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“It can’t be right,” she said after a while. “To have event without interval . . . Where is the dancing? Where is the way? I don’t think you’ll be able to control it, Hideo.” She smiled. “But of course you must try.”
All my childhood was in her hands, and she held them out to me.
“Welcome home, Hideo,” she said, with a smile as radiant as the summer light on the river.
Again she smiled, and I felt her warmth, the solar generosity of a woman in the prime of life, married, settled, rich in her work and being.
The sense of being a bubble in Udan’s river, a moment in the permanence of life in this house on this land on this quiet world, was almost crushing, denying my identity, and profoundly reassuring, confirming my identity.
“Isako told me once,” she said, “that a mother is connected to her child by a very fine, thin cord, like the umbilical cord, that can stretch light-years without any difficulty. I asked her if it was painful, and she said, ‘Oh, no, it’s just there, you know, it stretches and stretches and never breaks.’ It seems to me it must be painful. But I don’t know.
I felt strange, out of place, in my home. I did not acknowledge it to myself.
I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.
I turned out the light and darkness filled me as it filled the room.
On one planet or another, what did it matter? Alone, part of nothing, part of no one.
I turned the light on because I could not bear the darkness, but the light was worse.
In daylight the thought which had saved me from the dark seemed foolish;
My religion is godless, argumentative, and mystical.
I did not think about Udan. When I did I felt, far down deeper inside me than my bones, the knowledge of being no one, no where, and a shaking like a frightened animal.
It sounded light, trivial. Scientists like to trivialize.
and that is when it became like one of those dreams in which you cannot find the room which you must find.
Students are intense people, they laugh and cry, they break down and rebuild.
“I miss it sometimes,” I said. “I know that. I didn’t know that I was missing you. But I was dying of it. I would have died and never known why, Isidri. And anyhow, it was all wrong—my work was wrong.”
She smiled and said yes. She was infinitely yielding. Whatever Solly said or did sank into that acceptance and was lost, leaving Rewe unchanged: an attentive, obliging, gentle physical presence, just out of reach. She smiled, and said yes, and was untouchable.
but the deadly self-righteousness, the intolerance, the stupidity of the priests, the hideous doctrines that justified every cruelty in the name of the faith! As a matter of fact, Solly said to herself, was there anything she did like about Werel? And answered herself instantly: I love it, I love it. I love this weird little bright sun and all the broken bits of moons and the mountains going up like ice walls and the people—the people with their black eyes without whites like animals’ eyes, eyes like dark glass, like dark water, mysterious—I want to love them, I want to know them, I want to
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he stared with the blank disbelief of a man who has been talked back to by his shoe.
and met a wall of politeness without a door, without a peephole.
He expected no justice, looked for no reward, and valued above all competence, courage, and self-respect.
He was not unhappy, the relief of being at peace and the sweetness of being home were too great for that; but it was a desolate calm, and somewhere in it was anger. Not used to anger, he was not sure what he felt.
I fought every step of the way, he thought without pride.
Gradually he learned to take what she wanted to give him, the knowledge of who his wife had been.
Even his father, retired now, a quenched, silent man, was able to say, “She was the light of the house.” They were thanking him for her. They were telling him that it had not all been a waste.
Forced to endure and unable to ignore her, he hated her.
“Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire.
She looked up at him smiling; when she defeated him she always smiled at him.
“Because you’re free you can be honest,” he said, fastidiously peeling a pini fruit. “Don’t be too hard on those of us who aren’t and can’t.”
His fist was clenched; he opened it with a soft gesture of letting something go.
“Forgive me,” he said. “You don’t need any forgiveness!” “Oh, we all do.
not roughly though with the same desperate haste.
It was the mentality of a slave society: slaves and masters caught in the same trap of radical distrust and self-protection.
His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment, which she accepted gratefully, for as the days went on she realized occasionally how much confidence she had lost and kept losing: self-confidence, confidence that they would be ransomed, rescued, that they would get out of this room, that they would get out of it alive.
If it was lucky to live, I was lucky.”
He put his head into his hands, longing for tears, dry as stone.
He wanted to tell her that she had been a help and hope to him too, that he honored her, that she was brave beyond belief; but none of the words would come.
She was brave, like a brave mare, all nerve. She would break her heart before she quit.
I’m sorry! I feel like such an oaf with you, Teyeo. Blundering into your soul, invading you—We
Sex, comfort, tenderness, love, trust, no word was the right word, the whole word. It was utterly intimate, hidden in the mutuality of their bodies, and it changed nothing in their circumstances, nothing in the world, even the tiny wretched world of their imprisonment.
“I will be a lady,” Solly said. “A good girl. Tell me how, Teyeo.” “I don’t want you to give in,” he said, so fiercely, with tears in his eyes, that she went to him and held him in her arms. “Hold fast,” he said. “I will,” she said. But when Kergat or the others came in she was sedate and modest, letting the men talk, keeping her eyes down. He could not bear to see her so, and knew she was right to do so.
He had lost his world, but he had held fast to the one noble thing.
It was exciting to be with her, but difficult. He had to be important when he was with her. It was always a relief to be home with nobody there but his father and his undemanding grandmother
They were children who lived among the daily gods. Now they had seen one of the unusual gods. They were content. Another one would come along, before long. Time is nothing to the gods.
Do I want to? he thought. There was no response in him but a sense of darkening or softening, which he could not interpret.
You were born what you were. You were what you were born.
Part of her tact as a teacher was knowing when a question needed an answer. She said nothing.
He spent a day sitting in silence, looking out to sea and into his soul.
