Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness Read online

  The boy who was no longer a child after the experience of this week went along with almost everyone else in the village to meet his mother at the bridge that led out of the valley to the highway, but his mother ignored him just as she ignored the others waiting there in a scraggly line, and for a time stood in silence on the bridge where he had almost died, her head upright, and darted glances at the valley with the eyes of a hawk surveying its adversaries with the purest contempt. Probably she halted there to recover her sense of firm ground after the long, rough ride she had hitched from the provincial city in a truck driven by Korean forest workers. Presently she narrowed her eyes, creases rippling across her thin, flat, egg-shaped face so terrifically white and dry it appeared to be a scrap of paper and, looking right through the faces in the ring of people she approached and cut across, each step a swift kick so that her hissing sandals just skimmed the surface of the ground, she headed for the Manor house. When she had passed under the great roofed gate at the entrance with the boy, who was now the only one following her, she halted at the base of the giant black pine where the paths to the main house and the storehouse divided. Then, as if only now she had become aware of his existence, although he had made no effort to muffle his footsteps as he followed her all this way, she wheeled around in the dusk as though startled and stared down at him with her flashing eyes. And in unfamiliar accents entirely unlike those of the valley she snapped,

  ____Don’t think a certain party (it was the first time his mother used the phrase) hiding in the storehouse has any right to these ashes; they haven’t come back to him!

  Without another word his mother hurried toward the main house once again, and as he dug in his heels against the pull of her small back that seemed to have dwindled swiftly, resisting with a force of his own sufficient to shred the thousands of leaves on the black pine, he shouted something altogether unexpected, in a manner that communicated his outrage at having been ignored by his mother all this time,

  ____I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins! You can take the ashes of that coward and throw them in the feed trough, yessir! Now I’m going into the storehouse too, and forget all about them ashes! Because I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins!

  His mother, though she disdained to answer these shouted words, did look around for just an instant and toss her head at him, but he turned his back on the white, dry paper of her face that appeared to flutter and dance through the gelatin filter of his tears and the dusk, and pulling his fake helmet down over his ears just as she described it when she ridiculed him, the figure of a valley brat in his shirt woven from hemp and his old trousers tied around his legs like knickerbockers, he headed alone for the storehouse. The bayonet strapped to his hip with a hemp cord, his grandfather’s in the Russo-Japanese war which early that morning, just after his mother had set out in her black kimono, he had hunted up in the barn and cleaned of rust himself, reassured him as he walked along.

