The Dispossessed

by Ursula Le Guin

  “By climbing up on a pile of dead children?” Shevek said, but anger or, perhaps, an unadmitted reluctance to hurt the old man’s feelings, kept his voice muffled, and Atro did not hear him.

  “No,” Atro went on, “you’ll find the soul of the people true as steel, when the country’s threatened. A few rabble-rousers in Nio and the mill towns make a big noise between wars, but it’s grand to see how the people close ranks when the flag’s in danger. You’re unwilling to believe that, I know. The trouble with Odonianism, you know, my dear fellow, is that it’s womanish. It simply doesn’t include the virile side of life. ‘Blood and steel, battle’s brightness,’ as the old poet says. It doesn’t under stand courage—love of the flag.”

  Shevek was silent for a minute; then he said, gently, “That may be true, in part. At least, we have no flags.”

  When Atro had gone, Efor came into take out the dinner tray. Shevek stopped him. He came up close to him, saying, “Excuse me, Efor,” and put a slip of paper down on the tray. On it he had written, “Is there a microphone in this room?”

  The servant bent his head and read it, slowly, and then looked up at Shevek, a long look at short range. Then his eyes glanced for a second at the chimney of the fireplace.

  “Bedroom?” Shevek inquired by the same means.

  Efor shook his head, put the tray down, and followed Shevek into the bedroom. He shut the door behind him with the noiselessness of a good servant.

  “Spotted that one first day, dusting,” he said with a grin that deepened the lines on his face into harsh ridges.

  “Not in here?”

  Efor shrugged. “Never spotted it. Could run the water in there, sir, like they do in the spy stories.”

  They proceeded on into the magnificent gold and ivory temple of the shitstool. Efor turned on the taps and then looked around the walls. “No,” he said. “Don’t think so. And spy eye I could spot. Get onto them when I work for a man in Nio once. Can’t miss ’em once you get onto ’em.”

  Shevek took another piece of paper out of his pocket and showed it to Efor. “Do you know where this came from?”

  It was the note he had found in his coat, “Join with us your brothers.”

  After a pause—he read slowly, moving his closed lips—Efor said, “I don’t know where it came from.”

  Shevek was disappointed. It had occurred to him that Efor himself was in an excellent position to slip something into his “master’s” pocket.

  “Know who it come from. In a manner.”

  “Who? How can I get to them?”

  Another pause. “Dangerous business, Mr. Shevek.” He turned away and increased the rush of water from the taps.

  “I don’t want to involve you. If you can just tell me—tell me where to go. What I should ask for. Even one name.”

  A still longer pause. Efor’s face looked pinched and hard. “I don’t—” he said, and stopped. Then he said, abruptly, and very low, “Look, Mr. Shevek, God knows they want you, we need you, but look, you don’t know what it’s like. How you going to hide? A man like you? Looking like you look? This a trap here, but it’s a trap anywhere. You can run but you can’t hide. I don’t know what to tell you. Give you names, sure. Ask any Nioti, he tell you where to go. We had about enough. We got to have some air to breathe. But you get caught, shot, how do I feel? I work for you eight months, I come to like you. To admire you. They approach me all the time. I say, ‘No. Let him be. A good man and he got no part of our troubles. Let him go back where he come from where the people are free. Let somebody go free from this God damned prison we living in!’”

  “I can’t go back. Not yet. I want to meet these people.”

  Efor stood silent. Perhaps it was his life’s habit as a servant, as one who obeys, that made him nod at last and say, whispering, “Tuio Maedda, he who you want. In Joking Lane, in Old Town. The grocery.”

  “Pae says I am forbidden to leave the campus. They can stop me if they see me take the train.”

  “Taxi, maybe,” Efor said. “I call you one, you go down by the stairs. I know Kae Oimon on the stand. He got sense. But I don’t know.”

  “All right. Right now. Pae was just here, he saw me, he thinks I’m staying in because I’m ill. What time is it?”

