Orsinian tales

The House

THE sunlight of any October lay yellow across her way, and hundreds of dry, golden afternoons rustled under her steps. Only their great age kept the sycamores from being importunate. For blocks she was pursued by the familiarity of shadows, bricks, and balconies. Fountains spoke to her as if she had not been away at all. Eight years she had been gone, and this stupid city had never noticed her absence; its sunlight and the sound of its many waters hung about her like the walls of her own house, her home. Confused and offended, she passed the house at 18 Reyn Street without a glance at its door or garden wall, though something, not her eyes, saw that door and gate were locked. After that, the city began to let her be. Within a block or two it did not know her. The fountains talked to someone else. Now she was differently confused, recognising none of these crossings, not one doorstep or window of the shops and houses. She had to ask her way ignominiously of street-signs and house-numbers, and when she found the place she sought, a tenement with several entrances, she had to enter and inquire at open doors. Rumpled beds, family quarrels and partly buttoned dressing-gowns sent her up to a fourth-floor room, where her knock was answered only by a pencilled card tacked on the door. f.l. panin, it said. She looked in. A dormer room, jammed with the hefty sofas and tables of a dismantled house; a stranger's room, sunny, stuffy, defenseless.

Across from her was a curtained doorway. She said, "Anybody here?" and was answered from behind the curtain by someone half awake, "Hold on a moment."

She held on.

He came across the room, himself, as wholly himself as the stones and sunlight of the city after these eight years: the reality of her wretched dreams in which he and she stopped at inns on roads leading up into grey mountains and could not find, down cold corridors, each other's room: the original of all the facsimiles who, in Krasnoy on winter evenings, crossed a street with his walk or looked round with his turn of the head: himself.

"Sorry, I was asleep."

"I'm Mariya."

He stood still, and his coat hung on him as on a coatrack. Seeing that, she saw that his hair had gone a kind of dull grey – that his hair was grey. He was thin, grey, changed. She would not have known him if she passed him on the street. They shook hands.

"Sit down, Mariya," he said, and they both sat, in large shabby chairs. Across the bare floor between them lay a bar of Aisnar's unalloyed, inimitable autumn sunlight. "I have the alcove, but the Panins let me use this room while they're out. They both work the day shift at the GPR."

"That's where you work too – evening shift? I was going to leave a note."

"Usually I'd be on the way to work by this time. I've had some days off. Flu."

She should have expected him not to ask any questions. He disliked answering them, and seldom asked them. It was his self-respect that prevented him, a self-respect so entire that it included all other men and women, accepted them as responsible, exempted them from question. How had he survived so long in this world of the public confessional?

"I have a two-week holiday," she said. "I work in Krasnoy, teaching. In the primary schools."

It confused her to see his smile on the face of a man she did not know.

"I'm divorced from Givan."

He looked down at the sunlight on the floor. She answered the next question he did not ask – "Four years ago." Then she took out her cigarettes in self-defense. But she summoned up courage, before laying the smokescreen, to offer him one, reaching out to him across the sunlight: "Smoke?"

"Yes, thanks." He looked at the cigarette, smelled it, and leaned forward happily to the flame of her match. He inhaled the smoke and burst into a cough, a hacking, whacking cough, a series of explosions like heavy artillery, the most noise she had ever heard him make in his life. All through it he held on to the cigarette, and when he had got his breath back he took another draw, not inhaling.

"You shouldn't smoke," she said helplessly.

"Haven't been," he said. Sweat stood out on his forehead, even in his hair, which she now saw was only partly grey. Soon he put the cigarette out with care and stowed the unsmoked end in his shirt pocket. This he did with grace and ease, but then he looked at her with apology. She had not been with him during the years when he learned to save cigarette butts, and so might be embarrassed; and she tried to look impassive, knowing how he disliked causing embarrassment.

The strangers' room, the furniture of some other house, stood silently around them.

"Mariya, what did you come here for?" The question, which would have been any other man's, was not his, nor the voice; only the eyes, clear, frank, and obdurate.

