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. . . ."

"It's about forty miles to Sorg. Walking, you might be there tomorrow night."

"I was thinking that. But with this trouble they'll be policing the ways out of the city, all the roads. . . ."

"Not the roads east."

"I'm a bit scared," she said after a while, gently; no gypsy from the wild lands but only a countrywoman on the roads of ruin, afraid to go alone. She need not go alone. They could walk together out of the city eastward, taking the road up to Grasse and then down among the hills, from town to town on the rolling plain past fields and lone farms until they came in autumn evening under the grey walls, to the high spire of Sorg; and now with the trouble in Krasnoy the roads would be quite empty, no buses, no cars running, as if they walked into the last century and on before into the other centuries, back, towards their heritage, away from their death.

"You'd best wait it out here," he said as they turned onto Geyle Street. She looked up at his heavy face, saying nothing. On the stair-landing she murmured, "Thank you. You were kind to go with me."

"I wish I could." He turned to his door.

In the afternoon the windows of the flat rattled and rattled. His mother sat with her hands in her lap staring out over the flowers of the geranium at the cloud-spotted sky full of sunshine. "I'm going out, mother," Maler said, and she sat still; but as he put on his coat she said, "It's not safe."

"No. It's not safe."

"Stay inside, Maler."

"It's sunny outside. The sunshine bathes us all, eh? I need a good bath."

She looked up at him in terror. Having denied the need for help, she did not know how to ask for it. "This isn't real, this is insane, all this trouble-making, you mustn't get mixed up in it, I won't accept it. I won't believe it!" she said, raising her long arms to him as if in incantation. He stood there, a big heavy man. Down on the street there was a long shout, silence, a shout; the windows rattled again. She dropped her arms to her sides and cried, "But Maler, I'll be alone!"

"Yes, well," he said softly, thoughtfully, not wanting to hurt her, "that's how it is." He left her, closed the door behind him, and went down the stairs and out, dazzled at first by the bright October sunlight, to join the army of the unarmed and with them to go down the long streets leading westward to, but not across, the river.

1956

THE injured quarrier lay on a high hospital bed. He had not recovered consciousness. His silence was grand and oppressive; his body under the sheet that dropped in stiff folds, his face were as indifferent as stone. The mother, as if challenged by that silence and indifference, spoke loudly: "What did you do it for? Do you want to die before I do? Look at him, look at him, my beauty, my hawk, my river, my son!" Her sorrow boasted of itself. She rose to the occasion like a lark to the morning. His silence and her outcry meant the same thing: the unendurable made welcome. The younger son stood listening. They bore him down with their grief as large as life. Unconscious, heedless, broken like a piece of chalk, that body, his brother, bore him down with the weight of the flesh, and he wanted to run away, to save himself.

The man who had been saved stood beside him, a little stooped fellow, middle-aged, limestone dust white in his knuckles. He too was borne down. "He saved my life," he said to Stefan, gaping, wanting an explanation. His voice was the flat toneless voice of the deaf. "He would," Stefan said. "That's what he'd do." He left the hospital to get his lunch. Everybody asked him about his brother. "He'll live," Stefan said. He went to the White Lion for lunch, drank too much. "Crippled? Him? Kostant? So he got a couple of tons of rock in the face, it won't hurt him, he's made of the stuff. He wasn't born, he was quarried out." They laughed at him as usual. "Quarried out," he said. "Like all the rest of you." He left the White Lion, went down Ardure Street four blocks straight out of town, and kept on straight, walking northeast, parallel with the railroad tracks a quarter mile away. The May sun was small and greyish overhead. Underfoot there were dust and small weeds. The Karst, the limestone plain, jigged tinily about him with heatwaves like the transparent vibrating wings of flies. Remote and small, rigid beyond that vibrant greyish haze, the mountains stood. He had known the mountains from far off all his life, and twice had seen them close, when he took the Brailava train, once going, once coming back. He knew they were clothed in trees, fir trees with roots clutching the banks of running streams and with branches dark in the mist that closed and parted in the mountain gullies in the light of dawn as the train clanked by, its smoke dropping down the green slopes like a dropping veil. In the mountains the streams ran noisy in the sunlight; there were waterfalls. Here on the karst the rivers ran underground, silent in dark veins of stone. You could ride a horse all day from Sfaroy Kampe and still not reach the mountains, still be in the limestone dust; but late on the second day you would come under the shade of trees, by running streams. Stefan Fabbre sat down by the side of the straight unreal road he had been walking on, and put his head in his arms. Alone, a mile from town, a quarter mile from the tracks, sixty miles from the mountains, he sat and cried for his brother. The plain of dust and stone quivered and grimaced about him in the heat like the face of a man in pain.