The Silent Cry Read online

  From the end of his period at the Smile Training Center until his death by hanging, naked, with his head painted bright red, there’s no doubt that he remained obsessed by Miller’s words, “Let’s be cheerful, whatever happens.” His brief and premature last years were spent in unequivocal cheerfulness. He even lapsed into a particular sexual proclivity and explored its peculiar type of frenzy. I was reminded of it by a conversation with my wife when I returned home, stunned and exhausted, after the cremation. She was drinking whisky, alone, as she waited for me. That was the first day I saw her drunk.

  As soon as I got home I went and looked in the room she shared with our son. The child was still at home in those days. It was barely dusk, but the child lay on the bed looking up at me placidly with absolutely empty brown eyes, the kind of placidity with which a plant, if plants had eyes, might gaze back at someone peering at it. My wife was not beside him. If I remember correctly, she was sitting quite drunk in the gloom of the library when I found her, perched precariously on a step stool between the shelves like a bird on a swaying branch. I was so taken aback that I felt, if anything, more embarrassed for myself than for her. Getting the whisky bottle out of the niche inside the stool where I’d hidden it, she’d seated herself on its steps, taken a gulp straight from the bottle, and continued to drink little by little, getting steadily drunker as she went. Seeing me, she jerked back like a mechanical doll. Her upper lip was greasy with sweat. She couldn’t stand up. Her eyes, the color of plums, were feverish, but the skin of her neck and shoulders showing above her dress was rough with goose pimples. Her whole being suggested a dog driven by sickness to chew grass furiously only to vomit all the more.

  “You’re ill, surely?” I asked, ridiculously.

  “No, I’m not ill,” she replied with open scorn, swift to sense my embarrassment.

  “Then you’re drunk, in fact.”

  Squatting down facing her I watched, fascinated, a drop of sweat, quivering on the edge of her upper lip as she stared back at me suspiciously, roll down sideways as the lip curled. Her squalid breath, laden with the damp fumes of alcohol, swept over me. The exhaustion brought by the living from the deathbed of a friend seeped like a dye into every corner of my body, and I could have sobbed.

  “You’re dead drunk, you know.”

  “I’m not particularly drunk. If I’m sweating it’s because I’m scared.”

  “What about? The kid’s future?”

  “Scared that there should be people who kill themselves, naked, with their heads painted red.”

  I had told her that much, passing over the part about the cucumber.

  “That’s nothing for you to be particularly scared about, is it?”

  “I’m scared that you might paint your head red and kill yourself, naked,” she said, and hung her head in a display of unconcealed fear.

  With a shudder I saw for a moment, in the dark brown mass of her hair, a miniature of myself dead. The crimson head of Mitsusaburo Nedokoro in death, with lumps of partly dissolved powder paint dried behind the lobes of his ears, like drops of blood. Even as my friend’s body had been, so my own had the two ears left unpainted, token of the inadequate lapse of time between the conception of this bizarre suicide and its execution.

  “I won’t kill myself. Why should I?”

  “Was he a masochist?”

  “What makes you ask me that, the very day after his death? Just curiosity?”

  “Well, supposing,” she went on in a tone made excessively abject by the signs of anger in my voice (though an anger that wasn’t particularly clear even to myself), “supposing he did have some sexual perversion, there wouldn’t be any need for me to be afraid for you, would there?”

  She jerked her head back again and stared at me as though demanding my agreement. The unspeakably naked sense of helplessness in her preternaturally red eyes shocked me. But she shut them almost at once, raised the whisky bottle, and took another gulp. The curves of her eyelids were dark like dirty finger pads. She coughed till the tears came to her eyes and whisky mingled with saliva dribbled from the corners of her mouth. Instead of being concerned on her behalf over the stain it would make on her new, off-white silk dress, I took the bottle from her hand—a hand scrawny and stringy as a monkey’s—and took a swig to cover my awkwardness.

