The Day before the Revolution

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  The Day before the Revolution

  Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  NB! Has to be corrected according to russian translation (http://lib.rus.ec/b/69991).

  "The Day Before the Revolution" won the Nebula Award for the best science-fiction short story of 1974. Ursula's The Dispossessed won the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for the best novel of 1974. The Le Guin award-winning spree began with her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the Nebula and Hugo awards and to my mind did more to exploit the potential of the science-fiction novel than anything published to that time; and it continued with her Hugo novella of 1971, "The Word for World Is Forest," her Hugo short story of 1973, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and the 1973 National Book Award in children's literature for her novel The Farthest Shore. Ursula comes naturally to writing and science: her mother was an author, her father an anthropologist; her husband is a Portland State College professor of French history, and she herself, besides her family of three children, possesses an advanced degree in French and Italian Renaissance literature. The story that follows is cut from the same fictional tapestry as The Dispossessed.

  v1.0 - eBook downloaded from http://torrents.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=463754 and after that imported to fb2 by soshial (21.05.2008)

  The Day before the Revolution

  by Ursula Le Guin

  The speaker's voice was loud as empty beer-trucks in a stone street, and the people at the meeting were jammed up close, cobblestones, that great voice booming over them. Taviri was somewhere on the other side of the hall. She had to get to him. She wormed and pushed her way among the dark-clothed, close packed people. She did not hear the words, nor see the faces: only the booming, and the bodies pressed one behind the other. She could not see Taviri, she was too short. A broad black vested belly and chest loomed up blocking her way. She must get through to Taviri. Sweating, she jabbed fiercely with her fist. It was like hitting stones, he did not move at all, but the huge lungs let out right over her head a prodigious noise, a bellow. She cowered. Then she understood that the bellow had not been at her. Others were shouting. The speaker had said something, something fine about taxes or shadows. Thrilled, she joined the shouting-"Yes! Yes! "-and shoving on, came out easily into the open expanse of the Regimental Drill Field in Parheo. Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what they were called. The flowers nodded above her head, swaying in the wind that always blew across the fields in the dusk. She ran among them, and they whipped lithe aside and stood up again swaying, silent. Taviri stood among the tall weeds in his good suit, the dark gray one that made him look like a professor or a playact or, harshly elegant.

  He did not look happy, but he was laughing, and saying something to her. The sound of his voice made her cry, and she reached out to catch hold of his hand, but she did not stop, quite. She could not stop. "Oh, Taviri," she said, "it's just on there!". The queer sweet smell of the white weeds was heavy as she went` on. There were thorns, tangles underfoot, there were slopes.' pits. She feared to fall... she stopped.

  Sun, bright morning-glare, straight in the eyes, relentless. She had forgotten to pull the blind last night. She turned her back. on the sun, but the right side wasn't comfortable. No use. Day.

  She sighed twice, sat up, got her legs over the edge of the bed,; and sat hunched in her nightdress looking down at her feet.

  The toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes, we almost square where they touched each other, and bulged out' above in corns; the nails were discolored and shapeless. Between the knoblike ankle bones ran fine, dry wrinkles. The brief little plain at the base of the toes had kept its delicacy, but the skin was the color of mud, and knotted veins crossed the instep. Disgusting. Sad, depressing. Mean. Pitiful. She tried on all the' words, and they all fit, like hideous little hats. Hideous: yes, that one too. To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But" then, when she hadn't been hideous, had she sat around and-, stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body's not an: object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it's just you, yourself. Only when it's no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it- Is it in good shape? Will it do?: Will it last?

  "Who cares?" said Laia fiercely, and stood up.

  It made her giddy to stand up suddenly. She had to put out her hand to the bed table, for she dreaded falling. At that she thought` of reaching out to Taviri, in the dream.

  What had he said? She could not remember. She was not sure if she had even touched his hand. She frowned, trying to force' memory. It had been so long since she had dreamed about Taviri; and now not even to remember what he had said!

  It was gone, it was gone. She stood there hunched in her nightdress, frowning, one hand on the bed table. How long was it since she had thought of him-let alone dreamed of him-even,. thought of him, as "Taviri"? How long since she had said his name?

  Asieo said. When Asieo and I were in prison in the North. Before I met Asieo. Asieo's theory of reciprocity. Oh yes, she talked about him, talked about him too much no doubt, maundered, dragged him in. But as "Asieo," the last name, the public man. The private man was gone, utterly gone. There were so few left who had even known him. They had all used to be in jail. One laughed about it on those days, all the friends in all the jails. But they weren't even there, these days. They were in the prison cemeteries. Or in the common graves.

  "Oh, oh my dear," Laia said out loud, and she sank down onto the bed again because she could not stand up under the remembrance of those first weeks in the Fort, in the cell, those first weeks of the nine years in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, those first weeks after they told her that Asieo had been killed in the fighting in Capitol Square and had been buried with the Fourteen Hundred in the lime-ditches behind Oring Gate. In the cell. Her hands fell into the old position on her lap, the left clenched and locked inside the grip of the right, the right thumb working back and forth a little pressing and rubbing on the knuckle of the left first finger. Hours, days, nights. She had thought of them all, each one, each one of the fourteen hundred, how they lay, how the quicklime worked on the flesh, how the bones touched in the burning dark. Who touched him? How did the slender bones of the hand lie now? Hours, years.

