Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I’d better ring,” she said, “it’s a friend of mine that lives here, she’s not expecting me,” and she looked for the name on the mailboxes. So he could not let her in. But he turned from the open door and asked, “Excuse me, where do you come from?” She looked at him with a slight smile of surprise and answered, “From Sorg.”

  His mother was in the kitchen. The rose-geranium flared bright in the window, the asters were already fading. On edge, on the edge. He sat in the armchair, his eyes shut, listening for a step overhead or through the wall, the light step that had come to him not across foreign plains with gypsies but down the familiar road in twilight, the road from Sorg leading to this city, this house, this room. Of course the road led westward as well as eastward, only he had never thought of that. He had come in so quietly that his mother had not heard him, and seeing him in the armchair she jumped and her voice rang with panic: “Why didn’t you say something, Maler!” Then she lit the lamps and stroked the withering asters and chatted.

  The next day he met Provin. He had not yet said a word to Provin, not even good morning, working side by side in the office (Drafting and Planning, Krasnoy Bureau of the State Office of Civil Architecture) on the same plans (State Housing, Trasfiuve Project No. 2). The young man followed him as he left the building at five.

  “Mr Eray, let me speak to you.”

  “What about?”

  “About anything,” the young man said easily, knowing his own charm, and yet dead serious. He was goodlooking, bearing himself gallantly. Defeated, smoked out of his refuge of silence, Maler said at last, “Well I’m sorry, Provin. Not your fault. Because of Ihrenthal, the man who had your job. Nothing to do with you. It’s unreasonable. I’m sorry.” He turned away.

  Provin said fiercely, “You can’t waste hatred like that!”

  Maler stood still. “All right. I’ll say good morning after this. It’s all right. What’s the difference? What does it matter to you? What does it matter if any of us talks or doesn’t talk? What is there to say?”

  “It does matter. There’s nothing left to us, now, but one another.”

  They stood face to face on the street in the fine autumn rain, men passing around them to left and right, and Maler said after a moment, “No, we haven’t even got that left, Provin,” and set off down Palazay Street to his trolley stop. But after the long ride through midtown and across Old Bridge and through the Trasfiuve, and the walk through rain to Geyle Street, in the doorway of his house he met the woman from Sorg. She asked him, “Can you let me in?”

  He nodded, unlocking the door.

  “My friend forgot to give me her key, and she had to go out. I’ve been wandering around, I thought maybe you’d be home around the same time as yesterday. . . .” She was ready to laugh with him at her own improvidence, but he could not laugh or answer her. He had been wrong to reject Provin, dead wrong. He had collaborated with the enemy. Now he must pay the price of his silence, which is more silence, silence when one wants to speak: the gag. He followed her up the stairs, silent. And yet she came from his home, the town where he had never been.

  “Good evening,” she said at the turning of the stairs, no longer smiling, her quiet face turned away.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  He sat in the armchair and leaned his head back; his mother was in the other room; weariness rose up in him. He was much too tired to travel on the road. Bric-a-brac from the day, the office, the streets milled and juggled in his mind; he was almost asleep. Then for a moment he saw the road, and for the first time he saw people walking on it: other people. Not himself, not Ihrenthal who was dead, not anyone he knew, but strangers, a few people with quiet faces. They were walking westward, towards him, meeting and passing him. He stood still. They looked at him but they did not speak. His mother spoke sharply, “Maler!” He did not move, but she would never pass him by. “Maler, are you ill?” She did not believe in illness, though Maler’s father had died of cancer a few years ago; the trouble, she felt, had been in his mind. She had never been sick, and childbirth, even the two miscarriages she had had, had been painless, even joyous. There is no pain, only the fear of it, which one can reject. But she knew that Maler like his father had not rid his mind of fear. “My dear,” she murmured, “you mustn’t wear yourself out like this.”

  “I’m all right.” All right, all right, everything’s all right.

  “Is it Ihrenthal?”