  “Half past seven.”

  “If I go now, I have the night to find where I should go. Call the taxi, Efor.”

  “I’ll pack you a bag, sir—”

  “A bag for what?”

  “You’ll need clothes—”

  “I’m wearing clothes! Go on.”

  “You can’t just go with nothing,” Efor protested. This made him more anxious and uneasy than anything else. “You got money?”

  “Oh—yes. I should take that.”

  Shevek was on the move already; Efor scratched his head, looked grim and dour, but went off to the hail phone to call the taxi. He returned to find Shevek waiting outside the hall door with his coat on. “Go downstairs,” Efor said, grudgingly. “Kae be at the back door, five minutes. Tell him go out by Grove Road, no checkpoint there like at the main gate. Don’t go by the gate, they stop you there sure.”

  “Will you be blamed for this, Efor?”

  They were both whispering.

  “I don’t know you gone. Morning, I say you don’t get up yet. Sleeping. Keep ’em off a while.”

  Shevek took him by the shoulders, embraced him, shook his hand. “Thank you, Efor!”

  “Good luck,” the man said, bewildered. Shevek was already gone.

  Shevek’s costly day with Vea had taken most of his ready cash, and the taxi ride in to Nio took ten units more. He got out at a major subway station and by using his map worked his way by subway into Old Town, a section of the city he had never seen. Joking Lane was not on the map, so he got off the train at the central stop for Old Town. When he came up from the spacious marble station into the street he stopped in confusion. This did not look like Nio Esseia.

  A fine, foggy rain was falling, and it was quite dark; there were no streetlights. The lampposts were there, but the lights were not turned on, or were broken. Yellow gleams slitted from around shuttered windows here and there. Down the street, light streamed from an open doorway, around which a group of men were lounging, talking loud. The pavement, greasy with rain, was littered with scraps of paper and refuse. The shopfronts, as well as he could make them out, were low, and were all covered up with heavy metal or wooden shutters, except for one which had been gutted by fire and stood black and blank, shards of glass still sticking in the frames of the broken windows. People went by, silent hasty shadows.

  An old woman was coming up the stairs behind him, and he turned to her to ask his way. In the light of the yellow globe that marked the subway entrance he saw her face clearly; white and lined, with the dead, hostile stare of weariness. Big glass earrings bobbed on her cheeks. She climbed the stairs laboriously, hunched over with fatigue or with arthritis or some deformity of the spine. But she was not old, as he had thought; she was not even thirty.

  “Can you tell me where Joking Lane is,” he asked her, stammering. She glanced at him with indifference, hurried her pace as she reached the top of the stairs, and went on without a word.

  He set off at random down the street. The excitement of his sudden decision and flight from Ieu Eun had turned to apprehension, a sense of being driven, hunted. He avoided the group of men around the door, instinct warning him that the single stranger does not approach that kind of group. When he saw a man ahead of him walking alone, he caught up and repeated his question. The man said, “I don’t know,” and turned aside.

  There was nothing to do but go on. He came to a better-lighted cross street, which wound off into the misty rain in both directions in a dim, grim garishness of lighted signs and advertisements. There were many wineshops and pawnshops, some of them still open. A good many people were in the street, jostling past, going in and out of the wineshops. There was a man lying down, lying in the gutter, his coat bunched up over
his head, lying in the rain, asleep, sick, dead. Shevek stared at him with horror, and at the others who walked past without looking.

  As he stood there paralyzed, somebody stopped by him and looked up into his face, a short, unshaven, wry-necked fellow of fifty or sixty, with red-rimmed eyes and a toothless mouth opened in a laugh. He stood and laughed witlessly at the big, terrified man, pointing a shaky hand at him. “Where you get all that hair, eh, eh, that hair, where you get all that hair,” he mumbled.

  “Can—can you tell me how to get to Joking Lane?”

  “Sure, joking, I’m joking, no joke I’m broke. Hey you got a little blue for a drink on a cold night? Sure you got a little blue.”

