The Silent Cry (44 page)

“Come to think of it, Mitsu, the legend of the man with the stoop in the 1871 disturbances is so well known in the valley that you’d expect him to be included among the ‘spirits’ of the Nembutsu dance, wouldn’t you? Perhaps they deliberately left him out because he would have duplicated the ‘spirit’ of your great-grandfather’s brother. Of course, that would only be negative proof, but …”

“Speaking of the Nembutsu dance,” I said, “the performers go into the storehouse, make a few formal comments in praise of the interior, then have something to eat and drink there, don’t they? Mightn’t that be connected with the fact that one of the most important ‘spirits’ once spent years of confinement beneath it? If so, it would be a piece of positive proof. As I see it, when grandfather annotated this booklet, he knew perfectly well that the strange figure with the stoop was his own uncle, and was secretly expressing his affection for him.”

The priest made no direct reply, almost as though he were reluctant to see his own hypothesis enlarged by my imagination, and turned instead to the picture of hell.

“If your theory is correct,” he said, “I suppose it means that your great-grandfather had this picture painted for his brother while he was still living in the cellar.”

The painting brought me the same profound sense of peace as when
Takashi, my wife, and I had seen it together, but the peace this time wasn’t something passively evoked in my own mind, but was essential to the picture itself. It was there on the paper, independent of me. In a word, the thing that radiated so positively from it was
tenderness
. In all probability, it was this—the ultimate essence of tenderness—that the man who commissioned the painting had asked the artist to portray. Since the picture was aimed at giving peace to his brother’s soul as he grappled in his self-imposed confinement with his own private inferno, it must of course portray hell. But the red of the river of fire was to be the red of dogwood leaves catching the morning sun in autumn, and the waves of fire were to be done in lines soft and gentle as the folds of a woman’s skirt. In practice, the effect of the river of flames was to be one of absolute gentleness. In his own person great-grandfather’s brother had comprised both the dead man shrieking in agony and the devil who tortured him, and since the picture was designed to bring repose to this soul run wild, it must depict the sufferings of the dead and the cruelty of the demons with equal accuracy. Yet dead and demons, however intent on the expression of agony or the infliction of torture, were at the same time to be bound spiritually by a serene tenderness. Quite probably, one of the men with disheveled hair who lay spread-eagled on the red-hot boulders, or thrust the withered triangles of his buttocks out of the river of flames toward the fire raining out of space, was a portrait of great-grandfather’s brother himself. Indeed, once the idea had occurred to me I began to feel that all the faces of the dead had the same characteristic air, and a nostalgic glow of recognition stirred somewhere in the depths of my consciousness as though they were my own kin.

“The sight of this picture always put Taka in a bad temper, didn’t it?” the priest said reminiscently. “He’d been frightened of it ever since he was a kid.”

“I tend to think he wasn’t so much afraid of the picture as opposed to the gentleness of the hell it shows,” I said. “That’s how it seems to me now, at least. He had such an urge to self-punishment, such a feeling that he ought to be living in a cruder hell than he was, that I suspect he wanted to reject this mild, comforting kind of torment as false. He worked hard in his own way to preserve the harshness of his personal hell.”

The meaningless smile on the young priest’s small face gradually disappeared, to be replaced by a definite air of wariness. I knew from
experience that if his views were challenged his face, which never on any account showed doubt, would assume a shut-in, half-defiant look. But I had no desire to give him any further account of my inner problems, since ultimately he wasn’t really interested in anything apart from the lives of the people in the valley. For me, at least, the hell painting was further, positive proof, and with my other evidence would amply justify a review of the verdicts I’d hitherto pronounced on great-grandfather’s brother and Takashi.

As he walked with me as far as the main gate of the temple, the priest updated me on the activities of the young men of the valley since the “rising.”

“You remember the spartan young man who worked with Taka? They say he’ll get a seat on the council when the first elections since the amalgamation of the villages are held. Taka’s rising might seem to have been a complete failure, but at least it served to shake the valley out of its rut. The young men who formed what was, at first, essentially Taka’s group have extended their own influence relative to the older, conservative-minded bosses, to the point of getting one of their members onto the local council. So where the future of the valley as a whole is concerned, the rising was effective after all. It did something to reestablish vertical communication within the valley community, and to firm up horizontal communication among the younger people. You know, Mitsu, I feel that a definite prospect for future development in the valley has opened up at last. I feel sorry for S and Taka, but they both played their part.”

