by Kenzaburo Oe
Bird raised his voice a little and could hear that it was pickled in the vinegars of fear. He shook his head as though in spasm and—groping for a clue to the nature of the trap of darkness he was caught in—shuddered.
He was naked as a baby, defenseless, and, to make it worse, someone just as naked was curled against him asleep. His wife? Was he sleeping naked with his wife and hadn’t told her yet the secret of the grotesque baby she had just borne? Ah, it couldn’t be! Fearfully Bird put out his hand and touched the naked woman’s head. As he slid his other hand down her naked shoulder to her side (the body was large, opulent, with animal softness, qualities opposite to those of his wife’s body), the naked woman slowly but steadily twined her body around him. Awareness sharpened to clarity, and Bird, as he discovered his lover Himiko, discovered desire as well, desire which no longer stigmatized the attributes of womanhood. Ignoring the pain in his arms and shoulders, Bird embraced Himiko like a bear hugging an enemy. Her body, still fast asleep, was large and heavy. Bird slowly tightened his grip until the girl was pressed against his chest and belly with her head hanging limply backward above his shoulders. Bird peered into her upturned face; rising whitely out of the darkness, it seemed painfully young. Suddenly Himiko woke up, smiled at Bird, and with a slight movement of her head touched him with hot, dry lips. Without changing the position of their bodies, they drifted smoothly into intercourse.
“Bird, can you hold out while I make it?” Himiko’s voice was still asleep. She must have prepared against the danger of pregnancy, for now she had taken the first irreversible step toward her own pleasure.
“Certainly I can hold out,” Bird replied manfully, tensing, a navigator just informed that a storm was on its way. He performed warily, determined that restraint should not be swept away from the movements of his own body. He hoped to make amends now for his pitiful performance in the lumberyard.
“Bird!” Himiko raised a piteous scream that suited the childish face straining upward through the darkness. Like a soldier accompanying a comrade in arms to private battle, Bird stood by in stoic self-restraint while Himiko wrested from their coition the genuine something that was all her own. For a very long time after the sexual moment, Himiko’s whole body trembled. Then she grew delicate, helpless, soft in an infinitely feminine way, and finally, releasing a muffled sigh like a baby animal with a full belly, fell fast asleep just where she lay. Bird felt like a rooster watching over a chick. Smelling the healthy odor of sweat that rose from the head half-hidden beneath his chest, he lay perfectly still, supporting his weight on his elbows lest he oppress the girl beneath him. He was still terrifically aroused, but he didn’t want to interrupt Himiko’s natural sleep. Bird had banished the curse on everything feminine that had occupied his brain a few hours ago, and, though she was more womanly than ever, he was able to accept Himiko completely. His astute sexual partner sensed this: soon Bird heard her breathing grow regular and knew that she was fast asleep. But when he tried carefully to withdraw from the girl, he felt something on his penis like the grip of a warm, gentle hand. Himiko was experimenting with a slight retaining action while she slept. Bird tasted mild but wholly sexual satisfaction. He smiled happily and immediately fell asleep.
Once again sleep was like a funnel. Bird entered the sea of sleep with a smile, but on his way back to the shores of reality he was seized by a stifling, claustrophobic dream. He fled from the dream crying. When he opened his eyes, Himiko was awake, too, peering anxiously at his tears.
8
AS Bird started up the stairs toward his wife’s hospital room, his shoes in one hand and a bag of grapefruit under his arm, the young doctor with the glass eye started down. They met halfway. The one-eyed doctor halted several steps above Bird and launched his voice downward in what felt to Bird like high imperiousness. In fact, he said merely, “How is everything?”
“He’s alive,” Bird said.
“And, what about surgery?”
“They’re afraid the baby will weaken and die before they can operate,” Bird said, feeling his upturned face blush.
“Well, that’s probably for the best!”
Bird’s color deepened noticeably and a twitch appeared at the corners of his mouth. His reaction made the doctor blush, too.
