Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

She leaned over and kissed him very gently on the mouth. Her lips were light, dry, soft.

“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 Chief’s 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 civilisation 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?”