Description: The Unreal and the Real BROTHERS AND SISTERS 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. He got back an hour late from lunch to the office of the Chorin Company where he worked as an accountant. His boss came to his desk: "Fabbre, you needn''t stay this afternoon." "Why not?" "Well, if you want to go to the hospital . . ." "What can I do there? I can''t sew him back up, can I?" "As you like," the boss said, turning away. "Not me that got a ton of rocks in the face, is it?" Nobody answered him. When Kostant Fabbre was hurt in the rockslide in the quarry he was twenty-six years old; his brother was twenty-three; their sister Rosana was thirteen. She was beginning to grow tall and sullen, to weigh upon the earth. Instead of running, now, she walked, ungainly and somewhat hunched, as if at each step she crossed, unwilling, a threshold. She talked loudly, and laughed aloud. She struck back at whatever touched her, a voice, a wind, a word she did not understand, the evening star. She had not learned indifference, she knew only defiance. Usually she and Stefan quarrelled, touching each other where each was raw, unfinished. This night when he got home the mother had not come back from the hospital, and Rosana was silent in the silent house. She had been thinking all afternoon about pain, about pain and death; defiance had failed her. "Don''t look so down," Stefan told her as she served out beans for supper. "He''ll be all right." "Do you think . . . Somebody was saying he might be, you know. . . ." "Crippled? No, he''ll be all right." "Why do you think he, you know, ran to push that fellow out of the way?" "No why to it, Ros. He just did it." He was touched that she asked these questions of him, and surprised at the certainty of his answers. He had not thought that he had any answers. "It''s queer," she said. "What is?" "I don''t know. Kostant . . ." "Knocked the keystone out of your arch, didn''t it? Wham! One rock falls, they all go." She did not understand him; she did not recognise the place where she had come today, a place where she was like other people, sharing with them the singular catastrophe of being alive. Stefan was not the one to guide her. "Here we all are," he went on, "lying around each of us under our private pile of rocks. At least they got Kostant out from under his and filled him up with morphine. . . . D''you remember once when you were little you said ''I''m going to marry Kostant when I grow up.''?" Rosana nodded. "Sure. And he got real mad." "Because mother laughed." "It was you and dad that laughed." Neither of them was eating. The room was close and dark around the kerosene lamp. "What was it like when dad died?" "You were there," Stefan said. "I was nine. But I can''t remember it. Except it was hot like now, and there were a lot of big moths knocking their heads on the glass. Was that the night he died?" "I guess so." "What was it like?" She was trying to explore the new land. "I don''t know. He just died. It isn''t like anything else." The father had died of pneumonia at forty-six, after thirty years in the quarries. Stefan did not remember his death much more clearly than Rosana did. He had not been the keystone of the arch. "Have we got any fruit to eat?" The girl did not answer. She was gazing at the air above the place at the table where the elder brother usually sat. Her forehead and dark eyebrows were like his, were his: likeness between kin is identity, the brother and sister were, by so much or so little, the curve of brow and temple, the same person; so that, for a moment, Kostant sat across the table mutely contemplating his own absence. "Is there any?" "I think there''s some apples in the pantry," she answered, coming back to herself, but so quietly that in her brother''s eyes she seemed briefly a woman, a quiet woman speaking out of her thoughts; and he said with tenderness to that woman, "Come on, let''s go over to the hospital. They must be through messing with him by now." The deaf man had come back to the hospital. His daughter was with him. Stefan knew she clerked at the butcher''s shop. The deaf man, not allowed into the ward, kept Stefan half an hour in the hot, pine-floored waiting room that smelled of disinfectant and resin. He talked, walking about, sitting down, jumping up, arguing in the loud even monotone of his deafness. "I''m not going back to the pit. No sir. What if I''d said last night I''m not going into the pit tomorrow? Then how''d it be now, see? I wouldn''t be here now, nor you wouldn''t, nor he wouldn''t, him in there, your brother. We''d all be home. Home safe and sound, see? I''m not going back to the pit. No, by God. I''m going out to the farm, that''s where I''m going. I grew up there, see, out west in the foothills there, my brother''s there. I''m going back and work the farm with him. I''m not going back to the pit again." The daughter sat on the wooden bench, erect and still. Her face was narrow, her black hair was pulled back in a knot. "Aren''t you hot?" Stefan asked her, and she answered gravely, "No, I''m all right." Her voice was clear. She was used to speaking to her deaf father. When Stefan said nothing more she looked down again and sat with her hands in her lap. The father was still talking. Stefan rubbed his hands through his sweaty hair and tried to interrupt. "Good, sounds like a good plan, Sachik. Why waste the rest of your life in the pits." The deaf man talked right on. "He doesn''t hear you." "Can''t you take him home?" "I couldn''t make him leave here even for dinner. He won''t stop talking." Her voice was much lower saying this, perhaps from embarrassment, and the sound of it caught at Stefan. He rubbed his sweaty hair again and stared at her, thinking for some reason of smoke, waterfalls, the mountains. "You go on home." He heard in his own voice the qualities of hers, softness and clarity. "I''ll get him over to the Lion for an hour." "Then you won''t see your brother." "He won''t run away. Go on home." At the White Lion both men drank heavily. Sachik talked on about the fa

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