The way into the St Lazar Prison was through a twelve-foot gate in an iron fence, across a strip of cobbled yard, through a second gate in a second fence and under a tunnel of naked stone formed by the four-foot-thick walls of the building, and so into a corridor off which a large, vaulted room opened to the right, the warders’ room. The air in the corridor and the warders’ room was damp, with a sweet, musty odor. Windowless, the room was as silent as a wine-cellar or a cave, yet a queer, disagreeable rumor just beneath the range of hearing suggested that behind the further walls and doors the place was not silent, not empty, but crammed full, jammed, swarming. Luisa Paludeskar kept her head high as she and the official who accompanied her waited in the warders’ room for the prison clerk. She held her silk skirts in one hand to keep them from the moist, filthy floor. She did not look about her, did not speak. This was her hour of victory. She had worked for it for twenty-six months.
Two clerks hurried in, wiping their mouths from lunch, and then an immensely tall, fat man in the uniform of a lieutenant of the Polana militia. The official with Luisa opened his mouth to speak but she beat to it, saying in a clear voice the words that she had earned the right to say: “Lieutenant, Mr Konevin brings you an order from the High Court, signed by the prime minister, countermanding the sentence of the prisoner Itale Sorde.” The big man put out his hand for the paper which Luisa’s companion offered him. “How do, Mr Konevin,” he muttered, staring at Luisa. “Yes, indeed. Your servant, miss.”
“Baroness Paludeskar, Lieutenant Glay,” Konevin muttered; muttering seemed to be the natural form of speech here. “You’ll find it all in order, Glay. Immediate release. See there.” They bent their heads over the document and muttered lower. The lieutenant held the paper away from his enormous body as if afraid it would scorch him. “Yes, yes, Larenzay, look up Sorde Itale, entered December ’27.”
Both clerks raised their heads. On entering the room they had gone one to a table, the other to a desk, and sat down, without speaking and scarcely glancing at Konevin and Luisa. The one at the table had a head that grew straight out of his shoulders, with a warty, grey face. The one at the desk was thin and wiry with long, lank hair and a mouth like a razor-cut. “Sorde?” he said, and the name spoken aloud was startling in this muttering oppressive silence. “Sorde’s dead.”
“Dead? When?”
“Last week. End of the week.”
“I see. We’re having the epidemic, you know,” the lieutenant informed Konevin and Luisa. “Worse than usual this year. Look up the entry, Larenzay.”
“White ledger. Specially recommended prisoner,” the neckless clerk mumbled in a deep bass.
“Get the burial list for February, Larenzay. Please to sit down, baroness, please to sit down.” The huge lieutenant brought up a chair for her and dusted it with his sleeve. Luisa did not sit down. She feared to move at all. Her ears sang, a shrill hum. The lank-haired clerk argued, the neckless one mumbled, the lieutenant muttered, Konevin put in an exasperated remark. She heard nothing they said, only their grotesque voices, frogs on the marshes of hell.
“Please to sit down, baroness.”
“It may take some time, baroness,” Konevin said.
She gave in and sat down, letting her silken skirt drag on the floor. Summoning up all her self-control, she said very softly to Konevin, who stood beside her, “Is he dead, then?”
“Apparently not, baroness,” Konevin replied. Ears here were tuned to whispers: the lank-haired clerk shouted reproachfully as if the others had all been in the wrong, “On the sick list, not the death list,” and the neckless one droned, “Specially recommended.” Luisa shuddered all over and put her hands to her cheeks. The blood which had dropped sickeningly from her head was returning in a hot wave, dizzying her. She sat perfectly still until she knew she could trust herself not to faint and then said in an even voice, smiling a little, to Konevin, “I wonder that a man can stay alive two years in this place.”
“Much longer than that, baroness,” the official answered stiffly. He had made it clear when she met him at the office of the governor that he did not like the business she was on; since entering the prison he had been completely rigid, wearing a fixed look of distaste and exasperation on his round, ruddy face.
“What is the epidemic?”
“Prison fever, I suppose,” Konevin answered, and drew a short breath. He was afraid of infection, Luisa realised, and the thought gave her pleasure.
“He has been ill, then? Are they going to release him?”
“Yes, baroness. Look here, Glay, I can’t spend the afternoon here. Tell them to get on with it.”
“In a minute, Mr Konevin, in a minute,” the huge man answered, cringing yet unmoved; this was his domain, not Konevin’s, and both knew it. The lank-haired clerk was writing, his pen scraping with a loud, hard sound like his voice. The lieutenant went to the table, shifted papers about, muttered with the neckless clerk. There was no clock. Luisa sat turning a ring on her finger, pressing her right hand hard with her left, staring at the watery gleam that ran on the grey silk of her skirt; she could barely hold still, she could not endure to wait any longer, but still the unmarked minutes went by and went by, and there was no telling if the time was long or short or if it was passing at all. There was a noise out in the corridor and a guard in militia uniform came in with a tall, bald man in his sixties. They stopped just inside the doorway. The bald man stood stooped over, staring vaguely; he was wearing shapeless grey trousers and an old coat too large for him, and was barefoot. Realising that he was a prisoner, Luisa looked hastily away from him.
“Sorde Itale,” the lieutenant was saying, and the guard was also saying the name, “Sorde, specially recommended!” Sick with disgust and anger Luisa sat still and said, “This is not the man. Will you act on this order of release, lieutenant, or must I come here with the governor of the prison?”
“Not the man? What ward, Liyvek?”
“Sick ward,” the militiaman said. “This is him.”
“Extraordinary inefficiency,” Konevin said, and the lieutenant, suddenly angry and frightening in his anger, swung his great bulk and height towards the militiaman: “Who is this, take him back,” he said, while the militiaman repeated stolidly, “This is him.” The prisoner stood as if indifferent, his empty gaze crossing Luisa’s. He raised his hands to rub his eyes, and with terror she recognised the gesture.
“It is him, it’s him,” she said in a whisper to Konevin. Again all the others heard her whisper, the lieutenant drew himself up righteous and vindicated, the militiaman stepped back and the clerks muttered. Konevin looked at her coldly. She sat still. It was Konevin who went up to the prisoner, although not close to him, and said, in a stifled and embarrassed tone, “Sorde—Mr Sorde?”
The man stood patiently, unresponding.
“We’re here with your release, Mr Sorde. Your sentence is countermanded by the High Court. Do you understand?”
He came back to Luisa. “The man’s very sick,” he said with nervous distaste. “I have no idea what you can do. An impossible situation. Are you quite certain that you…”
“Will you have them finish whatever formalities are necessary, please.”
She did not look at the prisoner.
“One of our officials is bringing the prisoner’s possessions, baroness,” the lieutenant explained, officious and self-confident now, looming over her. “All his belongings when arrest was effected, they’ve been in confiscation, do you see, baroness, nobody has disturbed them.”
“Better send, for the blacksmith,” the lank-haired clerk said, and the neckless one snarled, “Don’t need the smith, he’s been in the sick wards,” and the lieutenant muttered, “Has he a fetter, Liyvek?” and the militiaman answered, “No,” while Konevin walked away down the room clicking his tongue in a fit of impatience and disgust. And finally a guard came in with a valise, a string-tied bundle of clothing, and a small parcel wrapped in paper. The lieutenant opened the parcel and spread out its contents on the table with his enormous, white hands: a silver watch and chain, a pair of cufflinks, some copper change, a penknife. “The gentleman’s jewelry and all, you see, baroness, nothing has been touched,” he said. The valise and the bundle were spotted with a soft, bluish mold. “Can we go now?” Luisa said, but there were still papers to be prepared, the neckless clerk was writing something that must be written before they could go.
“You can’t put the man in your cab, baroness,” Konevin said to her in a low voice as they stood at the desk. “The…state he’s in…”
“What do you suggest I do instead?” Luisa demanded, and in reaction to Konevin’s pusillanimity she brought herself to go up to the man in grey and speak to him. She said his name and did not know what else to say. He did not seem to look directly at her, nor did he answer directly, but after a while he spoke, in a thin, hoarse voice: “May I sit down?”
His body and clothing stank of sweat and sickness. The coat he wore had been red or plum-colored, but was black with dirt. She could not touch him. She pointed to the wooden chair. “Yes, sit down.” He did not move. Once he rubbed his hand hard over his face in that gesture terribly familiar to her, and then stood again, patient, blinking his swollen eyes.
“The fever, you know, baroness,” the lieutenant was saying as he held out a set of folded papers to her. “Makes ’em dull, no doubt he’ll be better soon. This here is the order of release, this is his passport, Mr Konevin will explain, the guard will take his things out for you. An honor to be of service to you, baroness.”
The guard who had brought Itale in was gone, and Konevin would not help her; the clerks and the lieutenant were watching, malevolent. She had to take Itale’s arm to make him move, to make him come with her, out of the warders’ room, under the stone arch; he shuffled, lame and unsteady. When they came out onto the cobbled yard into the clear, cold sunshine of a day of March he stopped and put his hands up over his eyes in pain.
“Come on, come with me,” she coaxed him. The guards at the prison entry, the guard at the outer gate, stood watching, curious and without sympathy. What she was doing was wrong, was against what they wanted, what they stood for, what they stood there for keeping the gates looked and the doors shut. What she had imagined and anticipated a thousand times as the moment of triumph was humiliating and grotesque. The driver of the cab that she had kept waiting stared at the shambling man with her and said, “Not inside,” and she had to give him ten kruner before he would let Itale ride inside the cab. Then she must climb into that cramped box with him and sit beside him, in uncontrollable aversion from and fear of his misery, his illness, his abjectness. He sat crouching, the hairless head nodding when the cab jolted, the hands lying lax on his thighs very large and dead white, like the hands of the lieutenant in the warders’ room.
Konevin, who rode with the driver, proved most serviceable when they reached the hotel. She had planned to spend the night at the hotel and then take Itale on in her carriage to her Sovena estate, fifty miles to the north; the first part of that plan was dropped without discussion. Konevin found her horses and a landaulet, and got the hotel people to make up a bed in Luisa’s carriage. When this was done it was late afternoon. Itale in her carriage, and she in the landaulet with her maid, set off one behind the other, down the steep streets of Rakava, out the old north gate, past the factories, onto the long downslope of the highroad north.
Roads were bad after the March rains. The Ras was in flood, and they had to go thirty miles out of their way to Foranoy, to cross at the bridge, and thirty miles back to the north road, so they were three nights and two days getting to their destination. The sick man continued most of the time in the same lassitude and indifference, asleep or in stupor, but when they arrived in the early morning he was feverish and could not walk at all. Luisa’s letter to the housekeeper had suffered the usual mail delay, so the house was half ready and half in cold disorder. It was raining. Luisa had the sick man put to bed, and sent for the doctor; but before he arrived she went to bed herself, worn out, and slept for twenty hours.
The doctor, a sour man of the veterinary-barber-physician breed, said the patient was suffering a relapse brought on by the cold and discomfort of the journey. “Cold and discomfort,” Luisa repeated sarcastically, thinking of the walls of St Lazar; but she made no explanations to the doctor, having learned already, from the guards at the prison gate, from the cabdriver, from her maid, from her own feelings, not to mention jail. If the doctor knew, or could admit that he knew, where his patient had spent the last two years, he would consider both the man and the woman whose house he was in with contempt. He would take her money of course and provide his services, but he would hold himself superior. Good men do not get put in jail.
Why was it like this, why was all her triumph turned to shame and mere, wretched inconvenience? He lay there sick and stupid day after day. He had never even clearly recognised her, never said her name, he was utterly out of reach, his mind gone. She did not dare ask the doctor if that blank stupor was caused by the disease or not, if it might lessen if the disease were cured, what hope of recovery there was. She looked into the sickroom once a day. She was unwilling to admit to herself that the sight of Itale now frightened and disgusted her, the bald head (shaved for lice, the doctor said), the blank look, the bony, yellowish body restless and yet slack. If she must look at that sick body it would take the place of the remembered lover, the young man in his strength. Those few nights, those few hours that she held to be the chief treasure of her life, the only time she had ever touched another person, would be tainted, degraded, with the prison taint, the smell of sickness and mortality. She would have nothing left at all. She must cling to the past, and to the future, when he would be himself again. But this was the future that she had dreamed of so long: Itale freed, the two of them here in the lonely house in the returning spring.
It went on raining. They could not keep the house warm. The old housekeeper was ill and querulous; the steward of the estate came daily with questions she could not answer intelligently and justifications for loans, purchases, and sales he had made which she knew nothing about. The doctor came and went, silent and sour, with his bottle of fat black leeches. She rode out daily on one of the stiff-kneed old horses; there had been no hunters or riders to keep up the stables for many years. The peasant tenants went about their business, indifferent to the presence or absence of the landowner. She knew no one any longer in the town, six miles away, where her grandfather had laid the foundations of his fortune speculating on wartime food prices, and had been a great man. Bored and wretchedly lonely, Luisa felt as she had when she was a child here: shoved aside, forgotten. Yet it was she who had isolated herself, telling no one her plans, so that she and Itale could be alone for once…She wrote to Enrike, in Vienna, that he must take his leave early and come spend it at the estate. “I must have you here,” she wrote. “I am at my wits’ end.”
