Orsinian tales o-1

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  "Ros is growing up," Kostant said.

  "She's getting on," Stefan mumbled.

  "She'll take some looking after. I've been thinking. This is no town for a girl growing up. Wild lads and hard men."

  "You'll find them anywhere."

  "Will you; no doubt," Kostant said, accepting Stefan's statement without question. Kostant had never been off the karst, never been out of Sfaroy Kampe. He knew nothing at all but limestone, Ardure Street and Chorin Street and Gulhelm Street, the mountains far off and the enormous sky.

  "See," he said, picking up his pipe again, "she's a bit wilful, I think."

  "Lads will think twice before they mess with Fabbre's sister," Stefan said. "Anyhow, she'll listen to you."

  "And you."

  "Me? What should she listen to me for?"

  "For the same reasons," Kostant said, but Stefan had found his voice now:

  "What should she respect me for? She's got good enough sense. You and I didn't listen to anything dad said, did we? Same thing."

  "You're not like him. If that's what you meant. You've had an education."

  "An education, I'm a real professor, sure. Christ! One year at the Normal School!"

  "Why did you fail there, Stefan?" The question was not asked lightly; it came from the heart of Kostant's silence, from his austere, pondering ignorance. Unnerved at finding himself, like Rosana, included so deeply in the thoughts of this reserved and superb brother, Stefan said the first thing that came to mind:

  "I was afraid I'd fail. So I didn't work."

  And there it was, plain as a glass of water, the truth, which he had never admitted to himself.

  Kostant nodded, thinking over this idea of failure, which was surely not one familiar to him; then he said in his resonant, gentle voice, "You're wasting your time here in Kampe."

  "I am? What about yourself?"

  "I'm wasting nothing. I never won any scholarship." Kostant smiled, and the humor of his smile angered Stefan.

  "No, you never tried, you went straight to the pit at fifteen. Listen, did you ever wonder, did you ever stop a minute to ask what am I doing here, why did I go into the quarries, what do I work there for, am I going to work there six days a week every week of the year every year of my life? For pay, sure, there's other ways to make a living. What's it for? Why does anybody stay here, in this Godforsaken town on this Godforsaken piece of rock where nothing grows? Why don't they get up and go somewhere? Talk about wasting your time! What in God's name is it all for – is this all there is to it?"

  "I have thought that."

  "I haven't thought anything else for years."

  "Why not go, then?"

  "Because I'm afraid to. It'd be like Brailava, like the college. But you – "

  "I've got my work here. It's mine, I can do it. Anywhere you go, you can still ask what it's all for."

  "I know." Stefan got up, a slight man moving and talking restlessly, half finishing his gestures and words. "I know. You take yourself with yourself. But that means one thing for me and something else again for you. You're wasting yourself here, Kostant. It's the same as this business, this hero business, smashing yourself up for that Sachik, a fool who can't even see a rockslide coming at him – "

  "He couldn't hear it," Kostant put in, but Stefan could not stop now. "That's not the point; the point is, let that kind of man look after himself, what's he to you, what's his life to you? Why did you go in after him when you saw the slide coming? For the same reason as you went into the pit, for the same reason as you keep working in the pit. For no reason. Because it just came up. It just happened. You let things happen to you, you take what's handed you, when you could take it all in your hands and do what you wanted with it!"

  It was not what he had meant to say, not what he had wanted to say. He had wanted Kostant to talk. But words fell out of his own mouth and bounced around him like hailstones. Kostant sat quiet, his strong hand closed not to open; finally he answered: "You're making something of me I'm not." That was not humility. There was none in him. His patience was that of pride. He understood Stefan's yearning but could not share it, for he lacked nothing; he was intact. He would go forward in the same, splendid, vulnerable integrity of body and mind towards whatever came to meet him on his road, like a king in exile on a land of stone, bearing all his kingdom – cities, trees, people, mountains, fields and flights of birds in spring – in his closed hand, a seed for the sowing; and, because there was no one of his language to speak to, silent.

  "But listen, you said you've thought the same thing, what's it all for, is this all there is to life – If you've thought that, you must have looked for the answer!"

  After a long pause Kostant said, "I nearly found it. Last May."

