by Неизвестный
My wife had a daughter, the baby who almost didn’t get born, who in her birth availed herself of my son’s victimhood. After she was born, I was astonished at the common, everyday love residing in my own heart. Just imagining this baby contracting polio made my head swim. And I realized for the very first time, and with a sense of wonder, that for a child not to be a cripple is the normal state of affairs.
Until my daughter was born, I vaguely sensed that there were an awful lot of kids who weren’t disabled. It’s just like marveling at the longevity of others when one’s own relatives and friends are dropping all around you. Because I didn’t want to look at normal children, I simply had an unfocused feeling—that boy is normal; our child should also be in good health—that there are a lot of healthy ones. This was because it was too painful for me to look at other children and so I avoided it. When my son entered kindergarten, it was inevitable that I should fear he would be ignored by the other children and that I would have to go and see for myself.
There I was blinded by the sight of all the normal children and unable to keep my eyes open. I knew that in two or three days, these children would bring their cunning and wit into play and would be showing us their imitations of my son’s walk and how he talks. There’s a chance he might not even realize that he’s being made fun of. But I’ll be damned if I’ll take him out of kindergarten.
As I watched, I could see him laughing happily. And because he was laughing, he was losing his turn on the swing to the other children. When he caught sight of me in the distance, he limped quickly toward me, his right hand upraised as though carrying a flag. I was waiting for him to tumble over, and sure enough, he had taken a spill by the time he got to me. I waited for him to get up. He came nearer, a frown on his face. I didn’t take him back to the swing but sent him back by himself. I briefly observed him with a casual air as I stood behind the other children, then bellowed at the children in a voice that reverberated over the kindergarten grounds, castigating them for not getting on the swing in proper order. I continued my scrutiny, agitated as a bear, my breathing labored.
In kindergarten my son was pushed off a bench and broke his arm. My wife was sickly and couldn’t go out, so I’d put the two children in the baby buggy and make the trips to the orthopedist. By that time we had moved to a small country town.
It seemed to me I heard voices coming from behind the glass doors of the houses in town.
He’s going by again with them in the baby buggy. He wants to show off the girl.
The boy’s arm is in a sling, but the truth is, it’s polio. It was treated too late. The parents are to blame.
He likes going to the orthopedist. He likes it because it’s an honest-to-god hospital.
The bone setting turned out poorly. The splint was removed too early, which dislocated the rigid muscle. I went off to Tokyo with him to talk to an old friend who was at Tokyo University Hospital. We went through the wards, and he introduced me to a number of specialists in the field.
“The muscle is already formed, you see. We could fix the dislocation surgically, but you have to remember this is infantile paralysis. He might end up even worse off.”
After I’d said good-bye to my friend and left the hospital, I was exhilarated, as though I’d made a suicide pact and then discovered that I, and I alone, had had the good fortune to survive. As I was walking toward the Ochanomizu train station, a woman called out to me.
“Did your little boy have polio? Poor baby! There’s little hope he’ll get better, is there.”
My self-centered exhilaration evaporated utterly at the sound of this well-meaning stranger’s voice, and my wife’s face rose before me.
“What would you like?” I asked my son, who had his eyes glued to the window, looking outside as we rode the train back. “Daddy will buy it for you.”
He shook his head and smiled.
“I wanna go home right away.”
“You do? Were you scared?”
“Uh-huh.”
My son had wept in the hospital, his naked body rigid. Quite naturally, he’s heard me tell doctors the same story over and over again. I’ve gradually gotten better at telling them about his polio. I’ve already created a plausible legend, as opposed to the simple facts.
Or perhaps it would be better to say I’ve created an environment in which the response is inevitable.
“Nothing can be done, I’m afraid.”
This time, in a large city hospital, he’d climbed up onto the X-ray table by himself to be confronted by a ring of musing doctors. He’d stood there like a defendant in the dock.
“You want to get well, son?” I asked him absurdly on the train. I’d hoped he would be unaware of even the existence of wellness and sickness. His response to this was merely to smile. I wanted to know what the smile meant. Whenever I saw his smile, I felt like a sumo wrestler suddenly thrown out of the ring. And simultaneously, there began to lurk somewhere inside me a hideous something that knew I could do anything to this boy, that anything would be allowed.
“Why are you laughing, son? You get a funny feeling when you think? Surely it’s not because you’re happy, is it?”
Still smiling, my son lowered his eyes, then stealing a glance at the other passengers, he went from merely smiling to actually snickering. What had provoked his suppressed laughter were the exaggerated gestures and conversation of several young blackmarketeers who were joking and fooling around in our car. Not surprisingly, my son and I don’t get through to each other. The reason we don’t—is it my fault, or in the end, is it due to his sickness?—is something I’m attempting to divine in my son’s naive, afflicted head.
“Polio is the problem,” I told my wife when I returned home. I played with my daughter as I talked, not looking at my wife full in the face. “The dislocation has nothing to do with it. And the dislocation certainly seems to be the result of the polio. It probably has nothing to do with his fall at kindergarten.”
