"Well, hang on," he said, putting his arm around her shoulders. "If you hang on, I will."

They sat there, not talking much, as the sun sank into the mist above the plains of April, and the towers and windows of the city yellowed in the falling light. As the sun set they went down the Hill together, out of the silent garden with its beautiful, ruined, staring house, into the smoke and noise and crowding of the thousand streets, where already night had fallen.

1920

The Road East

"THERE is no evil," Mrs Eray murmured to the rose-geranium in the windowbox, and her son, listening, thought swiftly of caterpillars, cutworms, leafmold, blight; but sunlight shone on the round green leaves and red flowers and grey hair in vast mild assent, and Mrs Eray smiled. Her sleeves dropped back as she raised her arms, a sun-priestess at the window. "Each flower proves it. I'm glad you like flowers, Maler." – "I like trees better," he said, being tired and edgy; edgy was the word he kept thinking, on edge, on the sharp edge. He wanted a vacation badly. "But you couldn't have brought me an oak tree for my birthday!" She laughed, turning to look at the October sheaf of golden asters he had brought her, and he smiled, sunk heavy and passive in his armchair. "Oh you poor old mushroom!" she said, coming to him. A big, pale, heavy man, he disliked that endearment, feeling that it fit him. "Sit up, smile! This lovely day, my birthday, these flowers, the sunlight. How can people refuse to enjoy this world! Thank you for my flowers, dear." She kissed his forehead and returned with her buoyant step to the window.

"Ihrenthal's gone," he said.

"Gone?"

"For a week now. No one's even said his name, all week."

It was a frontal attack, for she had known Ihrenthal; he had sat at her dinner-table, a shy, rash, curly-headed man; he had taken a second helping of soup; she could not blow his name away as if it were empty of meaning, of weight.

"You don't know what's become of him?"

"Of course I know."

She traced the round of a geranium leaf with her forefinger and said in a gentle tone as if to the plant, "Not really."

"I don't know whether he's been shot or simply jailed, if that's what you mean."

She withdrew her hand from the plant and stood looking up at the sunlit sky. "You must not be bitter, Maler," she said. "We don't know what's become of him, truly, in the deeper sense. Of him, of all that goes, disappears, is lost to us. We know so little, so very little. And yet enough! The sunlight shines, it bathes us all, it makes no judgment, has no bitterness. That much we know. That's the great lesson. Life is a gift, such a lovely gift! There's no room in it for bitterness. No room." Speaking to the sky, she had not noticed him get up.

"There's room for everything. Too much room. Ihrenthal was my friend. Is his – is his death a lovely gift?" But he rushed and mumbled his words, and she did not have to hear them. He sat down again while she went on to prepare supper and lay the table. "What if I'd been arrested instead of Ihrenthal?" he wanted to say, but did not say. She can't understand, he thought, because she lives inside, she's always looking out the window but she never opens the door, she never goes outside. . . . The tears he could not cry for Ihrenthal strained his throat again, but his thoughts were already slipping away, eastward, towards the road. On the road, the thought of his friend still was with him, the imagination of pain and the knowledge of grief: but with him, not locked inside him. On the road he could walk with sorrow, as he walked through the rain.

The road led east from Krasnoy through farmlands and past villages to a grey-walled town over which rose the fortress-like tower of an old church. The villages and the town were on maps and he had seen them once from the train: Raskofiu, Ranne, Malenne, Sorg: they were real places, none over fifty miles from the city. But in his mind he walked to them on foot and it was long ago, early in the last century perhaps, for there were no cars on the road nor even railroad crossings. He walked along in rain or sunlight on the country road towards Sorg where at evening he would rest. He would go to an inn down the street from the stout six-sided tower of the church. That was pleasant to look forward to. He had never come to the inn, though once or twice he had entered the town and stood beneath the church portal, a round arch of carven stone. Meantime he walked along through the weather, with a load on his back that varied in weight. On this bright autumn evening he walked too far, till the coming of darkness; it got cold, and fog lay over the dark hollow fields. He had no idea how much farther it was to Sorg, but he was hungry and very tired. He sat down on the bank of the road under a clump of trees and rested there a while in the silence of nightfall. He slipped the packstrap from his shoulders and sat quiet; cold, grieving, and apprehensive, yet quiet, watching mist and dusk. "Supper's ready!" his mother called cheerily. He rose at once and joined her at the table.

Next day he met the gypsy woman. The trolley had brought him east across the river, and he stood waiting to cross its tracks while the wind blew dust down the long street in the long light of evening. Standing beside him she said, "Would you tell me how to get to Geyle Street?" The voice was not a city voice. Black hair, coarse and straight, blew across a colorless face, skin over delicate bone. "I'm going that way," Maler said after a pause, and set off across the street, not looking to see if she came with him. She did. "I never was in Krasnoy before," she said. She came from the plains of a foreign land, windswept plains ringed by far peaks fading into night as nearby, in the wild grass, the smoke of a campfire veered and doubled on the wind over the flames and a woman sang in a strange tongue, a music lost in the huge, blue, frozen dusk. "I've never been out of it, not to speak of," he answered, looking at her. She was about his age, her dress was bright and shoddy, she walked erect, quiet-faced. "What number?" he asked, for they had come to Geyle Street, and she said, "Thirty-three," the number of his house. They walked side by side under the streetlamps, he and this delicate foreign wanderer, strange to each other, walking home together. While getting out his key he explained, "I live in this building," though that really explained very little.

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

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

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