Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I don’t know,” he said absently, his gaze following the design painted on the front of the harpsichord, a wreath of roses and hawthorn, chipped and faded on the cracked varnish. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I know it’s a mistake, so I do it.”

  She played a C-scale, one octave up and down, a tiny ripple of clear notes.

  “It’s foolish to talk that way.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “If you go, will you come back?”

  “No. I don’t think so. There is no reason to. I came here looking for the reason to come here, but I haven’t found it. You see, when I went to Krasnoy, I knew exactly why I was going, what I had to do. To write my books, meet people, make my way, fall in love, all the rest of it. I did all that. I went through all I had to go through. And now it’s done. It’s all done.”

  “At twenty-six—”

  “Don’t think I’m lazy, Givana. You’ve scarcely seen me work. I worked very hard, when I had work to do. But it’s done. So, I can go back to Krasnoy, or anywhere else, and write articles, and earn a living, take up life as most people do, get married, go on from day to day for fifty years if I like—I can see that; but I don’t believe it. I don’t see my life ahead. I have already lived it. All the rest seems meaningless. Do you know what I mean? You foresee your own life to come, in a way, don’t you?”

  “I never did until now. Since I’ve been pregnant. I see things…as if the baby saw them dreaming…a summer evening out there, under the poplar, the child and I are standing there waiting, for Ladis to ride home I suppose, and it’s a lovely summer evening, a little sad…because the wind is blowing.” She smiled. “And because I’ll be older, then.”

  “Do I ride home with Ladis?”

  “That’s for you to see.”

  They had forgotten the others; she spoke without the least convention, and he answered, harsh and pleading, “But I can’t. I can’t see anything ahead. There’s no way to see ahead through one’s own eyes, it’s the child as you say, the future you bear, that’s your vision, the truth, but I—I have lost the way—I can’t see.”

  “You worked so hard, you said so yourself; you’re tired, you’re worn out. You have to wait. It’s like winter, everything has to rest and wait.” She spoke earnestly, with confidence.

  The thaws came early, there was no snow after the last week of January. In February he received the first mail to come through to Kolleiy since Christmas: two letters from Karantay, one dated in early December asking if he had any news from Itale, the other an empty envelope, the seal broken. There was also a packet from the Rochoy publishing house, copies of his new book, Givan Faugen. He gave one to his brother. “Read it next winter!” he said, for Ladislas was in the thick of lambing season, at work twenty hours a day, and often not at the house for two or three days at a time. “No, in a week or so now,” Ladislas answered seriously. “But give it to Givana. It will please her.”

  “I will. Where are you off to?”

  “South paddocks.”

  “I’ll be along.”

  “If you like.” Ladislas swung upon his little horse, raised a hand in salute, and rode off. Amadey went to find Givana in the garden west of the house. It was a cold day, the wind blowing light and keen; sunlight flashed, dimmed, flashed in rain-pools on the raw black ground. Givana was stooping over a bed of dirt, her figure bright and frail in the restless light. “My crocuses are up,” she said proudly. “Two of them, see them?”

  “And my book’s out—see it?”

  She took the book, looked at the title, turned it over, did not know what to say. He showed her the flyleaf, on which he had written with the bad pen and gummy ink of the Kolleiy Post Inn, “For Givana and Ladislas from their loving brother Amadey.” She read the inscription and sought for words to say, then suddenly breaking through her own constraint she smiled and said, “Read me some of it!” She sat down on the garden seat, putting up her feet on a paving-stone to keep them from the mud under the bench.

  “Now?”

  “Now,” she said with her little air of command.

  Standing there in the uneasy sunlight he opened the book and read the first page aloud; he paused, and shut the book. “It seems years ago, someone else’s book…”

  “Go on.”

  “I can’t.”

  “How does it end?”

  “You shouldn’t know that before you read it.”

  “I always look at the end before I begin.”

  He glanced down at her, then opened to the last page of the book, and read about in his hard voice: “‘Givan made no reply for some minutes, but leaned on the railing of the bridge in mute contemplation of the river, which ran fast beneath, foam-streaked and yellow, swollen by the torrents of Spring. At length, raising his head, he said, “If life is anything more than a brief exile from the kingdoms beyond Death—”’”

  He stopped again. He closed the book and laid it down on the bench beside Givana. She looked up at him, helpless. The wind blew, the sun shone out and faded on the high, pale hill above the house. “It’s a very gloomy book,” the young man said.

