Orsinian tales o-1

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  Sanzo lay there, his face half buried in the grass.

  When she came back to him he had not moved. Her tears, which she had managed to control, started again as she stood by him.

  "Come on, get up, Sanzo," she said softly.

  He lay still.

  "Come on."

  After a while he twisted round and sat up. His white face was scored with the crisscross marks of the stiff grass, and his eyes when he opened them looked to the side, as if staring across to the grove of chestnuts.

  "Let's go home, Sanzo," she whispered to his terrible face. He drew back his lips and said, "Get away. Let me alone."

  "I want to go home."

  "Then go! Go on, do you think I need you? Go on, get out!" He tried to push her away, only striking her knee. Lisha went, and waited for him at the side of the drive outside the garden. When he passed her she held her breath, and when he was a good way past her she began to follow him, trying to walk soundlessly. The rain had started, thin drops slanting from a low, quiet sky.

  Sanzo did not have his stick. He strode along boldly at first, as he did when he walked with her, but then began to slow down, evidently losing his nerve. He got along all right for a while, and once she heard him whistling his jig-tune through his teeth. Once off the Hill, in the noisier streets where he could not hear echoes, he began to hesitate, lost his bearings and took a wrong turn. Lisha followed close behind him. People stared at both of them. He stopped short at last, and she heard him ask of no one, "Is this Bargay Street?"

  A man approaching him stared at him and then answered, "No, you're way off." He took Sanzo's arm and headed him back the right way, with directions, and questions about was he blind, was it a mill accident or the war. Sanzo went off, but before he had gone a block he stopped again and stood there. Lisha caught up with him and took his arm in silence. He was breathing very hard, like an exhausted runner.

  "Lisha?"

  "Yes. Come on."

  But at first he could not move at all, could not take a step.

  They went on, slowly, though the rain was getting thicker. When they reached their building he put out his hand to the entranceway, touching the bricks; with that as reassurance he turned to her and said, "Don't come again."

  "Good night, Sanzo," she said.

  "It's no good, see," he said, and at once started up the stairs. She went on to her entrance.

  For several days he went to the furniture store in the afternoon and stayed there late, not coming home till dinner time. Then there was no caning or repairing to be done for a while, and he took to going to the park in the late afternoon. He kept this up after the winter east wind had begun to blow, bringing the rain, the sleet, the thin, damp, dirty snow. When he stayed in the apartment all day, a nervous boredom would grow and grow in him; his hands shook and he lost the sensitivity of his touch, could not tell what he was handling, whether he was handling anything at all. This drove him out, and out longer, until he brought back a headache and a cough. Fever wrung him and rattled him for a week, and left him prey to more coughs and fevers every time he went out.

  The weakness, the stupidity of ill health were a relief to him. But it was hard on Sara. She had to leave breakfast ready for him and Volf now, and pay for patent medicines for his headache which sometimes made him cry out in pain, and be waked at night by his coughing. She had never done anything but work hard, and could have compensated herself by nagging and complaining; but it wasn't the work, it was his presence, his always being there, intent, listless, blind, doing nothing, saying nothing. That exasperated her till she would shout at poor Albrekt as they walked to the shop, "I can't stand it, I can't stay in that house with him!"

  But the only one who escaped that winter was old Volf. A few nights before Christmas he went out with the ten kroner Sara gave him back monthly from his pension, came back with his bottle, and climbed up three of the four flights of stairs but not the fourth. Heart failure laid him down on the stair-landing, where he was found an hour later. Laid in his coffin he looked a bigger man, and his face in death, intent, unseeing, was a darker version of his son's face. All old friends and neighbors came to the funeral, for which the Chekeys went into debt. The Benats were there, but Sanzo did not hear Lisha's voice.

  Sanzo moved out of the hall into the windowless bedroom that had been his father's, and things went on as before, a little easier on Sara.

  In January one of Eva's young men, a dyer at the Ferman mill, perhaps discouraged by the competition for Eva, began looking around and saw Lisha. If she saw him it was without fear and without interest; but when he asked her to walk out with him she agreed. She was as quiet and amenable as she had always been, there was no change in her, except that she and her mother were closer friends than they had been, talking together as equals, working together as partners. Her mother certainly saw the young man, but she said nothing about him to Lisha, nor did Lisha say anything except, occasionally, "I'll be walking out with Givan after supper."

  Across one night of March the wind from the frozen eastern plains dropped and a humid wind rose up from the south. The rain turned warm and large. In the morning weeds were pushing up between the stones of the courtyard, the city's fountains ran full and noisy, voices carried further down the streets, the sky was dotted with small bluish clouds. That night Lisha and Givan followed one of the Rakava lovers' walks, out through the East Gate to the ruins of a guard tower; and there in the cold and starlight he asked her to marry him. She looked out to the great falling darkness of the Hill and plains, and back to the lights of the city half hidden by the broken outer wall. It took her a long time to answer. "I can't," she said.

  "Why not, Lisha?"

  She shook her head.

