The Silent Cry (26 page)

I laid the plump birds out on the snow and began to pluck the feathers with their pattern of glossy black and reddish brown. Most of the feathers were promptly scattered by the wind among the falling snow-flakes, leaving only the heavier tail feathers at my feet. The flesh beneath was cold and firm, yet had a satisfying resilience to the touch. The fluffy down between the feathers was full of tiny, translucent lice which looked as though they were still alive. Breathing cautiously through my nostrils for fear of drawing the lice-infested down into my lungs, I went on plucking the feathers with fingers that grew steadily more numb. Suddenly the fragile, butter-colored skin broke and my fingertips made disturbing contact with what lay beneath. Through the rapidly expanding split the blackish red, damaged flesh appeared, pocked all over with beads of blood and lead pellets. I plucked the remaining tail feathers from the now completely naked body, and twisted the neck round and round, trying forcibly to wrench the head off. But just as it seemed that the neck would give way, something inside me refused to make the little extra effort required. I released my grip on the head, which sprang back sharply, so that the beak stabbed me smartly on the back of the hand. It made me see the pheasant’s head for the first time as an independent object, and I concentrated for a while on the emotions this evoked. A murmur of
voices behind me was followed by a sudden burst of laughter, but the noise was absorbed at once by the layer of snow on the slope separating Sedawa from the mulberry orchard, leaving only the sound of the newly falling snow brushing the lobes of my ears, an icy grating so faint that it might have been the rustling of the snowflakes against each other.

The pheasant’s head was closely covered with short brown feathers, which had a reddish, almost fiery gloss. The cockscomb-red around its eyes was dotted with black specks like the flesh of a strawberry. And the eyes themselves were dry and white—yet they were not eyes, but clumps of tiny white feathers; the real eyes, directly above them, had their black, threadlike eyelids firmly shut. I scraped an eyelid back with my nail, and something resembling the flesh of a grape slashed with a razor came oozing up and threatened to flow out like a liquid. Horror sent a momentary shock pulsing through me, but I gazed at it steadily and its power over me rapidly faded. It was, quite simply, the eye of a dead bird. The white false eyes, however, were not to be dismissed so lightly. I had felt their gaze upon me while I was plucking the remaining feathers from the all but naked body, even before I became consciously aware of the bird’s head. That was why, too impatient to go and look for a knife, I had grasped the head, false eyes and all, and tried to twist it off at the neck. Though my own right eye was very like the pheasant’s false eyes in its absence of sight, it achieved only a purely negative effect of sightlessness. If I were to hang myself like my friend, with my head daubed scarlet, naked, and a cucumber stuffed up my rear, I would have to paint in a glaring green eye on my upper eyelid for my death outfit to make any greater effect than my friend’s. . . .

Laying out the six stark-naked pheasants on the snow, I went back to the kitchen in search of material for a fire, moving my head from side to side through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees, as one-eyed persons will, in case there were dogs or cats in the vicinity.

“… quite naturally, the young man who’d betrayed his fellows was expelled from the goup,” Takashi was saying. “If he’d fled in the direction of the castle town, he would have been arrested in no time; and if he’d stayed in the valley, isolated from the rest, his friends wouldn’t have given him protection and the farmers he’d treated so roughly while he was still in a position of power would have paid him back in no uncertain terms. So his only hope was a sink-or-swim attempt to get through the forest to Kochi. As to whether his flight succeeded …

“Are the pheasants well covered, Mitsu?” he asked me, interrupting his lecture just as I was asking my wife for a box of matches to go with the bundle of old straw that I’d dragged out from under the floor. I doubted whether he had much confidence in the facts he was relating. I, for one, certainly couldn’t command such detailed knowledge of the actions and daily lives of the young men following the 1860 rising.

I stamped a hollow in the snow, thrust in the bundle of straw bent into a circle, and set fire to it. The fine down clinging to the skin of the pheasants burned first, giving off an oppressive odor. Almost at once, the bodies of the pheasants were crisscrossed with dark brown threads of melting animal matter, and the skin itself turned a dull color in the smoke, with beads of yellow fat rising here and there. It brought directly to mind something my dead friend had said about the photograph of the black who had been set fire to: “His body was so scorched and swollen that the details were blurred, like those of a crudely carved wooden doll.”

