A Fable

Carrying the gather of eggs in the loop of her apron, Marya, the elder sister, crossed the yard toward the house as though borne on a soft and tender cloud of white geese. They surrounded and enclosed her as though with a tender and eager yearning; two of them, one on either side, kept absolute pace with her, pressed against her skirts, their long undulant necks laid flat against her moving flanks, their heads tilted upward, the hard yellow beaks open slightly like mouths, the hard insentient eyes filmed over as with a sort of ecstasy: right up to the stoop itself when she mounted it and opened the door and stepped quickly through and closed it, the geese swarming and jostling around and over and onto the stoop itself to press against the door’s blank wood, their necks extended and the heads fallen a little back as though on the brink of swoons, making with their hoarse harsh unmusical voices faint tender cries of anguish and bereavement and unassuageable grief.

This was the kitchen, already strong with the approaching mid-day’s soup. She didn’t even stop: putting the eggs away, lifting for a moment the lid of the simmering pot on the stove, then placed rapidly on the wooden table a bottle of wine, a glass, a soup bowl, a loaf, a napkin and spoon, then on through the house and out the front door giving onto the lane and the field beyond it where she could already see them—the horse and harrow and the man guiding them, the hired man they had had since the death of her sister’s husband four years ago, and the sister herself moving across the land’s panorama like a ritual, her hand and arm plunging into the sack slung from her shoulder, to emerge in that long sweep which is the second oldest of man’s immemorial gestures or acts, she—Marya—running now, skirting among the old craters picketed off by tiny stakes bearing scraps of red cloth where the rank and lifeless grass grew above the unexploded shells, already saying, crying in her bright serene and carrying voice: ‘Sister! Here is the young Englishman come for the medal. There are two of them, coming up the lane.’

‘A friend with him?’ the sister said.

‘Not a friend,’ Marya said. ‘This one is looking for a tree.’

‘A tree?’ the sister said.

‘Yes, Sister. Cant you see him?’

And, themselves in the lane now, they could see them both—two men obviously but, even at that distance, one of them moving not quite like a human being and, in time nearer, not like a human being at all beside the other’s tall and shambling gait, but at a slow and terrific lurch and heave like some kind of giant insect moving erect and seeming to possess no progress at all even before Marya said: ‘He’s on crutches:’ the single leg swinging metronome and indefatigable yet indomitable too between the rhythmic twin counterstrokes of the crutches; interminable yet indomitable too and indubitably coming nearer until they could see that the arm on that side was gone somewhere near the elbow also, and (quite near now) that what they looked at was not even a whole man since one half of his visible flesh was one furious saffron scar beginning at the ruined homburg hat and dividing his face exactly down the bridge of the nose, across the mouth and chin, to the collar of his shirt. But this seemed to be only outside because the voice was strong and unpitying and the French he addressed them in was fluid and good and it was only the man with him who was sick—a tall thin cadaver of a man, whole to be sure and looking no less like a tramp, but with a sick insolent intolerable face beneath a filthy hat from the band of which there stood a long and raking feather which made him at least eight feet tall.

‘Madame Demont?’ the first man said.

‘Yes,’ Marya said with her bright and tender and unpitying smile.

The man with the crutches turned to his companion. ‘All right,’ he said in French. ‘This is them. Go ahead.’ But Marya had not waited for him, speaking to the man on crutches in French:

‘We were waiting for you. The soup is ready and you must be hungry after your walk from the station.’ Then she too turned to the other, speaking not in French now but in the old Balkan tongue of her childhood: ‘You too. You will need to eat for a little while longer too.’

‘What?’ the sister said suddenly and harshly, then to the man with the feather in the same mountain tongue: ‘You are Zsettlani?’

‘What?’ the man with the feather said in French harshly and loudly. ‘I speak French. I will take soup too. I can pay for it. See?’ he said, thrusting his hand into his pocket. ‘Look.’