Never had the trials and setbacks, the affronts and efforts of her long siege on the Krasnoy government so exhausted and defeated her as had these two weeks since she went with the order of release to St Lazar. She knew now how much she had enjoyed that siege, the strategies and flatteries, the slow building-up of her influence, the outwitting of the malicious and outpacing of the stupid. She had, always with the single goal, though she might not speak or even think about it for days or weeks, made herself a considerable figure in the politics of the capital. She had done small and great favors for men and women less astute than herself; she had got her brother his diplomatic post in Vienna; she had become a friend of the grand duchess, and a friend of the rabble-rousing deputy Stefan Oragon; Prime Minister Cornelius came to her house on Roches Street for conversation with clever and discreet people; the new minister of finance, Raskayneskar of Val Altesma, had proposed marriage to her as a speculation that would profit them both. The Krasnoy Intelligencer was full of gossip about her, but no one had made a slander, personal or political, stick to her name. She had used all her gifts, used them gallantly, and made a complete, recognised conquest of her aim. She had conquered. And the conquest won by that brave career through the rooms and offices of the powerful, was this.
The sight of the sick man, the memory of the sight of him, tormented her. Why must she be punished? Had she not worked to set him free, had she not succeeded? What was freedom, then? This desolation?
The doctor had supplied a woman from town to look after Itale. One night when this nurse was downstairs eating her dinner Luisa went into the sickroom, driven by an angry restlessness. There was no light but that of a bright fire. She thought the sick man was asleep, but as she came near the bed he spoke: “Who’s there?”
“I am,” she said. “Luisa. Do you know me?” She went up close to him, and spoke aloud, impatient and challenging. She could not see his face.
He answered; his voice was weak but natural, his own voice. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Where’s Amadey?”
She went cold and the breath stuck in her throat.
“He is not here,” she whispered at last.
The sick man paid no attention. He turned his head a little. The red firelight shone on the dry curve of his cheek. He lay there gazing straight ahead. Luisa went to a chair at the foot of the bed and sat down; she was shaky now, and soon stood up cautiously to leave the room. As she did so he gave a long sigh and murmured something, then spoke two words clearly: “The snow,” and lay silent again.
She hurried out of the room, went to her own room, and stood at the window that looked out over the front garden. Between running clouds the full moon shone and faded. She saw the road, a straight, light streak between dark fields, leading away from the front gate. When she was a child she had seen that road, on which adults, visitors, her parents, came and went, as freedom: to be hers, her way, when the time came. She would be free to go, to come, as she liked, dependent upon no one. She went on that road now as she liked, she had her freedom. The word had lost its meaning, like the word love. Had she not loved Itale? and he her? But she did not know who he was. She had worked to free a man, and he was not that man who lay sick in the room in this house. What did it mean, that they had been lovers? What had she been to him? He did not know her. He had not said her name. He had asked for a dead man, and he had said, “The snow.” The memories, accretions, complexities, affections, anxieties, the trivial and immense world of which she had for a while been one element, she could hear fragments of that if she wanted to listen to his mind wandering in fever, but then where was she? Astray in a strange place, the world as Itale knew it, his world, of which she was not and had never been the center. To accept the limitless richness, the independence, of a being not her own, was to lose herself. She could not do it. She had never been able to do it but those few times, those hours, which she now denied. What was the good of that, of love so-called, of hands and bodies touching and meeting, all that, when this was the truth, this miserable isolation of the dying body—the sick animal?
She dreamed that night that she was wandering in the streets of a town she had never seen, a town amongst the mountains, and the streets were packed snow; she could not find the place where she was to go, where the packhorse was stabled.
The next day late in the afternoon a caller was announced as she came in from a long ride: Mr Sorde. She stared for a moment in pure bewilderment, almost panic, collecting her wits only when she saw the man waiting for her in the drawing room, a middle-aged provincial gentleman in black.
She came forward, on guard. “I am Luisa Paludeskar.”
The man bowed. “Emanuel Sorde, baroness.”
“Itale’s father?”
“His uncle. His father’s health doesn’t permit him to travel at present. I am sorry to intrude myself on you, baroness. May I see Itale?”
She had not written Itale’s family, nor had she notified any of his friends in Krasnoy of anything beyond the fact of his release from prison. They had written to the family in the Montayna, and this man had travelled across the country simply on the chance that Itale was here. If he had not been here he would have found him wherever he was. He did not ask why she had not written, he did not care; he was simply resolute, he was going to see Itale. She took him upstairs at once.
She left him in the sickroom and went to her room to change, in a dry, bitter mood. How long would it go on? Instead of love and secrecy, she had got sickness and loneliness. Instead of triumph, shame. Instead of Itale, his uncle for company…It was a bad joke. Had she been wrong to look forward to Itale’s release as happiness, for her as well as for him? If she had not been seeking that happiness, how could she have carried on for two years and done all she had done to win his freedom? Where did the fault, the error lie?
The uncle’s presence at dinner relieved her at least from the endless brooding over such questions. He was tired, and hungry, and preoccupied entirely with his nephew. His manner was stiff and wary, but essentially indifferent: she was not what interested him. She began to feel at ease with him. When they spoke of Itale’s illness she asked Emanuel Sorde a question she had never brought herself to ask the doctor. “Even when his fever is down, he…he doesn’t seem to notice things…” She did not explain what it was she feared, but Sorde appeared to understand her, replying, “It’s the disease, I believe, baroness. It’s what the word typhus means. A stupor. It passes. What does your physician say?”
She shook her head. “He won’t tell me even whether Itale is worse or better.”
“The woman says his fever has been down the last two days.”
She had not known that. She sat silent over her scarcely touched plate, while Sorde ate.
“Baroness,” he said rather abruptly, “I saw Mr Brelavay as I came through Krasnoy. He told me what your modesty prevented your writing us. We are so deeply in your debt that it is presumption in me to speak of it.”
She was taken aback; she answered without forethought. “I am not modest, Mr Sorde. I act in my own interest. Itale was my friend. That friend was taken from me; I acted to get him back. That’s all.”
Surprising her again, the provincial lawyer simply smiled and raised his glass with a slight, formal bow of the head. He was, she realised, like Itale, formidable.
“All I ask,” she said, “is to see Itale as he was.”
“That we will not see, baroness.”
“But he is recovering—?”
“I hope so—I dare think so, having seen him, changed as he is. But I do not hope ever to see him as he was.”
He finished eating, laid down his fork quietly, across the plate, country style. He was hateful in his provincial, middle-aged self-assurance. He did not care for her. He did not care what she lost. He was old, and like all the old did not care for the future, did not believe in it.
But if he was right, if Itale was changed, would not be the same again, what future was she looking for?—Again the figure of the warders’ room, pitiful and repulsive, stood between her and the handsome, kindly boy who had been her lover: as if the fever had burnt up all that image like paper, like a bit of paper money in a fire. What was left? The old man, the uncle, was right. They were always right. There was nothing left of Itale but that man upstairs, whom she did not know, whom she did not want to look at, or be near.
A bar of morning sunlight slanted across the bed. The cool gold bathed his hands. Outside the window swallows dipped and swooped, building their nests in the eaves above. He could not watch them long, his eyes blurred, dazzled by the light.
Emanuel was in the armchair, with a book open on his knees, but presently engaged in trimming his fingernails, with a pleasurable concentration on the act.
“How’s Perneta?”
Emanuel looked up keenly, then returned to his trimming-job as he answered, “Very well indeed. A grandnephew of hers came up from Solariy last year, that’s her brother Karel’s daughter’s son, Karel Kidre he’s called, nice young fellow. Gives her a good deal of pleasure to have a relation to spoil. He’s in our office, in fact he’s supposed to be looking after some of my more onerous recurrent duties while I’m here, those damned property lines in Val Modrone. Nothing like a three-generation-long boundary dispute to keep a lawyer cheerful. But I imagine young Karel’s mostly out at Valtorsa, if the weather there’s like this.”
“Count Orlant?”
“He’s fine. Piera is the attraction.”
“Piera?”
“You haven’t forgotten Piera.”
“She’s married. Aisnar.”
“How did you know that story? That’s right, you knew about it before we did—saw her in Aisnar, didn’t you? No, she broke the engagement. They were to be married at Christmas and it was put off till spring and then all at once it was off altogether. That must have been a little while after you were arrested. Never did understand the whys and wherefores. At any rate she’s still not married. Count Orlant lets her do exactly as she pleases, of course, always has. Lets her manage the property, in fact; I’ve handled several matters for her the last couple of years. She is a much better manager than her father, I have to admit. But I don’t know what’s got into these young women. Here’s Laura wanting to do the same thing, as if Guide would let her, and she hasn’t the head for it at all. What do they want to be stewards for? what’s wrong with marriage and a family these days? Handsome women they are, too, both of ’em. Wasteful…”
Emanuel’s voice was deliberate, serene, long pauses between sentences. Itale listened, watching the sunlight on the red cover of the eiderdown on the bed: a dark red, somewhat faded; the fine threads caught the light in infinitesimal streaks of silver. The worn satin was very soft under his fingers. Warmth; softness; sunlight; color; these absorbed him; he must relearn them, little by little. Emanuel’s presence, his voice, his hands, that was the buoy, the raft. It was Emanuel’s touch that had first brought him back from the endless, limitless wanderings of fever: a hand held out, literally drawing him back, holding him in life. And his voice, now, talking easily, meandering among all the names of home.
A week or so later Luisa came up in the evening to sit with them. Itale was propped up a little so that he could watch the fire in the hearth. The lymphatic swellings that had followed the typhus fever were much reduced, and he was comfortable, able to enjoy warmth and rest. Emanuel and Luisa talked a little; he did not pay attention to what they said. She turned to him. “Itale, do you remember the trip from Rakava?”
He thought a while. “No.”
“We had to come round by Foranoy because of the floods. None of the ferries could cross.”
“No…But when…the day I came out. It was bright.”
“Yes, it was sunny, between storms. Windy.”
“I saw the sun.”
“Did you never see the sun in prison?” Emanuel asked, without emphasis, but Itale did not answer.
He never spoke of the twenty-six months in St Lazar, and Emanuel did not press him, saying to Luisa, “It’s best he puts it behind him, no doubt.”
As he grew stronger he did not talk much more. He asked very few questions even of Emanuel, none of Luisa. She left a copy of Novesma Verba on his table, but did not know whether he read it. When he was able to get up, his desire was simply to get outside, to be outside, sitting at first, later able to walk a little in the wild, half-ruined gardens. People of the estate stared at him, tall and unearthly thin still, with his stubble-covered head, a strange figure.
The night before Enrike was to arrive—for he had faithfully answered her plea with a promise to spend part of his leave with her, coming straight, or as straight as possible, from Vienna—she said to Emanuel, “Mr Sorde, I need your advice.”
“Not on anything very important,” Emanuel said drily, and she took the compliment and smiled. They did not like each other, and had come to respect each other’s wit and willpower, and indeed take considerable pleasure in it.
“It is very important.”
“Itale or estate law?”
“Itale.”
“Good.”
“Is he strong enough to hear bad news?”
“I don’t know, baroness. What is the matter?”
“You know that he was a friend of Estenskar, the poet. They were close friends. Estenskar is dead. He killed himself a month or two after Itale was arrested. He probably never knew about the arrest; he was under surveillance too, we now know, his mail was stopped, they were trying to make a charge against him. After his death his brother was arrested and held for a couple of months, and finally released without any charges. Itale stayed with them just before he went to Rakava. So far as I know, he was never told, he doesn’t know that Estenskar is dead. Have you ever mentioned it? has he said anything?”
“No,” Emanuel said with a shake of the head. He clasped his hands and looked down at them, grim. “I’ll tell him, if you like,” he said. “I doubt he’s entirely unprepared.”
“No; thank you for offering to take the burden, but you should not darken your last days with him. I knew Estenskar. I’ll tell him after you’re gone. If you think he is…”
“Oh, he’s hard, baroness,” Emanuel said, still speaking grimly. “He can take it. I think he can take almost anything, now. What he cannot do is give. If you can spare him that, if you can shield him from having to make choices and decisions for a bit longer, let him be here away from people, you’ll have done more for him than the horse-faced doctor did.”
Taking his own advice, Emanuel left that week without ever asking Itale what he intended to do when he left the Sovena. Itale tried to raise the subject himself, the night before Emanuel was to go. “You’re sure that father is all right?”
“You read your mother’s letter.”
“You’ve both been sparing me.”
“No, not really. I believe I told you almost exactly what Dr Charkar told us. His heart is not strong, neither is it actually unsound. He is as active as he ever was, within sensible limits. After all, he is over sixty.”
“That is the problem,” Itale said; and Emanuel frowned.
“Listen, Itale, there is no need for you to decide anything yet, just because I’m off home. Stay here as long as you can, find out where your course lies, don’t let yourself be forced into anything.”
Itale looked at him and then looked away. “Would I be welcome,” he said, so indistinctly and speaking so much aside that Emanuel did not at first understand him, and when he did answered without thinking, shocked, “Of course, don’t be foolish,” brushing aside the question, which only much later, when he was hours gone and well started on his way back home, returned suddenly into his mind, so clearly now and so painfully that he all but cried out aloud, “My God, Itale, how can you ask that? What have they done to you that you can ask that?”
