Personal Matter

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “The crisis should come today or tomorrow,” the doctor said. Bird peered at the baby rubbing its head as before with its large, red hands held up above its ears. The baby’s ears were identical to Bird’s, rolled in against its head. “I appreciate all you’re doing,” Bird said in a whisper, as if he were afraid the baby would hear. Then he quickly bowed to the doctor, his cheeks on fire, and hurried out of the ward.

  The minute the door closed Bird regretted not having made clear his desire to the doctor once again. He put his hands behind his ears as he walked along the corridor and began to rub his head just below the hairline with the fleshy pads of his thumbs. Gradually he arched backward, as if a heavy weight were attached to his head. He stopped short a minute later when he realized he was imitating the baby’s gestures, and glanced around him nervously. At the corner of the corridor, standing in front of a drinking fountain, two women from the maternity ward were staring blankly in his direction. Feeling his stomach heave, Bird turned toward the main wing and broke into a run.

  Bird’s friend spotted him from the restaurant as he slowly drove by looking for a parking place, and he came out into the street. When Bird finally managed to park, he looked at his watch. Thirty minutes late. His friend’s face as he approached was moldy with impatience.

  “The car belongs to a friend,” Bird said in embarrassed justification of the MG. “Sorry I’m late. Is everybody here?”

  “Just you and me. The others went to that protest rally at Hibiya Park.”

  “Oh, that,” Bird said. He remembered knowing at breakfast that Himiko was reading about the Soviet bomb in the paper and not feeling the least involved himself. Right now my primary worry is personal, a grotesque baby, I’ve turned my back on the real world. It’s all right for those others to participate in global destiny with their protest rallies: a baby with a lump on its head doesn’t have its teeth in them.

  “None of the others want to get involved with Mr. Delchef, that’s why they went down to the park.” His friend glanced at Bird irritably, as if he disapproved of Bird’s simple acceptance of the others’ absence. “A few thousand people protesting on the mall in Hibiya Park isn’t going to get anyone in trouble with Mr. Khrushchev personally!”

  Bird considered each member of the study group. There was no denying that deep involvement with Mr. Delchef now could lead to trouble for all of them. Several were employed by first-rate export houses, others were with the Foreign Office or taught at universities. In the event that the newspapers picked up the Delchef incident and treated it as a scandal, their situation was certain to be awkward if their superiors should discover that they were associated with the man in any way. Not one of them was as free as Bird, instructor at a cram-school and soon to be fired.

  “What are we going to do?” Bird prompted his friend.

  “There’s nothing we can do. It seems to me our only choice is to refuse the legation’s request for help.”

  “You’ve decided you don’t want to get involved with Mr. Delchef either?” Bird asked merely out of interest with no ulterior motives, yet his friend’s eyes reddened suddenly and he glowered at Bird, as if he had been insulted. Bird realized with surprise that he had been expected to approve at once of turning down the legation’s request.

  “But look at this from Mr. Delchef’s point of view,” Bird objected quietly. His friend submerged in peevish silence. “Allowing us to persuade him to come back may be his last chance. Didn’t they say they’d have to go to the police if we failed? Knowing that, I don’t see how we can refuse with a clear conscience!”

  “If Mr. Delchef let himself be persuaded by us, fine, great! But if it didn’t go well and this developed into a scandal, we’d find ourselves in the middle of an international incident!” Avoiding Bird’s face, the friend spoke with his eyes on the gutted sheep’s belly that was the driver’s seat of the MG. “It just doesn’t seem wise to me to mess with Mr. Delchef while all this is going on.”

  Bird could feel his friend imploring him to agree without further argument; the plea was so naked it was sad. But awesome words like scandal and international incident failed entirely to impress him. Even now he was over his head in the scandal of the bizarre baby, and the domestic incident created by the baby had a firmer and more poignant hold on the scruff of his neck than any international incident could ever have. Bird was free of the fear of all the pitfalls he supposed must be concealed around Mr. Delchef’s person. And he noticed now for the first time since the trouble with the baby had begun that the breadth of his life from day to day permitted him a far larger than ordinary margin of action. He was even amused by the irony.

