Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (10 page)

[[That’s it! That’s the other thing you shout when you cry in your sleep! says the “acting executor of the will.” It’s such a disheartening thing to hear at night, it makes me feel like running out into the moonlight in the hospital courtyard and screaming myself. But you know, that delivery man’s distress can’t have infected me, because unlike everybody else at the Manor house, I was as lively and full of spirit as a river shrimp just netted after that telegram arrived. The first thing that happened was that I was sent running to send cables to Manchuria, by
a certain party
and my mother separately. It was the first time I had
been recognized in my own house as a person who could have some actual effect, it was my “birth” in that sense, too. What struck me as peculiar in my child’s way was that my mother and
a certain party
were each trying to help my deserter brother in their own way, by separate routes. It was one thing for
a certain party
to have contacts in Manchuria, I was amazed that my mother seemed to know people too, and inside the Kanto army! Of course I know now that she was raised in Peking as the foster daughter of a man who took her in despite the fact that she had some connection with an act of rebellion against the emperor, and that
a certain party,
who had been smitten by her on his very first journey across the sea, had brought her back to the valley and married her formally as soon as he had left his wife from his days as a young village chief. Then, when he had seen to it that she was securely tethered in the depths of the forest for the rest of her life, he set out for China again and remained there, active at something in Manchuria for years. My mother’s telegram must have been directed at contacts related to her foster father. Before long, she and
a certain party
began shouting at each other in the storehouse, for the first time. My memory of that quarrel is a reconstruction later, when I finally managed to form a clear impression of what they were talking about by relying on rumors in the valley, but the way I “remember” it now, my mother said,

____
If he doesn’t get over to the other side quickly, he’ll be killed
and burst into tears. A
certain party
became furious, and shouted back,

____
What are you saying! This only happened because I permitted him to be raised by the likes of you, with a traitor’s blood in your veins! I’m doing everything in my power to have him shot quickly and treated as if he’d died in action so at least his ashes will come home to us.

____
You’re trying to have that child killed before he reaches the other side? You want your own child shot in the back on orders from hoodlums like
____
and
____
and that’s what you requested in your cable? That child is running as hard as he can, all alone, trying to reach the other side, and you want him shot in the back!
my mother shouted, still crying bitterly, and it went on that way. Much later, when I began reading military journals, I discovered that the names my mother had mentioned were the last bigshots in the Kanto army. To tell the truth, I was too young to grasp the real meaning of “the other side.” A child who’d been raised during the war may have known what “enemy” meant, but he simply didn’t have the imagination to resolve an image of real people and a real society on “the other side” of the front. All I could picture to myself was a cliff rising straight up on the horizon of a vast plain. One alone young soldier runs as hard as he can toward that cliff. If he can reach it, not only will all values be reversed and everything instantly allowed, the soldier will be extravagantly praised and find salvation—that was the scenario I wrote in my mind. Anyhow,
a certain party
had only two children, myself and my older brother, and my brother happened to be the child of his first wife, the woman he had divorced. In other words, my mother seemed to be working herself into a frenzy over her stepson! But this heated family battle lasted only a week. A notice arrived, and silence fell over the Manor house and hung there. Then, early one morning, my mother set out in mourning, and just before nightfall she returned with the ashes of the valley’s first war casualty in a white wooden box tied around her neck with a piece of white cotton cloth, “he” says.]]

The boy who was no longer a child after the experience of this week went along with almost everyone else in the village to meet his mother at the bridge that led
out of the valley to the highway, but his mother ignored him just as she ignored the others waiting there in a scraggly line, and for a time stood in silence on the bridge where he had almost died, her head upright, and darted glances at the valley with the eyes of a hawk surveying its adversaries with the purest contempt. Probably she halted there to recover her sense of firm ground after the long, rough ride she had hitched from the provincial city in a truck driven by Korean forest workers. Presently she narrowed her eyes, creases rippling across her thin, flat, egg-shaped face so terrifically white and dry it appeared to be a scrap of paper and, looking right through the faces in the ring of people she approached and cut across, each step a swift kick so that her hissing sandals just skimmed the surface of the ground, she headed for the Manor house. When she had passed under the great roofed gate at the entrance with the boy, who was now the only one following her, she halted at the base of the giant black pine where the paths to the main house and the storehouse divided. Then, as if only now she had become aware of his existence, although he had made no effort to muffle his footsteps as he followed her all this way, she wheeled around in the dusk as though startled and stared down at him with her flashing eyes. And in unfamiliar accents entirely unlike those of the valley she snapped,

