Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “It looks like it’s over,” he said.

  Sangiusto, then Moyshe, came out beside him. In the last encounter a soldier had brought a riflebutt down on Sangiusto’s hand, and the Italian sat down now on the curbstone holding the injured hand against his thigh with a soft groaning curse. Moyshe went off to look at the body of an insurgent lying down the street near a dead soldier; he turned the head gently so that he could seethe face, shrugged, came back.

  “Now what,” said Itale. “Now where.”

  “To the devil,” Sangiusto said in Italian. His hand, already badly swollen, hurt increasingly, he was sick at heart, he had not been shot down and killed but had to go on, go through it all over again, the long exile. “Oh what a bitch of a life!” he growled, this time in Piedmontese, and with his left hand whacked the butt of his empty gun on the stones of the street.

  “Home,” Moyshe said with his shrug. “And you?”

  Itale stood silent.

  “You’re welcome to come with me,” the Jew said coldly, ready for the rebuff.

  “Thank you,” Itale said, turning to look at him. After this day he knew this man’s face and voice and fine stern eyes as if he had known them all his life, better than he might ever know any other face, but there was nothing between them but trust—everything, nothing. There was nothing left for them to say. “We have to try to find our group,” Itale said. They parted with constrained words of farewell.

  Itale and Sangiusto set off for Helleskar’s house, around the Hill of the University, through River Quarter, past the cathedral and across its square, a dream walk, very long, through the red sunset, the dusk. They went tentatively at first, later they walked boldly. They were not halted even by the militia posted in Cathedral Square. Troops of mounted guards passed clattering, foot patrols of the city guard were posted here and there, but not in very much greater number than usual; the streets were emptier than usual, but not empty, there were other men in ones and twos walking, silent and not loitering. No women. A city without women. Itale and Sangiusto talked as they went, sometimes quite coherently, discussing probable causes of the apparent amnesty, trying to construct some idea of what had gone on during the two days of insurrection, what might have happened in the Eleynaprade while they were in the Ghetto, what condition the Assembly was now in. Itale was talkative, made jokes to cheer Sangiusto up, and once remarked, “Well, work’s certain and reward’s seldom…” In Sorden Street he asked what day it was, and as they crossed Roches Street he asked it again. “The fourteenth,” Sangiusto repeated.

  “I asked you that before, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s your hand?”

  “Like a fire.”

  “It’s not far now. We could…” He stopped himself. He had been about to say that perhaps they could stop a minute and rest, and that was foolish, with only two blocks left to walk. He stumbled. “We can stop,” Sangiusto said, his face drawn askew again. “No, it’s just up the street,” Itale said, “with any luck Tomas will be there already.” He thought he had said that before too, and gave up talking. They came to the big, stately house, went under the portal with its coats of arms and caryatids, knocked, and were admitted by the liveried servant. They were crossing the salon to the library, where the lonely old man rose eager and alarmed to meet them, when Itale reached out for his companion’s arm, stumbled again, and pitched down in a faint. Sangiusto, not in much better condition himself, was utterly dismayed, alone among strangers; he fell on his knees beside Itale and tried to wake him, whispering in despair, “Listen, my dear, my friend, listen to me…”

  V

  The next afternoon Sangiusto came into Itale’s room with a special edition of the Courier-Mercury, a single sheet printed—since the government presses had been burned on the night of the thirteenth—on some commandeered press, perhaps Novesma Verba’s. The paper contained no news from Paris, nothing about suspension or reconvocation of the Assembly, nothing directly about any event of August thirteenth and fourteenth; only a bulletin, dated the twelfth, of the grand duchess’ request to the Estates General, and a police notice to certain individuals considered illegal residents of the capital, who were hereby ordered to depart the Molsen Province by noon of the 16th August 1830, after which time if found in the City or Province they would be liable to arrest and imprisonment as conspirators against the Government of the Grand Duchy. There followed in smudged, badly set print a list of sixty-three names. Sangiusto read them out, hesitating and squinting, his foreign accent very noticeable. “Breve, Givan Alexis. Rasenne, Luke. Yagove, Pier Mariye. Brelavay, Tomas Alexis. Fabbre, Raul. Frenin, Givan—”

  “They’re out of date,” Itale remarked.

  Sangiusto went on, twenty or more names Itale knew as acquaintances and some he did not know at all, then, “Oragon, Stefan Mariye.”

  “Oragon! And the first deputy. Is Livenne on the list?”

