Урсула Ле Гуин - Dangerous People

“It’s still too hot. After sunset, maybe,” Shamsha said.

Bolekash said, “Come on! We’re going to the garden!” and whirled out again. Torip obediently followed her, clutching apricots. Shamsha called after them, “Keep out of the irrigation system, you two!”

“We will,” Torip called back, sweet as a towhee chirping.

Shamsha said, “They dammed up the ditches this morning and flooded the salad beds. A pair of wild pigs! The wheat’s on the stove, cooked, Tai, and I left the herbs in oil, there in the brown bowl. Do you want a hand with anything else?”

After thinking about it for a while, Tai said, “No.” Shamsha was relieved. When he cooked he moved so slowly among such a confusion of implements and unfinished work that it tried her patience, and she often ended up finishing the unfinished for him, which he never seemed to notice. She had already started out of the room when he said, “I guess the peas need to be shelled,” with the air of a person coming slowly upon a concept entirely new to him. Shamsha turned around, picked up the big basket of peas and an empty basket, and went back out on the balcony to shell them.

Kamedan had brought his lemonade out and was sitting there looking out through the goats to the hills. When she sat down with her baskets he moved closer, took up a handful of peapods, and began shelling, dropping the pods into the empty basket and the peas into his shirt pocket, except for those that went into his mouth.

“Will any of those come back?” Shamsha asked, and he answered, “Only the ones I don’t eat.”

“The book I’m working on describes people like Tai,” she said, “who by apparently doing nothing cause other people to do things. The author calls it controlling by receding, an important principle, especially useful for controlling people like me. People like me will always come forward as people like Tai recede.”

Kamedan smiled, diffident; he seldom analysed ideas or people. They both shelled steadily. The peas were small, crisp, and neat, willingly coming out of their pods under the push of a thumb. They fell musically into the basket in arpeggios as Shamsha shelled, and in a pattering rush when Kamedan leaned forward to empty his pocket. His movements were steady and quiet, reflecting his art as a weaver, and his nature, Shamsha thought as she watched him. Yet she did not trust his quietness, his gentleness. It was real but it was blind. Though his eyes were clear, inwardly the man was blind, eyes clinched shut, forehead wrinkled like a bull’s, helplessly dangerous.

Shamsha believed that men knew their helplessness, since the rules that bound desire were largely of their making and responded to their needs; but she would like to know a man who did not love his helplessness. She wondered if it had been Hwette’s choice to have a second child, or if it was Kamedan’s non-choice, his blind doing, the helpless, driven reassertion of potency as paternity, not wanting the child but the fatherhood of the child that bound him to the mother, his emptiness to her fullness.

And why had the child chosen to come to them? Had they yet considered that? Shamsha thought that Hwette might not have considered it and yet, when she did, would be able to answer the question. Hwette had that gift, though she seldom used it. Kamedan, if he considered the question, would not care if he could not answer it. He thought it was enough to welcome the child, to love the child, as he loved Torip. The child was a thread in the fabric of his relationship with Hwette, his marriage the warp on the high, broad loom and he the blind shuttle weaving her life into a pattern, a figure—but really, Shamsha thought, what gaudy metaphors! That book is controlling my mind. Here sits the handsomest man in Telina, shelling peas to help me, thoughtful, careful, kind, the perfect husband for my daughter. Why shouldn’t they be having another baby? Kamedan leaned forward to empty a load of peas from his shirt pocket, and the fineness of the corners of his mouth, the innocence of the smile that changed his face from its habitual calm, irresistibly invited her trust and pleasure. Men need marriage, she thought, and it’s foolish to begrudge it to them.

Looking down through the goats’ legs she saw the two wives, her daughters, coming together across the common from the Naward Bridge. Perhaps because her mind was agitated and she had been thinking about marriage, she saw ghosts: her father walked in his granddaughter Fefinum’s short, assertive stride, on small feet that turned out a little, planting themselves firmly at each step. And it was the grandmother, Shamsha’s mother Wenomal, who turned Hwette’s head, lifting the chin, looking up into the evening sky with a bodily gesture so submissive, so remote, that it frightened Shamsha and made her look away, thinking that it is never an altogether happy thing to see the dead, even in the living.

Her two daughters came up the stairs to the balcony, Fefinum talking steadily. Shamsha found herself nervous, feeling ashamed that she had not responded at once to Hwette’s message, wanting to make up for that silence now, though she must do so in silence. But Hwette greeted her without the least trace of question or confirmation, so that Shamsha felt foolish trying to catch her eye, and thought she must speak to her later, alone. After Hwette had gone indoors and Kamedan had followed her, Shamsha thought that the best thing would have been to get up and touch Hwette, hold her for a moment; that was all that was needed. But she had not done it. Since her marriage Hwette had become not easy to touch. Even as a little child, trusting and affectionate, she had been elusive, like the swallow she had been named for then; [24] Hwette as a child was called Sehoy, Barnswallow; she renamed herself Hwette, scrub oak, when she was adolescent or grown. and now, like the scrub oak she had named herself for, she was unobtrusive, unwelcoming to the hand.

But, Shamsha thought, whose reluctance am I really talking about? It was so easy to blame the passive person for one’s own active choice, and Shamsha had chosen for a long time, for years now, since Geseta left, not to touch people or be touched unless custom demanded it.

“‘The child coming to be born demands that the house be set in order,’” Shamsha thought, and was afraid.

“Why bother cooking them?” Fefinum said boisterously, scooping a handful of shelled peas from the basket and tossing half the handful in her mouth. She chewed noisily. She was still being a Clown, still enjoying the license to be crude, loud, and greedy, which she thought had been granted her when she joined the Society. That the license was granted only to the Clown, and that so long as she was Fefinum she was not the Clown, was the kind of distinction she did not make. Nor did she observe the distinction between her mother the center of a household, the Archivist of the Madrone Lodge, and her mother the changing, uncertain woman Shamsha. Fefinum saw the role not the person. Her obtuseness was often very restful to her mother. To be treated like a great rock made Shamsha feel like a great rock. To know her control over people and events was taken as a fact made her feel that she was in fact in control. Fefinum loved control, thrived on it; she couldn’t have wanted so badly to be a Clown if she wasn’t controlled by control, as the manuscript Controlling put it.

Kamedan came back out on the balcony and took up his place by Shamsha. Fefinum leaned against the carved railing facing the two of them, and stretched out her round, strong legs. She said, “I want to talk to you two about Hwette.” That was Fefinum practicing at being the great rock, the center of the household. Because the role was more important to her than the person, everything she did seemed like play-acting; and the more important it was, the more dishonest she seemed in doing it. Shamsha felt Kamedan shift a little, uncomfortable. In herself she felt the ironic and resistant spirit rise, holding its iron flail, ready to strike. I will not speak, I will not speak, I will not destroy her, she vowed to herself.