Orsinian tales

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, Ranne, 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.

"I'd better ring," she said, "it's a friend of mine that lives here, she's not expecting me," and she looked for the name on the mailboxes. So he could not let her in. But he turned from the open door and asked, "Excuse me, where do you come from?" She looked at him with a slight smile of surprise and answered, "From Sorg."

His mother was in the kitchen. The rose-geranium flared bright in the window, the asters were already fading. On edge, on the edge. He sat in the armchair, his eyes shut, listening for a step overhead or through the wall, the light step that had come to him not across foreign plains with gypsies but down the familiar road in twilight, the road from Sorg leading to this city, this house, this room. Of course the road led westward as well as eastward, only he had never thought of that. He had come in so quietly that his mother had not heard him, and seeing him in the armchair she jumped and her voice rang with panic: "Why didn't you say something, Maler!" Then she lit the lamps and stroked the withering asters and chatted.

The next day he met Provin. He had not yet said a word to Provin, not even good morning, working side by side in the office (Drafting and Planning, Krasnoy Bureau of the State Office of Civil Architecture) on the same plans (State Housing, Trasfiuve Project No. 2). The young man followed him as he left the building at five.

"Mr Eray, let me speak to you."

"What about?"

"About anything," the young man said easily, knowing his own charm, and yet dead serious. He was good looking, bearing himself gallantly. Defeated, smoked out of his refuge of silence, Maler said at last,-"Well I'm sorry, Provin. Not your fault. Because of Ihrenthal, the man who had your job. Nothing to do with you. It's unreasonable. I'm sorry." He turned away.

Provin said fiercely, "You can't waste hatred like that!"

Maler stood still. "All right. I'll say good morning after this. It's all right. What's the difference? What does it matter to you? What does it matter if any of us talks or doesn't talk? What is there to say?"

"It does matter. There's nothing left to us, now, but one another."

They stood face to face on the street in the fine autumn rain, men passing around them to left and right, and Maler said after a moment, "No, we haven't even got that left, Provin," and set off down Palazay Street to his trolley stop. But after the long ride through mid-town and across Old Bridge and through the Trasfiuve, and the walk through rain to Geyle Street, in the doorway of his house he met the woman from Sorg. She asked him, "Can you let me in?"

He nodded, unlocking the door.

"My friend forgot to give me her key, and she had to go out. I've been wandering around, I thought maybe you'd be home around the same time as yesterday. . . ." She was ready to laugh with him at her own improvidence, but he could not laugh or answer her. He had been wrong to reject Provin, dead wrong. He had collaborated with the enemy. Now he must pay the price of his silence, which is more silence, silence when one wants to speak: the gag. He followed her up the stairs, silent. And yet she came from his home, the town where he had never been.

"Good evening," she said at the turning of the stairs, no longer smiling, her quiet face turned away.

"Good evening," he said.

He sat in the armchair and leaned his head back; his mother was in the other room; weariness rose up in him. He was much too tired to travel on the road. Bric-a-brac from the day, the office, the streets milled and juggled in his mind; he was almost asleep. Then for a moment he saw the road, and for the first time he saw people walking on it: other people. Not himself, not Ihrenthal who was dead, not anyone he knew, but strangers, a few people with quiet faces. They were walking westward, towards him, meeting and passing him. He stood still. They looked at him but they did not speak. His mother spoke sharply, "Maler!" He did not move, but she would never pass him by. "Maler, are you ill?" She did not believe in illness, though Maler's father had died of cancer a few years ago; the trouble, she felt, had been in his mind. She had never been sick, and childbirth, even the two miscarriages she had had, had been painless, even joyous. There is no pain, only the fear of it, which one can reject. But she knew that Maler like his father had not rid his mind of fear. "My dear," she murmured, "you mustn't wear yourself out like this."

"I'm all right." All right, all right, everything's all right.

"Is it Ihrenthal?"

