by Kenzaburo Oe
The black soldier also liked to watch the blacksmith at work. From time to time, especially when Harelip was helping forge something like a hoe, his half-naked body glowing in the fire, we would surround the black soldier and walk over to the blacksmith’s shed. When the blacksmith lifted with hands covered in charcoal dust a piece of red-hot steel and plunged it into water, the black soldier would raise a cry of admiration like a scream, and the children would point and laugh. The blacksmith, flattered, frequently repeated this dangerous demonstration of his skill.
Even the women stopped being afraid of the black soldier. At times he received food directly from their hands.
It was the height of summer, and still no instructions arrived from the prefectural office. There was a rumor that the prefectural capitol had been bombed, but that had no effect on our village. Air hotter than the flames that burned a city hung over our village all the day long. And the space around the black soldier began to fill up with an odor that made our heads swim when we sat with him in the airless cellar, a strong, fatty odor like the stink of the weasel meat rotting on the compost heap. We joked about it constantly and laughed until our tears flowed, but when the black soldier began to sweat he stank so badly we could not bear to be at his side.
One hot afternoon Harelip proposed that we take him to the village spring; appalled at ourselves for not having had the thought earlier, we climbed the cellar steps tugging at the black soldier’s grimy hands. The children gathered in the square surrounded us with whoops of excitement as we ran down the cobblestone road baking in the sun.
When we were as naked as birds and had stripped the black soldier’s clothes we plunged into the spring all together, splashing one another and shouting. We were enraptured with our new idea. The naked black soldier was so large that the water barely reached his hips even when he went to the deepest part of the spring; when we splashed him he would raise a scream like a chicken whose neck was being wrung and plunge his head underwater and remain submerged until he shot up shouting and spouting water from his mouth. Wet and reflecting the strong sunlight, his nakedness shone like the body of a black horse, full and beautiful. We clamored around him splashing and shouting, and by and by the girls left the shade of the oak trees where they had been hesitating and came racing into the spring and hurriedly submerged their own small nakedness. Harelip caught one of the girls and began his lewd ritual, and we brought the black soldier over and from the best position showed him Harelip receiving his pleasure. The sun flooded all of our hard bodies, the water seethed and sparkled. Harelip, bright red and laughing, raised a shout each time he slapped the girl’s spray-wet, shining buttocks with his open palm. We roared with laughter, and the girl cried.
Suddenly we discovered that the black soldier possessed a magnificent, heroic, unbelievably beautiful penis. We crowded around him bumping naked hips, pointing and teasing, and the black soldier gripped his penis and planted his feet apart fiercely like a goat about to copulate and bellowed. We laughed until we cried and splashed the black soldier’s penis. Then Harelip dashed off naked as he was, and when he returned leading a large nanny-goat from the courtyard at the general store we applauded his idea. The black soldier opened his pink mouth and shouted, then danced out of the water and bore down upon the frightened, bleating goat. We laughed as though mad, Harelip strained to keep the goat’s head down, and the black soldier labored mightily, his black, rugged penis glistening in the sun, but it simply would not work the way it did with a billy-goat.
We laughed until we could no longer support ourselves on our legs, so hard that when finally we fell exhausted to the ground, sadness stole into our soft heads. To us the black soldier was a rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius. How can I describe how much we loved him, or the blazing sun above our wet, heavy skin that distant, splendid summer afternoon, the deep shadows on the cobblestones, the smell of the children and the black soldier, the voices hoarse with happiness, how can I convey the repletion and rhythm of it all?
To us it seemed that the summer that bared those tough, resplendent muscles, the summer that suddenly and unexpectedly geysered like an oil well, spewing happiness and drenching us in black, heavy oil, would continue forever and never end.