Enrike Paludeskar had arrived a few days earlier, in a wild rainstorm on the first of May, very much out of sorts. He had loyally come to his sister’s call, but that did not prevent him from resenting her expectation that he would coop himself up in the dreary house in the Godforsaken provinces with her and a convicted seditionist fresh from jail. She had no sense, she refused to realise that she was imperilling his position, his career, by making him come here, and indeed by insisting upon keeping Sorde here even while he, Enrike, was in Vienna or Krasnoy. He impressed this upon her pretty forcibly and at length, but when Itale came into the room he turned, stared, and then put out his hand. His heavy face had gone pale. He tried to say something but could not; he shook Itale’s hand, and put his left hand timidly on his shoulder, then awkwardly pulled away. “I hear, I hear you’ve been ill,” he said stammering.
He never succeeded after that in looking Itale in the face or talking naturally with him. Fortunately Itale spoke very little, and Enrike did not have to try to explain his guilt and revulsion to Luisa. He could not make it out. It was the government, the commonplace, decent men he worked with, whom Sorde had been trying to subvert; it was the same government, the same decent men, who had taken Sorde and done this to him. It was incredible, unreasonable. He could not solve the problem, and Itale, by embodying it, made him miserable.
“How do you like your work in Vienna?” Itale asked him once, conventionally enough, and Enrike gasped and groped—“It’s—interesting, and all that—I don’t do anything significant, really—open letters, you know, and all that—”
“Harry,” Luisa put in, drawling, “you mean you censor the mail?”
“No, no, no, nothing of that sort, for God’s sake, Luisa! What do you think I am? No, official letters, letters to the ambassador—dispatches and that sort of thing!”
He said nothing more to Luisa about sending Sorde away. He planned to leave himself, however, as soon as he could. Luisa did not need him, anyhow; she had begun collecting acquaintances as she always did, a crazy mixed lot, but she always mixed her lots.
These were neighbors, some of them neighbors at a distance of thirty miles, but they thought nothing of riding clear across the province if a full table and a hot political discussion awaited them at ride’s end. Duke Matiyas Sovenskar, heir to the Orsinian throne, lived on his enormous estate twenty miles to the north, and no one forgot his presence though he had not left that estate for years. The province was thick with retired officers of the defunct national army, old now but still bitter. Their club, the Friends of the Constitution, had lately been revived in emulation of the young liberals in the capital. They sounded out Luisa cautiously, until they found who the man staying with her was. In Krasnoy she was considered a woman who had liberal friends but whose influence lay in conservative circles; in the Sovena, because Sorde was with her, they took her for a radical patriot. Enrike protested, accused her of hypocrisy and of meddling with things she didn’t understand, was reminded that she had despite her lack of understanding meddled him into his diplomatic post, and left, defeated as always.
Luisa had begun to enjoy herself again. Grey-headed ex-colonels fought Leipzig over in the echoing salon, while their sons, landowners of the rich Sovena estates, toasted first Duke Matiyas—“Sovenskar, the Constitution, the Nation!” and then their hostess. Baron Agrikol Laravey-Gotheskar, six foot two and black-mustached, broad-chested, magnificent, drank to her and smashed his glass into the fireplace. She missed the weight of such men as Raskayneskar or Johann Cornelius, whose benign manners concealed real political power, yet she liked these noisy, quarrelsome Northerners. Their power was only personal, but it was immediate. She wanted to laugh whenever Laravey-Gotheskar smashed another wine glass, and yet she was stirred, her eyes met his fiery gaze. “Baron, your flattery has cost me three pieces of my grandmother’s crystal,” she told him, and he, furious as she expected, “Flattery! You misjudge me, baroness!”—and stalked off frowning tremendously to sulk, until the nearby discussions turned the course of his passions and he threw himself into the fray shouting, “But Vienna will hear no voice, gentlemen, but the voice of blood and iron!”
They were all, even Laravey-Gotheskar, very gentle with Itale. He took no part in their discussions, and generally excused himself early from the company. There was no need to explain or excuse his silence and withdrawal; the reason was all too visible, though he had been gaining a little weight and color as spring turned to the clear, bright northern summer. He still spent all day outdoors if he could. He could walk and ride a little; he talked with people on the estate; there was no reason, Luisa thought, why he could not talk with these men, his equals in education and like him in background and opinions. What kept him silent, then?
“There is a chance Laravey-Gotheskar might get the vacant seat for the Sovena. You could tell him so much he needs to know about the Assembly, Itale. He is extraordinarily naive.”
“I’m not the one to tell him.”
“Why not? Who knows more about it than you? The mistakes you could save him from making—”
“But I don’t know about it. I’m out of date. I didn’t even know till recently that Amiktiya had been suppressed. I can’t seem to take things in.” He looked at her for a moment, diffident. “And Estenskar,” he said, very low, as if apologetic.
It was three weeks since she had told him of Estenskar’s death. He had taken the news quietly and spoken of it quietly, asked questions, and then let it drop. She was disturbed by his mentioning Estenskar now, inappropriately.
“I wish you would help Laravey-Gotheskar. He’s very young, very naive, but not stupid. I should think he is exactly the kind of man your people want in the Assembly.”
“He is.”
“He reminds me sometimes of you. When you were fresh down from your mountains.”
Itale smiled a little forcedly, and she realised that she had hurt him by the comparison.
But everything hurt him, it seemed, and he was afraid of everything. He dodged away, evaded, withdrew; he would not commit himself, would not participate. The only person he had sought out for himself was the Lutheran pastor of the village, an amateur mathematician, an uncouth elderly misogynist. He and Itale would sit out in the garden with a book or two, the pastor explaining, Itale listening, a lesson in gibberish—calculus, binomials, God knows what. When Luisa’s impatience expressed itself in mild sarcasm, Itale explained stiffly that he had tried to occupy his mind with mathematics “before he was ill,” and finding he knew very little had wanted very much to learn more. “I can do that now,” he said. She had to let him and his pastor be. But he could not sit forever in the garden pretending to be a schoolboy again, evading all the problems about which he had been so passionate, the cause for which he had suffered, avoiding her.
There was a houseful of guests; in the evening, when once again Itale escaped again as early as he could, she felt some resentment or humiliation, and said to Laravey-Gotheskar, “If only I could interest him in all the things that meant so much to him!” The young baron, deaf to her self-pity and tolerating no criticism of the hero, frowned. “We talk, we talk, why should he listen? He has lived what we talk about!” Luisa was pleased. Itale had used to scold her that way, but no longer; Laravey-Gotheskar was the first man in years to give her a moral rebuke. “I’m afraid it was my disappointment speaking,” she answered meekly, “I miss him when he hides himself away.”—“Of course,” said the young man, and brooded, sunk in an awful tangle of enthusiasm, admiration, and jealousy, exactly where Luisa wanted him.
It was the trouble with him. For all his unpredictable pride, she could put him where she wanted him. There were only two men whom she had never been able to bend to her whim, though one had twice asked her in marriage and would ask her again if he thought it any use, and the other had been her lover: George Helleskar and Itale. Helleskar had taught her all she had ever known of fidelity; Itale had given her, a few times, for a little while, fulfilment. He had freed her, then, as she had freed him.
Why was that not enough, to be free and set free, to unlock the doors?
When her guests had left, and she must face again the long days of silence, a seeming intimacy that was increasing estrangement, she found herself angry with Itale, impatient; it was time he pulled himself together. “Why will you not talk to them?” she demanded. “They believe all you used to believe—do you hold yourself above them?”
He looked at her with an incredulity that shamed her for a moment.
“What I say to them?” he asked, in the diffident tone she disliked in him.
“Have you lost your faith in the power of words, then? Or in the Constitution, and impartial law, and all the rest of it, all you went to jail for—has that become unimportant to you, like everything else?”
“Like everything else?”
“You are indifferent to them, to me, to everything.”
He had no answer.
“You won’t even speak. How am I to know anything of you, or you of me, after this—this time—”
“What can I say?” he repeated, rigid, obdurate, and she realised with horror that he was holding nothing back from her: that he was in fact unable to speak. He was hard, Emanuel Sorde had said, but it was the hardness of rock, without resilience, mere ultimate coherence like a rock that is itself until it is broken. She could break him. He had no defense. He could do no more than resist her, withstand her, who had freed him and was now his jailer.
On St John’s Eve the wide horizon of the night flared with scattered bonfires. Every village, every outlying farm had its fire. Bagpipes droned by the crackling, lurid stacks of heath and straw, the young men and women danced, the old men drank; the night was full of voices, noises, half-lit, running figures. Luisa stood with her maid in the zone between darkness and firelight, and watched the girls of the village tuck up their skirts and leap across the coals, in the rite as old as the fields they worked, the leap across the fire from barrenness to fertility. The older women watching laughed and shouted obscene encouragement. Men were quarreling already over by the big fire, working up to the fight that always followed drinking. Luisa watched, repelled, excited, envious, contemptuous, until Agata, who found it all frightening, made her come away. When she was back at the house she felt stifled indoors, and went out again at once to walk in the garden, watching the distant glare and dying of the fires.
“Luisa.”
She stopped short. He stood not far from her, on a path by an overgrown hedge which made a mass of blackness in the cloudy moonlight; she could not see his face.
“I didn’t want to startle you.”
“You didn’t,” she said, though he had. “Who could be afraid on a night like this? Were you out to see the fires?”
He came towards her and stopped again. He was bareheaded in the warm night. He stood there tall and patient, and again she saw the grotesque and pitiful figure of the warders’ room. Why must he look like that, why must he stand like that?
“They were dancing at the bonfire in the village, it was exciting to see. The peasants here are pagans, underneath all their sour Lutheran twaddle. They’re not civilised at all.”
“May I talk to you a moment, Luisa?”
“Nothing would please me more!”
“I think I should leave soon.”
“I see. Well, that would certainly prevent any further conversation…” She could not control her irritation, more than irritation, a blind anger with him.
“You know that I am grateful,” he said very low.
“For God’s sake, Itale! It’s not your gratitude I want. If you want to stay, stay, if you want to go, go. You’re free, you don’t seem to realise it. All I want is for you to realise it, to behave like it.”
They walked on to the end of the path side by side. The moon, some nights past full, stood over the low black lands eastward. To the south four fires reddened the smoky darkness.
“Your wanting to go implies, I gather, that you’ve decided we are no longer to be lovers.”
He stopped and faced her. “I have decided? Luisa—” His voice shook. He took a breath, and with painfully evident effort said, “It has been decided for us.”
“Nothing is decided for me. I make my own choices!”
“Can you choose to want to touch me?”
“What do you mean,” she said, terrified.
He stood still, and she knew that he could say no more, and that it was the simplest thing in the world to prove him wrong: all she had to do was take his hand, touch his cheek, touch him. Or let him touch her.
She took a step back from him.
“It isn’t fair,” she said in a whisper. “It isn’t fair!”
After a while he said, “I don’t know very well what’s fair any longer. I don’t want to cause you pain, Luisa. I never wanted to. And never did much else.”
“Why must it be so stupid!” She looked at herself in the dim light, her shawl and the heavy skirt and flaring sleeves of her dress, her hands. “Why am I like this, why am I trapped in this? Why can’t I be free, free of it? Why can’t we do what we like?”
“O my dear,” he said in shame and pain, and he held out his hands to her.
“I wish I was dead,” she said, and turned, and walked away from him.
In the morning when they met she was calm and polite. “Well, what shall we do, Itale?” she said. “Shall we effect a joint triumphal entry into the capital, or shall we go back one by one? How soon do you want to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you well enough to ride, do you think?”
He nodded.
“I think I must stay for Laravey-Gotheskar’s party. He invited Duke Matiyas, I should love to see that old man…Do you want to stay for that? it’s in two weeks. If not I don’t know why you shouldn’t go when you choose. Take old Sheikh, I suppose he’s the likeliest one of the old nags to last all the way to Krasnoy.”
His gaze was on her, unhappy, the blue eyes.
“Then I’ll follow in mid-July. Enrike goes back to Vienna then, I may go with him. I’ve learned not to stay in Krasnoy in the summer. It’s dead. Dead center of a defeated country. I hate defeat.”
She looked at him as she spoke, and he looked down.
“When shall you go, then?”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Very well.”
“I haven’t much to take,” he said, getting up. “And all of it your gift. You know that, Luisa. The horse, the…the shirt, the life…”
But she would accept no comfort; not from him.
He left in the early morning. She bade him farewell in the house, downstairs; he went out to the stables, she up to her room. She stood at the window and watched him ride out the gate and straight away down the straight road between the level fields. He looked back once, half turning in the saddle. She did not lift her hand.