She had said the name, she had mentioned the dead, she had admitted death, let it into the room. He stared at her bewildered, overwhelmed with gratitude. She had given him back the power of speech. "Yes," he stammered, "yes, it's that. It's that. I can't take it – "

"You mustn't eat your heart out over it, my dear." She stroked his hand. He sat still, longing for comfort. "It wasn't your fault," she said, the soft exultation coming into her voice again. "There's nothing you could have done to change things, nothing you can do now. He was what he was, perhaps he even sought this, he was rebellious, restless. He's gone his own way. You must stay with what is real, what remains, Maler. His fate led him another way than yours. But yours leads home. When you turn your back on me, when you won't speak to me, my dear, then you're rejecting not only me, but your true self. After all, we have no one but each other."

He said nothing, bitterly disappointed, borne down by his guilt towards her, who did depend wholly on him, and towards Ihrenthal and Provin from whom he had tried to escape, following an unreal road in silenceand alone. But when she raised her arms and said or sang, "Nothing is evil, nothing is wasted, if only we look at the world without fear!" – then he broke away and stood up. "The only way to do that is go blind," he said, and went out, letting the door slam.

He came back drunk at three in the morning, singing. He woke too late to shave, and was late to work; after the lunch hour he did not go back to the office. He sat on in the dark simmering bar behind Roukh Palace where he and Ihrenthal had used to lunch together on beer and herring, and by six, when Provin came in, he was drunk again. "Good evening, Provin! Have a drink on me."

"Thanks, I will. Givaney said you might be here." They drank in silence, side by side, jammed together by the press at the bar. Maler straightened up and said, "There is no evil, Provin."

"No?" said Provin, smiling, glancing up at him.

"No. None at all. People get in trouble for things they say, but when they're shot for it it's their own fault, eh, so there's nothing evil in that. Or if they're just put in jail, all the better, it keeps them from talking. If nobody talks then nobody tells lies, and there isn't any real evil, you see, only lies. Evil is a lie. You have to be silent, then the world's good. All good. The police are good men with wives and families, the agents are good patriotic men, the soldiers are good, the State is good, we're good citizens of a great country, only we mustn't speak. We mustn't talk to one another, in case we tell a lie. That would spoil it all. Never speak to a man. Especially never speak to a woman. Have you got a mother, Provin? I don't. I was born of a virgin, painlessly. Pain is a lie, it doesn't exist – see?" He brought his hand down backwards on the edge of the bar with a crack like a stick breaking. "Ah!" he cried, and Provin too turned white. The men at the bar all round them, dark-faced men in shoddy grey, glanced at him; the simmering murmur of their talk went on. The month on the calendar over the bar was October, 1956. Maler pressed his hand to his side under his coat for a while and then silently, left-handed, finished his beer. "In Budapest, on Wednesday," the man next to him repeated quietly to his neighbor in plasterer's overalls, "on Wednesday."

"Is that true, all that?"

Provin nodded. "It's true."

"Are you from Sorg, Provin?"

"No, from Raskofiu, a few miles this side of Sorg. Will you come home with me, Mr Eray?"

"Too drunk."

"My wife and I have a room to ourselves. I wanted to talk with you. This business." He nodded at the man in overalls. "There's a chance – "

"Too late," Maler said. "Too drunk. Listen, do you know the road between Raskofiu and Sorg?"

Provin looked down. "You come from there too?"

"No. I was born here in Krasnoy. City boy. Never been to Sorg. Saw the church-spire once from a train going east, doing my military service. Now I think I'll go see it closer up. When will the trouble start here?" he asked conversationally as they left the bar, but the young man did not answer. Maler walked back across the river to Geyle Street, a very long walk. He was sober when he got home. His mother looked hard and shrunken, like a nut dried around its kernel. He was her lie, and one must keep hold of a lie, wither around it, hold on. Her world without evil, without hope, her world without revolution depended on him alone.

While he ate his late dry supper she asked him about the rumors she had heard at market. "Yes," he said, "that's right. And the West is going to help them, send in airplanes with guns, troops maybe. They'll make it."