When I got back, the Emperor was no longer at the storehouse, and the children I’d left gazing at the hole in the wall and the gap in the floor were scampering off down the graveled road like birds alarmed by the first signs of dusk. Even when I was a kid the children of the valley—unlike the “country” children who went on with their play even after it was dark—would rush home breathlessly the moment dusk began to fall, unless it were a festival or some other special occasion. Today’s children might not be scared of the Chosokabe who lived in the forest, but their habits at least hadn’t changed.

For my evening meal my wife had left by the fireplace a plate of sandwiches made with smoked meat, of which she’d bought a stock at the supermarket, and had gone to lie down in the back room, presumably to devote herself to the welfare of the baby in her womb. Wrapping the sandwiches in wax paper, I thrust them into the pocket
of my overcoat and went round the back to hunt out two whisky bottles, one full and one empty. I washed the empty bottle and filled it with hot water, though I knew it would soon be cold enough to sting the gums like iced water. Guessing that it would be chilly during the night, I crept past where my wife lay, intending to get some extra blankets out of the closet. But she hadn’t been asleep, and said suddenly:

“I was doing a bit of quiet thinking.” She spoke sharply, almost as though I’d been looking for an opportunity to creep in under the blankets with her.

“I’ve been going over various details of our married life in my mind, and I’ve come to the conclusion that under your influence I’ve let you share responsibility for a whole lot of my own decisions. It’s meant that when you deserted somebody, I was party to the desertion too. But now it really disturbs me, Mitsu. I’m going to start thinking again—about the baby in the institution, and about the baby that’s not born yet. Thinking for myself, independently of you.”

“Go ahead—my judgment isn’t to be relied on anyway,” I said dispiritedly, and added silently to myself: “and
I’m
going to shut myself up in the storehouse cellar to do some thinking too. With new evidence to consider, I have to get rid of my preconceived ideas about great-grandfather’s brother and Takashi and review their cases from scratch. To understand them correctly may be meaningless to them now that they’re dead, but for me it’s essential.”

I got down into the cellar and, squatting with my back against the white wall at the far end of the back room, just as the voluntary captive must have done a century earlier, wrapped three blankets tightly round me on top of my overcoat. Then, as I ate my sandwiches and took alternate mouthfuls of the whisky and the contents of the other bottle—warm water at first, soon turning to cold, though it wouldn’t freeze as long as the strong south wind continued to bluster about the hollow—I started thinking again. From a corner of this cellar where no human being had set foot for so many years, a dank smell arose where the wind had formed a pile of fragments from books and old papers eaten away by silverfish, a low writing desk long since disintegrated, and the remains of tatami mats that had rotted to pieces then dried out again. A similar smell arose from the stones of the floor, which were faintly damp like cold, sweaty skin and worn to a soft texture. A fine dust clung moist and heavy around my nostrils, lips,
and even the rims of my eyes, alarming me in case it fatally blocked the pores. I suddenly recalled painful memories of childhood asthma, twenty-five years earlier. I smelled my fingertips; already they were stained with a pungent dust that wouldn’t come off when I rubbed them on my knees. For all I knew, a spider grown to the size of a small crab after long days spent in that claustrophobic darkness might come rustling out from behind the pile of debris and bite me behind the ear. Down inside me, the idea aroused a physical revulsion which instantly filled the blackness before my eyes with giant silverfish peering at me, sow bugs half the size of real sows, and unseasonable crickets every bit as large as dogs.

A “retrial”? Yet here was the cellar, and if great-grandfather’s brother had indeed shut himself up here and maintained his identity as leader of the rising to the end of his days, that alone was enough to upset the verdict in which I’d always placed my faith. It was the same with Takashi, who had lived in an attempt to copy great-grandfather’s brother’s life: in the light of his ancestor’s newly demonstrated integrity, his own suicide began to look like a final, heroic attempt to put the whole of his “truth” on show for the benefit of me, the survivor. I looked on helplessly as the verdict I’d passed on Takashi fell irremediably to pieces in turn. Since the image of great-grandfather’s brother that I’d ridiculed every time Takashi thrust it at me had not been an illusion after all, Takashi’s position now looked considerably more favorable.