Later in the day of our archaic bathing in the spring an evening downpour rudely locked the valley in fog, and the rain continued to fall late into the night. The next morning, Harelip and my brother and I kept close to the storehouse wall with the black soldier’s food, to avoid the rain that was still falling. After breakfast, the black soldier, hugging his knees, softly sang a song in the dark cellar. Cooling our outstretched fingers in the rainspray sifting through the skylight, we were washed away by the expanse of the black soldier’s voice and the sealike solemnity of his song. When the song was finished there was no more spray coming through the skylight. Taking the black soldier’s arm, we led him smiling into the square. The fog had swiftly cleared from the valley; the trees had absorbed so much rainwater that their foliage was plump and swollen as baby chicks. When the wind blew, the trees trembled in fits, scattering wet leaves and drops of rainwater and causing small, momentary rainbows from which cicadas darted. In the heat beginning to revive and the tempest of shrill cicadas we sat down on the flat stone at the cellar entrance and for a long time breathed the air that smelled of wet bark.
Scarcely moving, we sat there until, in the afternoon, Clerk, carrying his rain gear, descended the road from the woods and went into the headman’s house. We stood up then, leaned against an old, dripping apricot tree, and waited for Clerk to burst from the darkness of the house to wave a signal. But Clerk did not appear; instead, the alarm bell on the roof of the headman’s barn began to clang, summoning the adults out working in the valley and the woods, and women and children from the rain-wet houses appeared on the cobblestone road. I looked back at the black soldier and saw that the smile was gone from his face. Anxiety suddenly born in me tightened my chest. Leaving the black soldier behind, my brother and Harelip and I ran to the headman’s house.
Clerk was standing in silence on the dirt floor in the entranceway; inside, the village headman sat crosslegged on the wooden floor, lost in thought. As we waited impatiently for the adults to gather, we struggled to maintain an expectation that was beginning to feel somehow hopeless. From the fields in the valley and from the woods, dressed in their work clothes, their cheeks puffy with discontent, the adults, including my father, who stepped into the entranceway with several small birds lashed to the barrel of his gun, gradually returned.
The minute the meeting began Clerk floored the children with an explanation in dialect to the effect that the authorities had decided the black soldier was to be turned over to the prefecture. Originally the army was to have come for him, Clerk continued, but as a result of an apparent misunderstanding and general confusion within the army itself, the village had been ordered to escort the black soldier as far as the town. The adults would have to suffer only the minor inconvenience of bringing the black soldier in. But we were submerged in astonishment and disappointment; turn over the black soldier and what would remain in the village? Summer would become an empty husk, a shed skin!
I had to warn the black soldier. Slipping past the adults I ran back to where he was sitting in the square in front of the storehouse. Slowly lifting his dull eyeballs he looked up at me halted in front of him and gasping for breath. I was able to convey nothing to him. I could only stare at him while sadness and irritation shook me. Still hugging his knees, the black soldier was trying to peer into my eyes. His lips as full as the belly of a pregnant river fish slowly opened and shiny white saliva submerged his gums. Looking back, I saw the adults leave the dark entranceway of the headman’s house with Clerk in the lead and move toward the storehouse.
I shook the black soldier’s shoulder as he sat there, and shouted at him in dialect. I was so agitated I felt I would swoon. What could I do, he merely allowed himself to be shaken by my arm in silence and peered a
round him, craning his thick neck. I released his shoulder and hung my head.
Suddenly the black soldier rose, soaring in front of me like a tree, and seized my upper arm and pulled me tight up against himself and raced down the cellar steps. In the cellar, dumbfounded, I was transfixed for a brief moment by the flexing of the black soldier’s taut thighs and the contraction of his buttocks as he moved around swiftly. Lowering the trap door, he secured it by passing the chain on the boar-trap he had repaired through the ring on the door and fastening it around the metal support protruding from the wall. Then he came back down the steps, his hands clasped and his head drooping, and I looked at his fatty, bloodshot eyes that appeared to have been packed with mud, his expressionless eyes, and realized abruptly that he was once again, as when the adults had taken him prisoner, a black beast that rejected understanding, a dangerously poisonous substance. I looked up at the giant black soldier, looked at the chain wrapped around the trap door, looked down at my own small, bare feet. A wave of fear and amazement broke over my vital organs and eddied around them. Darting away from the black soldier I pressed my back against the wall. The black soldier stood where he was in the middle of the cellar, his head drooping. I bit my lip and tried to withstand the trembling in my legs.