  “Count Helleskar has heard that Livenne was killed on Palazay Street.”

  “Go on.”

  “Palley, Tedor. Palley, Salvate. Vernoy, Roch. Sorde, Itale. Eklesay, Matiyas Mark. Chorin-Falleskar, George Andre.”

  “Another deputy.”

  Sangiusto finished reading the list. There was a pause.

  “Karantay is not on it,” he said.

  “No.”

  The old count had kept his servants out collecting what news they could and bringing it to him and his two refugees. Karantay was said to have been seriously hurt in the fighting on Palazay Street; there was no report at all of Brelavay or young Vernoy.

  “Even Oragon under ban,” Itale said. “That’s a blow.” He spoke rather unnaturally. He was sitting up in bed, one of the mighty beds of the Helleskar house, with great goosefeather coverlets and curtains like the stage curtain of the Opera. He looked haggard and meager, as if he had lost weight again and even height.

  “You should get out of Krasnoy at once,” Sangiusto said. “There will be no pardons henceforth.”

  “If only I could get some word of Brelavay.”

  “He will be in hiding or in jail. You can’t wait to hear of him. You have only twenty-four hours.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  “I’m not on this list.”

  “You may be on another.”

  “Almost certainly I am.” Sangiusto spoke with composure. “I’ll wait a little,” he said, “until all is quieter, and then go back to France.”

  “I’m going home. Come with me. For a while at least.”

  “Thank you, my friend. At a better time, when hospitality is not dangerous to the hosts, I shall come with great pleasure.”

  “As a favor to me. You can’t try to cross the border now. You can get to France later when things have quieted down. Of course you’ll want to go there, it’s all over here, there’s nothing for you to stay here for, but it’s not safe to try to leave the country now. You can lie low in the mountains a while. We came out of this together. If I can keep you from getting arrested it’s one thing I can do, there’s nothing else. Let me—”

  “Very well, I will come with you,” Sangiusto broke in on the accelerating rush of words. Itale stopped, drew in his breath, and said, “Good.”

  They were silent a while. Sangiusto was profoundly relieved, but could not express his relief.

  “If the stages are running as usual, the Southwestern Post leaves every second Friday, and the Aisnar Post the next Saturday. This is what, the fifteenth? It would be the Post this week. Three days to wait, then, and I don’t think we can wait here.”

  Sangiusto shook his head.

  “We can walk.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Not much over a hundred miles.”

  “But we must start at once, to be outside this province tomorrow.”

  Sangiusto’s injured hand had been bound up, and the arm put in a light sling to help immobilise it.

  “You can’t walk a hundred miles with that,” Itale said in self-disgust, looking at
the sling.

  “Oh, I think so. But you, I think you’re not well enough, Itale.”

  “The count will lend us horses to Fontanasfaray. Ten miles or so. It’s in the Perana. We can walk from there, or wait there for the coach.”

  “Good. Have you any money?”

  They stared at each other.

  “I have some change, I think.”

  “In my room at the inn I have a few kruner, but I don’t want to go there, it is a risk.”

  “No, don’t go there. The count will lend us enough to get home with. My God! what a fool I am.” Itale rubbed his hands over his face and his still short, rough hair with a laugh. The danger, the absurdity, and the hopelessness of his situation were, at this moment, both clear and meaningless to him. The important thing, just now, was that he not lose this friend, this brave amiable man, along with all the rest and the others lost: that Sangiusto not be arrested. This was as far as his mind would go. He could consider his own risk only in terms of Sangiusto’s, incapable of directly facing the possibility of himself being rearrested, reimprisoned.

  He had no hesitation at all asking Count Helleskar for the loan of horses and money, and he joked with the old man, who was reluctant to let his refugees go. Old Helleskar longed to defy the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire to trouble the guests of his house. He argued that neither of them was fit to travel, and that the police would never look for them “here under an old soldier’s roof.”—“Discretion is the entire extent of my valor, count,” Itale said. “We’ll run while the running’s good. Tell George, when he comes home, I think he’ll applaud my variety of valor.” Itale had got up in the late afternoon and dressed in the worn clothes, the old blue coat, that were now his sole possessions. He held himself very straight, to convince Helleskar and himself of his fitness. From time to time he wondered at how he managed to stand up and walk, when he felt so deathly tired, how he arrived at decisions when he could not keep two ideas in order in his head, how he talked and laughed when all the time there was in the back of his throat the tightness of unpermitted tears. From moment to moment he expected this specious vigor to run out, in which case he would no doubt fall flat on his face as he had done last night; and he wished earnestly that he could give up, cast it from him as one tosses away a pebble, and lie down, and rest. There was no more use in it; no point; no direction. But it made no difference. His thoughts and acts stayed chained to that rock of identity, of single unmoved unreasoning the will to remain himself.