  [[In my child’s way I sensed that people from the outside might try to destroy the Happy Days in the storehouse that were about to begin for me and a certain party and no one else, and if they did appear I intended to fight fearlessly with that old bayonet which had been used for cutting fodder and was like a pitch-black iron bar, “he” says. You seem to have had a marvelous time in that storehouse, was your father glad to have you there from the beginning? Certainly not, I didn’t even try to talk to him. There was a naked bulb hanging from the lintel at the entrance, wrapped in a black cloth as a precaution against air raids, and when I turned it on and stepped inside, where it was pitch dark, a certain party was wearing the underwater goggles with cellophane covering the lenses that I have now (he had originally prepared them to observe a solar eclipse in Manchuria) and staring into the back of the storehouse, I suppose he had already resolved to prevent anyone from reading his expression ever. All around the mechanical barber’s chair he was sitting in there were piles of big books in a foreign language. They were probably books about agriculture. According to the military journals I read later, he had plans to bring his “comrades” back to the land in the valley and to have the skirts of the forest cleared for cultivation. But by the time I joined him in the storehouse he must have lost his will to read those books, otherwise he wouldn’t have kept the goggles on day and night. With these goggles on I don’t imagine he could distinguish a single object in that storehouse. He did sense an annoying light when I switched on the bulb at the entrance, though, and he immediately scolded me with an angry Shhh! as if he were shooing a chicken away. In my haste to turn the light out, and in the darkness, and because I was still worked up after my proclamation to my mother, I caught the frayed heel of my straw sandal on the sill at the entrance and tumbled onto the dirt floor about two steps lower and rolled across it head over heels and finally cracked my rear against the raised wooden floor of the room where a certain party had installed his chair. But this time a certain party didn’t even hiss, it was as if he had fallen asleep the minute I had turned off the light, he held his large, looming head perfectly upright in the darkness and didn’t move a muscle. I opened my mouth wide and exhaled a ton of breath to keep from crying out, the bayonet on my hip had dug into my stomach and it hurt so much I could hardly stand it, and I wept truly forlorn tears and wet my scraped cheeks and the dry dirt of the floor. For quite a while I stayed just as I was, unable to get up. But from that night on I had a place to sleep in the storehouse. To make a certain party think I’d chosen to roll across the dirt floor as a way of locating the best place to sleep, and not simply fallen, I made a bed of straw and boards and old blankets directly on the floor where I had come to rest, and that’s where I slept. After that I only went back to the main house to get the meals I brought to a certain party. My mother was isolated, and not just at home, either. From the day those ashes returned, as if the only temporary bond between the outsider she was and the valley had been maintained through her stepson gone off to war on the Chinese mainland, she began to ignore every man, woman, and child in the valley even when they were right under her nose, and effectively vanished from society. Which left me, a kid, to run around the valley, with my grandfather’s bayonet on my hip, collecting our rations and keeping my small eyes peeled for extras and making sure that my family, and particularly a certain party, who was gradually becoming obsessive about his food, had enough to eat. Now that I think about it, there has never been a time since when I’ve taken so much responsibility for my own family’s daily welfare. On my own initiative I went down to the village office and received the plaque that said “A son lost in battle” and nailed it up with old nails, not to the main house but to the fire door of the storehouse. With the bayonet rattling at my side, I stood on my tiptoes and swung a large, heavy hammer, and when the kids from the valley who had followed me from the village gathered around in curiosity I waved them away with my hammer as if it were a scepter, “he” says.]]

  V

  [[Claiming sudden physical exhaustion, “he” spends the entire day either sleeping or looking at animal picture books. At the same time “he” tries to demonstrate to the “acting executor of the will” that “he” has not lost interest in narrating his “history of the age.” Look at this wild boar in Ceylon charging down a valley of dry brush with half a dozen baby boars, even though the parent in front is a female in this case, these little ones with their heads lowered as if they were lost in thought but their legs churning as they try to keep up remind me perfectly of myself in the days when I was at a certain party’s side. Do you suppose the Ceylonese wild boar has long hair growing around its eyes? This bunch is running at such terrific speed the picture is out of focus, maybe that makes it look all the more like hair—anyway, fierce as these characters are they have deeply shadowed, mournful eyes that don’t really fit them, and look how hard they stare at the ground just in front of their flying hooves, doesn’t it give them a solemn, fussy look? A human being never looks this intelligent when he’s running. I don’t feel I spen
t my Happy Days like a human being running, I was more like one of these little boars with a giant head and spindly legs and a huge mouth clamped cruelly shut in a melancholy face. I even imagine there must have been bright melon stripes down my back in those days. I’d like to put a belt around this baby boar’s middle and hang a bayonet on it from the Russo-Japanese war, I bet he’d manage the heavy, clanking thing somehow and keep right on running, even if he had to shorten his stride a little. Ha! Ha! Ha! Under cover of the animal pictures, “he” speaks obliquely about his Happy Days and seems about to resume his account, but continues to say nothing about actual life in the storehouse. There is a constant feeling of bloating as his liver fattens, and although precious little flesh or fat remain around his stomach it is as if, “he” complains, a bomb of gradually increasing size were biting into the soft layer beneath his skin, making concentration impossible. It would be so refreshing if this hard bomb that used to be my liver would just fall out of its present location by mistake! The way things stand, the bloated feeling of this rock maturing inside me even governs my subconscious while I sleep, not even my own sleep belongs to me! The “acting executor of the will” is becoming actively interested in the history. I wonder if the difficulty you’ve begun to experience in telling your story might have nothing to do with your illness. I wonder if there’s something hidden in your life in the storehouse that you don’t want to talk about, even though you speak of Happy Days. Could it be, she speculates, prodding at the same time, that those unpleasant memories are creating the bloated feeling that’s making even your subconscious uncomfortable? Ha! Ha! Ha! I consider that period in my life the first Happy Days in my thirty-five years, alongside these final Happy Days as I lie here dying unhurriedly but swiftly of cancer, “he” says. Will you ask the doctor to give me an injection to concentrate the life-force left in me and make it burn up quickly? Don’t you agree the patient should have the freedom to choose diluted life over a long period or concentrated life briefly? Anyway, tomorrow I may feel rested and my fever may be down, let’s start again then, “he” says, beginning to sleep.]]

