the wind's twelve quarters (39 page)

To die was merely to go on in another direction.
 

If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant when she wrote “True journey is return,” but it had never been more than an intuition, and she was farther than ever now from being able to rationalize it. She bent down, too suddenly, so that she grunted a little at the creak in her bones, and began to root in a bottom drawer of the desk. Her hand came on an age-softened folder and drew it out, recognizing it by touch before sight confirmed: the manuscript of Syndical Organization in Revolutionary Transition. He had printed the title on the folder and written his name under it, Taviri Odo Asieo, IX 741. There was an elegant handwriting, every letter well-formed, bold, and fluent. But he had preferred to use a voiceprinter. The manuscript was all in voiceprint,
 

and high quality too, hesitancies adjusted and idiosyncrasies of speech normalized. You couldn’t see there how he had said “o” deep in his throat as they did on the North Coast. There was nothing of him there but his mind. She had nothing of him at all except his name written on the folder. She hadn’t kept his letters, it was sentimental to keep letters. Besides, she never kept anything. She couldn’t think of anything that she had ever owned for more than a few years, except this ramshackle old body, of course, and she was stuck with that
 

Dualizing again. “She” and “it.” Age and illness made one dualist, made one escapist; the mind insisted, It's not me, it's not me. But it was. Maybe the mystics could detach mind from body, she had always rather wistfully envied them the chance, without hope of emulating them. Escape had never been her game. She had sought for freedom here, now, body and soul.
 

First self-pity, then self-praise, and here she still sat, for God’s love, holding Asieo’s name in her hand, why? Didn’t she know his name without looking it up? What was wrong with her? She raised the folder to her lips and kissed the handwritten name firmly and squarely, replaced the folder in the back of the bottom drawer, shut the drawer, and straightened up in the chair. Her right hand tingled. She scratched it, and then shook it in the air, spitefully. It had never quite got over the stroke. Neither had her right leg, or right eye, or the right comer of her mouth. They were sluggish, inept, they tingled. They made her feel like a robot with a short circuit.
 

And time was getting on, Noi would be coming, what had she been doing ever since breakfast?
 

She got up so hastily that she lurched, and grabbed at the chair-back to make sure
she did not fall. She went down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the big mirror there. Her grey knot was loose and droopy, she hadn’t done it up well before
breakfast. She struggled with it a while. It was hard to keep her arms up in the air. Amai, running in to piss, stopped and said, “Let me do it!” and knotted it up tight and neat in no time, with her round, strong, pretty fingers, smiling and silent. Amai was twenty, less than a third of Laia’s age. Her parents had both been members of the Movement, one killed in the insurrection of ’60, the other still recruiting in the South Provinces. Amai had grown up in Odonian Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter of anarchy. And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you cry when you thought: this is what we worked for, this is what we meant, this is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future.
 

Laia Asieo Odo’s right eye wept several little tears, as she stood between the lavatories and the latrines having her hair done up by the daughter she had not borne; but her left eye, the strong one, did not weep, nor did it know what the right eye did.
 

She thanked Amai and hurried back to her room. She had noticed, in the mirror, a stain on her collar. Peach juice, probably. Damned old dribbler. She didn’t want Noi to come in and find her with drool on her collar.
 

As the clean shirt went on over her head, she thought, What’s so special about Noi?
 

She fastened the collar-frogs with her left hand, slowly.
 

Noi was thirty or so, a slight, muscular fellow with a soft voice and alert dark eyes. That’s what was special about Noi. It was that simple. Good old sex. She had never been drawn to a fair man or a fat one, or the tall fellows with big biceps, never, not even when she was fourteen and fell in love with every passing fart. Dark, spare, and fiery, that was the recipe. Taviri, of course. This boy wasn’t a patch on Taviri for brains, nor even for looks, but there it was: she didn’t want him to see her with dribble on her collar and her hair coming undone.
 

Her thin, grey hair.
 

Noi came in, just pausing in the open door—my God, she hadn’t even shut the door while changing her shirt! She looked at him and saw herself. The old woman.
 

You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week’s shirt and last night’s braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your shaven scalp with diamond powder. None of it would make the slightest difference. The old woman would look a little less, or a little more, grotesque.
 

One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency, mere sanity, awareness of other people.
 

And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.
 

“Good morning,” the young man said in his gentle voice.
 

“Hello, Noi.”
 

No, by God, it was not out of mere decency. Decency be damned. Because the man she had loved, and to whom her age would not have mattered—because he was dead, must she pretend she had no sex? Must she suppress the truth, like a damned puritan authoritarian? Even six months ago, before the stroke, she had made men look at her and like to look at her; and now, though she could give no pleasure, by God she could please herself.
 

When she was six years old, and Papa’s friend Gadeo Used to come by to talk politics with Papa after dinner, she would put on the gold-colored necklace that Mama had found on a trash heap and brought home for her. It was so short that it always got hidden under her collar where nobody could see it. She liked it that way. She knew she had it on. She sat on the doorstep and listened to them talk, and knew that she looked nice for Gadeo. He was dark, with white teeth that flashed. Sometimes he called her “pretty Laia.” “There’s my pretty Laia!” Sixty-six years ago.
 

“What? My head’s dull. I had a terrible night.” It was true. She had slept even less
than usual.
 

“I was asking if you’d seen the papers this morning.”
 

She nodded.
 

“Pleased about Soinehe?”
 

Soinehe was the province in Thu which had declared its secession from the Thuvian State last night.
 

He was pleased about it. His white teeth flashed in his dark, alert face. Pretty Laia.
 

“Yes. And apprehensive.”
 