  She had said the name, she had mentioned the dead, she had admitted death, let it into the room. He stared at her bewildered, overwhelmed with gratitude. She had given him back the power of speech. “Yes,” he stammered, “yes, it’s that. It’s that. I can’t take it—”

  “You mustn’t eat your heart out over it, my dear.” She stroked his hand. He sat still, longing for comfort. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, the soft exultation coming into her voice again. “There’s nothing you could have done to change things, nothing you can do now. He was what he was, perhaps he even sought this, he was rebellious, restless. He’s gone his own way. You must stay with what is real, what remains, Maler. His fate led him another way than yours. But yours leads home. When you turn your back on me, when you won’t speak to me, my dear, then you’re rejecting not only me, but your true self. After all, we have no one but each other.”

  He said nothing, bitterly disappointed, borne down by his guilt towards her, who did depend wholly on him, and towards Ihrenthal and Provin from whom he had tried to escape, following an unreal road in silence and alone. But when she raised her arms and said or sang, “Nothing is evil, nothing is wasted, if only we look at the world without fear!”—then he broke away and stood up. “The only way to do that is go blind,” he said, and went out, letting the door slam.

  He came back drunk at three in the morning, singing. He woke too late to shave, and was late to work; after the lunch hour he did not go back to the office. He sat on in the dark simmering bar behind Roukh Palace where he and Ihrenthal had used to lunch together on beer and herring, and by six, when Provin came in, he was drunk again. “Good evening, Provin! Have a drink on me.”

  “Thanks, I will. Givaney said you might be here.” They drank in silence, side by side, jammed together by the press at the bar. Maler straightened up and said, “There is no evil, Provin.”

  “No?” said Provin, smiling, glancing up at him.

  “No. None at all. People get in trouble for things they say, but when they’re shot for it it’s their own fault, eh, so there’s nothing evil in that. Or if they’re just put in jail, all the better, it keeps them from talking. If nobody talks then nobody tells lies, and there isn’t any real evil, you see, only lies. Evil is a lie. You have to be silent, then the world’s good. All good. The police are good men with wives and families, the agents are good patriotic men, the soldiers are good, the State is good, we’re good citizens of a great country, only we mustn’t speak. We mustn’t talk to one another, in case we tell a lie. That would spoil it all. Never speak to a man. Especially never speak to a woman. Have you got a mother, Provin? I don’t. I was born of a virgin, painlessly. Pain is a lie, it doesn’t exist—see?” He brought his hand down backwards on the edge of the bar with a crack like a stick breaking. “Ah!” he cried, and Provin too turned white. The men at the bar all round them, dark-faced men in shoddy grey, glanced at him; the simmering murmur of their talk went on. The month on the calendar over the bar was October, 1956. Maler pressed his hand to his side under his coat for a while and then silently, left-handed, finished his beer. “In Budapest, on Wednesday,” the man next to him repeated quietly to his neighbor in plasterer’s overalls, “on Wednesday.”

  “Is that true, all that?”

  Provin nodded. “It’s true.”

  “Are you from Sorg, Provin?”

  “No, from Raskofiu, a few miles this side of Sorg. Will you come home with me, Mr Eray?”

  “Too drunk.”

  “My wife and I have a room to ourselves. I wanted to talk with you
. This business.” He nodded at the man in overalls. “There’s a chance—”

  “Too late,” Maler said. “Too drunk. Listen, do you know the road between Raskofiu and Sorg?”

  Provin looked down. “You come from there too?”

  “No. I was born here in Krasnoy. City boy. Never been to Sorg. Saw the church-spire once from a train going east, doing my military service. Now I think I’ll go see it closer up. When will the trouble start here?” he asked conversationally as they left the bar, but the young man did not answer. Maler walked back across the river to Geyle Street, a very long walk. He was sober when he got home. His mother looked hard and shrunken, like a nut dried around its kernel. He was her lie, and one must keep hold of a lie, wither around it, hold on. Her world without evil, without hope, her world without revolution depended on him alone.