The adults gathered above the trap door and began to tug at it, gently at first and then abruptly with a great cackling as of chickens being pursued. But the thick oak door that had been so useful for locking the black soldier securely in the cellar was locking the adults out now, and the children, the trees, the valley.
A few adults peered frantically through the skylight and were immediately replaced by others, bumping foreheads in the scramble. There was a sudden change in their behavior. At first they shouted. Then they fell silent, and a threatening gun barrel was inserted through the skylight. Like an agile beast the black soldier leaped at me and hugged me tightly to himself, using me as a shield against the rifle, and as I moaned in pain and writhed in his arms I comprehended the cruel truth. I was a prisoner, and a hostage. The black soldier had transformed into the enemy, and my side was clamoring beyond the trap door. Anger, and humiliation, and the irritating sadness of betrayal raced through my body like flames, scorching me. And most of all, fear, swelling and eddying in me, clogging my throat and making me sob. In the black soldier’s rude arms, aflame with anger, I wept tears. The black soldier had taken me prisoner.…
The gun barrel was withdrawn, the clamor increased, and then a long discussion began on the other side of the skylight. Without releasing his numbing grip on my arm the black soldier went into a corner where there was no danger of a sniper’s bullet and sat down in silence. He pulled me in close to himself, and, just as I had often done when we had been friends, I kneeled with my bare knees within the circle of his body odor. The adults continued to talk for a long time. Now and then my father peered in through the skylight and nodded to his son who had been taken hostage, and each time, I cried. Dusk rose like a tide, first in the cellar and then in the square beyond the skylight. When it got dark the adults began going home several at a time, shouting a few words of encouragement to me as they left. For a long time after that I heard my father walking back and forth beyond the skylight, and then suddenly he was gone and there was no further indication of life aboveground. Night filled the cellar.
The black soldier released my arm and peered at me as though pained by the thought of the warm, everyday familiarity that had flowed between us until that morning. Trembling with anger, I looked away and remained with my eyes on the floor, my shoulders stubbornly arched, until the black soldier turned his back on me and cradled his head between his knees. I was alone; like a weasel caught in a trap I was abandoned, helpless, sunk in despair. In the darkness the black soldier did not move.
Standing, I went over to the steps and touched the boar-trap, but it was cold and hard and repelled my fingers and the bud of a shapeless hope. I did not know what to do. I could not believe the trap that had captured me; I was a baby field rabbit who weakens and dies as it stares in disbelief at the metal claws biting into its wounded foot. The fact that I had trusted the black soldier as a friend, my incredible foolishness, was an agony to me. But how could I have doubted that black, stinking giant who never did anything but smile! Even now I could not believe that the man whose teeth were chattering in the darkness in front of me was that dumb black man with the large penis.
I was trembling with chill, and my teeth chattered. My stomach had begun to hurt, I squatted, pressing my stomach, and I encountered sudden dismay: I was going to have diarrhea, the strained nerves throughout my body had brought it on. But I could not relieve myself in front of the black soldier. I clenched my teeth and endured, cold sweat beading my forehead. I endured my distress for such a long time that the effort to endure filled the space that had been occupied by fear.
But finally I resigned myself, walked over to the barrel we had laughed and hooted to see the black soldier straddle, and dropped my pants. My exposed, white buttocks felt weak and defenseless, it seemed to me I could feel humiliation dyeing my throat, my esophagus, even the walls of my stomach pitch black. When I was finished I stood up and returned to the corner. I was beaten and I submitted, sinking to the bottom of despair. Pressing my grimy forehead against the cellar wall, warm with the heat of the ground above, I cried for a long time, stifling my sobs as best I could. The night was long. In the woods mountain dogs in a pack were barking. The air grew chill. Fatigue possessed me heavily and I slumped to the floor and slept.