  “If you decide to turn down the legation appeal as a group, I’d like to meet Mr. Delchef on my own. I was close to him, and even if the incident does come out in the open and I get involved in a scandal, well, it isn’t going to bother me particularly.”

  Bird was looking for something that would occupy him today and tomorrow, the new period of reprieve the doctor’s words had granted him. Besides, he honestly wanted a look at Mr. Delchef’s life as a recluse.

  The instant Bird accepted, his friend turned to gold, so swift was the alchemy that Bird on his part was a little embarrassed: “If you feel that’s what you want to do, go ahead! I can’t think of anything better,” the friend said with feverish conviction. “To tell the truth, I was hoping you’d agree to take the job on. The others got cold feet the minute they heard the news about Mr. Delchef, but you were as composed and detached as could be. Bird, I admired you for that!”

  Bird smiled blandly, not wishing to offend his suddenly loquacious friend. At the moment, as long as the baby was not involved, his capacity for calm detachment was infinite. But that was no reason, he thought bitterly, for the rest of Tokyo’s millions without the shackles of a grotesque baby around their necks to feel envious of him.

  “I’ll tell you what, I’ll treat you to lunch,” the friend proposed eagerly. “Let’s have a beer first.”

  Bird nodded, and they walked back to the restaurant together. They were seated across a table and had called for beer when Bird’s elated friend said: “Bird, did you have that habit of rubbing behind your ears with your thumbs when we were in school together?”

  As he edged into the narrow alley that opened like a crack between a Korean restaurant and a bar, Bird wondered if there wasn’t another exit hidden in this labyrinth. According to the map his friend had drawn for him, he had just entered a blind alley by the only entrance. The cul-de-sac was shaped like a stomach, a stomach with an obstruction in the duodenum. How could a man leading a fugitive life bury himself in a place as closed in as this and not feel anxious about it? Had Mr. Delchef felt so hounded that no other spot would have done as a hideaway? Chances were, he wasn’t hiding in this alley anymore. Bird cheered himself with the thought, and then he had come to the tenement house at the end of the alley. He stopped at the entrance to what might have been a secret trail to a mountain fortress, and wiped the sweat off his face. The alley itself seemed shady enough, but Bird saw when he looked up at the sky that the fierce sunlight of summer noon covered it like a white-hot platinum net. His face still uplifted to the glitter of the sky, Bird closed his eyes and rubbed his itching head with his thumbs. Suddenly he let his arms fall as if they had been struck down, and snapped his head upright; in the distance, a girl had raised her voice in a lunatic scream.

  With his shoes in one hand, Bird climbed a few stairs that were gritty with dirt and went into the building. The left side of the hallway was lined with prison-like doors. The right side was a blank wall, heavily scrawled on. Bird moved toward the back, checking the numbers on the doors. He could sense people behind each of the doors, yet all of them were closed. Then what did the tenants in this building do about escaping the heat? Was Himiko the forerunner of a tribe propagating wildly all over the city which shut itself up in locked rooms even in the middle of the day? Bird got all the way to the end of the hall and discovered a flight of
steep, narrow stairs hidden away like an inside pocket. Then he happened to look behind him: a large woman was planted in the entranceway, peering in his direction. She was in heavy shadow and so was the hall, for her back shut out the light from the street.

  “What do you want back there?” the woman called, moving as though to shoo a dog away.

  “I’ve just come to visit a foreign friend of mine,” Bird replied in a quaking voice.

  “American?”

  “He’s living with a young Japanese girl.”

  “Ah, why didn’t you say so! The American is the first room on the second floor.” With that, the large woman nimbly vanished. Assuming “the American” was Mr. Delchef, it was clear that he had won a place in the giantess’s affections. Bird was still doubtful as he climbed the unfinished wooden stairs. But then he executed a turn on the particularly narrow landing and there in front of him, his arms extended in welcome though his eyes were puzzled, Mr. Delchef stood. Bird felt a surge of joy: Mr. Delchef was the only tenant in the building with the wholesome good sense to leave his door open as a measure against the heat.

