Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The kitchen was warm and full of people. The cook-housekeeper Vera, who had come after his time but had been there for years now, greeted him mumbling. She was upset, and he understood that; how was an old woman with bad legs to get a new job? But no doubt Nikolas and Nina would take her in. Retsia’s children were all at the kitchen table: the boy he had met in the hall, and the older sister, and the little boy, whom they had called Riri last time Orte had seen them, but were calling Raul now; and there was another one, that sister or cousin of Retsia’s husband who lived with them, a short, sullen girl of twenty or more. Nikolas’s wife Nina came from behind the table to greet him with an embrace. As she spoke, he remembered what he had not thought of since Nikolas’s letter about it a couple of weeks ago, that Nikolas and Nina had adopted a baby—had Nikolas written that it was a boy? It had all seemed so artificial to him that he had read the letter carelessly, finding the matter distasteful and embarrassing, and now he could not recall what Nikolas had written. It would not do to ask Nina about it. Old Vera insisted on making tea for him to show that she was necessary, and he had to sit down with them all in the bright noisy kitchen and eat a little, wait for the tea and drink it. The noise abated. Nobody spoke to him much; Nina glanced at him with her sad, dark eyes. He began to realise with relief that his habitual gravity of manner might be taken for emotion controlled, might serve him as a façade behind which he could keep to himself his lack of sorrow, like a locked and empty room.

  He was not allowed to sleep in his old room upstairs after all. Nothing he had expected happened. The house was full up. It seemed that since the adoption Nikolas and Nina had given up their flat in Old Quarter and moved back here till they came in line for a larger flat. They were in Eduard’s old room, and their baby was in Nikolas’s old room; Retsia and her three were in the nursery; the cousin slept on the living-room couch; there was nothing left for him but the leather couch in the glassed-in porch off the music room, downstairs. Only the mother’s room was empty. He did not see it. He did not go upstairs. Retsia brought down blankets, then a quilt, finally a warm dressing gown of Nikolas’s. “It’s terrible out here, terrible, poor Eduard. If you sleep in this it might help you stay warm. Oh, how strange everything is!” Her hair was braided for sleep, she wore a pink wool wrapper. She looked broad, competent, maternal, beautiful; her face was illuminated as if she were listening to music. That is grief, he thought.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “But you always get cold feet at night. It’s terrible to stick you out here. I don’t know what we’ll do when Tomas comes. Oh, Eduard, I do so wish that you’d got married, I hate for people to be alone! I know you don’t mind, but I do. The curtains won’t close, will they? Oh, Christ, I’ve torn the side hem. Well, there’s nothing to shut out here but the rain.” The ready tears stood in her eyes; her warmth and strength enveloped him a moment as she hugged him. “Good night!” she said and left, shutting the curtained glass door behind her, and he heard her voice and the cousin’s in the next room.

  She went upstairs. The house grew silent. He rearranged the blankets and quilt and lay down on the couch. He read the book he had read on the train, a long-term project for goals and fund allocations in the department that would, in May, come under the administration of his bureau. Rain brushed the windows above the couch. His hands grew cold. Silently and suddenly the light in the next room went out, leaving the curtained glass door black, and the light from his small reading lamp very dim. The cousin was in that room. The house was full of people he did not know. This porch, cold, in night and rain, was strange to him. They never used the porch except in summer, on hot days. This was not the trip he had started out on. To come home, that was one true direction, but now it had lost its sense, he had ended up in a strange place. Was this confusion what they called grief? She is dead, he thought, she is dead, as he lay fairly comfortably propped against the arm of the couch, the book open against his raised knees under the quilt, gazing at the page numbers 144, 145, and waited for the reaction. But he had left home so long ago, after all. 144, 145. His eyes returned to the paragraph he had been reading. He read on to the end of the section. His watch said two-thirty. He turned off the bronze-shaded reading lamp and huddled down under the blankets and quilts; he heard the rain brush quietly against the windows. “I am going to Paraguay,” he told the salesman, annoyed at being asked. “To Paraguananza, the capital of the nation.” But they met with long delays along the line from floods of water, and when he got there, across terrible abysses, to Paraguananza, it was no different from here.

