The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (20 page)

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
-10
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: doe-eyed, 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.

She
looked up fondly at the facade of the House. That it had been built as a bank
gave peculiar satisfaction to its present occupants. They kept their sacks of
meal in the bomb-proof money-vault, and aged their cider in kegs in safe
deposit boxes. Over the fussy columns that faced the street carved letters
still read, 'National Investors and Grain Factors Banking Association'. The
Movement was not strong on names. They had no flag. Slogans came and went as
the need did. There was always the Circle of Life to scratch on walls and
pavements where Authority would have to see it. But when it came to names they
were indifferent, accepting and ignoring whatever they got called, afraid of
being pinned down and penned in, unafraid of being absurd. So this best known
and second oldest of all the cooperative Houses had no name except The Bank.

It
faced on a wide and quiet street, but only a block away began the Temeba, an
open market, once famous as a center for black-market psychogenics and
teratogenics, now reduced to vegetables, secondhand clothes, and miserable
sideshows. Its crapulous vitality was gone, leaving only half-paralyzed alcoholics,
addicts, cripples, hucksters, and fifth-rate whores, pawnshops, gambling dens,
fortune-telling, body-sculptors, and cheap hotels. Laia turned to the Temeba as
water seeks its level.

She
had never feared or despised the city. It was her country. There would not be
slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There
would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing
the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they
won't hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if
they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so
long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means
of power for other people. She had felt all that before she knew anything;
before she wrote the first pamphlet, before she left Parheo, before she knew
what 'capital' meant, before she'd been farther than River Street where she
played rolltaggie kneeling on scabby knees on the pavement with the other six-year-olds,
she had known it: that she, and the other kids, and her parents, and their
parents, and the drunks and whores and all of River Street, were at the bottom
of something - were the foundation, the reality, the source. But will you drag
civilization down into the mud? cried the shocked decent people, later on, and
she had tried for years to explain to them that if all you had was mud, then if
you were God you made it into human beings, and if you were human you tried to
make it into houses where human beings could live. But nobody who thought he
was better than mud would understand. Now, water seeking its level, mud to mud,
Laia shuffled through the foul, noisy street, and all the ugly weakness of her
old age was at home. The sleepy whores, their lacquered hair-arrangements
dilapidated and askew, the one-eyed woman wearily yelling her vegetables to
sell, the half-wit beggar slapping flies, these were her countrywomen. They
looked like her, they were all sad, disgusting, mean, pitiful, hideous. They were
her sisters, her own people.

She
did not feel very well. It had been a long time since she had walked so far,
four or five blocks, by herself, in the noise and push and striking summer heat
of the streets. She had wanted to get to Koly Park, the triangle of scruffy
grass at the end of the Temeba, and sit there for a while with the other old
men and women who always sat there, to see what it was like to sit there and be
old; but it was too far. If she didn't turn back now, she might get a dizzy
spell, and she had a dread of falling down, falling down and having to lie
there and look up at the people come to stare at the old woman in a fit. She
turned and started home, frowning with effort and self-disgust. She could feel
her face very red, and a swimming feeling came and went in her ears. It got a
bit much, she was really afraid she might keel over. She saw a doorstep in the
shade and made for it, let herself down cautiously, sat, sighed.