Seiobo There Below

by László Krasznahorkai

  That he was born, he says, he remembers exactly, he remembers that he was born, they lived on the first floor, and he sees himself, his body, down there far below, but he sees his soul as well — what did his soul look like? — well, it was white, and he couldn’t cry, because the umbilical cord was wound around his neck; and with that everything began, his entire life, and he had to cry but couldn’t, not figuratively, but because of the umbilical cord, he would have cried, but no sound came out of his throat, everyone watched him in fear, his father wasn’t even there, he remembers everything clearly; the room where he came into the world, the windows, the tatamis, the washbasins, all of the room’s objects, and where they were placed, and he remembers very well the feeling that he had been born, of where he had come from, and he understood immediately that he had now stepped into a different form, into a different existence, here somehow everything was harder: principally, breathing, and not only because of the umbilical cord around his neck, for someone immediately unwound it, the hardest thing of all was the breathing, that he had to take breaths or to put it more correctly, things weren’t even more difficult, but generally, everything seemed to have weight, everything became apparent together with its weight, that was the new thing, and inconceivable, and so very heavy, everything slowed down, and this everything was still bloody and slippery, and everything was slipping and was in shadow, as if somewhere the light was shining, the shadow of which only extended to here; but even today, when he conjures this memory up, he doesn’t know what was casting that shadow, he conjures it up with particular frequency, not even intending to, rather it just somehow floats into his consciousness, without any cause or precedent; that’s how it must have been, that was his birth, his father was not there, he wasn’t even there when they took him out of the room, he was not at home, during that time he was often away; the family was engaged in the respirator-mask trade, and the demand was great after the war, so his father didn’t live with his family but no one knew where, or with whom; he appeared only once a month, when he brought home his dirty clothes for his mother to launder, your father is a bad man, his mother said to him, but he never, not for a single instant, felt that, in any event, his father, if he had money, really did not live at home, the business went well, so that a month went by before his father took him into his arms, he brought the dirty laundry, and he looked at his son, and it is there very clearly within him that his father somehow held him at a distance from himself and thus examined him, but he didn’t sense that his father was bad: he was without any emotion at all, in the most objective manner possible, he determined that this is my father, while the father, in all likelihood, without any emotion at all and in the most objective manner, said, this is my son; this was his first meeting with his father, he recalls this as a very particular moment if he thinks about it, that first meeting, and in addition to its particularity, the most important thing was that it was the first, because later, afterward, for a good long time, he saw his father only very rarely, and his father hardly ever picked him up because he just showed up once a month, he took the money and brought the laundry, he waited until his mother gave him what he had brought one month ago — washed out and prepared — he hardly even sat down, or just for a little, and he always left immediately, hence it could be said that he grew up without a father, it could be said that his mother, abandoned, raised him, and the two of them lived together; he had no siblings, there was only him and his mother, altogether the two of them, his father showing up for only a few minutes once a month every month, so that he was alone very much of the time, indeed, in point of fact, he was always alone, all the time, this was his childhood and his youth, he says, and that is why later on he decided that if he reached manhood, he would have a huge family, and it turned out that way too, because here, he shows, is sensei Kimiko, and Sumiko-san, and Yumito-san, they are his daughters, and the littlest one, my son, is there, he says, Tomoaki, none of them are children anymore, and he has two grandchildren too: Maya-chan from Kimoko’s family, and Aya-chan from Sumiko’s family, he has a wife, Ribu-san, and next to her there is Amoru-san, but these are not the only people around him, but countless others as well, disciples in Kyõto, disciples in Tokyo, in Fujiyama and in Arayama, at least eighty people altogether, which of course doesn’t change anything about his solitude, because everyone is a soul, everyone; the family members and students he is addressing nod respectfully, who — now the pause in the Seiobo rehearsal is longer than usual, they see that the sensei is beginning to speak at greater length this time, he is talking to the guest and, well, at that point, as if a sign had been given, they sit all around their father and their grandfather and their master, because sensei Kimoko is there and Sumiko-san and Yumito-san and Tomoaki-san, and Maya-chan and Aya-chan are there, and there too — always a little detached from the others — is the mysterious silent Amoru-san, too, and of course the sensei’s most faithful disciples as well, Chiwako-san, Nozumu-san, and Himuko-san, and Ante-san and Haragu-san, and Gomu-Gomu