The Silent Cry (32 page)

Suddenly, Jin’s son gave a shrill cry to attract my attention.

“That’s him!” he shouted in a voice high-pitched with the excitement of discovery. “That’s the manager of the market!”

I watched as a plumpish man jogged past on unsteady feet. He wore a leather jacket, and the head above his bull neck was completely bald even though he couldn’t have been forty. Paddling the air with his arms like a landborne seal, he trotted on determinedly amidst a hail of insults from the children. He’d obviously been released from confinement in his house, but since the bridge was almost certainly under strict surveillance by the football team, he’d merely been given the run of the valley; in practice, he was as shut in as ever. So the sight of him trotting busily like a newsboy through this shower of abuse was at once comic and puzzling. Did he imagine he had some plan for getting things back to normal, alone in the valley without a single ally? Just then, one of the children discovered it was fun to
throw snowballs at him, and the others immediately followed suit. A snowball struck his ankle as he ran, toppling him with the greatest of ease. He struggled to his feet and without even brushing off the snow that clung to him from head to foot bellowed an impotent threat at the half-crazed children. But they only went on throwing snowballs more gleefully than ever. In my dry mouth I tasted again the raw, spontaneous fear of that day when my eye was split open in an assault by unknown children, and felt that I’d found a clue to the long-standing riddle of why they’d thrown that stone.

Miserable and irate, the man went on shouting faintly but persistently as he fended off the volley of snowballs with both arms.

“What’s he shouting?” I asked Jin’s son, who had promptly joined in the attack but had now returned to my side, still bubbling with excitement.

“He says that as soon as the snow thaws the Emperor’ll come with a gang and attack the village. He forgets we’ve got weapons to fight back with!” he added proudly. He peered into the now empty box of cookies from which he’d been eating, flung it aside, and, drawing out another of the boxes that stuffed the pockets of his short coat, crammed a fresh handful into his mouth.

“They don’t think they’d get the better of a gang, do they? Violence is a gangster’s speciality.”

“Takashi’ll teach them how to fight. He fought the rightists, so he knows how!” he declared, gulping down the contents of his mouth impatiently. “Did you fight, Mitsusaburo?” he added with indescribable acuteness.

“I wonder why they’re letting the manager go about as he likes?”

“I wonder…” the boy began noncommitally, then gave what was, in fact, the most pertinent of answers to my vague question. “He talks such rubbish that the valley folk have stopped paying much attention to him and the Emperor. He’s a Korean too, you know!”

I was disgusted at this unreasoning hostility toward Koreans in a kid born since the war, but if I tried to defend the manager, the boy would almost certainly get his gang of little ruffians together and have me running away in the same tottering, aimless fashion.

“You don’t need to come with me any more,” I said simply. “Go and play with your friends.”

“But Taka ordered me to come and take you to him!” he said, earnest perplexity written all over his small face. But I stoutly refused
his guidance and in the end left him standing there, cheeks crammed with another handful of cookies to assuage his frustration. For the first time since Jin had developed her abnormal appetite, her skinny son too had found more food than his shrunken stomach so hesitatingly demanded. A strange sense of duty toward it, allied with an uneasiness whose nature he himself didn’t understand, was making him eat and eat. He would probably spew it all up in the end.

The snow round the supermarket had been trodden into a slush, and the graveled road was an utter mess, a foretaste of the clogged days to come when the thaw set in in earnest and the whole valley turned to mud. In front of the store stood a large number of independent groups. Some were people who had carried television sets outside and were watching them there, others were looking on as various electrical appliances were taken out of their wrappings and subjected to modification.

On the TV screens, two different programs were in progress. Small children crouched in front of the sets, intent on the screens. By stationing themselves, half squatting, at points where it was possible to keep an eye on two sets at once, some of them were even managing to watch both channels. But the grown-ups standing at the rear had an unsettled air and weren’t really concentrating on the television sets. Coming at the same time as the strange state of emergency in the valley, this contact with people going about their everyday lives in distant towns had had a peculiar effect on them. The blurred image of a young girl in close-up on the screen, singing with her prominent chin thrust forward and an artificial smile on her face, only emphasized the abnormality of what had happened and was still happening in the valley.

