The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (14 page)

“Everything I’ve done has been for you, dear—everything. There isn’t another man in this world as strong and as gentle and as wonderful in every way as Mr. Tsukazaki. Noboru, I want you to call Mr. Tsukazaki Papa now; we’re going to be married early next month and we’ll invite lots of friends and have a lovely party.”

Ryuji had averted his eyes from Noboru’s impassive face and was engrossed in drinking, adding crystal sugar to the Lao-chu wine, stirring, tossing off the cup, and pouring himself another. He was afraid of seeming brazen to the boy.

Noboru knew that he was being feared as well as pitied, and the gentle threat had made him drunk: when he leveled the full iciness of his heart at the adults, a smile was playing at the corners of his mouth. It was hardly more than a wisp of a smile, the kind you see on the face of a schoolboy who has come to class unprepared but cocksure as a man leaping off a cliff; and yet, on the other side of the red formica table, Ryuji saw it out of the corner of his eye and snatched it up. Again, a misunderstanding. The grin he flashed back was the same brand of exaggerated glee as his smile that day near the park when, to Noboru’s intense disappointment and humiliation, he had appeared in a dripping-wet shirt.

“Fair enough. Then I won’t call you Noboru any more. From now on, it’s Son. What do you say, Son. Shake hands with Dad.” Ryuji placed one hard open hand on the table; Noboru struggled toward it as though he were paddling under water. No matter how he stretched, Ryuji’s fingers seemed just beyond reach. At last their hands met, thick fingers grappled his own, and the hot, calloused handshake began. Noboru felt a whirlwind catch him up and spin him away toward the tepid, formless world he dreaded most. . . .

That night, as soon as Fusako had left his room and closed the door without locking it, Noboru’s head began to swim. Hard heart . . . hard heart: he tried repeating the words to himself, but that only made him want to hold the genuine article in his hand. Hard as an iron anchor. . . .

Before leaving the room, his mother had turned off the gas heater. Now heat and cold were mingled in a fold of tepid air. If he could just brush his teeth, put on his pajamas in a hurry, and bundle into bed, he would be all right.

But an evasive languor made even removing his turtleneck sweater seem a wearisome task. Never had he waited so anxiously for his mother to reappear, to come back to his room, for example, to mention something she had forgotten to say. Nor had he ever felt such contempt for her.

He waited in the gradually mounting cold. And, weary of waiting, he abandoned himself to an absurd fantasy. His mother had come back and she was shouting:
It was all a lie. I’m so sorry to have made a game out of fooling you. Will you forgive me? We are most certainly not going to get married. If we did a thing like that the world would turn to chaos: ten tankers would sink in the harbor, and a thousand trains would be derailed; the glass in the windows all over the city would shatter, and every lovely rose would turn black as coal
.

But she did not come back and finally Noboru contrived a situation in which her return would mean real trouble. He could no longer distinguish cause from effect: possibly this unreasonable yearning for his mother was due to a desire to wound her even if he had to share the pain.

The courage propelling him now was frightening: his hands began to temble. He hadn’t touched the dresser since the night Fusako had stopped locking his door. There was a reason: shortly after Ryuji’s return on the morning of December 30, he had observed them through the peephole and managed to watch the progression of merging shapes to its dazzling climax; but the danger in sneaking into the wall in broad daylight, with the door not even locked, had discouraged him from risking the adventure again.

But now he felt like invoking curses, and longed for a small revolution. If he were really a genius and the world mere emptiness, then why shouldn’t he have the ability to prove it? He would have only to open a tiny crack in the glossy teacup of a world the adults believed in.

Noboru bolted to the dresser and seized the handle. Ordinarily he removed the drawer as quietly as possible but this time he wrenched it loose and dropped it to the floor. Then he stood and listened. Not a sound in response from anywhere in the house, no footsteps thudding up the stairs, nothing. The stillness drowned out everything but the pounding in his chest.

Noboru looked at his watch. It was only ten o’clock. Then a strange plot took shape in his mind: he would do his homework inside the dresser. The irony was beautiful, and what better way to mock the meanness of their suspicions?

