Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Don’t look so down,” Stefan told her as she served out beans for supper. “He’ll be all right.”

  “Do you think . . . Somebody was saying he might be, you know. . . .”

  “Crippled? No, he’ll be all right.”

  “Why do you think he, you know, ran to push that fellow out of the way?”

  “No why to it, Ros. He just did it.”

  He was touched that she asked these questions of him, and surprised at the certainty of his answers. He had not thought that he had any answers.

  “It’s queer,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “I don’t know. Kostant . . .”

  “Knocked the keystone out of your arch, didn’t it? Wham! One rock falls, they all go.” She did not understand him; she did not recognise the place where she had come today, a place where she was like other people, sharing with them the singular catastrophe of being alive. Stefan was not the one to guide her. “Here we all are,” he went on, “lying around each of us under our private pile of rocks. At least they got Kostant out from under his and filled him up with morphine. . . . D’you remember once when you were little you said ‘I’m going to marry Kostant when I grow up.’”

  Rosana nodded. “Sure. And he got real mad.”

  “Because mother laughed.”

  “It was you and dad that laughed.”

  Neither of them was eating. The room was close and dark around the kerosene lamp.

  “What was it like when dad died?”

  “You were there,” Stefan said.

  “I was nine. But I can’t remember it. Except it was hot like now, and there were a lot of big moths knocking their heads on the glass. Was that the night he died?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What was it like?” She was trying to explore the new land.

  “I don’t know. He just died. It isn’t like anything else.”

  The father had died of pneumonia at forty-six, after thirty years in the quarries. Stefan did not remember his death much more clearly than Rosana did. He had not been the keystone of the arch.

  “Have we got any fruit to eat?”

  The girl did not answer. She was gazing at the air above the place at the table where the elder brother usually sat. Her forehead and dark eyebrows were like his, were his: likeness between kin is identity, the brother and sister were, by so much or so little, the curve of brow and temple, the same person; so that, for a moment, Kostant sat across the table mutely contemplating his own absence.

  “Is there any?”

  “I think there’s some apples in the pantry,” she answered, coming back to herself, but so quietly that in her brother’s eyes she seemed briefly a woman, a quiet woman speaking out of her thoughts; and he said with tenderness to that woman, “Come on, let’s go over to the hospital. They must be through messing with him by now.”

  The deaf man had come back to the hospital. His daughter was with him. Stefan knew she clerked at the butcher’s shop. The deaf man, not allowed into the ward, kept Stefan half an hour in the hot, pine-floored waiting room that smelled of disinfectant and resin. He talked, walking about, sitting down, jumping up, arguing in the loud even monotone of his deafness. “I’m not going back to the pit. No sir. What if I’d said last night I’m not going into the pit tomorrow? Then how’d it be now, see? I wouldn’t be here now, nor you wouldn’t, nor he wouldn’t, him in there, your brother. We’d all be home. Home safe and sound, see? I’m not going back to the pit. No, by God. I’m going out to the farm, that’s where I’m going. I grew up there, see, out west in the foothills there, my brother’s there. I’m going back and work the farm with him. I’m not going back to the pit again.”

  The daughter sat on the wooden bench, erect and still. Her face was narrow, her black hair was pulled back in a knot. “Aren’t you hot?” Stefan asked her, and she answered gravely, “No, I’m all right.” Her voice was clear. She was used to speaking to her deaf father. When Stefan said nothing more she looked down again and sat with her hands in her lap. The father was still talking. Stefan rubbed his hands through his sweaty hair and tried to interrupt. “Good, sounds like a good plan, Sachik. Why waste the rest of your life in the pits.” The deaf man talked right on.

  “He doesn’t hear you.”

  “Can’t you take him home?”

  “I couldn’t make him leave here even for dinner. He won’t stop talking.”

  Her voice was much lower saying this, perhaps from embarrassment, and the sound of it caught at Stefan. He rubbed his sweaty hair again and stared at her, thinking for some reason of smoke, waterfalls, the mountains.