  He helped a certain party build a radio receiver the size of a horse. In Shanghai in the 1930’s, a certain party had shipped home two of the finest European receivers available there at the time. Now he installed in front of his mechanical barber’s chair a broad, rectangular platform which had been used originally in the breeding of silkworms and still reeked of their body fluid, and on top of this he took apart the two sets and reassembled them as one receiver. When he was finished, he attached headphones to his large head and sat listening to the radio all day. The construction of the receiver took three months to complete. Once it had been assembled a certain party scarcely ever removed his underwater goggles for observing solar eclipses and the headphones which made his large head bulk even larger. Trapped in the paranoid certainty that to someone peeking into the storehouse a certain party would look like a spy transmitting secret messages, he walked careful rounds around the building with the bayonet at his side.

  [[So you couldn’t hear the radio yourself? the “acting executor of the will” inquires after waiting in silence for a considerable interval while his shoulders heave and “he” labors to regain the energy which even this short fragment of narration has cost him. I had no desire to listen to the radio, my main tasks during those Happy Days, as a certain party sat there listening to the radio and pondering, were to gaze at the back of his giant head and to guard him from the volunteer informers in the valley who would have loved to discover a spy or two for the glory it would bring them. Besides, I wasn’t really interested in radio equipment. Then how can you have been any help assembling the receiver? All I did was pick up screws that had rolled off the work table onto the floor so a certain party didn’t have to keep getting up from his mechanical barber’s chair. Not that it was easy finding little screws in the dimness of that storehouse, it wasn’t a job a dog could do, “he” says.]]

  To provide food for a certain party and his mother, and for himself, he struggled. Standing on the left side of the large number 8 bike whose pedals he couldn’t quite reach even when the seat was lowered all the way, he would step with his right leg beneath the bar that supported the seat until his right foot rested on the right pedal, then push off, tilting the bike sharply away from himself to compensate for his weight, and “side-pedal” long, perilous hours until he reached the neighboring town down river, where he would buy in bulk, at the only butcher shop in the vicinity, according to a certain party’s instructions, the oxtails and pigs’ feet which no one in his region would eat except the Koreans who worked in the forest felling trees. Oxtails sold out at once and were often impossible to get; the pigs’ feet, unshaven, made a bristling, bulky package which he tied to the back of the bicycle and transported home. This shopping for meat was actually the first task a certain party had assigned him. For days after he had prepared his bed on the earth floor of the storehouse he had been ignored. Then one morning he awoke with a faint sensation of anxiety to find a certain party towering over him on the raised wooden floor in front of his mechanical barber’s chair, gazing down into the face. Only partially awake, he gazed back and smiled, and was immediately dismayed at his own forwardness and, because the smile had been ignored, ashamed. As he lay there in what was now indignant silence, a certain party addressed him for the first time. Can you ride a bicycle?