  "You were in love with somebody, he went off, or he's already married, or something went wrong with it like that. I know that. I asked you knowing it."

  "Why?" she said with anguish. He answered directly: "Because it's over, and it's my time now."

  That shook her, and sensing it, he said, with sudden humbleness, "Think about it."

  "I will. But – "

  "Just think about it. It's the right thing to do, Lisha. I'm the one for you. And I'm not the kind that changes my mind."

  That made her smile a little, because of Eva, but also because it was true. He was a shy, determined, holdfast fellow. What if I did? she thought, and at once felt herself become humble with his humility, protected, certain, safe.

  "It's not fair to ask me now," she said with a flash of anger, so that he insisted no more than to ask her, as they parted at her entrance, to think about it. She said she would. And she did.

  It was how long, five months now, since the day in the wild garden on the Hill; and she still woke in the night from a dream that the stiff dry grass of autumn was pushing against her back and she could not move or speak or see. Then as she woke from the dream she would see the sky suddenly, and rain falling straight from it on her. It was of that she had to think, only that.

  She saw Sanzo oftener now that it was sunny. She always spoke to him. He would be sitting in the yard near the pump sometimes, as his father had used to do. When she came for water for the washing and pressing, she would greet him: "Afternoon, Sanzo."

  "That you, Lisha?"

  His skin was white and dull, and his hands looked too large on his wrists.

  One day in early April she was ironing alone down in the cellar room which her mother rented as a laundry. Light came in through small windows set high in the wall, at ground level; sparse grass and weeds stirred in the sunlight just outside the dusty glass. A streak of sunshine fell across the shirt she was pressing, and the steam rose, smelling sharp of ozone. She began to sing aloud.

  Two tattered beggars met on the street.

  'Hey, little brother, give me bread to eat!'

  'Go to the baker's house, ask him for the key,

  If he won't hand it over, say you were sent by me!'

  She had to go out for water for the sprinkling
-bottle. After the dusk of the cellar, the sunlight filled her eyes with whorls and blots of black and gold. Still humming, she went to the pump.

  Sanzo had just come out of the house. "Morning, Lisha."

  "Morning, Sanzo."

  He sat down on the bench, stretching out his long legs, raising his face to the sun. She stood silent by the pump and looked at him. She looked at him intently, judgingly.

  "You still there?"

  "Yes, I'm here."

  "I never see you any more."

  She took this in silence. Presently she came and sat down beside him, setting the jug of water down carefully under the bench. "Have you been feeling better?"

  "Guess so."

  "The sun, it's like we could all get out and live again. It's really spring now. Smell this." She picked the small white flower of a weed that had come up between the flagstones near the pump, and put it in his hand. "It's too little to feel it. Smell it. It smells like pancakes."

  He dropped the flower and bowed his head as if looking down at it. "What have you been up to lately? Besides the laundry?"

  "Oh, I don't know. Eva's getting married, next month. To Ventse Estay. They're going to move to Brailava, up north. He's a bricklayer, there's work up there."

  "And how about you?"

  "Oh, I'm staying here," she said, and then feeling the dull, cold condescension of his tone added, "I'm engaged."

  "Who to?"

  "Givan Fenne."

  "What's he do?"

  "Dyer at Ferman. He's secretary of the Union section."

  Sanzo got up, strode across the yard to the archway, then turned and more hesitantly came back. He stood there a couple of yards from her, his hands hanging at his sides; he was not quite facing her. "Good for you, congratulations!" he said, and turned to go.

  "Sanzo!"

  He stopped and waited.

  "Stay here a minute."

  "What for?"

  "Because I want you to."

  He stood still.

  "I wanted to tell you . . ." But she got stuck. He came back, felt for the bench, and sat down.

  "Look, Lisha," he said in a cooler voice, "it doesn't make any difference."

  "Yes it does, it makes a lot. I wanted to tell you that I'm not engaged. He did ask me, but I'm not."

  He was listening, but without expression. "Then why'd you say you were?"

  "I don't know. To make you mad."

  "And so?"

  "And so," said Lisha. "And so, I wanted to tell you that you may be blind but that's no excuse for being deaf, dumb, and stupid. I know you were sick and I'm very sorry, but you'd be sicker if I had anything to do with it."

  Sanzo sat motionless. "What the hell?" he said. She did not answer; and after quite a while he turned, his hand reaching out and then stopping in mid-gesture, and said nervously, "Lisha?"

  "I'm right here."

  "Thought you'd gone."

  "I'm not done yet."

  "Well, go ahead. Nobody's stopping you."

  "You are."

  A pause.

  "Look, Lisha, I have to. Don't you see that?"

  "No, I don't. Sanzo, let me explain – "

  "No. Don't. I'm not a stone wall, Lisha."

  They sat side by side in the warmth a while.

  "You'd better marry that fellow."

  "I can't."

  "Don't be a fool."

  "I can't get around it. Around you."

  He turned his face away. In a strained, stifled voice he said, "I wanted to apologise – " He made a vague gesture.

  "No! Don't."