Itale rode down from Grasse in late evening of the last day of June. Tired, on a tired horse, he rode through the drab fields of burdock, shards, shacks, tramps, sour earth, and into the long streets of the Trasfiuve, and crossed Old Bridge under the statue of St Christopher of the Wayfarers, remembering the morning of the autumn equinox three years ago. He put up at a small inn just off Molsen Boulevard, ordered dinner, and went to bed very soon after he had eaten. He would look up his friends, take up his life, tomorrow; tonight he wanted only to sleep. The room was small and with the curtains drawn very dark. He got up again at once and drew back the curtains, opened both the windows wide to the warm, noisy city night. He had almost fallen asleep when the bell of the cathedral, a few streets away, struck ten. After that he lay wide awake in the darkness suffering all the memories and presences of his time in Krasnoy from the moment when he had first heard that bell strike, the two years in which so much life had been compressed that they seemed to lie like a fiery bar of sunlight between the remote, long, quiet years in the shadow of the mountains and the unimaginable but immediate past, the twenty-seven months of darkness.
As he breakfasted in the hot morning at a street cafe in the River Quarter he debated going back to the inn, lying low for another day. He had not got much rest; he mistrusted himself, his energy, his strength. What would he have to face, here? Riding from the Sovena he had been very nervous at first, avoiding every town entry and possible check-point that he could avoid, dreading the request to show his papers. That dread had lessened as he was, at one point and then another, checked cursorily and passed. But what was the situation here? He did not really know, and was apprehensive. However, he had to take Luisa’s horse to the Paludeskar stables in Roches Street; and he was going to have to get some money. He could not afford another night at the inn. Emanuel had loaned him fifty kruner, of which he had sixteen left in his pocket; less than he had arrived with the first time, five years ago. Less all round, he thought, coming back down from Old Quarter to the river and walking up the boulevard under the trees by the bright water. Less cash, less strength, less time to live; less of a man to stand up against the storming of the human world and the universe at his mind and body, the storm of light and wind and sensation and passion that never ceased, never rested, until death; for the walls of a building, a prison, were dust in that storm. He felt peculiarly slight, light, insubstantial as he walked up the wide street by the river, a flickering thing, exposed, uncertain. This mote, this speck between the sun in its gulfs of light and the earth with its long shadow, this was himself, Itale Sorde, and he was supposed to withstand the entire universe in order to remain himself; not only that, to do his job; to be a part of it. It was a strange business to be a man walking in the sunlight, stranger than to be a stone, or a river, or a tree holding up its branches in the July heat. They all knew what they were doing. He did not.
He passed two little girls hurrying with their hard-breathing nurse towards the far mirage of a sherbet-vendor’s cart. He saw their pigtails bob on their thin shoulders. How long since he had seen a child? He had reached the office of Novesma Verba. He turned to the parapet and leaned his hands on it, watching the bright Molsen go towards the sea. So far to go from this inland country, my shoreless kingdom Amadey had scaled it in the Ode, so far to go for a bitter end, and nameless…Come on, he said to himself, come on, Itale, and straightened up, turned, crossed the street, went up the stairs to the journal’s office. In his determination, and out of old habit, he did not knock but went straight in. A young fellow stepped out in front of him from behind the table: “What d’you want?”
“Who’s here?” Itale said stammering, unnerved; he did not know whether he had forgotten this man, or never known him.
“Mr Belavay is busy with a visitor. I’m Vernoy.”
He was young, twenty at most, and shone with self-confidence. Itale, vulnerable to every impression, was impressed by that youthfulness, and casting about for something to say asked, “Are you from Amiktiya?” Then he remembered that the student society had been put under ban and several of its leaders at the University in Krasnoy arrested, a few months before his release. It was a very stupid question, and the boy rapped out, “Who are you?”
“Sorde, Itale Sorde. Sorry. I wanted—”
“You’re Sorde?” Itale said yes, he was. Vernoy fell to pieces like wet paper, waved his hands, ran for Brelavay. Brelavay came, carrying his dark face like a long, ironical signboard on top of his long body, exactly the same, unchanged, so that Itale laughed with pure joy at the sight of him; but his friend, embracing him, sobbed and would not let him go.
“Here, come on, Tomas…”
They could not look at each other.
“Come on. Wait, here it is.” Brelavay found his handkerchief and blew his nose. “Almighty Christ, Itale,” he said tenderly. “What did you have?”
“Have?”
“What were you ill with?”
“Typhus.”
“No joke, eh?”
“Not a very good one.”
“Here, come along, why are we standing around my handkerchief like a scene from Othello? Sangiusto’s in here, remember him, Itale? Almighty Christ! to say your name again!—Where are you staying? I didn’t try to write you in the Sovena, your baroness said better not to when she wrote, has to watch her reputation, political of course. She kept you hidden there long enough. I expect you needed it.” He had his arm around Itale’s shoulders and was steering him into the composing-room, where, considerably shaken by his own feelings and Brelavay’s, Itale found himself returning a handshake and looking into a face that completed his confusion by bringing around him the moonlight, the sound of fountains, Luisa’s voice, Piera’s voice, the carriages on Fontarmana Street. When all that subsided he was sitting down feeling a little sick, and the others were around him looking concerned. “Sorry, I’m still shaky—how are you, Sangiusto?”
“Very well, Sorde.”
“You’re staying in Krasnoy?”
“Yes, since two weeks. I’m tired of England, I come here,” said the Italian. He spoke mostly in the present tense; his voice was calm, his manner relaxed, and in his smile there was a hint of complicity. Itale felt at ease with him at once. “But it’s not the same mood here as in ’27, even in Aisnar. It’s agitated…bad-tempered. But who knows? I come from England. Everyone on the Continent is agitated and emotional, neh?”
“What about Paris?” Brelavay asked.
“Oh, well, Paris. The Ultras, Royer-Collard, Article Fourteen, lovers, chestnut trees, old men catching little fishes in the Seine, Paris is always the same and who can predict of her?” They laughed, and again Sangiusto shot a quick accomplice’s glance at Itale. With some sense of playing a role, Itale asked the questions Brelavay had a right to expect him to ask: about recent events, political trends and changes. “If there’s any change,” Brelavay said, “it’s a change of mood, as Sangiusto said. Underneath—in people, in the people. On top, nothing. The ministry’s the same except for Raskayneskar replacing Tarven, the Assembly mumbles on, the grand duchess is ill—maybe—not ill—maybe; all rumor.”
“But three years ago there were no rumors,” said Sangiusto.
Taxes were heavier, Brelavay went on, political arrests increasingly common, “administrative sentences” without trial or term had been introduced, the student society and several other groups had been put under ban, censorship was massive and all mail likely to be read, there had been two bad harvests and unemployment in the cities of the east and center was high. “Some cause for bad temper,” Itale said.
“They blame it all on the Assembly. Even the bad harvests.”
“Your Assembly is the expiatory—what do you call it, the scapegoat for Austria; the prime minister sees to that.”
“How’s Oragon been doing?” Itale asked.
“Damn Oragon,” Brelavay said. “He’s not our Danton, Itale. He’s our Talleyrand. A demagogic one—the shit’s in a wooden shoe instead of a silk stocking—The nation be hanged, if Stefan Oragon can climb a little higher on the gallows!”
“Luisa said that my pardon was largely due to him.”
“It was. He needs our good press, and you were the price he had to pay for it.”
“Well. How…How is Frenin?”
“Fine. He’s in Solariy.”
“For the paper?”
“Living there.”
“In Solariy? What’s going on there?”
“What always did. Students, cattle fairs, everybody asleep by nine. He’s a grain shipper. Doing well, I hear. He left Krasnoy a few weeks after we heard you’d been arrested.” Itale still looked blank. “He got cold feet,” Brelavay said gently.
Brelavay, Frenin, Itale had been friends long before they thought of coming to the capital, and it had been Frenin who brought them, Frenin who said, how long ago, in the park by the blue Molsen in the sunlight, “I’m thinking of Krasnoy…”
It was an old bitterness to Brelavay, to Itale a blow; he could not escape the conviction that to have suffered, to have submitted to evil, though he had had no way at all to refuse it, had made him a cause of evil. It was because of him that Frenin had given up. In the conscious and painful acceptance of this responsibility, he sat silent for a minute; he weighed a broken inkstand that was on the table in his hand, and said finally, “Tomas, did you…do you know anything about Isaber?”
“Absolutely no trace. Nothing. They denied consistently, from the beginning, that he was in St Lazar; claimed he’d been released with an order to get out of the province. Beyond that, nothing.”
He had lived with the boy’s death for two years in prison; he had not known till the hope was taken from him how much hope he had kept, hidden, that when he came out he would find it had been a mistake, a cruel hoax, a nightmare of his own, and Isaber was alive.
This also, this inescapably, was his responsibility; he was answerable for this death.
Brelavay asked him nothing, seeing that he was distressed and assuming that he knew even less than they about what had become of the boy. Sangiusto stood up, stretching, and said in English, “To fresh fields and pastures new…I have eaten nothing.”
“Come on, I told Givan I’d meet him at the Illyrica at one,” Brelavay said, relieved to get away from the unlucky subject.
Givan Karantay had not changed; he was dark and warm as a banked fire. They sat two hours over their coffee-cups, talking. Two or three young men came up and asked if they might be introduced to Mr Sorde. Itale shook their hands and was short with them; they went humbly away.
“You’re their hero, their Valtura, dear fellow,” said Karantay.
“God forbid!”
“God forbid indeed,” Brelavay said. “Valtura’s dead. Died in the Spielberg in ’28.”
“Where Silvio Pellico, who knew Byron, is now,” said Sangiusto in his calm voice. “There must be good company in the Spielberg prison.” Now Itale knew why Sangiusto looked at him as if there were a tacit bond between them. There was. Sangiusto had spent three years in the Piombi in Venice as a political prisoner. Brelavay, Karantay, the young men wanted to hear and dared not ask about his jail term. Sangiusto did not want to hear, did not need to ask. Foreigner, exile, he was Itale’s compatriot.
Arguments concerning Stefan Oragon surfaced occasionally, and in the course of one of them Sangiusto put in, “But he is a professional, isn’t he? and you are amateurs, myself too. The coups d’état are made by professionals. They succeed. The revolutions are made by amateurs.”
“And fail?” Brelavay inquired.
“Of course!”
“But listen, Sangiusto,” Karantay said, “the words are good, it was amateurs that made ’89, all right. The crowds, the people that walked to Versailles and took the Bastille. And the Assembly, the Girondins, the Jacobins, they were lawyers, provincial men of letters, not politicians. But as they learned their trade, as they became professional, the Revolution began to fail, to lead inevitably towards the coup d’état that betrayed it.”
“They did never learn their trade,” the Italian said. “Robespierre is always an amateur. The professional is Napoleon. The question is really this, what is failure, what is success? The Revolution failed, yes, and Napoleon is a very successful man, a conqueror, an emperor, but it was the failure, not the success, that gives hope to our life.”
“Vivre libre, ou mourir,” Itale said, and laughed.
“Exactly, Vergniaud. A professional lawyer, very successful in his profession. A nice lazy fellow, an amateur deputy, unsuccessful. Sklk!” Sangiusto cut his throat with the side of his hand. “A fine career cut short. But first he told us to live free or die. Why did you laugh, Sorde?”
“Found I’d rather stay alive even if not free.”
“Of course. For two years, three years. Or longer. But here we are now, alive and free.”
“Alive,” Itale said.
His money problem had been promptly solved, as Brelavay told him peremptorily that he had twenty-eight months’ wages waiting at Novesma Verba. “It’s been very useful, the most cash we ever kept on hand, I don’t know how many loans we’ve made from it to get people over a thin time. But they always repaid because it was your money, if it was my money or our money they’d have embezzled freely…” Karantay had asked him to come share his rooms; he hesitated. “A friend was keeping my old rooms for me when I went to Rakava. I should go see whether he’s there.”
Karantay went with him into the River Quarter, past St Stephen’s and the Street of Hangman’s Feast, the swarming courts and alleys under toppling houses in the shadow of the Hill of the University. “No change here,” Itale remarked. “Not for five hundred years,” said Karantay. At 9 Mallenastrada, Mrs Rosa, cat-beleaguered, greeted her long-lost tenant without warmth. “Your things are here, Mr Sorde. I’ll be glad to have ’em out of my way.”
“Is Mr Brunoy here?”
She looked him up and down. “No.”
She knew him to be a jailbird. But his voice and clothing said gentleman. She wanted him to be a gentleman, she had had enough of jailbirds in her life, but she could not trust him; he had let her down, and her voice was vindictive as she said, “He died here, two years ago. Kounney’s got the rooms.”
“I see,” Itale said. After a moment he asked submissively if Kounney was in. Mrs Rosa stood aside, and he and Karantay climbed the dark rickety stairs. Kounney came from behind his loom: “We was very sorry to hear, Mr Sorde,” he said. “It’s good to see you.” Itale shook his hand, and stopped to play with the baby, not born when he left and now a solemn two-year-old. The delicate face, the dark eyes gazed into Itale’s. “What’s her name, Kounney?”
“It’s a him, he’s on the small side, makes him look like a girl. We called him Liyve. There’s a couple of things I kept for you here.” Kounney rummaged in the other room and returned with a small packet of papers which he gave to Itale: several letters written from Malafrena in the autumn of 1827, and a scrap of paper, one downhill scrawl of barely readable writing on it—“Prometheus no chains eternal.”
“Mr Brunoy wrote that for you a day or two before he died,” Kounney said.
Itale gave it to Karantay and walked away to the window.
“Did you know him, Givan?” he asked.
“Not well. He used to come to the office for word of you.”