  While he ate his late dry supper she asked him about the rumors she had heard at market. “Yes,” he said, “that’s right. And the West is going to help them, send in airplanes with guns, troops maybe. They’ll make it.” Then he laughed, and she dared not ask him why. Next day he went to work as usual. But on Saturday morning early the woman from Sorg stood at his door. “Please, can you get me across the river?” Softly, not to wake his mother, he asked what she meant. She explained that the bridges were being guarded and they would not let her across since she had no Krasnoy domicile card, and she must get across to the railway station to go back to her family in Sorg. She was a day late already, she must get back. “If you’re going to work and I went with you, you see, they might let you cross. . . .”

  “My office won’t be open,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “I don’t know, we could try it,” he said, looking down at her, feeling himself stout and heavy in his dressing-gown. “Are the trolleys running?”

  “No, they’ve stopped, people say everything’s stopped. Maybe even the trains. It’s going on over there on the west side, in River Quarter, they say.”

  In the early light under a grey sky they went together through the long streets toward the river. “They’ll probably stop me,” he said, “I’m only an architect. If they do, you might try to get to Grasse somehow. The trains going east stop there, it’s a suburban station. It’s only five or six miles from Krasnoy.” She nodded. She wore the same bright shoddy dress; it was cold, and they walked fast. When they came in sight of Old Bridge they hesitated. Across the bridge between the fine stone balustrades stood not only the idling soldiers they had expected but also a huge black thing, hunchbacked and oblique, its machine-gun snout poked out towards the west. A soldier waved aside his identification cards, told him to go home. He and the woman returned up the long streets where no trolleys ran, no cars, and few people walked. “If you want to walk on out to Grasse,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”

  The coarse black hair whipped over her cheek as she smiled, bewildered, a countrywoman astray. “You’re kind. But will the trains be running?”

  “Probably not.”

  The colorless delicate face was bent pondering; she smiled a little, faced with the insuperable.

  “Have you children at home, in Sorg?”

  “Yes, two children. I was here trying to get my husband’s compensation, he was hurt in an accident at the mill, he lost his arm. . . .”

  “It’s about forty miles to Sorg. Walking, you might be there tomorrow night.”

  “I was thinking that. But with this trouble they’ll be policing the ways out of the city, all the roads. . . .”

  “Not the roads east.”

  “I’m a bit scared,” she said after a while, gently; no gypsy from the wild lands but only a countrywoman on the roads of ruin, afraid to go alone. She need not go alone. They could walk together out of the city eastward, taking the road up to Grasse and then down among the hills, from town to town on the rolling plain past fields and lone farms until they came in autumn evening under the grey walls, to the high spire of Sorg; and now with the trouble in Krasnoy the roads would be quite empty, no buses, no cars running, as if they walked into the last century and on before into the other centuries, back, towards their heritage, away from their death.

  “You’d best wait it out here,” he said as they turned onto Geyle Street. She looked up at his heavy face, saying nothing. On the stair-landing she murmured, “Thank you. You were kind to go with me.”

  “I wish I could.” He turned to his door.

  In the afternoon the windows of the flat rattled and rattled. His mother sat with her hands in her lap staring out over the flowers of the geranium at the cloud-spotted sky full of sunshine. “I’m going out, mother,” Maler said, and she sat still; but as he put on his coat she said, “It’s not safe.”

  “No. It’s not safe.”

  “Stay inside, Maler.”

  “It’s sunny outside. The sunshine bathes us all, eh? I need a good bath.”

  She looked up at him in terror. Having denied the need for help, she did not know how to ask for it. “This isn’t real, this is insane, all this trouble-making, you mustn’t get mixed up in it, I won’t accept it. I won’t believe it!” she said, raising her long arms to him as if in incantation. He stood there, a big heavy man. Down on the street there was a long shout, silence, a shout; the windows rattled again. She dropped her arms to her sides and cried, “But Maler, I’ll be alone!”

  “Yes, well,” he said softly, thoughtfully, not wanting to hurt her, “that’s how it is.” He left her, closed the door behind him, and went down the stairs and out, dazzled at first by the bright October sunlight, to join the army of the unarmed and with them to go down the long streets leading westward to, but not across, the river.

