Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (16 page)

His bayonet clanking at his side, he crawls toward the stone steps at the bank entrance where
a certain party
waits, bullet-riddled, an army sword held high in one hand, the other outstretched to embrace him, shot in the back and dying. His eyes, filled with tears and his own blood, are
already blind to all things in reality, but the colossal chrysanthemum topped with a purple aurora illuminates the darkness behind his closed lids more radiantly than any light he has ever seen. His head nothing more than a dark void now, the blood all drained away, he is no longer certain whether the person awaiting him at the top of the stone steps is
a certain party,
but if he can crawl just one yard more, digging at the hot ground with his bullet-broken hands, he will reach the feet of the person unmistakably awaiting him, whoever he may be, and his blood and his tears will be wiped away.

[[Exasperated by his refusal to remove the headphones, a resourceful doctor plugs a microphone into the tape recorder, connects the headphones to a monitor and begins to speak through them, It’s time we started being honest with one another about your condition, you must understand and cooperate. Your condition … Having swiftly broken the connection to his consciousness, “he” is deaf to any further disturbance from the outside. Gasping in the shrill voice of a ten-year-old on the verge of death, distorting the melody in a multitude of ways, “he” continues to sing,
Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy Days are here again!]]

My kid brother and I were digging with pieces of wood in the loose earth that smelled of fat and ashes at the surface of the crematorium, the makeshift crematorium in the valley that was simply a shallow pit in a clearing in the underbrush. The valley bottom was already wrapped in dusk and fog as cold as the spring water that welled up in the woods, but the side of the hill where we lived, the little village built around a cobblestone road, was bathed in grape light. I straightened out of a crouch and weakly yawned, my mouth stretching open. My brother stood up too, gave a small yawn, and smiled at me.

Giving up on “collecting,” we threw our sticks into
the thick summer underbrush and climbed the narrow path shoulder to shoulder. We had come down to the crematorium in search of remains, nicely shaped bones we could use as medals to decorate our chests, but the village children had collected them all and we came away empty-handed. I would have to beat some out of one of my friends at elementary school. I remembered peeking two days earlier, past the waists of the adults darkly grouped around the pit, at the corpse of a village woman lying on her back with her naked belly swollen like a small hill, her expression full of sadness in the light of the flames. I was afraid. I grasped my brother’s slender arm and quickened my step. The odor of the corpse, like the sticky fluid certain kinds of beetles leaked when we squeezed them in our calloused fingers, seemed to revive in my nostrils.

Our village had been forced to begin cremating out of doors by an extended rainy season: early summer rains had fallen stubbornly until floods had become an everyday occurrence. When a landslide crushed the suspension bridge that was the shortest route to the
town,
the elementary school annex in our village was closed, mail delivery stopped, and our adults, when a trip was unavoidable, reached the
town
by walking the narrow, crumbly path along the mountain ridge. Transporting the dead to the crematorium in the
town
was out of the question.

But being cut off from the
town
caused our old but undeveloped homesteaders’ village no very acute distress. Not only were we treated like dirty animals in the
town,
everything we required from day to day was packed into the small compounds clustered on the slope above the narrow valley. Besides, it was the beginning of summer, the children were happy school was closed.

Harelip was standing at the entrance to the village, where the cobblestone road began, cuddling a dog against his chest. With a hand on my brother’s shoulder, I ran through the deep shade of the great gingko tree to peer at the dog in Harelip’s arms.

“See!” Harelip shook the dog and made him snarl. “Look at him!”

The arms Harelip thrust in front of me were covered with bites matted with dog hair and blood. Bites stood out like buds on his chest, too, and his short, thick neck.

“See!” Harelip said grandly.

“You promised to go after mountain dogs with me!” I said, my chest clogged with surprise and chagrin. “You went alone!”

“I went looking for you,” Harelip said quickly. “You weren’t around….”

“You really got bit!” I said, just touching the dog with my fingertips. Its eyes were frenzied, like a wolf’s, its nostrils flared. “Did you crawl into the lair?”