Itale stood with his back turned. “He was an upright man.”
“That he was,” said the weaver. “And a good death. He couldn’t talk when he wrote you that, but at the end he spoke; he raised up and said, ‘I’m ready,’—like a bridegroom going to his wedding. I looked to see who he was talking to. And he lay back quiet and content, and his breath caught like, and he died. I wished the priest had stayed. I never saw a better death.”
“Aye,” Itale said. “It was what he knew how to do.”
He took the slip of paper back from Karantay and slipped it folded into the back of his watch.
“How does it go, Kounney?”
“I’ve kept working.” He looked up at Itale. “We’re in your rooms now, there being six of us we spread out a bit, but if you want—”
“No, I won’t be coming back, Kounney. Did she raise the rent on you?”
“No, and she didn’t ask rent of Mr Brunoy at the end, so that the little he had put by for it and the books and his watch paid to bury him. She’s all right. Knows when times are hard.”
Kneeling, Itale put out his hand to the frail, solemn little boy in his sexless, shapeless, worn dress. “Goodbye, Liyve,” he said. The contrast in size of their hands was too much; he touched the child’s cheek. He stood up, shook hands with Kounney, bidding him goodbye.
They went on to Karantay’s rooms south of the Eleynaprade. Karantay had kept a letter for Itale from Amadey Estenskar, dated February 6, 1828. Itale began to read it, laid it down, and put his head in his hands. “I can’t read anymore letters from the dead,” he said.
Karantay had the top floor of a house, a set of big rooms, sparsely furnished, with high, large windows. Itale paced down the uncarpeted floor and back, and sat down again, wearily.
“They all died today,” he said.
“They haven’t been very good years, these last two or three,” Karantay said gently.
“What’s wrong—what is it that’s wrong, Givan?”
“I don’t know. Speaking for myself, nothing. I go on writing, it’s all I care about, you know, really. I make a living by it; I’m going to get married in September.”
“Married!—To Karela?”
Karantay nodded. He had been in love a long time, and had never been willing to talk about it; Itale could not tell even now whether his reticence expressed coolness of feeling, or suppressed a happiness he felt egoistical and unseemly.
“So as I say, I have all I have ever asked for, for myself. But for us all together, they haven’t been good years. You in jail, Amadey dead, Frenin giving up…Who can blame him? We knew all along we were pounding our heads on a stone wall trying to knock it down. But one’s head gets sore. And addled…Then there’ve been so many searches. And summonses—Tomas has been called up three times now. And these damnable administrative sentences, they frighten us all. And the censorship so heavy I wonder why anybody still bothers to read Verba, sometimes…But they do read it. Our subscription list has doubled in the last year and a half. And there are young men coming up, and men like Sangiusto—there are more of us than there used to be. It’s only that the waiting’s long, and we’ve never known for certain what it is we’re waiting for. No change there. But we’re a couple of years older.”
Itale smiled. The kind sobriety of Karantay’s temper refreshed him now as always. “Waiting…” he said. “That’s not true of you, Givan. You have your work. But I have never worked. I’ve only made ready.”
“The time will come, Itale.”
“Will it? Is there any time but now?”
Karantay did not answer.
“I don’t know, Givan. I have lost—I have no right to speak of this.”
“You have earned the right to speak of anything.”
“No. That’s exactly it. I have earned nothing—nothing. You don’t earn, you don’t gain, where I was, Givan. You lose. You lose the right to talk to people who have—who believe in the powers of light—What I learned there was that I have no rights, and infinite responsibility.”
“That would be infinite injustice. It’s false, Itale.”
“I would rather trust you than myself,” Itale said. “I wish I could. I was—I was a better man, before—” He cut himself off, standing up abruptly. “I’m very tired, maybe I should lie down for a while.”
He went off to the spare room. At eight Karantay looked in to go out to supper with him. He was sound asleep, and Karantay hesitated to waken him. He looked down at Itale’s face, worn and sleep-submerged, and then out the uncurtained, open window westward over roofs and gables and chimneystacks, the high view smoky and shadowed in long evening light. It was hot; there was no wind. Karantay stood there beside the friend he had not hoped to see again, wishing that there would be a wind off the river, darkness, rain. But the weather was steady, it would not change. On the bureau a silver watch lay open. It said two-thirty. Karantay tapped it, but it did not run. He spoke to Itale at last, rousing him, and they went down to the inn where Karantay took his meals.
July passed, a long, hot July, and August came in hot. Itale was still with Karantay. The novelist had pressed him to stay, and he had yielded easily, lacking any real wish to go out and find himself a room. The impermanence of the arrangement, Karantay’s affectionate, reserved companionship, suited him. Companionship, friendship, he wanted very much, but he could not take hold here, he could not recommit himself to anything but his friends. He waited, irresolute, drifting, and increasingly tense, though his health continued to improve; taking comfort in being with Karantay, Brelavay, Sangiusto, and the others; waiting for alternate Mondays when the mail from the Montayna Diligence came in; waiting to decide where he was going to stay in Krasnoy and whether he was going to stay in Krasnoy; waiting, he did not know for what.
George Helleskar was travelling in Germany, not due back for a few weeks. Itale had gone to pay his respects to the old count and had been received with emotion that was painful to him. The tough old man was over eighty now, and his invitation was pleading: “You could stay here, you know, I’ve lost count of the rooms standing empty…” He asked about Luisa, and even mentioned Estenskar, whom he had never liked. “A bit of the real fireworks, that lad. One fine burst and it was over. He had the sense to know it, and not go sputtering on for fifty years, boring the cosmos…”
“I wonder if most of us don’t bore the cosmos,” Itale said to Karantay as they strolled back through the Eleynaprade in the fag end of the warm evening.
“It’s my profession,” said the novelist. “Anyhow, I’d rather bore it than be bored by it.”
A man in what had been a respectable coat came up to them begging; Itale talked with him a while. “That’s a new trade for him,” he said when the man had gone off with their small joint contribution. “How many out of work now? One of every three or four, I should think.”
“Vernoy says the river-docks are working less than half the men this summer.”
“So’s the Assembly,” Itale said with a glance at the Sinalya Palace looming pale and somber behind the splendid chestnut alleys.
“I wonder why the grand duchess has shut herself up in the Roukh.”
“Afraid of demonstrations, Oragon says.”
“The Sinalya is more vulnerable. I wonder what it is she really fears.”
“Damned Austrian cow in the throne room of Egen the Great. She needs to be taught her place.”
Karantay laughed. “You’re fierce, lately.”
“So’s everyone else. It’s hot. We’re tired. My God! we’re tired. Will it ever change? I came here five years ago. All that time—all my life, all our lives, Givan—since we were born, the net’s been drawing tighter, the air’s been getting staler, there’s been less and less room to move. Europe is like a pond in drought, drying up…”
“And the Austrian cattle drinking the last of the water,” said Karantay. They walked on. An owl flew across the path in front of them from one oak to another, hunting, soft as a tossed ball of dark wool in the dusk.
Brelavay, who had taken over Itale’s editorship of Novesma Verba, wanted to give it back to him, but Itale had temporised, and most of the others agreed with him that they had to be cautious: he was, after all, a convicted seditionist, and any public act put both himself and his collaborators at risk. He had drawn enough to live on out of the fund that Brelavay insisted was his back wages, but was not currently on the staff. He served, however, as an unpaid employee, along with Sangiusto, who was working as a very slightly paid reporter at the Assembly. Their reportership was more than anything else a test, to find if they could with impunity reconnect themselves with the journal. So the two of them sat in the gallery of the Assembly Room in the hot afternoons listening to the order of the day dragging on, in Latin, below them among the scanty ranks of the Estates General. No other reporters ever bothered to attend; the Courier-Mercury got its list of motions direct from the president. Sangiusto and Itale allayed their boredom one afternoon by inventing the debates in the Egyptian National Dynastic Assembly of Both Kingdoms on August 11, 1830 B.C.—“The President: I recognise Mr Aphasis, the Deputy from Karnak. Mr Aphasis: My lords, gentlemen! Are we to credit the unsupported allegation of the honorable deputy from. Ptu-upon-Nile that two wagonloads of perishable produce such as pullet-eggs and radishes and a small cart containing mummified cats were detained for sixty-two hours for examination at the West Gate of His Divine Highness’ capital city? Is it positively known, can it be subject to material proof, that the pullet-eggs and radishes were rendered unfit for consumption and that the mummified cats deteriorated in quality due to the alleged detention for examination?…” Brelavay slipped their farce into Novesma Verba, signing it “Cheops,” and the Censor passed it. It was the journal’s last report of debates in the Assembly.
At the opening next day, Prime Minister Cornelius appeared on the rostrum to request adjournment of the Assembly until October, on the part of the Grand Duchess Mariya, whose indisposition, aggravated by the inclement weather, forbade her the study and exercise of judgment required for the sanction or veto of decrees voted by the Assembly convened by her gracious favor. The president, a rightwing noble, closed debate and adjourned the session, and as protest began from the left a concerted exit by the right took enough deputies out that the protesters lacked the quorum of seventy. It all took six or eight minutes. Itale and Sangiusto had to compare notes to be sure they knew what had occurred. They went off at once to the Cafe Illyrica with the news, but it had preceded them; men out of work wanted nothing better than a subject of talk, a subject of indignation. The closure of the parliament to which nobody had paid any attention drew the attention of the whole city. Itale and Sangiusto, themselves out of work again, wandered the hot, restless streets watching and listening. The park was full of people, as if it were some festival day. The City Watch had been posted at the gates of the Sinalya Palace, empty now at the end of its long chestnut-shaded mall. The Palace Guard were on duty at the Roukh, which stood tawny and dour over its square, baking in the August sun. Shops along Palazay Street between the two palaces were mostly closed and shuttered as if for holiday. Molsen Boulevard lay long and empty above the empty river; one barge came down, black in the blinding sun-glare, as Itale and Sangiusto strolled to the journal’s office. Oragon was there, fresh from Court. All doors there, he said, were locked, all mouths shut. Only one rumor was afloat, that a courier had arrived last night from Vienna. But couriers were always arriving.
“The emperor’s dead,” said young Vernoy.
“Almighty Christ!” said Brelavay, “it’s Metternich that’s dead!”
“Impossible,” said Sangiusto. “Metternich lives forever. Is the grand duchess perhaps really sick?”
Oragon, sitting sideways on the long composing-table, his coat off and his stock loosened, shook his big, rough head. “No sicker than yesterday. She was at mass this morning in Roukh Chapel. Cancer she may have. But that won’t explain today’s move.” His voice with its slurring eastern accent dominated all others, and though he looked hot and baffled he was enjoying his power to dominate, to give answers, to force the respect of these selfwilled journalists who had lost confidence in him. He turned now as he always, instinctively, turned to the man in whom he sensed authority or symbolic value for the group, and spoke to him as deep unto deep. “What’s the mood in the streets now, Sorde?”
“Do I know?” Oragon’s knowingness jarred on Itale. “The same as the mood in here, I suppose. We’re all in the same boat.”
“It’s the unemployed mobs they’re afraid of,” said young Vernoy with his sententious and irresistible self-assurance. “They’ve closed the Assembly because it’s a potential rallying-center.”
“Rallying about what?” said Brelavay. “Why the hugger-muggering in the Roukh? Why have all the Ostriches put their heads in the sand?”
“Well, Vernoy must be right,” Karantay said, “but why so abruptly? They’ve created the disturbance they were trying to avoid. It’s not like Cornelius. His reasons must be pressing.”
The discussion went round and round, moved on to the Illyrica, went on, got nowhere. Words and men came and went. It was nine o’clock. Itale’s head ached; he sat gazing at his glass of beer, the drift of foam at the rim. He picked it up and drank it off, and as he set it down saw Oragon making his way among the tables to him. The deputy bent down and said in a low voice, “Come out of here a moment, Sorde.”
“What’s up?”
“I want a word with you.”
He took Itale’s arm and led him off across Tiypontiy Street, but he could not wait till they had got across the street into the park to speak. In the midst of passing traffic, in the dusty darkness broken by cab-lanterns, he said aloud, his face close to Itale’s, “There’s been a revolution in France. King Charles is dethroned. He went too far, violated the Charter—the city wouldn’t take it, they fought in the streets—The Duke of Bordeaux will be made constitutional king.”
They stood still amongst the horses, the rolling wheels.
“Is that it, then?”
“That’s it. Charles tried to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies. Overshot his authority. He abdicated on the thirtieth of July. The fighting must have been over for twelve days now. The new king will be sworn to fealty to the Constitution. It’s the end of absolute monarchy in France.”
“The end,” Itale repeated. The flashing darkness and noise of the traffic, the smell of dust and horse-sweat and hot stone, it was familiar, he knew these words, this moment.
“And the beginning—”
“Where did you find out?”
“Friend in Vienna, through a friend in Aisnar. You and I are among the dozen or so people in the whole country that know it.” Itale was struck by Oragon’s evident satisfaction as he said this, mixed with a kind of urgent confusion. Still gripping Itale’s arm, the deputy went on, “What do we do with it—what do we do with it? It’s a bombshell. Cornelius knows that. What do we do with it, Sorde?”