When I woke up, my arm was again in the numbing grip of the black soldier’s hand. Fog and adult voices were blowing in through the skylight. I could also hear the creaking of Clerk’s artificial leg as he paced back and forth. Before long the thud of a heavy mallet hammering the trapdoor merged with the other noises. The heavy blows resounded in my empty stomach and made my chest ache.
Suddenly the black soldier was shouting, and then he seized me by the shoulder and pulled me to my feet and dragged me into the middle of the cellar into full view of the adults on the other side of the skylight. I could not understand why he did this. The eyes at the skylight peered in at my shame that dangled there by its ears like a shot rabbit. Had my brother’s moist eyes been among them I would have bitten off my tongue in shame. But only adult eyes were clustered at the window, peering in at me.
The noise and tempo of the mallet heightened, and the black soldier screamed and grasped my throat from behind in his large hand. His nails bit into the soft skin and the pressure on my Adam’s apple made it impossible to breathe. I flailed with my hands and feet and threw back my head and moaned. How bitter it was to be humiliated in front of the adults! I twisted my body, trying to escape the body of the black soldier glued to my back, and kicked his shins, but his thick, hairy arms were hard and heavy. And his shrill screams rose above my moans. The adults’ faces withdrew, and I imagined the black soldier had intimidated them into racing to put a stop to the smashing of the trapdoor. The black soldier stopped screaming and the pressure like a boulder against my throat eased. My love for the adults and my feeling of closeness revived.
But the pounding on the trapdoor grew louder. The adults’ faces reappeared at the skylight, and the black soldier, screaming, tightened his fingers around my throat. My head was pulled back and my opened lips uttered a shrill, feeble sound I could do nothing about, like the scream of a small animal. Even the adults had abandoned me. Unmoved by the sight of the black soldier choking me to death they continued to batter the door. When they had broken in they would find me with my neck wrung like a weasel’s, my hands and feet stiffened. Burning with hatred, despairing, I writhed and wept and listened to the sound of the mallet, my head wrenched back, moaning without shame.
The sound of countless wheels revolving rang in my ears and blood from my nose ran down my cheeks. Then the trapdoor splintered, muddy bare feet with bristly hair covering even the backs of the toes piled in, and ugly adults inflamed to madness fill
ed the cellar. Screaming, the black soldier clasped me to himself and sank slowly down the wall toward the floor. My back and buttocks tight against his sweating, sticky body, I felt a current hot as rage flowing between us. And like a cat that has been surprised in the act of copulation, in spite of my shame, I laid my hostility bare. It was hostility toward the adults crowded together at the bottom of the steps observing my humiliation, hostility toward the black soldier squeezing my throat in this thick hand, pressing his nails into the soft skin and making it bleed, hostility toward all things mixing together as it twisted upward in me. The black soldier was howling. The noise numbed my eardrums, there in the cellar at the height of summer I was slipping into an absence of all sensation replete as if with pleasure. The black soldier’s ragged breathing covered the back of my neck.
From the midst of the bunched adults my father stepped forward dangling a hatchet from his hand. I saw that his eyes were blazing with rage and feverish as a dog’s. The black soldier’s nails bit into my neck and I moaned. My father bore down on us, and seeing the hatchet being raised I closed my eyes. The black soldier seized my left wrist and lifted it to protect his head. The entire cellar erupted in a scream and I heard the smashing of my left hand and the black soldier’s skull. On the oily, shining skin of his arm beneath my jaw thick blood coagulated in shivering drops. The adults surged toward us and I felt the black soldier’s arm slacken and pain sear my body.