____Don’t think
a certain party
(it was the first time his mother used the phrase) hiding in the storehouse has any right to these ashes; they haven’t come back to him!

Without another word his mother hurried toward the main house once again, and as he dug in his heels against the pull of her small back that seemed to have dwindled swiftly, resisting with a force of his own sufficient to shred the thousands of leaves on the black pine, he shouted
something altogether unexpected, in a manner that communicated his outrage at having been ignored by his mother all this time,

____
I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins! You can take the ashes of that coward and throw them in the feed trough, yessir! Now I’m going into the storehouse too, and forget all about them ashes! Because I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins!

His mother, though she disdained to answer these shouted words, did look around for just an instant and toss her head at him, but he turned his back on the white, dry paper of her face that appeared to flutter and dance through the gelatin filter of his tears and the dusk, and pulling his
fake
helmet down over his ears just as she described it when she ridiculed him, the figure of a valley brat in his shirt woven from hemp and his old trousers tied around his legs like knickerbockers, he headed alone for the storehouse. The bayonet strapped to his hip with a hemp cord, his grandfather’s in the Russo-Japanese war which early that morning, just after his mother had set out in her black kimono, he had hunted up in the barn and cleaned of rust himself, reassured him as he walked along.

[[In my child’s way I sensed that people from the outside might try to destroy the
Happy Days
in the storehouse that were about to begin for me and
a certain party
and no one else, and if they did appear I intended to fight fearlessly with that old bayonet which had been used for cutting fodder and was like a pitch-black iron bar, “he” says. You seem to have had a marvelous time in that storehouse, was your father glad to have you there from the beginning? Certainly not, I didn’t even try to talk to him. There was a naked bulb hanging from the lintel at the entrance, wrapped in a black cloth as a precaution against air raids, and when I turned it on and stepped
inside, where it was pitch dark,
a certain party
was wearing the underwater goggles with cellophane covering the lenses that I have now (he had originally prepared them to observe a solar eclipse in Manchuria) and staring into the back of the storehouse, I suppose he had already resolved to prevent anyone from reading his expression ever. All around the mechanical barber’s chair he was sitting in there were piles of big books in a foreign language. They were probably books about agriculture. According to the military journals I read later, he had plans to bring his “comrades” back to the land in the valley and to have the skirts of the forest cleared for cultivation. But by the time I joined him in the storehouse he must have lost his will to read those books, otherwise he wouldn’t have kept the goggles on day and night. With these goggles on I don’t imagine he could distinguish a single object in that storehouse. He did sense an annoying light when I switched on the bulb at the entrance, though, and he immediately scolded me with an angry Shhh! as if he were shooing a chicken away. In my haste to turn the light out, and in the darkness, and because I was still worked up after my proclamation to my mother, I caught the frayed heel of my straw sandal on the sill at the entrance and tumbled onto the dirt floor about two steps lower and rolled across it head over heels and finally cracked my rear against the raised wooden floor of the room where
a certain party
had installed his chair. But this time
a certain party
didn’t even hiss, it was as if he had fallen asleep the minute I had turned off the light, he held his large, looming head perfectly upright in the darkness and didn’t move a muscle. I opened my mouth wide and exhaled a ton of breath to keep from crying out, the bayonet on my
hip had dug into my stomach and it hurt so much I could hardly stand it, and I wept truly forlorn tears and wet my scraped cheeks and the dry dirt of the floor. For quite a while I stayed just as I was, unable to get up. But from that night on I had a place to sleep in the storehouse. To make
a certain party
think I’d chosen to roll across the dirt floor as a way of locating the best place to sleep, and not simply fallen, I made a bed of straw and boards and old blankets directly on the floor where I had come to rest, and that’s where I slept. After that I only went back to the main house to get the meals I brought to
a certain party.
My mother was isolated, and not just at home, either. From the day those ashes returned, as if the only temporary bond between the outsider she was and the valley had been maintained through her stepson gone off to war on the Chinese mainland, she began to ignore every man, woman, and child in the valley even when they were right under her nose, and effectively vanished from society. Which left me, a kid, to run around the valley, with my grandfather’s bayonet on my hip, collecting our rations and keeping my small eyes peeled for extras and making sure that my family, and particularly
a certain party,
who was gradually becoming obsessive about his food, had enough to eat. Now that I think about it, there has never been a time since when I’ve taken so much responsibility for my own family’s daily welfare. On my own initiative I went down to the village office and received the plaque that said “A son lost in battle” and nailed it up with old nails, not to the main house but to the fire door of the storehouse. With the bayonet rattling at my side, I stood on my tiptoes and swung a large, heavy hammer, and when the kids from the valley who had followed me from
the village gathered around in curiosity I waved them away with my hammer as if it were a scepter, “he” says.]]