Taking a flashlight and some English word cards, he wriggled into the chest. A mysterious force would draw his mother to the room. She would find him in the chest and guess his purpose. Shame and rage would inflame her. She would haul him out of the dresser and slap his face; then he would show her the word cards and protest, with eyes as innocent as a lamb’s: “But what did I do wrong? I was only studying. It’s easier to concentrate in a small space. . . .” He stopepd imagining the episode and laughed out loud, gasping in the dusty air.

The moment he huddled inside the chest he was calm again. The trembling and the trepidation seemed almost funny now; he even had a feeling he would be able to study well. Not that it really mattered: this was the world’s outer edge. So long as he was here, Noboru was in contact with the naked universe. No matter how far you ran, escape beyond this point was impossible.

Bending his arms in the cramped space, he began to read the cards in the light of the flashlight.

He didn’t even turn off the flashlight, sinking, before he knew it, into sleep.

It was close to midnight when Ryuji and Fusako went up to the bedroom. The announcement at dinner had relieved them of a great weight and they felt that a new phase was beginning.

But when it was time to go to bed, a strange shame stirred in Fusako. All evening she had discussed matters of importance, touched too lingeringly on the emotions of kinship, and now, in addition to a deep sense of quiet and relief, she felt embarrassed in the presence of something she couldn’t name, something unaccountably sacred.

Choosing a black negligee she knew Ryuji liked, Fusako got into bed and, disregarding for the first time Ryuji’s preference for a brightly lighted room, asked him to turn out all the lights. He embraced her in the dark.

When it was done Fusako said: “I thought I wouldn’t feel embarrassed if all the lights were out, but it was just the opposite. The darkness becomes a huge eye and you feel as if you’re being watched the whole time.”

Ryuji laughed at her nervousness and glanced around the room. The curtains on the windows shut out all the light from the street. The gas heater burning in one corner gave off a pale reflection of bluish light. It was just like the night sky above a small distant city. The frail luster of the brass bedposts trembled in the darkness.

Then Ryuji’s eye fell on the wainscot along the wall adjoining the next room. From one spot on the ornately carved wooden border, light was trickling into the room.

“I wonder what that is,” he mused aloud. “Do you think Noboru’s still up? You know, this place is getting pretty run-down. I’d better seal that up in the morning.”

Like a serpent coiling for a strike, Fusako lifted her bare white neck from the bed and peered through the darkness at the point of light. She comprehended with terrific speed. One motion carried her out of bed and into a dressing gown; then she bolted from the room without a word. Ryuji called after her but there was no answer.

He heard Noboru’s door open. Silence. A muffled sound that might have been Fusako crying: Ryuji slid out of bed. He paced the floor in the darkness trying to decide whether he should go straight in or wait and finally, sitting down on the couch near the window, lit a cigarette.

Noboru started awake as something ferociously strong hauled him out of the dresser by the seat of his pants. For a minute, he didn’t realize what had happened. His mother’s slender, supple hands were falling on his nose and lips and mouth and he couldn’t hold his eyes open. It was the first time she had ever laid a hand on him.

He lay almost prostrate on the floor, one of his legs thrust into a tangle of shirts and underwear scattered when they had stumbled over the drawer. He hadn’t imagined his mother could muster such terrific strength.

Finally he managed to look up at the panting figure glaring down at him.

The skirts of her dark-blue robe were wide open, the fleshy swells of her lower body looked grotesquely massive and threatening. Soaring high above the gradually tapering trunk was her face, gasping, grieved, turned horribly old in an instant and drenched in tears. The bulb on the distant ceiling wreathed her bedraggled hair with a lunatic halo.

All this Noboru took in at a glance and at the back of his icy brain a memory stirred: it was as if he had participated in this same moment a long time ago. This, beyond a doubt, was the punishment scene he had watched so often in his dreams.

His mother began to sob and, still glaring down at him through her tears, screamed in tones he could scarcely understand: “It’s humiliating—it’s just so humiliating! My own son, a filthy, disgusting thing like that—I could die this very minute! Oh, Noboru, how could you have done this to me!”

