"I wish you'd told me that."

"I didn't know it then."

"Come, let's go on."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He walked along beside her, silent.

"Can I stay here, Pier?"

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

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

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

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

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

1965

The Lady of Moge

THEY met once when they were both nineteen, and again when they were twenty-three. That they met only once after that, and long after, was Andre's fault. It was not the kind of fault one would have expected of him, seeing him at nineteen years old, a boy poised above his destiny like a hawk. One saw the eyes, the hawk-eyes, clear, unblinking, fierce. Only when they were closed in sleep did anyone ever see his face, beautiful and passive, the face of the hero. For heroes do not make history – that is the historians' job – but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war. She was Isabella Oriana Mogeskar, daughter of the Counts of Helle and the Princes of Moge. She was a princess, and lived in a castle on a hill above the Molsen River. Young Andre Kalinskar was coming to seek her hand in marriage. The Kalinskar family coach rolled for half an hour through the domains of Moge, came through a walled town and up a steep fortified hill, passed under a gateway six feet thick, and stopped before the castle. The high wall was made splendid by an infinite tracery of red vines, for it was autumn; the chestnut trees of the forecourt were flawless gold. Over the golden trees, over the towers, stood the faint, clear, windy sky of late October. Andre looked about him with interest. He did not blink.