The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,119
was dying.
‘Sov,’ my mother said, sitting down beside me on my bed, with a curious, tender, complicitous smile, ‘shall we choose your kemmerday?’
‘I’m not in kemmer,’ I said passionately.
‘No,’ Guyr said. ‘But next month I think you will be.’
‘I won’t!’
My mother stroked my hair and face and arm. We shape each other to be human, old people used to say as they stroked babies or children or one another with those long, slow, soft caresses.
After a while my mother said, ‘Sether’s coming in, too. But a month or so later than you, I think. Dory said let’s have a double kemmerday, but I think you should have your own day in your own time.’
I burst into tears and cried, ‘I don’t want one, I don’t want to, I just want, I just want to go away …’
‘Sov,’ my mother said, ‘if you want to, you can go to the kemmerhouse at Gerodda Ereb, where you won’t know anybody. But I think it would be better here, where people do know you. They’d like it. They’ll be so glad for you. Oh, your Grand’s so proud of you! “Have you seen that grandchild of mine, Sov, have you seen what a beauty, what a mahad!” Everybody’s bored to tears hearing about you …’
Mahad is a dialect word, a Rer word; it means a strong, handsome, generous, upright person, a reliable person. My mother’s stern mother, who commanded and thanked but never praised, said I was a mahad? A terrifying idea that dried my tears.
‘All right,’ I said desperately. ‘Here. But not next month! It isn’t. I’m not.’
‘Let me see,’ my mother said. Fiercely embarrassed yet relieved to obey, I stood up and undid my trousers.
My mother took a very brief and delicate look, hugged me, and said, ‘Next month, yes, I’m sure. You’ll feel much better in a day or two. And next month it’ll be different. It really will.’
Sure enough, the next day the headache and the hot itching were gone, and though I was still tired and sleepy a lot of the time, I wasn’t quite so stupid and clumsy at work. After a few more days I felt pretty much myself, light and easy in my limbs. Only if I thought about it there was still that queer feeling that wasn’t quite in any part of my body, and that was sometimes very painful and sometimes only strange, almost something I wanted to feel again.
My cousin Sether and I had been apprenticed together at the furniture shop. We didn’t go to work together because Sether was still slightly lame from that rope trick a couple of years earlier, and got a lift to work in a poleboat so long as there was water in the streets. When they closed the Arre Watergate and the ways went dry, Sether had to walk. So we walked together. The first couple of days we didn’t talk much. I still felt angry at Sether. Because I couldn’t run through the dawn any more but had to walk at a lame-leg pace. And because Sether was always around. Always there. Taller than me, and quicker at the lathe, and with that long, heavy, shining hair. Why did anybody want to wear their hair so long, anyhow? I felt as if Sether’s hair was in front of my own eyes.
We were walking home, tired, on a hot evening of Ockre, the first month of summer. I could see that Sether was limping and trying to hide or ignore it, trying to swing right along at my quick pace, very erect, scowling. A great wave of pity and admiration overwhelmed me, and that thing, that growth, that new being, whatever it was in my bowels and in the ground of my soul moved and turned again, turned towards Sether, aching, yearning.
‘Are you coming into kemmer?’ I said in a hoarse, husky voice I had never heard come out of my mouth.
‘In a couple of months,’ Sether said in a mumble, not looking at me, still very stiff and frowning.
‘I guess I have to have this, do this, you know, this stuff, pretty soon.’
‘I wish I could,’ Sether said. ‘Get it over with.’
We did not look at each other. Very gradually, unnoticeably, I was slowing my pace till we were going along side by side at an easy walk.
‘Sometimes do you feel like your tits are on fire?’ I asked without knowing that I was going to say anything.