  Stefan stopped fidgeting, looked out the front window in silence. He was frightened. "That – that's not an answer," he mumbled.

  "Seems like there ought to be a better one," Kostant agreed.

  "You get morbid sitting here. . . . What you need's a woman," Stefan said, fidgeting, slurring his words, staring out at the early-autumn evening rising from stone pavements unobscured by tree branches or smoke, even, clear, and empty. Behind him, his brother laughed. "It's the truth," Stefan said bitterly, not turning.

  "Could be. How about yourself?"

  "They're sitting out on the steps there at widow Katalny's. She must be night nursing at the hospital again. Hear the guitar? That's the fellow from Brailava, works at the railway office, goes after anything in skirts. Even goes after Nona Katalny. Sachik's kid lives there now. Works in the New Pit, somebody said. Maybe in your crew."

  "What kid?"

  "Sachik's."

  "Thought he'd left town."

  "He did, went to some farm in the west hills. This is his kid, must have stayed behind to work."

  "Where's the girl?"

  "Went with her father as far as I know."

  The pause this time lengthened out, stretched around them like a pool in which their last words floated, desultory, vague, fading. The room was full of dusk. Kostant stretched and sighed. Stefan felt peace come into him, as intangible and real as the coming of the darkness. They had talked, and got nowhere; it was not a last step; the next step would come in its time. But for a moment he was at peace with his brother, and with himself.

  "Evenings getting shorter," Kostant said softly.

  "I've seen her once or twice. Saturdays. Comes in with a farm wagon." "Where's the farm at?" "West, in the hills, was all old Sachik said." "Might ride out there, if I could," Kostant said. He struck a match for his pipe. The flare of the match in the clear dusk of the room was also a peaceful thing; when Stefan looked back at the window the evening seemed darker. The guitar had stopped and they were laughing out on the steps next door. "If I see her Saturday I'll ask her to come by." Kostant said nothing. Stefan wanted no answer. It was the first time in his life that his brother had asked his help.

  The mother came in, tall, loud-voiced, tired. Floors cracked and cried under her step, the kitchen clashed and steamed, everything was noisy in her presence except her two sons, Stefan who eluded her, Kostant who was her master.

  Stefan got off work Saturdays at noon. He sauntered down Ardure Street looking out for the farm wagon and roan horse. They were not in town, and he went to the White Lion, relieved and bored. Another Saturday came and a third. It was October, the afternoons were shorter. Martin Sachik was walking down Gulhelm Street ahead of him; he caught up and said, "Evening, Sachik." The boy looked at him with blank grey eyes; his face, hands, and clothes were grey with stone-dust and he walked as slowly and steadily as a man of fifty.

  "Which crew are you in?"

  "Five." He spoke distinctly, like his sister.

  "That's my brother's."

  "I know." They went on pace for pace. "They said he might be back in the pit next month."

  Stefan shook his head.

  "Your family still out there on that farm?" he asked.

  Martin nodded, as they
stopped in front of the Katalny house. He revived, now that he was home and very near dinner. He was flattered by Stefan Fabbre's speaking to him, but not shy of him. Stefan was clever, but he was spoken of as a moody, unsteady fellow, half a man where his brother was a man and a half. "Near Verre," Martin said. "A hell of a place. I couldn't take it."

  "Can your sister?"

  "Figures she has to stay with Ma. She ought to come back. It's a hell of a place."

  "This isn't heaven," Stefan said.

  "Work your head off there and never get any money for it, they're all loony on those farms. Right where Dad belongs." Martin felt virile, speaking disrespectfully of his father. Stefan Fabbre looked at him, not with respect, and said, "Maybe. Evening to you, Sachik." Martin went into the house defeated. When was he going to become a man, not subject to other men's reproof? Why did it matter if Stefan Fabbre looked at him and turned away? The next day he met Rosana Fabbre on the street. She was with a girl friend, he with a fellow quarrier; they had all been in school together last year. "How you doing, Ros?" Martin said loudly, nudging his friend. The girls walked by haughty as cranes. "There's a hot one," Martin said. "Her? She's just a kid," the friend said. "You'd be surprised," Martin told him with a thick laugh, then looked up and saw Stefan Fabbre crossing the street. For a moment he realised that he was surrounded, there was no escape.