“I wrapped a leather belt around my neck so he couldn’t get my throat,” Harelip said proudly.

In the dusking, purple hillside and the cobblestone road I distinctly saw Harelip emerging from a lair of withered grass and shrubs with a leather belt around his throat and the puppy in his arms while a mountain dog bit into him.

“As long as they don’t get your throat,” he said, confidence strong in his voice. “And I waited until there were only puppies inside.”

“I saw them running across the valley,” my brother said excitedly, “five of them.”

“When?”

“Just after noon.”

“I went after that.”

“He sure is white,” I said, keeping envy out of my voice.

“His mother
mated
with a wolf!” The dialect Harelip used was lewd but very real.

“You swear?” My brother spoke as if in a dream.

“He’s used to me now,” Harelip said, accentuating his confidence. “He won’t go back to his friends.”

My brother and I were silent.

“Watch!” Harelip put the dog down on the cobblestones and released him. “See!”

But instead of looking down at the dog we looked up at the sky covering the narrow valley. An unbelievably large airplane was crossing it at terrific speed. The roar churned the air into waves and briefly drowned us. Like insects trapped in oil we were unable to move in the sound.

“It’s an enemy plane!” Harelip screamed. “The enemy’s here!”

Looking up at the sky we shouted ourselves hoarse. “An enemy plane …”

But except for the clouds glowing darkly in the setting sun the sky was already empty. We turned back to Harelip’s dog just as it was yowling down the gravel path away from us, its body dancing. Plunging into the underbrush alongside the path it quickly disappeared. Harelip stood there dumbfounded, his body poised for pursuit. My brother and I laughed until our blood seethed like liquor. Chagrined as he was, Harelip had to laugh, too.

We left him, and ran back to the storehouse crouching in the dusk like a giant beast. In the semidarkness inside, my father was preparing our meal on the dirt floor.

“We saw a plane!” my brother shouted at my father’s back. “A great big enemy plane!”

My father grunted and did not turn around. Intending to clean it, I lifted his heavy hunting gun down from the rack on the wall and climbed the dark stairs, arm in arm with my brother.

“Too bad about that dog,” I said.

“And that plane,” my brother said.

We lived on the second floor of the cooperative storehouse in the middle of the village, in the small room once used for raising silkworms. When my father stretched out on his straw mats and blankets on the floor of thick planks that were beginning to rot and my brother and I lay down on the old door which was our sleeping platform, the former residence of countless silkworms that had left stains on the paper walls still reeking of their bodies and bits of rotten mulberry leaf stuck to the naked beams in the ceiling filled to repletion with human beings.

We had no furniture at all. There was the dull gleam of my father’s hunting gun, not only the barrel but even the stock, as if the oiled wood were also steel that would numb your hand if you slapped it, to provide our poor quarters with a certain direction, there were dried weasel pelts hanging in bunches from the exposed beams, there were various traps. My father made his living shooting rabbits, birds, wild boar in winter when the snow was deep, and trapping weasels and delivering the dried pelts to the
town
office.

As my brother and I polished the stock with an oil rag we gazed up through the chinks in the wooden slats at the dark sky outside. As if the roar of an airplane would descend from there again. But it was rare for a plane to cross the sky above the village. When I had put the gun
back in the rack on the wall we lay down on the sleeping platform, huddling together, and waited, threatened by the emptiness in our stomachs, for my father to bring the pot of rice and vegetables upstairs.

My brother and I were small seeds deeply embedded in thick flesh and tough, outer skin, green seeds soft and fresh and encased in membrane that would shiver and slough away at the first exposure to light. And outside the tough, outer skin, near the sea that was visible from the roof as a thin ribbon glittering in the distance, in the city beyond the heaped, rippling mountains, the war, majestic and awkward now like a legend that had survived down the ages, was belching foul air. But to us the war was nothing more than the absence of young men in our village and the announcements the mailman sometimes delivered of soldiers killed in action. The war did not penetrate the tough outer skin and the thick flesh. Even the “enemy” planes that had begun recently to traverse the sky above the village were nothing more to us than a rare species of bird.