and Raun, here in the Mahorowa, as the master calls his rehearsal space not far from the Kamigamo shrine, in the northwest corner of Kyõto, everyone is here, and they listen to their father and their grandfather and their master with the greatest of curiosity, although it is completely obvious that they have heard this quite a few times already and they know all of the master’s stories, so they know too the ones in which he speaks of himself, but perhaps it is just that fact that impresses them so much, the master always tells them with the same, precisely the same words, he never mixes up his words, never mixes up the order of events in the stories, and he always begins by saying that I remember that I was born, we lived on the first floor, and I see myself, my body, down there far below, but I see my own soul as well — never a single alteration, and this is passed on: the family members and the students themselves try to follow the master’s words exactly, when they begin to speak of him to someone with enthusiasm, in this way, the master’s story is passed on, just like a fairy-tale, although with the difference that in this story not even one single word may ever be altered, not even a single expression, no one may add anything to it, and no one may take anything away, he was born on December 22, 1947, in Kyõto, he says, the family home is still there, and even today it is his property, the street however has no name, it is a completely narrow, tiny alley, and it was always like that, it lies not far from the Nanna-jo and the Horikawa-dori intersection, across from the enormous Nishi-Hongan-ji temple, you have to picture the alley running parallel with the Nanna-jo, just a few houses on it and among them, there in the middle, was ours, he says, where the lower story was always used for business purposes — for the respirator-mask trade — even today it is like that, we lived on the upper floor, my mother and I, because there were only two of us in the house, my father, while the business was still operating, turned up once a month, for a very brief time, to leave his dirty clothes and take his clean ones, my mama was always working, she hardly had any time to be with me, so that I was alone so much, so very much, so that my solitude was truly profound, as profound as solitude could be, he says, and roughly at that point, as if touched by a magic wand, the family members and the students begin, by mutual consent — as if from this point on the story doesn’t really concern them — to return to their places, the places from where, listening to the beginning of the master’s story just now, they had gathered around him, the children and the grandchildren move at least ten meters to his left; generally this is how the private rehearsals, when the master rehearses by himself, proceed, and completely apart from him, in the background, so that the master will not be disturbed, are the children, chiefly Kimoko, the eldest girl, who herself has already reached the level of master; accordingly then, farther away from the father and grandfather, the disciples seek out an even more suitable distance from him to the right, or sit facing him by the wall of the Mahorowa, for the place of the master is sacred, no one may sit close to him, only Amoru-san, but only so she can supervise, keep accounts of, arrange
the master’s affairs; Amoru-san, about whom someone not from here would hardly be able to say what it was she was doing, although she is always doing something during the rehearsals — he remembers a boy on a bicycle, he says; it was still before he himself began attending school, a boy fell down in the street with his bicycle, and he really had a bad fall, but everyone just laughed at him, just then there were a lot of us on the street, and everyone laughed at the boy, but not me, I wept, I felt so sorry for him, mainly because I felt how much his knee was hurting from the fall, my mother began saying enough already, stop crying, he’s already gone, he dusted off his trousers, got onto his bicycle, and he’s already cycled off toward the Horikawa, but he still just wept, he really felt sorry for him, so incredibly sorry for him, because the others had laughed at him; but this actually was not his own memory, he says, this was told to him by his mother much later, and so it remained like that, it became his own memory, and now he relates it as if he were recollecting something he remembered, which, however, he did, thanks to his mother, as, for example, when already in school, he says, we went to the swimming pool once, but there was one boy among us who did not dare to go in, he was afraid of water, he was afraid of the swimming pool, I understood what he was afraid of, though I myself was not afraid; yet everyone began to jeer at him, and I of course just burst out crying, I felt so sorry for him, they talked about it when I was older already, that as a small child it was always like that, I was always feeling sorry for somebody, and I was always weeping, and these have become memories that have accompanied me throughout my entire life, and so he continues unchecked, in his own particular way of speaking, repeating and repeating, there are numerous repetitions in the narration, but it’s as if he were doing it just for the rhythm, because his memory — if it is a question of the Noh — is formidable; if he is telling a story, as he is now, he keeps returning to each point, each thread of the story, which he already related earlier, perhaps because he wishes to emphasize them, or because he wishes to preserve a content-rhythm