"To see you. To talk to you, I mean, Pier. It got so that I had to. I'm lonely. I mean, more than that, I'm alone. By myself. Outside. There's nobody in Krasnoy that I can say anything to, they don't need me. I used to think, while we were married, you know, that if I were by myself, on my own, I'd find a lot of interesting people, friends, and be on the inside, do you know what I mean? But that was all wrong. You had friends then and I expect you do now. You have a place to stand on when you meet people. I never did, I never made friends. I never have reached another person, except you. I suppose I didn't really want to reach anybody. But now I do." She stopped, and with the same horror with which she had heard him cough, heard herself sob loudly. "I can't stand it very much longer. Everything is falling apart. I've lost my nerve." She went on as fast as she could. "Are people here buying salt? You can't get salt any more in Krasnoy, people buy it all and save it, they say if you wrap yourself in a sheet soaked in salt water it will cure radiation burns. Is that true? I don't know. Is everyone here scared? But it's not just the bombs, there are the other things they talk about, germ warfare, and how there are too many people and more all the time, so soon we'll all be like rats in a box. And nobody seems to really hope for anything good any more. And then you get older, and you think about dying, and in a time like this it seems so mean and pointless. Living and dying both. It's like being alone at night in the wind, it just blows right through me. I try to hold myself up and have some dignity, you know, but I can't believe in it anymore, I feel like an ant in a swarm, I can't do it alone!"

To spare her or himself he had gone to stand at the window, and with his back still turned he spoke, gently. "Nobody can," he said. "But you can't turn back, my dear. Nobody can do that either."

"I'm not trying to turn back. Truly I'm not. I'm just trying to meet you, now, here, don't you see? Here where we are now. Because you're the only person I ever have met. All the others are on different roads, they live in other houses. Didn't you ever think I'd have to come back to you?"

"I never once thought it."

"But I never left you, Pier! I only ran away because I knew I belonged to you, and I thought the only way I'd ever be myself was to get free of you. Myself, myself, a lot of good myself was. All I did was run like a stupid bitch till I got to the end of my leash."

"Well, leashes have two ends," he said, leaning forward as if to gaze through the glass at a rooftop, a cloud, a remote grey mountain-peak. "I let go."

She tried to smooth her hair, which escaped in fierce tendrils from the knotted braids, red-blonde. Her voice was still shaky, but she said with dignity, "I wasn't talking about love, Pier."

"Then I don't understand."

"I meant loyalty. Taking somebody in as part of your own life. Either you do or you don't. We did. I was disloyal. You let me go, but you aren't capable of disloyalty."

He came back to the chair facing her and sat down.

Now she had the courage to look at him, and made sure that his face had not in fact changed; it had been eroded, erased, by sickness or hard times: not change, only loss.

"Look, my dear" – that word was most comfortable to Mariya, though she knew it was only the expression of his general kindliness – "look, my dear, no matter how you put it, you're trying to go back. There's nothing left to go back to. In any sense." And he looked at her with that kindness, as if he wished he could soften the facts.

"What happened? Will you tell me? Not now if you don't want. Sometime. I talked to Moshe, but I didn't want to ask questions about you. I came here thinking you still lived in the house in Reyn Street and … all the rest."

"Well, during the Pentor Government we published some works that got the House into trouble when the R.E.P. came back into force. Bernoy, if you remember him, Bernoy and I were tried that fall. We were in prison up north. They let me out two years ago. But of course I can't work for the state now in a responsible position, and that cuts out working for the House." He still called it "the House," the publishing firm Korre and Sons, which his family had owned and run from 1813 to 1946. When the firm was nationalised he had been kept on as manager. That had been his position when Mariya met him and married him and when she left him, and she had never imagined the chance of his losing it.

He took the cigarette end out of his shirt pocket, took up a matchbox from a table, then hesitated. "Well, what it amounts to is that where I am now isn't where I was during our marriage. I'm nowhere in particular, you see. And we're well out of it. Loyalty really isn't relevant, at this point." He lit the cigarette and very cautiously got a mouthful of smoke.

The table-lamp had a purple, ball-fringed shade to it, something left over from another world. Mariya fiddled with this, tugging at the dusty purple balls as if counting them around the shade. Her face was knotted in a frown. "Well, but where does loyalty count except in a tight place? You sound as if you'd given up, Pier!"

Silence gave assent.

"I haven't been in trouble or in jail, and I have a job, and a room to myself. I'm much better off. But look at me. Like a lost dog. You can at least respect yourself, no matter what they've taken from you, but what I've lost is just that – self-respect."

"You," he said, suddenly white with anger, "you took away my self-respect eight years ago!"

This was not true, but she did not blame him for believing it. She persisted: "All right, then neither of us has any, there's nothing to prevent our meeting."

Silence gave no assent.