  2. METEMPSYCHOSIS

  WHEN THE LAWYER’S LETTER CAME, Eduard Russe thought nothing at first about the house that had been willed to him, but tried only to dredge up from the shifty bogs of memory some shard or fragment, a cranium, a fingerbone, of that great-uncle, his mother’s father’s brother, who had seen fit, or been forced by a paucity of survivors, to leave him the house in Brailava. He had always lived in Krasnoy; when he was nine or ten he had gone with his mother to visit their Northern relatives, but of that journey he could recall only the most trivial things—a hen with her brood of chicks in a back yard by a basket, a man standing and singing aloud on a street corner directly under (so his child’s eye averred) a huge, dark-blue mountain. Of the grandfather who had then owned the house, of the great-uncle who had next inherited it, nothing remained but a discomfort of dark rooms and loud old voices. Old men, deaf, not the same species as himself, no kin. Crossed swords with basket grips and curved blades hanging on a chimney: sabres. He had never seen a sabre. He was not allowed to play with them. The old men did nothing with them, did not keep them polished. If they had let him take them down he would have polished them. He was ashamed, now, of this ingratitude of mind which left him only his own childish envies and not one glimpse of the man who had given him a house—even if he did not want the house and could wish the old man had, equally, forgotten him. What was he to do with a house in Brailava? What was he supposed to reply to the lawyer’s letter? Employed in the Bureau of Housing, on modest salary, he had never had any use for lawyers and had kept well clear of the breed. His wife would have known how to answer the letter; she had good sense about such things, and good manners too. Following what he imagined Elena might have written, he produced a short, civil acknowledgment of the lawyer’s communication, posted it, and then, in fact, altogether forgot about the great-uncle, the legacy, the property in Brailava. He was busy, having undertaken an extra task of the kind he was good at, a reorganisation and simplification of record-keeping. People would say he was trying to lose himself in his work, but though he had always liked his work and still did, he knew there was no way to lose himself in it. Rather he found himself in it constantly, met himself in the work he had done, in the people he worked with. On every street corner on the way to the Bureau he met himself coming back from work to the apartment on Sidres Street where Elena, who taught in the College of Applied Arts, would be home already, unless it was Wednesday night when she had a class from four to six—

  His days were punctuated by these dashes, not periods but breaks, empty spaces in which he stopped himself from finishing the thought, or from trying to finish the thought which no longer had an end, since in this case Elena had no class from four to six on Wednesday, because she was dead of an aneurysm of the heart and had been dead for three months, and in any case all thoughts led to this same non-end or stopping place and were there, as in the cremator’s fire, destroyed.

  He knew he could manage his misery in a wiser way, without these breaks and terrible repetitions, if he could sleep well. But he could never sleep, now, more than two or three hours at a time, and then would wake and lie awake as long as he had slept. He tried drinking, and he tried the sleeping pills a friend at work recommended. Both gave him five hours’ sleep, two hours’ nightmare, and a day of sick despair. He went back to reading during his night wakings. He read anything, but preferred history, the histories of other countries. So
metimes, at three in the morning, he cried, as he read the history of Renaissance Spain, ignoring his tears. He had no dreams. She had taken his dreams, and they had gone with her too far, by now, to find their way back to him. They had got lost and petered out, dried up, somewhere in that thick, rock-ridden darkness through which Elena had very slowly gone, tunnelling her way forward, heavily, without breathing. He felt that she was beyond that now, in some other region, but not one he was able to imagine.

  A second letter arrived from the law firm in Brailava. The envelope was double-weight manila, heavy, portentous. Resigned, he opened it. The lawyer’s letter was short and only moderately obscure, appearing to suggest, with due caution, that as things stood (and undoubtedly given his professional affiliation he was far better informed on this subject than the writer), he might find, if he decided to consider selling the house, that it was possible to get a good price for it; dissociating himself promptly, the lawyer, whom Eduard now envisaged as almost inevitably sixty and clean-shaven with a long upper lip, went on to remark that there were several reputable real-property agents in Krasnoy with Northern branches, if he did not wish to be troubled with the business himself. However, personal belongings left in the house might demand, at least briefly, his presence and decision as to whether the furniture, papers, books, etc., were of value, monetary or sentimental. With the letter were some documents, evidently deeds, descriptions, and so on, concerning the property, and, in an old, soft, rather mangy leather pouch, a steel ring on which were six keys.

