Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Well all I said was she was over there a lot lately.”

  “Yes?” Mrs Benat said in a tone of mild but serious interest.

  “And she got all huffy,” said Eva, the second daughter, sixteen.

  “Mh, she did?”

  “He can’t even work, what does he act so stuck up for?”

  “He works.”

  “Oh, fixing chairs or something. But he always acts so stuck up, and then she got stuck up when I asked her. Is my hair straight?” Eva was pretty, as her mother had been at sixteen. She was dressed now to walk out with one of the many solemn, bony-wristed youths who requested that privilege, and to earn it had to undergo a close inspection of their persons and their antecedents by Mr and Mrs Benat.

  After she had gone Mrs Benat put up her darning and went into the younger children’s room. Lisha was humming her five-year-old sister to sleep with the song about the two beggars. The wind that had risen the night before rattled the window in gusts.

  “She asleep? Come along.”

  Lisha followed her mother to the kitchen.

  “Make us a cup of chocolate. I’m dead tired. . . . Ough, this little place. If we had a room where you girls could sit with your boys. I don’t like this walking out, it’s not right. A girl ought to be at home for her courting. . . .”

  She said no more until Lisha had made the chocolate and sat down at the table with her. Then she said, “I don’t want you going to the Chekeys’ any more, Lisha.”

  Lisha set down her cup. She smoothed out a crease in her skirt, and folded the end of the belt under the buckle.

  “Why not, mother?”

  “People talk.”

  “People have to talk about something.”

  “Not about my daughter.”

  “Can he come here, then?”

  Mrs Benat was startled by this flank attack, bold and almost impudent, the last thing she expected from Lisha. Shaken, she spoke out bluntly: “No. Do you mean you have been courting?”

  “I guess so.”

  “The man is blind, Alitsia!”

  “I know,” the girl said, without irony.

  “He can’t—he can’t earn a living!”

  “His pension’s two hundred and fifty.”

  “Two hundred and fifty!”

  “It’s two hundred and fifty more than a lot of people are making these days,” Lisha said. “Besides, I can work.”

  “Lisha, you’re not talking of marrying him?”

  “We haven’t yet.”

  “But Lisha! Don’t you see—”

  Mrs Benat’s voice had grown soft, desperate. She laid the palms of her hands on the table, short, fine hands swollen with hot water and strong soap.

  “Lisha, listen to me. I’m forty years old. Half my life I’ve lived in this city, twenty years in this place, these four rooms. I came here when I was your age. I was born in Foranoy, you know that, it’s an old town too, but not a trap like this one. Your grandfather was a mill hand. We had a house there, a house with a parlor, and a yard with a rose bush. When your grandmother was dying, you wouldn’t remember, but she kept asking, when are we going home? When are we going home? I liked it fine here at first, I was young, I met your father, we were going to move back up north, in a year or two. And we talked about it. And you children came. And then the war, and good pay. And now that’s all gone and it’s nothing but strikes and wage cuts. So I finally looked back and saw that we’ll never get out, we’re here for good. When I saw that I made a vow, Lisha. You’ll say I’m not in church from one year to the next, but I went to the cathedral, and I made a vow to the Virgin of the Sovena there. I said, Holy Mother, I’ll stay here, it’s all right, if you’ll let my children get out. I’ll never say another word, if you’ll just let them get away, get out of here.”

  She looked up at her daughter. Her voice grew still softer. “Do you see what I’m getting at, Lisha? Your father’s a man in ten thousand. But what has he to show for it? Nothing. Nothing saved. The same flat we moved into when we married. The same job. Practically the same wages. That’s how it is in this trap, this city. I see him caught in that, what about you? I won’t have it! I want you to marry well, and get out of here! Let me finish. If you married Sanzo Chekey, two can scrape by on that pension of his, but what about children? And there isn’t any work for you now. If you married him, you know where you’d go? Across the yard. From four rooms to three. With Sara and Albrekt and the old man. And work for nothing in their ratty little shop. And be tied to a man who’d come to hate you because he couldn’t help you. Oh, I know Sanzo, he was always proud, and don’t think I haven’t grieved for him. But you’re my child, and it’s your life, Lisha, all your life!”