  Stefan was on the way to the White Lion, but passing the town hotel and livery stable he saw the roan horse in the yard. He went in, and sat in the brown parlour of the hotel in the smell of harness grease and dried spiders. He sat there two hours. She came in, erect, a black kerchief on her hair, so long awaited and so fully herself that he watched her go by with simple pleasure, and only woke as she started up the stairs. "Miss Sachik," he said.

  She stopped, startled, on the stairs.

  "Wanted to ask you a favor." Stefan's voice was thick after the strange timeless waiting. "You're staying here over tonight?"

  "Yes."

  "Kostant was asking about you. Wanted to ask about your father. He's still stuck indoors, can't walk much."

  "Father's fine."

  "Well, I wondered if – "

  "I could look in. I was going to see Martin. It's next door, isn't it?"

  "Oh, fine. That's – I'll wait."

  Ekata ran up to her room, washed her dusty face and hands, and put on^to decorate her grey dress, a lace collar that she had brought to wear to church tomorrow. Then she took it off again. She retied the black kerchief over her black hair, went down, and walked with Stefan six blocks through the pale October sunlight to his house. When she saw Kostant Fabbre she was staggered. She had never seen him close to except in the hospital where he had been effaced by casts, bandages, heat, pain, her father's chatter. She saw him now.

  They fell to talking quite easily. She would have felt wholly at ease with him if it had not been for his extraordinary beauty, which distracted her. His voice and what he said was grave, plain, and reassuring. It was the other way round with the younger brother, who was nothing at all to look at, but with whom she felt ill at ease, at a loss. Kostant was quiet and quieting; Stefan blew in gusts like autumn wind, bitter and fitful; you didn't know where you were with him.

  "How is it for you out there?" Kostant was asking, and she replied, "All right. A bit dreary."

  "Farming's the hardest work, they say."

  "I don't mind the hard, it's the muck I mind."

  "Is there a village near?"

  "Well, it's halfway between Verre and Lotima. But there's neighbors, everybody within twenty miles knows each other."

  "We're still your neighbors, by that reckoning," Stefan put in. His voice slurred off in mid-sentence. He felt irrelevant to these two. Kostant sat relaxed, his lame leg stretched out, his hands clasped round the other knee; Ekata faced him, upright, her hands lying easy in her lap. They did not look alike but might have been brother and sister. Stefan got up with a mumbled excuse and went out back. The north wind blew. Sparrows hopped in the sour dirt under the fir tree and the scurf of weedy grass. Shirts, underclothes, a pair of sheets snapped, relaxed, jounced on the clothesline between two iron posts. The air smelt of ozone. Stefan vaulted the fence, cut across the Katalny yard to the street, and walked westward. After a couple of blocks the street petered out. A track led on to a quarry, abandoned twenty years ago when they struck water; there was twenty feet of water in it now. Boys swam there, summers. Stefan had swum there, in terror, for he had never learned to swim well and there was no foothold, it was all deep and bitter cold. A boy had drowned there years ago, last year a man had drowned himself, a quarrier going blind from stone-splinters in his eyes. It was still called the West Pit. Stefan's father had worked in it as a boy. Stefan sat down by the lip of it and watched the wind, caught down in the four walls, eddy in tremors over the water that reflected nothing.

  "I have to go meet Martin," Ekata said. As she stood up Kostant put a hand out to his crutches, then gave it up: "Takes me too long to get afoot," he said.

  "How much can you get about on those?"

  "From here to there," he said, pointing to the kitchen. "Leg's all right. It's the back's slow."

  "You'll be off them – ?"

  "Doctor says by Easter. I'll run out and throw 'em in the West Pit-" They both smiled. She felt tenderness for him, and a pride in knowing him.

  "Will you be coming in to Kampe, I wonder, when bad weather comes?"

  "I don't know how the roads will be."

  "If you do, come by," he said. "If you like."

  "I will."

  They noticed then that Stefan was gone.

  "I don't know where he went to," Kostant said. "He comes and he goes, Stefan does. Your brother, Martin, they tell me he's a good lad in our crew."