To his surprise, Noboru discovered that he had lost all desire to protest that he had been studying English. But that didn’t make any difference now. Obviously, his mother was not mistaken; and she had brushed against “reality,” a thing she dreaded worse than leeches. In one sense, that made them more nearly equal now than they had ever been: it was almost empathy. Pressing his palms to his reddened, burning cheeks, Noboru resolved to watch carefully how a person drawn so near could retreat in one fleeting instant to an unattainable distance. Clearly it was not the discovery of reality itself that had spawned her indignation and her grief: Noboru knew that his mother’s shame and her despair derived from a kind of prejudice. She had been quick to interpret the reality, and inasmuch as her banal interpretation was the cause of all her agitation, no clever excuse from him would be to any purpose.

“I’m afraid this is more than I can handle,” Fusako said finally, her voice ominously quiet. “A frightening child like this is too much for me. . . . You just wait a minute! I’m going to see that Father punishes you so that you won’t dare think of this kind of thing again.” It was clear that Fusako expected her threat to make Noboru cry and apologize.

But then her resolution faltered; for the first time, she considered dealing with the problem later. If she could get Noboru to apologize before Ryuji came into the room, she would be able to hide the details from him and save her pride as a mother. Then the tears and the apology would have to come quickly; but she couldn’t suggest that mother and son conspire to resolve the problem, for she had threatened that the father would punish him. She could only wait in silence.

But Noboru didn’t say a word. He was interested only in the ultimate destination of the great engine now in motion. In that dark hole inside the chest he had stood at the outermost limit of his world, at the edge of the seas and the deserts. And because all things took life there, because he was to be punished for having been there, he could not return to the tepid towns of men, nor lower his face to their tear-moistened lawns. On the oath he had sworn to that beautiful pinnacle of humanity swathed in the roar of that horn, sworn to the gleaming representatives of order he had seen through the peephole that summer night, he could never turn back again.

The door opened tentatively and Ryuji peeked into the room.

Fusako saw that she and her son had lost an opportunity, and she grew angry again. Either Ryuji should have stayed away altogether or he should have come in with her at the beginning.

Irritated by Ryuji’s clumsy entrance and struggling to align her feelings, Fusako became more furiously angry at Noboru than before.

“Would you mind telling me what’s going on here?” Ryuji said as he came into the room.

“I want you to punish him, Father. If this child isn’t beaten within an inch of his life the evil in him will keep getting worse. He was spying on us through a hole in the chest there.”

“Is that right, Son?” There was no anger in Ryuji’s voice.

Still sprawled on the floor, his legs flung out in front of him, Noboru nodded.

“I see. . . . Well, I suppose the idea just sort of hit you all of a sudden and you tried it tonight?”

Noboru shook his head emphatically.

“Oh? Then you’ve done the same thing maybe once or twice before?”

Again Noboru shook his head.

“Then this has been going on from the very beginning?”

Seeing the boy nod, Fusako and Ryuji exchanged involuntary glances. Noboru had a pleasant vision of the lightning in the adults’ gaze illuminating the life on shore that Ryuji dreamed about and Fusako’s wholesome household as they crashed noisily into rubble—but his excitement had led him to overestimate the power of his imagination. He had been expecting an impassioned reaction.

“I see” was all Ryuji said. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his bathrobe. The hairy legs protruding below the robe were directly in front of Noboru’s face.

Now Ryuji was obliged to reach a father’s decision, the first decision about shore life he had ever been forced to make. But his memory of the sea’s fury was tempering his critical notons of land and the landsman with inordinate mildness, and his instinctive approach to problems was therefore thwarted. To beat the boy would be easy enough, but a difficult future awaited him. He would have to receive their love with dignity, to deliver them from daily dilemmas, to balance daily accounts; he was expected in some vague, general way to comprehend the incomprehensible feelings of the mother and the child and to become an infallible teacher, perceiving the causes of a situation even as unconscionable as this one: he was dealing here with no ocean squall but the gentle breeze that blows ceaselessly over the land.