  It was curious that he should have sent them without waiting to hear from Eduard again, to identify him more securely, to meet him. It was the keys that had made the envelope misshapen and heavy. Eduard spread them out fanwise on his left palm with his right forefinger and studied them with uneasy curiosity. Two, identical, looked like old-fashioned, respectable front-door keys. The other four were wildly various: one that might fit a big padlock, one with a barrel like a clock key, one plain iron all-purpose that suggested a pantry or cellar door, and one of brass with delicately intricate wards, probably the key to some old piece of furniture, a wardrobe or escritoire. He imagined, with continuing unease, the brass keyhole in the curved mahogany, shelves behind glass, meaningless papers in half-empty drawers.

  He requested two days off work at the end of the month. He would go up to Brailava on the Wednesday evening train, come back on the Sunday. Efficiency. See the lawyer, see the house, arrange to have it cleared out and put up for sale. While looking after all this he would be able to see something of the city where his mother had been born and lived as a child. With the money from the sale of the house he would go to Spain. Unearned money should be spent at once, otherwise it festered. What would it cost to go to Egypt? He had always wanted to see the pyramids. Red-coated, waving sabres, cinematic English soldiers charged thinly across a waste of gold behind the back of the indifferent Sphinx and petered out, like water poured onto sand. The Sahara, a furnace, an empty place. The train jerked forward tentatively and stopped again. No one else was in the compartment at the moment; the young couple who had taken the facing seat were standing in the corridor. They had been joking with friends on the platform. Now they shouted and waved and banged the windows childishly as the train, quiet and purposeful, began to glide forward. Eduard’s eyes filled up with tears and his breath stuck in an audible sob. Appalled by the ambush, by the overwhelming advantage grief had over him, he clenched his hands, shut his eyes, feigned sleep, although his face was hot and his breath would not come evenly. He foreswore Egypt, damn Egypt, damn Toledo and Madrid. The tears dried in his eyes. He watched the northern suburbs slide past beyond the viaducts in the soft, amniotic haze of the September afternoon.

  The young couple came back into the compartment, no longer talking or smiling; their animation had been all for their friends in North Station. Eduard continued to gaze out the window as the train ran steadily north on the level embankments by the Molsen. The river was wide, serene, a pale silken blue color between low banks. Willows stood in the late sunlight by the river. The haze was thickening; it looked like rain ahead, in the north, a heavy blueness of clouds. He had got off work early to catch the five o’clock express. They would be in Brailava by half past six, following the river all the way. He got a little drowsy, looking at the silken water.

  At a quarter to six there was a tremendous noise and a subsequent absolute silence. As Eduard picked himself up from the floor of the compartment where for some reason he had arrived, the young man kicked him in the shoulder. “Watch that!” Eduard said furiously, and retrieved his briefcase, which had also slid across the floor. There was now a strange, thin commotion of voices in the corridor. “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” the young woman was saying in a silly voice. The commotion grew to a hubbub like that of an audience at intermission, both inside the car and outside along the tracks, shouts, exclamations, descriptions, comparisons, complaints, as it became clear that the engine had hit a hay truck stalled at a crossing, and that though nobody was hurt except for the truck driver, who had been killed, the engine had derailed and there was going to be a delay while they brought a relief engine down from Brailava. Another break, a dash not a period; non-arrival. Eduard walked up and down the tracks a while in the late long sunlight. It was almost seven when a relief engine arrived, from the south not the north, and pulled the train back to a siding at the local station called Isestno, which was not even mentioned on the Krasnoy–Brailava schedule of the Northern Line; and there it waited, while night fell and the rain came on, until the tracks were mended and the relief engine from Brailava came and hauled it on in, arriving at Sumeny Station at half past ten.

