Four Ways to Forgiveness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “There,” she said, “no chief will give you that.”

  She took up her knitting again. He was half asleep when she asked, “Your mother is living, Mr. Havzhiva?”

  “All my people are dead.”

  She made a little soft sound. “Bereft,” she said. “And no wife?”

  “No.”

  “We will be your mothers, your sisters, your daughters. Your people. I kissed you for that love that will be between us. You will see.”

  “The list of the persons invited to the reception, Mr. Yehedarhed,” said Doranden, the Chiefs chief liaison to the Sub-Envoy.

  Havzhiva looked through the list on the handscreen carefully, ran it past the end, and said, “Where is the rest?”

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Envoy—are there omissions? This is the entire list.”

  “But these are all men.”

  In the infinitesimal silence before Doranden replied, Havzhiva felt the balance of his life poised.

  “You wish the guests to bring their wives? Of course! If this is the Ekumenical custom, we shall be delighted to invite the ladies!”

  There was something lip smacking in the way Yeowan men said “the ladies,” a word which Havzhiva had thought was applied only to women of the owner class on Werel. The balance dipped. “What ladies?” he asked, frowning. “I’m talking about women. Do they have no part in this society?”

  He became very nervous as he spoke, for he now knew his ignorance of what constituted danger here. If a walk on a quiet street could be nearly fatal, embarrassing the Chief’s liaison might be completely so. Doranden was certainly embarrassed—floored. He opened his mouth and shut it.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Doranden,” Havzhiva said, “please pardon my poor efforts at jocosity. Of course I know that women have all kinds of responsible positions in your society. I was merely saying, in a stupidly unfortunate manner, that I should be very glad to have such women and their husbands, as well as the wives of these guests, attend the reception. Unless I am truly making an enormous blunder concerning your customs? I thought you did not segregate the sexes socially, as they do on Werel. Please, if I was wrong, be so kind as to excuse the ignorant foreigner once again.”

  Loquacity is half of diplomacy, Havzhiva had already decided. The other half is silence.

  Doranden availed himself of the latter option, and with a few earnest reassurances got himself away. Havzhiva remained nervous until the following morning, when Doranden reappeared with a revised list containing eleven new names, all female. There was a school principal and a couple of teachers; the rest were marked “retired.”

  “Splendid, splendid!” said Havzhiva. “May I add one more name?”—Of course, of course, anyone Your Excellency desires—“Dr. Yeron,” he said.

  Again the infinitesimal silence, the grain of dust dropping on the scales. Doranden knew that name. “Yes,” he said.

  “Dr. Yeron nursed me, you know, at your excellent hospital. We became friends. An ordinary nurse might not be an appropriate guest among such very distinguished people; but I see there are several other doctors on our list.”

  “Quite,” said Doranden. He seemed bemused. The Chief and his people had become used to patronising the Sub-Envoy, ever so slightly and politely. An invalid, though now well recovered; a victim; a man of peace, ignorant of attack and even of self-defense; a scholar, a foreigner, unworldly in every sense: they saw him as something like that, he knew. Much as they valued him as a symbol and as a means to their ends, they thought him an insignificant man. He agreed with them as to the fact, but not as to the quality, of his insignificance He knew that what he did might signify. He had just seen it.

  “Surely you understand the reason for having a bodyguard, Envoy,” the General said with some impatience.

  “This is a dangerous city. General Denkam, yes, I understand that. Dangerous for everyone. I see on the net that gangs of young men, such as those who attacked me, roam the streets quite beyond the control of the police. Every child, every woman needs a bodyguard I should be distressed to know that the safety which is every citizen’s right was my special privilege.”

  The General blinked but stuck to his guns. “We can’t let you get assassinated,” he said.

  Havzhiva loved the bluntness of Yeowan honesty. “I don’t want to be assassinated,” he said. “I have a suggestion, sir. There are policewomen, female members of the city police force, are there not? Find me bodyguards among them. After all, an armed woman is as dangerous as an armed man, isn’t she? And I should like to honor the great part women played in winning Yeowe’s freedom, as the Chief said so eloquently in his talk yesterday.”