“I know. But it’s the real thing, this time. It’s the beginning of the end of the Government in Thu. They haven’t even tried to order troops into Soinehe, you know. It would merely provoke the soldiers into rebellion sooner, and they know it.”
 

She agreed with him. She herself had felt that certainty. But she could not share his delight. After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory. A real sense of triumph must be preceded by real despair. She had unlearned despair a long time ago. There were no more triumphs. One went on.
 

“Shall we do those letters today?”
 

“All right. Which letters?”
 

“To the people in the North,” he said without impatience.
 

“In the North?”
 

“Parheo, Oaidun.”
 

She had been born in Parheo, the dirty city on the dirty river. She had not come here to the capital till she was twenty-two and ready to bring the Revolution. Though in those days, before she and the others had thought it through, it had been a very green and puerile revolution. Strikes for better wages, representation for women. Votes and wages—Power and Money, for the love of God! Well, one does learn a little, after all, in fifty years.
 

But then one must forget it all.
 

“Start with Oaidun,” she said, sitting down in the armchair. Noi was at the desk ready to work. He read out excerpts from the letters she was to answer. She tried to pay attention, and succeeded well enough that she dictated one whole letter and started on another. “Remember that at this stage your brotherhood is vulnerable to the threat of... no, to the danger... to...” She groped till Noi suggested, “The danger of leader-worship?”
 

“All right. And that nothing is so soon corrupted by power-seeking as altruism. No. And that nothing corrupts altruism—no. O for God’s love you know what I’m trying to say, Noi, you write it. They know it too, it’s just the same old stuff, why can’t they read my books!”
 

“Touch,” Noi said gently, smiling, citing one of the central Odonian themes.
 

“All right, but I’m tired of being touched. If you’ll write the letter I’ll sign it, but I can’t be bothered with it this morning.” He was looking at her with a little question or concern. She said, irritable, “There is something else I have to do!”
 

When Noi had gone she sat down at the desk and moved the papers about, pretending to be doing something, because she had been startled, frightened, by the words she had said. She had nothing else to do. She never had had anything else to do. This was her work: her lifework. The speaking tours and the meetings and the streets were out of reach for her now, but she could still write, and that was her work. And anyhow if she had had anything else to do, Noi would have known it; he kept her schedule, and tactfully reminded her of things, like the visit from the foreign students this afternoon.
 

Oh, damn. She liked the young, and there was always something to learn from a foreigner, but she was tired of new faces, and tired of being on view. She learned
from them, but they didn’t learn from her; they had learnt all she had to teach long ago, from her books, from the Movement. They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts! —That’s not anarchism, that’s mere obscurantism. —You don’t think liberty and discipline are incompatible, do you?— They accepted their tongue-lashing meekly as children, gratefully, as if she were some kind of All-Mother, the idol of the Big Sheltering Womb. She! She who had mined the shipyards at Seissero, and had cursed Premier Inoilte to his face in front of a crowd of seven thousand, telling him he would have cut off his own balls and had them bronzed and sold as souvenirs, if he thought there was any profit in it—she who had screeched, and sworn, and kicked policemen, and spat at priests, and pissed in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square that said HERE WAS FOUNDED THE SOVEREIGN NATION STATE OF A-IO ETC ETC, pssssssssss to all that! And now she was everybody’s grandmama, the dear old lady, the sweet old monument, come worship at the womb. The fire’s out, boys, it’s safe to come up close.
 

“No, I won’t,” Laia said out loud. “I will not.” She was not self-conscious about talking to herself, because she always had talked to herself. “Laia’s invisible audience,” Taviri had used to say, as she went through the room muttering. “You needn’t come, I won’t be here,” she told the invisible audience now. She had just decided what it was she had to do. She had to go out. To go into the streets.
 

It was inconsiderate to disappoint the foreign students. It was erratic, typically senile. It was unOdonian. Psssssss to all that. What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all? She would go out for a walk.
 

“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.’'
 

On the way downstairs she decided, scowling, to stay and see the foreign students. But then she would go out.
 

They were very young students, very earnest: doeeyed, shaggy, charming creatures from the Western Hemisphere, Benbili and the Kingdom of Mand, the girls in white trousers, the boys in long kilts, warlike and archaic. They spoke of their hopes. “We in Mand are so very far from the Revolution that maybe we are near it,” said one of the girls, wistful and smiling: “The Circle of Life!” and she showed the extremes meeting, in the circle of her slender, dark-skinned fingers. Amai and Aevi served them white wine and brown bread, the hospitality of the House. But the visitors, unpresumptuous, all rose to take their leave after barely half an hour. “No, no, no,” Laia said, “stay here, talk with Aevi and Amai. It’s just that I get stiff sitting down, you see, I have to change about. It has been so good to meet you, will you come back to see me, my little brothers and sisters, soon?” For her heart went out to them, and theirs to her, and she exchanged kisses all round, laughing, delighted by the dark young cheeks, the affectionate eyes, the scented hair, before she shuffled off. She was really a little tired, but to go up and take a nap would be a defeat. She had wanted to go out. She would go out. She had not been alone outdoors since—when? Since winter! before the stroke. No wonder she was getting morbid. It had been a regular jail sentence. Outside, the streets, that’s where she lived.
 

She went quietly out the side door of the House, past the vegetable patch, to the street. The narrow strip of sour city dirt had been beautifully gardened and was producing a fine crop of beans and ceea, but Laia’s eye for farming was unenlightened. Of course it had been clear that anarchist communities, even in the time of transition, must work towards optimal self-support, but how that was to be managed in the way of actual dirt and plants wasn’t her business. There were farmers and agronomists for that. Her job was the streets, the noisy, stinking streets of stone, where she had grown up and lived all her life, except for the fifteen years in prison.