by Kenzaburo Oe
“I was doing a bit of quiet thinking.” She spoke sharply, almost as though I’d been looking for an opportunity to creep in under the blankets with her.
“I’ve been going over various details of our married life in my mind, and I’ve come to the conclusion that under your influence I’ve let you share responsibility for a whole lot of my own decisions. It’s meant that when you deserted somebody, I was party to the desertion too. But now it really disturbs me, Mitsu. I’m going to start thinking again—about the baby in the institution, and about the baby that’s not born yet. Thinking for myself, independently of you.”
“Go ahead—my judgment isn’t to be relied on anyway,” I said dispiritedly, and added silently to myself: “and I’m going to shut myself up in the storehouse cellar to do some thinking too. With new evidence to consider, I have to get rid of my preconceived ideas about great-grandfather’s brother and Takashi and review their cases from scratch. To understand them correctly may be meaningless to them now that they’re dead, but for me it’s essential.”
I got down into the cellar and, squatting with my back against the white wall at the far end of the back room, just as the voluntary captive must have done a century earlier, wrapped three blankets tightly round me on top of my overcoat. Then, as I ate my sandwiches and took alternate mouthfuls of the whisky and the contents of the other bottle—warm water at first, soon turning to cold, though it wouldn’t freeze as long as the strong south wind continued to bluster about the hollow—I started thinking again. From a corner of this cellar where no human being had set foot for so many years, a dank smell arose where the wind had formed a pile of fragments from books and old papers eaten away by silverfish, a low writing desk long since disintegrated, and the remains of tatami mats that had rotted to pieces then dried out again. A similar smell arose from the stones of the floor, which were faintly damp like cold, sweaty skin and worn to a soft texture. A fine dust clung moist and heavy around my nostrils, lips, and even the rims of my eyes, alarming me in case it fatally blocked the pores. I suddenly recalled painful memories of childhood asthma, twenty-five years earlier. I smelled my fingertips; already they were stained with a pungent dust that wouldn’t come off when I rubbed them on my knees. For all I knew, a spider grown to the size of a small crab after long days spent in that claustrophobic darkness might come rustling out from behind the pile of debris and bite me behind the ear. Down inside me, the idea aroused a physical revulsion which instantly filled the blackness before my eyes with giant silverfish peering at me, sow bugs half the size of real sows, and unseasonable crickets every bit as large as dogs.
A “retrial”? Yet here was the cellar, and if great-grandfather’s brother had indeed shut himself up here and maintained his identity as leader of the rising to the end of his days, that alone was enough to upset the verdict in which I’d always placed my faith. It was the same with Takashi, who had lived in an attempt to copy great-grandfather’s brother’s life: in the light of his ancestor’s newly demonstrated integrity, his own suicide began to look like a final, heroic attempt to put the whole of his “truth” on show for the benefit of me, the survivor. I looked on helplessly as the verdict I’d passed on Takashi fell irremediably to pieces in turn. Since the image of great-grandfather’s brother that I’d ridiculed every time Takashi thrust it at me had not been an illusion after all, Takashi’s position now looked considerably more favorable.
In the depths of the cellar where the darkness stirred with fierce eddies of wind, I saw the eyes of a dying cat, a tabby torn that I’d kept from my student days until I married and my wife was about to get pregnant. I remembered the eyes from that unhappy day when I found him run over with something like a red, skinned hand protruding from between his legs : the eyes of an old cat, perfectly calm and clear, their yellow irises like tiny, shining chrysanthemums; the eyes of a cat that, despite the sharp flashes of pain darting about the seat of sensation in its tiny brain, kept suffering firmly locked away and, at least to one peering in from outside, remained calm and expressionless; the eyes of a cat that treated its agony as something exclusively its own and, as such, nonexistent to others. I’d shown no imagination toward the human beings whose eyes concealed a similar private hell. I’d been consistently critical of Takashi’s attempts, as one such human being, to discover some way to a new life. I’d even refused aid in the face of his pitiful request made when death was already upon him. So Takashi had dealt with his hell alone and unaided. As I contemplated them in the darkness, the eyes of my cat, companion of many years, became Takashi’s eyes, and the eyes of great-grandfather’s brother whom I’d never known, and my wife’s eyes, red like plums; and they all linked up into a shining ring that was rapidly becoming an undeniable part of my being. They would go on multiplying, I felt sure, throughout the time remaining to me, till a hundred pairs of eyes would glitter like a chain of stars in the night of my experience. And I would live on, suffering agonies of shame under the light of those stars, peering out timidly like a rat, with my single eye, at a dim and equivocal outer world. . . .