“Throw it. Let everybody know. That’s what they’re afraid of, isn’t it? You announce it at the Illyrica. I’ll get some fellows to print up something for the provinces.” Itale laughed as he spoke. He felt that the moment was much too large for him, that the noise of hooves and wheels on cobblestones was the only convincing part of it; he and the rest of them were suddenly playing a role in history, and for this reason he felt artificial, like any private man up on a stage. At the same time it was, at last, easy to make decisions. The time had come. All one had to do at such a moment, when the walls fell down, was go ahead in the direction one had always tried to go.
Oragon was flustered and two-minded only because he had never had any one direction to his actions, any fidelity. Enormously ambitious, energetic, emotional, he lacked the necessary passion. But he was very quick. He caught Itale’s meaning at once and wanted no more from him, having received his impetus. “All right, good. Here’s the note from Vienna, with the details. Go to the press as fast as you can before they close it on us. I’ll let the city know.”
As Itale, Karantay, and Sangiusto left the Illyrica together they heard Oragon, up on one of the sidewalk tables, telling the news in his big slurring voice. “The French Revolution is accomplished. They’ve got the freedom they fought for forty years ago. The last Bastille is fallen! And their chance is ours. The same choice, the same chance! Is this France’s victory and glory, or Europe’s, ours? Will we sit quiet and let Metternich send more troops here to keep us quiet and suck us dry? I say recall the National Assembly, and Sovenskar to the throne of the free kingdom!” The traffic seemed to have halted, cab-lamps and cafe lanterns shining on many faces upturned to the orator: all things moveless, as things seen in a flash of lightning. The three men slipped away, hurried down dark streets towards the river.
The short, warm, summer night went by full of the thump and rattle of the presses, shouting, laughter, orating. They printed up a news-sheet over the journal’s name headed, in 72-point type, REVOLUTION. The shop was snowed under with it, it was all over the streets, men and horses were found to carry it to the provinces. It announced what they knew about the Paris revolution, and stated that the National Assembly was remaining in session to consider the urgent questions of relations with the new government of France, tax control, and succession to the throne of the kingdom. “Lots of fuses to that bomb,” Brelavay said when he read it. He and Oragon had been about the city all night, going from one deputy’s house to another to inform them that the Assembly would meet as usual at nine tomorrow. Leaving the printer’s shop Itale went with him and Sangiusto to Cathedral Square, which had been the center of agitation during the night. In the cool of August dawn, under a high, cloud-brindled, colorless sky, the square looked immense and empty. The cathedral stood indifferent as a mountain, intent only on holding up its ponderous, delicate towers and ranks of stone saints and kings. They went on to the Eleynaprade. Down the mall, one behind the other, stood the cavalry of the palace guard, the men sallow and sleepy on tall horses. Behind them on the lawns under the trees swarmed an aimless crowd, thousands of people drifting, dispersing, regathering. The constant movement and the low but immense sound of the voices of the crowd was improbable, bewildering, in the austere and indrawn hour of dawn.
Itale had meant to go on to Karantay’s flat for a few hours’ sleep, but stayed with the others in the crowd. Brelavay went to buy bread and cheese, since they were hungry. He went off and came back at a run, fearing something momentous would happen while he was gone ten minutes. The sky grew lighter, higher. Sunlight touched the crowns of the chestnuts. Nothing momentous had occurred but sunrise. It became a warm August morning. The crowd, grown enormous, now covered all the lawns beneath the grave, ignorant old trees. Itale and the other two had slowly pushed their way along the front of the crowd to the fence surrounding the gravelled area before the palace, and could see and hear the deputies of the left, gathered on the mall in front of the gates, arguing with officers of the guard. Itale was not paying much attention, as he was distracted by the increasing pressure and aimless turbulence of the crowd, and also was extremely sleepy.
“There’s Livenne,” Brelavay said. “Leftwing Noble from the Sovena.”
“They talked about him there. He hasn’t attended all month,” Itale said, and yawned till his eyes watered and he could not see the big, fair, young man who was saying, “Herr Colonel, you have no authority to keep the gates locked. The Assembly Room belongs to the Assembly.”
“Distinguished Sir, there has been no change in our orders,” the colonel of militia said for the tenth time.
“You had best send to the Roukh Palace requesting a change in your orders, Herr Colonel,” Livenne said loudly, and the crowd pressed against the fence a few feet from him shouted in support.
Sangiusto nudged Itale: “Look, they catch two crows.” Two clerical deputies who had come up the mall out of curiosity were trying to depart and found the crowd closed across their way and jeering. They hesitated and came back to join the forty or fifty liberal deputies waiting in front of the iron gates. More jeers and insults rang up and down the edges of the mall, now continuously walled with men; the guardsmen’s horses shifted feet, one tossed its head up and down until controlled. There was a sudden outbreak of shouts and cheers, hats and caps flew up into the sunlight, a gig came rolling up the gravel of the mall between the tall horses and the crowd-walls. “Who is the little old man?” Sangiusto asked as the cheering broke out all around them.
“Prince Mogeskar. Matiyas Sovenskar’s cousin. Nobilissimus. Took some courage to come here.—Long live Mogeskar!” Itale shouted, swept up by the crowd’s enthusiasm. “Long live Mogeskar!” The prince got out of his gig, a pinched, brusque, neat, very old man, and said to Oragon and Livenne, “Good morning, gentlemen. Why are the palace gates shut in our faces?”—himself caught by the affronted, restless, lively temper of the crowd. But they waited. Ten o’clock struck on the deep bell of the cathedral. Eighty deputies stood on the sun-white gravel before the gates. Prince Mogeskar had invited an elderly priest to sit in his gig: “Hot work, this, for old men,” he said, and sat on, stiff and speckless in the blazing light. Stefan Oragon was always near the gig, even held the horse made nervous by the crowd. He was heliotropic, drawn to power as if his own power of winning men was less a gift than a deficiency: he could not stand alone. Yet he knew far better than Mogeskar, or Livenne, or the colonel of the militia, what power was; he knew himself to be the focus of the crowd, the soul of this immense, conglomerate, temporary entity. When he chose to act, they would act.
Itale, bored, thirsty, and half-asleep, shifted from one foot to the other because both hurt. He was staring at the mansards of the palace against the hazy sky, counting windows, when abruptly he felt himself lifted off his feet, picked up, and cried out, “What is it?” in a surge of excitement. He pushed and was pushed, they were no longer standing still, no longer waiting; he heard a guardsman bawling an order in German about the relief of every second man, and the men around him shouting, “What is it? They’re going to fire!” Oragon was up above them all, upon one of the canon that flanked the iron gates, shouting, pointing to the palace. The noise was unbelievable, he could not believe that mere men could make such a noise, yet through it he heard clearly a different sound: tat, tat, a remote, cross, spinsterish voice, and then the scream of a panicked horse. They were pushing, forcing, ground and sucked step by step out of sunlight, into booming corridors, marble underfoot, garlands of roses on the ceilings overhead. Then all at once the ceiling rose up very high, and there was air and room to breathe; they were in the Assembly Room. Itale found he was close armlinked with Sangiusto, and began to comprehend that he with the crowd had forced their way into the palace. Oragon was there, up on the platform shouting orders, trying to gather the deputies out of the mob. Itale rubbed his arms which were sore, rubbed sweat off his forehead, stared around him. “Let’s get out of this, up to the gallery,” he said, and found himself hoarse, as if he had been shouting for a long time; perhaps he had, he did not know. They tried to get to the side door that led to the reporters’ gallery, but were stopped at once by a group coming in, men carrying heavy sacks. The sacks were put down beside the rostrum. The noise of voices in the huge room sank down steadily like waters at ebb. The rostrum was the center of the hush. With all the rest, Itale and Sangiusto came past, and saw that the sacks were dead men. The face of one of them had been shot off. His hands stuck out from his cuffs, stiff and posed, and his cracked shoes stuck up the same way. The ear was visible, normal, intact, a man’s ear, just below the bright red porridge of the face. The other man, middle-aged, did not look dead, but lay there startled, with open eyes. Above that, at the rostrum, they saw a blond, young, strong face, Livenne’s. He was speaking in a clear voice. “These two and the others killed paid a debt not owing. No more! We are not buying our country but claiming it as our inheritance, ours by right. Remember that! There is no need for violence, no need for sacrifice. We are the creditors, not the debtors!” Tears ran down Itale’s face as he stood there, then stopped as suddenly as they had started. He and the Italian began again to try to make their way to the side door and the gallery, but they never got there.
For six hours they stood side by side against the back wall of the Assembly Room while the Assembly, a hundred and thirty deputies among thousands of others, held session. They voted to speak their own language in debate, voted this and all decrees subject to validation by the king alone, voted congratulations in the nation’s name to the new king of France, though they did not yet know who he was, the Duke of Bordeaux or Louis-Philippe of Orleans, and rumors now claimed Lafayette as the president of a new French republic. “They’ll pick Louis-Philippe,” Sangiusto said. “For a whole generation the old mushroom has been waiting, waiting. All things come to him who waits.” Itale nodded, not listening. He listened with strained attention to each speaker but found it difficult to understand or remember what they said. Prince Mogeskar now had the floor. His brusque, precise voice trembled with effort and age. “I will give my allegiance to the House of the Sovenskars, as did my ancestors, and yours. I will do so with joy, when the time comes. But the time has not come. We can call Matiyas Sovenskar king but can we crown him? Can we defend him? Metternich will hear our requests, for he needs peace, but he not listen to our defiance. We have not the strength to defy that power! For the king’s own sake I beg you to wait in determination, not to act rashly!” And all this seemed clear and true to Itale, until Oragon and others replied and proved with equal clarity that the only hope lay in rapid action, the installation of Matiyas Sovenskar on the throne before Austria could intervene. Fait accompli, bloodless revolution, fatal procrastination, Austrian troops, uprising of all Europe, the words spun round, and all the time the point of all the words was incomprehensible, was missing. It was five o’clock. Itale startled himself awake from a momentary standing doze and said, “Let’s get out of here, Francesco.” Again they did not get where they were headed. A deputation from the Roukh Palace had just come in: a dozen palace guards, Raskayneskar the minister of finance, and the prime minister. Cornelius went towards the rostrum, spoke to Livenne and Oragon, smiled his pleasant, bland smile. “Gentlemen, thank you for permitting me to interrupt your debate. I bear a message to you from the sovereign. Her Grace regrets the disappointment caused by the adjournment of session of the National Assembly and, attentive to the wishes of her people, will tomorrow request the reconvocation of the Assembly on Monday next. She has asked me to notify the present gathering that fraternal greetings have been sent to King Louis-Philippe of France, and to thank them for their share in maintaining law and order in the city during the day, trusting that such order will continue without incident, and that the—”
“Without incident? What about the men shot down this morning?”
The interruption from the floor set off a roar of voices, a surge towards the platform, checked by Oragon shouting out, “This is not a gathering, this is the Assembly of the Nation! Tell the duchess that until King Matiyas reaches Krasnoy the sovereign is here, in this hall! Tell her that peace and order depend on her submission to us, the government of the kingdom!”
Cornelius looked at him, looked around, and shrugged. “This is simply folly,” he said. He turned to go, and because he was decisive and the crowd was more intent upon the speaker, he got out, with the chalk-faced Raskayneskar and the dozen guardsmen. “The die is cast!” Oragon was roaring; the hall seethed fantastically in turmoil, frenzy. “Come along, come along,” Sangiusto said, and this time they got out, and stood dazed outside the palace in the still, clear evening air.
At midnight Itale was standing in the darkness on Ebroiy Street a block from Roukh Square, sucking one of his finger-joints that had been scraped raw in handling cobblestones, and carefully studying the torchlit barrier that had been raised across the street where it debouched into the square. Two men near him were arguing in a dreary, savage monotone; he could not distinguish one voice from the other: “Three thousand militia three miles down river at Basre—We’ve got the Roukh cut off—Count on the militia joining us—Who says they will, they’ve got the guns—The guns—” Still nearer him two women sat on the curbstone, one suckling a baby, and they spoke now and then: “So then I told him, I forgot the eggs, I told him…”—“Oh aye, mother of God, what can you do at a time like this?” One sighed, one laughed, “Save up and wait, I told him!…” Men ran by up the street, followed by a queer hollow roaring sound. A group of thirty or more came pulling and pushing a black thing up the street towards the barricade, a cannon. The iron wheels made a gobbling roar on the stones, torches flared around making the shadows lurch and fly. Itale looked down in the torchlight. The baby was very young; its head, lying on the mother’s bare arm, was unbelievably small. After the cannon had gone by he could hear the small smacking noises the baby made in sucking, the women’s dry easy voices, “So I says Oh don’t tell me, you old sow, I didn’t hatch out last week,” and the men arguing, “The streets—The guns—” He went on up the street to the barricade and rejoined Sangiusto there.
It took a long time to get the cannon in place and the barrier rebuilt around it. Men kept coming to see it, to give advice on loading and firing it, to touch it. Of all the men behind the Ebroiy Street barricade one in twenty-five or thirty had a gun. Most of the Novesma Verba men were there, but not Karantay; some said he was still with the Assembly, others that he was on the Gulhelm Street barricade. Itale clambered up to the slanting top of the barrier over the cannon and looked down on Roukh Square. In the uneasy dimness of torches, stars, windowlight from the palace, the big cobbled square sloped slightly downward from the iron palisades of the palace, empty. It was empty all night.