  Her voice had risen, and it quavered on the last words. In tears, Lisha put out her hands across the table and held her mother’s tightly. “Listen, mother, I promise . . . if Sanzo ever says anything—maybe he won’t, I don’t know—if he does, and I still can’t find a job, so we’d have enough to move, then I’ll say no.”

  “You don’t think he’d let you earn his living?”

  Though Lisha’s eyes were swollen with tears and her cheeks were wet, she spoke quite steadily. “He’s proud,” she said, “but he’s not stupid, mother.”

  “But Lisha, can’t you find a whole man!”

  The girl released her hands and sat up straighter. She said nothing.

  “Promise me you won’t see him again.”

  “I can’t. I promised all I could, mother.”

  There was a silence between them.

  “You never crossed me in anything,” Mrs Benat said, in a heavy, pondering tone. “You’ve been a good one, always. You’re grown now. I can’t lock you in like a slut. Kass might say yes, but I can’t do it now. It’s up to you, Lisha. You can save yourself, and him. Or you can waste it all.”

  “Save myself? For what?” the girl said, without any bitterness. “There never was anybody but him. Even when I was a little kid, before he went into the army. To waste that, that would be a sin. . . . Maybe it was kind of a sin, a little bit, to make that vow, too, mother.”

  Mrs Benat stood up. “Who’s to say?” she asked wearily. “I want to spare my daughter a miserable life, and she tells me it’s a sin.”

  “Not for you, mother. For me. I can’t keep your vows!”

  “Well, God forgive us both, then. And him. I meant it for the best, Lisha.” Mrs Benat went off to her room, walking heavily. Lisha sat on at the table, turning a spoon over and over in her hands. She felt no triumph from having for the first time in her life opposed and defeated her mother. She felt only weariness, and sometimes as she sat tears welled into her eyes again. The only good thing about it all was that there was no longer anyone she feared. At last she went into the room she shared with Eva, found a pencil and a scrap of paper, and wrote a very brief letter to Sanzo Chekey, telling him that she loved him. When it was written she folded it very small, put it in a heavy old gilt-brass locket her mother had given her, and fastened the chain about her neck. Then she went to bed, and lay a long time listening to the endless, aimless blowing of the wind.

  Sara Chekey, as Mrs Benat had said, had no patience. That same night she said to her nephew, while Volf and Albrekt were at the tavern, “Sanzo, you ever think about getting married? Don’t pull a face like that. I’m serious. I thought of it a while back, I’ll tell you why. You should see Lisha Benat’s face when she looks at you. That’s what put it into my head.”

  He turned towards Sara and said coolly, “What business of yours is it how she looks at me?”

  “I’ve got eyes, I can see what’s in front of me!” Then she caught her breath; but Sanzo gave his disquieting laugh. “Go ahead and look, then,” he said. “Only don’t bother to tell me.”

  “Listen, Sanzo Chekey, there you stand in your pride acting like nothing on earth made any difference to you, and never think that what I’m saying might have some sense in it you might listen to. What good do you think I’d get out
of your marrying? I was just thinking of you and happened to notice—”

  “Drop it,” he said. His voice had broken into the strained, arrogant note that exasperated Sara. She turned on him with a rush of justifications and accusations.

  “That’s done it,” Sanzo broke in. “I’ll never see that girl again.” There being nowhere else to get away from Sara, he went out, slamming the door behind him. He ran down the stairs. Out on the street, without his stick, his coat, or any money, he stopped, and stood there. Lisha wanted to get him, did she? and Sara wanted him got? And they had laid their little plans, and he had fallen for it! —When the awful tension of humiliation and rage began to subside, he had lost his bearings and did not know which direction he was facing, whether he had moved away from the doorway or not. He had to grope around for several minutes to locate himself. People passed by, talking; they paid no attention to him, or thought he was drunk. At last he found the entrance, went back upstairs, took ten kroner from his father’s little cash-box, brushed past the protesting Sara, and slammed the door a second time.

