It was a frontal attack, for she had known Ihrenthal; he had sat at her dinner-table, a shy, rash, curly-headed man; he had taken a second helping of soup; she could not blow his name away as if it were empty of meaning, of weight.
"You don't know what's become of him?"
"Of course I know."
She traced the round of a geranium leaf with her forefinger and said in a gentle tone as if to the plant, "Not really."
"I don't know whether he's been shot or simply jailed, if that's what you mean."
She withdrew her hand from the plant and stood looking up at the sunlit sky. "You must not be bitter, Maler," she said. "We don't know what's become of him, truly, in the deeper sense. Of him, of all that goes, disappears, is lost to us. We know so little, so very little. And yet enough! The sunlight shines, it bathes us all, it makes no judgment, has no bitterness. That much we know. That's the great lesson. Life is a gift, such a lovely gift! There's no room in it for bitterness. No room." Speaking to the sky, she had not noticed him get up.
"There's room for everything. Too much room. Ihrenthal was my friend. Is his – is his death a lovely gift?" But he rushed and mumbled his words, and she did not have to hear them. He sat down again while she went on to prepare supper and lay the table. "What if I'd been arrested instead of Ihrenthal?" he wanted to say, but did not say. She can't understand, he thought, because she lives inside, she's always looking out the window but she never opens the door, she never goes outside. . . . The tears he could not cry for Ihrenthal strained his throat again, but his thoughts were already slipping away, eastward, towards the road. On the road, the thought of his friend still was with him, the imagination of pain and the knowledge of grief: but with him, not locked inside him. On the road he could walk with sorrow, as he walked through the rain.
The road led east from Krasnoy through farmlands and past villages to a grey-walled town over which rose the fortress-like tower of an old church. The villages and the town were on maps and he had seen them once from the train: Raskofiu, Ranne, Malenne, Sorg: they were real places, none over fifty miles from the city. But in his mind he walked to them on foot and it was long ago, early in the last century perhaps, for there were no cars on the road nor even railroad crossings. He walked along in rain or sunlight on the country road towards Sorg where at evening he would rest. He would go to an inn down the street from the stout six-sided tower of the church. That was pleasant to look forward to. He had never come to the inn, though once or twice he had entered the town and stood beneath the church portal, a round arch of carven stone. Meantime he walked along through the weather, with a load on his back that varied in weight. On this bright autumn evening he walked too far, till the coming of darkness; it got cold, and fog lay over the dark hollow fields. He had no idea how much farther it was to Sorg, but he was hungry and very tired. He sat down on the bank of the road under a clump of trees and rested there a while in the silence of nightfall. He slipped the packstrap from his shoulders and sat quiet; cold, grieving, and apprehensive, yet quiet, watching mist and dusk. "Supper's ready!" his mother called cheerily. He rose at once and joined her at the table.
Next day he met the gypsy woman. The trolley had brought him east across the river, and he stood waiting to cross its tracks while the wind blew dust down the long street in the long light of evening. Standing beside him she said, "Would you tell me how to get to Geyle Street?" The voice was not a city voice. Black hair, coarse and straight, blew across a colorless face, skin over delicate bone. "I'm going that way," Maler said after a pause, and set off across the street, not looking to see if she came with him. She did. "I never was in Krasnoy before," she said. She came from the plains of a foreign land, windswept plains ringed by far peaks fading into night as nearby, in the wild grass, the smoke of a campfire veered and doubled on the wind over the flames and a woman sang in a strange tongue, a music lost in the huge, blue, frozen dusk. "I've never been out of it, not to speak of," he answered, looking at her. She was about his age, her dress was bright and shoddy, she walked erect, quiet-faced. "What number?" he asked, for they had come to Geyle Street, and she said, "Thirty-three," the number of his house. They walked side by side under the streetlamps, he and this delicate foreign wanderer, strange to each other, walking home together. While getting out his key he explained, "I live in this building," though that really explained very little.
"I'd better ring," she said, "it's a friend of mine that lives here, she's not expecting me," and she looked for the name on the mailboxes. So he could not let her in. But he turned from the open door and asked, "Excuse me, where do you come from?" She looked at him with a slight smile of surprise and answered, "From Sorg."
His mother was in the kitchen. The rose-geranium flared bright in the window, the asters were already fading. On edge, on the edge. He sat in the armchair, his eyes shut, listening for a step overhead or through the wall, the light step that had come to him not across foreign plains with gypsies but down the familiar road in twilight, the road from Sorg leading to this city, this house, this room. Of course the road led westward as well as eastward, only he had never thought of that. He had come in so quietly that his mother had not heard him, and seeing him in the armchair she jumped and her voice rang with panic: "Why didn't you say something, Maler!" Then she lit the lamps and stroked the withering asters and chatted.
The next day he met Provin. He had not yet said a word to Provin, not even good morning, working side by side in the office (Drafting and Planning, Krasnoy Bureau of the State Office of Civil Architecture) on the same plans (State Housing, Trasfiuve Project No. 2). The young man followed him as he left the building at five.
"Mr Eray, let me speak to you."
"What about?"
"About anything," the young man said easily, knowing his own charm, and yet dead serious. He was good looking, bearing himself gallantly. Defeated, smoked out of his refuge of silence, Maler said at last,-"Well I'm sorry, Provin. Not your fault. Because of Ihrenthal, the man who had your job. Nothing to do with you. It's unreasonable. I'm sorry." He turned away.
Provin said fiercely, "You can't waste hatred like that!"
Maler stood still. "All right. I'll say good morning after this. It's all right. What's the difference? What does it matter to you? What does it matter if any of us talks or doesn't talk? What is there to say?"
"It does matter. There's nothing left to us, now, but one another."
They stood face to face on the street in the fine autumn rain, men passing around them to left and right, and Maler said after a moment, "No, we haven't even got that left, Provin," and set off down Palazay Street to his trolley stop. But after the long ride through mid-town and across Old Bridge and through the Trasfiuve, and the walk through rain to Geyle Street, in the doorway of his house he met the woman from Sorg. She asked him, "Can you let me in?"
He nodded, unlocking the door.
"My friend forgot to give me her key, and she had to go out. I've been wandering around, I thought maybe you'd be home around the same time as yesterday. . . ." She was ready to laugh with him at her own improvidence, but he could not laugh or answer her. He had been wrong to reject Provin, dead wrong. He had collaborated with the enemy. Now he must pay the price of his silence, which is more silence, silence when one wants to speak: the gag. He followed her up the stairs, silent. And yet she came from his home, the town where he had never been.
"Good evening," she said at the turning of the stairs, no longer smiling, her quiet face turned away.
"Good evening," he said.
He sat in the armchair and leaned his head back; his mother was in the other room; weariness rose up in him. He was much too tired to travel on the road. Bric-a-brac from the day, the office, the streets milled and juggled in his mind; he was almost asleep. Then for a moment he saw the road, and for the first time he saw people walking on it: other people. Not himself, not Ihrenthal who was dead, not anyone he knew, but strangers, a few people with quiet faces. They were walking westward, towards him, meeting and passing him. He stood still. They looked at him but they did not speak. His mother spoke sharply, "Maler!" He did not move, but she would never pass him by. "Maler, are you ill?" She did not believe in illness, though Maler's father had died of cancer a few years ago; the trouble, she felt, had been in his mind. She had never been sick, and childbirth, even the two miscarriages she had had, had been painless, even joyous. There is no pain, only the fear of it, which one can reject. But she knew that Maler like his father had not rid his mind of fear. "My dear," she murmured, "you mustn't wear yourself out like this."