The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I don’t—When everybody in the town knew who he was—” He felt her shrug. They kept walking. The road was long again as when he and Kasimir had walked it the first time without light. They came to the hill where the lights had appeared, the laughter and calling all round them in the rain. “Come faster, Stefan,” the girl beside him said timidly, “you’re cold.” He had to stop soon, and breaking away from her went blind to the roadside seeking anything, a fencepost or tree, anything to lean against till he could stop crying; but there was nothing. He stood there in the darkness and she stood near him. At last he turned and they went on together. Rocks and weeds showed white in the ragged circle of light from her flashlight. As they crossed the hillcrest she said with the same timidity and stubbornness, “I told mother we want to marry. When we heard they had you in jail here I told her. Not father, yet. This was—this was what he couldn’t stand, he can’t take it. But mother’s all right, and so I told her. I’d like to be married quite soon, if you would, Stefan.” He walked beside her, silent. “Right,” he said finally. “No good letting go, is there.” The lights of the house below them were yellow through the trees; above them stars and a few thin clouds drifted through the sky. “No good at all.”

  Unlocking the Air

  This is a fairy tale. People stand in the lightly falling snow. Something is shining, trembling, making a silvery sound. Eyes are shining. Voices sing. People laugh and weep, clasp one another’s hands, embrace. Something shines and trembles. They live happily ever after. The snow falls on the roofs and blows across the parks, the squares, the river.

  This is history. Once upon a time a good king lived in his palace in a kingdom far away. But an evil enchantment fell upon that land. The wheat withered in the ear, the leaves dropped from the trees of the forest, and no thing thrived.

  This is a stone. It’s a paving stone of a square that slants downhill in front of an old, reddish, almost windowless fortress called the Roukh Palace. The square was paved nearly three hundred years ago, so a lot of feet have walked on this stone, bare feet and shod, children’s little pads, horses’ iron shoes, soldiers’ boots; and wheels have gone over and over it, cart wheels, carriage wheels, car tires, tank treads. Dogs’ paws every now and then. There’s been dogshit on it, there’s been blood, both soon washed away by water sloshed from buckets or run from hoses or dropped from the clouds. You can’t get blood from a stone, they say, nor can you give it to a stone; it takes no stain. Some of the pavement, down near that street that leads out of Roukh Square through the old Jewish quarter to the river, got dug up once or twice and piled into a barricade, and some of the stones even found themselves flying through the air, but not for long. They were soon put back in their place, or replaced by others. It made no difference to them. The man hit by the flying stone dropped down like a stone beside the stone that killed him. The man shot through the brain fell down and his blood ran out on this stone, or another one maybe, it makes no difference to them. The soldiers washed his blood away with water sloshed from buckets, the buckets their horses drank from. The rain fell after a while. The snow fell. Bells rang the hours, the Christmases, the New Years. A tank stopped with its treads on this stone. You’d think that that would leave a mark, a huge heavy thing like a tank, but the stone shows nothing. Only all the feet bare and shod over the centuries have worn a quality into it, not a smoothness exactly but a kind of softness like leather or like skin. Unstained, unmarked, indifferent, it does have that quality of having been worn for a long time by life. So it is a stone of power, and who sets foot on it may be transformed.

  This is a story. She let herself in with her key and called, “Mama? It’s me, Fana,” and her mother in the kitchen of the apartment called, “I’m in here,” and they met and hugged in the doorway of the kitchen.

  “Come on, come on!”

  “Come where?”

  “It’s Thursday, Mama!”

  “Oh,” said Bruna Fabbre, retreating towards the stove, making vague protective gestures at the saucepans, the dishcloths, the spoons.

  “You said.”

  “But it’s nearly four already—”

  “We can be back by six-thirty.”

  “I have all the papers to read for the advancement tests.”

  “You have to come, Mama. You do. You’ll see!”

  A heart of stone might resist the shining eyes, the coaxing, the bossiness. “Come on!” she said again, and the mother came.

  But grumbling. “This is for you,” she said on the stairs.

