Bunub

Bunub is a machinist in the Air Vehicle Engine factory and the neighbor of Shevek and Takver during the Anarres famine. She is defined by her grievance-filled account of daily life and by her desire for the couple’s double room, but her intervention when Takver is posted away does more than irritate Shevek: she gives words to his most painful suspicions about partnership, parenting, and scarcity. Her brief reappearance in a later domestic scene, through the memory of a mobile, links her to the couple’s earlier life in the crowded housing block.

Identity and Place in the Block

Bunub is a fifty-year-old woman who lives alone in a double room despite the housing shortage and works as a machinist. She says she had claimed Shevek and Takver’s room when it first became vacant, but that the block housing registrar’s enmity kept her from obtaining it. The corner window is the particular object of her envy. For Shevek, the room dispute makes her self-interest especially difficult to overlook; Takver, by contrast, finds Bunub’s complaints entertaining and listens to her accounts of the men who pass through her door.

Bunub presents herself as a person repeatedly wronged by institutions and neighbors. She says her factory is a poisonous mass of incompetence, favoritism, and sabotage, and that meetings of her syndicate become scenes of innuendo directed at her. In her telling, even the wider social organism seems organized to persecute her. The narration emphasizes the persistence of this grievance: Takver laughs at her recitations, sometimes to Bunub’s face, while Bunub smiles thinly and continues. Shevek understands Takver’s response, but cannot share it.

The Posting and the Partnership

After Shevek returns from a long absence, Bunub enters the couple’s room and goes straight to the table to read Takver’s letter. She calls Takver’s posting to Northeast terrible, protesting that there was not even a decad’s notice and that a nursing mother has been sent hundreds of miles away. She presents the separation as deliberate, claiming that Divlab is hostile to partnerships and intentionally posts partners apart. To support that reading, she invokes her own former partner, Labeks, and says they will never reunite.

Bunub’s account is inseparable from her interest in the room. She sees the empty crib and speaks of Takver’s baby as having cried for four decads, attributing the crying to shortages and Takver’s lack of milk. She questions how Shevek might join Takver in Northeast, then predicts that he will soon have to leave the double room. In the same breath, she suggests that Takver may have sought the posting herself, perhaps because children tie partners down and come between them. Her interpretation shifts between condemning the system for separating the couple and speculating that Takver welcomed the separation.

Shevek answers that Takver wanted the posting and could have refused it, and reminds Bunub that they are facing a famine. He leaves for breakfast after rejecting her claim that he had said otherwise. Yet he recognizes that she has accurately wounded him: Bunub’s horror lies in voicing his own most despicable fears. Her accusation therefore functions as more than self-serving gossip. The possibility that scarcity and a child might strain a partnership is already present in Shevek’s distress, even as he refuses Bunub’s conclusion that Takver’s choice signifies a wish to leave him.

Scarcity, Housing, and Resentment

The exchange takes place amid material pressure. Shevek has been away for more than eighty hours with very little food, and at breakfast he takes double portions of porridge and bread. A server’s frown makes scarcity visible as social scrutiny, but Shevek refuses to explain or apologize for his hunger. The scene places Bunub’s complaints about room allocation and the alleged persecution of her partnership alongside the practical emergency that has sent Takver away to work.

Bunub’s grievance about the double room is concrete, but the story does not reduce her to a simple villain. She is simultaneously an opportunistic claimant to a scarce room and a person who describes herself as excluded by institutions. Her insistence that the community is hostile to her partnership echoes Shevek’s own fear that Takver’s posting may endanger theirs, even though he knows Takver chose to go. Their difference lies partly in how they respond to that fear: Bunub turns it into a sweeping indictment of Divlab and the social order, while Shevek defends Takver’s agency and the necessity of the work.

Recollection and Narrative Significance

Much later, a mobile that had hung over Shevek’s desk becomes the occasion for recalling Bunub. Shevek explains that Takver made the mobile, that it is his favorite, and that he gave the others to Bedap rather than leave them for Bunub, whom he remembers by the comic epithet “Mother Envy down the corridor.” Takver laughs shakily at the memory and admits she had not thought of Bunub in years. The name and the object reopen an earlier domestic world without making Bunub present again.

The mobile also clarifies Bunub’s place in the couple’s shared history. She had wanted their corner room and was still there when Takver’s absence, the empty crib, and Shevek’s fear made the room feel vulnerable. Later, the object she wanted to be kept from becomes a private keepsake of Takver’s handiwork, identified by Shevek as his favorite. Bunub’s brief return through memory thus connects housing envy and intimate loss to the durable things the couple carry forward: not ownership of the room, but a handmade object and the recollection of the person who made it.