The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (18 page)

Most
of the processsions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of
cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces
of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a
couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have
mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the
course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a
basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of
nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute.
People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him for he
never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the
sweet, thin magic of the tune.

He
finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As
if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds
from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The
horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer.
Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them,
whispering, 'Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope...' They begin to form in
rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field
of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do
you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me
describe one more thing.

In
a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in
the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one
locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in
the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In
one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted,
foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little
damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces
long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a
child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually
is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps
it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its
nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits
hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid
of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it know the mops
are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The
door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes - the child
has no understanding of time or interval - sometimes the door rattles terribly
and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in
and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer
in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are
hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door
never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room,
and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. 'I will be
good,' it says. 'Please let me out. I will be good!' They never answer. The
child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only
makes a kind of whining, 'eh-haa, eh-haa', and it speaks less and less often.
It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on
a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs
are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They
all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see
it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to
be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand
that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their
friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the
skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly
weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This
is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve,
whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see
the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back,
to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them,
these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel
disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger,
outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do
something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were
brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed
and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that
day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither
and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace
of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the
happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to
let guilt within the walls indeed.

The
terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the
child.

Often
the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen
the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or
years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could
be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure
of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile
to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its
habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so
long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and
darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the
bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of
reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their
generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true
source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness.
They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is
the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes
possible the nobility of their architecture; the poignancy of their music, the
profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle
with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in
the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the
young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first
morning of summer.

Now
do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing
to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At
times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go
home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man
or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These
people go out into the street, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas,
through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas.
Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler
must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and
on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north,
towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the
darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even
less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it
at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they
are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

THE
DAY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

In
memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911-1972

My
novel
The
Dispossessed
is about a small worldful of people who call themselves
Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived
several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn't get
into the action — except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.

Odonianism
is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever
name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic
'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist
thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman.
Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or
socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity,
mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all
political theories.

To
embody it in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job
for me, and absorbed me totally for many months. When it was done I felt lost,
exiled — a displaced person. I was very grateful, therefore, when Odo came out of
the shadows and across the gulf of Probability, and wanted a story written, not
about the world she made, but about herself.

This
story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas.

The
speaker's voice was as loud as empty beer-trucks in a stone street, and the
people at the meeting were jammed up close, cobblestones, that great voice
booming over them. Taviri was somewhere on the other side of the hall. She had
to get to him. She wormed and pushed her way among the dark-clothed,
close-packed people. She did not hear the words, nor see the faces: only the
booming, and the bodies pressed one behind the other. She could not see Taviri,
she was too short. A broad black-vested belly and chest loomed up, blocking her
way. She must get through to Taviri. Sweating, she jabbed fiercely with her
fist. It was like hitting stone, he did not move at all, but the huge lungs let
out right over her head a prodigious noise, a bellow. She cowered. Then she
understood that the bellow had not been at her. Others were shouting. The
speaker had said something, something fine about taxes or shadows. Thrilled,
she joined the shouting - 'Yes! Yes!' - and shoving on, came out easily into
the open expanse of the Regimental Drill Field in Parheo. Overhead the evening
sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry,
white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what they were called. The
flowers nodded above her head, swaying in the wind that always blew across the
fields in the dusk. She ran among them, and they whipped lithe aside and stood
up again swaying, silent. Taviri stood among the tall weeds in his good suit,
the dark grey one that made him look like a professor or a playactor, harshly
elegant. He did not look happy, but he was laughing, and saying something to
her. The sound of his voice made her cry, and she reached out to catch hold of
his hand, but she did not stop, quite. She could not stop. 'Oh, Taviri,' she
said, 'it's just on there!' The queer sweet smell of the white weeds was heavy
as she went on. There were thorns, tangles underfoot, there were slopes, pits.
She feared to fall, to fall, she stopped.

Sun,
bright morning-glare, straight in the eyes, relentless. She had forgotten to
pull the blind last night. She turned her back on the sun, but the right side
wasn't comfortable. No use. Day. She sighed twice, sat up, got her legs over
the edge of the bed, and sat hunched in her nightdress looking down at her
feet.

The
toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes, were almost square where they
touched each other, and bulged out above in corns; the nails were discolored
and shapeless. Between the knob-like anklebones ran fine, dry wrinkles. The
brief little plain at the base of the toes had kept its delicacy, but the skin
was the color of mud, and knotted veins crossed the instep. Disgusting. Sad,
depressing. Mean. Pitiful. She tried on all the words, and they all fit, like
hideous little hats. Hideous: yes, that one too. To look at oneself and find it
hideous, what a job! But then, when she hadn't been hideous, had she sat around
and stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body's not an object, not
an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it's just you, yourself. Only when
it's no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it - Is it in
good shape? Will it do? Will it last?

'Who
cares?' said Laia fiercely, and stood up.

It
made her giddy to stand up suddenly. She had to put out her hand to the
bed-table, for she dreaded falling. At that she thought of reaching out to
Taviri, in the dream.

What
had he said? She could not remember. She was not sure if she had even touched
his hand. She frowned, trying to force memory. It had been so long since she
had dreamed about Taviri; and now not even to remember what he had said!