Our retrial is your trial ! And the old men waved their hats at the great beam.
I sat hunched up, scarcely breathing, as though I were indeed crouched alone before the judges and jurors of my dream, my eyes shut against the darkness to avoid the other eyes fixed on me, my head a strangely alien sphere cradled in the overcoat and blankets that wrapped my arms. Must I then live out my days to no positive purpose—vague, indeterminate, depressing days, remote from the sure sense of existence of those who had risen above their private hells ? Or was there perhaps some way of letting go and retreating into a more comfortable darkness ? As in a sequence of photographic stills, I saw another me slip free from my drooping shoulders as I sat hunched like a body in a burial urn, and, rising, crawl through the gap in the floorboards, then go climbing up the steep staircase, the clothes bundling its body fluttering in the gusts of wind that blew straight up from- the valley. As my ghostly self reached the point on the stairs where it could see the valley stretching out below the hole knocked in the wall, I could suddenly feel, still crouched at the bottom of the cellar though I was, the sickening vertigo that seized the figure standing there halfway up the stairs, defenseless and paralyzed before the deep, black, wind-filled space; and I pressed my fingers to my temples to soothe the dull ache in the core of my head. But when the apparition arrived directly below the great wooden beam, I suddenly realized in terror that I still hadn’t grasped the “truth” which, as I hanged myself, I would cry aloud to those who went on living; and the apparition promptly vanished from sight.
I couldn’t even share that “something” inside my friend that had made him paint his head crimson and kill himself, naked, with a cucumber stuck up his anus. Even the eye that I’d believed to be watching the blood-filled darkness inside my head had in fact fulfilled no function at all. If I hadn’t yet grasped the “truth,” I was unlikely to find the strength of purpose to take that final plunge into death. It hadn’t been like that with great-grandfather’s brother and Takashi just before they died : they had been sure of their own hell, and in crying out the “truth” had risen above it.
So real was the sense of defeat that surged up in my chest like boiling water and spread with stinging pain throughout my body that I made a further discovery: just as Takashi from childhood had been fired with a sense of opposition to me, so I had been hostile to Takashi and his idol, great-grandfather’s brother, and had sought meaning in a placid way of life quite different from theirs. When, despite everything, I had the accident that blinded me in one eye as surely as if I’d been leading a life of danger, I was doubly indignant, and spent my hospital days miserably killing off flies. But Takashi, despite my objections, had persisted in a series of highly doubtful, rather disreputable ventures. And in that final moment when he stood facing the muzzle that was to split the naked upper half of his body into a mass of ripe pomegranates, he’d succeeded in achieving self-integration, in securin
g for himself an identity given consistency by his desire to be like great-grandfather’s brother. The fact that I’d refused his last appeal hardly mattered in practice. Almost certainly, he’d heard the voices of great-grandfather’s brother and all the other family spirits that filled the storehouse, heard them calling to him, recognizing him, and accepting him into their midst. With their aid, he’d been able to face up to his own agonizing fear of death for the sake of rising above his private hell.