Near dawn I was awakened by the noise of a gigantic impact and a furious ringing in the ground. I saw my father sit up on his blanket on the floor like a beast lurking in the forest night about to spring upon his prey, his eyes bright with desire and his body tense. But instead of springing he dropped back to the floor and appeared to fall asleep again.

For a long time I waited with my ears peeled, but that ringing did not occur again. Breathing quietly the damp air that smelled of mold and small animals I waited patiently in the pale moonlight creeping through the skylight high in the storehouse roof. A long time passed, and my brother, who had been asleep, his sweaty forehead pressed against my side, began to whimper. He too had been
waiting for the ground to quiver and ring again, and the prolonged anticipation had been too much for him. Placing my hand on his delicate neck like a slender plant stem I shook him lightly to comfort him, and, lulled by the gentle movement of my own arm, fell asleep.

When I woke up, fecund morning light was slanting through every crack in the slat walls, and it was already hot. My father was gone. So was his gun from the wall. I shook my brother awake and went out to the cobblestone road without a shirt. The road and the stone steps were awash in the morning light. Children squinting and blinking in the glare were standing vacantly or picking fleas out of the dogs or running around and shouting, but there were no adults. My brother and I ran over to the blacksmith’s shed in the shade of the lush nettle tree. In the darkness inside, the charcoal fire on the dirt floor spit no tongues of red flame, the bellows did not hiss, the blacksmith lifted no red-hot steel with his lean, sun-blackened arms. Morning and the blacksmith not in his shop—we had never known this to happen. Arm in arm, my brother and I walked back along the cobblestone road in silence. The village was empty of adults. The women were probably waiting at the back of their dark houses. Only the children were drowning in the flood of sunlight. My chest tightened with anxiety.

Harelip spotted us from where he was sprawled at the stone steps that descended to the village fountain and came running over, arms waving. He was working hard at being important, spraying fine white bubbles of sticky saliva from the split in his lip.

“Hey! Have you heard?” he shouted, slamming me on the shoulder.

“Have you?”

“Heard?” I said vaguely.

“That plane yesterday crashed in the hills last night. And they’re looking for the enemy soldiers that were in it, the adults have all gone hunting in the hills with their guns!”

“Will they shoot the enemy soldiers?” my brother asked shrilly.

“They won’t shoot, they don’t have much ammunition,” Harelip explained obligingly, “They aim to catch them!”

“What do you think happened to the plane?” I said.

“It got stuck in the fir trees and came apart,” Harelip said quickly, his eyes flashing. “The mailman saw it, you know those trees.”

I did, fir blossoms like grass tassles would be in bloom in those woods now. And at the end of summer, fir cones shaped like wild bird eggs would replace the tassles, and we would collect them to use as weapons. At dusk then and at dawn, with a sudden rude clatter, the dark brown bullets would be fired into the walls of the storehouse.…

“Do you know the woods I mean?”

“Sure I do. Want to go?”

Harelip smiled slyly, countless wrinkles forming around his eyes, and peered at me in silence. I was annoyed.

“If we’re going to to go I’ll get a shirt,” I said, glaring at Harelip. “And don’t try leaving ahead of me because I’ll catch up with you right away!”

Harelip’s whole face became a smirk and his voice was fat with satisfaction.

“Nobody’s going! Kids are forbidden to go into the hills. You’d be mistaken for the foreign soldiers and shot!”

I hung my head and stared at my bare feet on the cobblestones baking in the morning sun, at the sturdy,
stubby toes. Disappointment seeped through me like treesap and made my skin flush hot as the innards of a freshly killed chicken.

“What do you think the enemy looks like?” my brother said.

I left Harelip and went back along the cobblestone road, my arm around my brother’s shoulders. What
did
the enemy soldiers look like, in what positions were they lurking in the fields and the woods? I could feel foreign soldiers hiding in all the fields and woods that surrounded the valley, the sound of their hushed breathing about to explode into an uproar. Their sweaty skin and harsh body odor covered the valley like a season.