of events untraceable by anyone else, it is impossible to know; in any event his memories from his nursery school years are innumerable, he says, namely that there was a nursery school nearby, facing the corner of the Nishi-Hongan-ji, yet opposite, in the inner corner of the Nishi-Hongan-ji, there inside, an enormous tower rose, and this proved to be a very particular building indeed, because no matter what time of day it was, whether morning or noon or evening, this tower, which in the time of the Meiji Dynasty had been called the shinseigomin, completely covered the nursery school in shadow, so that all of my nursery-school memories are connected with this completely dark nursery, because that enormous tower overshadowed us completely, there inside it was always dark, and I had to spend my entire nursery time there with the others, we played there in the dark, right up until when it was time to start school, and all the while, not one nanny or teacher turned up who even once mentioned or explained why it was always so dark inside, and that is why it stayed with me, that nursery school is some kind of dark place where children play in the dark, and where there is always an enormous tower rising somewhere nearby; but then came school and with that something different, as it happened the worst thing of all and completely suddenly, namely that from one day to the next our business went bankrupt, my father’s business partner, with whom we ran the respirator-mask business, suddenly left, here was the problem now, thanks to him: he disappeared, vanished without a trace, we never saw him again, yet we stayed on there and it was really bad, because earlier we had had everything, we suffered no deprivation whatsoever, indeed, the master says, he believes that many considered his family to be well-off, they had a television set and a piano, and there were few people, few families that could permit themselves that, for after the Second World War nearly everyone lost everything, just their respiratory mask business flourished, until it went bankrupt, and from that point on they were plunged, completely unexpectedly, into the deepest poverty, they had nothing left, neither a television nor a piano, and the saddest thing of all, he says, was that my father who, while the business was successful, was never at home, moved back one day after we had gone bankrupt, and from then on until the day he died he lived at home; he sat in silence, I remember exactly where: downstairs where we used to run our business, facing the window, and even today in my memories he is still there, smoking a cigarette, and for years he didn’t look away from the window, he never really took part in anything, he just sat there and smoked a cigarette, he left everything in the care of my mother; yet if I gave him some advice about anything, he immediately took it up — although at the time I was only nine years old, altogether nine, when he moved back into the house, and we were plunged into destitution — sometimes I gave him this or that piece of advice, and he honored these recommendations, that we had to address this or that problem, my mother also listened to me, but according to custom it was my father who had to say that this, that, or the other should be done, and he always agreed with my advice, my father wasn’t interested in how old I was, he accepted my recommendations as did my mother, in fact, my relationship with my mother was the closest, no one was important to me, just my mother, she raised me, looked after me, took care of me, and I loved my mother very much, I spoke about everything with her, not only as a child, as a youth, but afterward as well, I felt her to be much closer to me than my father, or anyone else; she lived with her husband, that is to say with my father, in the old house until her death, near the Kyõto Station, there in the street that runs parallel with the Nanna-jo, in the parental house that is now close as well to the Shin-E Building, and after a while, when I moved back to Kyõto — because I was away for a while, I moved back here, to the Kamigamo: we were living quite far from each other, but nearly every day I came to visit her, and I talked about everything with her, it was like that up until her death, because she was the person closest to me, not even like a mother but like a friend, there was nothing that I couldn’t discuss with her, I had no secrets before her, to keep a secret would have been totally senseless, I did, however, worry about her greatly, when my family sank into poverty, my father’s business partner left, my father came home, and in general there was no money at all, the business had completely collapsed, but what could we do, we had to work, and then my mother did just what she could, namely there was a possibility of making Christmas-tree decorations, one yen for each piece; after the big collapse there was simply nothing to eat, we were in such a difficult situation, and we only got rice regularly from my mother’s relatives in the countryside, there was that, rice and water, rice and water, every day, it was because of that that my mother had to work, my father was incapable of doing anything, most likely because he had collapsed as well, just like our business, we had to make these baubles for Christians, that was the only possibility, the value of the yen, however, was very low, and my mother had to make a lot of these baubles every single day, so I began to help her, I too was making these baubles for Christians to hang on their Christmas trees, the only problem was that I was