  There had been nothing whatever to eat on the train and no vendors at mournful Isestno siding, but Eduard did not feel hungry as he walked under the bright cavernous dome of Sumeny, carrying the briefcase which was all he had brought. Now that he was off the train at last, he felt shaken. He had planned to arrive at half past six, find a hotel near the station, have dinner, but now he did not want to stay up and eat out among strangers, he wanted to go home. Other men hurried past him through the high doors into the rainy night.

  “Taxi?”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Where to, sir?”

  “Fourteen Kamenny Street.”

  “That’ll be up Underhill,” the taxi driver said, confirming Eduard’s memory of the name of the district and of the dark-blue crags hunched over a singing man, a man under a hill, and took off, doors and smeared windows rattling. It was dark in the cab and the smell was comfortable. Eduard roused himself, confused, almost from sleep, and sank back into it, almost.

  “Fourteen, was it?”

  “Right.”

  “This one, looks like. There’s Twelve.”

  He could see no street number. There was a house; there was rain, trees, darkness. He paid the driver, who said good night to him in the dry, civil, Northern voice.

  Three stone steps, flanked by shrubs and some kind of iron fence or grille: “14” over the rather ornate wooden doorframe. A strange city, a strange street, whose house? The first of the twin keys fit the lock. He opened the door, looked in, took a couple of steps in, but left the door ajar behind him, to be certain of escape.

  Pitch dark; dry; cool. Sound of rain above on high roofs. No other sound.

  The light switch came under his hand to the right of the door. He felt that he should say, “I’m here.” To whom? He turned on the light.

  The hall was much smaller than it had seemed in darkness. He had, he now realised, felt himself to be in an almost limitless space, but it was only the quiet shabby front hall of an old house on a rainy night. The strip of carpet on the handsome black and grey tiles was worn and not very clean. Somebody’s hat, his great-uncle’s hat, an old felt, lay forlorn on a small sideboard. The light fixture was of yellowish cloudy glass.

  The door was still ajar behind him. He returned and closed it, and automatically put the key ring into his trousers pocket
.

  Stairs went up to the left. The hall went on past them: a door to the right and an end door, both shut. The sitting room would be that one to the right, the end one would lead back to the kitchen. There was a dining room, maybe on the way to the kitchen; it was in a dark dining room that he had heard the loud old voices. He should look into the rooms, but he was tired. He had been sleeping very badly for several nights, and the train trip with its shock and unfelt death and long delay had left him shaky. The hall was all right, the old hat was all right, but he could not take much more. The yellowish light illuminated the stairs as well as the hall. He went up the stairs, his right hand on the narrow heavily varnished railing. At the top he turned and went down the hall to the end door, opened it, and turned on the light. He did not know why he chose that door, or whether he had been upstairs in the house as a child. This was the front bedroom, probably the largest. It might be the room his great-uncle had slept in, perhaps died in, unless he had died in hospital, or it might have been the grandfather’s room, or have stood unused for thirty years. It was clean and sparse, bed, table, chair, two windows, fireplace. The bed was made, tight and neat, an old blue coverlet pulled tight. The overhead light in its glass shade was dim, and there was no lamp.

  Eduard put down his briefcase by the bed.

  The washroom was at the other end of the hall. He thought at first the water had been cut off, for the pipe groaned when he turned the faucet, but then it spat rust, belched red, and ran clear. He was thirsty. He drank from the faucet. The water was rusty and cold and tasted of the north.

  There was an old bookcase with glassed shelves in the hall, and he stopped before it for a minute, but the light was faint and the titles of the books meant nothing. He could not read. He went into the front bedroom and turned back the blue coverlet. The bed was made up with heavy linen sheets and a dark blanket. He took off his clothes, hung his coat and trousers in the empty closet, turned off the light, got into the cold bed in the dark room made tremulous by a distant street lamp shining through rain or the shadows of leaves; he stretched out and laid his head back on the hard pillow, and slept.