“Your wife hasn’t been told about the baby’s brain,” he said, speaking into the air above Bird’s head. “She thinks there’s a defective organ. Of course, the brain is an organ, there’s no getting around that, so it’s not a lie. You try lying your way out of a tight spot and you only have to lie all over again when the truth gets out. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Bird said.
“Well then, don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Bird and the doctor bowed decorously and passed each other on the stairs with faces averted. Well, that’s probably for the best! the doctor had said. To weaken and die before they could operate. That meant escaping the burden of a vegetable baby, and without fouling your own hands with its murder. All you had to do was wait for the baby to weaken and die hygienically in a modern hospital ward. Nor was it impossible to forget about it while you waited: that would be Bird’s job. Well, that’s probably for the best! The sensation of deep and dark shame renewed itself in Bird and he could feel his body stiffen. Like the expectant mothers and the women who had just given birth who passed him in their many-colored rayon nightgowns, like those who carried in their bodies a large, squirming mass, and those who had not quite escaped the memory and habit of it, Bird took short, careful steps. He was pregnant himself, in the womb of his brain, with a large squirming mass that was the sensation of shame. For no real reason, the women in the corridor eyed him haughtily as they passed, and under each glance Bird meekly lowered his head. These were the women who had watched him leave the hospital in an ambulance with his grotesque baby, that same host of pregnant angels. For a minute he was certain they knew what had happened to his son since then. And perhaps, like ventriloquists, they were murmuring at the back of their throats Ah! if it’s that baby you mean, he’s been installed on an efficient conveyer system in an infant slaughterhouse and is weakening to death this very minute—well, that’s probably for the best!
A squalling of many infants beset Bird like a whirlwind. His eye wildly wheeling fell on the rows of cradles in the infant ward. Bird fled down the corridor at a near run: he had a feeling several of the infants had stared back.
In front of the door to his wife’s room, Bird carefully sniffed his hands and arms and shoulders, even his chest. There was no telling how it might complicate his predicament if his wife, waiting for him in her sickbed with her sense of smell honed to keenness, should scent out Himiko’s fragrance on his body. Bird turned around, as if to make certain of an escape route: paused all along the dim corridor, young women in their nightgowns were peering at him through the dimness. Bird considered scowling back but he merely shook his head weakly and turned his back, then gave a timid knock at the door. He was performing the role of the young husband who has been visited by sudden misfortune.
When Bird stepped into the room his mother-in-law was standing with her back to the lush greenery in the window, and his wife was staring in his direction, lifting her head like a weasel beyond the mound of blanket that covered her spread thighs. Both wore startled looks in the greenly tinged, fecund light. In moments of surprise and sadness, Bird observed, the blood bond between these two women was manifest in all their features and even the slightest gesture.
“I didn’t mean to startle you, I knocked, but lightly—”
“Ah, Bird,” his wife sighed, fixing him with wasted eyes that now were filling rapidly with tears. With her face clean of make-up and the pigment darkly evident on the surface of her skin, she had the firm, boyish look of the tennis player she had been when Bird had met her several years ago. Exposed to her gaze as he was, Bird felt horribly vulnerable; when he had put the bag of grapefruit down on the blanket, he stooped as if to conceal himself and deposite
d his shoes beneath the bed. If only, he wished ruefully, he could talk from the floor, crawling around like a crab. Out of the question: Bird straightened up, forcing himself to smile.
“Hey,” he sang, working to keep his voice light, “is the pain all gone now?”
“It still hurts periodically. And every so often there’s a contraction like a spasm. Even when I’m not in pain somehow I don’t feel right, and the minute I laugh it hurts.”
“That’s miserable.”
“It is. Bird, what’s wrong with the baby?”
“What’s wrong? That doctor with the glass eye must have explained, didn’t he?” As he spoke, trying to keep the song in his voice, Bird looked quickly in his mother-in-law’s direction, like a boxer with no confidence darting a glance behind him at his trainer. Beyond his wife’s head in the narrow space between the bed and the window, his mother-in-law was transmitting secret signals frantically. Bird couldn’t catch the nuances, only that he was being commanded to say nothing to his wife, that much was clear.