  Once their course was decided he and Sangiusto had agreed that promptness would best serve both their own interest and their host’s; so he rode, with Sangiusto and a couple of Helleskar grooms, down Tiypontiy Street, past the trees of the park and the silent Sinalya Palace, past the coachyard at West Gate, past the hotel where he had met Luisa, past the tenements and through the northwestern suburb, out onto the plain that lay dun and gold in the light of summer evening, and on towards the hills. From the road above Kolonnarmana they looked back at the city on the curve of the river, a faint scattering of points of light in the wide grey twilight, so delicate it seemed one could take it up in the hand like a piece of silver gauze. They rode on, upward. Remote in the sky over bare hilltops the crescent moon hung for a while. It had set when they reached Fontanasfaray. The air here, a thousand feet above the river valley, was cool. Gulhelm Street was lit softly with colored lanterns, fantastic among tree-shadows. A few strollers passed, open carriages rolled by. They put up at the first inn they came to. “It looks expensive,” Itale said, but Sangiusto said, “We will find one cheaper tomorrow,” and he did not argue. He had noticed as he rode that his horse’s ears seemed at times far off, yards away, and at other times very near; the same was true of the stars, which now drew off together in a clump in the enormous, barren sky, and now came up so close that he felt the cold prickle of their fire under the skin of his forehead and cheeks, a troubling sensation.

  They were given a room under the eaves, the only room he had free, said the innkeeper; the resort was full of vacationers escaping the heat of the city. “Yes, it is quite warm in Krasnoy,” Sangiusto said.

  As soon as the man left, Itale lay down and closed his eyes. Sangiusto, in intense discomfort from his injured hand, swore a little; he asked some question, but Itale did not answer. He was not asleep yet, and wanted to speak to Sangiusto, but could not speak. He was nearly asleep, and comfortable enough now that he could lie down; only very deep within him, at the depth below dream, the depth where he had lived for two years of solitary confinement, something remained stone-hard, mute, in anguish. Everything was over, finished, gone; only nothing was finished, nothing was done, and he must go on—go back, go home, into exile. He lay still and saw before him in the darkness of his closed eyes the great, quiet slopes of the mountains above the reflecting lake.

  PART SEVEN

  Malafrena

  I

  When the Aisnar Post was on time, which it sometimes was, it came into Erreme, a junction point, at about four in the morning, some twenty hours out of Krasnoy. Passengers for Aisnar need only be roused by the changing of horses and then went on as before, briskly, over level roads; passengers for the Montayna had to get out in the cold darkness or colder dawn and change to the waiting Montayna Diligence. If they were new to the journey they looked at the outlandish vehicle and asked with misgiving, “Is this the Portacheyka coach?” If they had previously travelled in the southwest they merely sighed and made ready to endure. Four shaggy horses, short in the barrel and powerful of shoulder, were in the traces; a boy of nine or ten with a shapeless hat and a contemptuous eye mounted the wheeler; a tall dark man whose mouth seemed to have rusted shut, letting out only monosyllables in a flat unanswerable voice, got onto the box and said not “Get up!” but “Hoy!” to the horses, and off the Montayna Diligence would go, jouncing and jolting on a rutted road, its back to the sunrise, towards the mountains that rose blue and forbidding from the retreating night.

