This language was completely familiar to Havzhiva, and he nodded again, intent.
"I asked them questions. They asked me questions. Historians have to do a lot of that, I found out they have schools, and asked if I could go to one. Some of them came here and talked to me and my family and other people, finding out if there would be trouble if I left. Stse is a conservative pueblo. There hadn't been a historian from here for four hundred years."
She smiled; she had a quick, catching smile, but the young man listened with unchanging, intense seriousness. Her look rested on his face tenderly.
"People here were upset, but nobody was angry.
So after they talked about it, I left with those people. We flew to Kathhad. There's a school there. 1 was twenty-two. I began a new education. I changed being. I learned to be a historian."
"How?" he asked, after a long silence.
She drew a long breath. "By asking hard ques-
tions," she said. "Like you're doing now.... And by giving up all the knowledge I had — throwing it away."
"How?" he asked again, frowning. "Why?"
"Like this. When I left, I knew 1 was a Buried Cable woman. When I was there, I had to unknow that knowledge. There, I'm not a Buried Cable woman. I'm a woman. I can have sex with any per-
3-hi® 138 -i-*-®
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son I choose. I can take up any profession I choose. Lineage matters, here. It does not matter, there. It has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and no use, anywhere else in the universe." She was as intense as he, now. "There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical."
"Are there two kinds of gods?"
"No," she said. "There are no gods there. The gods are here."
She saw his face change.
She said after a while, "There are souls, there.
Many, many souls, minds, minds full of knowledge and passion. Living and dead. People who lived on this earth a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. Minds and souls of people from worlds a hundred light-years from this one, all of them with their own knowledge, their own history.
The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That's not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I learned, here and there, only increased it. There's nothing that is not sacred." She spoke slowly and quietly, the way most people talked in the pueblo. "You can choose the local sacredness or the great one. In the end they're the same. But not in the life one lives. To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.' The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river."
After a while he said, "Rocks are the river's bed."
She laughed. Her gaze rested on him again,
appraising and affectionate. "So I came home," she said. "For a rest."
"But you're not — you're no longer a woman of your lineage?"
As> 139 a
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"Yes; here. Still. Always."
"But you've changed being. You'll leave again."
"Yes," she said decisively. "One can be more than one kind of being. I have work to do, there."
He shook his head, slower, but equally decisive. "What good is work without the gods? It makes no sense to me, Mother of All Children. I don't have the mind to understand."
She smiled at the double meaning. "I think you'll understand what you choose to understand, Man of my People," she said, addressing him formally to show that he was free to leave when he wanted.
He hesitated, then took his leave. He went to work, filling his mind and world with the great repeated patterns of the broadloom rugs.
That night he made it up to lyan lyan so ardently that she was left spent and a bit amazed. The god had come back to them burning, consuming.
" 1 want a child," Havzhiva said as they lay melded, sweated together, arms and legs and breasts and breath all mingled in the musky dark.
"Oh," lyan lyan sighed, not wanting to talk, decide, resist. "Maybe . . . Later , . . Soon . .."
"Now," he said, "now."
"No," she said softly. "Hush."
He was silent. She slept.
More than a year later, when they were nineteen, lyan lyan said to him before he put out the light, "I
want a baby."
"It's too soon."
"Why? My brother's nearly thirty. And his wife J-»® 140 -xAs A Man of the People
would like a baby around. After it's weaned I'll come sleep with you at your house. You always said you'd like that."
"It's too soon," he repeated. "I don't want it."
She turned to him, laying aside her coaxing, reasonable tone. "What do you want, Havzhiva?"
"I don't know."
"You're going away. You're going to leave the People. You're going crazy. That woman, that damned witch!"
"There are no witches," he said coldly. "That's stupid talk. Superstition."
They stared at each other, the dear friends, the lovers.
"Then what's wrong with you? If you want to move back home, say so. If you want another woman, go to her. But you could give me my child, first! when I ask you for it! Have you lost your araha?" She gazed at him with tearful eyes, fierce, unyielding.
He put his face in his hands. "Nothing is right," he said. "Nothing is right. Everything I do, I have to do because that's how it's done, but it — it doesn't make sense — there are other ways —"
"There's one way to live rightly," lyan lyan said,
"that I know of. And this is where I live. There's one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!" She cried hard after this, convulsively, the fear and anger of months breaking out at last, and he held her to calm and comfort her.
When she could speak, she leaned her head
against him and said miserably, in a small, hoarse voice, "To have when you go, Havzhiva."
At that he wept for shame and pity, and whis-
FOURWAYSTO FORGIVENESS
pered, "Yes, yes." But that night they lay holding each other, trying to console each other, till they fell asleep like children.
"I am ashamed," Granite said painfully.
"Did you make this happen?" his sister asked, dry.
"How do I know? Maybe I did. First Mezha, now my son. Was I too stern with him?"
"No, no."
"Too lax, then. I didn't teach him well. Why is he crazy?"
"He isn't crazy, brother. Let me tell you what I
think. As a child he always asked why, why, the way children do. I would answer: That's how it is, that's how it's done. He understood. But his mind has no peace. My mind is like that, if I don't remind myself. Learning the Sun-stuff, he always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are:
that is the truth. But he wasn't satisfied by the truth. He isn't crazy, brother, but he is lame. He can't walk. He can't walk with us. So, if a man can't walk, what should he do?"
"Sit still and sing," Granite said slowly.
"If he can't sit still? He can fly."
"Fly?"
"They have wings for him, brother."
"1 am ashamed," Granite said, and hid his face in his hands.
'-r*eS 142 3-a.S A Man of the People
Tovo went to the temple and sent a message to Mezha at Kathhad: "Your pupil wishes to join you." There was some malice in the words. Tovo blamed the historian for upsetting her son's balance, offcen-tering him till, as she said, his soul was lamed. And she was jealous of the woman who in a few days had outdone the teachings of years. She knew she was jealous and did not care. What did her jealousy or her brother's humiliation matter? What they had to do was grieve.
As the boat for Daha sailed away, Havzhiva looked back and saw Stse: a quilt of a thousand shades of green, the sea marshes, the pastures, fields, hedgerows, orchards; the town clambering up the bluffs above, pale granite walls, white stucco walls, black tile roofs, wall above wall and roof above roof. As it diminished it looked like a seabird perched there, white and black, a bird on its nest. Above the town the heights of the island came in view, grey-blue moors and high, wild hills fading into the