The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (15 page)

Though Ryuji didn’t realize it, the distant influence of the sea was at work on him again: he was unable to distinguish the most exhaulted feelings from the meanest, and suspected that essentially important things did not occur on land. No matter how hard he tried to reach a realistic decision, shore matters remained suffused with the hues of fantasy.

In the first place, it would be a mistake to interpret literally Fusako’s plea that he beat Noboru. Sooner or later, he knew, she would come to feel grateful for his leniency. Besides, he found himself believing in the paternal instinct. As he hurried to banish from his mind merely dutiful concern for this reticent, precocious, bothersome child, this boy whom he didn’t really love, Ryuji managed to convince himself that he was brimming with genuine fatherly affection. It seemed to him besides that he was discovering the emotion for the first time, and he was surprised at the unpredictability of his affections.

“I see,” he said again, lowering himself slowly to the floor and crossing his legs.

“You sit down too, Mother. I’ve been thinking, and it seems to me that Noboru isn’t the only one to blame for what’s happened. When I came into this house, Son, your life changed too. Not that it was wrong for me to come, but your life
did
change, and it’s natural for a boy in junior high school to feel curious about changes in his life. What you did was wrong, there’s no question about that, but from now on I want you to direct that curiosity toward your school work, do you understand?

“You have nothing to say about what you saw. And nothing to ask. You’re not a child any more and someday we’ll be able to laugh together and talk about what’s happened here as three adults. Mother, I want you to calm down too. We’re going to forget about the past and face the future happily, hand in hand. I’ll seal that hole up in the morning and then we can all forget this whole unpleasant evening. Right? What do you say, Noboru?”

Noboru listened feeling as though he were about to suffocate.
Can this man be saying things like that? This splendid hero who once shone so brightly?

Every word burned like fire. He wanted to scream, as his mother had screamed:
How can you do this to me?
The sailor was saying things he was never meant to say. Ignoble things in wheedling, honeyed tones, fouled words not meant to issue from his lips until Doomsday, words such as men mutter in stinking lairs. And he was speaking proudly, for he believed in himself, was satisfied with the role of father he had stepped forward to accept.

He is satisfied
. Noboru felt nauseous. Tomorrow Ryuji’s slavish hands, the hands of a father puttering over carpentry of a Sunday afternoon, would close forever the narrow access to that unearthly brilliance which he himself had once revealed.

“Right? What do you say, Son?” Ryuji concluded, clapping a hand on Noboru’s shoulder. He tried to shake free and couldn’t. He was thinking that the chief had been right: there were worse things than being beaten.

N
OBORU
asked the chief to call an emergency meeting: on their way home from school, the boys convened at the swimming pool next to the foreign cemetery.

Climbing down a horse’s back of a hill thick with giant oaks was one way to reach the pool. At midslope they stopped and gazed through the evergreen trees at the cemetery below: quartz sparkled in the winter light.

From this point on the hill, the tombstones and stone crosses ranged in long terraced rows were all facing away from them. The inky green of sago palm bloomed among the graves; greenhouse flower cuttings laid in the shadows of stone crosses brightened the lawn with unseasonable reds and greens.

Above the rooftops in the valley loomed the Marine Tower, the foreigners’ graves lay to the right, and in a smaller valley to the left, the pool waited. In the off season, the bleachers there made an excellent meeting place.

Tripping over bared tree roots which swelled like tumid black blood vessels across the face of the slope, the boys scrambled down the hill and broke onto the withered grass path that led into the evergreens surrounding the pool. The pool was drained, and very quiet. The blue paint on the bottom was chipping; dry leaves had piled up in the corners. The blue steel ladder stopped far short of the bottom. Banking into the west now, the sun was hidden behind the cliffs which enclosed the valley like folding screens: dusk had come already to the bottom of the pool.

Noboru trailed along behind the others: he could still see in his mind the backs of all those endless foreign graves—graves and crosses all turned away from him. Then what would this place in back be called, this place where they were?

