Four Ways to Forgiveness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He put his hand on her arm as they talked, and I saw with peculiar intensity how gentle his touch was, almost hesitant, yet trustful. That is love, I thought. Yet they parted, I saw, without that look of private understanding that lovers often give each other.

  He and I rode in his government electric car, his two silent bodyguards, policewomen, sitting in the front seat. We spoke of Esdardon Aya, whose name, he explained to me, meant Old Music. I told him how Esdardon Aya had saved my life by sending me here. He listened in a way that made it easy to talk to him. I said, “I was sick to leave my books, and I’ve thought about them, missing them, as if they were my family. But I think maybe I’m a fool to feel that way.”

  “Why a fool?” he asked. He had a foreign accent, but he had the Yeowan lilt already, and his voice was beautiful, low and warm.

  I tried to explain everything at once: “Well, they mean so much to me because I was illiterate when I came to the City, and it was the books that gave me freedom, gave me the world—the worlds—But now, here, I see how the net, the holos, the neareals mean so much more to people, giving them the present time. Maybe it’s just clinging to the past to cling to books. Yeowans have to go towards the future. And we’ll never change people’s minds just with words.”

  He listened intently, as he had done at the meeting, and then answered slowly, “But words are an essential way of thinking. And books keep the words true…I didn’t read till I was an adult, either.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I knew how, but I didn’t. I lived in a village. It’s cities that have to have books,” he said, quite decisively, as if he had thought about this matter. “If they don’t, we keep on starting over every generation. It’s a waste. You have to save the words.”

  When we got to his house, up at the top end of the old part of town, there were four crates of books in the entrance hall.

  “These aren’t all mine!” I said.

  “Old Music said they were yours,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, with his quick smile and a quick glance at me. You can tell where an Alien is looking much better than you can tell with us. With us, except for the few people with bluish eyes, you have to be close enough to see the dark pupil move in the dark eye.

  “I haven’t got anywhere to put so many,” I said, amazed, realizing how that strange man. Old Music, had helped me to freedom yet again.

  “At your school, maybe? The school library?”

  It was a good idea, but I thought at once of the Chief’s inspectors pawing through them, perhaps confiscating them. When I spoke of that, the Sub-Envoy said, “What if I present them as a gift from the Embassy? I think that might embarrass the inspectors.”

  “Oh,” I said, and burst out, “Why are you so kind? You, and he—Are you Hainish too?”

  “Yes,” he said, not answering my other question. “I was. I hope to be Yeowan.”

  He asked me to sit down and drink a little glass of wine with him before his guard drove me home. He was easy and friendly, but a quiet man. I saw he had been hurt. There were scars on his face and a gap in his hair where he had had a head injury. He asked me what my books were, and I said, “History.”

  At that he smiled, slowly this time. He said nothing, but he raised his glass to me. I raised mine, imitating him, and we drank.

  Next day he had the books delivered to our school. When we opened and shelved them, we realised we had a great treasure. “There’s nothing like this at the University,” said one of the teachers, who had studied there for a year.

  There were histories and anthropologies of Werel and of the worlds of the Ekumen, works of philosophy and politics by Werelians and by people of other worlds, there were compendiums of literature, poetry and stories, encyclopedias, books of science, atlases, dictionaries. In a corner of one of the crates were my own few books, my own treasure, even that first little crude History of Yeowe, Printed at Yeowe University in the Year One of Liberty. Most of my books I left in the school library, but I took that one and a few others home for love, for comfort.

  I had found another love and comfort not long since, A child at school had brought me a present, a spotted-cat kitten, just weaned. The boy gave it to me with such loving pride that I could not refuse it. When I tried to pass it on to another teacher they all laughed at me. “You’re elected, Rakam!” they said. So unwillingly I took the little being home, afraid of its frailty and delicacy and near to feeling a disgust for it. Women in the beza at Zeskra had had pets, spotted cats and foxdogs, spoiled little animals fed better than we were. I had been called by the name of a pet animal once.

  I alarmed the kitten taking it out of its basket, and it bit my thumb to the bone. It was tiny and frail but it had teeth. I began to have some respect for it.

  That night I put it to sleep in its basket, but it climbed up on my bed and sat on my face until I let it under the covers There it slept perfectly still all night. In the morning it woke me by dancing on me, chasing dust motes in a sunbeam. It made me laugh, waking, which is a pleasant thing. I felt that I had never laughed very much, and wanted to.

  The kitten was all black, its spots showing only in certain lights, black on black. I called it Owner. I found it pleasant to come home evenings to be greeted by my little Owner.

  Now for the next half year we were planning the great demonstration of women. There were many meetings, at some of which I met the Sub-Envoy again, so that I began to look for him. I liked to watch him listen to our arguments. There were those who argued that the demonstration must not be limited to the wrongs and rights of women, for equality must be for all. Others argued that it should not depend in any way on the support of foreigners, but should be a purely Yeowan movement. Mr. Yehedarhed listened to them, but I got angry. “I’m a foreigner,” I said. “Does that make me no use to you? That’s owner talk—as if you were better than other people!” And Dr. Yeron said, “I will believe equality is for all when I see it written in the Constitution of Yeowe.” For our Constitution, ratified by a world vote during the time I was at Hagayot, spoke of citizens only as men. That is finally what the demonstration became, a demand that the Constitution be amended to include women as citizens, provide for the secret ballot, and guarantee the right to free speech, freedom of the press and of assembly, and free education for all children.

