Dangerous People

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kamedan came back out on the balcony and took up his place by Shamsha. Fefinum leaned against the carved railing facing the two of them, and stretched out her round, strong legs. She said, “I want to talk to you two about Hwette.” That was Fefinum practicing at being the great rock, the center of the household. Because the role was more important to her than the person, everything she did seemed like play-acting; and the more important it was, the more dishonest she seemed in doing it. Shamsha felt Kamedan shift a little, uncomfortable. In herself she felt the ironic and resistant spirit rise, holding its iron flail, ready to strike. I will not speak, I will not speak, I will not destroy her, she vowed to herself.

  “I don’t think Hwette is ever going to be a Blood Clown,” Fefinum said, low-voiced, tragically important.

  Shamsha held her tongue and nodded once.

  “She’s been coming to Society meetings and learning the dances all summer, ever since the Moon. And of course she does everything right, but I just don’t think she has the vocation, the true run of it. And Shaio agrees with me. We talked about it today. Just Shaio and I—not with Hwette, of course. And she agrees with me.”

  In Telina the Blood Lodge people call their singer of most authority “The Eye of the Ewe,” and that was what Shaio was called. The idea of that powerful, stern old woman meekly agreeing with Fefinum, bleating “oh yes!” like a baa-lamb, made Shamsha say, “Ah—!” But no more. She controlled herself and kept still.

  “But—” Fefinum leaned forward, pointing the fingers of her right hand at Shamsha, all her toes spread out intensely—“what Hwette has is a much greater calling. I felt that all along. Even before she wanted to join the Blood Clowns.”

  This was too much for Shamsha. “She only joined because you nagged her to.”

  “I encouraged her. Of course I did. You have to start somewhere, and she was doing nothing, nothing at all.”

  “Aside from the house and the gardens and bringing up Torip and helping bring up Bolekash and working at the heyimas, nothing at all,” Shamsha said, letting the ironic spirit flail away. But her daughter’s pompous earnestness only increased: “That’s nothing, mother. Nothing to what she could do, what she ought to be. You know that!”

  Kamedan said, “Yes.”

  Shamsha drew back into herself, wary as a snail. She set the big basket of shelled peas down off her lap onto the decking. “What do you mean, ought to be?”

  “Shaio says she ought to be learning the great songs. That she has the gift, but isn’t giving it.”¶¶¶¶¶

  “Then it’s hers to give, not yours,” Shamsha said. This time the flail hit. Fefinum winced. Shamsha looked down and shut her eyes in disgust with herself and her daughter. She stood up, picking up the baskets one in each hand, the heavy peas and the empty pods, so that she stood like a scales. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Fefinum started to speak again, but Shamsha went on: “I don’t understand spiritual business. I don’t go to the deep springs. I’m only an intellectual. But I will say, I think Hwette has enough responsibilities as it is. She hasn’t ever been herself entirely since the baby was born—” She stopped short.

  Fefinum, no longer play-acting, whether her ambition was for her sister or for herself, said quickly but gently, “That’s just it. She’s never found who she needs to be. Isn’t it so, Kamedan?”

  He said nothing, but nodded once, slightly.

  “She’s twenty-five years old. With luck she has a considerable length of life in which to find herself,” Shamsha said. “Don’t hurry her. Let it happen.” She went indoors with the baskets, aware that she was running away, evading further confrontation. But how could she talk sensibly about Hwette until she had talked to Hwette about this second pregnancy? And it seemed to her that her last words were not merely conventional wisdom used in self-defense. In saying them she knew that Hwette did need to be let alone, and that her need was urgent.

  She set the baskets down on the counter. Tai was at the stove and didn’t turn around. She went to Hwette and Kamedan’s room. The curtains were drawn making a warm golden darkness in the room. “Soubí, soubí,” Shamsha said at the door, “are you in here?” Hwette was sitting on the chest, her hands at her sides. She looked up. In the dusk Shamsha could not see if she was smiling or weeping or neither. Shamsha sat down on the chest beside her and put her arm around Hwette’s round, warm, delicate, vigorous body. They sat still for a while. “Oh, you, oh, you,” Shamsha whispered, as she had whispered to the new baby daughter. Hwette leaned comfortably against her, fitting into her arm. They were going back to being part of each other. Shamsha drew a deep, long breath. “Well!” she said, and then nothing more. Nothing needed saying or thinking for a while.