“Yes, you told the truth,” I admitted meekly beneath the gaze of the same family spirits who earlier had gazed on Takashi at his death, keenly aware as I did so of my own utter wretchedness. I felt an extraordinary sense of inadequacy, a sense that like the cold seemed to grow steadily deeper. In a half-masochistic, half-despairing frame of mind, I ventured a pathetic little whistle summoning the Chosokabe to come and destroy the storehouse and bury me alive beneath it. But of course nothing happened. I spent several hours in utter prostration, shivering like a wet dog. Eventually, the gap in the floorboards above me and the half-blocked secret windows at the side grew white. The wind had dropped by now. Oppressed by a desire to urinate, I struggled up on frozen legs and thrust my head up through the floor. The forest that occupied almost all the space where the wall had been knocked down was still dark and mist-shrouded, with only the narrowest halo of purple reflecting the dawn, but up in the top right-hand corner of the hole the flame-red sky itself was visible. I’d seen the same flaming red on the backs of the dogwood leaves that daybreak as I lurked in my pit in the garden. It had summoned up memories of the painting of hell back here in the hollow, and impressed me as a kind of signal. The meaning of that signal, uncertain then, was readily understandable now. The “tender” red of the painting was essentially the color of self-consolation, the color of people who strove to go on quietly living their murkier, less stable, and vaguer everyday lives rather than face the threat of those terrifying souls who tackled their own hell head-on. Ultimately, I felt sure great-grandfather had commissioned the hell picture for the repose of his own soul. And the only people who had drawn consolation from it were those of his descendants who, like grandfather and myself, lived out their lives in vague apprehension, unwilling to allow the urgent inner demand for sudden, unscheduled leaps forward to grow to the point where action was necessary.
In the pale darkness just outside the entrance where several layers of doors had been, a dim figure stood gazing down at my head, which from there must have looked like a melon lying on the floor. The figure stirred. It was my wife. How does one offer casual greetings, how does one behave in a normal, everyday manner when discovered with one’s head poking out of a crack in the floor, staring at a patch of red in the morning sky? Petrified with embarrassment as though my head had literally become a melon, I could only gaze up at her.
“Hello, Mitsu,” she said, addressing me in a voice hard-edged with tension yet controlled so as to moderate my alarm at being taken unawares.
“Hello,” I said. “Don’t worry—I may have startled you, but I’m not mad.”
“I’ve known for some time that it’s your habit to go underground to think. You did it once in Tokyo, didn’t you?”
“I always thought you were asleep that morning,” I said, mortification adding to the burden of fatigue.
“I kept an eye on you from the kitchen window,” she said, “until the milkman came and I was sure you’d be restored to life above ground. I was afraid something nasty might happen,” she added reminiscently. Then, as I stayed silent, she went on in a more energetic voice as though to encourage us both :
“Mitsu—wouldn’t it be possible for us to have another try together? Couldn’t we make a new start, bringing up the two babies together, the one in the institution and the one that’s not yet born? I’ve thought about it for a long time, and decided on my own that that’s what I want. I came to ask you whether it was totally impossible or not. And seeing you were down there thinking, I thought I’d better put it off till you came out of your own accord. So I’ve been waiting here. For me, it was more frightening than that time in the pit in the back garden. I was afraid the wind might bring the storehouse down—it’s so unsteady with the wall knocked out—and I was terrified when I heard whistling coming out of the depths! But I went on waiting, because I didn’t feel I had any right to fetch you out.”
She spoke slowly. Already she was pressing her hands to the sides of her belly in the cautious way of pregnant women; it gave the black silhouette of her body, even standing, a spindle-shaped stability, but I could see it trembling with suppressed tension. She stopped speaking and wept silently for a while.
“Let’s try. I’ll take on the English teaching job,” I said, breathing out heavily and using what little air remained in my lungs in an attempt to sound offhand. Nevertheless, the regret in my voice was obvious enough to set my own ears burning.