  It was true, as my friend had told me with a mixture of pleasure and sadness at a point midway in his sexual progress—a point, that is, on the slope of a tendency still vague yet clear enough to the person concerned, neither shallow enough to be of the kind that anyone might experience by chance nor sufficiently indulged to be absolutely past discussing with others—that he’d long been seeking masochistic experiences. He’d visited a private establishment where some ferocious female catered to masochists. There was nothing remarkable about what happened the first day. But on his second visit three weeks later, the stupid brute of a woman, remembering his tastes accurately, announced portentously that she would henceforth be indispensable to him. It wasn’t until the next stage, as he lay naked on his face and a knotted hemp rope landed with a thud beside his ear, that he realized that the great brutish female had indeed assumed a place in his world as an unarguable fact.

  “It was as though my body was completely disassembled, all soft and limp in each part, something like a string of sausages, without any sensation at all. But my mind was floating somewhere way up above, completely cut off from my body.” And he’d fixed his eyes on me with an oddly weak, pained little smile.

  I took another mouthful of whisky and, like my wife, was seized with a fit of coughing which sent lukewarm whisky through my undershirt to run down the skin of my chest and belly. Then as I gazed at her, sitting with her eyes still shut, the dark lids evoking another, false pair of eyes like the protective markings on the wings of certain moths, I was seized with an impulse to talk to her roughly.

  Even assuming he was a masochist—I would say—it wouldn’t mean you’d have nothing to be afraid of. It wouldn’t justify your making a distinction between him and me and telling yourself I would never paint my head red and kill myself, naked. Sexual peculiarities aren’t very important in the long run; they’re only one distortion caused by something grotesque and really frightening coiled up in the depths of the personality. There was some enormous, uncontrollable, crazy motive force lurking in the depths of his soul, and it happened to induce a particular distortion called masochism—that’s all. It wasn’t his involvement with masochism that gave birth to the madness leading to his suicide, but the reverse. And I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness. . . .

  But I said nothing of all this to my wife, nor did the idea itself send its fine tendrils down into the folds of my brain, blunted by exhaustion. The fancy, like bubbles rising in a glass, fizzed for a while then vanished. Such notions pass without leaving any experience behind. This is particularly true when one remains silent about them; all one needs to do is wait till the undesirable notions pass away without damaging the walls of the brain.

  If I could get by in this way now, then I should be able to escape the poison until the massive counterattack when I would finally have to accept it as an experience. Curbing my tongue, I put my hands under my wife’s arms from behind and hoisted her to her feet. It felt like sacrilege to support my living wife—the mystery and vulnerability of a body made to give birth in peril and in stress—with arms contaminated by lifting the body of a dead friend; yet of the two bodies, equal burdens, it was to my dead friend’s that I felt closer.

  We advanced at a slow pace toward the bedroom where the baby awaited us; but by the bathroom her progress was arrested like that of a ship that has lowered anchor, and cleaving her way through the dusky, lukewarm, summer-evening air of the room, she vanished into the toilet. She was there for a long while. When finally she reemerged, breasting the now deeper gloom, I took her to the bedroom and, giving up the idea of undressing her, laid her on the bed just as she was. Heaving a great sigh as though to expel her ve
ry soul, she fell fast asleep. Some yellow fibrous substance that she had vomited clung about her lips, fine as the hairs on a flower petal yet clearly shining in the twilight.

  The baby gazed up at me as ever with wide-open eyes, but whether he was hungry or thirsty or felt some other discomfort I couldn’t tell. He lay with eyes open and expressionless, like a marine plant in the water of the dusk, simply and placidly existing. He demanded nothing, expressed absolutely no emotion. He didn’t even cry. One might even wonder if he were alive at all. Supposing my wife had been drunk all day since my early morning departure and had left the baby to its own devices, what should I do? At the moment she was nothing but a drunken slut in a deep sleep. I had a strong premonition of disaster. But as with my wife, I shrank from the sacrilege of stretching out contaminated hands and touching the baby. And to the baby, too, I felt less close than to my dead friend. However long I gazed down at him, he went on staring at me with utterly expressionless eyes. Finally, a drowsiness that drew one along with the irresistible force of a tidal wave came welling from those brown eyes. Without even fetching a bottle of milk for him, I curled up to sleep. On the threshold of unconsciousness, I told myself with a fresh sense of shock that my only friend had painted his head bright red and hanged himself, that my wife had got herself suddenly and quite unexpectedly drunk, that my son was an imbecile. To crown everything, I was about to go to sleep, jammed in an inadequate space between my wife’s and son’s beds, without locking up, without taking my tie off, my person still defiled from contact with the dead. All judgment suspended, like an insect impaled helpless on a pin. . . . Shrinking before a sense that I was being slowly eroded by a power that was unquestionably dangerous yet hard to identify, I drifted off to sleep. And by the morning I could no longer quite recall what I’d felt with such conviction the night before. It had failed, in short, to constitute an experience.

