Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The house stood quiet in the September sunlight and dark.

  That night Mrs Augeskar, yarn, needle, sock poised one moment in her hands, lifted her braid-crowned head, listening as she had listened years ago to her first son, Kasimir, crying out in sleep in his crib upstairs. “Poor child,” she whispered. And Bruna raised her fair head listening too, for the first time, hearing the solitary cry from the forests where she had never been. The house stood still around them. On the second day the boys played outdoors till rain fell and night fell. Kasimir stood in the kitchen sawing on his bull-fiddle, his face by the shining neck of the instrument quiet and closed, keeping right on when others came in to perch on stools and lean against the sink and talk, for after all there were seven young people there on vacation, they could not stay silent. But under their voices the deep, weak, singing voice of Kasimir’s fiddle went on wordless, like a cry from the depths of the forest; so that Bruna suddenly past patience and dependence, solitary, not the third daughter and fourth child and one of the young people, slipped away and went upstairs to see what it was like, this grave sickness, this mortality.

  It was not like anything. The young man slept. His face was white, his hair black on white linen: clear as printed words, but in a foreign language.

  She came down and told her mother she had looked in, he was sleeping quietly; true enough, but not the truth. What she had confirmed up there was that she was now ready to learn the way through the forest; she had come of age, and was now capable of dying.

  He was her guide, the young man who had come in out of the rain with a case of pneumonia. On the afternoon of the fifth day she went up to his room again. He was lying there getting well, weak and content, thinking about a morning ten years ago when he had walked out with his father and grandfather past the quarries, an April morning on a dry plain awash with sunlight and blue flowers. After they had passed the Chorin Company quarries they suddenly began to talk politics, and he understood that they had come out of town onto the empty plain in order to say things aloud, in order to let him hear what his father said: “There’ll always be enough ants to fill up all the ant-hills—worker ants, army ants.” And the grandfather, the dry, bitter, fitful man, in his seventies angrier and gentler than his son, vulnerable as his thirteen-year-old grandson: “Get out, Kosta, why don’t you get out?” That was only a taunt. None of them would run away, or get away. A man, he walked with men across a barren plain blue with flowers in brief April; they shared with him their anger, their barren helpless obduracy and the brief blue fire of their anger. Talking aloud under the open sky, they gave him the key to the house of manhood, the prison where they lived and he would live. But they had known other houses. He had not. Once his grandfather, Stefan Fabbre, put his hand on young Stefan’s shoulder while he spoke. “What would we do with freedom if we had it, Kosta? What has the West done with it? Eaten it. Put it in its belly. A great wondrous belly, that’s the West. With a wise head on top of it, a man’s head, with a man’s mind and eyes—but the rest all belly. He can’t walk any more. He sits at table eating, eating, thinking up machines to bring him more food, more food. Throwing food to the black and yellow rats under the table so they won’t gnaw down the walls around him. There he sits, and here we are, with nothing in our bellies but air, air and cancer, air and rage. We can still walk. So we’re yoked. Yoked to the foreign plow. When we smell food we bray and kick.—Are we men, though, Kosta? I doubt it.” All the time his hand lay on the boy’s shoulder, tender, almost deferent, because the boy had never seen his inheritance at all but had been born in jail, where nothing is any good, no anger, understanding, or pride, nothing is any good except obduracy, except fidelity. Those remain, said the weight of the old man’s hand on his shoulder. So when a blonde girl came into his room where he lay weak and content, he looked at her from that sunwashed barren April plain with trust and welcome, it being irrelevant to this moment that his grandfather had died in a deportation train and his father had been shot along with forty-two other men on the plain outside town in the reprisals of 1956. “How do you feel?” she said, and he said, “Fine.”

  “Can I bring you anything?”

  He shook his head, the same black-and-white head she had seen clear and unintelligible as Greek words on a white page, but now his eyes were open and he spoke her language. It was the same voice that had called faintly from the black woods of fever, the neighborhood of death, a few nights ago, which now said, “I can’t remember your name.” He was very nice, he was a nice fellow, this Stefan Fabbre, embarrassed by lying there sick, glad to see her. “I’m Bruna, I come next after Kasi. Would you like some books? Are you getting bored yet?”—“Bored? No. You don’t know how good it is to lie here doing nothing, I’ve never done that. Your parents are so kind, and this big house, and the fields outside there—I lie here thinking, Jesus, is this me? In all this peace, in all this space, in a room to myself doing nothing?” She laughed, by which he knew her: the one who had laughed in rain and darkness before lights broke over the hill. Her fair hair was parted in the middle and waved on each side down nearly to the light, thick eyebrows; her eyes were an indeterminate color, unclear, grey-brown or grey. He heard it now indoors in daylight, the tender and exultant laugh. “Oh you beauty, you fine proud filly-foal never broken to harness, you scared and restive, gentle girl laughing…”

  Wanting to keep her he asked, “Have you always lived here?” and she said, “Yes, summers,” glancing at him from her indeterminate, shining eyes in the shadow of fair hair. “Where did you grow up?”