The electrical goods taken from their packages had been stood on the damp ground, and two middle-aged men were at work on them with hammers and chisels. They were the valley blacksmith and tinsmith—obviously two more special advisers taken on by the young men. The groups of onlookers were mostly women. It was clear that this was the first time the pair had undertaken such a task, and though they were probably the most skilled craftsmen in the valley the work progressed slowly and uncertainly. Its nature was mildly destructive, consisting in removing the manufacturer’s nameplate and number from the appliances. At one point, the chisel with which one of the men was trying to get the nameplate off the face of an electric heater
bit deeply into the bright scarlet paint on its side, and a wave of sighs from the women squatting round the workman made him shrink visibly with embarrassment. The petty task he was engaged in was far removed from the skills that were such a confident part of his being. This puerile destruction, in fact, was aimed at obliterating proof that the appliances had been looted from the supermarket, in readiness for the day when the snow thawed and the forces of the Emperor came rolling back up the paved road from the town to the hollow.

Leaving the crowd and turning toward the entrance of the supermarket, I realized that the young men of the football team were keeping an eye on my movements. They were scattered throughout the groups standing round the television sets or watching the craftsmen, lurking among them like dark blots on the festive mood of the crowd, their faces shut in and morose, their eyes glinting. Steeling myself against their unnerving stares, I gave the door a push, but it didn’t open. I peered through the glass at the utter chaos inside and pushed and pulled at the handle with increasing dismay.

“Looting’s over for today! There’ll be another round tomorrow!”

Turning at the sound of Jin’s son’s voice, I found him, his cheeks still stuffed with cookies, standing grinning with his friends in a semicircle just behind me. Half expecting I would box his ears, he took a step back, and his friends with him.

“I didn’t come here to loot, I came to buy some kerosene.”

“Looting’s over for today! Another round tomorrow!” chorused the boy’s friends with the same elation, and laughed mockingly. The children had already adapted to the new style of life created by the “rising” and were now rioters to the manner born.

Hoping for some support, I called across the threatening cluster of children’s heads to the team members, who still had me under their expressionless surveillance.

“I want to speak to Taka. Take me to him, will you?”

But the young men cocked their bullet heads as though perplexed and said nothing, their gawky, unprepossessing features increasingly stiff and blank. I was seized with a hysterical irritability.

“Taka
told
me to take you to him!” Jin’s son said to me placatingly, his confidence restored, and without awaiting my reaction set off ahead of me along the path leading round to the back of the store. I chased after him, plowing with difficulty through the deep snow that buried the path. Icicles lay in wait for me, striking me smartly beside my
sightless eye before breaking off and falling.

Behind the saké storehouse that had been converted into the supermarket, there was a square yard where they’d once put the great brewing vats out to dry. The ramshackle supermarket office that had been set up there served now as headquarters for the rioters. A young man stood on guard at the door. Having brought me this far, Jin’s son squatted down in the unmarked snow in one corner of the yard to wait for me. Beneath the guard’s watchful gaze I opened the door in silence and entered the room, which was filled with hot air and the animal smell of young bodies.

“Hi, Mitsu! I didn’t really think you’d come,” Takashi greeted me cheerfully. “At the time of the Security Treaty demonstrations, you didn’t even come and watch, did you?” He was swathed to the neck in a white cloth, having his hair cut.

“Aren’t you getting rather big ideas to compare this with the Security Treaty disturbances?” I said scathingly.