  “You go on home.” He heard in his own voice the qualities of hers, softness and clarity. “I’ll get him over to the Lion for an hour.”

  “Then you won’t see your brother.”

  “He won’t run away. Go on home.”

  At the White Lion both men drank heavily. Sachik talked on about the farm in the foothills, Stefan talked about the mountains and his year at college in the city. Neither heard the other. Drunk, Stefan walked Sachik home to one of the rows of party-walled houses that the Chorin Company had put up in ’95 when they opened the new quarry. The houses were on the west edge of town, and behind them the karst stretched in the light of the half-moon away on and on, pocked, pitted, level, answering the moonlight with its own pallor taken at third-hand from the sun. The moon, second-hand, worn at the edges, was hung up in the sky like something a housewife leaves out to remind her it needs mending. “Tell your daughter everything is all right,” Stefan said, swaying at the door. “Everything is all right,” Sachik repeated with enthusiasm, “aa-all right.”

  Stefan went home drunk, and so the day of the accident blurred in his memory into the rest of the days of the year, and the fragments that stayed with him, his brother’s closed eyes, the dark girl looking at him, the moon looking at nothing, did not recur to his mind together as parts of a whole, but separately with long intervals between.

  On the karst there are no springs; the water they drink in Sfaroy Kampe comes from deep wells and is pure, without taste. Ekata Sachik tasted the strange spring-water of the farm still on her lips as she scrubbed an iron skillet at the sink. She scrubbed with a stiff brush, using more energy than was needed, absorbed in the work deep below the level of conscious pleasure. Food had been burned in the skillet, the water she poured in fled brown from the bristles of the brush, glittering in the lamplight. They none of them knew how to cook here at the farm. Sooner or later she would take over the cooking and they could eat properly. She liked housework, she liked to clean, to bend hot-faced to the oven of a woodburning range, to call people in to supper; lively, complex work, not a bore like clerking at the butcher’s shop, making change, saying “Good day” and “Good day” all day. She had left town with her family because she was sick of that. The farm family had taken the four of them in without comment, as a natural disaster, more mouths to feed, but also more hands to work. It was a big, poor farm. Ekata’s mother, who was ailing, crept about behind the bustling aunt and cousin; the men, Ekata’s uncle, father, and brother, tromped in and out in dusty boots; there were long discussions about buying another pig. “It’s better here than in the town, there’s nothing in the town,” Ekata’s widowed cousin said; Ekata did not answer her. She had no answer. “I think Martin will be going back,” she said finally, “he never thought to be a farmer.” And in fact her brother, who was sixteen, went back to Sfaroy Kampe in August to work in the quarries.

  He took a room in a boarding house. His window looked down on the Fabbres’ back yard, a fenced square of dust and weeds with a sad-looking fir tree at one corner. The landlady, a quarrier’s widow, was dark, straight-backed, calm, like Martin’s sister Ekata. With her the boy felt manly and easy. When she was out, her daughter and the other boarders, four single men in their twenties, took over; they laughed and slapped one another on the back; the railway clerk from Brailava would take out his guitar and play music-hall song
s, rolling his eyes like raisins set in lard. The daughter, thirty and unmarried, would laugh and move about a great deal, her shirtwaist would come out of her belt in back and she would not tuck it in. Why did they make so much fuss? Why did they laugh, punch one another’s shoulders, play the guitar and sing? They would begin to make fun of Martin. He would shrug and reply gruffly. Once he replied in the language used in the quarry pits. The guitar player took him aside and spoke to him seriously about how one must behave in front of ladies. Martin listened with his red face bowed. He was a big, broad-shouldered boy. He thought he might pick up this clerk from Brailava and break his neck. He did not do it. He had no right to. The clerk and the others were men; there was something they understood which he did not understand, the reason why they made a fuss, rolled their eyes, played and sang. Until he understood that, they were justified in telling him how to speak to ladies. He went up to his room and leaned out the window to smoke a cigarette. The smoke hung in the motionless evening air which enclosed the fir tree, the roofs, the world in a large dome of hard, dark-blue crystal. Rosana Fabbre came out into the fenced yard next door, dumped out a pan of dishwater with a short, fine swing of her arms, then stood still to look up at the sky, foreshortened, a dark head over a white blouse, caught in the blue crystal. Nothing moved for sixty miles in all directions except the last drops of water in the dishpan, which one by one fell to the ground, and the smoke of Martin’s cigarette curling and dropping away from his fingers. Slowly he drew in his hand so that her eye would not be caught by the tiny curl of smoke. She sighed, whacked the dishpan on the jamb of the door to shake out the last drops, which had already run out, turned, went in; the door slammed. The blue air rejoined without a flaw where she had stood. Martin murmured to that flawless air the word he had been advised not to say in front of ladies, and in a moment, as if in answer, the evening star shone out northwest-wards high and clear.

