The Silent Cry (41 page)

It was still the middle of the night. Since early morning, when word had come that the Emperor was making his first personal visit to the valley since the “rising,” the southerly winds heralding the end of winter had swept the forest and the hollow, and they had raged on unabated into the small hours. If I peered through the crack in the floor above my head, toward the gap made in the first-floor wall of the storehouse facing the valley, my line of vision was blocked by pitch-black forest. During the morning the sky had been free of clouds, but dust from the continent had hung a deep, yellowish brown shadow about it, weakening the sun’s rays. The same darkness had persisted even after the wind grew stronger, and had finally sunk unrelieved into night. As the gale mounted, the forest gave off a deepthroated roar like a stormy sea, the sound swelling till the very soil seemed to cry out. Here and there, I could distinguish isolated voices rising like flecks of foam to the surface : the great trees towering over the belt of land between the forest and the valley were moaning in the
wind, calling to me in individual tones that awoke vivid early memories. Like recollections of old folk in the valley to whom I’d spoken once or twice in childhood and remembered ever after, the giants of the forest were still alive in me: not in any complex or profound way yet with individual characters of their own. One day when I was small, an old worker from the soy sauce store, who lived at a different stratum of valley society from myself and with whom I’d never before exchanged a single word, had taken me unawares on the path leading down to the river past the storehouse where they brewed the sauce. Twisting my arm while I raged and struggled helplessly, he’d poured into my ears a torrent of coarse abuse about my mother’s insanity. And just as I clearly remembered the old man’s great doggy face, so I could see now the aged horse chestnut that grew on the hillside behind the house. As I listened to its sound, the whole tree surged into sight in vivid detail on the screen of my memory, bending and shouting in the gale.

Even during the morning, when the wind hadn’t been so fierce, I’d lain in the gloom by the open fireplace, listening to the great trees sounding in the wind. Brooding vaguely I’d wondered, among other things, whether to visit the trees for one last look before I left the hollow. It occurred to me that once I left I should never see them again, a thought which made me extremely doubtful about the reliability of my sight on that last occasion, and made me directly and vividly aware in turn of the death that awaited me some day. My main preoccupations, though, were two letters offering me jobs. One was from the professor of my old department in Tokyo, the other from the office of an expedition going to Africa to catch animals for an open zoo to be set up somewhere in the country. The professor offered me both lectureships in English literature that had been held ready at private universities for myself and the friend who had hanged himself. The offer carried the promise of a stable future. The letter from the expedition office was a hasty summons, reeking unmistakably of danger, from a scholar, a man of about the same age as S would have been, who had given up a post as assistant professor of zoology in order to organize the zoo. It was he who had praised my translation of the book on trapping in the book-review section of a leading newspaper. I’d met him several times; he was the kind of man who would board a sinking ship as its new captain after even the rats had left. Now he wanted me to join the expedition as its official interpreter.

The first of the two letters probably represented my only remaining chance to return to that kind of post; when my friend died, I’d thrown over the lectureship my old university had given me, without even consulting the professor of my department. Moreover, since Takashi hadn’t left me any of the money he’d got from the sale of the house and land, I would have to decide on some occupation sooner or later. The lectureship was ideal, but still I hesitated. My wife, with whom I hadn’t yet discussed the question of my next job and who only learned of the two offers because of the telegrams that came pressing for answers, had said quite coolly:

“If you’re interested in the work in Africa, why don’t you go, Mitsu ?” I immediately had a crushing premonition of all the difficulties and discomforts such unfamiliar work would entail.

“I’m sure that ‘official interpreter’ means not only paper work but giving orders to native porters and camp workers,” I said. “I can just see myself shouting ‘Forward march!’ and the like in abominable Swahili!” I spoke in tones of utter depression, but in my mind’s eye I saw a still more dismal vision: of myself all bloody from banging my temple, my cheekbone, even my sightless eye on African trees with iron bark and African rocks hard enough to contain diamonds. I saw myself finally falling victim to acute malaria, groaning under a high fever that made me resent even the indomitable zoologist’s scoldings and exhortations, and stretched out exhausted on the marshy ground, crying in Swahili to the bitter end, “Tomorrow we leave!”