  He came closer. Shevek drew away, seeing the open hand but not understanding.

  “Come on, take a joke mister, one little blue,” the man mumbled without threat or pleading, mechanically, his mouth still open in the meaningless grin, his hand held out.

  Shevek understood. He groped in his pocket, found the last of his money, thrust it into the beggar’s hand, and then, cold with a fear that was not fear for himself, pushed past the man, who was mumbling and trying to catch at his coat, and made for the nearest open door. It was under a sign that read “Pawn and Used Goods Best Values.” Inside, among the racks of worn-out coats, shoes, shawls, battered instruments, broken lamps, odd dishes, canisters, spoons, beads, wrecks and fragments, every piece of rubbish marked with its price, he stood trying to collect himself.

  “Looking for something?”

  He put his question once more.

  The shopkeeper, a dark man as tall as Shevek but stooped and very thin, looked him over. “What you want to get there for?”

  “I’m looking for a person who lives there.”

  “Where you from?”

  “I need to get to this street, Joking Lane. Is it far from here?”

  “Where you from, mister?”

  “I am from Anarres, from the Moon,” Shevek said angrily. “I have to get to Joking Lane, now, tonight.”

  “You’re him? The scientist fellow? What the hell you doing here?”

  “Getting away from the police! Do you want to tell them I’m here, or will you help me?”

  “God damn,” the man said. “God damn. Look—” He hesitated, was about to say something, about to say something else, said, “You just go on,” and in the same breath though apparently with a complete change of mind, said, “All right. I’m closing. Take you there. Hold on. God damn!”

  He rummaged in the back of the shop, switched off the light, came outside with Shevek, pulled down metal shutters and locked them, padlocked the door, and set off at a sharp pace, saying, “Come on!”

  They walked twenty or thirty blocks, getting deeper into the maze of crooked streets and alleys in the heart of Old Town. The misty rain fell softly in the unevenly lit darkness, bringing out smells of decay, of wet stone and metal. They turned down an unlit, unsigned alley between high old tenements, the ground floors of which were mostly shops. Shevek’s guide stopped and knocked on the shuttered window of one: V. Maedda, Fancy Groceries. After a good while the door was opened. The pawnbroker conferred with a person inside, then gestured to Shevek, and they both entered. A girl had let them in. “Tuio’s in back, come on,” she said, looking up into Shevek’s face in the weak light from a back hallway. “Are you him?” Her voice was faint and urgent; she smiled strangely. “Are you really him?”

  Tuio Maedda was a dark man in his forties, with a strained, intellectual face. He shut a book in which he had been writing and got quickly to his feet as they entered. He greeted the pawnbroker by name, but never took his eyes off Shevek.

  “He come to my shop asking the way here, Tuio. He say he the, you know, the one from Anarres.”

  “You are, aren’t you?” Maedda said slowly. “Shevek. What are you doing here?” He stared at Shevek with alarmed, luminous eyes.

  “Looking for help.”

  “Who sent you to me?”

  “The first man I asked. I don’t know who you are. I asked him where I could go, he said to come to you.”

  “Does anybody else know you’re here?”

  “They don’t know I’ve gone. Tomorrow they will.”

  “Go get Remeivi,” Maedda said to the girl. “Sit down, Dr. Shevek. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

  Shevek sat down on a wooden chair but did not unfasten his coat. He was so tired he was shaking. “I escaped,” he said. “From the University, from the jail. I don’t know where to go. Maybe it’s all jails here. I came here because they talk about the lower classes, the working classes, and I thought, that sounds like my people. People who might help each other.”

  “What kind of help are you looking for?”

  Shevek made an effort to pull himself together. He looked around the little, littered office, and at Maedda. “I have something they want,” he said. “An idea. A scientific theory. I came here from Anarres because I thought that here I could do the work and publish it. I didn’t understand that here an idea is a property of the State. I don’t work for a State. I can’t take the money and the things they give me. I want to get out. But I can’t go home. So I came here. You don’t want my science, and maybe you don’t like your government either.”

