Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (19 page)

My brother, eyes flashing, was sitting on the sleeping platform. His eyes were hot, and a little dry with fear.

“You closed the rain shutters, didn’t you!” I said, sneering to hide the trembling of my own lips.

“Yes—” Ashamed of his timidness my brother lowered his eyes. “How was he?”

“He smells terrible,” I said, sinking in fatigue. Truly I
was exhausted, and I felt wretched. The trip to the
town,
the black soldier’s supper—after the long day’s work my body was as heavy as a sponge soaked with fatigue. Taking off my shirt, which was covered with dried leaves and burrs, I bent over to wipe my dirty feet with a rag, a demonstration for my brother’s sake that I had no desire to accept further questions. My brother observed me worriedly, his lips pursed. I crawled in next to him and burrowed under our blanket with its smell of sweat and small animals. My brother sat there watching me, his knees together and pressing against my shoulder, not asking any more questions. It was just as he sat when I was sick with fever, and I too, just as when I was sick with fever, longed only to sleep.

When I woke up late the next morning I heard the noise of a crowd coming from the square alongside the storehouse. My brother and father were gone. I looked up at the wall and saw that the hunting gun was not there. As I listened to the clamor and stared at the empty gun rack my heart began to pound. I sprang out of bed, grabbed my shirt, and ran down the stairs.

Adults were crowded into the square, and the dirty faces of the children looking up at them were tight with uneasiness. Apart from everyone, Harelip and my brother were squatting next to the cellar window. They’ve been watching! I thought to myself angrily, and was running toward them when I saw Clerk emerge, head lowered, lightly supporting himself on his crutch, from the cellar entrance. Violent, dark exhaustion and landsliding disappointment buried me. But what followed Clerk was not the dead body of the black soldier but my father, his gun on his shoulder and the barrel still in its bag, talking
quietly with the village headman. I breathed a sigh, and sweat hot as boiling water steamed down my sides and the insides of my thighs.

“Take a look!” Harelip shouted at me as I stood there. “Go on!”

I got down on all fours on the hot cobblestones and peered in through the narrow skylight window that was just at ground level. At the bottom of the lake of darkness the black soldier lay slumped on the floor like a domestic animal that had been pummeled senseless.

“Did they beat him?” I said to Harelip, my body trembling with anger as I straightened. “Did they beat him when he had his feet tied and couldn’t move?” I shouted.

“What?” In order to repel my anger Harelip had readied himself for a fight, his face taut, his lip thrust out.

“Who?”

“The adults!” I shouted. “Did they beat him?”

“They didn’t have to beat him,” Harelip said regretfully. “All they did was go in and look. Just looking at him did that!”

Anger faded. I shook my head vaguely. My brother was peering at me.

“It’s all right,” I said to my brother.

One of the village children stepped around us and tried to look through the skylight window but Harelip kicked him in the side and he screamed. Harelip had already reserved the right to decide who should look at the black soldier through the skylight. And he was keeping a nervous watch on those who would usurp his right.

I walked over to where Clerk was talking to the adults surrounding him. As if I were a village brat with snot drying on my upper lip he ignored me completely and went right on talking, damaging my self-respect and my feeling of friendship for him. But there are times when
you cannot afford to nurse your own pride and self-respect. I thrust my head past the hips of the adults and listened to Clerk and the headman talking.

Clerk was saying that neither the
town
office nor the police station was able to take charge of the black prisoner. Until a report had been made to the prefectural office and a reply received, the village must keep the black soldier, was obliged to keep him. The headman objected, repeating that the village lacked the force to hold the black soldier prisoner. Moreover, delivering the dangerous prisoner under guard by the long mountain route was too much for the villagers to handle unaided. The long rainy season and the floods had made everything complicated, difficult.

But when Clerk assumed a peremptory tone, the arrogant tone of a minor bureaucrat, the adults submitted weakly. When it became clear that the village would keep the black soldier until the prefecture had settled on a policy, I left the perplexed, disgruntled adults and ran back to my brother and Harelip where they sat in front of the skylight, monopolizing it. I was filled with deep relief, anticipation, and anxiety I had contracted from the adults and which moved in me like sluggish worms.