“But surely it would at least give you more chance of a new life than lecturing in English at a university?”

“Taka, of course, would have gone and carved out a new life for himself immediately. According to Momoko, the kind of people who’d go all the way to Africa to catch elephants were humanity’s only hope in his eyes. He had a vision of the first man going into the wilds of Africa to catch elephants after all the zoos had been destroyed in a nuclear war. His elusive ‘Mr. Humanity.’ ”

“Yes, Taka would have leaped at the offer. But I realize now that you’re the type who’d never, deliberately at least, choose any work that might involve constant risks. You leave those jobs to other people. Then, when they’ve survived the dangers, got over their exhaustion, and written a book about their experiences,
you
step in and translate it.”

She might have been making an objective appraisal of some complete stranger. But dismayed though I was to find such dispassionate powers
of observation in her, I reflected that she was probably right. I was the type who, rather than discover a new life for himself, rather than build a thatched hut of his own, would choose to live as a lecturer in English literature, without a single student who pinned any serious hopes on his classes, fated to be disliked by them all unless he missed at least one lecture every week or so, living in seedy bachelorhood (for there was point in going on with this marriage) and labeled “Rat” by his students, like that philosopher whom Takashi had met in New York. Set, in short, on a course in which the only changes remaining were old age and death.

At the time of his suicide, Takashi had transferred all the notes and coins left in his pockets to an envelope addressed to Hoshio and Momoko and put it away in a desk drawer where his blood wouldn’t get on it. Immediately after his funeral (we buried him in the only vacant lot left in the family graveyard, and S’s ashes with him), Hoshio got the Citroen unaided over the temporary bridge, refusing all offers of help from the young men, and with Momoko by his side moved off down the paved road, driving carefully over the half-thawed slush still covering it. Before his departure, he delivered the following speech to my wife and myself while Momoko, standing docile and extremely feminine at his side, kept up a succession of small nods in support of his remarks :

“Now that we don’t have Taka, Momo and me will have to manage by ourselves. So I’m marrying her. After all, we’re both past the legal age of consent. We can make a living together—I can find a garage somewhere and Momo can get a job as waitress in a coffee shop. I’m hoping to have my own gas station someday. Taka used to say I should try the kind of station he saw in America, the sort that can handle quite serious repairs and serve snacks as well. Now that he’s dead, Momo and me have to go it alone, there’s no one else we can look to.”

My wife and I would have left the hollow with them, begging a lift in the back of the Citroen at least as far as the small town by the sea, but I had a feverish cold. Even after that, my hands had a hot, prickly feeling that lasted for three weeks, as though they’d developed a spongy layer that prevented me lifting anything. Then, when I got better, my wife started saying she wasn’t up to a long journey. She was, in fact, suffering frequent spells of nausea and faintness. I had no trouble in deducing what she was preparing herself for psychologically,
what she was hoping for with her whole body, but I had no desire to discuss it. For us, it fell into the category of things already settled.

With a vague sense of resignation, I brooded over this question of my new job, while Natsumi sat in the gloom on the other side of the fireplace looking like a doll firmly weighted at its base. There was no one left in the main house to interrupt our dialogue. But nowadays she would lapse almost at once into a profound silence, fleeing beyond the sphere of conversation. For a while after Takashi’s death, she’d been in a state of constantly renewed drunkenness. Before long, however, she voluntarily disposed of all the remaining bottles of whisky and took to spending her time, except when she was asleep and at mealtimes, sitting silent and correct on her heels, with her hands folded over her belly and her eyes half closed. I suspected that for her the suggestion about Africa had been no more than a disinterested comment on the choices facing some complete stranger. I no longer cast any deep shadow across the world of her awareness, nor she on mine.

In the afternoon, Jin’s eldest son crept into the kitchen, moving quietly in deference to my wife’s silence.