still a child, and a child could not be treated as a regular employee, he says; so that he could only get half a yen for the same work, and that wasn’t enough to live on, his mother’s earnings and then what he earned, it wasn’t enough; in addition it turned out to be a bigger problem that these baubles turned out to be very small, they had to be small, and after a while his mother’s eyes couldn’t take it anymore; how small they were — she strained her eyes, she fatally overworked them — she could work for a few hours but then her eyes were tired, she cried, and finally it was painful for his mother, she developed a kind of over-sensitivity of the optic nerve, in the evening she could hardly bear to look at anything; but it was all in vain, she could not stop working, so after a while, when in the evening those eyes were really hurting a lot, he said, a nun began visiting them, she took care of his mother, she cooked the rice, and this lasted until he, the master, was in the eleventh grade, during which time, he says, he was continually worried, he was very worried for
his mother, he couldn’t even pay attention in school, he only thought of his mother’s eyes, and how they would hurt in the evenings, and he really wanted his mother to stop working, already he was in middle school but everything went on, and he was worried that his mother wouldn’t stop, and that there would be a huge problem, he was so worried that he couldn’t think of anything else, only about her, and he became more and more worried that she would be very ill, and wouldn’t get up anymore; keep on studying, they told him, but he was incapable of that, he says, he wanted to stay home at any cost, to help his mother, and he did stay home, and he helped her too, he too began to produce these baubles for the Christmas trees, and he didn’t go to university, even though his teacher advised him to do so, instead of university the Christmas baubles, really it couldn’t be otherwise, he had to stay at home, because in any event he wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on anything else from all the worry, and he was still in middle school when, at the beginning of the school year, there was the renowned mountain-climbing event, this was the occasion that he, along with every one of his classmates, awaited with great excitement, just that in his case the problem was that the other school children always, the week before the big mountain-climbing event, got a new pair of running shoes, yet so great was the destitution in their home that there was no money for new running shoes, so that his mother came up with the idea of polishing the old running shoes with some half-penny chocolate, first she really cleaned them off and then smeared the chocolate on, and really they looked as if they could have been new, but he was distressed by this, and because he was not ashamed if, due to the family’s poverty, he was the only one not to get new running shoes before the big mountain-climbing event, he took the shoes and scraped off the chocolate, and he never went mountain climbing with the others, this is just one example of how difficult it was, he says, but an example, too, of how difficult it was for him to be with others; it wasn’t as if he didn’t long to be among them, there was nothing he desired more than to play alongside them, it was just that some obstacle or another was always in the way, which meant that he always had to renounce their companionship, so when he was in middle school he became even more solitary than he had been in primary school: just his mother and he, the two of them in the street that ran parallel with the Nanna-jo, while his father sat the entire day in the old business premises, smoking cigarettes and looking out the window, although nothing ever happened out there, he was completely alone, and so the years passed and the compassion within him for those who could not make friends grew ever deeper, or for those who could not be with the people they wanted to be with, because he was always at home, or at school, or at school or at home, and because he was so worried for his mother and the entire family, and what would happen to them if he wasn’t at home, during this time because of the worry he very often would not go out into the street to play, or go and join up with the others during school breaks, because there was only one thought in his mind, how to find an exit from this destitution so that his mother would not have to strain her eyes; he brooded over this incessantly, and of course in the meantime, he says, he did not have too much time to think about playing with the others; he could however have made friends, for example, with the boy who once complained that he felt very bad, and he was really afraid, because he couldn’t go like this to his singing lessons in the mornings; I said to him, he says, that I would go in his place, and I even went, I went, and in the meantime I learned everything that he was supposed to learn, then later at the singing lessons I explained the situation with my classmate; I sang everything that he was supposed to have sung, and I was praised greatly, and the teacher said that they did not reproach my classmate for his absences, that it was alright, and of course the boy in question was very grateful for this, and they could have even been friends, but well he had to go home, at the beginning he just walked normally, then he began to move quickly, but finally he was already running, so afraid was he that while he was gone something had happened with his mother’s eyes, and so it was