  Bird propped his shoes against the wall in the hallway and then shook hands with Mr. Delchef, who was beaming at him from just inside the door. Like a marathon runner, he wore only a pair of blue shorts and an undershirt; his red hair was cropped short but he sported a bushy and expectably reddish mustache. Bird could find nothing to indicate that the man in front of him was a fugitive—except his stupendous body odor, worthy of a hulking bear of a man though Mr. Delchef was slight of build. Probably he hadn’t found the opportunity to take a bath since secluding himself here.

  When they had exchanged greetings in mutually meager English, Mr. Delchef explained that his girlfriend had just left to have her hair set. Then he invited Bird inside, but Bird pointed to the tatami mat floor and declined with the excuse that his feet were dirty. He wanted to say what he had to say standing in the hall. He was afraid of being stuck in Mr. Delchef’s room.

  Bird could see that the apartment was empty of furniture. A single window was open in the back, but it was obstructed by a severe wooden fence less than a foot away. It was probable that other private lives were being unfurled on the far side of the fence, better not observed from Mr. Delchef’s window.

  “Mr. Delchef, your legation wants you to go back quickly,” Bird said, plunging headlong into his mission.

  “I will not go back; my girlfriend wants me to stay with her,” Mr. Delchef smiled. The poverty and crudeness of their English made the dialogue seem a game. It also permitted them a harsh frankness.

  “I shall be the last messenger. After me someone from the legation will come, or maybe the Japanese police even.”

  “I think the police will not do anything. Please remember, I am still a diplomat.”

  “Perhaps not. But if the people from the legation come and take you away you must be sent back to your own country.”

  “Yes, I am prepared. Since I have caused trouble, I must be assigned to a less important post or I must lose my job as a diplomat.”

  “Therefore, Mr. Delchef, before it becomes a scandal it would be better to return to the legation.”

  “I will not return. My girlfriend wants me to stay,” Mr. Delchef said with a broad smile.

  “Then it is not for political reasons? You are hiding away here simply because of sentimental attachment to your girlfriend?”

  “Yes, precisely.”

  “Mr. Delchef, you are a strange man.”

  “Strange, why?”

  “But your friend cannot speak English, can she?”

  “We understand each other always in silence.”

  A bulb of intolerable sadness was gradually sprouting in Bird.

  “Well, I shall make my report now and the people from the legation will come right away to take you back.”

  “Since I will be taken against my will there is nothing I can do. I think my friend will understand.”

  Bird weakly shook his head in admission of defeat. Sweat sparkled in the fine copper hair around Mr. Delchef’s mustache. Then Bird noticed that brilliant beads of sweat were trembling in the hair all over Mr. Delchef’s body.

  “I shall tell them how you feel,” Bird said, and stopped to pick up his shoes.

  “Bird, was your baby born?”

  “Yes, but the baby is not normal and now I am waiting for it to die.” Bird couldn’t have explained the impulse to confess. “The baby has a brain hernia, the condition is so terrible that the baby appears to have two heads.”

  “Why do you wait for the baby to die when it needs an operation?” Mr. Delchef’s smile vanished and a look of manly courage fiercened the lines of his face.

  “There is not one chance in one hundred that the baby would grow up normally even after surgery,” Bird said in consternation.

  “Kafka, you know, wrote in a letter to his father, the only thing a parent can do for a child is to welcome it when it arrives. And are you rejecting your baby instead? Can we excuse the egotism that rejects another life because a man is a father?”

  Bird was silent, his cheeks and eyes feverish with the violent blushing that had become a new habit. No longer was Mr. Delchef an eccentric foreigner with a red mustache who maintained a humorous presence of mind though his predicament was severe. Bird felt as if he had been downed by a bullet of criticism from an unexpected sniper. He gathered himself to protest at whatever the cost and suddenly hung his head, sensing he had nothing to say to Mr. Delchef.

