The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (21 page)

Nearby
was a fruit-seller, sitting silent behind his dusty, withered stock. People
went by. Nobody bought from him. Nobody looked at her. Odo, who was Odo? Famous
revolutionary, author of
Community, The Analogy,
etc., etc.
She, who was she? An old woman with grey hair and a red face sitting on a dirty
doorstep in a slum, muttering to herself.

True?
Was that she? Certainly it was what anybody passing her saw. But was it she,
herself, any more than the famous revolutionary, etc., was? No. It was not. But
who was she, then?

The
one who loved Taviri.

Yes.
True enough. But not enough. That was gone; he had been dead so long.

'Who
am I?' Laia muttered to her invisible audience, and they knew the answer and
told it to her with one voice. She was the little girl with scabby knees,
sitting on the doorstep staring down through the dirty golden haze of River
Street in the heat of late summer, the six-year-old, the sixteen-year-old, the
fierce, cross, dream-ridden girl, untouched, untouchable. She was herself.
Indeed she had been the tireless worker and thinker, but a blood clot in a vein
had taken that woman away from her. Indeed she had been the lover, the swimmer
in the midst of life, but Taviri, dying, had taken that woman away with him.
There was nothing left, really, but the foundation. She had come home; she had
never left home. 'True voyage is return.' Dust and mud and a doorstep in the
slums. And beyond, at the far end of the street, the field full of tall dry
weeds blowing in the wind as night came.

'Laia!
What are you doing here? Are you all right?'

One
of the people from the House, of course, a nice woman,
a
bit
fanatical and always talking. Laia could not remember her name though she had
known her for years. She let herself be taken home, the woman talking all the
way. In the big cool common room (once occupied by tellers counting money
behind polished counters supervised by armed guards) Laia sat down in a chair.
She was unable just as yet to face climbing the stairs, though she would have
liked to be alone. The woman kept on talking, and other excited people came in.
It appeared that a demonstration was being planned. Events in Thu were moving
so fast that the mood here had caught fire, and something must be done. Day
after tomorrow, no, tomorrow, there was to be
a
march,
a big one, from Old Town to Capitol Square - the old route. 'Another Ninth
Month Uprising,' said a young man, fiery and laughing, glancing at Laia. He had
not even been born at the time of the Ninth Month Uprising, it was all history
to him. Now he wanted to make some history of his own. The room had filled up. A
general meeting would be held here, tomorrow, at eight in the morning. 'You
must talk, Laia.'

'Tomorrow?
Oh, I won't be here tomorrow,' she said brusquely. Whoever had asked her
smiled, another one laughed, though Amai glanced round at her with a puzzled
look. They went on talking and shouting. The Revolution. What on earth had made
her say that? What a thing to say on the eve of the Revolution, even if it was
true.

She
waited her time, managed to get up and, for all her clumsiness, to slip away
unnoticed among the people busy with their planning and excitement. She got to
the hall, to the stairs, and began to climb them one by one. 'The general
strike,'
a
voice, two voices, ten voices were
saying in the room below, behind her. 'The general strike,' Laia muttered,
resting for a moment on the landing. Above, ahead, in her room, what awaited
her? The private stroke. That was mildly funny. She started up the second
flight of stairs, one by one, one leg at a time, like a small child. She was
dizzy, but she was no longer afraid to fall. On ahead, on there, the dry white
flowers nodded and whispered in the open fields of evening. Seventy-two years
and she had never had time to learn what they were called.