Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (12 page)

____
The vegetables I set aside to make enough gruel for the whole family to eat were all thrown into that pot of filthy oxtail
consequently there is nothing left for us.
So I grabbed two chunks of something that passed for bread, finely ground corn steamed with just a touch of wheat flour, and took them out into the garden, thinking I would eat them with the vegetables that should have sunk to the bottom of the broth remaining in the large pot. But when I stuck my hand into the pot I found that everything in that muddy broth had cooked away, leaving only bunches of fiber, and for just an instant the horror seeping through my fingers stirring around at the bottom of that pot came close to making me sympathize with my mother’s outrage. As a matter of fact, even after I had finished washing down that corn bread like board planks with some water I drew from the well, I didn’t go back to the storehouse for a while. Partly it was
a certain party
tearing into the oxtail stew the morning after his bladder cancer had been discovered, lifting those joints of oxtail whose baleful odor had overwhelmed the
bouquet garni
I had gathered at the edge of the forest, holding them by the ends between his thick, round thumb and first finger, ripping the meat away from the bone and devouring them one after another without offering to share the smallest morsel with me; partly I was afraid that, eaten in a valley surrounded by a forest, and early in the morning besides, the smell of a thing like that would draw down upon us all those ghostly creatures that had dwelled for years in the forest’s depths. After that, on the rare occasions when we got hold of an oxtail, and even when all we had was pigs’ feet, I had to do the cooking myself, because
a certain party’s
physical condition no longer permitted him to leave the storehouse to cook or do anything else. To be sure, I followed his instructions, and the procedure was simple enough: all I did was throw the meat into a large pot of boiling water in chunks, just as it
came from the butcher, wait a while, add barley or some other grain, whatever vegetable scraps I could sneak away from my mother, who was no longer ever careless about leaving her onions and carrots unattended, some salt, and a few beans of a substance that never under any circumstances made its way into my mother’s kitchen, garlic. Possibly
a certain party’s
instructions for that simplified cooking were a reduction of his experiences on the Chinese mainland designed to permit him to relive them in the valley; certainly there was no one anywhere in the valley whose diet was closer to that of the Korean forest workers. The Koreans held up well under labor conditions that would have to be called harsh, and
a certain party,
too, despite his advancing bladder cancer, grew, thanks to that unique meat-pot with garlic, in the manner of a landslide, fatter and fatter until there was no covering him, “he” says.]]