“No, Mitsu. I’m going to take the two children to stay with my family while you’re working in Africa. Why don’t you cable the expedition office? I think the need to oppose Taka has always made you deliberately reject the things that resembled him in you. But Taka’s dead, Mitsu, so you should be fairer to yourself. Now you’ve seen that the ties between your great-grandfather’s brother and Taka weren’t just an illusion created by Taka, why don’t you try to find out what you share with them yourself? It’s even more important to do so now, isn’t it, if you want to keep your memory of Taka straight?”
It occurred to me with wry self-derision that working as an interpreter in Africa wasn’t going to solve everything, but the feeling wasn’t strong enough to make me argue. My voice betrayed my inner uneasiness, but all I said was:
“If we fetch the baby back from the institution, do you think we can get him to adapt to life with us ?”
“I was thinking about that for ages last night, Mitsu, and I began to feel that if only we have the courage we can make a start on it at least,” she said in a voice pathetic in its obvious physical and spiritual exhaustion. Afraid she might faint and fall, I wriggled and kicked down with my feet, struggling to haul myself up onto the floor as quickly as possible. But I got stuck, and it was a long time before I finally scrambled up to ground level. Then, as I walked toward her, I heard a voice inside me reciting quite simply what Takashi’s bodyguards had said when they announced their plan to get married: “Now that we don’t have Taka, we’ll have to manage by ourselves.” And I had no mind to squash the voice into silence.
“I made a kind of bet with myself—that if only you came out of there safely you’d accept my suggestion. I was on tenterhooks all night long,” she said in a tearful, naively apprehensive voice, and trembled more violently than ever.
One day soon after, my wife, who was wary of traveling in case it affected the unborn baby, made up her mind to cross the bridge, on which repair work had already started, and leave the hollow. That morning, a man came from the valley to say good-bye to us, bringing with him a newly made wooden mask. It represented a human face like a split pomegranate, and the closed eyes were studded with countless nails. The man was the tatami maker who had once absconded from the valley and had been summoned back from the town to help revive the Nembutsu dance that summer. Now he was working again, making mats for the valley assembly hall, which was due to be restored with funds specially allotted at the time of the merger, and for various other places where jobs had been found for him. And at the same time he was planning different costumes for each of the “spirits” Li the dance. We presented him with the jacket and trousers that Takashi had had on when he came back from America, for use by the performer who wore the mask of Takashi’s “spirit.”
“Lots of young fellows have said they want to come down from the forest in this mask,” the tatami maker said proudly. “They’re already arguing about it among themselves.”
We passed through the forest, my wife and the unborn baby and I, as we left the hollow in which, in all probability, we would never set foot again. As a “s
pirit,” Takashi’s memory was the common property of the valley; there was no need for us to tend his grave. The work awaiting me away from the hollow, in the days while Natsumi tried to bring our newly reclaimed son back into our world and simultaneously prepared for the birth of the other child, would mean a life of sweat and grime in Africa. Shouting commands in Swahili from beneath my sun helmet, typing English day and night, I would be too busy to consider what was going on inside me. As chief interpreter for the expedition, I could hardly persuade myself that an elephant with “Expectation” painted on its huge gray belly would come lumbering out before my eyes as we lay in wait among the grass of the plains, but now that I’d accepted the job there were moments when I felt that, at any rate, it was the beginning of a new life. It would be easy there, at least, to build myself that thatched hut.
BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB
Waguih Ghali
Born and brought up in Cairo, Waguih Ghali spent much of his adult life in Europe. His stay in London and his suicide in 1969 were described in After a Funeral, by Diana Athill. Beer in the Snooker Club is his only novel. First published in 1964, it is a classic of migrant literature. Known and loved by readers and writers since first publication, it is now a Serpent’s
Tail Classic, with a new foreword by Diana Athill.
‘Beer in the Snooker Club is one of the best novels about Egypt ever written. In the protagonist, Ram, a passionate nationalist who is nonetheless an anglophile, Waguih Ghali creates a hero who is tragic, funny and sympathetic. Through him we are presented with an authentic and acutely observed account of Egyptian society at a time of great upheaval’