Mariya counted off nine cotton balls, then another nine. "What I mean, I ought to say it, Pier, is that I want to see if we can meet again; if I can come to you. Not come back, just come. I could be some help to you, as things are. I was just coming begging, but I didn't know – I can get transferred to a school here. At least we might find a couple of rooms, and when you're ill it's a help to have somebody to look after things. It would be a better arrangement than this, for both of us. It would be more sensible." Her face began to contract with tears again. She could not keep from crying, and got up to go. Her sleeve caught in the ball-fringed shade and pulled the lamp down with a smash. "Oh I'm sorry I came! I'm sorry!" she cried, picking up the lamp, struggling to refit the shade. He took it from her. "The bulb broke, see, the shade clamps onto the bulb. Don't cry, Mariya. We'll have to get a new bulb for it. Please, my dear. It's all right."

"I'll go get the new bulb. Then I'll go."

"I didn't say go." He moved back from her. "I didn't say come, either. I don't know what to say. You go off with that bastard Givan Pelle, divorce me, and then come back to tell me loyalty's the only thing that counts. Does it? Did mine? You told me then that fidelity is a bourgeois pretense invented by married people who haven't the courage to live free."

"I didn't say that, I repeated it, couldn't you tell I learned it from Givan!"

"I don't care where you learned it, you said it, to me!" He gasped for breath. He looked down at the lampshade askew over the socket, and after a minute said, "All right. Wait." He sat down, and neither spoke. A golden beam slid imperceptibly up through the air of the room as the sun's end of it slid down towards the quiet plowlands west of Aisnar. She saw his face through a dust of gold. He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness.

That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.

A gilt-framed mirror hung over the clothes-chest, and she went to it to repair her braids. It reflected the brown air of a parlour long ago dispersed, the walls torn down: but in the mirror the blinds were still drawn. Her face was there only as a blur among many silvery plaques of blindness. She looked behind the curtain and saw a kerosene stove, a cot, a couple of packing-boxes serving as pantry and bureau. She looked at the cot and thought of the oaken bedstead in the house in Reyn Street, white sheets open and the white coverlet thrown back, on hot mornings of summer waking to the sound of fountains through windows left open to moonlight and now radiant with sunlight, the white curtains blowing a little; summers of marriage.

"Ouf," she sighed, squeezed so flat between past and present that she could not breathe. "There should be some place to go, some direction to things, shouldn't there. . . . Pier, what happened to Bernoy?" "Typhus. In jail."

"I remember him with that girl, the one who dropped her pearls in the wine, but they were imitation pearls." "Nina Farbey." "Did they ever marry?"

"No, he married the eldest Akoste girl. She lives over on the east side now, I see her now and then. They had two boys." He stood up, rubbing his face, and now came past her to get a necktie and comb from the box by his bed. He made himself neat, peering into the mirror that refused to see him.

"Listen, Pier, I want to tell you something. A while after we married, Givan told me that one reason he'd wanted to marry me was he knew I couldn't have children. I don't know, he said a lot of things like that, they didn't mean much. But it made me think, it made me see that perhaps that's really what made me leave you. When I found out I couldn't have children, after the miscarriage, you know, it didn't seem so bad. But I kept on feeling lighter and lighter, as if there was nothing to me, I didn't weigh anything, and it didn't matter what I did. But you were real, what you did still mattered. Only I didn't matter at all."

"I wish you'd told me that."

"I didn't know it then."

"Come, let's go on."

"I'll go; it's cold. Is there a shop near?"

"I want to get out." They went down the rattling stairs. At the first breath outside he gasped like a diver into a mountain lake and fired off a short volley of his coughs, but then went on all right. They walked fast because it was cold and because the cold and the golden light and blocks of blue shadow exhilarated them. "How is so-and-so," she asked of various old acquaintances, and he told her. He had not slipped out of the net of friendship, acquaintance, alliance by blood, marriage, work, or temperament, woven over a hundred and thirty years by his family and their House, secured by his status in a provincial city, and enlarged by his own sociable character. She had thought of herself as one born for few, passionate friendships, out of place at the polite and cheerful dinnertables and firesides of his life. Now she thought she had not been out of place, only envious. She had begrudged him to his friends, she had envied the gifts he gave them: his courtesy, his kindness, his affection. She had envied him his competence and pleasure in the act of living.

They went into a hardware shop and he asked for a forty-watt light bulb. While the man was finding it and filling out the Government sales forms for it, Mariya got the money ready. Pier had already put money on the counter.