In the depths of the cellar where the darkness stirred with fierce eddies of wind, I saw the eyes of a dying cat, a tabby torn that I’d kept from my student days until I married and my wife was about to get pregnant. I remembered the eyes from that unhappy day when I found him run over with something like a red, skinned hand protruding from between his legs : the eyes of an old cat, perfectly calm and clear, their yellow irises like tiny, shining chrysanthemums; the eyes of a cat that, despite the sharp flashes of pain darting about the seat of sensation in its tiny brain, kept suffering firmly locked away and, at least to one peering in from outside, remained calm and expressionless; the eyes of a cat that treated its agony as something exclusively its own and, as such, nonexistent to others. I’d shown no imagination toward the human beings whose eyes concealed a similar private hell. I’d been consistently critical of Takashi’s attempts, as one such human being, to discover some way to a new life. I’d even refused aid in the face
of his pitiful request made when death was already upon him. So Takashi had dealt with his hell alone and unaided. As I contemplated them in the darkness, the eyes of my cat, companion of many years, became Takashi’s eyes, and the eyes of great-grandfather’s brother whom I’d never known, and my wife’s eyes, red like plums; and they all linked up into a shining ring that was rapidly becoming an undeniable part of my being. They would go on multiplying, I felt sure, throughout the time remaining to me, till a hundred pairs of eyes would glitter like a chain of stars in the night of my experience. And I would live on, suffering agonies of shame under the light of those stars, peering out timidly like a rat, with my single eye, at a dim and equivocal outer world. . . .

Our retrial is your trial !
And the old men waved their hats at the great beam.

I sat hunched up, scarcely breathing, as though I were indeed crouched alone before the judges and jurors of my dream, my eyes shut against the darkness to avoid the other eyes fixed on me, my head a strangely alien sphere cradled in the overcoat and blankets that wrapped my arms. Must I then live out my days to no positive purpose—vague, indeterminate, depressing days, remote from the sure sense of existence of those who had risen above their private hells ? Or was there perhaps some way of letting go and retreating into a more comfortable darkness ? As in a sequence of photographic stills, I saw another me slip free from my drooping shoulders as I sat hunched like a body in a burial urn, and, rising, crawl through the gap in the floorboards, then go climbing up the steep staircase, the clothes bundling its body fluttering in the gusts of wind that blew straight up from- the valley. As my ghostly self reached the point on the stairs where it could see the valley stretching out below the hole knocked in the wall, I could suddenly feel, still crouched at the bottom of the cellar though I was, the sickening vertigo that seized the figure standing there halfway up the stairs, defenseless and paralyzed before the deep, black, wind-filled space; and I pressed my fingers to my temples to soothe the dull ache in the core of my head. But when the apparition arrived directly below the great wooden beam, I suddenly realized in terror that I still hadn’t grasped the “truth” which, as I hanged myself, I would cry aloud to those who went on living; and the apparition promptly vanished from sight.

I couldn’t even share that “something” inside my friend that had
made him paint his head crimson and kill himself, naked, with a cucumber stuck up his anus. Even the eye that I’d believed to be watching the blood-filled darkness inside my head had in fact fulfilled no function at all. If I hadn’t yet grasped the “truth,” I was unlikely to find the strength of purpose to take that final plunge into death. It hadn’t been like that with great-grandfather’s brother and Takashi just before they died : they had been sure of their own hell, and in crying out the “truth” had risen above it.

So real was the sense of defeat that surged up in my chest like boiling water and spread with stinging pain throughout my body that I made a further discovery: just as Takashi from childhood had been fired with a sense of opposition to me, so I had been hostile to Takashi and his idol, great-grandfather’s brother, and had sought meaning in a placid way of life quite different from theirs. When, despite everything, I had the accident that blinded me in one eye as surely as if I’d been leading a life of danger, I was doubly indignant, and spent my hospital days miserably killing off flies. But Takashi, despite my objections, had persisted in a series of highly doubtful, rather disreputable ventures. And in that final moment when he stood facing the muzzle that was to split the naked upper half of his body into a mass of ripe pomegranates, he’d succeeded in achieving self-integration, in securing for himself an identity given consistency by his desire to be like great-grandfather’s brother. The fact that I’d refused his last appeal hardly mattered in practice. Almost certainly, he’d heard the voices of great-grandfather’s brother and all the other family spirits that filled the storehouse, heard them calling to him, recognizing him, and accepting him into their midst. With their aid, he’d been able to face up to his own agonizing fear of death for the sake of rising above his private hell.