Someone was standing behind me, peering with equal intensity at the same thing as myself. I turned and saw Takashi, his face so flushed with the heat of his fireside eloquence that I expected the falling snow-flakes to melt on first contact. I felt sure that the pheasants with their scorched down had evoked much the same memories in him too.

“My friend who died told me you gave him a civil rights pamphlet when you met him in New York. He said it had a photo of a black who’d been burned alive.”

“That’s right. A terrible picture, the sort of thing that tells you something about the essential nature of violence.”

“Another thing he said was that you startled him by threatening to ‘tell the truth.’ He was worried because he got the impression you had some other ‘truth’ on your mind apart from what you actually talked about, but that you couldn’t get it out. How about it—he never got his answer, but was the suspicion he died with at least well founded?”

Takashi went on peering at the pheasants, his eyes narrowed anxiously as though half blinded, not just by the light reflected by the snow onto his steadily paling cheeks, but also by something rising up within himself.

“ ‘Shall I tell you the truth?’—” he said. I felt sure he’d used the same voice in saying the same thing to my friend in New York. “It’s a phrase from a young poet. I was forever quoting it at that period. I was
thinking about the absolute truth which, if a man tells it, leaves him no alternative but to be killed by others, or kill himself, or go mad and turn into a monster. The kind of truth that once uttered leaves you clutching a bomb with the fuse irretrievably lit. What do you think, Mitsu—is the courage to tell others that kind of truth possible for ordinary flesh and blood ?”

“I can imagine someone in a desperate situation resolving to tell the truth, but I don’t believe that after telling it he would either be killed or kill himself, or go mad and turn into a monster—he would find some way of going on living,” I objected, hoping to ferret out the purpose behind Takashi’s unexpected talkativeness.

“No—that’s as difficult as the perfect crime,” said Takashi, dismissing my ill-considered view with the firmness of one who had obviously been pondering the theme for a long time. “If the man who was supposed to have told the truth managed to go on living without one of those fates overtaking him, it would be direct evidence that the truth he was supposed to have told wasn’t in fact the sort—the bomb with the fuse lit—that I’m concerned with.”

“Do you mean, then, that the man who tells your kind of truth has absolutely no way out?” I asked in dismay. But then I had an idea for a compromise. “What about a writer? Surely there are writers who have told the truth and gone on living?”

“Writers? Occasionally, I admit, they tell something near the truth and survive without either being beaten to death or going mad. They deceive other people with a framework of fiction, but what essentially undermines the work of an author is the very fact that, provided one imposes a framework of fiction, one can get away with anything, however frightening, dangerous, or shameful it may be. However serious the truth he may be telling, the writer at least is always aware that in fiction he can say anything he wants, so he’s immune from the start to any poison his words might contain. This communicates itself eventually to the reader, who develops a low opinion of fiction as something that never reaches directly into the innermost recesses of the soul. Seen in that way, the truth in the sense in which I imagine it just isn’t to be found in anything written or printed. The most you can expect is the writer who goes through the motions of a leap into the dark.”

The snow settled on the row of pheasants where they lay with their down scorched off, their bodies fleshy and heavy. I took them up two
at a time and banged them sharply together to shake off the snow. They made a dull thud that set up nasty echoes in the pit of my stomach.

“My friend said he suspected that on the day you said you would ‘tell the truth,’ just before he startled you by coming up from behind, you’d been studying that photograph of the charred body. He was right, wasn’t he ? You were sitting at the drugstore counter imagining telling your own truth and being turned into a blackened corpse like that.”