  There was a silence again. Sanzo sat up straighter and rubbed his hands over his eyes and forehead, painfully. "Look, Lisha, it's no good. Honestly. There's your parents, what are they going to say, but that's not it, it's all the rest of it, living with my aunt and uncle, I can't … A man has to have something to offer."

  "Don't be humble."

  "I'm not. I never have been. I know what I am and this – this business doesn't make any difference to that, to me. But it does, it would to somebody else."

  "I want to marry you," Lisha said. "If you want to marry me, then do, and if you don't then don't. I can't do it all by myself. But at least remember I'm in on it too!"

  "It's you I'm thinking of."

  "No it's not. You're thinking of yourself, being blind and the rest of it. You let me think about that, don't think I haven't, either."

  "I have thought about you. All winter. All the time. It … it doesn't fit, Lisha."

  "Not there, no."

  "Where, then? Where do we fit? In the house up there on the Hill? We can split it, twenty rooms each. . . ."

  "Sanzo, I have to go finish the ironing, it has to be ready at noon. If we decide anything we can figure out that kind of thing. I'd like to get clear out of Rakava."

  "Are you," he hesitated. "Will you come this afternoon?"

  "All right."

  She went off, swinging the water-jug. When she got to the cellar she stood there beside the ironing board and burst into tears. She had not cried for months; she had thought she was too old for tears and would not cry again. She cried without knowing why, her tears ran like a river free of the ice-lock of winter. They ran down her cheeks; she felt neither joy nor grief, and went on with her work long before her tears stopped.

  At four o'clock she started to go to the Chekeys' flat, but Sanzo was waiting for her in the courtyard. They went up the Hill to the wild garden, to the lawn above the chestnut grove. The new grass was sparse and soft. In the green darkness of the grove the first candles of the chestnuts burned yellowish-white. A few pigeons soared in the warm, smoky air above the city.

  "There's roses all around the house. Would they mind if I picked some?"

  "They? Who?"

  "All right, I'll be right back."

  She came back with a handful of the small, red, thorny roses. Sanzo had lain back with his arms under his head. She sat down by him. The broad, sweet April wind blew over them level with the low sun. "Well," he said, "we haven't got anywhere, have we?"

  "I don't know. I think so."

  "When did you get like this?"

  "Like what?"

  "Oh, you know. You used to be different." His voice when he was relaxed had a warm, burring note in it, pleasant to hear. "You never said anything. . . . You know what?"

  "What?"

  "We never finished reading that book."

  He yawned and turned on his side, facing her. She put her hand on his.

  "When you were a kid you used to smile all the time. Do you still?"

  "Not since I met you," she said, smiling.

  Her hand lay still on his.

  "Listen. I get the disability pension, two-fifty. It would get us out of Rakava. That's what you want?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Well, there's Krasnoy. Unemployment's not supposed to be so bad there, and there must be cheap places to live, it's a bigger city."

  "I thought of it too. There must be more jobs there, it's not all one industry like here. I could get something."

  "I could pick up something with this caning, if there was anybody with any money wanting things like that done. I can handle repair work too, I was doing some last fall." He seemed to be listening to his own words; and suddenly he gave his strange laugh, that changed his face. "Listen," he said, "this is no good. You going to lead me to Krasnoy by the hand? Forget it. You ought to get away, all right. Clear away. Marry that fellow and get away. Use your head, Lisha."

  He had sat up, his arms around his knees, not facing her.

  "You talk as if we were both beggars," she said. "As if we had nothing to give each other and nowhere to go."

  "That's it. That's the point. We don't. I don't. Do you think getting out of this place will make any difference? Do you think it'll change me? Do you think if I walk around the corner . . . ?" He was trying for irony but achieved only agony. Lisha clenched her hands. "No, of course I don't," she said. "Don't talk like everybody
else. They all say that. We can't leave Rakava, we're stuck here. I can't marry Sanzo Chekey, he's blind. We can't do anything we want to do, we haven't got enough money. It's all true, it's all perfectly true. But it's not all. Is it true that if you're a beggar you mustn't beg? What else can you do? If you get a piece of bread do you throw it away? If you felt like I do, Sanzo, you'd take what you were given and hold on to it!"

  "Lisha," he said, "oh God, I want to hold on – Nothing – " He reached to her and she came to him; they held each other. He struggled to speak but could not for a long time. "You know I want you, I need you, there is nothing, there is nothing else," he stammered, and she, denying, denying his need, said, "No, no, no, no," but held him with all the strength she had. It was still much less than his. After a while he let her go, and taking her hand stroked it a little. "Look," he said quietly enough, "I do … you know. Only it's a very long chance, Lisha."

  "We'll never get a chance that isn't long."

  "You would."

  "You are my long chance," she said, with a kind of bitterness, and a profound certainty.

  He found nothing to say to that for a while. Finally he drew a long breath and said very softly, "What you said about begging . . . There was a doctor, two years ago at the hospital where I was, he said something like that, he said what are you afraid of, you see what the dead see, and still you're alive. What have you got to lose?"