  “In Sfaroy Kampe, up north.”

  “Your family’s still there?”

  “My sister lives there.” She still asked about families. She must be very innocent, more elusive and intact even than Kasimir, who placed his reality beyond the touch of any hands or asking of identity. Still to keep her with him, he said, “I lie here thinking. I’ve thought more already today than in the last three years.”

  “What do you think of?”

  “Of the Hungarian nobleman, do you know that story? The one that was taken prisoner by the Turks, and sold as a slave. It was in the sixteenth century. Well, a Turk bought him, and yoked him to a plow, like an ox, and he plowed the fields, driven with a whip. His family finally managed to buy him back. And he went home, and got his sword, and went back to the battlefields. And there he took prisoner the Turk that had bought him, owned him. Took the Turk back to his manor. Took the chains off him, had him brought outside. And the poor Turk looked around for the impaling stake, you know, or the pitch they’d rub on him and set fire to, or the dogs, or at least the whip. But there was nothing. Only the Hungarian, the man he’d bought and sold. And the Hungarian said, ‘Go on back home…’”

  “Did he go?”

  “No, he stayed and turned Christian. But that’s not why I think of it.”

  “Why do you?”

  “I’d like to be a nobleman,” Stefan Fabbre said, grinning. He was a tough, hard fellow, lying there nearly defeated but not defeated. He grinned, his eyes had a black flicker to them; at twenty-five he had no innocence, no confidence, no hope at all of profit. The lack of that was the black flicker, the coldness in his eyes. Yet he lay there taking what came, a small man but hard, possessing weight, a man of substance. The girl looked at his strong, blunt hands on the blanket and then up at the sunlit windows, thinking of his being a nobleman, thinking of the one fact she knew of him from Kasimir, who seldom mentioned facts: that he shared a tenement room in Krasnoy with five other students, three beds were all they could fit into it. The room, with three high windows, curtains pulled back, hummed with the silence of September afternoon in the country. A boy’s voice rang out from fields far away. “Not much chance of it these days,” she said in a dull soft voice, looking down, meaning nothing, for once wholly cast down, tired, without tenderness or exultation. He would get well, would go back a week late to the city, to the three bedsteads and five roommates, shoes on the floor and rust and hairs in t
he washbasin, classrooms, laboratories, after that employment as an inspector of sanitation on State farms in the north and northeast, a two-room flat in State housing on the outskirts of a town near the State foundries, a black-haired wife who taught the third grade from State-approved textbooks, one child, two legal abortions, and the hydrogen bomb. Oh was there no way out, no way? “Are you very clever?”

  “I’m very good at my work.”

  “It’s science, isn’t it?”

  “Biology. Research.”

  Then the laboratories would persist; the flat became perhaps a four-room flat in the Krasnoy suburbs; two children, no abortions, two-week vacations in summer in the mountains, then the hydrogen bomb. Or no hydrogen bomb. It made no difference.

  “What do you do research on?”

  “Certain molecules. The molecular structure of life.”

  That was strange, the structure of life. Of course he was talking down to her; things are not briefly described, her father had said, when one is talking of life. So he was good at finding out the molecular structure of life, this fellow whose wordless cry she had heard faintly from congested lungs, from the dark neighborhood and approaches of his death; he had called out and “Poor child,” her mother had whispered, but it was she who had answered, had followed him. And now he brought her back to life.

  “Ah,” she said, still not lifting her head, “I don’t understand all that. I’m stupid.”

  “Why did they name you Bruna, when you’re blonde?”

  She looked up startled, laughed. “I was bald till I was ten months old.” She looked at him, seeing him again, and the future be damned, since all possible futures ever envisaged are—rusty sinks, two-week vacations and bombs or collective fraternity or harps and houris—endlessly, sordidly dreary, all delight being in the present and its past, all truth too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable. There is simply no telling what will happen. Kasimir came in with a bunch of red and blue flowers and said, “Mother wants to know if you’d like milk-toast for supper.”

  “Oatbread, oatbread,” Bruna sang arranging the cornflowers and poppies in Stefan’s water-glass. They ate oats three times a day here, some poultry, turnips, potatoes; the little brother Antony raised lettuce, the mother cooked, the daughters swept the big house; there was no wheat-flour, no beef, no milk, no housemaid, not any more, not since before Bruna was born. They camped here in their big old country house, they lived like gypsies, said the mother: a professor’s daughter born in the middle class, nurtured and married in the middle class, giving up order, plenty, and leisure without complaint but not giving up the least scruple of the discriminations she had been privileged to learn. So Kasimir for all his gentleness could still hold himself untouched. So Bruna still thought of herself as coming next after Kasimir, and asked about one’s family. So Stefan knew himself here in a fortress, in a family, at home. He and Kasimir and Bruna were laughing aloud together when the father came in. “Out,” Dr Augeskar said, standing heroic and absolute in the doorway, the sun-king or a solar myth; his son and daughter, laughing and signalling child-like to Stefan behind his back, went out. “Enough is enough,” Augeskar said, ausculting, and Stefan lay guilty, smiling, child-like.