not possible for him to be anyone’s friend, for even if this boy had invited him on another afternoon to come along and play with him, in this dark period of his life he only thought immediately of what would happen at home if he weren’t there, this was always his profound conviction, that no one would be there to help, as he was utterly certain, under this burden of continual suffering, that a larger catastrophe was looming; in the first place he thought of his mother, filled with concern for her, thinking that the catastrophe would be connected with her eyes, but it didn’t happen like that, something completely different occurred, something completely extraordinary that turned everything upside down and changed their lives; no one thought that it could happen but it did; everyone, and in particular he himself, was convinced that the catastrophe was here, about to occur, and everything seemed so utterly hopeless that one day — such was the sorrow that overwhelmed him from his mother’s and father’s fate — he made a decision and went to them in the upper room, and his advice was that they should commit suicide, together, the entire family, because in my view, I said to them, he says, this is the only solution, this is what I can recommend, because we are so bereft of any future, there is no future whatsoever for us, all of our time is completely taken up solving the problems of everyday life, of what we are going to eat; well, of course I wasn’t thinking of any future, I did not wish for any future, because there was no future at all, I went to the upstairs room, I knelt down before them, I bowed, and I said, let us all commit suicide together, but in the end we didn’t do it, because an extraordinary turn of events came about, something completely unimaginable: one day in school a big white dog suddenly got into the hallway, I was in the seventh grade, when a stray, bedraggled, white dog came in, and it was in such a bad state that everyone just yelled and screamed at it, but no one dared or wanted to try to grab hold of it, it was evident, however, that the dog was getting close to the end already, its entire body was trembling, its fur was scraped off, and it was so skinny that its bones literally stuck out, of course it was chased out of the classroom somehow, and chased out of the entire building onto the street, it’s just that the dog didn’t leave but stayed there near the school and stayed right underneath our classroom window, it didn’t move away from there for a whole week, it just trembled and cried and howled and whined, you could hear it very clearly, and in the end I couldn’t hear anything else, I heard it even at home: so the dog did not budge from next to the tree, they tried to chase it away with a cane, but it was simply impossible to chase it away, so it stayed, no one bothered it anymore, only you could hear it crying, and I — as the week went by — looked at the dog, and I saw how it wanted to die, and then I said to myself, I have to take it home, somehow it will get along with us, and so, the master relates, that’s exactly what he did, he took the dog home, he just said to it come, and at that one single word the dog came; but his mother said we can’t do this, we can’t have a dog here, whatever are we going to give him to eat, and this really did present a huge problem, as they had no meat that they could give to the dog, only rice, and moreover, dogs don’t eat rice; his mother advised him to take it out to the monastery, it can’t stay here, but, he says, he was not able to do that, he pleaded with his family, please let it stay here, he even made a doghouse secretly, he pleaded with his mother, but she said we don’t have enough even for ourselves, to which he replied that he would give the dog his own portion, which of course sounded a bit peculiar, because dogs don’t eat rice, but then he implored his mother so much that that night they gave the dog his nightly portion of rice, and the dog ate the rice, and then already his mother began to see things differently, and she allowed the dog to stay, fine, she said, we’ll keep it, and really it turned out like that, he says, we took in the white dog, and two weeks later, altogether two weeks after the day that we had taken the dog in — people began knocking at the front door saying they wanted to buy an oxygen mask, suddenly they were getting orders, my father’s bu
siness started up again, and even his business partner, the one who had caused the business to go bankrupt earlier, turned up again, and suggested that due to the change in demand they should go back into partnership again, and the telephone rang off the hook, and there were hundreds and thousands of orders, everything changed at once, the business flourished; at that time, the massive industrialization campaign was going on and due to the pollution, a huge demand for oxygen masks arose, and in addition, my father’s business partner came up with a new kind of mask, a yellow one that filtered out the pollution more effectively, and it became so successful that even the state television, the NHK, did a program about it and advertised it, everything got better, the master lowers his voice, and everyone knew, my mother knew, I knew, and my father knew as well, that the change in our fate was because of the dog, it brought us luck, my father announced sitting on his chair in front of the window, and from that point on he prayed for it, for the white dog, and ever since he, my father, died, I pray for it, and when I shall die, my first-born child, sensei Kimiko will pray for it too.