  Kostant Fabbre was home, and alone all day now that he was able to get across a room on crutches. How he spent these vast silent days no one considered, probably least of all himself. An active man, the strongest and most intelligent worker in the quarries, a crew foreman since he was twenty-three, he had had no practice at all at idleness, or solitude. He had always used his time to the full in work. Now time must use him. He watched it at work upon him without dismay or impatience, carefully, like an apprentice watching a master. He employed all his strength to learn his new trade, that of weakness. The silence in which he passed the days clung to him now as the limestone dust had used to cling to his skin.

  The mother worked in the dry-goods shop till six; Stefan got off work at five. There was an hour in the evening when the brothers were together alone. Stefan had used to spend this hour out in the back yard under the fir tree, stupid, sighing, watching swallows dart after invisible insects in the interminably darkening air, or else he had gone to the White Lion. Now he came home promptly, bringing Kostant the Brailava Messenger. They both read it, exchanging sheets. Stefan planned to speak, but did not. The dust lay on his lips. Nothing happened. Over and over the same hour passed. The older brother sat still, his handsome, quiet face bowed over the newspaper. He read slowly; Stefan had to wait to exchange sheets; he could see Kostant’s eyes move from word to word. Then Rosana would come in yelling good-bye to schoolmates in the street, the mother would come in, doors would bang, voices ring from room to room, the kitchen would smoke and clatter, plates clash, the hour was gone.

  One evening Kostant, having barely begun to read, laid the newspaper down. There was a long pause which contained no events and which Stefan, reading, pretended not to notice.

  “Stefan, my pipe’s there by you.”

  “Oh, sure,” Stefan mumbled, took him his pipe. Kostant filled and lit it, drew on it a few times, set it down. His right hand lay on the arm of the chair, hard and relaxed, holding in it a knot of desolation too heavy to lift. Stefan hid behind his paper and the silence went on.

  I’ll read out this about the union coalition to him, Stefan thought, but he did not. His eyes insisted on finding another article, reading it. Why can’t I talk to him?

  “Ros is growing up,” Kostant said.

  “She’s getting on,” Stefan mumbled.

  “She’ll take some looking after. I’ve been thinking. This is no town for a girl growing up. Wild lads and hard men.”

  “You’ll find them anywhere.”

  “Will you; no doubt,” Kostant said, accepting Stefan’s statement without question. Kostant had never been off the karst, never been out of Sfaroy Kampe. He knew nothing at all but limestone, Ardure Street and Chorin Street and Gulhelm Street, the mountains far off and the enormous sky.

  “See,” he said, picking up his pipe again, “she’s a bit wilful, I think.”

  “Lads will think twice before they mess with Fabbre’s sister,” Stefan said. “Anyhow, she’ll listen to you.”

  “And you.”

  “Me? What should she listen to me for?”

  “For the same reasons,” Kostant said, but Stefan had found his voice now—“What should she respect me for? She’s got good enough sense. You and I didn’t listen to anything dad said, did we? Same thing.”

  “You’re not like him. If that’s what you meant. You’ve had an education.”

  “An education, I’m a real professor, sure. Christ! One year at the Normal School!”

  “Why did you fail there, Stefan?”