  They heard Kamedan’s voice outside the window, talking to a neighbor on the northeast balcony.

  Shamsha felt tension come into Hwette’s body or her own arm. They no longer sat in perfect ease. Words began to press at Shamsha’s tongue. She said at last, “I finally saw the flower, soubí.”

  Hwette made a drowsy little uncomprehending sound.

  “The chicory flower.”

  Hwette stayed wordless and heavy against her. Shamsha wanted to ask a great many questions but said only, “Thank you for telling me.”

  “What chicory flower?” Hwette whispered sleepily.

  “This afternoon, soubí,” Shamsha said. The strangeness of Hwette’s question came to her slowly, bringing coldness.

  “I was thinking about the book, you know, and I was so hot and stupid. The flower lay there in front of me for I don’t know how long before I saw it. It’s a wonder I didn’t just chop it into the salad without noticing.” Every word she spoke took her farther from trust and ease. Every word was true, but when she spoke it it became false.

  “Somebody brought you a chicory flower?”

  “You did, soubí.”

  “I was at the heyimas. With the Blood Clowns. All afternoon.” Hwette sighed and straightened up, leaving the curve of the mother’s arm and body. She stretched out her arms into the growing dusk and sighed.

  “Hwette, you were here.”

  “How could I have been?” She asked the question as if she expected an answer.

  Shamsha felt coldness in the center of her body. She asked, “Are you pregnant, Hwette?”

  Hwette stood up quickly and lightly. “I don’t know, mamoubí, how can I tell? My bleedings are so irregular I can’t worry about them. So if I am I don’t know it. Have you been dreaming grandbabies, mamou?” Light as air she moved across the room, gathering up her loose hair and bringing it across her shoulder to braid it.

  Shamsha sat cold and confused. “I don’t think I was dreaming,” she said.

  Bolekash came running down the hall, calling, “Dinner is ready, Taibí says!”

  Shamsha hurried back to the kitchen and looked over the littered counters and workblocks. There was no chicory plant lying there. But Tai had been working at the counters. She did not want to ask him if he had seen it. His slow mind would seize on the strange question and worry at it and he would talk about it. She’d look in the compost basket after dinner. It might be there. Why hadn’t she put it in water or taken it to her own room, done something appropriate with it, the message, the grandmother-word? Had she really left it lying there along with the parsley stems and trash? But she had cleaned the counter before she left the kitchen—she was sure she had. Had the chicory plant been there at all? Had Hwette been there? Was she asleep on her feet then? Now? She took her place at the dinner table. “Thank the food, Bolekash,” she said to her granddaughter, hearing her own stern voice.

  Looking around at what was on the table, the child said, “Heya! Our praise to you, eggplants, onions, we already thanked the chicken. Our praise to you, tomatoes, nice green peas. What’s that? Chiles, herbs, rice, lemons, salad, heya hey heya! Shut up, Torip.”

  “You didn’t thank the pies, you didn’t thank the pies!”

  “I did too, they’re leftovers, I di
d yesterday.”

  “But you ought to—”

  “Hush,” the grandmother said, and they hushed, and ate.

  In the late, still darkness as the cricket chorus rang like beaten bells, Shamsha lay awake, thinking that there was a person she wanted to talk to: Duhe, that Serpentine doctor,****** who had been the first to say that Controlling was a useful book and might not only be kept in the Archives but copied for use in lodges in the other towns. Duhe was a person who saw and heard. Shamsha was certain of it, though they had talked only about the book.

  Shamsha had said she intended to take the fragile manuscript up to the Exchange to reproduce, to make a sturdy copy to keep in the Archives; and Duhe—they had been alone in the Archives reading room—had said, “Then you don’t want to perform it?”††††††

  Shamsha had admitted that she had thought desirously about hand-copying the text, so as to clarify both the handwriting and some errors or obscure passages, but thought this might be mere self-indulgence. “A doctor wrote this book,” she said, “and I’m no doctor, not well read or practiced in this kind of thinking, this healing thinking. Where I’m in control,” with a glance at the darkened, foxed, spotted manuscript, “is here in the Archives alone with the books. That’s my learning, my experience.” Duhe nodded; Shamsha went on, “Usually I’m a very good judge of whether an old work is better kept or let go. But this time, I distrusted myself. This book resonates with my temperament, my way of thinking so closely that to me it was a great discovery, but I don’t know if it would mean so much to other people.”