[[Once August begins, “he” is in a state of constant agitation. Apparently not even sleep releases him, for although “he” no longer sobs aloud as before, it seems that “he” repeatedly cries out as though in great anger. However, “he” insists to a dubious “acting executor of the will” that “he” continues to have no memory whatsoever of his dreams. These past few days you’ve frequently expressed concern over whether your mother will be able to survive the heat of this summer, I wonder if your dreams might have something to do with that? It could be, now when I’m finally in a position to really let my mother have it for the first time in my life, I don’t know what I’d do if she died a step ahead of me, “he” replies with
objective calm. But a minute later “he” is agitated once again. The fact is, my mother could decide to violate our contract and commit suicide cleverly enough to make it look like natural death of old age and I wouldn’t even be able to go into the field to investigate. She’s easily capable of starving herself and starting whatever organs inside her were sufficiently weakened rolling down a gentle slope they could never get back up, she has more than enough malice for that! “he” says resentfully. You and your mother promised one another you wouldn’t commit suicide? When I was in high school my mother made certain I would never be able to try suicide by hurting and humiliating me so deeply my basic attitudes toward society around me were bent all out of shape. How can the force she had to exert against me to achieve that not bounce back at her? And doesn’t that amount to having entered into a contract? But in order to denounce her effectively for her contract violation I’d have to catch her in the act of attempting suicide just the way she caught me! As the day in August approaches when twenty-five years ago the ten officers and soldiers who had deserted from the army led him and
a certain party
out of the valley in a wagon, his agitation is high from before dawn until late at night and the “acting executor of the will” must go to the nurses’ station frequently to request treatment to calm him down. Insisting that he must re-experience that midsummer day under weather and atmospheric conditions as similar as possible, “he” has the air-conditioning in his private room turned off. You know I can never experience that summer day again just as it was, how can you try to cheat me out of that final summer? “he” says. But in the un-airconditioned hospital room his exhaustion accelerates, “he” spends the entire day sighing, then tires
and falls asleep without having narrated a word, dreams, and cries out in anger. The morning after such a night, “he” complains of a kind of difficulty “he” has never before admitted. When I try as hard as I can to remember clearly the officers and soldiers who loaded
a certain party
into a wagon in spite of the bleeding cancer in his bladder and hauled him out of the valley as if they were pulling a root up out of the ground they sometimes appear in my memory, especially the officers, dressed just like Occupation GI’s! I’ve always had a double image of soldiers, part Japanese infantry just before the war and part GI during the Occupation. And while the two images are separate they have a way of merging subtly, I could never describe the uniforms of those young officers and soldiers who came to the valley with any concrete accuracy. Yet that part is crucial! Without it I can’t make you accept what I say as anything but make-believe! The radiant culmination of my
Happy Days
originates there, everything I ever did from that time on was affected by the force emanating from there, even my death so close at hand glistens in the light from there and nowhere else! Thus “he” laments, and, helpless to control his mounting agitation, trembles. Yet when the “acting executor of the will” tries to help, hunting up, for example, photograph collections of wartime styles and manners so that “he” can verify his memory objectively, “he” is, if anything, resentful. I intend to narrate a “history of our age” which I myself have experienced definitively, the experience of which continues to live inside me; if I start dressing up my own uncertain memory with photographic records made by someone I don’t even know, you tell me how I’m going to produce a “history of our age” with any real power over me and my mother! “he” shouts in irritation, his eyes red
as plums. The truth is, it’s not easy, all these years later, to reproduce in words just how it felt late that afternoon at the height of summer, when those officers and soldiers appeared in the valley and crossed the bridge from the highway and drew up in a solid line, and I heard them declare, as I stood among the adults who had evacuated to the valley and were too lazy to work and the other valley kids, that they had come for none other than
a certain party,
and then ask to be taken to him, and happiness seemed to charge me with static electricity so that every particle of my flesh and blood stood on end, even though I was thunderstruck by that sudden and unexpected development. And going back through the way those soldiers moved, their stiff quickstep even when they only had a few paces to go or their no-nonsense voices when they shouted orders to themselves, to the valley boy inside myself that was me in August, 1945, and reviving him gradually with fresh blood until he has regained his former health entirely is no easy job, either. For one thing, my mother attacked precisely that ecstatically happy boy inside me with such persistence she finally drove him to the edge of extinction. For a long time it was as if destroying him was the sole objective of her remaining years, she went about it with a fury worse than the cancer gnawing at my liver! But you must have resisted? So if you recall all the things inside yourself you tried to protect from your mother as a child and talk about them one by one wouldn’t that give you all the leads you need? Say, I notice recently you’ve been doing more for my “history of the age” than just transcribing it! For very nearly the first time since taking to his sick bed “he” expresses something like genuine gratitude. In his excitement and irritation “he” is also revealing an unexpected openness. Because
I’m afraid if you lost interest in this project now you’d sink so deeply into the liver cancer in your imagination you’d never surface again, says the “acting executor of the will.” Ha! Ha! Ha! Once again on guard, and cunning, “he” tries kicking sand with his hind leg to cover the openness “he” has just revealed. I didn’t realize you could be so exquisitely sentimental! Now “he” has regained his grip on what he needs to speak about himself with cool objectivity, and in the process, no doubt aided by his desire to oppose the “acting executor of the will,” a measure of vitality as well. For the moment, however, “he” will reply on this vitality to help him fall asleep. When “he” awakens from this shallow sleep and his strength and spirits are at such low ebb “he” cannot fall asleep again, in the middle of the night, if his scribe on her cot next to his bed will also wake up and keep him company, “he” will resume his account.]]