  On the morning of August twentieth, four passengers made the change, stumbling through the half-light from the big coach to the smaller one amongst horses being led about, mailbags being transferred, and other obscure hurlyburly. “Is this the Portacheyka coach?” one of the four, a young woman, asked the driver with misgiving. “Aye,” he said flatly. Sangiusto handed her in and soon they were off, with a snarl from the coachman’s horn, a shout of “Hoy!” and a groaning protest from every joint of the vehicle, soon to be echoed silently in every joint of three of the passengers. The fourth one was under two years old, and light enough to find the jolts and lurches entertaining. The young mother and Sangiusto promptly went to sleep again; Itale and the baby waked. The baby played with the bundles piled round him and with bits of straw from the floor that had got within his reach; he gazed about him often with a thoughtful and unhappy air, but made no complaint. The air was misty grey and very cold. Itale sat huddled, his collar up round his ears and his hands in his pockets. Ever since St Lazar, where he had suffered from cold more than from any other misery, he felt cold easily, and dreaded it, but had no resistance to it. So he sat now huddled up trying to keep his teeth from chattering. To keep his mind off his discomfort he watched steadily out the narrow slit of front window, through which he could see the wheelboy’s hat and the sky and, when the road turned that way, a glimpse of peaks ahead. Day came fast. Now the round hills to either hand brightened with the morning sun, the clear light of a harvest day in the high country. The hay was long since in, the grain coming in; in fields far off on the hillsides Itale would see a line of mowers, the tiny glint of lifted sickles. When they passed through villages or past estates, small freeholds with the house set near the road, white and red hens cackled away from the wheels, dogs ran out and barked till the coach was out of earshot. Over the hills in the sun sometimes a hawk circled, lazy in the dry blue air. Ahead, seen only at the crests of the long climbs, the mountains rose up from behind the yellow hills.

  Itale remembered how, years ago now,
he had pulled out his watch to check the hour that he first lost sight of those mountains; nine-twenty of a September morning it had been, he recalled the hour though not the date. He had been on his way to Solariy. And from Solariy, in time, to Krasnoy. And to Aisnar, and to Esten, and to Rakava; to the dark cold room where he had been chained to the wall; to Roukh Square at dawn, and Ebroiy Street in the smoky evening. And now he was come round full circle and even so did not know where he was going, or where was any place he could with a clear heart call home. He felt for his watch, but did not have it; he thought he had lost it, then remembered that since it no longer ran he had left it in his room at Karantay’s flat. The police probably had it again by now. Let them have it, he thought.

  Sangiusto sighed in his sleep. Though a farrier in Fontanasfaray had set and splinted his hand it continued to give him a great deal of pain, and he slept when he could. Propped up in the corner across from him the young mother also slept, her childish, round face curiously stern. Her child beside her had slid down uncomfortably among the bundles and was looking unhappier. Itale looked away from the child guiltily. It was going to cry, and it would be up to him, being awake, to do something about it. Sure enough the baby gave a series of gasps, preliminary to the howl. He looked very sad and helpless. He stared straight at Itale and gasped more loudly. Itale returned his look, uneasily, and said in a low tone, “Don’t do that. You’ll wake up your mother.” The eyes filled immediately with tears, the small face went all into folds, and the baby gave a piteous wail. “Damn!” Itale said, and reached across, picked the baby out of the nest of bundles, and set him on his knees. He was startled at the lightness and fragility of the burden. Really there was not much to a baby.

  The baby gasped a couple of times, then settled down with a sigh like a tiny echo of Sangiusto’s, put his thumb in his mouth, and fell to playing with a button of Itale’s coat. What did the mother call him? Stasio. “Stasio’s father died,” she had said to someone in the Aisnar coach last night, “in June, the consumption it was.” Itale felt a touch on his hand, the faint brush of the child’s hand. Not the young man’s name nor “my husband,” but “Stasio’s father”; all the dead man’s life was that now, his fatherhood. Stasio discovered the top button of Itale’s waistcoat and fingered it delicately as a miser with a jewel; he sucked his thumb and slowly, with many starts and little movements, dropped his head down against Itale’s coat and fell asleep. He had been cold, Itale thought, he was warmer now, in the shelter of Itale’s arm, and could sleep. Itale no longer gazed ahead at the hills but down at his little, transitory charge. The child’s hair was brown, very fine. Itale touched it very lightly, thinking of his friend Egen Brunoy; Brunoy’s hair had been brown like this but coarse and dry. Itale tried to recall Brunoy’s face, but could not. He could rouse no reality of memory, only a dull regret and a dull shame. He thought of Isaber, and his mind as always flinched away. He thought of Frenin, of Karantay who was hurt or dead or jailed; but from that too his mind flinched away, to Brelavay, but the thought of Brelavay in the dark cold room, chained, was unendurable—his hands clenched, and he had to control his sudden tension lest he waken the sleeping child. But the list would be finished. Amadey, dead. And then last, and unexpected for he had never thought of her as a friend among his friends, Luisa: unkind, unforgiving and un-self-forgiving, loyal: and like the others, self-betrayed. And betrayed, like the others, by him. By his desires and her own, and their hope; by their love. Where he had most passionately set his heart and mind he had done injury; and the worst injury, the worst betrayal, was the knowledge of it. His arm grew cramped but he did not move lest he wake the child. At last he too dozed off.