  "He's young," Ekata said.

  "It's hard at first. I went in at fifteen. But then when you've got your strength, you know the work, and it goes easy. Good wishes to your family, then." She shook his big, hard, warm hand, and let herself out. On the doorstep she met Stefan face to face. He turned red. It shocked her to see a man blush. He spoke, as usual leaping straight into the subject – "You were the year behind me in school, weren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "You went around with Rosa Bayenin. She won the scholarship I did, the next year."

  "She's teaching school now, in the Valone."

  "She did more with it than I would have done. – I was thinking, see, it's queer how you grow up in a place like this, you know everybody, then you meet one and find out you don't know them."

  She did not know what to answer. He said good-bye and went into the house; she went on, retying her kerchief against the rising wind.

  Rosana and the mother came into the house a minute after Stefan. "Who was that on the doorstep you were talking to?" the mother said sharply. "That wasn't Nona Katalny, I'll be bound."

  "You're right," Stefan said.

  "All right, but you watch out for that one, you're just the kind she'd like to get her claws into, and wouldn't that be fine, you could walk her puppydog whilst she entertains her ma's gentlemen boarders." She and Ro-sana both began to laugh their loud, dark laughter. "Who was it you were talking to, then?"

  "What's it to you?" he shouted back. Their laughter enraged him; it was like a pelting with hard clattering rocks, too thick to dodge.

  "What is it to me who's standing on my own doorstep, you want to know, I'll let you know what it is to me – " Words leapt to meet her anger as they did to all her passions. "You so high and mighty all the time with all your going off to college, but you came sneaking back quick enough to this house, didn't you, and I'll let you know I want to know who comes into this house – " Rosana was shouting, "I know who it was, it was Martin Sachik's sister!" Kostant loomed up suddenly beside the three of them, stooped and tall on his crutches: "Cut it out," he said, and they fell silent.

  Nothing was said, then or later, to the mother or between the two brothers, about Ekata Sachik's having been in
the house.

  Martin took his sister to dine at the Bell, the cafe where officials of the Chorin Company and visitors from out of town went to dine. He was proud of himself for having thought of treating her, proud of the white tableclothes and the forks and soupspoons, terrified of the waiter. He in his outgrown Sunday coat and his sister in her grey dress, how admirably they were behaving, how adult they were. Ekata looked at the menu so calmly, and her face did not change expression in the slightest as she murmured to him, "But there's two kinds of soup."

  "Yes," he said, with sophistication. "Do you choose which kind?" "I guess so."

  "You must, you'd bloat up before you ever got to the meat – " They snickered. Ekata's shoulders shook; she hid her face in her napkin; the napkin was enormous – "Martin, look, they've given me a bedsheet – " They both sat snorting, shaking, in torment, while the waiter, with another bedsheet on his shoulder, inexorably approached.

  Dinner was ordered inaudibly, eaten with etiquette, elbows pressed close to the sides. The dessert was a chestnut-flour pudding, and Ekata, her elbows relaxing a little with enjoyment, said, "Rosa Bayenin said when she wrote the town she's in is right next to a whole forest of chestnut trees, everybody goes and picks them up in autumn, the trees grow thick as night, she said, right down to the river bank." Town after six weeks on the farm, the talk with Kostant and Stefan, dining at the restaurant had excited her. "This is awfully good," she said, but she could not say what she saw, which was sunlight striking golden down a river between endless dark-foliaged trees, a wind running upriver among shadows and the scent of leaves, of water, and of chestnut-flour pudding, a world of forests, of rivers, of strangers, the sunlight shining on the world. "Saw you talking with Stefan Fabbre," Martin said. "I was at their house." "What for?" "They asked me." "What for?"

  "Just to find out how we're getting on." "They never asked me." "You're not on the farm, stupid. You're in his crew, aren't you? You could look in sometime, you know. He's a grand man, you'd like him."

  Martin grunted. He resented Ekata's visit to the Fabbres without knowing why. It seemed somehow to complicate things. Rosana had probably been there. He did not want his sister knowing about Rosana. Knowing what about Rosana? He gave it up, scowling.