  The seventh day, when Stefan and Kasimir should have taken bus and train back to Krasnoy where the University was now open, was hot. Warm darkness followed, windows open, the whole house open to choruses of frogs by the river, choruses of crickets in the furrows, a southwest wind bearing odors of the forest over dry autumn hills. Between the curtains billowing and going slack burned six stars, so bright in the dry dark sky that they might set fire to the curtains. Bruna sat on the floor by Stefan’s bed, Kasimir lay like a huge wheatstalk across the foot of it, Bendika, whose husband was in Krasnoy, nursed her five-month-old firstborn in a chair by the empty fireplace. Joachim Bret sat on the windowsill, his shirtsleeves rolled up so that the bluish figures OA46992 were visible on his lean arm, playing his guitar to accompany an English lute-song:

  Yet be just and constant still,

  Love may beget a wonder,

  Not unlike a summer’s frost or

  winter’s fatal thunder:

  He that holds his sweetheart dear

  until his day of dying

  Lives of all that ever lived

  most worthy the envying.

  Then, since he liked to sing praise and blame of love in all the languages he knew and did not know, he began to strum out “Plaisir d’Amour,” but came to grief on the shift of key, while the baby was sat up to belch loudly causing merriment. The baby was flung aloft by Kasimir while Bendika protested softly, “He’s full, Kasi, he’ll spill.”—“I am your uncle. I am Uncle Kasimir, my pockets are full of peppermints and papal indulgences. Look at me, whelp! You don’t dare vomit on your uncle. You don’t dare. Go vomit on your aunt.” The baby stared unwinking at Bruna and waved its hands; its fat, silky belly showed between shirt and diaper. The girl returned its gaze as silently, as steadily. “Who are you?” said the baby. “Who are you?” said the maiden, without words, in wonder, while Stefan watched and faint chords in A sobbed joyously on Bret’s guitar between the lighted room and the dark dry night of autumn. The tall young mother carried the baby off to bed, Kasimir turned off the light. Now the autumn night was in the room, and their voices spoke among the choruses of crickets and frogs on the fields, by the streams. “It was clever of you to get sick, Stefan,” said Kasimir, lying again across the foot of the bed, long arms white in the dusk. “Stay sick, and we can stay here all winter.”

  “All year. For years. Did you get your fiddle fixed?”

  “Oh yes. Been practicing the Schubert. Pa, pa, poum pah.”

  “When’s the concert?”

  “Sometime in October. Plenty of time. Poum, poum—swim, swim, little trout. Ah!” The long white arms sawed vaguely a viol of dusk. “Why did you choose the bass viol, Kasimir?” asked Bret’s voice among frogs and crickets, across marshbottoms and furrows, from the windowsill. “Because he’s shy,” said Bruna’s voice like a country wind. “Because he’s an enemy of the feasible,” said Stefan’s dark dry voice. Silence. “Because I showed extraordinary promise as a student of the cello,” said Kasimir’s voice, “and so I was forced to consider, did I want to perform the Dvorak Concerto to cheering audiences and win a People’s Artist award, or did I not? I chose to be a low buzz in the background. Poum, pa poum. And when I die, I want you to put my corpse in the fiddle case, and ship it rapid express deep-freeze to Pablo Casals with a label saying ‘Corpse of Great Central European Cellist.’” The hot wind blew through the dark. Kasimir was done, Bruna and Stefan were ready to pass on, but Joachim Bret was not able to. He spoke of a man who had been helping people get across the border; here in the southwest rumors of him were thick now; a young man, Bret said, who had been jailed, had escaped, got to England, and come back; set up an escape route, got over a hundred people out in ten months, and only now had been spotted and was being hunted by the secret police. “Quixotic? Traitorous? Heroic?” Bret asked. “He’s hiding in the attic now,” Kasimir said, and Stefan added, “Sick of milk-toast.” They evaded and would not judge; betrayal and fidelity were immediate to them, could not be weighed any more than a pound of flesh, their own flesh. Only Bret, who had been born outside prison, was excited, insistent. Prevne was crawling with agents, he went, even if you went to buy a newspaper your identification was checked. “Easier to have it tattooed on, like you,” said Kasimir. “Move your foot, Stefan.”—“Move your fat rump, then.”—“Oh, mine are German numbers, out of date. A few more wars and I’ll run out of skin.”—“Shed it, then, like a snake.”—“No, they go right down to the bone.”—“Shed your bones, then,” Stefan said, “be a jellyfish. Be an amoeba. When they pin me down, I bud off. Two little spineless Stefans where they thought they had one MR 64100282A. Four of them, eight, six
teen thirty-two sixty-four a hundred and twenty-eight. I would entirely cover the surface of the globe were it not for my natural enemies.” The bed shook, Bruna laughed in darkness. “Play the English song again, Joachim,” she said.