The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (19 page)

It
was gone, it was gone. She stood there hunched in her nightdress, frowning, one
hand on the bed-table. How long was it since she had thought of him - let alone
dreamed of him -even thought of him, as 'Taviri'? How long since she had said
his name?

Asieo
said. When Asieo and I were in prison in the North. Before I met Asieo. Asieo's
theory of reciprocity. Oh yes, she talked about him, talked about him too much
no doubt, maundered, dragged him in. But as 'Asieo', the last name, the public
man. The private man was gone, utterly gone. There were so few left who had
even known him. They had all used to be in jail. One laughed about it in those
days, all the friends in all the jails. But they weren't even there, these
days. They were in the prison cemeteries. Or in the common graves.

'Oh,
oh my dear,' Laia said out loud, and she sank down onto the bed again because
she could not stand up under the remembrance of those first weeks in the Fort,
in the cell, those first weeks of the nine years in the Fort in Drio, in the
cell, those first weeks after they told her that Asieo had been killed in the
fighting in Capitol Square and had been buried with the Fourteen Hundred in the
lime-ditches behind Oring Gate. In the cell. Her hands fell into the old
position on her lap, the left clenched and locked inside the grip of the right,
the right thumb working back and forth a little pressing and rubbing on the
knuckle of the left first finger. Hours, days, nights. She had thought of them
all, each one, each one of the Fourteen Hundred, how they lay, how the
quicklime worked on the flesh, how the bones touched in the burning dark. Who
touched him? How did the slender bones of the hand lie now? Hours, years.

'Taviri,
I have never forgotten you!' she whispered, and the stupidity of it brought her
back to morning light and the rumpled bed. Of course she hadn't forgotten him.
These things go without saying between husband and wife. There were her ugly
old feet flat on the floor again, just as before. She had got nowhere at all,
she had gone in a circle. She stood up with a grunt of effort and disapproval,
and went to the closet for her dressing gown.

The
young people went about the halls of the House in becoming immodesty, but she
was too old for that. She didn't want to spoil some young man's breakfast with
the sight of her. Besides, they had grown up in the principle of freedom of
dress and sex and all the rest, and she hadn't. All she had done was invent it.
It's not the same.

Like
speaking of Asieo as 'my husband'. They winced. The word she should use as a
good Odonian, of course, was 'partner'. But why the hell did she have to be a
good Odonian?

She
shuffled down the hall to the bathrooms. Mairo was there, washing her hair in a
lavatory. Laia looked at the long, sleek, wet hank with admiration. She got out
of the House so seldom now that she didn't know when she had last seen a
respectably shaven scalp, but still the sight of a full head of hair gave her
pleasure, vigorous pleasure. How many times had she been jeered at
Longhair,
longhair,
had
her hair pulled by policemen or young toughs, had her hair shaved off down to
the scalp by a grinning soldier at each new prison? And then had grown it all over
again, through the fuzz, to the frizz, to the curls, to the mane ... In the old
days. For God's love, couldn't she think of anything today but the old days?

Dressed,
her bed made, she went down to commons. It was a good breakfast, but she had
never got her appetite back since the damned stroke. She drank two cups of herb
tea, but couldn't finish the piece of fruit she had taken. How she had craved
fruit as a child badly enough to steal it; and in the Fort - oh, for God's love
stop it! She smiled and replied to the greetings and friendly inquiries of the
other breakfasters and big Aevi who was serving the counter this morning. It
was he who had tempted her with the peach, 'Look at this, I've been saving it
for you,' and how could she refuse? Anyway she had always loved fruit, and
never got enough; once when she was six or seven she had stolen a piece off a
vendor's cart in River Street. But it was hard to eat when everyone was talking
so excitedly. There was news from Thu, real news. She was inclined to discount
it at first, being wary of enthusiasms, but after she had read the article in
the paper, and read between the lines of it, she thought, with a strange kind
of certainty, deep but cold, Why, this is it; it has come. And in Thu, not
here. Thu will break before this country does; the Revolution will first
prevail there. As if that mattered! There will be no more nations. And yet it
did matter somehow, it made her a little cold and sad -envious, in fact. Of all
the infinite stupidities. She did not join in the talk much, and soon got up to
go back to her room, feeling sorry for herself. She could not share their
excitement. She was out of it, really out of it. It's not easy, she said to
herself in justification, laboriously climbing the stairs, to accept being out
of it when you've been in it, in the center of it, for fifty years. Oh, for
God's love. Whining!

She
got the stairs and the self-pity behind her, entering her room. It was a good
room, and it was good to be by herself. It was a great relief. Even if it
wasn't strictly fair. Some of the kids in the attics were living five to a room
no bigger than this. There were always more people wanting to live in an
Odonian House than could be properly accommodated. She had this big room all to
herself only because she was an old woman who had had a stroke. And maybe
because she was Odo. If she hadn't been Odo, but merely the old woman with a
stroke, would she have had it? Very likely. After all, who the hell wanted to
room with a drooling old woman? But it was hard to be sure. Favoritism,
elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she
had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only
Time works the great changes. Meanwhile this was a nice, large, sunny room,
proper for a drooling old woman who had started a world revolution.

Her
secretary would be coming in an hour to help her dispatch the day's work. She
shuffled over to the desk, a beautiful, big piece, a present from the Nio
Cabinetmakers' Syndicate because somebody had heard her remark once that the
only piece of furniture she had ever really longed for was a desk with drawers
and enough room on top ... damn, the top was practically covered with papers
with notes clipped to them, mostly in Noi's small clear handwriting: Urgent. -
Northern Provinces. - Consult w/R.T.?

Her
own handwriting had never been the same since Asieo's death. It was odd, when
you thought about it. After all, within five years after his death she had
written the whole
Analogy.
And there were those letters, which
the tall guard with the watery grey eyes, what was his name, never mind, had
smuggled out of the Fort for her for two years.
The Prison
Letters
they
called them now, there were a dozen different editions of them. All that stuff,
the letters which people kept telling her were so full of 'spiritual strength'
- which probably meant she had been lying herself blue in the face when she
wrote them, trying to keep her spirits up - and the
Analogy
which was
certainly the solidest intellectual work she had ever done, all of that had
been written in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, after Asieo's death. One had to
do something, and in the Fort they let one have paper and pens ... But it had
all been written in the hasty, scribbling hand which she had never felt was
hers, not her own like the round, black scrollings of the manuscript of
Society
Without Government,
forty-five years old. Taviri had
taken not only her body's and her heart's desire to the quicklime with him, but
even her good clear handwriting. But he had left her the Revolution.

How
brave of you to go on, to work, to write, in prison, after such a defeat for
the Movement, after your partner's death, people had used to say. Damn fools.
What else had there been to do? Bravery, courage - what was courage? She had
never figured it out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on, others
said. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real choice, ever?

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 Organisation 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 corner 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 chairback 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 doorway - my God, she hadn't even shut the
door while changing her shirt! She looked at him and saw herself. The old
woman.