Ursula LeGuin - Four Ways to Forgiveness

"If I write this for you, I want water, a lot of water, and soap and blankets and toilet paper and pillows and a doctor, and I want somebody to come when I knock on that door, and I want some decent

clothes. Warm clothes. Men's clothes,"

"No doctor!" the man.said. "Write it! Please!

Now!" He was jumpy, twitchy, she dared push him no further. She read their statement, copied it out in her large, childish scrawl — she seldom handwrote anything — and handed both to the spokesman. He glanced over it and without a word hurried the other men out. Clash went the door.

"Should 1 have refused?"

"I don't think so," Teyeo said. He stood up and stretched, but sat down again looking dizzy. "You bargain well," he said.

"We'll see what we get. Oh, God. What is going on?"

"Maybe," he said slowly, "Gatay is unwilling to yield to these demands. But when Voe Deo — and

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your Ekumen — get word of it, they'll put pressure on Gatay."

"I wish they'd get moving- I suppose Gatay is horribly embarrassed, saving face by trying to conceal the whole thing — is that likely? How long can they keep it up? What about your people? Won't they be hunting for you?"

"No doubt," he said, in his polite way.

It was curious how his stiff manner, his manners, which had always shunted her aside, cut her out, here had quite another effect: his restraint and formality reassured her that she was still part of the world outside this room, from which they came and to which they would return, a world where people lived long lives.

What did long life matter? she asked herself. and didn't know. It was nothing she had ever thought about before. But these young Patriots lived in a world of short lives. Demands, violence, immediacy, and death, for what? for a bigotry, a hatred, a rush of power.

"Whenever they leave," she said in a low voice,

"I get really frightened."

Teyeo cleared his throat and said, "So do I."

Exercises.

"Take hold — no, take hold, I'm not made of glass! — Now —"

"Ha!" he said, with his flashing grin of excitement, as she showed him the break, and he in turn repeated it, breaking from her.

"All right, now you'd be waiting — here" — thump — "see?"

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"Ai!"

"I'm sorry — I'm sony, Teyeo — I didn't think about your head — Are you all right? I'm really

sorry —"

"Oh, Kamye," he said, sitting up and holding his black, narrow head between his hands. He drew several deep breaths. She knelt penitent and anxious.

"That's." he said. and breathed some more,

"that's not. not fair play."

"No of course it's not, it's aiji — all's fair in love and war, they say that on Terra — Really, I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry, that was so stupid of me!"

He laughed, a kind of broken and desperate laugh, shook his head, shook it again. "Show me," he said. "I don't know what you did."

Exercises.

"What do you do with. your mind?"

"Nothing."

"You just let it wander?" "No. Am I and my mind different beings?"

"So . .. you don't focus on something? You just wander with it?"

"No."

"So you don't let it wander."

"Who?" he said, rather testily.

A pause.

"Do you think about —"

"No," he said- "Be still."

A very long pause, maybe a quarter hour.

"Teyeo, I can't. I itch. My mind itches. How long have you been doing this?"

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A pause, a reluctant answer: "Since I was two."

He broke his utterly relaxed motionless pose, bent his head to stretch his neck and shoulder muscles. She watched him.

"I keep thinking about long life, about living long," she said. "I don't mean just being alive a long time, hell, I've been alive about eleven hundred years, what does that mean, nothing. I mean ... Something about thinking of life as long makes a difference. Like having kids does. Even thinking about having kids. It's like it changes some balance- It's funny I keep thinking about that now, when my chances for a long life have kind of taken a steep fall... ."

He said nothing. He was able to say nothing in a way that allowed her to go on talking. He was one ' of the least talkative men she had ever known. Most men were so wordy. She was fairly wordy herself.

He was quiet. She wished she knew how to be quiet.

"It's just practice, isn't it?" she asked. "Just sitting there."

He nodded.

"Years and years and years of practice. , . - Oh, God. Maybe ..."

"No, no," he said, taking her thought immediately.

"But why don't they do something? What are they waiting for? It's been nine days\"

From the beginning, by unptanned, unspoken agreement, the room had been divided in two: the line ran down the middle of the mattress and across to the facing wall. The door was on her side, the left;

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the shit-hole was on his side, the right. Any invasion of the other's space was requested by some almost invisible cue and permitted the same way. When one of them used the shit-hole the other unobtrusively faced away. When they had enough water to take cat-baths, which was seldom, the same arrangement held. The line down the middle of the mattress was absolute. Their voices crossed it, and the sounds and smells of their bodies. Sometimes she felt his warmth; Werelian body temperature was somewhat higher than hers, and in the dank, still air she felt that faint radiance as he slept. But they never crossed the line, not by a finger, not in the deepest sleep.

Solly thought about this, finding it, in some moments, quite funny. At other moments it seemed stupid and perverse. Couldn't they both use some human comfort? The only time she had touched him was the first day, when she had helped him get onto the mattress, and then when they had enough water she had cleaned his scalp wound and little by little washed the clotted, stinking blood out of his hair, using the comb, which had after all been a good thing to have, and pieces of the Goddess's skirt, an invaluable source of washcloths and bandages. Then once his head healed, they practiced aiji daily; but aiji had an impersonal, ritual purity to its clasps and grips that was a long way from creature comfort. The rest of the time his bodily presence was clearly, invariably uninvasive and untouchable.

He was only maintaining, under incredibly difficult circumstances, the rigid restraint he had always shown. Not just he, but Rewe, too; all of them, all of them but Batikam; and yet was

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Batikam's instant yielding to her whim and desire the true contact she had thought it? She thought of the fear in his eyes, that last night. Not restraint, but constraint.

It was the mentality of a slave society: slaves and masters caught in the same trap of radical distrust and self-protection.

"Teyeo," she said, "I don't understand slavery.