Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  And so I rode off that evening to Ile.

  Galven was not there. Martin said he had taken out the mare to exercise her. Martin was cleaning harness in the stable by lantern-light and moonlight, and I talked with him there while I waited for Galven to come back. Moonlight enlarged the woods of Ile; the birches and the house looked silver, the oaks were a wall of black. Martin came to the stable door with me for a smoke. I looked at his face in the moonlight, and I thought I could trust him, if only he’d trust me.

  “Martin, I want to ask you something. I have good reason for asking it.”

  He sucked at his pipe, and waited.

  “Do you consider Galven to be sane?”

  He was silent; sucked at his pipe; grinned a little. “Sane?” he said. “I’m not one to judge. I chose to live here too.”

  “Listen, Martin, you know that I’m his friend. But he and my sister, they’re in love, they talk of marrying. I’m the only one to look after her. I want to know more about—” I hesitated and finally said, “About his first marriage.”

  Martin was looking out into the yard, his light eyes full of moonlight. “No need to stir that up, doctor. But you ought to take your sister away.”

  “Why?”

  No answer.

  “I have a right to know.”

  “Look at him!” Martin broke out, fierce, turning on me. “Look at him! You know him well enough, though you’ll never know what he was, what he should have been. What’s done is done, there’s no mending it, let him be. What would she do, here, when he went into his black mood? I’ve lived day after day in this house with him when he never spoke a word, and there was nothing you could do for him, nothing. Is that for a young girl to live with? He’s not fit to live with people. He’s not sane, if you want. Take her away from here!”

  It was not wholly jealousy, but it was not logic, either, that led his argument. Galven had argued against himself in the same way last night. I was sure Galven had had no “black mood” since he had known Poma. The blackness lay further behind.

  “Did he divorce his wife, Martin?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  Martin nodded.

  “All right; if she’s dead, that story’s closed. All I can do is speak to him.”

  “You won’t do that!”

  It wasn’t either question or threat so much as it was terror, real terror in his voice. I was clinging to common sense by now desperately, clutching at the straw. “Somebody’s got to face reality,” I said angrily. “If they marry they’ve got to have something to live on—”

  “To live on, to live on, that’s not what it’s about! He can’t marry anybody. Get her out of here!”

  “Why?”

  “All right, you asked if he was sane, I’ll answer you. No. No, he isn’t sane. He’s done something he doesn’t know about, he doesn’t remember, if she comes here it will happen again, how do I know it won’t happen again!”

  I felt very dizzy, there in the night wind under the high dark and silver of the trees. I finally said in a whisper, “His wife?”

  No answer.

  “For the love of God, Martin!”

  “All right,” the man whispered. “Listen. He came on them in the woods. There, back in the oaks.” He pointed to the great trees standing somber under moonlight. “He’d been out hunting. It was the day after he’d sent off the man from Brailava, told him get out and never come back. And she was in a rage with him for it, they’d quarrelled half the night, and he went off to the marshes before dawn. He came back early and he found them there, he took a short cut through the woods, he found them there in broad daylight in the forest. And he shot her point-blank and clubbed the man with his rifle, beat his brains out. I heard the shot, so close to the house, I came out and found them. I took him home. There were a couple of other men staying here, I sent them away, I told them she’d run off. That night he tried to kill himself, I had to watch him, I had to tie him up.” Martin’s voice shook and broke again and again. “For weeks he never said a word, he was like a dumb animal, I had to lock him in. And it wore off but it would come back on him, I had to watch him night and day. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t that he’d come on them that way like dogs in heat, it was that he’d killed them, that’s what broke him. He came out of it, he began to act like himself again, but only when he’d forgotten that. He forgot it. He doesn’t remember it. He doesn’t know it. I told him the same story, they’d run off, gone abroad, and he believed it. He believes it now. Now, now will you bring your sister here?”

  All I could say at first was, “Martin, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Then, pulling myself together, “They—what did you do?”