  On the bus she said it again. “This is for you. Not me.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Bruna did not reply for a while, looking out the bus window at the grey city lurching by, the dead November sky behind the roofs.

  “Well, you see,” she said, “before Kasi, my brother Kasimir, before he was killed, that was the time that would have been for me. But I was too young. Too stupid. And then they killed Kasi.”

  “By mistake.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake. They were hunting for a man who’d been getting people out across the border, and they’d missed him. So it was to…”

  “To have something to report to the Central Office.”

  Bruna nodded. “He was about the age you are now,” she said. The bus stopped, people climbed on, crowding the aisle. “Since then, twenty-seven years, always since then it’s been too late. For me. First too stupid, then too late. This time is for you. I missed mine.”

  “You’ll see,” Stefana said. “There’s enough time to go round.”

  This is history. Soldiers stand in a row before the reddish, almost windowless palace; their muskets are at the ready. Young men walk across the stones towards them, singing,

  Beyond this darkness is the light,

  O Liberty, of thine eternal day!

  The soldiers fire their guns. The young men live happily ever after.

  This is biology.

  “Where the hell is everybody?”

  “It’s Thursday,” Stefan Fabbre said, adding, “Damn!” as the figures on the computer screen jumped and flickered. He was wearing his topcoat over sweater and scarf, since the biology laboratory was heated only by a spaceheater which shorted out the computer circuit if they were on at the same time. “There are programs that could do this in two seconds,” he said, jabbing morosely at the keyboard.

  Avelin came up and glanced at the screen. “What is it?”

  “The RNA comparison count. I could do it faster on my fingers.”

  Avelin, a bald, spruce, pale, dark-eyed man of forty, roamed the laboratory, looked restlessly through a folder of reports. “Can’t run a university with this going on,” he said. “I’d have thought you’d be down there.”

  Fabbre entered a new set of figures and said, “Why?”

  “You’re an idealist.”

  “Am I?” Fabbre leaned back, stretched, rolled his head to get the cricks out. “I try hard not to be,” he said.

  “Realists are born, not made.” The younger man sat down on a lab stool and stared at the scarred, stained counter. “It’s coming apart,” he said.

  “You think so? Seriously?”

  Avelin nodded. “You heard that report from Prague.”

  Fabbre nodded.

  “Last week…This week…Next year—Yes. An earthquake. The stones come apart—it falls apart—there was a building, now there’s not. History is made. So I don’t understand why you’re here, not there.”

  “Seriously, you don’t understand that?”

  Avelin smiled and said, “Seriously.”

  “All right.” Fabbre stood up and began walking up and down the long room as he spoke. He was a slight, grey-haired man with youthfully intense, controlled movements. “Science or political activity, either/or: choose. Right? Choice is responsibility, right? So I chose my responsibility responsibly. I chose science and abjured all action but the acts of science. The acts of a responsible science. Out there they can change the rules; in he
re they can’t change the rules; when they try to I resist. This is my resistance.” He slapped the laboratory bench as he turned round. “I’m lecturing. I walk up and down like this when I lecture. So. Background of the choice. I’m from the northeast. ’56, in the northeast, do you remember? My grandfather, my father—reprisals. So, in ’60, I come here, to the university. ’62, my best friend, my wife’s brother. We were walking through a village market, talking, then he stopped, he stopped talking, they had shot him. A kind of mistake. Right? He was a musician. A realist. I felt that I owed it to him, that I owed it to them, you see, to live carefully, with responsibility, to do the best I could do. The best I could do was this,” and he gestured around the laboratory. “I’m good at it. So I go on trying to be a realist. As far as possible under the circumstances, which have less and less to do with reality. But they are only circumstances. The circumstances in which I do my work as carefully as I can.”

  Avelin sat on the lab stool, his head bowed. When Fabbre was done, he nodded. After a while he said, “But I have to ask you if it’s realistic to separate the circumstances, as you put it, from the work.”

  “About as realistic as separating the body from the mind,” Fabbre said. He stretched again and reseated himself at the computer. “I want to get this series in,” he said, and his hands went to the keyboard and his gaze to the notes he was copying. After five or six minutes he started the printer and spoke without turning. “You’re serious, Givan, you think it’s coming apart as a whole?”