Several men pulled up a couple of the mattresses laid as shot-stoppers on the barricade till they could lie down on then. Sangiusto and Itale lay side by side, their chins on their arms, watching the palace. It was about forty hours since they had had any sleep. At long intervals they spoke to each other.
“What’s that?”
On the next barricade north, Palazay Street, there was something going on, something was being set up or put in place.
“Got another cannon.”
“No, it sticks up into the air.”
They could not make out what it was in the uncertain torchlight. Itale put his head down on his arms. He dreamed and waked in starts and waking did not know what he had dreamed; it was like being in a small boat on quiet water, trailing a hand over the edge so that sometimes the waves touch it sometimes not, one does not know if one is touching air or water. Vernoy climbed up beside them. He shook Itale gently, offered him something, bending down his tired, pleasant young face. He had come by a hatful of apples down in the Ghetto. They all sat up and munched apples, were cheered by eating, talked a little. “What d’you think they’ll do come daylight, Sorde?”
“Wait.”
“I think they’ll try to blow us up.”
“The whole city? They’ll do better to wait for the militia. Apple, Francesco?”
But Sangiusto had gone back to sleep.
“Not long till light, now,” Itale said softly, and then they were all silent for a long time. Northwest over the roofs a pink glow flickered, faded, flickered again, a fire that had got out of hand; there had been a lot of burning in the Old Quarter and other districts. The pink glow faded. The few lighted windows of the Roukh looked wan. Itale looked up: the sky was grey, it was dawn. He woke wide awake, turned over and sat up on the steep-set mattress, looking eastward over Ebroiy Street that dropped away sharply downhill and over the Ghetto lying many-roofed, jumbled, shadowy, between the barricade and the river. To the left rose the Hill of the University, on the far side of which he had used to live. There on the highest point in the city, the cross on the spire of the university chapel, light struck, trembled, steadied; gold crept down the spire, down chimneystacks and roofs of houses crowded rank above rank on the hill. He turned again and saw the battlements of the palace tawny red, alive against the dead blue-grey of the western sky. It was a fine summer morning. He was no longer tired, only very hungry, and though he was excited his thoughts no longer rushed but came simple, detached, concrete: thoughts of what the men in the besieged palace were probably planning, thoughts of people out in the suburbs going about their business and wondering what was going on inside the city, thoughts of what it would be like to be shot down in the street, the stones against his hands and face. He loved Krasnoy, he loved the steep shadowy roofs beneath which people still lay asleep, the sunlit hill, the old palace fierce red in the sunlight, the streets and the stones of the streets. It was his city; his people; his day. “I wish I could shave,” he said aloud, and Sangiusto nodded and yawned. They stood up, stretching, and balanced on the crown of the barricade between the fortress and the risen sun. With the act of standing up the simplification, the clarification of thought and feeling was perfected. Itale was completely happy, standing there empty-handed beside his friend in the indifferent calm of the morning. He had nothing left in the world but the day’s light, no weapon, no shelter, not future. It was for this he had lived and waited. Almost tenderly he thought of the soldiers sweating inside their stone walls there; what was there to worry about? It was the break of day, and standing up there he could have crowed like a cock at daybreak, in pure joy, in celebration of the light.
He glanced at his friend and said, with his hands in his pockets, smiling irrepressibly, “Do you believe in God, Francesco?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“No. Thank God!”
Sangiusto shook his head. He was exhilarated but not exultant, being busy with a premonition amounting to certainty that he was going to get killed today. Freedom was freedom, and often enough he had honestly wished for the privilege of such a death, and yet now it came to the point he was bitter that he could not die for his own country, on his own ground; he was homesick.
“The light shineth in the darkness,” Itale sang aloud, “and the darkness comprehendeth it not!” Sangiusto laughed at the words and the cockcrow tune. Brelavay climbed up beside them, looked around, sat down and took off his shoe. “Had a rock in here all night,” he explained. “Look at that hole in my stocking.”
“You ought to marry. Get your stockings darned.”
“Not till I can marry a countess, like young Liyve,” Brelavay said, cocking his sharp, dark face up at Itale. “Or a baroness at least.”
“She won’t darn your stockings. Look there!”
On the Palazay Street barricade a long pole had been set up, and on it hung, almost unmoving in the quiet air, a red and blue flag. All the men looked at the flag. None of them had seen it raised for eighteen years. Most were too young to remember ever having seen it.
“I’m going round to see if Karantay’s at Gulhelm Street,” Brelavay said. Itale stopped him as he started to climb down: “Listen, if you find Givan tell him we should all try to meet tonight—At the Verba office, I suppose.”
“That’s no good if things go badly.”
“At Helleskar’s, then. All right?”
“That should do. See you in half an hour. Don’t wait breakfast for me!” Brelavay went off, the others stood talking, waiting. A third of Roukh Square now was sunlit.
Since he could not cross the square Brelavay had to make a long semicircle to get round to Gulhelm Street; coming up it, two blocks from the square, he ran into a crowd: civilians surrounding men in uniform. Brelavay could see the white and gold of militia uniforms, but could not make out how many soldiers there were. Evidently a detachment had been sent from the garrison at Basre to make contact with the Roukh guards. A lieutenant and a captain argued with the chiefs of the barricade; the men around Brelavay were pushy and restless, crowding in thicker every moment, itching to get their hands on the soldiers’ guns. They shouted at their spokesmen and at the officers. There was an effort to clear a passage down the street, away from the palace, and Brelavay heard one of the barricade chiefs, a workingman in his forties, telling the captain with exasperation and despair, “Get your men out now, get them out!” The captain took offense. “We shall march on to the palace,” he said in his German accent, and turned to give the order. Brelavay was knocked right off his feet and carried forward some way, suffocated by the pressure of the mob, kicking out like a horse and grabbing for any support. What he had hold of when the pressure lessened was a militiaman’s shoulder strap. He and the soldier stared at each other, their frightened faces six inches apart, while a tremendous continuous noise and the rocking, swaying pressure they were caught in confused them both. “They’re firing,” the soldier said, staring at Brelavay. He tried to break away, and as he did Brelavay wrenched the musket out of his hands. Using the gunstock as a ram to clear his way, he got out of the thick of the crowd. “I’ve got a gun, by God!” he yelled in triumph. He saw nobody to shoot at, and presently it occurred to him that he had no powder and shot. There was no more firing, the mob was scattering. What had happened, what had become of the troop of soldiers, Brelavay did not understand. He saw men lying on the street, a dozen or more of them; there were white uniforms. There was the captain’s gold braid on a body crushed together like a crumpled rag, beaten to death and trampled. Brelavay stood staring at that terrible body. The crowd was streaming on up Gulhelm Street towards the barricade. They would have ammunition. He ran after them in a state of wild excitement, shouting, as several others were shouting, “Wait!”
On the Ebroiy Street barricade, they had heard from the left the small dry sound of shots and then a dull roar like flooding water heard far off; then they saw a confused dark tide come boiling up over the Gulhelm Street barrier and into Roukh Square, now white with sunlight. As the crowd spread into the square it thinned and looked sparse, aimless, like grasshoppers jumping in stubble, Itale thought, but it was hard not to join them as other barricades began to spill over and feed running men back into the square. At the same time he was yelling, “Keep back! Keep back!” to the men who after waiting all night in the streets had heard gunfire and noise and pressed forward trying to see or get onto the square. “Keep back, keep the line!” His teeth jarred together and he thought he was falling. “What was that?” he said to Sangiusto and then realised that the cannon, almost under his feet, had been fired. “Too much powder,” Sangiusto was growling in the smoke. Young Vernoy pushed between them, leapt down from the barricade, and vanished into the mob that now swarmed black across the square and against the iron fence around the palace. Another man tried to do the same but Itale blocked his way and pushed him back and down with all his strength. “Keep back, damn you, hold the barricade!” he shouted in fury, turning constantly to see what was happening in the square. The mob at the iron fence seethed, scaling it, swarming over it, smashing the gates, jamming at the palace doors. “They’re in!” men shouted, and now Itale crouched ready to jump down, to join, he could not hold himself back any longer. But as he paused there the whole scene seemed to pause. Little puffs of smoke which had appeared a moment ago at the windowslits of the palace were evaporating quickly in the sunlit air. The enormous steady crowd-roar continued the same, but there was some change in the crowd’s motion, a swaying and scattering, men still pouring in from the barricades but also a counter-movement, a press back towards the barricades, heavy and disordered, under the white puffs of smoke. Then there was a noise that seemed to stop everything so that Itale crouched motionless, paralysed: the cannons of the Roukh. Nothing now but clambering men around him, men running, and the monstrous, endless sound. Then it ceased and he heard human voices again and saw the square emptied out. The crowds had shrunk away into separate swarms at each barricade; at the iron fence and on the sloping cobblestones men were lying down here and there as if waiting for something. Around the heads of some of these were streaks and blotches of bright red, and a man that came clambering up the barricade at Itale had a great smear of the same red stuff, like paint, over half his face and in his hair. “Leave your guns here at the barricade,” Sangiusto was saying, quiet as a butler taking coats, and several of the fugitives who had muskets handed them obediently to him. “Here, here, take it,” he was telling Itale, and Itale took the gun and shotbag. Red coats, of that same bright paint color, now appeared filing rapidly out of the doors of the palace, which hung open like a black mouth. Sangiusto lay down on their mattress and loaded his gun, aimed it, and fired it; reloaded, aimed, fired. Itale imitated him, but had trouble with his gun, an Austrian army musket; he had never shot anything but a hunting-piece. Presently he lowered the loaded gun, got up, and said, “Come on, Francesco.”
“Why?”
“They’ve gone over the Palazay Street barricade, they’ll be coming around behind us. Let’s head down toward the river.”
They started down Ebroiy Street.
Brelavay had lost his gun and been knocked down twice getting out of Roukh Square. He was now on a rooftop overlooking Palazay Street midway between the Roukh and the Sinalya, along with six other men and a heap of paving-blocks and furniture. The throng below were all civilians, angry after panic but aimless in their anger; the palace guard had turned east and south to isolate the barricades and join up with the militia. Brelavay scanned the crowd constantly, looking for a short dark man and two tall ones, Karantay, Sorde, Sangiusto. They could be anywhere. They could be lying dead on Roukh Square. He was sore, sick, and wrathful. A dozen times he thought he saw one of their faces, then lost it or saw it was a stranger’s. A spatter of gunfire from the south; he listened and watched. If he believed those three were dead he would give up, run, run home. He looked about the quiet rooftops in the morning sunshine, hating the impassioned, hysterical city, the crowds below him. If Sorde and Karantay were dead he would as soon throw himself over with the paving-blocks they had carried up here to dump on the soldiers when they came by. It was not hope that kept him there, in control of himself and of his little rooftop mob; it was the thought of his friends. He had a hopeful spirit, but deeper in him than any conviction lay loyalty, and on that bedrock, obstinate and ironic, he waited.
Hooves were clattering by on Ebroiy Street, while Itale and Sangiusto stood in the darkness inside an arched doorway in the courtyard of a tenement block. The squad passed by, going up the street towards the Roukh. As Sangiusto and then Itale came out of hiding a stooped young woman appeared in the court, two little children huddling close to her. She stood still, looking at them.
“Can you give us water?” Itale said.
She nodded, returned in silence with the children to a dark staircase, and came back with a dipper so that the two men could drink from the covered well in the courtyard. She stood watching them, her face quiet, and when Itale thanked her she said, “Go to Mendel’s, the butcher’s, the men have gone there.” So they went, and found in the yard behind a kosher butcher shop, under silent shuttered tenements and the blank back wall of a synagogue, a couple of dozen Jews planning the Ghetto’s part in the insurrection. They were calm and methodical. One, a man in his thirties with beautiful weary eyes, dominated the discussion by natural authority and because he had a good supply of powder and shot for their empty guns. Itale heard him called Moyshe, and called him so, never learning his last name. Under his direction they occupied a block of rooftops on Ebroiy Street. Presently a file of the red-coated guards appeared coming down from the Roukh, on shining restive horses. The men on the roofs opened fire, a dry clatter of cracks and bangs, foolish and exciting to hear as firecrackers. There was shouting, horses galloped, others with empty saddles neighed, ran down the street, stopped with their reins dragging and looking nervously, peaceably around. In the pause that followed Itale said to Moyshe beside him, “Where did you come by all this ammunition?”
“Last night, when we burned the old armory on Gelde Street.”
“What are you in this for, Moyshe?”
“Because where we stand any change is for the better,” the Jew said, tapping his flask to loosen the packed powder. He glanced aside at Itale. “I could ask, what are you in this for?”
“I like the open air.”
“It’s a game to you.”
“No. It’s not a game.”
“Eight,” Sangiusto said, counting the men they had killed in the firecracker burst. His mouth was tense and he squinted a little, so that he did not look like himself.
Far up at the head of the street where the mounted troop had retreated, on the broken barricade, several small figures had appeared. One raised a megaphone and they heard a thin, bawling voice: “Lay down all weapons and proceed to your houses…four hours…proceed to your…general amnesty is granted for four hours…” Shots were fired from a rooftop, the small figures vanished.