  “Amadey, you are going back to Krasnoy, aren’t you?”

  He shook his head.

  “But there’s nothing for you here—”

  “All my kingdom is here. It always was.” Hands in his pockets he turned away to the gate, then turned back as if to speak again; he smiled a little as if in apology, shrugged, and went on around the house.

  Givana soon followed him, wearied and oppressed by the cold wind. She lay down in her room and dozed uncomfortably. Through halfsleep she heard Amadey’s voice down in the yard, the stamping of a horse. Rain began to patter on the roof and window, and she slept.

  “Perhaps he went out to shoot in the forest,” she said, that night. Ladislas, at his long-delayed supper, nodded and went on eating.

  “It’s been dark two hours,” he said, setting down knife and fork. “There’s been some accident with the horse, maybe.”

  He got up. Givana, watching his exhausted face, said nothing.

  He came back from the forest past midnight. “Gil is going on to Kolleiy with the lantern,” he said. Givana helped him pull off his mired boots; he sat back on the hearthseat, and almost at once fell asleep, before he had lain down. Wakeful in her pregnancy, Givana sat with him, keeping the fire built up; the old housekeeper brought quilts and they made a bed of the hearthseat. Ladislas slept there until dawn, when he woke suddenly. Givana was asleep, curled up in the armchair by the fire. Ladislas went quietly upstairs to his brother’s room to check that no one was there, then put on his boots and went out into the icy white sunrise. The crest of the hill above the house was lipped with gold; stables, yard, house, trees stood pallid and rigid in the dawn light. Ladislas pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck and went to the stables. The stable-boy came clambering down to meet him from the loft room.

  “Where’s the Rakava bridle,” Ladislas said, his voice hoarse with sleep and cold, “did Dom Amadey take it?”

  “Aye, for the mare.”

  “I’m going out towards Fonte, by the old road, tell them in the house.”

  He set off on his little black horse through the frostbound forest, up the hills now bright along their eastern slopes, riding towards the summit and the tower that stood yellow in the level light. As he came over the last rise before the valley under Radiko he saw the brown mare standing halfway down the steep ascent, her reins dragging. She shied away as he rode close; she ran a little, stumbled on the reins and stopped, turning her dark nervous head to watch Ladislas. He rode up past her and across the fallen wall of the courtyard, dismounted, and went to the foot of the ramp leading up into the tower. Amadey had set the gun, a hunting rifle, against his chest under the heart, and had fallen forward, sprawled out, his head turned to the side. His coat was soaking wet with rain and his hair looked black. Ladislas touched his hand which lay on the mudd
y ground, mudstained and as cold as the ground or the rain. The wind kept blowing on the hills, the domain of Radiko, as it always did. Amadey’s eyes were open, so that he seemed to be looking westward over the ruined wall and the hills at the sky where, for him, there had been no sunrise, the night continuing.