Then he laughed, and she dared not ask him why. Next day he went to work as usual. But on Saturday morning early the woman from Sorg stood at his door. "Please, can you get me across the river?" Softly, not to wake his mother, he asked what she meant. She explained that the bridges were being guarded and they would not let her across since she had no Krasnoy domicile card, and she must get across to the railway station to go back to her family in Sorg. She was a day late already, she must get back. "If you're going to work and I went with you, you see, they might let you cross. . . ."

"My office won't be open," he said.

She said nothing.

"I don't know, we could try it," he said, looking down at her, feeling himself stout and heavy in his dressing-gown. "Are the trolleys running?"

"No, they've stopped, people say everything's stopped. Maybe even the trains. It's going on over there on the west side, in River Quarter, they say."

In the early light under a grey sky they went together through the long streets toward the river. "They'll probably stop me," he said, "I'm only an architect. If they do, you might try to get to Grasse somehow. The trains going east stop there, it's a suburban station. It's only five or six miles from Krasnoy." She nodded. She wore the same bright shoddy dress; it was cold, and they walked fast. When they came in sight of Old Bridge they hesitated. Across the bridge between the fine stone balustrades stood not only the idling soldiers they had expected but also a huge black thing, hunchbacked and oblique, its machine-gun snout poked out towards the west. A soldier waved aside his identification cards, told him to go home. He and the woman returned up the long streets where no trolleys ran, no cars, and few people walked. "If you want to walk on out to Grasse," he said, "I'll go with you."

The coarse black hair whipped over her cheek as she smiled, bewildered, a countrywoman astray. "You're kind. But will the trains be running?"

"Probably not."

The colorless delicate face was bent pondering; she smiled a little, faced with the insuperable.

"Have you children at home, in Sorg?"

"Yes, two children. I was here trying to get my husband's compensation, he was hurt in an accident at the mill, he lost his arm. . . ."

"It's about forty miles to Sorg. Walking, you might be there tomorrow night."

"I was thinking that. But with this trouble they'll be policing the ways out of the city, all the roads. . . ."

"Not the roads east."

"I'm a bit scared," she said after a while, gently; no gypsy from the wild lands but only a countrywoman on the roads of ruin, afraid to go alone. She need not go alone. They could walk together out of the city eastward, taking the road up to Grasse and then down among the hills, from town to town on the rolling plain past fields and lone farms until they came in autumn evening under the grey walls, to the high spire of Sorg; and now with the trouble in Krasnoy the roads would be quite empty, no buses, no cars running, as if they walked into the last century and on before into the other centuries, back, towards their heritage, away from their death.

"You'd best wait it out here," he said as they turned onto Geyle Street. She looked up at his heavy face, saying nothing. On the stair-landing she murmured, "Thank you. You were kind to go with me."

"I wish I could." He turned to his door.

In the afternoon the windows of the flat rattled and rattled. His mother sat with her hands in her lap staring out over the flowers of the geranium at the cloud-spotted sky full of sunshine. "I'm going out, mother," Maler said, and she sat still; but as he put on his coat she said, "It's not safe."

"No. It's not safe."

"Stay inside, Maler."

"It's sunny outside. The sunshine bathes us all, eh? I need a good bath."

She looked up at him in terror. Having denied the need for help, she did not know how to ask for it. "This isn't real, this is insane, all this trouble-making, you mustn't get mixed up in it, I won't accept it. I won't believe it!" she said, raising her long arms to him as if in incantation. He stood there, a big heavy man. Down on the street there was a long shout, silence, a shout; the windows rattled again. She dropped her arms to her sides and cried, "But Maler, I'll be alone!"

"Yes, well," he said softly, thoughtfully, not wanting to hurt her, "that's how it is." He left her, closed the door behind him, and went down the stairs and out, dazzled at first by the bright October sunlight, to join the army of the unarmed and with them to go down the long streets leading westward to, but not across, the river.

1956