They sat in a diamond on the blackened concrete bleachers. Noboru took out of his briefcase a slim notebook and handed it to the chief without a word. Inked on the cover in venomous red was: “Charges against Ryuji Tsukazaki.”

Craning their necks to see, the boys read the text together. It was an excerpt from Noboru’s diary; the dresser-drawer incident of the night before brought to eighteen the number of entries.

“This is awful,” the chief mourned. “This last one alone is worth about thirty-five points. And the total—let’s see—even if you go easy and call this first charge five points, they get worse the closer they get to the end: I’m afraid the total’s way over a hundred and fifty. I didn’t realize it was quite this bad. We’re going to have to do something about this.”

As he listened to the chief, Noboru began to tremble. Finally he asked: “Is there any chance of saving him?”

“None at all. It’s too bad, though.”

A long silence followed. This the chief interpreted as indicating a lack of courage and he began to speak again, twisting between his fingers the tough vein of a dried leaf he had pulverized: “All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty. I know I’ve said this before, but have you ever thought about it carefully? Because to assume for those reasons that we are permitted to do anything we want is sloppy thinking. As a matter of fact, we are the ones who do the permitting. Teachers, schools, fathers, society—we permit all those garbage heaps. And not because we’re powerless either. Permitting is our special privilege and if we felt any pity at all we wouldn’t be able to permit this ruthlessly. What it amounts to is that we are constantly permitting unpermissible things. There are only a very few really permissible things: like the sea, for example—”

“And ships,” Noboru added.

“Right—anyway, very few. And if they conspire against us, it’s just as if your own dog were to bite a hunk out of your hand. It’s a direct insult to our special privilege.”

“We’ve never done anything about it before,” interrupted number one.

“That doesn’t mean we’re never going to,” the chief answered adroitly, his voice benign. “But getting back to Ryuji Tsukazaki,” he continued, “he’s never meant much to the group as a whole, but for number three he was a person of considerable importance. At least he’s credited with having shown number three some luminous evidence of the internal order of life I’ve mentioned so often. But then he betrayed number three. He became the worst thing on the face of this earth, a father. And something has to be done. It would have been much better if he’d just stayed the useless sailor he started out to be.

“As I’ve said before, life consists of simple symbols and decisions. Ryuji may not have have known it, but he was one of those symbols. At least, according to number three’s testimony it
seems
that he was.

“I’m sure you all know where our duty lies. When a gear slips out of place it’s our job to force it back into position. If we don’t, order will turn to chaos. We all know that the world is empty and that the important thing, the only thing, is to try to maintain order in that emptiness. And so we are guards, and more than that because we also have executive power to insure that order is maintained.”

The chief stated the conclusion simply: “We’ll have to pass sentence. In the long run it’s for his own good. Number three! Do you remember that day on the pier when I said there was only one way to make him a hero again, and that soon I’d be able to tell you what it was?”

“I remember,” Noboru answered, trying to keep his legs from trembling.

“Well, the time has come.”

The other boys sought each other’s faces, then sat motionless and silent. They understood the grave importance of what the chief was about to say.

They gazed into the empty, dusk-shadowed pool. White lines were painted on the chipped blue bottom. The dry leaves in the corners had sifted in like dust.

At that moment, the pool was terrifically deep. Deeper and deeper as watery blue darkness seeped up from the bottom. The knowledge, so certain it was sensuous, that nothing was there to support the body if one plunged in generated around the empty pool an unremitting tension. Gone now was the soft summer water that received the swimmer’s body and bore him lightly afloat, but the pool, like a monument to summer and to water, had endured, and it was dangerous, lethal.

The blue steel ladder crept over the edge and down into the pool and, still far from the bottom, stopped. Nothing there to support a body, nothing at all!

“Classes are over at two tomorrow; we can have him meet us here and then take him out to our dry dock at Sugita. Number three, it’s up to you to lure him down here somehow.