  PART FIVE

  Prisons

  I

  “In Rakava, beneath the high walls…” The tune had stuck with Itale all the way from Esten, jolting in his head as he jolted over the roads of the Polana on an outside seat of the springless coach, in the wind, between hills that hid themselves at last in slow-drifting clouds and veils of autumn rain. It was in the rain that he first saw the high walls, and from the south. Coming to Rakava from the north, from the plains, one would see first a swell of land, a hill rising a thousand feet so gradually that it could hardly be seen as a whole, and below the long skyline a patch of something like broken pearls, that as one came closer would take form, becoming a walled city built of white and tawny stone, towered and battlemented, remote, magnificent. But coming up from the south over the crest of the great hill, Itale first saw Rakava below him, exposed and dingy in the rain of an October afternoon. The houses had spread out far beyond the walls; the towers huddled in a maze and jumble of streets, dominated by the featureless bulk of several buildings that stood massive at the north edge of the city, the cloth factories. In older centuries Rakava had been the pearl of the east, the glory and fortress of the province, the untaken, the unsullied, Racava intacta. Now the high walls were breached in fifty places to let in and out the swarms of men and women going to work in the factories, coming back from work in the factories. There was still wealth there; industry was modern and on a scale unmatched in any other city of the land. Wool and silk was the city’s wealth; silkworms were raised, baled fleeces stored, yarns spun and dyed, cloth woven and cut, in the huge sheds and buildings along the northern wall; the life of the city was there, and the old towers of feudal defense stood useless, like the rusty iron fingers of a gauntlet thrusting up through the chalk of a barren hill. The coach passed under those towers and Itale looked up at their blind, massive walls uneasily. One, a fort, all but windowless, was the St Lazar Prison, another next to it, higher and elaborately battlemented, housed the provincial Courts of Law; he saw no sign of use or habitation in the others, their dark gates barred. Dusk came fast in the narrow streets. The coach rattled down cobbles slippery with rain. One of the horses slipped, plunged, and went down with a sickening crash, leaving its mate straining to stay afoot in the broken harness and the coach tilted over, so that Itale half jumped and half slid down to the street, where he too slipped, and so greeted the stones of Rakava on hands and knees, his head badly jolted and his palms scraped raw. The horse had broken its knees, a crowd had gathered immediately and pressed in close on the horses, the coach, the passengers. Itale got his valise out of the boot and pushed his way out of the crowd, his head still ringing; he got directions from a woman and set off down the street to the Rosetree Inn, where Isaber was waiting for him.

  The ex-student-teacher, nineteen now and an ardent acolyte at Novesma Verba, was very glad to see him; he had been alone in Rakava two days and had apparently had a wretched time of it. He talked all the time Itale had his bath, which was the first thing he had ordered, a hot tub in front of a hot fire. Even as he finally got warm he could feel the cold he had taken on the rainy trip settling itself in his throat and nose and eyesockets, moving in, making itself at home. The quantity of hot water brought up had been meager, the fire did not burn well. As he stood on the hearth to towel himself dry he observed two cockroaches the size of his thumb bickering over a greasy spot on the floor. “No rose, this Rosetree,” he said.

  “The rats run up on the beds at night. It’s foul. The whole city’s foul.”

  Itale shivered. “Hand me my shirt there, would you, Agostin? Thanks. Well, is it any worse than the Krasnoy slums?”

  “Yes. Because that’s all there is. The rest of it is dead. And the people are like rats. They won’t even talk to you.”

  “You’re an outsider. You’re not one of ’em. All provincials are suspicious. I know, I’m a provincial.” He always found himself reassuring Isaber, trying to cheer him up, making light of difficulties; it made him feel much more than five years older than the boy, and roused a sense of hypocrisy in him. “They are probably human, anyhow,” he said drily. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

  “I ordered mutton, there isn’t much else,” Isaber said, despondent, and they went down to a greasy supper in the gloomy depths of the inn. When Itale got to bed, with his cold, and a sharp ache in his wrist where he had wrenched it landing on the cobblestones, he reflected that his arrival in Rakava had been inauspicious; and indeed that the journey had begun ill; why had Amadey turned away like that without a word, as if he could not wait to see him go? A rat scrabbled in the wall, or under the bed. The air of the room was sour with the smell of the cheap tallow candles just blown out. “What am I doing here?” Itale thought in discouragement, and let the unanswered question magnify his sense of being in a strange room among unfamiliar walls and streets, until his own tired, unrelaxed body felt strange to him. The pain in his wrist and hand increased. He could not find an easy position. As his waking intelligence began to blur, the pressure of the alien and the inimical increased until he felt himself unable to move, lying as still and tense as a hunted man in hiding yet half-asleep and longing for full sleep, and still the stupid question hanging in his mind, “What am I doing here?”

  Next morning he had not forgotten that night-mood, and could not shake it off entirely. Only the question had resumed its primary form, waiting for him among the stones of Rakava as it had waited for him in a kindlier disguise among the fountains and gardens of Aisnar, borrowing from them the aspect of desire, or of longing; here it was undisguised and blunt, a mere question, “What am I doing?”

