Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

“Just some Sun people. Your relative is a historian?”

“Crazy people,” Iyan Iyan said with indifference, and came to sit naked on naked Hav­zhiva and massage his back.

The historian arrived, a little short thin woman of fifty or so called Mezha. By the time Hav­zhiva met her she was wearing Stse clothing and eating breakfast with everybody else. She had bright eyes and was cheerful but not talkative. Nothing about her showed that she had broken the social contract, done things no woman does, ignored her lineage, become another kind of being. For all he knew she was married to the father of her children, and wove at a loom, and castrated animals. But nobody shunned her, and after breakfast the old people of the household took her off for a returning-traveler ceremony, just as if she were still one of them.

He kept wondering about her, wondering what she had done. He asked Iyan Iyan questions about her till Iyan Iyan snapped at him, “I don’t know what she does, I don’t know what she thinks. Historians are crazy. Ask her yourself!”

When Hav­zhiva realised that he was afraid to do so, for no reason, he understood that he was in the presence of a god who was requiring something of him. He went up to one of the sitting holes, rock cairns on the heights above the town. Below him the black tile roofs and white walls of Stse nestled under the bluffs, and the irrigation tanks shone silver among fields and orchards. Beyond the tilled land stretched the long sea marshes. He spent a day sitting in silence, looking out to sea and into his soul. He came back down to his own house and slept there. When he turned up for breakfast at Iyan Iyan’s house she looked at him and said nothing.

“I was fasting,” he said.

She shrugged a little. “So eat,” she said, sitting down by him. After breakfast she left for work. He did not, though he was expected at the looms.

“Mother of All Children,” he said to the historian, giving her the most respectful title a man of one lineage can give a woman of another, “there are things I do not know, which you know.”

“What I know I will teach you with pleasure,” she said, as ready with the formula as if she had lived here all her life. She then smiled and forestalled his next oblique question. “What was given me I give,” she said, meaning there was no question of payment or obligation. “Come on, let’s go to the plaza.”

Everybody goes to the plaza in Stse to talk, and sits on the steps or around the fountain or on hot days under the arcades, and watches other people come and go and sit and talk. It was perhaps a little more public than Hav­zhiva would have liked, but he was obedient to his god and his teacher.

They sat in a niche of the fountain’s broad base and conversed, greeting people every sentence or two with a nod or a word.

“Why did—” Hav­zhiva began, and stuck.

“Why did I leave? Where did I go?” She cocked her head, bright-eyed as an araha, checking that those were the questions he wanted answered. “Yes. Well, I was crazy in love with Granite, but we had no child, and he wanted a child…. You look like he did then. I like to look at you…. So, I was unhappy. Nothing here was any good to me. And I knew how to do everything here. Or that’s what I thought.”

Hav­zhiva nodded once.

“I worked at the temple. I’d read messages that came in or came by and wonder what they were about. I thought, all that’s going on in the world! Why should I stay here my whole life? Does my mind have to stay here? So I began to talk with some of them in other places in the temple: who are you, what do you do, what is it like there…. Right away they put me in touch with a group of historians who were born in the pueblos, who look out for people like me, to make sure they don’t waste time or offend a god.”

This language was completely familiar to Hav­zhiva, and he nodded again, intent.

“I asked them questions. They asked me questions. Historians have to do a lot of that. I found out they have schools, and asked if I could go to one. Some of them came here and talked to me and my family and other people, finding out if there would be trouble if I left. Stse is a conservative pueblo. There hadn’t been a historian from here for four hundred years.”

She smiled; she had a quick, catching smile, but the young man listened with unchanging, intense seriousness. Her look rested on his face tenderly.

“People here were upset, but nobody was angry. So after they talked about it, I left with those people. We flew to Kathhad. There’s a school there. I was twenty-two. I began a new education. I changed being. I learned to be a historian.”

“How?” he asked, after a long silence.

She drew a long breath. “By asking hard questions,” she said. “Like you’re doing now…. And by giving up all the knowledge I had—throwing it away.”

“How?” he asked again, frowning. “Why?”

“Like this. When I left, I knew I was a Buried Cable woman. When I was there, I had to unknow that knowledge. There, I’m not a Buried Cable woman. I’m a woman. I can have sex with any person I choose. I can take up any profession I choose. Lineage matters, here. It does not matter, there. It has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and no use, anywhere else in the universe.” She was as intense as he, now. “ There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal 417.26 There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.] “Local knowledge” usually refers to such minor items as weather patterns or road conditions, but Le Guin draws here on the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who uses the phrase to show how complex cultural patterns such as religion are built upon, and defined by, those smaller sorts of understanding. 424.15 the Terran Altiplano] The high plateau (averaging over 12,000 feet in elevation) that sits amid the Andes Mountains in Bolivia and extends into parts of Peru, Argentina, and Chile. 433.29 I believe in it because it is impossible.] Adapted from a line by Carthaginian Christian philosopher Tertullian (c. 155–240 C.E.): Certum est quia impossibile est , “It [the resurrection of Christ] is certain because it is impossible.” 459.36 “jump the ditch.”] An echo of the custom of jumping the broom, originally a joking term in Britain for an unsanctioned elopement but later a marriage ceremony practiced by American slaves who were not allowed to marry legally. 518.23–25 But how do you get there?… the problem with Utopia] In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” 572.25–26 cyanotic skin coloration] See note 338.10 . 576.31 Kwan Yin–like] Kwan Yin or Guanyin, an East Asian Buddhist divinity commonly called the “Goddess of Mercy.” . There are two kinds of time, local and historical.”

“Are there two kinds of gods?”

“No,” she said. “There are no gods there. The gods are here.”

She saw his face change.

She said after a while, “There are souls, there. Many, many souls, minds, minds full of knowledge and passion. Living and dead. People who lived on this earth a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. Minds and souls of people from worlds a hundred light-years from this one, all of them with their own knowledge, their own history. The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That’s not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I learned, here and there, only increased it. There’s nothing that is not sacred.” She spoke slowly and quietly, the way most people talked in the pueblo. “You can choose the local sacredness or the great one. In the end they’re the same. But not in the life one lives. ‘To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.’ The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river.”