“I told you they weren’t going to kill him!” Harelip shouted triumphantly. “How can a black man be an enemy!”

“It’d be a waste,” said my brother happily. The three of us peered through the skylight, cheeks bumping, and seeing the black soldier stretched out as before, his chest lifting and falling as he breathed, we sighed with satisfaction. There were some children who advanced right to the soles of our feet upturned on the ground and drying under the sun, muttering their displeasure with us, but when Harelip sprang up and shouted they scattered, screaming.

Presently we tired of watching the black soldier lying there, but we did not abandon our privileged position. Harelip allowed the children one by one, when they had promised compensation in dates, apricots, figs, persimmons or whatever, to look through the skylight for a short time. As the children stared through the window even the backs of their necks reddened with their surprise and wonder, and when they stood up they rubbed the dirt from their jaws with their palms. Leaning against the storehouse wall I looked down at the children engrossed in this first real experience of their lives while Harelip yelled at them to hurry and their small butts burned in the sun, and I felt a strange satisfaction and fullness, exhilaration. Harelip turned over on his knees a hunting dog that wandered over from the crowd of adults and began pulling ticks and crushing them between his amber nails as he shouted orders and arrogant abuse at the children. Even after the adults had left with Clerk to see him as far as the ridge road we continued our strange game. From time to time we took long looks ourselves, the children’s resentful voices at our backs, but the black soldier lay sprawled there as before and gave no indication of moving. As if he had been beaten and kicked, as if merely looking at him had been enough to wound him!

That night, accompanied once again by my father with his gun, I went down into the cellar carrying a heavy pot of gruel. The black soldier looked up at us with eyes yellowed heavily along the edges with fat, then thrust his hairy fingers directly into the hot pot and ate hungrily. I was able to observe him calmly, and my father, who had stopped pointing his gun, leaned against the wall looking bored.

As I looked down at the black man with his forehead aslant above the pot, watching the trembling of his thick
neck and the sudden flexing and relaxing of his muscles, I began to perceive him as a gentle animal, an obedient animal. I looked up at Harelip and my brother peering through the skylight with bated breath and flashed a sly smile at their gleaming eyes. I was growing used to the black soldier–the thought planted a seed of proud happiness that sprouted in me. But when the black soldier moved in such a way that the chain on the boar-trap rattled, fear revived in me with tremendous vigor, rushing into even the most distant blood vessels in my body and making my skin crawl.

From that day on, the job of carrying food to the black soldier, once in the morning and once at night, accompanied by my father, who no longer bothered to remove his rifle from his shoulder, was a special privilege reserved for me. When my father and I appeared at the side of the storehouse early in the morning or as evening was becoming night, the children who had been waiting in the square would release all at once a large sigh that rose spreading, like a cloud, into the sky. Like a specialist who has lost all interest in his work but retains his meticulousness on the job, I crossed the square with brows intently knit, never glancing at the children. My brother and Harelip were satisfied to walk on either side of me, so close our bodies touched, as far as the entrance to the cellar. And when my father and I went down the steps they ran back and peered through the skylight. Even if I had become entirely bored with carrying food to the black soldier, I would have continued the job simply for the pleasure of feeling at my back as I walked along that hot sigh of envy risen to resentment in all the children, Harelip included.

I did ask my father, however, for special permission for Harelip to come to the cellar once a day only, in the afternoon. This was to transfer to Harelip’s shoulders part of a burden that was too heavy for me to handle alone. A small, old barrel had been placed next to one of the pillars in the cellar for the black soldier’s use. In the afternoon, lifting the barrel between us by the thick, heavy rope that ran through it, Harelip and I carefully climbed the steps and walked to the communal compost heap to empty the stinking, sloshing mixture of the black soldier’s shit and piss. Harelip went about his work with excessive zeal: sometimes, before we emptied the barrel into the large tank alongside the compost heap, he would stir the contents with a stick and discourse on the state of the black soldier’s digestion, particularly his diarrhea, concluding, among other things, that the trouble was caused by the kernels of corn in his gruel.