Takashi was perched on a small wooden chair beside a potbellied stove. The valley barber, who was little more than a boy, was plying his scissors with the earnest devotion of one who had rushed to offer his services to the hero of the “rising.” By Takashi’s side stood a young woman with a short, cylindrical neck, whose whole appearance immediately suggested emotional instability. With her plump body pressed familiarly to his, she was collecting the falling hair in an open newspaper. A short distance away, at the back of the room, Hoshio and three of the team members were printing something on a mimeograph, presumably their ideological and factual justification for the assault on the supermarket.

Takashi ignored my sarcasm, but his fellows stopped work and watched for his response. I imagined he had educated his young, inexperienced fellow rioters by telling them about his own experiences in June, 1960, drawing a forced parallel between those events and this minor riot.

“In
Ours Was the Shame
you played a repentant student activist,” I wanted to say to my brother, to whom the heat of the stove and the barber’s scissors gave the look of a youthful, simpleminded farmer. “Have you taken on the opposite role this time?” But I managed to hold my tongue.

“How about the kerosene?” Takashi asked his companions.

“I’ll go to the storehouse and see, Taka,” Hoshio responded promptly,
handing the roller of the mimeographing machine to the young man by his side. Even so, he remembered to hand me and Takashi one copy each of the newly printed leaflet as he went out of the room. As assistant to the leader, he was obviously a very able member of the “rising.” I glanced at the leaflet.

Why will the Emperor of the Supermarkets have to suffer in silence?

Because otherwise :

It would be bad business for the chain stores!

It would be awkward with the tax office!

He would never be able to do business in the valley again!

Would anyone as guilty as the Emperor do anything suicidal?

“The first thing, Mitsu,” Takashi put in swiftly, obviously hoping to forestall any criticism I might make of the wording of the leaflet, “is to get everybody, right down to the lowest level, thinking along these basic lines. We’ve got subtler and more powerful cards up our sleeves. This sexy little piece, for example, used to be the Emperor’s liaison officer, but now she’s cooperating with us. She’s bold and fearless in her attacks on the Emperor—particularly since she hopes to get the sack soon anyway, so she can move into town.”

Her heart-shaped face flushed pink with pleasure at this clever flattery, and she preened herself as though about to burst into song. She was obviously the kind of girl, of whom there’s one in every farming village, who from the age of twelve or thirteen becomes the object of the lustful aspirations of all the young men living round about.

“They say you stopped the priest from coming to talk to me yesterday,” I said, averting my eyes from the girl, who was now directing her charm not only toward Takashi but to the non-specific plurality. “Did you?”

“Not me, Mitsu. But all yesterday, at least, the team was naturally keeping an extra-sharp eye on the intellectuals and prominent people of the valley. After all, they’re an influence to be reckoned with. Supposing, for example, that just as the villagers were about to break into the supermarket again with a drunken laborer at their head, some important village figure had told the ordinary folk at the rear to stop. The looting probably wouldn’t have gone any further than the first, almost accidental incident. By today, though, a majority of the valley folk have already put themselves in the wrong. If the privileged class were to get all righteous and aloof, they’d only make themselves hated.
So we’ve switched our tactics—nobody’s keeping a watch on them any longer. On the contrary, our fellows are joining them wherever they gather and giving opinions or asking their advice. Mitsu, remember the spartan hero who led the chicken farm association ? He’s trying to find some way for the village to take over the supermarket. His idea is to drive the Emperor out and put the supermarket under the joint management of the inhabitants of the valley. Don’t you think it’s an attractive plan ? He’s got a rather special perspective on such things, which leaves me free to concentrate on
violent
activities.”

The young men laughed the dutiful laugh of officially recognized accomplices. They seemed to find Takashi’s way of talking attractive.

“But since the second round of looting, we’ve had to supervise the distribution of the supermarket’s stock, so my own work’s quite difficult too. For example, I have to make sure there’s not too big a difference between the spoils of one group of homes from the ‘country’ and another. There’s method in our looting, you see!” He laughed. “The team’s keeping a strict guard on the market and the warehouse until distribution begins again tomorrow. The young fellows are staying here tonight. How about it, Mitsu ? What do think of our ‘supervised looting’?”