  "Taviri, I have never forgotten you!" she whispered, and the stupidity of it brought her back to morning-light and the rumpled bed. Of course she hadn't forgotten him. These things go without saying between husband and wife. There were her ugly old feet flat on the floor again, just as before. She had got nowhere at all, she had gone in a circle. She stood up with a grunt of effort and disapproval, and went to the closet for her dressing gown.

  The young people went about the halls of the House in becoming immodesty, but she was too old for that. She didn't want to spoil some young man's breakfast with the sight of her. Besides, they had grown up in the principle of freedom of dress and sex and all the rest, and she hadn't. All she had done was invent it. It's not the same.

  Like speaking of Asieo as "my husband." They winced. The word she should use as a good Odonian, of course, was "partner. " But why the hell did she have to be a good Odonian?

  She shuffled down the hall to the bathrooms. Mairo was there, washing her hair in a lavatory. Laia looked at the long, sleek, wet hank with admiration. She got out of the House so seldom now that she didn't know when she had last seen a respectably shaven scalp, but still the sight of a full head of hair gave her pleasure, vigorous pleasure. How many times had she been jeered at, Longhair, Longhair, had her hair pulled by policemen or young y toughs, had her hair shaved off down to the scalp by a grinning soldier at each n
ew prison? And then had grown it all over again, through the fuzz, to the frizz, to the curls, to the mane... In the old days. For God's love, couldn't she think of anything today but the old days?

  Dressed, her bed made, she went down to commons. It was a good breakfast, but she had never got her appetite back since the ;j damned stroke. She drank two cups of herb tea, but couldn't finish the piece of fruit she had taken. How she had craved fruit as a child, badly enough to steal it; and in the Forth for God's love stop it! She smiled and replied to the greetings and friendly .j inquiries of the other breakfasters and big Aevi who was serving the counter this morning. It was he who had tempted her with the peach, "Look at this, I've been saving it for you," and how' could she refuse? Anyway she had always loved fruit, and never got enough; once when she was six or seven she had stolen a j piece off a vendor's cart in River Street. But it was hard to eat when everyone was talking so excitedly. There was news from Thu, real news. She was inclined to discount it at first, being j wary of enthusiasms, but after she had read the article in the paper, and read between the lines of it, she thought, with a strange kind of certainty, deep but cold, Why, this is it; it has come. And in Thu, not here. Thu will break before this country does; the Revolution will first prevail there. As if that mattered! There will be no more nations. And yet it did matter somehow, it made her a little cold and sad-envious, in fact. Of all the infinite stupidities. She did not join the talk much, and soon got up to go back to her room feeling sorry for herself. She could not share their excitement. She was out of it, really out of it. It's not easy, she said to herself in justification, laboriously climbing the 7 stairs, to accept being out of it when you've been in it, in the center of it, for fifty years. Oh for God's love. Whining!

  She got the stairs and the self-pity behind her, entering her room. It was a good room, and it was good to be by herself. It was a great relief. Even if it wasn't strictly fair. Some of the kids in the attics were living five to a room no bigger than this. There were always more people wanting to live in an Odonian House than could be properly accommodated. She had this big room all to herself only because she was an old woman who had had a stroke. And maybe because she was Odo. If she hadn't been Odo, but merely the old woman with a stroke, would she have had it? Very Rely. After all who the hell wanted to room with a drooling old woman? But it was hard to be sure. Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only Time works the great changes. Meanwhile this was a nice, large, sunny room, proper for a drooling old woman who had started a world revolution.

  Her secretary would be coming in an hour to help her dispatch the day's work. She shuffled over to the desk, a beautiful, big piece, a present from the Nio Cabinetmakers' Syndicate because somebody had heard her remark once that the only piece of furniture she had ever really longed for was a desk with drawers and enough room on top... damn, the top was practically covered with papers with notes clipped to them, mostly in Noi's small clear handwriting: Urgent.-Northern Provinces.-Consult w/R.T.?

  Her own handwriting had never been the same since Asieo's death. It was odd, when you thought about it. After all, within five years after his death she had written the whole Analogy. And there were those letters, which the tall guard with the watery grey eyes, what was his name, never mind, had smuggled out of the Fort for her for two years. The Prison Letters they called them now, there were a dozen different editions of them. All that stuff, the letters which people kept telling her were so full of "spiritual strength"-which probably meant she had been lying herself blue in the face when she wrote them, trying to keep her spirits up-and the Analogy which was certainly the solidest intellectual work she had ever done, all of that had been written in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, after Asieo's death. One had to do something, and in the Fort they let one have paper and pens . . . But it had all been written in the hasty, scribbling hand which she had never felt was hers, not her own like the round, black scrollings of the manuscript of Society Without Government, forty-five years old. Taviri had taken not only her body's and her heart's desire to the quicklime with him, but even her good clear handwriting.