  The question was not asked lightly; it came from the heart of Kostant’s silence, from his austere, pondering ignorance. Unnerved at finding himself, like Rosana, included so deeply in the thoughts of this reserved and superb brother, Stefan said the first thing that came to mind—“I was afraid I’d fail. So I didn’t work.”

  And there it was, plain as a glass of water, the truth, which he had never admitted to himself.

  Kostant nodded, thinking over this idea of failure, which was surely not one familiar to him; then he said in his resonant, gentle voice, “You’re wasting your time here in Kampe.”

  “I am? What about yourself?”

  “I’m wasting nothing. I never won any scholarship.” Kostant smiled, and the humor of his smile angered Stefan.

  “No, you never tried, you went straight to the pit at fifteen. Listen, did you ever wonder, did you ever stop a minute to ask what am I doing here, why did I go into the quarries, what do I work there for, am I going to work there six days a week every week of the year every year of my life? For pay, sure, there’s other ways to make a living. What’s it for? Why does anybody stay here, in this Godforsaken town on this Godforsaken piece of rock where nothing grows? Why don’t they get up and go somewhere? Talk about wasting your time! What in God’s name is it all for—is this all there is to it?”

  “I have thought that.”

  “I haven’t thought anything else for years.”

  “Why not go, then?”

  “Because I’m afraid to. It’d be like Brailava, like the college. But you—”

  “I’ve got my work here. It’s mine, I can do it. Anywhere you go, you can still ask what it’s all for.”

  “I know.” Stefan got up, a slight man moving and talking restlessly, half finishing his gestures and words. “I know. You take yourself with yourself. But that means one thing for me and something else again for you. You’re wasting yourself here, Kostant. It’s the same as this business, this hero business, smashing yourself up for that Sachik, a fool who can’t even see a rockslide coming at him—”

  “He couldn’t hear it,” Kostant put in, but Stefan could not stop now. “That’s not the point; the point is, let that kind of man look after himself, what’s he to you, what’s his life to you? Why did you go in after him when you saw the slide coming? For the same reason as you went into the pit, for the same reason as you keep working in the pit. For no reason. Because it just came up. It just happened. You let things happen to you, you take what’s handed you, when you could take it all in your hands and do what you wanted w
ith it!”

  It was not what he had meant to say, not what he had wanted to say. He had wanted Kostant to talk. But words fell out of his own mouth and bounced around him like hailstones. Kostant sat quiet, his strong hand closed not to open; finally he answered: “You’re making something of me I’m not.” That was not humility. There was none in him. His patience was that of pride. He understood Stefan’s yearning but could not share it, for he lacked nothing; he was intact. He would go forward in the same, splendid, vulnerable integrity of body and mind towards whatever came to meet him on his road, like a king in exile on a land of stone, bearing all his kingdom—cities, trees, people, mountains, fields and flights of birds in spring—in his closed hand, a seed for the sowing; and, because there was no one of his language to speak to, silent.

  “But listen, you said you’ve thought the same thing, what’s it all for, is this all there is to life— If you’ve thought that, you must have looked for the answer!”

  After a long pause Kostant said, “I nearly found it. Last May.”

  Stefan stopped fidgeting, looked out the front window in silence. He was frightened. “That—that’s not an answer,” he mumbled.

  “Seems like there ought to be a better one,” Kostant agreed.

  “You get morbid sitting here. . . . What you need’s a woman,” Stefan said, fidgeting, slurring his words, staring out at the early-autumn evening rising from stone pavements unobscured by tree-branches or smoke, even, clear, and empty. Behind him, his brother laughed. “It’s the truth,” Stefan said bitterly, not turning.

  “Could be. How about yourself?”

  “They’re sitting out on the steps there at widow Katalny’s. She must be night nursing at the hospital again. Hear the guitar? That’s the fellow from Brailava, works at the railway office, goes after anything in skirts. Even goes after Nona Katalny. Sachik’s kid lives there now. Works in the New Pit, somebody said. Maybe in your crew.”