“Yes—I had a feeling that he understood to some extent. And I feel that I myself understand at least the significance of the way he chose to commit suicide.” He spoke straightforwardly, reawakening in me the emotion I’d felt on hearing his tribute to my dead friend at the airport. “It may seem funny that I should be so sure about something concerning a friend of yours, but I’ve been thinking over the implications of what happened ever since I heard about it from Natsumi. Before he painted his head red and hanged himself, naked,” (and—I thought—with a cucumber stuffed up his rear, though since my wife didn’t know this, Takashi didn’t either) “I’m sure he gave a last cry of ‘Shall I tell the truth?’ Even if he didn’t actually shout the words aloud, I feel that the very act of jumping, with the cold realization that a moment later his body would be hanging there naked and redheaded for all to see, irretrievably dead, was in itself just such a desperate cry. Don’t you agree, Mitsu? Don’t you think it takes terrific courage to make one’s final gesture with one’s own naked, crimson-headed corpse ? He told the truth through the act of dying. I don’t know just what truth it was he told, but the one absolutely certain thing is that he told it. When I heard about it from Natsumi, something inside me gave the signal, ‘OK, message received.’ ”

I understood what Takashi meant.

“It seems he made a sound deal when he paid for your medicine.”

“If the time ever comes for
me
to tell that kind of truth, I’d like you to hear it, Mitsu. It’s the sort that wouldn’t have its full effect unless I told it to you.” He spoke with the naive excitement of a child that knows it’s doing something risky.

“You mean, me as a close relative?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, your truth concerns our sister?” I asked, overcome by a stifling suspicion.

Takashi’s body went momentarily rigid, then he stared so fiercely that I was afraid he would lash out at me. But he was merely focusing on me with intense wariness in order to gauge accurately just what lay behind my words, and after a while his body suddenly relaxed and he averted his gaze.

We stared in silence at the new snow settling on the corpses of the pheasants. The dank cold chilled our bodies to the marrow. Like his comrade of the grotesque features and inadequate clothing, Takashi was shivering, his lips blue. I was eager to get back into the kitchen, yet at the same time wanted to round off our conversation amicably. Takashi, however, rescued us from our awkwardness while I was still groping vaguely for something safe to say.

“The reason I persuaded you to come back to the valley,” he said, “wasn’t just plain cunning. It wasn’t just so that, when I sold the storehouse and land, I could tell them at the village office that my elder brother up at the house had asked me to come and make arrangements. It’s also because I want you to be a witness when I tell the truth. I’m hoping that moment will come while we’re together.”

“The land and the house don’t matter now,” I said. “But neither do I believe you’ll ever tell anybody such a terrible truth—if, that is, you really
have
such a truth hidden inside you. In the same way, I don’t suppose I’ll ever find my new life, or my thatched hut. . . .”

So, side by side and chilled to the bone, we walked back into the house. It was lunchtime, and Momoko was just dishing out stew to the young men round the fireplace. For Takashi and his friends, living and training together like the young men’s New Year communes of an earlier generation, this would be their first meal under the same roof. The ever-industrious Hoshio sat in a corner, apart from the happy circle formed by his new comrades, with a large number of footballs which, one by one, he was assiduously polishing with oil to preserve the leather. I handed the corpses of the six pheasants to my wife, put on my new boots, and scuffled my way back through the snow to the storehouse.

The Freedom of the Ostracized

T
IME
passed, but the powdery snow went on falling, betraying my private hope that it would change into larger, petal-like flakes, and I remained alien to it. I stayed shut up in the storehouse, concentrating on my translation, never going out into the snow. My meals were brought to me there; the only time I returned to the main building was when I needed to replenish the water in the kettle on the stove. Whenever I went, I found Takashi and his companions in a state of childlike innocence, drunk with the snow and showing no signs as yet of the fatigue or wear and tear that goes with a hangover. New snow wiped out all traces of deterioration in what had already settled, constantly renewing the first impression, so there was no chance for the devotees in the main house to recover from their snowy infatuation. Eventually, I discovered that I could use melted snow in my kettle, and my daily life was cut off even more definitively from the main building. I spent three days enfolded in the driving, alien snow, savoring the sense of relaxation of one free from all surveillance, a sense so strong that I could tell that my own expression and movements were slackening and slowing up.