  But he had left her the revolution.

  How brave of you to go on, to work, to write, in prison, after such a defeat for the Movement, after your partner's death, people had used to say. Damn fools. What else had there been to do? Bravery, courage-what was courage? She had never '°' figured it out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on; others said. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real choice, ever?

  To die was merely to go on in another direction.

  If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant when she wrote, "True journey is return,", but it had never been more than an intuition, and she was farther than ever now from bring able to rationalise it. She bent down,: too suddenly, so that she grunted a little at the creak in her bones, and began to root in a bottom drawer of the desk. Her hand came to an age-softened folder and drew it out, recognizing it by touch= before sight confirmed: the manuscript of Syndical Organization in Revolutionary Transition. He had printed the title on the . folder and written his name under it, Taviri Odo Asieo, IX 741. There was an elegant handwriting, every letter well-formed, bold, and fluent. But he had preferred to use a voice printer. The manuscript was all in voiceprint, and high quality too, hesitancies adjusted and idiosyncrasies of speech normalized. You couldn't see there how he had said "o" deep in his throat as they did on the North Coast. There was nothing of him there but his, mind. She had nothing of him at all except his name written on. the folder. She hadn't kept his letters, it was sentimental to keep letters. Besides, she never kept anything. She couldn't think of anything that she had ever owned for more than a few years,. except this ramshackle old body, of course, and she was stuck: with that...

  Dualizing again. "She" and "it. " Age and illness made one dualist, made one escapist; the mind insisted, It's not me, it's not me. But it was. Maybe the mystics could detach mind from body, she had always rather wistfully envied them the chance, _ without hope of emulating them. Escape had never been her 7v game. She had sought for freedom here, now, body and soul.

  First self-pity, then self-praise, and here she still sat, for God's love, holding Asieo's name in her hand, why? Didn't she know his name without looking it up? What was wrong with her? She raised the folder to her lips and kissed the handwritten name firmly and squarely, replaced the folder in the back of the bottom drawer, shut the drawer, and straightened up in the chair. Her right hand tingled. She scratched it, and then shook it in the air, spitefully. It had never quite got over the stroke. Neither had her right leg, or right eye, or the right corner of her mouth. They were sluggish, inept, they tingled. They made her feel like a robot with a short circuit.

  And. time was getting on, Noi would be coming, what had she been doing ever since breakfast?

  She got up so hastily that she lurched, and grabbed at the chair back to make sure she did not fall. She went down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the big mirror there. Her grey knot was loose and droopy, she hadn't done it up well before breakfast. She struggled with it awhile. It was hard to keep her arms up in the air. Amai, running in to piss, stopped and said, "Let me do it!" and knotted it up tight and neat in no time, with her round, strong, pretty fingers, smiling and silent. Amai was twenty, less than a third of Laia's age. Her parents had both been members of the Movement, one killed in the insurrection of '60, the other still recruiting in the South Provinces. Amai had grown up in Odonian Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter of anarchy. And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you cry when you thought: this is what we worked for, this is what we meant, this is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future.

  Laia Osaieo Odo's right eye wept several little tears as she stood between the lavatories and the latrines having her hair done up by the daughter she had not borne;
but her left eye, the strong one, did not weep, nor did it know what the right eye did.

  She thanked Amai and hurried back to her room. She had noticed, in the mirror, a stain on her collar. Peach juice, probably. Damned old dribbler. She didn't want Noi to come in and find her with drool on the collar.

  As the clean shirt went on over her head, she thought, What's so special about Noi?

  She fastened the collar-frogs with her left hand, slowly.

  Noi was thirty or so, a slight, muscular fellow with a soft voice and alert dark eyes. That's what was special about Noi. It was that simple. Good old sex. She had never been drawn to a fair man or a fat one, or the tall fellows with big biceps, never, not even when she was fourteen and fell in love with every passing fart. Dark, spare, and fiery, that was the recipe. Taviri, of course. This boy wasn't a patch on Taviri for brains, nor even for looks, but there it was: She didn't want him to see her with dribble on her collar and her hair coming undone.

  Her thin, grey hair.

  Noi came in, just pausing in the open doorway-my God, she hadn't even shut the door while changing her shirt!-She looked at him and saw herself. The old woman.

  You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week's shirt and last night's braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your shaven scalp with diamond powder. None of it would make the slightest difference. The old woman would look a little less, or a little more, grotesque.

  One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency, mere sanity, awareness of other people.

  And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.

  "Good morning," the young man said in his gentle voice.

  "Hello, Noi. "

  No, by God, it was not out of mere decency. Decency be damned. Because the man she had loved, and to whom her age would not have mattered-because he was dead, must she pretend she had no sex? Must she suppress the truth, like a damned puritan authoritarian? Even six months ago, before the stroke, she had made men look at her and like to look at her; and now, though she could give no pleasure, by God she could please herself.