by Frank Wynne
By this time I had stopped crying, and I asked, “Why were you crying, Mama?”
Not answering my question, she instead asked me listlessly, “Have you eaten?”
“Yes, but when Papa comes home I’ll eat again. I like eating with you and Papa. It’s so late and he’s still not home … He’ll come home tonight, won’t he? Won’t he?”
“Probably. He’ll probably be home tonight.”
“Did he come home last night, Mama?” I asked her.
“Yes, he came home last night, but you were already asleep. You didn’t hear him, that’s all. He even went to your bed and kissed you four times.”
I laughed with pleasure.
“You were praying last night, weren’t you, Mama?” As I asked that question, I heard, somewhere in my memory, Mother’s prayers from the night before.
“No,” she said, contradicting me. “I spent last night darning. You were asleep and Papa was reading. The other kids were asleep, too. And now it’s time for you to sleep.”
“If Papa comes home, wake me, Mama. You’ll wake me, won’t you?”
My mother coughed. I asked no more questions. I watched her finish nursing my sister, after which she stretched out silently and stared upward toward the top of the mosquito net. I still didn’t say anything. I saw that her eyes were red, but I didn’t say anything more. Then I too fell asleep.
When I awoke, Mother was still beside me, silently staring at the mosquito net. Her eyes had lost their redness. Before getting out of bed, I asked her, “Is Papa home?”
My mother’s body twitched slightly. She turned over to look at me.
“No, he’s not, honey. But you slept for a long time, didn’t you? That means you must be in good health. Now get out of bed and ask the servant to give you a bath, okay?”
I wanted to see my father and would not put off seeing him any longer. I refused and began to whine. “No! I want Papa. Where’s Papa, Mama?”
“He’ll be home soon, honey. Take your bath. When you’re clean, he’ll come home.”
When I still didn’t budge, my mother spoke more firmly: “I said call the servant to give you your bath.”
This time I didn’t care about the harshness of her voice.
“I want Papa!” I demanded. “Where’s Papa?”
“He’s working,” she said stiffly. “Now take a bath!”
When I ignored her, her resoluteness suddenly disappeared. Kissing me affectionately, she got up and lifted me from the bed. She placed my feet on the floor, and after kissing me on my chin, spoke to me lovingly. “Papa will be home soon. But you have to take your bath. When you’ve had your bath, Papa will play with you. It’s getting late. When Papa comes, I’ll call you. Now go and take your bath.”
The affection in her voice softened my rebelliousness, and slowly I stumbled off to find the servant.
After my bath, when I found that my father still wasn’t home, I felt that familiar emptiness and began to cry again. This time I brushed off my mother’s promises and bribes of food. I refused her coaxing and pleading.
The night grew later and later and still my father didn’t come. With that feeling of emptiness welling inside me, I cried and would not stop. I screamed and felt as if I could go on screaming forever. My mother took me outside, but even the cool night air had no effect on the emptiness I felt. I knew that my crying upset my mother, but I wasn’t going to be assuaged by her display of patience and care. She spoke softly and lovingly, but I continued to call out for my father. Even when her voice grew angrier in tone, I still continued to wail. The night deepened.
Between my outpourings of tears and screams I heard my mother invoke the name of the Most Powerful and beg for His forgiveness. But I continued to cry and to call for my father. It was pitch-black outside. When I cried, Mother never tried to threaten or frighten me; she attempted to ease my heartache with kind words and swaddle me in her affection. But this time it was of no use.
Finally, in desperation, my mother called for Dipo, one of my foster brothers, and told him to find my father and bring him home.
“Where should I look for him?” Dipo asked.
“I don’t know. Just keep on looking until you find him. Tell him to come home, that his son is having a fit.”
My mother, with the weight of my body in her arms, went back into the house. My tears began to subside, but after a time, when my father still hadn’t returned, I began to scream and wail again. Then, I remember—it’s like seeing through a fog now—my mother carrying me into the front room. She also carried a lantern, which she held up to the clock on the wall.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” she said, perturbed.
With the lamp still in her hand, she went to the back room.
“Papa! Papa!” I screamed again.
“He’ll be home shortly, my baby. Now go to sleep!”
But my father still didn’t come and I cried again, sometimes sobbing, at other times screaming.
Finally my father did return, with Dipo trailing behind.
“Papa, Papa!” I screamed. I don’t know how many times I called for him.
My mother went to my father and without saying a word handed me to him. She then walked silently off toward her bedroom.
“Papa …” I sobbed again.