My wife’s eyes suddenly opened wide. It was as though she were looking not at me but at something huge behind me. I looked away from her.
“That’s not true at all! He dislocated it because he fell. Because you had him go to kindergarten, even though I was so opposed to it. We’re certainly not going to stay in a town that has a kindergarten like that. They weren’t even watching when he was shoved. The polio didn’t cripple him. He’s got everything exactly where it should be. The dislocation is what’s crippling him. That’s what it is. And it’s the poor child who has to suffer!”
She burst into tears.
My wife despised the town, though in reality it seemed to me that I was the only one she was mad at. Driven on by that anger, we came to Tokyo.
3
My son, older, but still misshapen, was soon big enough to go to school. We came to Tokyo and discovered that in the big city, people weren’t as concerned about the boy’s affliction as those in a small town were, since you could find disabled kids everywhere if you put your mind to it. Whenever I discovered a child who’d had polio, I’d tell my wife right away. On days when I had that to talk about, I quickly came home. I also came across children who had to walk with crutches. There was no timidity in the faces of such children, and they had the unaffected air of those who are used to being looked at, even though they did walk off to one side.
He’s better off than that kid. Imagine how his parents must feel!
I once watched one going along an arrow-straight riverside road on the outskirts of town until he was out of sight.
And I was quick to bring home stories I’d heard at work or from friends who worked elsewhere, about people who’d had polio and yet did regular work like everyone else.
Gradually my wife was taken in by my strategy.
“The candy store owner was in hysterics,” she told me one day. “The boy tells me that everyone in the household comes running out to see him when he goes there. And then he wins another prize.”
Unobserved, I followed my son to t
he store to appraise the situation myself. I assumed it must be due to the goodwill of the candy store owner or my wife’s hopeless fantasizing. I returned home dumbstruck with admiration. He again had won something. I no longer felt any need to sound out my wife. Even if she were doing something to help things along, it was doubtless because she herself was now sure of the outcome. I, for my part, have decided to believe that this is how it will always turn out.
The child’s right hand interferes with his left. It moves about like a snake, independent of his will. It blocks his one healthy hand, and when it comes to rest on his desk, it tears up any papers there, willy-nilly. Except when he’s asleep, the hand is in constant motion and you can never tell what it’s going to do. Because of this, the boy restrains the hand by keeping it hooked onto a pocket, which he’ll abruptly rip.
“It’s really a problem, this darned hand,” he complains shrilly to no one in particular. He chastises his mischievous right hand. I recalled what a doctor once told me.
“We could stop it from moving around like that with brain surgery. The only problem is, it would never move again.”
“You’re right,” his mother said, “you’re ripping your pockets is really a problem.” She had beaten me at my own game, and I was staggered. I was forced to respond.
“C’mon boy, try and wrap your fingers around Daddy’s.”
My boy’s fingers wrapped themselves around mine with an aberrant force that tore at my heart. I pushed back hard against his palm and fingers.
“Ah! That feels good! It feels real good!”
The boy squealed in delight as I pushed even harder. Only a portion of the nerves in his arm and fingers was alive, and it was now ignoring the dead nerves and doing as it damned well pleased. The muscles were being taunted, and they, in turn, were complaining to the nerves. Their complaints were being acknowledged.
How very happy my impulsive malice had made the boy. I remembered a passage I’d read in a novel about a field hospital. In order to recover the use of fingers left on a hand that a bullet had raised havoc with, a patient had to submit to some one hundred painful lashes of a whiplike leather device.
“Will I really get movement back this way?” asked the patient, a major.
“That is a photograph of someone who was successfully treated,” said the doctor, pointing coldly. “That is why I have the photo on the wall. You must trust me.”
The leather whip was an amalgam of the doctor’s good and evil intentions. It occurred to me that I, too, in my own way, might find it necessary to sustain, or try to sustain, this evil intent.
Even so, I was outraged at my wife’s stupidity, her falling into my trap, her cornering me, but when I do walk along the street and see people with their children, I’m filled with concern for my boy and hurry home and, after shouting at my wife for no good reason, start to push on his fingers. Thus my wife was now completely reassured.
“What’s the matter with your right hand? Pick up the chopsticks.”
At mealtimes I doggedly harassed him about the hand. For this trivial lifting of a pair of chopsticks, my son assumed the strained expression of a man lifting a half-ton stone.
“Try to hold it, even if you can’t. Understand? There’s no other way to do it. I’ll push on your hand again.”
I let out an ear-splitting scream. It was directed at my wife. Or perhaps it was not. I struck a hectoring posture for both of us, for me and for my wife, in the face of an unseen observer, one that some might liken to God himself.
“It’s a fact,” my wife said. “He’s getting lazy, this boy.”
“Getting lazy? He certainly isn’t. It’s not the boy who’s getting lazy.”
“And who are you saying is lazy?”
“I d-dunno who. I d-dunno wh-who.” I was shaking with rage and couldn’t talk.
I took my son out into the yard.