  I lay down on the train tracks along with seventy thousand women, that hot day. I sang with them. I heard what that sounds like, so many women singing together, what a big, deep sound it makes.

  I had begun to speak in public again when we were gathering women for the great demonstration. It was a gift I had, and we made use of it. Sometimes gang boys or ignorant men would come to heckle and threaten me, shouting, “Bosswoman, Owner-woman, black cunt, go back where you came from!” Once when they were yelling that, go back, go back, I leaned into the microphone and said, “I can’t go back. We used to sing a song on the plantation where I was a slave,” and I sang it,

  O, O, Ye-o-we,

  Nobody never comes back.

  The singing made them be still for a moment. They heard it, that awful grief, that yearning.

  After the great demonstration the unrest never died down, but there were times that the energy flagged, the Movement didn’t move, as Dr. Yeron said. During one of those times I went to her and proposed that we set up a printing house and publish books. This had been a dream of mine, growing from that day in Hagayot when Seugi had touched her words and wept.

  “Talk goes by,” I said, “and all the words and images in the net go by, and anybody can change them. But books are there. They last. They are the body of history, Mr. Yehedarhed says.”

  “Inspectors,” said Dr. Yeron. “Until we get the free press amendment, the chiefs aren’t going to let anybody print anything they didn’t dictate themselves.”

  I did not want to give up the idea. I knew that in Yotebber Region we could not publish anything political, but I argued that we might print stories and poems by women of the region. Others thought it a w
aste of time. We discussed it back and forth for a long time. Mr. Yehedarhed came back from a trip to the Embassy, up north in the Old Capital. He listened to our discussions, but said nothing, which disappointed me. I had thought that he might support my project.

  One day I was walking home from school to my apartment, which was in a big, old, noisy house not far from the levee. I liked the place because my windows opened into the branches of trees, and through the trees I saw the river, four miles wide here, easing along among sandbars and reedbeds and willow isles in the dry season, brimming up the levees in the wet season when the rainstorms scudded across it. That day as I came near the house, Mr. Yehedarhed appeared, with two sour-faced policewomen close behind him as usual. He greeted me and asked if we might talk. I was confused and did not know what to do but to invite him up to my room.

  His guards waited in the lobby. I had just the one big room on the third floor. I sat on the bed and the Sub-Envoy sat in the chair. Owner went round and round his legs, saying roo? roo?

  I had observed that the Sub-Envoy took pleasure in disappointing the expectations of the Chief and his cohorts, who were all for pomp and fleets of cars and elaborate badges and uniforms. He and his policewomen went all over the city, all over Yotebber, in his government car or on foot People liked him for it. They knew, as I knew now, that he had been assaulted and beaten and left for dead by a World Party gang his first day here, when he went out afoot alone. The city people liked his courage and the way he talked with everybody, anywhere. They had adopted him. We in the Liberation Movement thought of him as “our Envoy,” but he was theirs, and the Chief’s too The Chief may have hated his popularity, but he profited from it.

  “You want to start a publishing house,” he said, stroking Owner, who fell over with his paws in the air.

  “Dr. Yeron says there’s no use until we get the Amendments.”

  “There’s one press on Yeowe not directly controlled by the government,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, stroking Owner’s belly.

  “Look out, he’ll bite,” I said. “Where is that?”

  “At the University. I see,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, looking at his thumb. I apologized. He asked me if I was certain that Owner was male. I said I had been told so, but never had thought to look. “My impression is that your Owner is a lady,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, in such a way that I began to laugh helplessly.

  He laughed along with me, sucked the blood off his thumb, and went on. “The University never amounted to much. It was a Corporation ploy—let the assets pretend they’re going to college. During the last years of the War it was closed down. Since Liberation Day it’s reopened and crawled along with no one taking much notice of it. The faculty are mostly old. They came back to it after the War. The National Government gives it a subsidy because it sounds well to have a University of Yeowe, but they don’t pay it any attention, because it has no prestige. And because many of them are unenlightened men.” He said this without scorn, descriptively. “It does have a printing house.”

  “I know,” I said. I reached out for my old book and showed it to him.

  He looked through it for a few minutes. His face was curiously tender as he did so. I could not help watching him. It was like watching a woman with a baby, a constant, changing play of attention and response.

  “Full of propaganda and errors and hope,” he said at last, and his voice too was tender. “Well, I think this could be improved upon. Don’t you? All that’s needed is an editor. And some authors.”

  “Inspectors.” I warned, imitating Dr. Yeron.

  “Academic freedom is an easy issue for the Ekumen to have some influence upon,” he said, “because we invite people to attend the Ekumenical Schools on Hain and Ve. We certainly want to invite graduates of the University of Yeowe. But of course, if their education is severely defective because of the lack of books, of information…”

  I said, “Mr. Yehedarhed, are you supposed to subvert government policies?” The question broke out of me unawares.