“If they would just tell me what was wrong,” his wife said in a voice as lonely as it was withdrawn. Bird knew that the dark demons of doubt had driven her a hundred times to whisper these same words in this same helpless tone.
“There’s a defective organ somewhere, the doctor won’t talk about the details. They’re probably still testing. Another thing, those university hospitals are bureaucratic as hell!” Bird could smell the stench of his lie even as he told it.
“I just know it must be his heart if they have to make so many tests. But why should my baby have a bad heart?” The dismay in his wife’s voice made Bird feel again like scuttling around on the floor. Instead, he spoke harshly, affecting the tone of voice of a peevish teen-ager: “Since there are experts on the case why don’t we leave the diagnosing to them! All the speculation in the world isn’t going to do us one damn bit of good!”
An unconfident Bird turned a guilty eye back to the bed and saw that his wife had tightly shut her eyes. He looked down at her face and wondered uneasily if a sense of everyday balance would be restored to it; the flesh of the eyelids was wasted, the wings of the nose were swollen, and the lips seemed large out of all proportion. His wife lay motionless, with her eyes closed; she seemed to be falling asleep. All of a sudden a whole river of tears spilled from beneath her closed lids. “Just as the baby was born I heard the nurse cry ‘Oh!’ So I suspected that something must have been wrong. But then I heard the Director laughing happily, or I thought I did, it got so I couldn’t tell what was real and what was a dream—when I came to, the baby had already been taken away in an ambulance.” She spoke with her eyes closed.
That hairy Director son of a bitch! Anger clogged Bird’s throat. He had made such an uproar with his giggling that a patient under anesthesia had heard him; if he has a habit of doing that when he’s astonished, I’ll lie for him in the dark with a lead pipe and make the cocksucker laugh his head off! But Bird’s rage was that of a child’s, limited to a moment. He knew he would never grip a club of any kind, never lie in wait in any darkness. He had to acknowledge that he had lost the self-esteem essential to rebuking someone else.
“I brought you some grapefruit,” Bird said in a voice that asked forgiveness.
“Grapefruit! Why?” his wife challenged. Bird realized his mistake immediately.
“Damn! I forgot you always hated the smell of grapefruit,” he said, stumbling into self-disgust. “But why would I have gone out of my way to buy grapefruit of all things?”
“Probably because you weren’t really thinking of me or the baby, either. Bird, do you ever think seriously of anyone but yourself? Didn’t we even argue about grapefruit when we were planning the menu at the wedding dinner? Really, Bird, how could you have forgotten?”
Bird shook his head in impotence. Then he fled from the hysteria that was gradually tightening his wife’s eyes and turned to stare at his mother-in-law, still transmitting signals from the cramped niche between the bed and the wall. His eyes implored her for help.
“I was trying to buy some fruit and I had this feeling that grapefruit meant something special to us. So I bought some, without even thinking what it was that made them special. What shall I do with them?”
Bird had gone to the fruit store with Himiko, and there was no doubting that her presence had cast its shadow on the something special he had felt. From now on, Bird thought, Himiko’s shadow would be falling heavily on the details of his life.
“You must have known I can’t be in the same room with even one grapefruit; the smell irritates me terribly,” Bird’s wife gave chase. Bird wondered apprehensively if she hadn’t detected Himiko’s shadow already.
“Why don’t you take the whole bag down to the nurses’ office?” As his mother-in-law spoke, she flashed Bird a new signal. The light filtering through the lush greenery in the window at her back ringed her deeply sunken eyes and the spatulate sides of her soaring nose with a quivering, greenish halo. Bird finally understood: this radium spook of a mother-in-law was trying to tell him that she would be waiting in the corridor when he returned from the nurses’ office.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Is the office downstairs?”
“Next to the clinic waiting room,” she said with a long look at Bird.
