Урсула Ле Гуин - Dangerous People

“Hush,” the grandmother said, and they hushed, and ate.

In the late, still darkness as the cricket chorus rang like beaten bells, Shamsha lay awake, thinking that there was a person she wanted to talk to: Duhe, that Serpentine doctor, [26] The Doctors Lodge was under the auspices of the Third House, the Serpentine, but people of other Houses could join it. Shamsha is thinking of Duhe as a member of her House, the House of the undomesticated plants such as wildflowers. who had been the first to say that Controlling was a useful book and might not only be kept in the Archives but copied for use in lodges in the other towns. Duhe was a person who saw and heard. Shamsha was certain of it, though they had talked only about the book.

Shamsha had said she intended to take the fragile manuscript up to the Exchange to reproduce, to make a sturdy copy to keep in the Archives; and Duhe—they had been alone in the Archives reading room—had said, “Then you don’t want to perform it?” [27] To the Kesh, a written text was “performed” by reading it aloud, or by hand-copying it, or printing it in letterpress.

Shamsha had admitted that she had thought desirously about hand-copying the text, so as to clarify both the handwriting and some errors or obscure passages, but thought this might be mere self-indulgence. “A doctor wrote this book,” she said, “and I’m no doctor, not well read or practiced in this kind of thinking, this healing thinking. Where I’m in control,” with a glance at the darkened, foxed, spotted manuscript, “is here in the Archives alone with the books. That’s my learning, my experience.” Duhe nodded; Shamsha went on, “Usually I’m a very good judge of whether an old work is better kept or let go. But this time, I distrusted myself. This book resonates with my temperament, my way of thinking so closely that to me it was a great discovery, but I don’t know if it would mean so much to other people.”

She had seen in Duhe’s face that this confession was surprising and interesting to the doctor. Indeed, she was surprised by her own candor and fluency. Duhe listened in a way that gave one words.

Without exploiting that power, Duhe simply replied that her opinion was that the book was not only worth reproducing, but worth performing by hand or even printing, if Shamsha had considered that option.

“Ah! Don’t tempt me!” Shamsha replied, laughing, for there was no work she liked better than setting a text in type, delighting in the type itself, the ink, the press, the paper, the first proof, the trimming, the sewing, the binding, in the high redwood workshop of the Oak Lodge, where the rigorous and demanding mind met the rigorous demands of a material art, and where from that meeting a book came to be, the most mental of material things. In that place, at that work, Shamsha had known the most intense satisfactions of her life. Not the most enduring, but the purest. Too pure: so that she had avoided the easy obsession, and gone to the Madrone, and become not a maker but an unmaker of books, judging what should be saved and what unmade, the knot of words untied, the letters scattered like seed, the paper gone back to pulp or to earth and ash, to the green shoots and reeds and trees and books of years to come.

“I fed a wooden goat,” she said, and heard her voice thin and weak as a child’s, and sat up in bed in the darkness startled and lost.

What had she been thinking about? About the book, about Duhe, why? Because she wanted to talk to the doctor about Hwette, but that was nonsense, why should she do that? She had been falling asleep. Something had happened which she did not understand, or had not happened. But she was certainly not going to ask a stranger’s advice about it. She could run her own household.

Thirty-five years ago Shamsha had joyously married Mehoia. They were living in Wenomal’s household in Hardcinder House when their son and daughter were born. Between a night and a morning the young husband had died of heart failure, leaving Shamsha forever distrustful of anything given her.

Some years later at a dance in Wakwaha she met a man named Geseta, who followed her to Telina and wooed her relentlessly. He was handsome and charming and seemed to Shamsha a great piece of luck, except that he was singleminded. He knew only one story, the love story. To Geseta, life was a means of achieving orgasm. Of course biology was on his side; his sperm and her eggs would agree with him, if they could speak, as would many people of eighteen or nineteen. But there was more to a story than the climax. Shamsha wondered what she was doing in Geseta’s love story. But he was so handsome and so accomplished a storyteller that she entered into the plot; she resisted, she wavered, she flirted, she fled, and she succumbed deliciously to his ardor. Their orgasms were many and rewarding.

As his passion waned, he forced it to revive, for if living is only one thing the lack of that thing is death. He demanded marriage; he importuned her to the point of harassment. She saw that their story was over, but he insisted on prolonging it past the end. Her resistance became real. Resentful, he called it teasing, provocation. He became jealous, possessive, following her everywhere, but would not talk with her. The anger between them burned high. She set his things out on the balcony. [28] Divorce was usually by agreement, but a wife could make a one-sided divorce public and final by putting her husband’s belongings in a pile on the balcony or outside the ground-level door and telling the other people of the household that he did not live there any more. A man refusing to accept such a divorce would face community disapproval and ostracism. Either party of a marriage could request and usually obtain divorce by putting the matter to arbitration by the Councils of his House. When he found them, she was alone in the house. He raped her.

To that rape her third child chose to come to be conceived. That was the hinge of the door of Hwette’s life.

People would talk, seeing Shamsha pregnant and Geseta gone off to Madidinou; they might well speculate that she had not consented to this pregnancy. Shamsha was chivalrous. Knowing Geseta was unable to endure real shame, she did not tell even her mother that she had been raped. She longed to, but felt that even so much solidarity would give her unfair advantage over Geseta, who knowing her strength would founder in his weakness. But it may have been that her strength and his weakness grew in that silence.

To her the rape was one thing and the conception another thing; they were facts of so different a nature that she could connect them only artificially, not in feeling. Justification was irrelevant. What she felt was that this child had chosen to come into her in pain.

The birth was a deliverance, setting free Shamsha’s own soul. At Hwette’s birth and all through her babyhood, Shamsha knew she had given this child more than she had given the others. They were themselves, but this one was herself given away, set free, not known. She called the baby Sehoy, a common name, but to her holding in it the flight of the swallows at dusk over the River, quick, many, scarcely to be seen, voices veering and disappearing, all but disembodied by swiftness and twilight.

Geseta came back to Telina and fell in love with various women. These days, now that he and Shamsha were getting old, he liked to come around Hardcinder House and indulge in nostalgia, always telling that same old love story though it had become a lie. She did not care if he came or not. Where his passion had touched her was a burn scar, thick and nerveless, an ugly thing but not crippling. Her only feeling towards Geseta was an intense distrust of him with their daughter. Once when Sehoy was four or five Shamsha had found him in the Narrow Gardens with her, picking her honeysuckle flowers to suck. Shamsha had come between him and the child and said to him, “Never touch her.” Something terrible in her face or voice made him obey. He sometimes made feeble efforts to disobey, to charm and win over the child or to win sympathy for himself in the family, complaining how his heart ached for his daughter and how she was deprived of the simple warmth of his fatherhood by the mother’s possessive jealousy. Shamsha ignored all that. But if he made any bodily move towards the child, Shamsha was between them, like a heavy, silent dog with its head and tail down, watching him sidelong.