  The General departed with a face of cast iron.

  Havzhiva did not particularly like his bodyguards. They were hard, tough women, unfriendly, speaking a dialect he could hardly understand. Several of them had children at home, but they refused to talk about their children. They were fiercely efficient. He was well protected. He saw when he went about with these cold-eyed escorts that he began to be looked at differently by the city crowds: with amusement and a kind of fellow feeling. He heard an old man in the market say, “That fellow has some sense.”

  Everybody called the Chief the Chief except to his face. “Mr. President,” Havzhiva said, “the question really isn’t one of Ekumenical principles or Hainish customs at all. None of that is or should be of the least weight, the least importance, here on Yeowe. This is your world.”

  The Chief nodded once, massively.

  “Into which,” said Havzhiva, by now insuperably loquacious, “immigrants are beginning to come from Werel now, and many, many more will come, as the Werelian ruling class tries to lessen revolutionary pressure by allowing increasing numbers of the underclass to emigrate. You, sir, know far better than I the opportunities and the problems that this great influx of population will cause here in Yotebber. Now of course at least half the immigrants will be female, and I think it worth considering that there is a very considerable difference between Werel and Yeowe in what is called the construction of gender—the roles, the expectations, the behavior, the relationships of men and women. Among the Werelian immigrants most of the decision-makers, the people of authority, will be female. The Council of the Hame is about nine-tenths women, I believe. Their speakers and negotiators are mostly women. These people are coming into a society governed and represented entirely by men. I think there is the possibility of misunderstandings and conflict, unless the situation is carefully considered beforehand. Perhaps the use of some women as representatives—”

  “Among slaves on the Old World,” the Chief said, “women were chiefs. Among our people, men are chiefs. That is how it is. The slaves of the Old World will be the free men of the New World.”

  “And the women, Mr. President?”

  “A free man’s women are free,” said the Chief.

  “Well, then,” Yeron said, and sighed her deep sigh. “I guess we have to kick up some dust.”

  “What dust people are good at,” said Dobibe.

  “Then we better kick up a whole lot,” said Tualyan. “Because no matter what we do, they’ll get hysterical. They’ll yell and scream about castrating dykes who kill boy babies. If there’s five of us singing some damn song, it’ll get into the neareals as five hundred of us with machine guns and the end of civilization on Yeowe. So I say let’s go for it. Let’s have five thousand women out singing. Let’s stop the trains. Lie down on the tracks. Fifty thousand women lying on the tracks all over Yotebber. You think?”

  The meeting (of the Yotebber City and Regional Educational Aid Association) was in a schoolroom of one of the city schools. Two of Havzhiva’s bodyguards, in plain clothes, waited unobtrusively in the hall. Forty women and Havzhiva were jammed into small chairs attached to blank netscreens.

  “Asking for?” Havzhiva said.

  “The secret ballot!”

  “No job discrimination!”

  “Pay for our work!”

  “The secret bal
lot’”

  “Child care!”

  “The secret ballot!”

  “Respect!”

  Havzhiva’s noter scribbled away madly. The women went on shouting for a while and then settled down to talk again.

  One of the bodyguards spoke to Havzhiva as she drove him home. “Sir,” she said. “Was those all teachers?”

  “Yes,” he said. “In a way.”

  “Be damn,” she said. “Different from they used to be.”

  “Yehedarhed! What the hell are you doing down there?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You were on the news. Along with about a million women lying across railroad tracks and all over flyer pads and draped around the President’s Residence. You were talking to women and smiling.”

  “It was hard not to.”

  “When the Regional Government begins shooting, will you stop smiling?”

  “Yes. Will you back us?”

  “How?”

  “Words of encouragement to the women of Yotebber from the Ambassador of the Ekumen. Yeowe a model of true freedom for immigrants from the Slave World. Words of praise to the Government of Yotebber—Yotebber a model for all Yeowe of restraint, enlightenment, et cetera.”