  1956

  Brothers and Sisters

  THE INJURED QUARRIER lay on a high hospital bed. He had not recovered consciousness. His silence was grand and oppressive; his body under the sheet that dropped in stiff folds, his face were as indifferent as stone. The mother, as if challenged by that silence and indifference, spoke loudly: “What did you do it for? Do you want to die before I do? Look at him, look at him, my beauty, my hawk, my river, my son!” Her sorrow boasted of itself. She rose to the occasion like a lark to the morning. His silence and her outcry meant the same thing: the unendurable made welcome. The younger son stood listening. They bore him down with their grief as large as life. Unconscious, heedless, broken like a piece of chalk, that body, his brother, bore him down with the weight of the flesh, and he wanted to run away, to save himself.

  The man who had been saved stood beside him, a little stooped fellow, middle-aged, limestone dust white in his knuckles. He too was borne down. “He saved my life,” he said to Stefan, gaping, wanting an explanation. His voice was the flat toneless voice of the deaf.

  “He would,” Stefan said. “That’s what he’d do.”

  He left the hospital to get his lunch. Everybody asked him about his brother. “He’ll live,” Stefan said. He went to the White Lion for lunch, drank too much. “Crippled? Him? Kostant? So he got a couple of tons of rock in the face, it won’t hurt him, he’s made of the stuff. He wasn’t born, he was quarried out.” They laughed at him as usual. “Quarried out,” he said. “Like all the rest of you.” He left the White Lion, went down Ardure Street four blocks straight out of town, and kept on straight, walking northeast, parallel with the railroad tracks a quarter mile away. The May sun was small and greyish overhead. Underfoot there were dust and small weeds. The karst, the limestone plain, jigged tinily about him with heatwaves like the transparent vibrating wings of flies. Remote and small, rigid beyond that vibrant greyish haze, the mountains stood. He had known the mountains from far off all his life, and twice had seen them close, when he took the Brailava train, once going, once coming back. He knew they were clothed in trees, fir trees with roots clutching the banks of running streams and with branches dark in the mist that closed and parted in the mountain gullies in the light of dawn as the train clanked by, its smoke dropping down the green slopes like a dro
pping veil. In the mountains the streams ran noisy in the sunlight; there were waterfalls. Here on the karst the rivers ran underground, silent in dark veins of stone. You could ride a horse all day from Sfaroy Kampe and still not reach the mountains, still be in the limestone dust; but late on the second day you would come under the shade of trees, by running streams. Stefan Fabbre sat down by the side of the straight unreal road he had been walking on, and put his head in his arms. Alone, a mile from town, a quarter mile from the tracks, sixty miles from the mountains, he sat and cried for his brother. The plain of dust and stone quivered and grimaced about him in the heat like the face of a man in pain.

  He got back an hour late from lunch to the office of the Chorin Company where he worked as an accountant. His boss came to his desk: “Fabbre, you needn’t stay this afternoon.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, if you want to go to the hospital . . .”

  “What can I do there? I can’t sew him back up, can I?”

  “As you like,” the boss said, turning away.

  “Not me that got a ton of rocks in the face, is it?” Nobody answered him.

  When Kostant Fabbre was hurt in the rockslide in the quarry he was twenty-six years old; his brother was twenty-three; their sister Rosana was thirteen. She was beginning to grow tall and sullen, to weigh upon the earth. Instead of running, now, she walked, ungainly and somewhat hunched, as if at each step she crossed, unwilling, a threshold. She talked loudly, and laughed aloud. She struck back at whatever touched her, a voice, a wind, a word she did not understand, the evening star. She had not learned indifference, she knew only defiance. Usually she and Stefan quarrelled, touching each other where each was raw, unfinished. This night when he got home the mother had not come back from the hospital, and Rosana was silent in the silent house. She had been thinking all afternoon about pain, about pain and death; defiance had failed her.