  Down a midsummer road white as snow beneath the powder of crushed rock, the same long road he had dreamed of reapeatedly before and after, he “side-pedaled” to the butcher shop in the neighboring town and that wasn’t all: stopping on the way home at the shack of the forest workers who had been brought forcibly from Korea and were kept in isolation, barred from living in any other community no matter how wretched, he had to receive from the Koreans a few strands of garlic. Because he had the feeling both the oxtails and the pigs’ feet would have been food for the Koreans if a certain party had not managed to cut in ahead of them, he was afraid they might notice the packages loaded on his bicycle right in front of their shack, and when he finally managed to cross the bridge back into the valley, he was careful the strands of white garlic tied with a cord to his bare stomach beneath his shirt were not discovered by the other children. When the word spread among these valley brats that the compost pool at the Manor house had a queer smell and they came reconnoitering, he took his position in front of the drain cover of the outhouse attached to the storehouse for a certain party’s exclusive use, and brandishing his Russo-Japanese bayonet as if it were a carving knife, he kept the persistent enemy away and finally sent them running altogether out of the territory the people of the valley referred to as Manor-house-rise.

  The day he delivered his first oxtail on bicycle number 8 a certain party made one of his rare appearances outside the storehouse, to do the cooking himself. The cooking shed stood alongside an uncovered well with the giant black pine behind it, between the storehouse and the main house, which was a good thing both for his mother, who had no desire to behold anything so ominously exposed as an oxtail, and for a certain party himself who, in becoming a temporary cook, could not help losing a measure of his dignity. His face stubbly with beard, wearing an African explorer’s helmet and a khaki “citizen’s jacket” buttoned up to the collar, his underwater goggles on, useful as protection against the midday summer sun and the spattering from the giant heated pan of the crude lard his mother made, a certain party emerged from the storehouse with a step reminiscent of the wooden soldier dolls, popular in those days, that tottered forward in a kind of simulated walk when you placed them on an incline. Slowly he approached the cooking shed; dangling from his right fist, in which he clutched it by the butchered end, bright red meat and yellow fat and white bone showing, was an entire oxtail with black hide still matted with blood and filth; in his left hand he gripped a short sword in a scabbard of white wood. The boy, whose headlong journey clinging to a bicycle had drenched his shirt and short pants and model helmet in
sweat and who had washed them in the river and stuffed them into a red-willow stump to dry, was waiting in the garden in just the outfit valley children always wore when they swam in the river, a cotton loincloth and nothing more, his bayonet in hand. As a certain party passed, his large moon face looking pale and puffy in the sunlight, he spoke an order in a soft, hoarse voice,

  ____Pick me some smelly wild grass, pick all that grass you won’t even feed the goats because you say the smell is too strong.

  Naked as he was, he bounded off at once like an animal on the run. But when he stepped into the thicket of hot, damp underbrush at the edge of the forest and began actually picking “smelly grass,” he was stricken by the sudden feeling that this was an unlawful act no respectable person in the valley had ever committed before, maybe even an open betrayal, a desecration of all the plant life thriving in the forest. Then his exultant pride at having managed to obtain the oxtail meat a certain party required seemed to spoil, to deteriorate in the direction of a very nearly indelible shame. Nonetheless, though he had never so much as touched wild scented grasses, he managed to gather, guided by the instincts of “one who eats,” a bouquet garni as opulent and fragrant as any to be had in the valley, including even withered tomato plants covered with yellow fruit the size of ping-pong balls which he pulled up roots and all, and ran back to a certain party.

  [[Before long I became experienced at making oxtail stew myself, and do you know when I think back to the “smelly grasses” I gathered that day I get the feeling my bouquet garni included everything indispensable to oxtail stew but impossible to obtain in that valley, not only celery and parsley but even dried laurel. I even get the feeling a certain party must have had a bottle of wine hidden away, to use in stewing the oxtail he’d sauteed in lard, or that he’d prepared soup stock in advance and could actually move effortlessly to stage two of the preparation, cooking the whole stew. I realize I’d be inviting my mother’s ridicule if I left things in writing so obviously counter to the truth, so I won’t include it in my account but it does feel real to me, “he” says.]]