"I broke it," she said in an undertone.

"You're a visitor. It's my lamp."

"No it's not, it's the Panins'."

"Here you are," he said gracefully, and the man took his money. Cheered by this victory, he asked as they left the shop, "Did you come by Reyn Street?"

"Yes."

He smiled; his face was vivid, the low sun shining full on it. "Did you look at the house?"

"No."

"I knew you hadn't!" The reddish light kindled him like a match. "Come along, let's go look at it. It hasn't changed at all. Would you like to? – if you don't, please say so. I couldn't go past it, when I first got back." They were now walking back together the way she had come alone. "That, of course," he went on quite light-heartedly, "is my reef, my undoing. Yours is isolation. Mine's owning. Love of place. Love of one place. People are not really important to me, you know, as they are to you. But after a while I saw the trick, the point, just as you did; it's the same thing, loyalty. I mean, ownership and loyalty don't actually depend on each other. You lose the place, but you keep the loyalty. Now I like to go by the house. They used it for a Government office for a while, printing forms or something, I'm not sure what it's used for now."

They were soon walking on the dry leaves of sycamores between the walls of gardens and the calm, ornate fronts of old houses. The wind of the autumn evening smelled very sweet. They stopped and looked at the house at 18 Reyn Street: a gold stucco front; an iron balcony over the door that opened straight onto the street; a high, beautiful window to either side of the door, and three windows above. A crab-apple tree leaned over the wall of the garden. In spring the windows of the east bedrooms opened on the froth and spume of its flowering. In the square before the house a fountain played in a shallow basin, and standing near the gate in the wall they heard the small babbling reply of the little naiad-fountain in the garden. When the windows were open in summer the murmur of water filled the house. Against the locked door, the locked gate, the drawn blinds, she remembered open windows filled with moonlight, sunlight, leaves, the sound of water and of voices.

"Property is theft," Pier Korre said dreamily, looking at his house.

"It looks empty. All the blinds are drawn."

"Yes, it does. Well, come along."

After a block or two she said, "Nothing leads anywhere. We come and stand in the street like tourists. Your family built it, you were born in it, we lived in it. Years and years. Not just our years, all the years. All broken off. It's all in pieces."

While they walked, separated sometimes by a hurrying man or an old woman pushing a barrow-load of firewood, as the narrow streets of Aisnar filled up with people coming from work, she kept talking to him. "It's not just human isolation, loneliness, that I can't stand any more. It's that nothing holds together, everything is broken off, broken up – people, years, events. All in pieces, fragments, not linked together. Nothing weighs anything anymore. You start from nothing, and so it doesn't matter which way you go. But it must matter."

Avoiding a pushcart of onions, he said either, "It should," or, "It doesn't."

"It does. It must. That's why I'm back here. We had a way to go, isn't that true? That's what marriage is, it means making a journey together, night and day. I was afraid of going ahead, I thought I'd get lost, my precious self, you know. So I ran off. But I couldn't, there was nowhere else to go. There's only one way. At twenty-one I married you and here it is fourteen years and two divorces later and I'm still your wife. I always was. Everything I ever did since I was twenty has been done for you, or to you, or with you, or against you. Nobody else counted except in comparison, or relation, or opposition to you. You're the house to which I come home. Whether the doors are open or locked."

He walked along beside her, silent.

"Can I stay here, Pier?"

His voice hardly freed itself from the jumble of voices and noises in the street: "There are no doors. No house left."

His face was tired and angry; he did not look at her. They reached his tenement and climbed the stairs and came into the Panins' flat.

"We could find something better than this," she said with timidity. "Some privacy . . ."

The room was dusky, the window a square of void evening sky, without color. He sat down on the sofa. She put the new bulb in the socket, fixed the ball-fringed shade on it, switched it on and off again. Pier's body as he sat awkwardly relaxed, stripped of all grace and of the substance that holds a man down heavy on the earth, was like a shadow among the shadows. She sat down on the floor beside him. After a while she took his hand. They sat in silence; and the silence between them was heavy, was present, it had a long past, and a future, it was like a long road walked at evening.

People came heavy-footed into the room, switching on the lamp, speaking, staring: an ugly, innocent-looking couple in their twenties, he lank, she pregnant. Mariya jumped up smoothing her braids. Pier got up. "The Panins, Mariya," he said. "Martin, Anna, this is Mariya Korre. My wife."

1965