When Harelip and I went down to the cellar with my father to get the small barrel and found the black soldier astride it, his pants down around his ankles and his black, shiny rear thrust out in almost exactly the attitude of a copulating dog, we had to wait behind him for a while. Harelip, listening to the furtive clinking of the chain that linked the black soldier’s ankles on either side of the barrel, eyes glazed dreamily with surprise and awe, kept a tight grip on my arm.

The children came to be occupied entirely with the black soldier, he filled every smallest corner of our lives. Among the children the black soldier spread like a plague. But the adults had their work. The adults did not catch the children’s plague. They could not afford to wait motionlessly for the instructions that were so slow to arrive from the town office. When even my father, who had undertaken supervision of the prisoner, began leaving the
village to hunt again, the black soldier began to exist in the cellar for the sole purpose of filling the children’s daily lives.

My brother and Harelip and I fell into the habit of spending the daylight hours in the cellar where the black soldier sat, our chests hammering with the excitement of breaking a rule at first but soon enough, as we grew accustomed to being there, with complete casualness, as if supervising the black soldier during the day, while the adults were away in the hills or down in the valley, was a duty we had been entrusted with and must not neglect. The peephole at the skylight, abandoned by Harelip and my brother, was passed on to the village children. Flat on their bellies on the hot, dusty ground, their throats flushed and dry with envy, the children took turns peering in at the three of us sitting around the black soldier on the dirt floor. When occasionally, in an excess of envy, a child forgot himself and tried to follow us into the cellar, he received a pommeling from Harelip for his rebellious act and had to fall to the ground with a bloody nose.

In no time at all we had only to carry the black soldier’s “barrel” to the top of the cellar steps, transporting it to the compost heap in the fierce sun while under attack by its ferocious stench was a task carried out by children we haughtily appointed. The designated children, cheeks shining with pleasure, carried the barrel straight up, careful not to spill a drop of the muddy yellow liquid that seemed so precious to them. And every morning all the children, including ourselves, glanced up at the narrow road that descended through the woods from the ridge
with almost a prayer that Clerk would not appear with instructions we dreaded.

The chain from the boar-trap cut into the black man’s ankles, the cuts became inflamed, blood trickled onto his feet and shriveled and stuck there like dried blades of grass. We worried constantly about the pinkish infection in the wounds. When he straddled the barrel the pain was so bad it made the black soldier bare his teeth like a laughing child. After looking deep into one another’s eyes for a long time and talking together, we resolved to remove the boar-trap. The black soldier, like a dull black beast, his eyes always wet with a thick liquid that might have been tears or mucous, sat in silence hugging his knees on the cellar floor—what harm could he do us when we removed the trap? He was only a single head of black man!

When Harelip tightly grasped the key I brought from my father’s tool bag, leaned over so far his shoulder was touching the black soldier’s knees, and unlocked the trap, the black soldier suddenly rose with a groan and stamped his feet. Weeping with fear, Harelip threw the trap against the wall and ran up the steps; my brother and I, not even able to stand up, huddled together. The fear of the black soldier that had suddenly revived in us took our breaths away. But instead of dropping upon us like an eagle, the black soldier sat back down just where he was and hugged his knees and gazed with his wet, filmy eyes at the trap lying against the wall. When Harelip returned, head hanging with shame, my brother and I greeted him with kind smiles. The black soldier was as gentle as a domestic animal….

Late that night my father came to lock the giant padlock on the cellar door and saw that the black soldier’s
ankles had been freed, yet he did not admonish me. Gentle as cattle—the thought, like air itself, had crept into the lungs of everyone in the village, children and adults alike.

The next morning my brother and Harelip and I took breakfast to the black soldier and found him puttering with the boar trap. When Harelip had thrown the trap against the wall the mechanism that snapped it shut had broken. The black soldier was examining the broken part with the same expert assurance as the trap-mender who came to the village every spring. And then abruptly he lifted his darkly glistening forehead and indicated with motions what he wanted. I looked at Harelip, unable to contain the joy that seemed to slacken my cheeks. The black soldier had communicated with us, just as our livestock communicated so had the black soldier!