  “Yes. I think the experiment is over.”

  The printer scraped and screeched, and they raised their voices to be heard over it.

  “Here, you mean.”

  “Here and everywhere. They know it, down at Roukh Square. Go down there. You’ll see. There could be such jubilation only at the death of a tyrant or the failure of a great hope.”

  “Or both.”

  “Or both,” Avelin agreed.

  The paper jammed in the printer, and Fabbre opened the machine to free it. His hands were shaking. Avelin, spruce and cool, hands behind his back, strolled over, looked, reached in, disengaged the corner that was jamming the feed.

  “Soon,” he said, “we’ll have an IBM. A Mactoshin. Our hearts’ desire.”

  “Macintosh,” Fabbre said.

  “Everything can be done in two seconds.”

  Fabbre restarted the printer and looked around. “Listen, the principles—”

  Avelin’s eyes shone strangely, as if full of tears; he shook his head. “So much depends on the circumstances,” he said.

  This is a key. It locks and unlocks a door, the door to Apartment 2–1 of the building at 43 Pradinestrade in the Old North Quarter of the city of Krasnoy. The apartment is enviable, having a kitchen with saucepans, dishcloths, spoons, and all that is necessary, and two bedrooms, one of which is now used as a sitting room with chairs, books, papers, and all that is necessary, as well as a view from the window between other buildings of a short section of the Molsen River. The river at this moment is lead-colored and the trees above it are bare and black. The apartment is unlighted and empty. When they left, Bruna Fabbre locked the door and dropped the key, which is on a steel ring along with the key to her desk at the Lyceum and the key to her sister Bendika’s apartment in the Trasfiuve, into her small imitation leather handbag, which is getting shabby at the corners, and snapped the handbag shut. Bruna’s daughter Stefana has a copy of the key in her jeans pocket, tied on a bit of braided cord along with the key to the closet in her room in Dormitory G of the University of Krasnoy, where she is a graduate student in the department of Orsinian and Slavic Literature working for a degree in the field of Early Romantic Poetry. She never locks the closet. The two women walk down Pradinestrade three blocks and wait a few minutes at the corner for the number 18 bus, which runs on Bulvard Settentre from North Krasnoy to the center of the city.

  Pressed in the crowded interior of the handbag and the tight warmth of the jeans pocket, the key and its copy are inert, silent, forgotten. All a key can do is lock and unlock its door; that’s all the function it has, all the meaning; it has a responsibility but no rights. It can lock or unlock. It can be found or thrown away.

  This is history. Once upon a time in 1830, in 1848, in 1866, in 1918, in 1947, in 1956, stones flew. Stones flew through the air like pigeons, and hearts, too, hearts had wings. Those were the years when the stones flew, the hearts took wing, the young voices sang. The soldiers raised their muskets to the ready, the soldiers aimed their rifles, the soldiers poised their machine guns. They were young, the soldiers. They fired. The stones lay down, the pigeons fell. There’s a kind of red stone called pigeon’s blood, a ruby. The red stones of Roukh Square were never rubies; slosh a bucket of water over them or let the rain fall and they’re grey again, lead grey, common stones. Only now and then in certain years they have flown, and turned to rubies.

