self-confidence. Itale, vulnerable to every impression, was impressed by that youthfulness, and casting about for something to say asked, “Are you from Amiktiya?” Then he remembered that the student society had been put under ban and several of its leaders at the University in Krasnoy arrested, a few months before his release. It was a very stupid question, and the boy rapped out, “Who are you?”

  “Sorde, Itale Sorde. Sorry. I wanted—”

  “You’re Sorde?” Itale said yes, he was. Vernoy fell to pieces like wet paper, waved his hands, ran for Brelavay. Brelavay came, carrying his dark face like a long, ironical signboard on top of his long body, exactly the same, unchanged, so that Itale laughed with pure joy at the sight of him; but his friend, embracing him, sobbed and would not let him go.

  “Here, come on, Tomas. . . .”

  They could not look at each other.

  “Come on. Wait, here it is.” Brelavay found his handkerchief and blew his nose. “Almighty Christ, Itale,” he said tenderly. “What did you have?”

  “Have?”

  “What were you ill with?”

  “Typhus.”

  “No joke, eh?”

  “Not a very good one.”

  “Here, come along, why are we standing around my handkerchief like a scene from Othello? Sangiusto’s in here, remember him, Itale? Almighty Christ! to say your name again! —Where are you staying? I didn’t try to write you in the Sovena, your baroness said better not to when she wrote, has to watch her reputation, political of course. She kept you hidden there long enough. I expect you needed it.” He had his arm around Itale’s shoulders and was steering him into the composing-room, where, considerably shaken by his own feelings and Brelavay’s, Itale found himself returning a handshake and looking into a face that completed his confusion by bringing around him the moonlight, the sound of fountains, Luisa’s voice, Piera’s voice, the carriages on Fontarmana Street. When all that subsided he was sitting down feeling a little sick, and the others were around him looking concerned. “Sorry, I’m still shaky—how are you, Sangiusto?”

  “Very well, Sorde.”

  “You’re staying in Krasnoy?”

  “Yes, since two weeks. I’m tired of England, I come here,” said the Italian. He spoke mostly in the present tense; his voice was calm, his manner relaxed, and in his smile there was a hint of complicity. Itale felt at ease with him at once. “But it’s not the same mood here as in ’27, even in Aisnar. It’s agitated . . . bad-tempered. But who knows? I come from England. Everyone on the Continent is agitated and emotional, neh?”

  “What about Paris?” Brelavay asked.

  “Oh, well, Paris. The Ultras, Royer-Collard, Article Fourteen, lovers, chestnut trees, old men catching little fishes in the Seine, Paris is always the same and who can predict of her?” They laughed, and again Sangiusto shot a quick accomplice’s glance at Itale. With some sense of playing a role, Itale asked the questions B
relavay had a right to expect him to ask: about recent events, political trends and changes. “If there’s any change,” Brelavay said, “it’s a change of mood, as Sangiusto said. Underneath—in people, in the people. On top, nothing. The ministry’s the same except for Raskayneskar replacing Tarven, the Assembly mumbles on, the grand duchess is ill—maybe—not ill—maybe; all rumor.”

  “But three years ago there were no rumors,” said Sangiusto.

  Taxes were heavier, Brelavay went on, political arrests increasingly common, “administrative sentences” without trial or term had been introduced, the student society and several other groups had been put under ban, censorship was massive and all mail likely to be read, there had been two bad harvests and unemployment in the cities of the east and center was high. “Some cause for bad temper,” Itale said.

  “They blame it all on the Assembly. Even the bad harvests.”

  “Your Assembly is the expiatory—what do you call it, the scapegoat for Austria; the prime minister sees to that.”

  “How’s Oragon been doing?” Itale asked.

  “Damn Oragon,” Brelavay said. “He’s not our Danton, Itale. He’s our Talleyrand. A demagogic one—the shit’s in a wooden shoe instead of a silk stocking— The nation be hanged, if Stefan Oragon can climb a little higher on the gallows!”

  “Luisa said that my pardon was largely due to him.”

  “It was. He needs our good press, and you were the price he had to pay for it.”

  “Well. How . . . How is Frenin?”

  “Fine. He’s in Solariy.”

  “For the paper?”

  “Living there.”

  “In Solariy? What’s going on there?”

  “What always did. Students, cattle fairs, everybody asleep by nine. He’s a grain shipper. Doing well, I hear. He left Krasnoy a few weeks after we heard you’d been arrested.” Itale still looked blank. “He got cold feet,” Brelavay said gently.

  Brelavay, Frenin, Itale had been friends long before they thought of coming to the capital, and it had been Frenin who brought them, Frenin who said, how long ago, in the park by the blue Molsen in the sunlight, “I’m thinking of Krasnoy. . . .”