  “They’re where they died. Do you want to dig them up and make sure?” he said in a cracked, savage voice. “There in the forest. Go ahead, here, here’s the manure shovel, it’s what I dug a hole for them with. You’re a doctor, you won’t believe Galven could do that to a man, there wasn’t anything left of the head but—but—” Martin put his face into his hands suddenly and rocked back and forth, crouching down on his heels, crouching and rocking and sobbing.

  I said what I could to him, but all he could say to me was, “If I could just forget it, the way he has!”

  When he began to get himself under control again, I left, not waiting for Galven. Not waiting, I say—I was running from him. I wanted to be out from under the shadow of those trees. I kept the pony at a trot all the way home, glad of the empty road and the wash of moonlight over the wide valley. And I came into our house out of breath and shaking; and found Galven Ileskar standing there, by the fire, alone.

  “Where’s my sister?” I yelled, and he stared in bewilderment. “Upstairs,” he stammered, and I went up the stairs four at a time. There she was in her room, sitting on her bed, among all the pretty odds and ends and bits and tatters that she never put away. She had been crying. “Gil!” she said, with the same bewildered look. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing—I don’t know,” and I backed out, leaving her scared to death, poor girl. But she waited up there while I came back down to Galven; that’s what they’d arranged, the custom of the times, you know, the men were to talk the matter over.

  He said the same thing: “What’s wrong, Gil?” And what was I to say? There he stood, tense and gallant, with his clear eyes, my friend, ready to tell me he loved my sister and had found some kind of job and would stand by her all his life, and was I supposed to say, “Yes, there’s something wrong, Galven Ileskar,” and tell him what it was? Oh, there was something wrong, all right, but it was a deeper wrong, and an older one, than any he had done. Was I to give in to it?

  “Galven,” I said, “Poma’s spoken to me. I don’t know what to say. I can’t forbid you to marry, but I can’t—I can’t—” And I stuck; I couldn’t speak; Martin’s tears blinded me.

  “Nothing could make me hurt her,” he said very quietly, as if making a promise. I don’t know whether he understood me; I don’t know whether, as Martin believed, he did not know what he had done. In a way it did not matter. The pain and the guilt of it were in him, then and always. That he knew, knew from end to end, and endured without complaint.

  Well, that wasn’t quite the end of it. It should have been, but what he could endure, I couldn’t, and finally, against every impulse of mercy, I told Poma what Martin had told me. I couldn’t let her walk into the forest undefended. She listened to me, and as I spoke I knew I’d lost her. She believed me, all right. God help her, I think she knew before I told her!—not the facts, but the truth. But my telling her forced her to take sides. And she did. She said she’d stay with Ileskar. They were married in October.

  The doctor cleared his throat, and gazed a long time at the fire, not noticing his junior partner’s impatience.

  “Well?” the young man burst out at last like a firecracker— “What happened?”

  “What happened? Why, nothing much happened. They lived on at Ile. Galven had g
ot himself a job as an overseer for Kravay; after a couple of years he did pretty well at it. They had a son and a daughter. Galven died when he was fifty; pneumonia again, his heart couldn’t take it. My sister’s still at Ile. I haven’t seen her for a couple of years, I hope to spend Christmas there. . . . Oh, but the reason I told you all this. You said there are unpardonable crimes. And I agree that murder ought to be one. And yet, among all men, it was the murderer whom I loved, who turned out in fact to be my brother. . . . Do you see what I mean?”

  1920

  Conversations at Night

  “THE BEST THING to do is get him married.”

  “Married?”

  “Shh.”

  “Who’d marry him?”

  “Plenty of girls! He’s still a big strong fellow, good-looking. Plenty of girls.”

  When their sweating arms or thighs touched under the sheet they moved apart with a jerk, then lay again staring at the dark.

  “What about his pension?” Albrekt asked at last. “She’d get it.”