As he led the officers and soldiers up the stone path toward the Manor house at the top of the rise, followed by nearly all the children in the valley, whose friendliness toward him had been instantly restored by the appearance of the strangers, he perceived, with a flicker of uneasiness that intruded for just an instant on the excitement rioting in his head, that his mother was hurriedly closing the double rain doors ordinarily used only a few times a year when a typhoon was approaching, not only on the ground floor but on the second floor where no one lived and even in the attic, as if it were an attacking army he was leading up from the valley, and, hoping to preserve his high spirits, he lowered his eyes to the path as he climbed. At the roofed gate at the entrance to the Manor house, one of the officers yelled at the children to go back. There was nothing unusual in the valley about voices being raised, but if someone did shout, in any situation except a family
quarrel, he shrank with shame at his raised voice, which had reached the ears of the things lurking in the forest depths, and ultimately compromised himself though he may have been entirely in the right. The other party, however, no matter how large a concession may have been made to him, far from forgetting that he had been shouted at, retained the memory rancorously. In the communal society of the valley, the label “the one who raises his voice” amounted to an official coup de grace administered to someone who had been judged irretrievably antisocial. The sound of voices being raised quite shamelessly by
outsiders
at a crowd of valley children thus filled him with resentment and disgust and a certain sense of injustice, and then at the entrance to the storehouse where he was living with
a certain party
it was his turn to be told in a loud voice, Stay Out Even so, he somehow managed to contain, temporarily, his anger, and humiliation at this outrageous impropriety and, when he had opened the kitchen door to the main house by lifting the latch inside with an old nail, he went in to “challenge” his mother where she huddled motionlessly in the darkness of the adjoining room.

____Mother! Mother! Just like I thought, just like I thought, Mother, the army has come for
a certain party
just like I thought His voice as he spoke into the darkness was shrill with excitement, but his mother ignored his mood, answering only,

____Just
as
I thought, the least you can do is speak properly, you must have a
little
shame left!

Yet he managed to contain forbearingly even the antagonism this venomous response provoked, and continued his appeal for a dialogue based on exultation they could share:

____Mother! Mother! I have a piece of paper hidden in a
secret place with a list of all the people who said
a certain party
was a spy or who spread rumors that he wrote letters to the newspapers saying we would lose the war, and Mother! I’ve been thinking about that list ever since the soldiers came for
a certain party
just like I thought!

____
A certain party
doesn’t have the ability to be a spy. And he doesn’t have the gumption to come right out and say we’re going to lose the war, either! Oh, he wrote in to the papers all right, something about making Saipan and Tinian and Guam permanent strongholds against the enemy and moving the Imperial palace out there, even if it meant leaving all of Japan defenseless against the American attack, nonsense like that, Lord knows why or who he thought he was a-talking to, and then he hid himself in the storehouse because he was afraid the secret police would come to arrest him, but all that happened was a few country cops came out to tell him to stop it, yessir!

____Mother! Mother! The army came for
a certain party,
Mother, just like I thought! Just like I thought! When he had sung out these final words into the darkness that retained the heat of day where his mother sat motionless and probably sweating he dashed outside again into the early evening light and snuck around to the back of the storehouse, nimbly evading the soldiers despite the glare of the still-reddish sun which tightened his chest and stopped him in his tracks for just a minute, like a blind rat, then scrambled up onto the outhouse roof, got down on his hands and knees, and tried to catch a few words of the conference the officers were having with
a certain party.
Before long his leg was grabbed and he was pulled down off the roof by a soldier who had been walking around the storehouse, possibly to guard it, possibly because he was bored; unable to find another hiding place where he could continue to hold out alone against the world he raced back
yet again, undeterred, to the dark kitchen entrance of the main house, and reported, in a voice so strained and shrill he might have seemed to be weeping,
Mother! Mother! the situation has become critical so they’re going to revolt and a certain party is going to lead them, just like I thought, just like I thought, we’re in a crisis situation and they’ve chosen a certain party as their leader! We’d better have a good look at the list of people who said a certain party was a spy or someone who wanted us to lose the war, and we’d better total up their names, Mother, we’re going to have our hands full, because Mother, Mother, it’s just like I thought it would be!