  “Ah, the poor little thing!” Mr. Delchef said in a whisper. Bird looked up, shuddering, and realized the foreigner was talking not about his baby but about him. Silently he waited for the moment when Mr. Delchef would set him free.

  When Bird was finally able to say good-by, Mr. Delchef presented him with a small English dictionary of his native language. Bird asked his friend to autograph the book. Mr. Delchef wrote a single word in a Balkan language, signed his name beneath it and then explained: “In my country, this means hope.”

  At the narrowest part of the alley, Bird awkwardly crossed paths with a small Japanese girl. Smelling the scent of freshly set hair and seeing the unhealthy whiteness of her neck as the girl squeezed past him with her head lowered, Bird stopped himself from speaking to her. Bird emerged in the dizzying light and ran for the car like a fugitive, sweat cascading down his body. At this hottest hour of the day, he was the only man in the city on the run.

  11

  SUNDAY morning, Bird woke up to find the bedroom brimming with unexpected light and fresh air: the window was wide open, a breeze was making a lightful sweep of the room and blowing into the hall. From the living room came the drone of a vacuum cleaner. Accustomed to the dimness of the house, Bird was embarrassed in all this light by his own body beneath the covers. Hastily, before Himiko could storm in and tease him in his nakedness, he put on his pants and shirt and went out to the living room.

  “Good morning, Bird!” Himiko said brightly. Her head turbaned in a towel, she was wielding the vacuum cleaner as though it were a pole with which she wanted to crush a scampering mouse. The flushed face she turned to Bird had regained its look of youth. “My father-in-law came over; he’s taking a walk while I finish cleaning.”

  “I’d better leave.”

  “Why must you run away, Bird?” Himiko said resentfully.

  “I feel like a recluse these days; it just seems queer to meet someone new when you’re living in a hideaway.”

  “My father-in-law knows that men often stay the night here and it’s never bothered him specially. But I think he would be disturbed if one of my friends seemed to rush away like a fugitive the minute he got here.” Himiko’s face was still hard.

  “O.K. Then I’d better shave.” Bird went back to the bedroom. Himiko’s show of resentment had been a shock. Bird reflected that he had been clinging doggedly to himself from the minute he had moved into his friend’s house, aware of Himiko as a single cell only in the organism of his conscio
usness. How could he have been so certain of such absolute rights! He had become a chrysalis of personal misfortune, seeing only the inner walls of the cocoon, never doubting for an instant the chrysalis’s prerogatives. …

  Bird finished shaving and glanced into the fogged mirror at the pale, grave face of a chrysalis of personal misfortune. He noticed that his own face looked wizened, not, he had a feeling, simply because he had lost weight.

  “Ever since I barged in on you I’ve been acting mostly like an egomaniac,” Bird volunteered when he returned to the living room. “I’d even started to feel as if that was the only way to behave.”

  “Are you apologizing?” Himiko teased. Her face again was utter softness.

  “I’ve been sleeping in your bed and eating the food you cooked for me, even making you wear my own tether. I have no right to any of this, and yet I’ve felt perfectly at home here.”

  “Bird, are you going to leave?” Himiko said uneasily.

  Bird stared at the girl and was stricken by something like a sense of destiny: never again would he cross paths with a person suited so perfectly to himself. The taste of regret was harsh on his tongue.

  “Even if you do leave eventually, stay for a while, will you, Bird?”

  In the bedroom again, Bird lay down on his back and closed his eyes, clasping his hands behind his head. He wanted a minute alone with his gratitude.

  Later the three of them sat around the table in the restored living room discussing the leaders of the new African states and the grammar of Swahili. Himiko took down the map of Africa from the bedroom wall and spread it on the table to show her father-in-law.

  “Why don’t you and Himi take a trip to Africa?” the older man proposed abruptly. “If you sold this house and property you’d have all the money you needed.”

  “That’s not such a bad idea—” Himiko glanced at Bird as if to test him. “You could forget your unhappiness about the baby, Bird. And I could forget my husband’s suicide.”