  He came back about ten the next morning, flopped down on his hallway bed, and slept all day. It was Sunday, and his uncle, having to pass the sprawled figure several times, finally said to Sara, “Why’d he go bust out again? Took all his money, Volf says. He ain’t bust out like that all summer. Like he used to when he first got home.”

  “Yes, drinking up the money that’s to support him and his father, that’s all he’s good for.”

  Albrekt scratched his head and as usual answered slowly and not exactly to the point. “Seems like a hell of a life for a fellow only twenty-six,” he said.

  The next day at four Lisha came to the apartment. He proposed that they walk out; they went up onto the Hill, to the garden. It was October now, an overcast day getting ready to rain. Neither of them spoke as they walked. They sat down on the grass below the empty house. Lisha shivered, looking out over the grey city, its thousand streets, its huge factories. Without sunlight, the garden was dominated by the forbidding dark bulk of the chestnut grove. A train whistled across town far away.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “All grey and black.”

  She heard the childish whispering note in her own voice. But it had not cost his pride to ask the question of her. That was good, that lightened her heart a little. If they could only go on talking, or if he would touch her, so that for him she would be there, then it would be all right. Soon he did reach out to her, and willingly she put herself entirely inside the hold of his arm, resting her cheek against his shoulder. She felt a tension in him as if he had something he wanted to say, and she was about to ask him what it was, when he lifted her face with his hand and kissed her. The kiss grew insistent. He turned so that his weight was on her and pushed her back, the pressure of his mouth sliding down to her throat and to her breasts. She tried to speak and could not, tried to push him away and could not. His weight pushed her down, his shoulder blocked out the sky. Her stomach contracted in a knot, she could not see, but she managed to gasp out, “Let me go,” a weak thin whisper. He paid no heed; he crushed her down into the stiff grass and the darkness of the earth, with such strength that she felt only weakness, weakness as if she were dying. But when he tried to force her legs apart with his hand it hurt, so sharply that she began to struggle again, to fight like an animal. She got one arm free, pushed his head away, and writhed out from under him in one convulsive movement. She got to all fours, staggered to her feet, and ran.

  Sanzo lay there, his face half buried in the grass.

  When she came back to him he had not moved. Her tears, which she had managed to control, started again as she stood by him.

  “Come on, get up, Sanzo,” she said softly.

  He lay still.

  “Come on.”

  After a while he twisted round and sat up. His white face was scored with the crisscross marks of the stiff grass, and his eyes when he opened them looked to the side, as if staring across to the grove of chestnuts.

  “Let’s go home, Sanzo,” she whispered to his terrible face. He drew back his lips and said, “Get away. Let me alone.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Then go! Go on, do you think I need you? Go on, get out!” He tried to push her away, only striking her knee. Lisha went, and waited for him at the side of the drive outside the garden. When he passed her she held her breath, and when he was a good way past her she began to follow him, trying to walk soundlessly. The rain had started, thin drops slanting from a low, quiet sky.

  Sanzo did not have his stick. He strode along boldly at first, as he did when he walked with her, but then began to slow down, evidently losing his nerve. He got along all right for a while, and once she heard him whistling his jig-tune through his teeth. Once off the Hill, in the noisier streets where he could not hear echoes, he began to hesitate, lost his bearings and took a wrong turn. Lisha followed close behind him. People stared at both of them. He stopped short at last, and she heard him ask of no one, “Is this Bargay Street?”

  A man approaching him stared at him and then answered, “No, you’re way off.” He took Sanzo’s arm and headed him back the right way, with directions, and questions about was he blind, was it a mill accident or the war. Sanzo went off, but before he had gone a block he stopped again and stood there. Lisha caught up with him and took his arm in silence. He was breathing very hard, like an exhausted runner.