  One day the previous summer, my friend had met my younger brother in a New York drugstore and had brought back his own testimony concerning my brother’s life in America. Takashi had gone to America as a member of a student theater group. Their leader was a Diet member, a woman from the right wing of one of the progressive political parties. The troupe consisted entirely of students who had taken part in the political riots of June, 1960, but had since thought better of it. Their play was a penitential piece entitled Ours Was the Shame, and was followed by an apology to the citizens of America, on behalf of repentant members of the student movement, for having obstructed their President’s visit to Japan. When Takashi first told me that he was going to America with them, he’d said he planned to flee the troupe as soon as it arrived and go off and roam the country by himself. However, reading the semi-satirical, semi-embarrassed accounts of Ours Was the Shame sent by Japanese reporters from the States, I realized that he hadn’t yet brought himself to leave the troupe but was still appearing in performances of the play in Washington and cities as far away as Boston and New York. I tried to work out why he should have abandoned his original plan and gone on playing the role of a repentant student activist, but the task was beyond my imagination. I wrote a letter therefore asking my friend, who was in New York with his wife studying at Columbia, to look up Takashi at the troupe’s headquarters. But he’d been unable to contact them, and it was by sheer coincidence that he’d run into my brother. Going into a drugstore on Broadway, he’d come upon Takashi, his slight frame propped against the counter, drinking a lemonade with earnest concentration. Stealing up from behind, he’d silently grabbed Takashi’s shoulder. My brother swung round as though released by a spring, so suddenly that it was my friend who was taken aback. Takashi was grubby, sweating, pale, and tense. His whole appearance suggested a man taken unawares while plotting a single-handed bank robbery.

  “Hi, Takashi. Mitsu wrote and told me you were in the States,” my friend declared. “Seems he no sooner got married than he got his new wife pregnant.”

  “I haven’t got married, or got anybody pregnant,” said Takashi in a voice that was still not quite steady.

  My friend laughed heartily as though he’d just heard a splendid joke. “I’m off to Japan next week,” he said. “Any message for Mitsu?”

  “Weren’t you supposed to stay at Columbia for several years?”

  “Not any more. I got myself hurt in the demonstrations. Not physically—something happened to my head. It’s not bad enough to have them put me in a mental hospital, but they’ve decided I should shut myself up in a kind of sanitarium.”

  At this point my friend noticed a profound embarrassment spreading like a stain over Takashi’s face, and suddenly felt he understood the significance of the abrupt start Takashi had given when taken by surprise. And being a kindly man, he couldn’t help feeling secretly sorry. He had prodded the other in what must be a reformed activist’s tenderest spot. Both fell silent, gazing at the tightly packed row of jars lining the shelf behind the counter—jars brimming with a pink liquid, sweetish and raw-looking as entrails. Their two images were reflected in the distorting glass of the bottles, and whenever they moved even slightly the pink freaks swayed in exaggerated fashion. One almost expected them to break into song at any moment.

  Late one night in June when Takashi, still an unrepentant student activist, was outside the National Diet, my friend had gone there too—not so much from any political motive of his own as to accompany his new wife as she took part in a demonstration with a small drama group to which she belonged—and when a disturbance broke out had had his head bashed in by a police stave as he tried to protect his wife from the onslaught of the armed riot squad. The fracture wasn’t particularly serious in a simple surgical sense. But from the time of that late-night assault amidst the scent of young green leaves, something had been lacking inside my friend’s head, and an obscure tendency to manic depression had taken its place alongside his other attributes. There could hardly have been anyone whom a reformed student activist was more reluctant to meet.