  Maedda smiled. “No. I don’t. But our government don’t like me any better. You didn’t pick the safest place to come, either for you or for us…Don’t worry. Tonight’s tonight; we’ll decide what to do.”

  Shevek took out the note he had found in his coat pocket and handed it to Maedda. “This is what brought me. Is it from people you know?”

  “‘Join with us your brothers…’ I don’t know. Could be.”

  “Are you Odonians?”

  “Partly. Syndicalists, libertarians. We work with the Thuvianists, the Socialist Workers Union, but we’re anti-centralist. You arrived at a pretty hot moment, you know.”

  “The war?”

  Maedda nodded. “A demonstration’s been announced for three days from now. Against the draft, war taxes, the rise in food prices. There’s four hundred thousand unemployed in Nio Esseia, and they jack up taxes and prices.” He had been watching Shevek steadily all the time they talked; now, as if the examination was done, he looked away, leaning back in his chair. “This city’s about ready for anything. A strike is what we need, a general strike, and massive demonstrations. Like the Ninth Month Strike that Odo led,” he added with a dry, strained smile. “We could use an Odo now. But they’ve got no Moon to buy us off with this time. We make justice here, or nowhere.” He looked back at Shevek, and presently said in a softer voice, “Do you know what your society has meant, here, to us, these last hundred and fifty years? Do you know that when people here want to wish each other luck they say, ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’ To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation, that they can never say again that it’s just a mirage, an idealist’s dream! I wonder if you fully understand why they’ve kept you so well hidden out there at Ieu Eun, Dr. Shevek. Why you never were allowed to appear at any meeting open to the public. Why they’ll be after you like dogs after a rabbit the moment they find you’re gone. It’s not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh. Walking amongst us.”

  “Then you’ve got your Odo,” the girl said in her quiet, urgent voice. She had re-entered as Maedda was speaking. “After all, Odo was only an idea. Dr. Shevek is the proof.”

  Maedda was silent for a minute. “An undemonstrable proof,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “If people know he’s here, the police will know it too.”

  “Let them come and try to take him,” the girl said, and smiled.

  “The demonstration is going to be absolutely nonviolent,” Maedda said with sudden violence. “Even the SWU have accepted that!”

  “I haven’t accepted it, Tuio. I’m not going t
o let my face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the black-coats. If they hurt me, I’ll hurt back.”

  “Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not achieved by force!”

  “And power isn’t achieved by passivity.”

  “We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! What do you say?” Maedda appealed to Shevek. “The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!”

  Shevek looked at him, at the girl, and at the pawnbroker who stood listening tensely near the door. He said in a tired, quiet voice, “If I would be of use, use me. Maybe I could publish a statement on this in one of your papers. I did not come to Urras to hide. If all the people know I am here, maybe the government would be afraid to arrest me in public? I don’t know.”

  “That’s it,” Maedda said. “Of course.” His dark eyes blazed with excitement. “Where the devil is Remeivi? Go call his sister, Siro, tell her to hunt him out and get him over here.—Write why you came here, write about Anarres, write why you won’t sell yourself to the government, write what you like—we’ll get it printed. Siro! Call Meisthe too.—We’ll hide you, but by God we’ll let every man in A-Io know you’re here, you’re with us!” The words poured out of him, his hands jerked as he spoke, and he walked quickly back and forth across the room. “And then, after the demonstration, after the strike, we’ll see. Maybe things will be different then! Maybe you won’t have to hide!”

  “Maybe all the prison doors will fly open,” Shevek said. “Well, give me some paper, I’ll write.”

  The girl Siro came up to him. Smiling, she stooped as if bowing to him, a little timorously, with decorum, and kissed him on the cheek; then she went out. The touch of her lips was cool, and he felt it on his cheek for a long time.