  “Lisha?”

  “Yes. Come on.”

  But at first he could not move at all, could not take a step.

  They went on, slowly, though the rain was getting thicker. When they reached their building he put out his hand to the entranceway, touching the bricks; with that as reassurance he turned to her and said, “Don’t come again.”

  “Good night, Sanzo,” she said.

  “It’s no good, see,” he said, and at once started up the stairs. She went on to her entrance.

  For several days he went to the furniture store in the afternoon and stayed there late, not coming home till dinner time. Then there was no caning or repairing to be done for a while, and he took to going to the park in the late afternoon. He kept this up after the winter east wind had begun to blow, bringing the rain, the sleet, the thin, damp, dirty snow. When he stayed in the apartment all day, a nervous boredom would grow and grow in him; his hands shook and he lost the sensitivity of his touch, could not tell what he was handling, whether he was handling anything at all. This drove him out, and out longer, until he brought back a headache and a cough. Fever wrung him and rattled him for a week, and left him prey to more coughs and fevers every time he went out.

  The weakness, the stupidity of ill health were a relief to him. But it was hard on Sara. She had to leave breakfast ready for him and Volf now, and pay for patent medicines for his headache which sometimes made him cry out in pain, and be waked at night by his coughing. She had never done anything but work hard, and could have compensated herself by nagging and complaining; but it wasn’t the work, it was his presence, his always being there, intent, listless, blind, doing nothing, saying nothing. That exasperated her till she would shout at poor Albrekt as they walked to the shop, “I can’t stand it, I can’t stay in that house with him!”

  But the only one who escaped that winter was old Volf. A few nights before Christmas he went out with the ten kroner Sara gave him back monthly from his pension, came back with his bottle, and climbed up three of the four flights of stairs but not the fourth. Heart failure laid him down on the stair-landing, where he was found an hour later. Laid in his coffin he looked a bigger man, and his face in death, intent, unseeing, was a darker version of his son’s face. All old friends and neighbors came to the funeral, for which the Chekeys went into debt. The Benats were there, but Sanzo did not hear Lisha’s voice.

  Sanzo moved out of the hall into the windowless bedroom that had been his father’s, and things went on as before, a little easier on Sara.

  In January o
ne of Eva’s young men, a dyer at the Ferman mill, perhaps discouraged by the competition for Eva, began looking around and saw Lisha. If she saw him it was without fear and without interest; but when he asked her to walk out with him she agreed. She was as quiet and amenable as she had always been, there was no change in her, except that she and her mother were closer friends than they had been, talking together as equals, working together as partners. Her mother certainly saw the young man, but she said nothing about him to Lisha, nor did Lisha say anything except, occasionally, “I’ll be walking out with Givan after supper.”

  Across one night of March the wind from the frozen eastern plains dropped and a humid wind rose up from the south. The rain turned warm and large. In the morning weeds were pushing up between the stones of the courtyard, the city’s fountains ran full and noisy, voices carried further down the streets, the sky was dotted with small bluish clouds. That night Lisha and Givan followed one of the Rákava lovers’ walks, out through the East Gate to the ruins of a guard tower; and there in the cold and starlight he asked her to marry him. She looked out to the great falling darkness of the Hill and plains, and back to the lights of the city half hidden by the broken outer wall. It took her a long time to answer. “I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not, Lisha?”

  She shook her head.

  “You were in love with somebody, he went off, or he’s already married, or something went wrong with it like that. I know that. I asked you knowing it.”

  “Why?” she said with anguish. He answered directly: “Because it’s over, and it’s my time now.”

  That shook her, and sensing it, he said, with sudden humbleness, “Think about it.”

  “I will. But—”

  “Just think about it. It’s the right thing to do, Lisha. I’m the one for you. And I’m not the kind that changes my mind.”