  Increasingly embarrassed by Takashi’s silence, my friend stared fixedly at the pink jars with the feeling that his own eyes, melting in the heat of his embarrassment, were being transformed into the same pink, viscous fluid as in the jars and were oozing out of his skull. He envisaged his melting pink eyeballs plopping hopelessly and irretrievably, like eggs dropped into a frying pan, onto the silver counter on which Americans of all extractions—southern European, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish—had their bare, sweaty forearms firmly planted. High summer in New York, with Takashi at his side noisily sucking up the last fragments of lemon through his straw and frowning as he shook the sweat from his forehead. . . .

  “If there’s anything for me to tell Mitsu …” my friend began by way of leave-taking.

  “Tell him I’m going to run away from the troupe, will you? If I don’t make it, I’ll probably be deported, so either way I won’t be with the company any longer.”

  “When are you quitting?”

  “Today,” said Takashi with a great air of resolve.

  It dawned on my friend with a sense of urgency, almost of panic, that my brother was actually waiting for something at the drugstore. The full implication of his display of surprise as he’d jumped like a suddenly released spring, the implication of his abrupt silence, the implication of the shreds of lemon so hastily sucked up, all linked up into a ring of actuality. But he felt relieved to detect in the signs of feeling welling up and disappearing again in my brother’s eyes—eyes with a dull, greasy film that brought to mind a professional wrestler—not merely a sense of constraint at having bumped into someone he would rather not have met, but an attitude of arrogant pity toward him.

  “Is some secret agent coming here to help you escape?” my friend asked in an attempt at a joke.

  “Shall I tell you the truth?” replied Takashi in a mock-menacing tone. “Do you see that pharmacist filling a little bottle with capsules over there on the other side of the medicine shelves?” Twisting his body round like my brother, my friend discerned, beyon
d the shelves with their countless bottles of drugs standing out against the dark background like a film negative of New York at the height of summer, a bald-headed man who faced away from them, concentrating intently on his delicate task.

  “That medicine’s for me, for my inflamed, tortured penis. Once it’s safely in my hands I can make my escape from Ours Was the Shame and set off on my own.”

  My friend sensed the Americans around them stiffen at the single English word “penis” set like a precious stone in the otherwise incomprehensible Japanese dialogue. The vast, alien exterior that lay all about them asserted its reality once more.

  “Surely you can get hold of that kind of medicine easily enough?” said my friend with an earnest dignity directed against the new surveillance under which they had come from the people about them.

  “Yes, if you go to hospital in line with proper procedure,” said Takashi, indifferent to the trivial psychological conflict going on in my friend. “But it’s a hell of a business here in America if you can’t. The prescription I’ve given the pharmacist was forged for me by a nurse in the medical office at the hotel. If the trick came to light a young black nurse would get fired and I’d be deported, I imagine.”

  Why hadn’t he followed the regular procedure? Because the trouble with his urethra was obviously gonorrhea, which, moreover, he’d picked up on his first night in America by having sex with a black prostitute of an age that allowed him to see her as a mother figure. Should the facts become known to the elderly Diet member who was leader of the troupe, she would obviously send Takashi back to the country from which he’d just taken so much trouble to escape. Besides, he’d fallen prey to a depressing suspicion that since his urethra had been invaded by gonorrhea he might also be infected with syphilis, a suspicion that had quenched any urge to devote his creative imagination to some new course of action.

  Five weeks had passed since he’d visited that district where black and white merged in a complex range of shades, but no primary symptoms of syphilis had appeared. Moreover, he used a sore throat as a pretext for obtaining a succession of small doses of antibiotics from the medical orderly of the troupe, thanks to which the trouble in his urethra eased somewhat; only then did Takashi shake off his inertia. Having struck up an acquaintance with a nurse in the hotel medical office in the course of their long stay in New York (the base which the troupe used for its sorties into other centers), Takashi persuaded her to get hold of a form used by doctors for writing prescriptions. The nurse, a black girl with a limitless spirit of service to others, had not only entered on the form the type and amount of medicine most suited to the trouble in his urethra, but had directed him to a drugstore in a busy part of town where there was little likelihood of the irregularity being detected.