  She had seen in Duhe’s face that this confession was surprising and interesting to the doctor. Indeed, she was surprised by her own candor and fluency. Duhe listened in a way that gave one words.

  Without exploiting that power, Duhe simply replied that her opinion was that the book was not only worth reproducing, but worth performing by hand or even printing, if Shamsha had considered that option.

  “Ah! Don’t tempt me!” Shamsha replied, laughing, for there was no work she liked better than setting a text in type, delighting in the type itself, the ink, the press, the paper, the first proof, the trimming, the sewing, the binding, in the high redwood workshop of the Oak Lodge, where the rigorous and demanding mind met the rigorous demands of a material art, and where from that meeting a book came to be, the most mental of material things. In that place, at that work, Shamsha had known the most intense satisfactions of her life. Not the most enduring, but the purest. Too pure: so that she had avoided the easy obsession, and gone to the Madrone, and become not a maker but an unmaker of books, judging what should be saved and what unmade, the knot of words untied, the letters scattered like seed, the paper gone back to pulp or to earth and ash, to the green shoots and reeds and trees and books of years to come.

  “I fed a wooden goat,” she said, and heard her voice thin and weak as a child’s, and sat up in bed in the darkness startled and lost.

  What had she been thinking about? About the book, about Duhe, why? Because she wanted to talk to the doctor about Hwette, but that was nonsense, why should she do that? She had been falling asleep. Something had happened which she did not understand, or had not happened. But she was certainly not going to ask a stranger’s advice about it. She could run her own household.

  Thirty-five years ago Shamsha had joyously married Mehoia. They were living in Wenomal’s household in Hardcinder House when their son and daughter were born. Between a night and a morning the young husband had died of heart failure, leaving Shamsha forever distrustful of anything given her.

  Some years later at a dance in Wakwaha she met a man named Geseta, who followed her to Telina and wooed her relentlessly. He was handsome and charming and seemed to Shamsha a great piece of luck, except that he was singleminded. He knew only one story, the love story. To Geseta, life was a means of achieving orgasm. Of course biology was on his side; his sperm and her eggs would agree with him, if they could speak, as would many people of eighteen or nineteen. But there was more to a story than the climax. Shamsha wondered what she was doing in Geseta’s love story. But he was so handsome and so accomplished a storyteller that she entered into the plot; she resisted, she wavered, she flirted, she fled, and she succumbed deliciously to his ardor. Their orgasms were many and rewarding.

  As his passion waned, he forced it to revive, for if living is only one thing the lack of that thing is death. He demanded marriage; he importuned her to the point of harassment. She saw that their story was over, but he insisted on prolonging it past the end. Her resistance became real. Resentful, he called it teasing, provocation. He became jealous, possessive, following her everywhere, but would not talk with her. The anger between them burned high. She set his things out on the balcony.‡‡‡‡‡‡ When he found them, she was alone in the house. He raped her.

  To that rape her third child chose to come to be conceived. That was the hinge of the door of Hwette’s life.

  People would talk, seeing Shamsha pregnant and Geseta gone off to Madidinou; they might well speculate that she had not consented to this pregnancy. Shamsha was chivalrous. Knowing Geseta was unable to endure real shame, she did not tell even her mother that she had been raped. She longed to, but felt that even so much solidarity would give her unfair advantage over Geseta, who knowing her strength would founder in his weakness. But it may have been that her strength and his weakness grew in that silence.

  To her the rape was one thing and the conception another thing; they were facts of so different a nature that she could connect them only artificially, not in feeling. Justification was irrelevant. What she felt was that this child had chosen to come into her in pain.

  The birth was a deliverance, setting free Shamsha’s own soul. At Hwette’s birth and all through her babyhood, Shamsha knew she had given this child more than she had given the others. They were themselves, but this one was herself given away, set free, not known. She called the baby Sehoy, a common name, but to her holding in it the flight of the swallows at dusk over the River, quick, many, scarcely to be seen, voices veering and disappearing, all but disembodied by swiftness and twilight.