  “They’d stay here. Where else? Plenty of girls would jump at the chance. Rent-free. She’d help at the shop, and look after him. Fat chance I’d give up his pension after all I’ve done. Not even my blood kin. They’d have your brother’s room, and he’d sleep in the hall.”

  This detail gave so much reality to the plan that only after a long time, during which he had scratched his sweaty arms to satisfaction, did Albrekt ask, “You think of anybody special?”

  In the hall outside their door a bed creaked as the sleeper turned. Sara was silent a minute, then whispered, “Alitsia Benat.”

  “Huh!” Albrekt said in vague surprise. The silence lengthened, drew into uneasy, hot-weather sleep. Sara not knowing she had slept found herself sitting up, the sheet tangled about her legs. She got up and peered into the hall. Her nephew lay asleep; the skin of his bare arms and chest looked hard and pale, like stone, in the first light.

  “Why’d you yell like that?”

  He sat up suddenly, his eyes wide. “What is it?”

  “You were talking, yelling. I need my sleep.”

  He lay still. After Sara had settled back into bed it was silent. He lay listening to the silence. At last something seemed to sigh deeply, outside, in the dawn. A breath of cooler air brushed over him. He also sighed; he turned over on his face and sank into sleep, which was a whiteness to him, like the whitening day.

  Outside the dreams, outside the walls, the city Rákava stood still in daybreak. The streets, the old wall with its high gates and towers, the factories that bulked outside the wall, the gardens at the high south edge of town, the whole of the long, tilted plain on which the city was built, lay pale, drained, unmoving. A few fountains clattered in deserted squares. The west was still cold where the great plain sloped off into the dark. A long cloud slowly dissolved into a pinkish mist in the eastern sky, and then the sun’s rim, like the lip of a cauldron of liquid steel, tipped over the edge of the world, pouring out daylight. The sky turned blue, the air was streaked with the shadows of towers. Women began to gather at the fountains. The streets darkened with people going to work; and then the rising and falling howl of the siren at the Ferman cloth-factory went over the city, drowning out the slow striking of the cathedral bell.

  The door of the apartment slammed. Children were shrieking down in the courtyard. Sanzo sat up, sat on the edge of his bed for a while; after he had dressed he went into Albrekt and Sara’s room and stood at the window. He could tell strong light from darkness, but the window faced the court and caught no sunlight. He stood with his hands on the sill, turning his head sometimes, trying to catch the contrast of dark and light, until he heard his father moving about and went into the kitchen to make the old man his coffee.

  His aunt had not left the matches in their usual place to the left of the sink. He felt about for the tin box along the counter and shelf, his hands stiff with caution and frustration. He finally located it left out on the table, in plain sight, if he had been able to see. As he got the stove lighted his father came shuffling in.

  “How goes it?” Sanzo said.

  “The same, the same.” The old man was silent till the coffee was ready, then said, “You pour, I got no grip this morning.”

  Sanzo located the cup with his left hand, brought the coffeepot over it with his right. “On the mark,” Volf said, touching his son’s hand with his rigid arthritic fingers to keep it in the right place. Between them they got their cups filled. They sat at the table in silence, the father chewing on a piece of bread.

  “Hot again,” he mumbled.

  A bluebottle buzzed in the window, knocking against the glass. That sound and the sound of Volf chewing his bread filled Sanzo’s world. A knock on the door came like a gunshot. He jumped up. The old man went on chewing.

  He opened the door. “Who is it?” he said.

  “Hullo, Sanzo. Lisha.”

  “Come on in.”

  “Here’s the flour mother borrowed Sunday,” she whispered.

  “The coffee’s hot.”

  The Benat family lived across the courtyard; Sanzo had known them all since he was ten, when he and his father had come to live with Albrekt and Sara. He had no clear picture of how Alitsia looked, having seen her last when she was fourteen. Her voice was soft, thin, and childish.

  She still had not come in. He shrugged and held out his hands for the flour. She put the bag square in his hands so that he did not have to fumble for it.

  “Oh, come on in,” he said. “I never see you any more.”

