That made her smile a little, because of Eva, but also because it was true. He was a shy, determined, hold-fast 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 Rákava.”
“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 handf
ul 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 Rákava. 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 Rákava, 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?”
“I know what I’ve got to lose,” Lisha said. “And I’m not going to.”
“I know what I’ve got to gain,” he said. “That’s what scares me.” His face was raised, as if he were looking out over the city. It was a very strong face, hard and intent, and Lisha looking at him was shaken; she shut her eyes. She knew that it was she, her will, her presence, that set him free; but she must go with him into freedom, and it was a place she had never been before. In the darkness she whispered, “All right, I’m scared too.”
“Well, hang on,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders. “If you hang on, I will.”
They sat there, not talking much, as the sun sank into the mist above the plains of April, and the towers and windows of the city yellowed in the falling light. As the sun set they went down the Hill together, out of the silent garden with its beautiful, ruined, staring house, into the smoke and noise and crowding of the thousand streets, where already night had fallen.
1920
The Road East
“THERE IS NO EVIL,” Mrs Eray murmured to the rose-geranium in the windowbox, and her son, listening, thought swiftly of caterpillars, cutworms, leafmold, blight; but sunlight shone on the round green leaves and red flowers and grey hair in vast mild assent, and Mrs Eray smiled. Her sleeves dropped back as she raised her arms, a sun-priestess at the window. “Each flower proves it. I’m glad you like flowers, Maler.”—“I like trees better,” he said, being tired and edgy; edgy was the word he kept thinking, on edge, on the sharp edge. He wanted a vacation badly. “But you couldn’t have brought me an oak tree for my birthday!” She laughed, turning to look at the October sheaf of golden asters he had brought her, and he smiled, sunk heavy and passive in his armchair. “Oh you poor old mushroom!” she said, coming to him. A big, pale, heavy man, he disliked that endearment, feeling that it fit him. “Sit up, smile! This lovely day, my birthday, these flowers, the sunlight. How can people refuse to enjoy this world! Thank you for my flowers, dear.” She kissed his forehead and returned with her buoyant step to the window.
“Ihrenthal’s gone,” he said.
“Gone?”
“For a week now. No one’s even said his name, all week.”
It was a frontal attack, for she had known Ihrenthal; he had sat at her dinner-table, a shy, rash, curly-headed man; he had taken a second helping of soup; she could not blow his name away as if it were empty of meaning, of weight.
“You don’t know what’s become of him?”
“Of course I know.”
She traced the round of a geranium leaf with her forefinger and said in a gentle tone as if to the plant, “Not really.”
“I don’t know whether he’s been shot or simply jailed, if that’s what you mean.”
She withdrew her hand from the plant and stood looking up at the sunlit sky. “You must not be bitter, Maler,” she said. “We don’t know what’s become of him, truly, in the deeper sense. Of him, of all that goes, disappears, is lost to us. We know so little, so very little. And yet enough! The sunlight shines, it bathes us all, it makes no judgment, has no bitterness. That much we know. That’s the great lesson. Life is a gift, such a lovely gift! There’s no room in it for bitterness. No room.” Speaking to the sky, she had not noticed him get up.
“There’s room for everything. Too much room. Ihrenthal was my friend. Is his—is his death a lovely gift?” But he rushed and mumbled his words, and she did not have to hear them. He sat down again while she went on to prepare supper and lay the table. “What if I’d been arrested instead of Ihrenthal?” he wanted to say, but did not say. She can’t understand, he thought, because she lives inside, she’s always looking out the window but she never opens the door, she never goes outside. . . . The tears he could not cry for Ihrenthal strained his throat again, but his thoughts were already slipping away, eastward, towards the road. On the road, the thought of his friend still was with him, the imagination of pain and the knowledge of grief: but with him, not locked inside him. On the road he could walk with sorrow, as he walked through the rain.
The road led east from Krasnoy through farmlands and past villages to a grey-walled town over which rose the fortress-like tower of an old church. The villages and the town were on maps and he had seen them once from the train: Raskofiu, Rann
e, Malenne, Sorg: they were real places, none over fifty miles from the city. But in his mind he walked to them on foot and it was long ago, early in the last century perhaps, for there were no cars on the road nor even railroad crossings. He walked along in rain or sunlight on the country road towards Sorg where at evening he would rest. He would go to an inn down the street from the stout six-sided tower of the church. That was pleasant to look forward to. He had never come to the inn, though once or twice he had entered the town and stood beneath the church portal, a round arch of carven stone. Meantime he walked along through the weather, with a load on his back that varied in weight. On this bright autumn evening he walked too far, till the coming of darkness; it got cold, and fog lay over the dark hollow fields. He had no idea how much farther it was to Sorg, but he was hungry and very tired. He sat down on the bank of the road under a clump of trees and rested there a while in the silence of nightfall. He slipped the packstrap from his shoulders and sat quiet; cold, grieving, and apprehensive, yet quiet, watching mist and dusk. “Supper’s ready!” his mother called cheerily. He rose at once and joined her at the table.
Next day he met the gypsy woman. The trolley had brought him east across the river, and he stood waiting to cross its tracks while the wind blew dust down the long street in the long light of evening. Standing beside him she said, “Would you tell me how to get to Geyle Street?” The voice was not a city voice. Black hair, coarse and straight, blew across a colorless face, skin over delicate bone. “I’m going that way,” Maler said after a pause, and set off across the street, not looking to see if she came with him. She did. “I never was in Krasnoy before,” she said. She came from the plains of a foreign land, windswept plains ringed by far peaks fading into night as nearby, in the wild grass, the smoke of a campfire veered and doubled on the wind over the flames and a woman sang in a strange tongue, a music lost in the huge, blue, frozen dusk. “I’ve never been out of it, not to speak of,” he answered, looking at her. She was about his age, her dress was bright and shoddy, she walked erect, quiet-faced. “What number?” he asked, for they had come to Geyle Street, and she said, “Thirty-three,” the number of his house. They walked side by side under the streetlamps, he and this delicate foreign wanderer, strange to each other, walking home together. While getting out his key he explained, “I live in this building,” though that really explained very little.
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