“I’m going to give the rest of you instructions now. Please remember what you’re supposed to bring. I’ll take care of the sleeping pills and the scalpel myself. We won’t be able to handle a powerful man like that unless we knock him out first. Adults are supposed to take one to three tablets of that German stuff we’ve got at home, so he should go out like a light if we give him about seven. I’ll make powder out of the tablets so they’ll dissolve quicker in tea.

“Number one, you’re to bring some six-foot lengths of strong hemp rope; you’d better have—let’s see—one, two, three, four—make it five lengths just to be sure. Number two, you prepare a thermos of hot tea and hide it in your briefcase. Since number three has the job of getting him down here, he doesn’t have to bring anything. We’ll need sugar and spoons, and paper cups for us and a dark-colored plastic cup for him—that’ll be your job, number four. Number five, you get some cloth for a blindfold and a towel we can use for a gag.

“You can each bring any kind of cutting tool you like—knives, saws, whatever you prefer.

“We’ve already practiced the essentials on a cat and this’ll be the same, so there’s nothing to worry about. The job’s a little bigger this time, that’s all—and it may stink a little worse.”

The boys sat dumb as stones and stared into the empty pool.

“Are you scared, number one?” Number one managed a slight shake of his head.

“How about you, number two?” As though suddenly cold, the boy stuffed his hands into his overcoat pockets.

“What’s wrong, number three?” Noboru was gasping for breath, his mouth utterly dry as if stuffed with straw: he couldn’t answer.

“That’s what I was afraid of. You’re all great talkers, but when the chips are down you haven’t got one thimbleful of nerve. Well, maybe this will make you feel better; I brought it along just in case.” The chief produced from his briefcase an ocher lawbook and deftly flipped it open to the page he wanted.

“I want all of you to listen carefully: ‘Penal Code, Article Fourteen,’” he read.
“‘Acts of juveniles less than fourteen years of age are not punishable by law.’
I’ll read it again as loud as I can:
‘Acts of tuveniles less than fourteen years of age are not punishable by law.’”

The chief had the others pass the book around while he continued: “You might say that our fathers and the fictitious society they believe in passed this law for our benefit. And I think we should be grateful to them. This law is the adults’ way of expressing the high hopes they have for us. But it also represents all the dreams they’ve never been able to make come true. They’ve assumed just because they’ve roped themselves so tight they can’t even budge that we must be helpless too; they’ve been careless enough to allow us here, and only here, a glimpse of blue sky and absolute freedom.

“This law they’ve written is a kind of nursery tale, a pretty deadly nursery tale, I’d say. And in a way it’s understandable. After all, up to now we
have
been nursery kids, adorable, defenseless, innocent kids.

“But three of us here will be fourteen next month—myself, number one, and you, number three. And you other three will be fourteen in March. Just think about it a minute. This is our last chance!”

The chief scrutinized their faces and saw tension easing out of their cheeks, fear dwindling away. Awakening for the first time to society’s sweet cordiality, the boys felt secure in the knowledge that their enemies were actually their protectors.

Noboru looked up at the sky. Afternoon blue was fading into the sifting grays of dusk. Suppose Ryuji tried at the height of his heroic death throes to look up at this hallowed sky? It seemed a shame to blindfold him.

“This is our last chance,” the chief repeated. “If we don’t act now we will never again be able to obey freedom’s supreme command, to perform the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world, unless we are prepared to sacrifice our lives. And you can see that it’s absurd for the executioners to risk their own lives. If we don’t act now we’ll never be able to steal again, or murder, or do any of the things that testify to man’s freedom. We’ll end up puking flattery and gossip, trembling our days away in submission and compromise and fear, worrying about what the neighbors are doing, living like squealing mice. And someday we’ll get married, and have kids, and finally we’ll become fathers, the vilest things on earth!

“We must have blood! Human blood! If we don’t get it this empty world will go pale and shrivel up. We must drain that sailor’s fresh lifeblood and transfuse it to the dying universe, the dying sky, the dying forests, and the drawn, dying land.