“The Emperor’s crossing the bridge,” he reported. “He’s got five young guys with him.”

By now, none of the valley folk believed the Emperor would bring a gang with him. As soon as the thaw set in, he’d sent a representative who settled all the complex questions created by the “rising” in as simple a fashion as possible. Specifically, he’d piled goods onto the first heavy truck to enter the valley, and reopened the supermarket. He demanded no compensation for the looting, nor did he report the matter to the police. The plan put forward by the young priest and the Sea Urchin for getting the more prosperous inhabitants to put up the funds to take over the supermarket, losses and all, was dismissed out of hand. There was a rumor, in fact, that no formal proposal had ever been made to the Emperor at all. Within a short time after Takashi’s death, the forces behind the “rising” had collapsed at the center. They’d lost all power to influence the Emperor by threatening to rekindle the riot. The housewives of the valley and the “country,” filled with abject gratitude and satisfaction at not being questioned about the looting, were quite happily buying foodstuffs and household goods costing an average twenty or thirty per cent more than before the trouble. As for the electrical appliances and other larger articles that had been looted, people came, one by one and in secret, to return
them to the supermarket, where they were put on sale again as damaged goods and sold out at special discounts in no time at all. The women from the “country” who had taken part in the “rising” and fought with each other over cheap articles of clothing now proved to have appreciable sums of cash hidden away, and were among the most eager customers at the sale. And the owners of forest land shut themselves up again in their snug shells with audible sighs of relief.

I walked down to the valley behind Jin’s son, my eyes stung by the thick dust whipped off bare fields by the boisterous wind. Everything around me—the dark brown stretches of withered grassland where the snow had completely vanished, leaving the soil parched and powerless as yet to put forth new life, even the somber evergreen heights of the forest beyond the groves of great deciduous trees—had an air of indefinable loss, like the dead ruin of a human being, that awoke an obscure uneasiness in me as my gaze roved across the hollow. I dropped my eyes and saw the back of the boy’s neck, where grime had made a splotchy pattern. For hours on end he had crouched on top of the great boulder where the wretched little sexpot had met her end, braving the buffets of the dust-laden wind in order to catch sight of the Emperor making his entry into the valley. The boy walked hurriedly with drooping head, his rear view exuding an air of fatigue that was strange in a child. It was the fatigue of a member of a family that had finally surrendered. I felt sure that the whole valley awaited the arrival of the Emperor and his subordinates with the same weary air. The hollow had capitulated.

The boy wouldn’t have played the part of sentinel so enthusiastically if my purpose in going down to meet the Emperor hadn’t been relevant to his mother, who ate almost nothing now and was rapidly growing thinner. I doubted, otherwise, whether he would have worked for me that day at all, since Takashi’s death had divorced me once more from the daily lives of the inhabitants of the hollow. By now, even the children made no attempt to poke fun at me. When we arrived in the open space before the village office, I immediately recognized the Emperor and his followers, who seemed to have bypassed the supermarket and were marching straight up the graveled road. The large man who came striding along with military precision, kicking up the bottom of a long black overcoat reaching almost to his heels, was the Emperor. Even at a distance, the round face beneath the deerstalker was obviously plump and fresh-complexioned. The
young men surrounding him, who came walking with the same long, vigorous strides, all had similar sturdy physiques. They were dressed in shoddy overcoats and were bareheaded but, following their leader’s example, they walked proudly with shoulders back and heads held upright. I was vividly reminded of the day when the occupation forces’ jeeps first came into the valley; the Emperor and his party were like the calmly triumphant aliens of that midsummer morning. The grown-ups of the valley had found it difficult to get used to the feeling of being occupied even after they’d witnessed practical confirmation of the nation’s defeat, and had gone on with their daily tasks, ignoring the foreign troops. But all the while their souls were suffused with shame. The children were different: promptly adapting to the new situation, they ran after the jeeps shouting “hello, hello!”—a piece of emergency education imparted at school—and were given canned foods and candy.