  “Just for a minute. I have to get back to help mother.”

  “With the laundry? Thought you were working at Rebolts.”

  “They laid off sixty cutters at the end of last month.”

  She sat with them at the kitchen table. They talked about the proposed strike at the Ferman cloth-factory. Though Volf had not worked for five years, crippled by arthritis, he was full of information from his drinking-companions, and Lisha’s father was a Union section-head. Sanzo said little. After a while there was a pause.

  “Well, what do you see in him?” said the old man’s voice.

  Lisha’s chair creaked; she said nothing.

  “Look all you like,” Sanzo said, “it’s free.” He stood up and felt for the cups and plates on the table.

  “I’d better go.”

  “All right!” Turning towards the sink, he misjudged her position, and ran right into her. “Sorry,” he said, angrily, for he hated to blunder. He felt her hand, just for a moment, laid very lightly on his arm; he felt the movement of her breath as she said, “Thanks for the coffee, Sanzo.” He turned his back, setting the cups down in the sink.

  She left, and Volf left a minute later, working his way down the four flights of stairs to the courtyard where he would sit most of the day, hobbling after the sunlight as it shifted from the west to the east wall, until the evening sirens howled and he went to meet his old companions, off work, at the corner tavern. Sanzo washed up the dishes and made the beds, then took his stick and went out. At the Veterans’ Hospital they had taught him a blind-man’s trade, chair-caning, and Sara had hunted and badgered the local used-furniture sellers until one of them agreed to give Sanzo what caning work came his way. Often it was nothing, but this week there was a set of eight chairs to be done. It was eleven blocks to the shop, but Sanzo knew his routes well. The work itself, in the silent room behind the shop, in the smell of newly cut cane, varnish, mildew, and glue, was pleasant, hypnotic; it was past four when he knocked off, bought himself a sausage roll at the corner bakery, and followed another leg of his route to his uncle’s shop, CHEKEY: STATIONERS, a hole in the wall where they sold paper, ink, astrological charts, string, dream-books, pencils, tacks. He had been helping Albrekt, who had no head for figures, with the accounting. But there was very little accounting to be done these days; there were no customers in the shop, and he could hear Sara in the back room working herself up into a rage at Albrekt over something. He s
hut the shop door so the bell would jangle and bring her out to the front hoping for a customer, and strode on the third leg of his circuit, to the park.

  It was fiercely hot, though the sun was getting lower. When he looked up at the sun, a greyish mist pressed on his eyes. He found his usual bench. Insects droned in the dry park grass, the city hummed heavily, voices passed by, near and far, in the void. When he felt the shadows rising up around him he started home. His head had begun to ache. A dog followed him for blocks. He could hear its panting and its nails scratching on the pavement. A couple of times he struck out at it with his stick, when he felt it crowding at his ankles, but he did not hit it.

  After supper, eaten in haste and silence in the hot kitchen, he sat out in the courtyard with his father and uncle and Kass Benat. They spoke of the strike, of a new dyeing process that was going to cost a whole caste of workmen their jobs, of a foreman who had murdered his wife and children yesterday. The night was windless and sticky.

  At ten they went to bed. Sanzo was tired but it was too hot, too close for sleep. He lay thinking again and again that he would get up and go down and sit in the courtyard where it would be cooler. There was a soft, interminable roll of thunder, seeming to die away then muttering on, louder then softer. The hot night gathered round him swathing him in sticky folds, pressing on him, as the girl’s body had pressed on him for a second that morning when he had run against her. A sudden chill breeze whacked at the windows, the air changed, the thunder grew loud. Rain began to patter. Sanzo lay still. He knew by a greyish movement inside his eyes when the lightning flashed. Thunder echoed deafening in the well of the courtyard. The rain increased, rattling on the windows. As the storm slackened he relaxed; languor came into him, a faint, sweet well-being; without fear or shame he began to pursue the memory of that moment, that touch, and following it found sleep.