  He did not laugh. He paused for quite a long time before he answered. “I don’t know,” he said. “So far the Ambassador has backed me We may both get reprimanded. Or fired. What I’d like to do…” His strange eyes were right on me again. He looked down at the book he still held. “What I’d like is to become a Yeowan citizen,” he said. “But my usefulness to Yeowe, and to the Liberation Movement, is my position with the Ekumen. So I’ll go on using that, or misusing it, till they tell me to stop.”

  When he left I had to think about what he had asked me to do. That was to go to the University as a teacher of history, and once there to volunteer for the editorship of the press. That all seemed so preposterous, for a woman of my background and my little learning, that I thought I must be misunderstanding him. When he convinced me that I had understood him, I thought he must have very badly misunderstood who I was and what I was capable of. After we had talked about that for a little while, he left, evidently feeling that he was making me uncomfortable, and perhaps feeling uncomfortable himself, though in fact we laughed a good deal and I did not feel uncomfortable, only a little as if I were crazy.

  I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine. But what I thought about was him, Yehedarhed Havzhiva. I kept seeing him sitting there in my old chair, stooping down to stroke Owner. Sucking blood off his thumb. Laughing. Looking at me with his white-cornered eyes. I saw his red-brown face and red-brown hands, the color of pottery. His quiet voice was in my mind.

  I picked up the kitten, half-grown now, and looked at its hinder end. There was no sign of any male parts. The little black silky body squirmed in my hands. I thought of him saying, “Your Owner is a lady,” and I wanted to laugh again, and to cry. I stroked the kitten and set her down, and she sat sedately beside me, washing her shoulder. “Oh poor little lady,” I said. I don’t know who I meant. The kitten, or Lady Tazeu, or myself.

  He had said to take my time thinking about his proposal, all the time I wanted. But I had not really thought about it at all when, the next day but one, there he was, on foot, waiting for me as I came out of the school. “Would you like to walk on the levee?” he said.

  I looked around.

  “There they are,” he said, indicating his cold-eyed bodyguards. “Everywhere I am, they are, three to five meters away. Walking with me is dull, but safe. My virtue is guaranteed.”

  We walked down through the streets to the levee and up onto it in the long early evening light, warm and pink-gold, smelling of river and mud and reeds. The two women with guns walked along just about four meters behind us.

  “If you do go to the University,” he said after a long silence, “I’ll be there constantly.”

  “I haven’t yet—” I stammered.

  “If you stay here, I’ll be here constantly,” he said. “That is, if it’s all right with you.”

  I said nothing. He looked at me without turning his head. I said without intending to, “I like it that I can see where you’re looking.”

  “I like it that I can’t see where you’re looking,” he said, looking directly at me.

  We walked on. A heron rose up out of a reed islet and its great wings beat over the water, away. We were walking south, downriver. All the western sky was full of light as the sun went down behind the city in smoke and haze.

  “Rakam, I would like to know where you came from, what your life on Werel was,” he said very softly.

  I drew a long breath. “It’s all gone,” I said. “Past.”

  “We are our past. Though not only that. I want to know you. Forgive me. I want very much to know you.”

  After a while I said, “I want to tell you. But it’s so bad. It’s so ugly. Here, now, it’s beautiful. I don’t want to lose it.”

  “Whatever you tell me I will hold valuable,” he said, in his quiet voice that went to my heart. So I told him w
hat I could about Shomeke compound, and then hurried on through the rest of my story. Sometimes he asked a question. Mostly he listened. At some time in my telling he had taken my arm, I scarcely noticing at the time. When he let me go, thinking some movement I made meant I wanted to be released, I missed that light touch. His hand was cool. I could feel it on my forearm after it was gone.

  “Mr. Yehedarhed,” said a voice behind us: one of the bodyguards. The sun was down, the sky flushed with gold and red. “Better head back?”

  “Yes,” he said, “thanks.” As we turned I took his arm. I felt him catch his breath.

  I had not desired a man or a woman—this is the truth—since Shomeke. I had loved people, and I had touched them with love, but never with desire, My gate was locked.

  Now it was open. Now I was so weak that at the touch of his hand I could scarcely walk on.

  I said, “It’s a good thing walking with you is so safe.”

  I hardly knew what I meant. I was thirty years old but I was like a young girl. I had never been that girl.

  He said nothing. We walked along in silence between the river and the city in a glory of failing light.

  “Will you come home with me, Rakam?” he said.

  Now I said nothing.

  “They don’t come in with us,” he said, very low, in my ear, so that I felt his breath.

  “Don’t make me laugh!” I said, and began crying. I wept all the way back along the levee. I sobbed and thought the sobs were ceasing and then sobbed again. I cried for all my sorrows, all my shames. I cried because they were with me now and always would be. I cried because the gate was open and I could go through at last, go into the country on the other side, but I was afraid to.

  When we got into the car, up near my school, he took me in his arms and simply held me, silent. The two women in the front seat never looked round.