  Geseta came back to Telina and fell in love with various women. These days, now that he and Shamsha were getting old, he liked to come around Hardcinder House and indulge in nostalgia, always telling that same old love story though it had become a lie. She did not care if he came or not. Where his passion had touched her was a burn scar, thick and nerveless, an ugly thing but not crippling. Her only feeling towards Geseta was an intense distrust of him with their daughter. Once when Sehoy was four or five Shamsha had found him in the Narrow Gardens with her, picking her honeysuckle flowers to suck. Shamsha had come between him and the child and said to him, “Never touch her.” Something terrible in her face or voice made him obey. He sometimes made feeble efforts to disobey, to charm and win over the child or to win sympathy for himself in the family, complaining how his heart ached for his daughter and how she was deprived of the simple warmth of his fatherhood by the mother’s possessive jealousy. Shamsha ignored all that. But if he made any bodily move towards the child, Shamsha was between them, like a heavy, silent dog with its head and tail down, watching him sidelong.

  When Sehoy was grown and had given herself the name Hwette, her begetter laid claim to a superior understanding of her heart and mind, an intuitive link with her. He argued with her against her choice of a name; to call oneself Scrub Oak was self-denigrating, too humble, too scrubby, he said. She should call herself Isitut, Wild Iris: something delicate, beautiful, like herself. When Kamedan began to come to the house, courting Hwette, Geseta talked against him all the time. His jealousy and envy of the young man was so apparent that Shamsha felt a queasy pity for him. He insisted that he was thinking only of Hwette’s wellbeing. “Kamedan will destroy her,” he said.

  “You should know,” Shamsha said.

  “I do know. I know his type. He’ll love only one woman all his life. He’ll demand everything of her—th
at she be the world to him, and he the world to her. He’ll smother her with love, he’ll tie her down with giving. He’ll be jealous of anyone or anything that touches her, so he’ll keep touching her all over, all the time. She’s a wildflower, she can’t thrive indoors. She’s a hummingbird, like me—she needs to move, move. She’ll die if she can’t go from flower to flower. I used to resent your not letting me touch her, but I see now that you were right; you knew we had to keep hands off her. She’s very fragile. She can’t take pressures on her, claims on her. Her strength is in her freedom.”

  Disgust with his assertion of complicity and distaste for his sentimentality did not quite keep Shamsha from agreeing with him; but she shrugged and said nothing. Hwette and Kamedan were going to marry. And in her beauty of sexual delight, fulfilled desire, pregnancy, motherhood, Hwette was radiant, like a hummingbird indeed, not for fragility but for intensity of life.

  Yet that vitality flashed out less and less often. Scarcely at all for how long now, a year? or more? Kamedan was as all-loving of her as Geseta had foretold. He adored her and seemed to depend on her for his being. Neither Mehoia nor Geseta himself had ever drawn from Shamsha, drained her, demanded her as Kamedan did Hwette. It’s all very well for a lover to say he’d die without you, but unfair to make it your unremitting responsibility to keep him alive, Shamsha thought. Then she thought, What about Hwette’s own life?

  The answer was a jolt, a blank. What was Hwette’s life?

  To Fefinum just now she had said, “housework, garden work, bringing up her son and niece, working at the heyimas”—Well, wasn’t that a life, anybody’s life? The household, the heyimas; one’s family, other people; the obligations and responsibilities, the network of reciprocal and mutual work, observance, care, and celebration: what more was there?

  A swallow in a net. Kamedan claiming her attention, desire, constant companionship; little Torip and Bolekash needing her attention, care, companionship, teaching; Fefinum demanding that she perfect herself spiritually to fulfil her sister’s ambition; and she, Shamsha, the mother, what did she ask of Hwette? To be good, not to bother, be competent, let me get on with my work, my head stuck into the empty spaces between written words all the time. She’s the hinge of the household, not I. It all depends on her being here, and she’s being pulled to pieces by us all pulling her different ways. She should leave. Take little Torip and go. Where? To her brother’s house in Kastoha, there wouldn’t be pressure on her there. Or up to Wakwaha, by herself, leave the child with us, go by herself, go alone, that’s what she should do. I’ll tell her that, Shamsha thought. First thing tomorrow.