During the morning the Ghetto was not cut off, and men came through constantly with news of fighting on Palazay Street and around the Eleynaprade. For a long time after noon nothing moved on the streets below Moyshe’s group, no one came from north or south. They waited, and their isolation became more and more certain and unbearable, driving them to reconnoiter recklessly, to try to provoke attack. Roukh Square was now full of militiamen from the garrison downriver, and evidently was supplying troops to the northern part of the city. Moyshe’s group at last worked their way back to the rooftops over the barricade and began shooting. The troops got below them and fired the houses on the north side of Ebroiy Street. The wooden tenements burned like haystacks. Women, the women who had been in hiding all day in the courts and rooms, ran out into the street, threw their belongings from windows; as they ran down the plank stairways, the insurgents passed children huddled waiting on the landings, and Moyshe paused to call some urgent question to an old man, who for answer only shook his fist at them and cursed them with impotent hatred. They ran on, out of the buildings, across the sun-bright, crowded street, full of men and women, scared horses, broken bedsteads, falling beams of fire. Moyshe led them in and out of the warren of the Ghetto, coming back always to one place or another on Ebroiy Street, now deserted, scoured by troops of the mounted guards, where they could hold up for a while at the windows of deserted rooms and shoot; but their shot was running out. There were always fewer of them at each run for cover, and in the last they scattered; only Itale and Sangiusto kept together, following Moyshe, and ran straight into a squad of militia, face to face, before any of them had time to lift a gun and fire. They clubbed their muskets, fought through, ran under fire, dodged into a house, through a courtyard, ending up in the butcher’s shop from behind which they had started that morning. They were not pursued. They waited there in hiding. Sounds from the street grew fewer, quieter. An hour went by. Itale got up from his crouching half-doze and went to the door of the shop. It was evening. The sky was clear greenish-blue at the upper end of the street, where he could see the squat north tower of the Roukh. Gutted facades of houses across the way stared calmly at nothing. The air was smoky, warm, and sweet. At his feet lay a bundle of clothing and an old shoe, dropped by a family fleeing the fire.
“It looks like it’s over,” he said.
Sangiusto, then Moyshe, came out beside him. In the last encounter a soldier had brought a riflebutt down on Sangiusto’s hand, and the Italian sat down now on the curbstone holding the injured hand against his thigh with a soft groaning curse. Moyshe went off to look at the body of an insurgent lying down the street near a dead soldier; he turned the head gently so that he could seethe face, shrugged, came back.
“Now what,” said Itale. “Now where.”
“To the devil,” Sangiusto said in Italian. His hand, already badly swollen, hurt increasingly, he was sick at heart, he had not been shot down and killed but had to go on, go through it all over again, the long exile. “Oh what a bitch of a life!” he growled, this time in Piedmontese, and with his left hand whacked the butt of his empty gun on the stones of the street.
“Home,” Moyshe said with his shrug. “And you?”
Itale stood silent.
“You’re welcome to come with me,” the Jew said coldly, ready for the rebuff.
“Thank you,” Itale said, turning to look at him. After this day he knew this man’s face and voice and fine stern eyes as if he had known them all his life, better than he might ever know any other face, but there was nothing between them but trust—everything, nothing. There was nothing left for them to say. “We have to try to find our group,” Itale said. They parted with constrained words of farewell.
Itale and Sangiusto set off for Helleskar’s house, around the Hill of the University, through River Quarter, past the cathedral and across its square, a dream walk, very long, through the red sunset, the dusk. They went tentatively at first, later they walked boldly. They were not halted even by the militia posted in Cathedral Square. Troops of mounted guards passed clattering, foot patrols of the city guard were posted here and there, but not in very much greater number than usual; the streets were emptier than usual, but not empty, there were other men in ones and twos walking, silent and not loitering. No women. A city without women. Itale and Sangiusto talked as they went, sometimes quite coherently, discussing probable causes of the apparent amnesty, trying to construct some idea of what had gone on during the two days of insurrection, what might have happened in the Eleynaprade while they were in the Ghetto, what condition the Assembly was now in. Itale was talkative, made jokes to cheer Sangiusto up, and once remarked, “Well, work’s certain and reward’s seldom…” In Sorden Street he asked what day it was, and as they crossed Roches Street he asked it again. “The fourteenth,” Sangiusto repeated.
“I asked you that before, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“How’s your hand?”
“Like a fire.”
“It’s not far now. We could…” He stopped himself. He had been about to say that perhaps they could stop a minute and rest, and that was foolish, with only two blocks left to walk. He stumbled. “We can stop,” Sangiusto said, his face drawn askew again. “No, it’s just up the street,” Itale said, “with any luck Tomas will be there already.” He thought he had said that before too, and gave up talking. They came to the big, stately house, went under the portal with its coats of arms and caryatids, knocked, and were admitted by the liveried servant. They were crossing the salon to the library, where the lonely old man rose eager and alarmed to meet them, when Itale reached out for his companion’s arm, stumbled again, and pitched down in a faint. Sangiusto, not in much better condition himself, was utterly dismayed, alone among strangers; he fell on his knees beside Itale and tried to wake him, whispering in despair, “Listen, my dear, my friend, listen to me…”
The next afternoon Sangiusto came into Itale’s room with a special edition of the Courier-Mercury, a single sheet printed—since the government presses had been burned on the night of the thirteenth—on some commandeered press, perhaps Novesma Verba’s. The paper contained no news from Paris, nothing about suspension or reconvocation of the Assembly, nothing directly about any event of August thirteenth and fourteenth; only a bulletin, dated the twelfth, of the grand duchess’ request to the Estates General, and a police notice to certain individuals considered illegal residents of the capital, who were hereby ordered to depart the Molsen Province by noon of the 16th August 1830, after which time if found in the City or Province they would be liable to arrest and imprisonment as conspirators against the Government of the Grand Duchy. There followed in smudged, badly set print a list of sixty-three names. Sangiusto read them out, hesitating and squinting, his foreign accent very noticeable. “Breve, Givan Alexis. Rasenne, Luke. Yagove, Pier Mariye. Brelavay, Tomas Alexis. Fabbre, Raul. Frenin, Givan—”
“They’re out of date,” Itale remarked.
Sangiusto went on, twenty or more names Itale knew as acquaintances and some he did not know at all, then, “Oragon, Stefan Mariye.”
“Oragon! And the first deputy. Is Livenne on the list?”
“Count Helleskar has heard that Livenne was killed on Palazay Street.”
“Go on.”
“Palley, Tedor. Palley, Salvate. Vernoy, Roch. Sorde, Itale. Eklesay, Matiyas Mark. Chorin-Falleskar, George Andre.”
“Another deputy.”
Sangiusto finished reading the list. There was a pause.
“Karantay is not on it,” he said.
“No.”
The old count had kept his servants out collecting what news they could and bringing it to him and his two refugees. Karantay was said to have been seriously hurt in the fighting on Palazay Street; there was no report at all of Brelavay or young Vernoy.
“Even Oragon under ban,” Itale said. “That’s a blow.” He spoke rather unnaturally. He was sitting up in bed, one of the mighty beds of the Helleskar house, with great goosefeather coverlets and curtains like the stage curtain of the Opera. He looked haggard and meager, as if he had lost weight again and even height.
“You should get out of Krasnoy at once,” Sangiusto said. “There will be no pardons henceforth.”
“If only I could get some word of Brelavay.”
“He will be in hiding or in jail. You can’t wait to hear of him. You have only twenty-four hours.”
“Will you come with me?”
“I’m not on this list.”
“You may be on another.”
“Almost certainly I am.” Sangiusto spoke with composure. “I’ll wait a little,” he said, “until all is quieter, and then go back to France.”
“I’m going home. Come with me. For a while at least.”
“Thank you, my friend. At a better time, when hospitality is not dangerous to the hosts, I shall come with great pleasure.”
“As a favor to me. You can’t try to cross the border now. You can get to France later when things have quieted down. Of course you’ll want to go there, it’s all over here, there’s nothing for you to stay here for, but it’s not safe to try to leave the country now. You can lie low in the mountains a while. We came out of this together. If I can keep you from getting arrested it’s one thing I can do, there’s nothing else. Let me—”
“Very well, I will come with you,” Sangiusto broke in on the accelerating rush of words. Itale stopped, drew in his breath, and said, “Good.”
They were silent a while. Sangiusto was profoundly relieved, but could not express his relief.
“If the stages are running as usual, the Southwestern Post leaves every second Friday, and the Aisnar Post the next Saturday. This is what, the fifteenth? It would be the Post this week. Three days to wait, then, and I don’t think we can wait here.”
Sangiusto shook his head.
“We can walk.”
“How far is it?”
“Not much over a hundred miles.”
“But we must start at once, to be outside this province tomorrow.”
Sangiusto’s injured hand had been bound up, and the arm put in a light sling to help immobilise it.
“You can’t walk a hundred miles with that,” Itale said in self-disgust, looking at the sling.
“Oh, I think so. But you, I think you’re not well enough, Itale.”
“The count will lend us horses to Fontanasfaray. Ten miles or so. It’s in the Perana. We can walk from there, or wait there for the coach.”
“Good. Have you any money?”
They stared at each other.
“I have some change, I think.”
“In my room at the inn I have a few kruner, but I don’t want to go there, it is a risk.”
“No, don’t go there. The count will lend us enough to get home with. My God! what a fool I am.” Itale rubbed his hands over his face and his still short, rough hair with a laugh. The danger, the absurdity, and the hopelessness of his situation were, at this moment, both clear and meaningless to him. The important thing, just now, was that he not lose this friend, this brave amiable man, along with all the rest and the others lost: that Sangiusto not be arrested. This was as far as his mind would go. He could consider his own risk only in terms of Sangiusto’s, incapable of directly facing the possibility of himself being rearrested, reimprisoned.
He had no hesitation at all asking Count Helleskar for the loan of horses and money, and he joked with the old man, who was reluctant to let his refugees go. Old Helleskar longed to defy the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire to trouble the guests of his house. He argued that neither of them was fit to travel, and that the police would never look for them “here under an old soldier’s roof.”—“Discretion is the entire extent of my valor, count,” Itale said. “We’ll run while the running’s good. Tell George, when he comes home, I think he’ll applaud my variety of valor.” Itale had got up in the late afternoon and dressed in the worn clothes, the old blue coat, that were now his sole possessions. He held himself very straight, to convince Helleskar and himself of his fitness. From time to time he wondered at how he managed to stand up and walk, when he felt so deathly tired, how he arrived at decisions when he could not keep two ideas in order in his head, how he talked and laughed when all the time there was in the back of his throat the tightness of unpermitted tears. From moment to moment he expected this specious vigor to run out, in which case he would no doubt fall flat on his face as he had done last night; and he wished earnestly that he could give up, cast it from him as one tosses away a pebble, and lie down, and rest. There was no more use in it; no point; no direction. But it made no difference. His thoughts and acts stayed chained to that rock of identity, of single unmoved unreasoning the will to remain himself.
Once their course was decided he and Sangiusto had agreed that promptness would best serve both their own interest and their host’s; so he rode, with Sangiusto and a couple of Helleskar grooms, down Tiypontiy Street, past the trees of the park and the silent Sinalya Palace, past the coachyard at West Gate, past the hotel where he had met Luisa, past the tenements and through the northwestern suburb, out onto the plain that lay dun and gold in the light of summer evening, and on towards the hills. From the road above Kolonnarmana they looked back at the city on the curve of the river, a faint scattering of points of light in the wide grey twilight, so delicate it seemed one could take it up in the hand like a piece of silver gauze. They rode on, upward. Remote in the sky over bare hilltops the crescent moon hung for a while. It had set when they reached Fontanasfaray. The air here, a thousand feet above the river valley, was cool. Gulhelm Street was lit softly with colored lanterns, fantastic among tree-shadows. A few strollers passed, open carriages rolled by. They put up at the first inn they came to. “It looks expensive,” Itale said, but Sangiusto said, “We will find one cheaper tomorrow,” and he did not argue. He had noticed as he rode that his horse’s ears seemed at times far off, yards away, and at other times very near; the same was true of the stars, which now drew off together in a clump in the enormous, barren sky, and now came up so close that he felt the cold prickle of their fire under the skin of his forehead and cheeks, a troubling sensation.
They were given a room under the eaves, the only room he had free, said the innkeeper; the resort was full of vacationers escaping the heat of the city. “Yes, it is quite warm in Krasnoy,” Sangiusto said.
As soon as the man left, Itale lay down and closed his eyes. Sangiusto, in intense discomfort from his injured hand, swore a little; he asked some question, but Itale did not answer. He was not asleep yet, and wanted to speak to Sangiusto, but could not speak. He was nearly asleep, and comfortable enough now that he could lie down; only very deep within him, at the depth below dream, the depth where he had lived for two years of solitary confinement, something remained stone-hard, mute, in anguish. Everything was over, finished, gone; only nothing was finished, nothing was done, and he must go on—go back, go home, into exile. He lay still and saw before him in the darkness of his closed eyes the great, quiet slopes of the mountains above the reflecting lake.