  There was no disguise here, no distraction. Here in this city whose existence was a suction of crowds into the factories and rejection of them, suction and rejection, repetitive unvarying activity like that of a powerful machine, work irrelevant to climate, to season, to the land or the hour of sunrise or sunset, or the wits or the wishes of any soul among those crowds, here, Itale thought after he had been in Rakava a few days, he had crossed some boundary towards which he had been tending for a long time; but he did not know where he had come, or why, or if there was any way back home.

  He did, of course, what he had come to do: called on factory owners and managers, used Oragon’s introductions to meet the political leaders of the city and among the workers, studied the functioning and organisation of the factories; he was profoundly impressed by the men and the city, by the vigor, the tremendous, inorganic energy of the system, which, less than twenty years and only beginning to reach full development, had transformed the lives of a hundred thousand people. After a fortnight he had so much material for a series of articles that he began to write them, calling the series, with an irony perceptible only to himself, “Industry in Rakava.” He was industrious enough, his mind worked with speed and concentration, he was tireless; only he had to avoid certain questions in his writing and his thoughts, or they would lead him back round to the one he could not answer. And it seemed to him sometimes that his senses were dulled, here, so that he did not feel keenly nor see clearly; his emotions too were cool, as if insulated off.

  Isaber worked hard for him, and stuck close to him. The boy was not the companion Itale would have liked. His loyalty verged too much upon dependence; he demanded that Itale lead and inform him. That Itale should question his own purposes was unthinkable to him. They were working for Freedom and that was all that was needed. Sometimes this trust was a comfort to Itale, sometimes he was moved by it to destructive cynicisms which he did not let himself say aloud. Perhaps he had no right to do what he was doing; certainly he had no right to destroy the whole fabric of Isaber’s beliefs and hopes.

  The days went by rapidly
, evenly. They were well into November and rain or sleet and snow fell every day. Itale put off his plans to leave. He continued to gather material for his articles, his understanding of the subject continued to grow. He wrote to Brelavay that he might stay on till Christmas, if their money held out. Under his steady activity there was a lethargy, an unwillingness to move again, to go on or go back. He was here, he would stay. He kept returning to the factories to watch the rattling grey-black efficiency of the wooden and iron machines out of which came long webs of pure white wool, fragile silks the colors of jewels and flowers, patterned velvets, splendid and delicate products of the looms and racks, the stinking vats of dye and sizing, the crazy dancing spindles, the endless trays of leaves and worms. The big new Ferman Wool factory had two steam-driven looms, the first in the country; he had read Sangiusto’s descriptions of such machines in the northern English cities, and went to see them in some intellectual excitement, but was drawn back to them again and again simply to watch them work: the swift endless back-and-forth, the deft, effaced men that served them. He could stand watching them for an hour, all the time with a slightly sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. They were the same motions, it was the same product, as Kounney working at his loom in his rooms in Mallenastrada; it was weaving, there had been weaving done since the dawn of human time, why did the powered looms so fascinate and frighten him? He wrote an article describing them, their structure, their product, and their probable effect on the economy if more came into use. “What a lot you know about all this,” Isaber said reading it, admiring as always. “What are you calling the piece?”

  “Freeing the Hands,” Itale said.

  The workman told off to demonstrate the powered loom to Itale was named Fabbre. Itale had quickly discovered the man’s politics to be radical, and they had struck up a kind of friendship, very cautious on both sides. Fabbre lived with his wife, his father-in-law, and five children in a four-room house outside the east wall. The Ferman managers had built this row of houses for their skilled workmen: Fabbre was an aristocrat, and treated as such. The houses had floors, and small fenced front yards, though the back doors opened on an alley of mud. The children played in troops in the alley, never in the little bare yards. These houses fascinated Itale as the machinery of the factories did. The slums of Rakava were like the slums of Krasnoy or any other city; that dirt and misery was old, coeval with the cities, the poor you have always with you—but Fabbre and his family were not poor; they were not dirty; if they were miserable it was not by the ancient causes of cold, hunger, and disease. They did not plant flowers in these front plots, or vegetables, which would be stolen, Fabbre’s wife said, it was not worth the trouble. Anyway they would likely move soon, there were new houses being built by the East Gate, water piped in to a pump in your own yard, they said. “The Company keeps us well enough,” she said factually and yet with a cold irony.