“You’re gonna catch the ball. Use your right hand as much as possible. I won’t m-m-make it easy for you.”
When I saw my son run gleefully into the yard with the ball, I knew what it was I was up to. How fine it would be, I thought, if at a time like this, I were a nice man from the neighborhood gazing on the charming scene from atop the bluff and shedding a tear or two, and not the father of this boy.
4
I’d recently read an article in the paper about a special swimming class for those who’ve had polio, to be held in the YWCA’s indoor pool. It said the class, sponsored by the Red Cross, would be undertaken as an experiment and that each of eighty polio victims from throughout Tokyo would have their own instructor.
(Given the fact that there would be a swimming class for polio victims, I, his father, had no option but to go.)
It was with a heavy heart I entertained the thought. I’ve never missed such an article. Just as I’d watched him at the kindergarten and had watched myself being looked at when I put the boy in the baby buggy, I’d been on the lookout for this sort of article. My wife had decided that I was overjoyed at being able to take part. And because she’d come to that conclusion, I had no choice but to go.
They say that America leads in the treatment of this affliction, and I’ve even heard speculation that it’s been on the increase since the American Occupation. The article said that the class would be conducted by a doctor who had returned from America, bringing with him a dozen or so instructors he had personally trained.
As the class began and all those disabled by this same disease came together under one roof, I had the feeling that all the polio victims that I’d sought out in my walks were gathered right there before me. There actually were children I remembered seeing before. Absurdly enough, the less severe the child’s case, the more puffed up with pride the mother and father were, and faint though they were, I could nonetheless see proud smiles playing about their lips. I wondered how in the world I looked. That was my greater concern, not my son.
I suddenly noticed that my son was paying no attention to what the director and the other speakers were saying, to their speeches of encouragement, but was looking around at the other crippled boys in his row, as though he were about to launch into some tomfoolery with them at any moment, even though he was now in his fifth year in grammar school. I pulled on his bad right hand.
“Put it in your pocket,” I said, pinching him hard.
“Ow! That hurts!”
He at least had that much sensation left in his hand. I’d known that, of course, but hadn’t thought he’d yell out like that.
All eyes fell on me.
Well, am I the only one who does this sort of thing?
I am a evil person to do it. I am an irredeemable villain.
As I thought this to myself, I struck a protective pose, putting my arms around my son. I forced myself to lift my face.
I watched from the stands as my son was left to bob about by himself in the pool. Few pools could have been as noisy as this one. The children swimming weren’t chattering away, however. It was their instructors who were talking. They would explain something, show their charges how to float, play the fool, praise the children. As I watched, it struck me that somehow it might be the instructors who were abnormal, brimming as they were with an exaggerated sense of their own benevolence. This flood of goodness almost made my head spin.
An instructor took my son in his arms and placed him in the water as though he were a newborn being given his first bath. The instructor, a college student, didn’t get into the water ahead of him.
The director saw this.
“Not like that!”
I was near the director and felt the impulse to make an excuse for the youth in spite of myself, but the director’s back was turned to me as though in rebuff.
I realized that it was best not to say anything. My son was full of cheer, as though revived in the water, and frolicked about, laughing. As I looked on his artless, ungainly face, I wanted to call out to him.
Don’t be too proud of yourself! You’re a sick boy!
I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings if I were to continue watching, so I closed my eyes, moving not a muscle, but even then I could hear his shouts of joy. I couldn’t very well put my hands over my ears, so I let my head hang down between the bleacher seats, staying absolutely still.
“Excuse me, sir. You, sir, the father of this child.”
The director was calling me. Flustered, I picked up a towel and ran to the edge of the pool.
“Your father will take good care of you.”
“The student’s just a part-time worker,” I said, surprised at my own words.
“What’s ‘part-time’ mean?” my son asked me.
I’d been avoiding the director, but now he approached me and suggested I get in the water with my boy.
“You can learn a bit too.”
Learn?
What can I learn? Might I learn something about restraint?
Doing as I was told, I put on a pair of trunks and got into the pool, but I lacked the confidence to go near my son. For reasons not entirely clear to even me, I went over to the most seriously disabled lad. He was a middle school student. The upper half of his body was that of a superbly conditioned adult, but his legs were as spindly as bamboo. It was obvious he couldn’t stand even in the water. When he lay face up he had no trouble floating because his lower extremities were so light.
He was first to smile as I approached him, and when the instructor let go of his hands, he paddled and moved forward slightly.
“I did it! I swam!” he said, looking at me as the instructor supported him in the water. He then swam over to me. He bumped into me hard. This was something I had anticipated, however.
“Well done!” I said, holding his strange, pathetic body in my arms. Yet I could feel the rage in my heart. For the youth with his crippled body, entirely dependent on me, was trembling with delight. In the water, surrounded by the stands as I was, however, I was compelled to smile, and moving my facial muscles, I told him again and again how well he had done. My mouth told him so, but I felt like someone involved in a conspiracy, and maintaining the deception was sheer torture.