[[Claiming sudden physical exhaustion, “he” spends the entire day either sleeping or looking at animal picture books. At the same time “he” tries to demonstrate to the “acting executor of the will” that “he” has not lost interest in narrating his “history of the age.” Look at this wild boar in Ceylon charging down a valley of dry brush with half a dozen baby boars, even though the parent in front is a female in this case, these little ones with their heads lowered as if they were lost in thought but their legs churning as they try to keep up remind me perfectly of myself in the days when I was at
a certain party’s
side. Do you suppose the Ceylonese wild boar has long hair growing around its eyes? This bunch is running at such terrific speed the picture is out of focus, maybe that makes it look all the more like hair—anyway, fierce as these characters are they have deeply shadowed, mournful eyes that don’t really fit them, and look how hard they stare at the ground just in front of their flying hooves, doesn’t it give them a solemn, fussy look? A human being never looks this intelligent when he’s running. I don’t feel I spent my
Happy Days
like a human being running, I was more like one of these little boars with a giant head and spindly legs and a huge mouth clamped cruelly shut in a melancholy face. I even imagine there must have been bright melon stripes down my back in those days. I’d like to put a belt around this baby boar’s middle and hang a bayonet on it from the Russo-Japanese war, I bet he’d manage the heavy, clanking thing somehow and keep
right on running, even if he had to shorten his stride a little. Ha! Ha! Ha! Under cover of the animal pictures, “he” speaks obliquely about his
Happy Days
and seems about to resume his account, but continues to say nothing about actual life in the storehouse. There is a constant feeling of bloating as his liver fattens, and although precious little flesh or fat remain around his stomach it is as if, “he” complains, a bomb of gradually increasing size were biting into the soft layer beneath his skin, making concentration impossible. It would be so refreshing if this hard bomb that used to be my liver would just fall out of its present location by mistake! The way things stand, the bloated feeling of this rock maturing inside me even governs my subconscious while I sleep, not even my own sleep belongs to me! The “acting executor of the will” is becoming actively interested in the history. I wonder if the difficulty you’ve begun to experience in telling your story might have nothing to do with your illness. I wonder if there’s something hidden in your life in the storehouse that you don’t want to talk about, even though you speak of
Happy Days.
Could it be, she speculates, prodding at the same time, that those unpleasant memories are creating the bloated feeling that’s making even your subconscious uncomfortable? Ha! Ha! Ha! I consider that period in my life the first
Happy Days
in my thirty-five years, alongside these final
Happy Days
as I lie here dying unhurriedly but swiftly of cancer, “he” says. Will you ask the doctor to give me an injection to concentrate the life-force left in me and make it burn up quickly? Don’t you agree the patient should have the freedom to choose diluted life over a long period or concentrated life briefly? Anyway, tomorrow I may feel rested and my fever may be down, let’s start again then, “he” says, beginning to sleep.]]