"I'm all right." All right, all right, everything's all right.
"Is it Ihrenthal?"
She had said the name, she had mentioned the dead, she had admitted death, let it into the room. He stared at her bewildered, overwhelmed with gratitude. She had given him back the power of speech. "Yes," he stammered, "yes, it's that. It's that. I can't take it – "
"You mustn't eat your heart out over it, my dear." She stroked his hand. He sat still, longing for comfort. "It wasn't your fault," she said, the soft exultation coming into her voice again. "There's nothing you could have done to change things, nothing you can do now. He was what he was, perhaps he even sought this, he was rebellious, restless. He's gone his own way. You must stay with what is real, what remains, Maler. His fate led him another way than yours. But yours leads home. When you turn your back on me, when you won't speak to me, my dear, then you're rejecting not only me, but your true self. After all, we have no one but each other."
He said nothing, bitterly disappointed, borne down by his guilt towards her, who did depend wholly on him, and towards Ihrenthal and Provin from whom he had tried to escape, following an unreal road in silenceand alone. But when she raised her arms and said or sang, "Nothing is evil, nothing is wasted, if only we look at the world without fear!" – then he broke away and stood up. "The only way to do that is go blind," he said, and went out, letting the door slam.
He came back drunk at three in the morning, singing. He woke too late to shave, and was late to work; after the lunch hour he did not go back to the office. He sat on in the dark simmering bar behind Roukh Palace where he and Ihrenthal had used to lunch together on beer and herring, and by six, when Provin came in, he was drunk again. "Good evening, Provin! Have a drink on me."
"Thanks, I will. Givaney said you might be here." They drank in silence, side by side, jammed together by the press at the bar. Maler straightened up and said, "There is no evil, Provin."
"No?" said Provin, smiling, glancing up at him.
"No. None at all. People get in trouble for things they say, but when they're shot for it it's their own fault, eh, so there's nothing evil in that. Or if they're just put in jail, all the better, it keeps them from talking. If nobody talks then nobody tells lies, and there isn't any real evil, you see, only lies. Evil is a lie. You have to be silent, then the world's good. All good. The police are good men with wives and families, the agents are good patriotic men, the soldiers are good, the State is good, we're good citizens of a great country, only we mustn't speak. We mustn't talk to one another, in case we tell a lie. That would spoil it all. Never speak to a man. Especially never speak to a woman. Have you got a mother, Provin? I don't. I was born of a virgin, painlessly. Pain is a lie, it doesn't exist – see?" He brought his hand down backwards on the edge of the bar with a crack like a stick breaking. "Ah!" he cried, and Provin too turned white. The men at the bar all round them, dark-faced men in shoddy grey, glanced at him; the simmering murmur of their talk went on. The month on the calendar over the bar was October, 1956. Maler pressed his hand to his side under his coat for a while and then silently, left-handed, finished his beer. "In Budapest, on Wednesday," the man next to him repeated quietly to his neighbor in plasterer's overalls, "on Wednesday."
"Is that true, all that?"
Provin nodded. "It's true."
"Are you from Sorg, Provin?"
"No, from Raskofiu, a few miles this side of Sorg. Will you come home with me, Mr Eray?"
"Too drunk."
"My wife and I have a room to ourselves. I wanted to talk with you. This business." He nodded at the man in overalls. "There's a chance – "
"Too late," Maler said. "Too drunk. Listen, do you know the road between Raskofiu and Sorg?"
Provin looked down. "You come from there too?"
"No. I was born here in Krasnoy. City boy. Never been to Sorg. Saw the church-spire once from a train going east, doing my military service. Now I think I'll go see it closer up. When will the trouble start here?" he asked conversationally as they left the bar, but the young man did not answer. Maler walked back across the river to Geyle Street, a very long walk. He was sober when he got home. His mother looked hard and shrunken, like a nut dried around its kernel. He was her lie, and one must keep hold of a lie, wither around it, hold on. Her world without evil, without hope, her world without revolution depended on him alone.
While he ate his late dry supper she asked him about the rumors she had heard at market. "Yes," he said, "that's right. And the West is going to help them, send in airplanes with guns, troops maybe. They'll make it."
Then he laughed, and she dared not ask him why. Next day he went to work as usual. But on Saturday morning early the woman from Sorg stood at his door. "Please, can you get me across the river?" Softly, not to wake his mother, he asked what she meant. She explained that the bridges were being guarded and they would not let her across since she had no Krasnoy domicile card, and she must get across to the railway station to go back to her family in Sorg. She was a day late already, she must get back. "If you're going to work and I went with you, you see, they might let you cross. . . ."
"My office won't be open," he said.
She said nothing.
"I don't know, we could try it," he said, looking down at her, feeling himself stout and heavy in his dressing-gown. "Are the trolleys running?"
"No, they've stopped, people say everything's stopped. Maybe even the trains. It's going on over there on the west side, in River Quarter, they say."
In the early light under a grey sky they went together through the long streets toward the river. "They'll probably stop me," he said, "I'm only an architect. If they do, you might try to get to Grasse somehow. The trains going east stop there, it's a suburban station. It's only five or six miles from Krasnoy." She nodded. She wore the same bright shoddy dress; it was cold, and they walked fast. When they came in sight of Old Bridge they hesitated. Across the bridge between the fine stone balustrades stood not only the idling soldiers they had expected but also a huge black thing, hunchbacked and oblique, its machine-gun snout poked out towards the west. A soldier waved aside his identification cards, told him to go home. He and the woman returned up the long streets where no trolleys ran, no cars, and few people walked. "If you want to walk on out to Grasse," he said, "I'll go with you."
The coarse black hair whipped over her cheek as she smiled, bewildered, a countrywoman astray. "You're kind. But will the trains be running?"
"Probably not."
The colorless delicate face was bent pondering; she smiled a little, faced with the insuperable.
"Have you children at home, in Sorg?"
"Yes, two children. I was here trying to get my husband's compensation, he was hurt in an accident at the mill, he lost his arm. . . ."