  “Sure. I hope it helps. Is this a revolution, Havzhiva?”

  “It is education, ma’am.”

  The gate stood open in its massive frame; there were no walls.

  “In the time of the Colony,” the Elder said, “this gate was opened twice in the day: to let the people out to work in the morning, to let the people in from work in the evening. At all other times it was locked and barred.” He displayed the great broken lock that hung on the outer face of the gate, the massive bolts rusted in their hasps. His gesture was solemn, measured, like his words, and again Havzhiva admired the dignity these people had kept in degradation, the stateliness they had maintained in, or against, their enslavement. He had begun to appreciate the immense influence of their sacred text, the Arkamye, preserved in oral tradition. “This was what we had. This was our belonging,” an old man in the city had told him, touching the book which, at sixty-five or seventy, he was learning to read.

  Havzhiva himself had begun to read the book in its original language. He read it slowly, trying to understand how this tale of fierce courage and abnegation had for three millennia informed and nourished the minds of people in bondage. Often he heard in its cadences the voices he had heard speak that day.

  He was staying for a month in Hayawa Tribal Village, which had been the first slave compound of the Agricultural Plantation Corporation of Yeowe in Yotebber, three hundred fifty years ago. In this immense, remote region of the eastern coast, much of the society and culture of plantation slavery had been preserved. Yeron and other women of the Liberation Movement had told him that to know who the Yeowans were he must know the plantations and the tribes.

  He knew that the compounds had for the first century been a domain of men without women and without children. They had developed an internal government, a strict hierarchy of force and favoritism. Power was won by tests and ordeals and kept by a nimble balancing of independence and collusion. When women slaves were brought in at last, they entered this rigid system as the slaves of slaves. By bondsmen as by Bosses, they were used as servants and sexual outlets. Sexual loyalty and partnership continued to be recognized only between men, a nexus of passion, negotiation, status, and tribal politics. During the next centuries the presence of children in the compounds had altered and enriched tribal customs, but the system of male dominance, so entirely advantageous to the slave-owners, had not essentially changed.

  “We hope to have your presence at the initiation tomorrow,” the Elder said in his grave way, and Havzhiva assured him that nothing could please or honor him more than attendance at a ceremony of such importance. The Elder was sedately but visibly gratified. He was a man over fifty, which meant he had been born a slave and had lived as a boy and man through the years of the Liberation. Havzhiva looked for scars, remembering what Yeron had said, and found them: the Elder was thin, meager, lame, and had no upper teeth; he was marked all through by famine and war. Also he was ritually scarred, four parallel ridges running from neck to elbow over the point of the shoulder like long epaulets, and a dark blue open eye tattooed on his forehead, the sign, in this tribe, of assigned, unalterable chiefdom. A slave chief, a chattel master of chattels, till the walls went down.

  The Elder walked on a certain path from the gate to the longhouse, and Havzhiva following him observed that no one else used this path: men, women, children trotted along a wider, parallel road that diverged off to a different entrance to the longhouse. This was the chiefs’ way, the narrow way.

  That night, while the children to be initiated next day fasted and kept vigil over on the women’s side, all the chiefs and elders gathered for a feast. There were inordinate amounts of the heavy food Yeowans were accustomed to, spiced and ornately served, the marsh rice that was the basis of everything fancied up with colorings and herbs; above all there was meat. Women slipped in and out serving ever more elaborate platters, each one with more meat on it—cattle flesh. Boss food, the sure and certain sign of freedom.

  Havzhiva had not grown up eating meat, and could count on it giving him diarrhea, but he chewed his way manfully through the stews and steaks, knowing the significance of the food and the meaning of plenty to those who had never had enough.

  After huge baskets of fruit finally replaced the platters, the women disappeared and the music began. The tribal chief nodded to his leos, a word meaning “sexual favorite/adopted brother/not heir/not son.” The young man, a self-assured, good-natured beauty, smiled; he clapped his long hands very softly once, then began to brush the grey-blue palms in a subtle rhythm. As the table fell silent he sang, but in a whisper.

