The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe Read Free Book Online

still drunker, but that I’m afraid to slip out of the pleasant state I’ve reached.”
    It was fear and disgust in various forms that drove her down into drunkenness. But like a wounded duck that dives beneath the water, she knew that to surface would mean encountering an immediate hail of anxieties, so she was never entirely free from the fear and disgust, even in her drunkenness. When she drank, her eyes became unusually bloodshot; the fact worried her, and on one occasion she’d said, obviously haunted by the analogy with the traumatic birth of our poor baby, “In Korean folk tales they say that a woman whose eyes are red like plums has eaten human flesh.”
    The smell of her whisky-sodden breath hung about the room. The effect of my beer had already worn off, and every time she breathed out I was aware of it with the sharp regularity of a pulse. The heating worked too well, and we’d opened the double windows of our room to let in some air. Suddenly, the fierce roar of a belated jet tore in like a whirlwind through the narrow gap. I set my single eye, lonely fighter with reactions dulled by fatigue, roving frantically in search of theplane that must have arrived. But all it found was two parallel-moving lights on the point of disappearing into the depths of the milky darkness.
    It was the engines of a jet taking off that had so startled me. Realizing the truth of this, I was nonetheless taken in more than once in the same way, though takeoffs were few and far between by now and the whole airport had a half-paralyzed look. The night alone still stood there, helpless, with nowhere to flee before the mercilessly searching lights. The planes huddled still, the color of dried fish amid a chaos of glowing blues and hot oranges.
    Silent in our room, we went on patiently waiting for the delayed plane. My brother’s return could have little positive significance for my wife and me, whatever might be true of his bodyguards, yet all of us there waited as intently as though he were bringing back some force that would set something basic in motion in each of us.
    With a small cry, Momoko shot upright on the bed. She’d been asleep, curled up like a fetus on top of the cover. Hoshio, who had been stretched out on the floor, got up slowly and went over to the bed. My wife sat with the whisky tumbler still gripped in her hand and her head held erect like a weasel. I remained standing vacantly with my back to the blind. Powerless to do anything for this girl in the grip of her own dreams, we stared at the inverted triangle of her face, pinched with tension and wet with a stream of tears that gleamed white like vaseline in the light from the Braun tube.
    “The plane’s crashed,” she sobbed. “It’s burning! It’s burning!”
    “No plane’s crashed, stop crying,” the youth said resentfully in a rough voice, apparently ashamed on her behalf.
    “Summer … summer!” she breathed and, sinking back onto the bed again, curled up and moved on to another, different dream.
    The air in the room was indeed hot enough for summer. My palms were beginning to sweat. Why, I asked myself, should a couple of kids feel such an intense need for my brother as their guardian deity that they would wait all through the long night, overwrought even in their dreams ? Was my brother the type to fulfill their expectations ? With a sense of pity for his young friends, I spoke to Hoshio.
    “Won’t you have just a little whisky?”
    “No thank you.”
    “Do you mean to say you’ve never touched liquor?”
    “Me? I used to drink. After I left my part-time high school, while I was working as a laborer, I’d work for three days then on the fourthI’d drink gin nonstop from morning to night. Sometimes I had a short sleep, but one way or the other I was always drunk—drunk awake or drunk asleep. I had some pretty weird dreams.” He spoke in a voice unexpectedly hoarse with feeling.
    He came to stand by my side, thrusting his back against the