Bird stepped into the dusky corridor with the bag of grapefruit under his arm. Even as he walked along, the fruit began discharging its bouquet; it seemed to infuse his face and chest with particles of fragrance. Bird reflected that the smell of grapefruit could actually provoke an attack in some asthmatics. Bird thought about his wife lying peevishly abed and that woman with green halos in the hollows of her eyes, flagging signals like the poses in a Kabuki dance. And what about himself, toying with the relationship between asthma and grapefruit! It was all an act, a bad play, only the baby with the lump on its head was for real: only the baby gradually wasting away on a diet of sugar-water instead of milk. But why sugar the water? It was one thing to deprive the baby of milk, but to flavor the substitute in any way, didn’t that make the whole nasty business more like a contemptible trick?
Bird presented the bag of grapefruit to some off-duty nurses and started to introduce himself; suddenly, as if the stuttering that had afflicted him as a schoolboy had returned, he found himself unable to get out a single word. Rattled, he bowed in silence and hurried away. Behind him the nurses’ bright laughter rose. It’s all an act, phony, why did everything have to be so unreal? Scowling, his breath coming hard, Bird climbed the steps three at a time and passed the infants’ ward warily, afraid he might carelessly glance inside.
In front of a service kitchen for the use of relatives and companions of the patients, a kettle in one hand, Bird’s mother-in-law was standing proudly erect. Bird, approaching, saw around the woman’s eyes instead of a halo of light sifted through green leaves an emptiness so wretched it made him shudder. Then he noticed that her erectness had nothing to do with pride: exhaustion and despair had robbed her body of its natural suppleness.
They kept the conversation simple, one eye on the door to Bird’s wife’s room fifteen feet away. When Bird’s mother-in-law confirmed that the baby was not dead, she said, reproachfully, “Can’t you arrange for things to be taken care of right away? If that child ever sees the baby, she’ll go mad!”
Bird, threatened, was silent.
“If only there was a doctor in the family,” the woman said with a lonely sigh.
We’re a pack of vermin, Bird thought, a loathsome league of self-defenders. Nonetheless he delivered his report, his voice hushed, wary of the patients who might be crouching like mute crickets behind the closed doors that lined the corridor, their ears aflame with curiosity: “The baby’s milk is being decreased and he’s getting a sugar-water substitute. The doctor in charge said we should be seeing results in a few days.”
As he finished, Bird saw the miasma that had enveloped his mother-in-law vanish utterly. Already the kettle of water seemed a weight t
oo heavy for her arm. She nodded slowly and, in a thin, helpless voice, as if she wanted badly to go to sleep, “Oh, I see. Yes, I see. When this is all over, we’ll keep the baby’s sickness a secret between us.”
“Yes,” Bird promised, without mentioning that he had spoken to his father-in-law already.
“Otherwise, my little girl will never agree to have another child, Bird.”
Bird nodded; but his almost physical revulsion for the woman merely heightened. His mother-in-law went into the kitchen now, and Bird returned to his wife’s room alone. But wouldn’t she see through a ruse this simple? It was all playacting, and every character in this particular play was a dissembler.
Bird knew by the face his wife turned to him as he stepped into the room that the hysteria about the grapefruit was forgotten. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re all worn down,” his wife said, extending abruptly an affectionate hand and touching Bird’s cheek.
“I am—”
“You’ve begun to look like a sewer rat that wants to scurry into a hole.” The slap caught him unawares. “Is that so?” he said with a bitterness on his tongue, “like a sewer rat?”
“Mother is afraid you’ll start drinking again, that special way you have, no limits, night and day—”
Bird recalled the sensations of protracted drunkenness, the flushed head and the parched throat, belly aching, body of lead, the fingers numb and the brain whisky-logged and slack. Weeks of life as a cave dweller enclosed in whisky walls.
“If you did start drinking again you’d end up dead drunk and no good to anybody just when our baby really needed you. You would, Bird.”