The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe Read Free Book Online Page B

touching in its unexpectedness. Then as I averted my gaze from his pitifully working face, he left me and went and lay beside his comrade on the bed. Not a further sound was heard from him.
    I retrieved from near my wife’s feet the whisky bottle and a paper cup that had come with a packed lunch for sightseers at the airport, and drank some of the raw, evil-smelling stuff. She bought only the cheapest whisky. It burned my throat and I sputtered briefly.
    “Hey, Rat—” my wife called to me, “are you going to spend all night staring at the airfield? I’ve got something to say to you.” She was dispassionate, comfortably submerged at her standard level of intoxication.
    Carefully clutching the whisky bottle and cup, I went and sat by her knees.
    “What do you think we should say if Taka asks about the baby?”
    “We don’t have to say anything, do we?”
    “But if he asks next why I’m drinking, I won’t be able to keep quiet,” she said, displaying the cool objectivity that drunkenness always gave her. “Though of course if I answer either question it’ll remove the necessity to answer the other, which makes things simpler.”
    “Not so simple. If you understood the causal relationship between the two things as well as you think you do, you would already have got the better of both the matter of the baby and your drinking problem. You would be sober and pregnant with a new baby.”
    “I wonder whether Takashi’ll lecture me too? ‘Quit drinking! Life should be lived sober!’ The trouble is,” she added flatly, “I’ve no desire to be reeducated.” I poured some more whisky into her glass. “Don’t you think he may be expecting us to bring the baby here to meet him?”
    “He’s not of an age to go imagining anything so definite about any baby. He’s hardly grown up himself yet.”
    She seemed to be gazing at a vision of the baby somewhere between her own left knee and my right. Balancing her tumbler precariously on the arm of the chair, she stretched out her now empty hand and seemed to sketch the outline of a plump or heavily swaddled baby in a single continuous motion that heightened my awkwardness and general sense of indignation.
    “I’ve a feeling, for instance, Taka might bring a teddy bear or something for the baby, which would put us all on the spot.”
    “I don’t imagine he’s got the money to buy teddy bears,” I said, realizing as I spoke that although I didn’t want her to talk about the baby to my brother on the first occasion she met him, I was equally reluctant to have the task fall to me.
    “Is he the sensitive or the thick-skinned type?”
    “He’s a mixture—very sensitive in some ways, very insensitive in others. Anyway, he’s not a particularly desirable type for you to be introduced to in your present condition.” On the bed the young man stirred, then curled up like a threatened wood louse and hemmed feebly. Takashi’s henchman had made a mild protest.
    “I don’t want to be cross-questioned by anybody,” she said defensively, abruptly excited and just as suddenly subdued, as though she’dspoken at the very moment when the ball of emotion, tossed into the air, had reached its point of rest.
    “Nor do you have to,” I said comfortingly, in case she should start on the interminable descent of some inner spiral staircase of hysterical self-loathing or self-pity. “There’s no reason for you to be especially afraid of Takashi. You’re just tense because you’re meeting a new member of the family. There’s nothing else to fear—not that I think you are afraid.” I poured another shot of whisky into her tumbler. If she wasn’t going to make up her own mind to sleep, she must be made to go one step beyond her usual level of drunkenness. Her mind, always suggestible, was threatened, was besieged by something, some evil specter worse than any physical pain.
    She took a sip of whisky, plainly fighting against nausea. Straining my one eye, tired and aching