  Instruments of music had been forbidden on most plantations; most Bosses had allowed no singing except the ritual hymns to Tual at the tenth day service. A slave caught wasting Corporation time in singing might have acid poured down his throat. So long as he could work there was no need for him to make noise.

  On such plantations the slaves had developed this almost silent music, the touch and brush of palm against palm, a barely voiced, barely varied, long line of melody. The words sung were deliberately broken, distorted, fragmented, so that they seemed meaningless. Shesh, the owners had called it, rubbish, and slaves were permitted to “pat hands and sing rubbish” so long as they did it so softly it could not be heard outside the compound walls. Having sung so for three hundred years, they sang so now.

  To Havzhiva it was unnerving, almost frightening, as voice after voice joined, always at a whisper, increasing the complexity of the rhythms till the cross-beats nearly, but never quite, joined into a single texture of hushing sibilant sound, threaded by the long-held, quarter-tonal melody sung on syllables that seemed always about to make a word but never did. Caught in it, soon almost lost in it, he kept thinking now—now one of them will raise his voice—now the leos will give a shout, a shout of triumph, letting his voice free!—But he did not. None did. The soft, rushing, waterlike music with its infinitely delicate shifting rhythm went on and on. Bottles of the orange Yote wine passed up and down the table. They drank. They drank freely, at least. They got drunk. Laughter and shouts began to interrupt the music. But they never once sang above a whisper.

  They all reeled back to the longhouse on the chiefs’ path, embracing, peeing companionably, one or two pausing to vomit here and there. A kind, dark man who had been seated next to Havzhiva now Joined him in his bed in his alcove of the longhouse.

  Earlier in the evening this man had told him that during the night and day of the initiation heterosexual intercourse was forbidden, as it would change the energies. The initiation would go crooked, and the boys might not become good members of the tribe. Only a witch, of course, would deliberately break the taboo, but many women were witches and would try to seduce a man out of malice. Regular, that is, homosexual,
intercourse would encourage the energies, keep the initiation straight, and give the boys strength for their ordeal. Hence every man leaving the banquet would have a partner for the night. Havzhiva was glad he had been assigned to this man, not to one of the chiefs, whom he found daunting, and who might have expected a properly energetic performance. As it was, as well as he could remember in the morning, he and his companion had been too drunk to do much but fall asleep amidst well-intended caresses.

  Too much Yote wine left a ringing headache, he knew that already, and his whole skull reconfirmed the knowledge when he woke.

  At noon his friend brought him to a place of honor in the plaza, which was filling up with men. Behind them were the men’s longhouses, in front of them the ditch that separated the women’s side, the inside, from the men’s or gate side—still so-called, though the compound walls were gone and the gate alone stood, a monument, towering above the huts and longhouses of the compound and the flat grainfields that stretched away in all directions, shimmering in the windless, shadowless heat.

  From the women’s huts, six boys came at a run to the ditch. It was wider than a thirteen-year-old could jump, Havzhiva thought; but two of the boys made it. The other four leapt valiantly, fell short, clambered out, one of them hobbling, having hurt a leg or foot in his fall. Even the two who had made the jump successfully looked exhausted and frightened, and all six were bluish grey from fasting and staying awake. Elders surrounded them and got them standing in line in the plaza, naked and shivering, facing the crowd of all the men of the tribe.

  No women at all were visible, over on the women’s side.

  A catechism began, chiefs and elders barking questions which must evidently be answered without delay, sometimes by one boy, sometimes by all together, depending on the questioner’s pointing or sweeping gesture. They were questions of ritual, protocol, and ethics. The boys had been well drilled, delivering their answers in prompt yelps. The one who had lamed himself in the jump suddenly vomited and then fainted, slipping quietly down in a little heap. Nothing was done, and some questions were still pointed to him, followed by a moment of painful silence. After a while the boy moved, sat up, sat a while shuddering, then struggled to his feet and stood with the others. His bluish lips moved in answer to all the questions, though no voice reached the audience.