  This is a bus. Nothing to do with fairy tales and not romantic; certainly realistic; though in a way, in principle, in fact, it is highly idealistic. A city bus crowded with people in a city street in Central Europe on a November afternoon, and it’s stalled. What else? Oh, dear. Oh, damn. But no, it hasn’t stalled; the engine, for a wonder, hasn’t broken down; it’s just that it can’t go any farther. Why not? Because there’s a bus stopped in front of it, and another one stopped in front of that one at the cross street, and it looks like everything’s stopped. Nobody on this bus has yet heard the word “gridlock,” the name of an exotic disease of the mysterious West. There aren’t enough private cars in Krasnoy to bring about a gridlock even if they knew what it was. There are cars, and a lot of wheezing idealistic busses, but all there is enough of to stop the flow of traffic in Krasnoy is people. It is a kind of equation, proved by experiments conducted over many years, perhaps not in a wholly scientific or objective spirit but nonetheless presenting a well-documented result confirmed by repetition: there are not enough people in this city to stop a tank. Even in much larger cities it has been authoritatively demonstrated as recently as last spring that there are not enough people to stop a tank. But there are enough people in this city to stop a bus, and they are doing so. Not by throwing themselves in front of it, waving banners, or singing songs about Liberty’s eternal day, but merely by being in the street getting in the way of the bus, on the supposition that the bus driver has not been trained in either homicide or suicide; and on the same supposition—upon which all cities stand or fall—they are also getting in the way of all the other busses and all the cars and in one another’s way, too, so that nobody is going much of anywhere, in a physical sense.

  “We’re going to have to walk from here,” Stefana said, and her mother clutched her imitation leather handbag. “Oh, but we can’t, Fana. Look at that crowd! What are they—Are they—?”

  “It’s Thursday, ma’am,” said a large, red-faced, smiling man just behind them in the aisle. Everybody was getting off the bus, pushing and talking. “Yesterday I got four blocks closer than this,” a woman said crossly, and the red-faced man said, “Ah, but this is Thursday.”

  “Fifteen thousand last time,” said somebody, and somebody else said, “Fifty, fifty thousand today!”

  “We can never get anywhere near the Square, I don’t think we should try,” Bruna told her daughter as they squeezed into the crowd outside the bus door.

  “You stay with me, don’t let go, and don’t worry,” said the student of Early Romantic Poetry, a tall, resolute young woman, and she took her mother’s hand in a firm grasp. “It doesn’t really matter where we get, but it would be fun if you could see the Square. Let’s try. Let’s go round behind the post office.”

  Everybody was trying to go the same direction. Stefana and Bruna got across one street by dodging and stopping and pushing gently; then turning against the flow they trotted down a nearly empty alley, cut across the cobbled court back of the Central Post Office, and rejoined an even thicker crowd moving slowly down a wide street and out from between the
buildings. “There, there’s the palace, see!” said Stefana, who could see it, being taller. “This is as far as we’ll get except by osmosis.” They practised osmosis, which necessitated letting go of each other’s hands, and made Bruna unhappy. “This is far enough, this is fine here,” she kept saying. “I can see everything. There’s the roof of the palace. Nothing’s going to happen, is it? I mean, will anybody speak?” It was not what she meant, but she did not want to shame her daughter with her fear, her daughter who had not been alive when the stones turned to rubies. And she spoke quietly because although there were so many people pressed and pressing into Roukh Square, they were not noisy. They talked to one another in ordinary, quiet voices. Only now and then somebody down nearer the palace shouted out a name, and then many, many other voices would repeat it with a roll and crash like a wave breaking. Then they would be quiet again, murmuring vastly, like the sea between big waves.

  The street lights had come on. Roukh Square was sparsely lighted by tall, old, cast-iron standards with double globes that shed a soft light high in the air. Through that serene light, which seemed to darken the sky, came drifting small, dry flecks of snow.

  The flecks melted to droplets on Stefana’s dark, short hair and on the scarf Bruna had tied over her fair, short hair to keep her ears warm.

  When Stefana stopped at last, Bruna stood up as tall as she could, and because they were standing on the highest edge of the Square, in front of the old Dispensary, by craning she could see the great crowd, the faces like snowflakes, countless. She saw the evening darkening, the snow falling, and no way out, and no way home. She was lost in the forest. The palace, whose few lighted windows shone dully above the crowd, was silent. No one came out, no one went in. It was the seat of government; it held the power. It was the powerhouse, the powder magazine, the bomb. Power had been compressed, jammed into those old reddish walls, packed and forced into them over years, over centuries, till if it exploded it would burst with horrible violence, hurling pointed shards of stone. And out here in the twilight in the open there was nothing but soft faces with shining eyes, soft little breasts and stomachs and thighs protected only by bits of cloth.