My father held me to his chest. His clothes, cool from the night air, felt damp to the touch. Slowly but surely, my tears subsided and then, finally, were gone, leaving small shudders that racked my chest. Walking with me in his arms, my father said to me: “My boy, my boy. Don’t cry. Papa’s here, isn’t he? Now go to sleep. Sleep. It’s late. Listen. Isn’t that a rooster?”
I listened carefully and, sure enough, I could hear the crowing of a rooster.
“It’s almost dawn,” he said slowly.
The morning felt so silent. The heaving of my chest subsided and finally stopped. My father carried me to Mother’s bed. I heard her crying faintly, her head buried beneath the pillow. Even as my father stroked her hair, she continued to cry. My father said nothing; my mother was speechless too. The only sound was my mother’s sobs, which caused my own heart to tremble. Moving silently and with great care, my father left the room, carrying me outside and into the cool early morning light.
“Why must you cry so much?” he asked me.
“I waited for you and you didn’t come home,” I said half in tears. “Mama said that when it got dark you would come home, but you didn’t come.”
“But I’m home now, aren’t I?” he said softly. “So now it’s time for you to sleep. Come on …”
My father sang slowly. His deep voice was both soft and soothing. After that I don’t remember what happened, but when I awoke I found my father asleep beside me. A short while later, sleep robbed me of consciousness again.
When I next awoke, the sun was high. Because it was a holiday, my father hadn’t gone to work. I found him and my mother sitting, facing each other, in the front room. After the servant had given me my bath, I ran back into the front room. “You’re not going away again, are you, Papa?” I screamed at my father.
My mother looked at my father, who laughed and chucked me under the chin. “No,” he said, “I don’t have to work today. You’re not going to cry again, are you?”
“Mama was crying again yesterday,” I told him.
My father looked at my mother, but she didn’t say anything. He said nothing either. I began to shout and scream happily as if nothing had happened between them and nothing were happening around me.
“Mama said we’re going to Rembang,” I announced.
My father looked at my mother again but still said nothing.
“I’m going, and the baby, too. We’re going to see the sea. You’ll come with us, won’t you, Papa?”
Once more my father turned toward my mother but then turned back to me. “Of course I will. When do we leave?”
I looked at my mother and asked her coyly, “When are we going to Rembang, Mama?”
She didn’t say
anything. She seemed incapable of answering. Her almond eyes reddened and glazed. A moment later they were pools of water, but just as a teardrop began to fall, she quickly wiped it away with the hem of her blouse. Not understanding what was happening, I began to scream and cry again. Something felt wrong inside, and when my mother rose from her seat and left the room, I began to scream louder. I ran after her and pulled on her sarong.
“Why are you crying, Mama?”
My mother picked me up, rocked me slowly in her arms, and then carried me away. But still she said nothing. She carried me to my bed and there laid her face on my chest. My father stayed where he was.
Yes, that incident too stands out clearly in my mind. But that part of my life—like the riverbanks and clumps of bamboo swept away by the Lusi River—is now gone.
*
Every year at Lebaran, at the end of the fasting month, Father would buy a load of firecrackers. He’d also give me and my sister and my mother and the foster kids a set of new clothes and some spending money. We’d set off the firecrackers on the ground in front of the house and all the neighbor kids would come running over to watch them explode.
Such an immeasurable sense of delight those holidays gave me, but that same sense of delight was not always evident in the look on my mother’s face. The holidays seemed to be a sad time for her, especially after my father began to spend less and less time at home.
Gradually, I grew used to my father’s absences and no longer threw a fit every time he left. Mother no longer was forced to send one of the boarders out to call him home. For a very long time I didn’t know where my father went when he was not at school. My mother never asked him where he went. She never said anything at all when he left and never greeted him when he returned. It seemed like whenever my father left the house Mother was off somewhere working, in the kitchen, the back room, or the garden.
I, too, rarely asked my father where he went. When I did ask him, his answer was always, “Work.” And if I followed that question with another, such as, “Can I come along?” he wouldn’t even turn to look at me as he answered me: “No, you may not. When you’re older, you can go out by yourself. Now go and play with the others.” Then he walked quickly away.
On the Lebaran holidays my mother would watch us kids setting off firecrackers from her chair in the front room. She never said anything, but her lips moved constantly as a rosary passed through her fingers. Once when I did approach her she told me: “You should not play with firecrackers on Lebaran. Our religion forbids it. Firecrackers are used for Chinese celebrations and have no place in Muslim ceremonies.”
Regardless of my mother’s opinion, my father continued to buy us firecrackers for Lebaran, that is until one of the kids got hurt. After that, he never bought them again.
Then, one day, something really important happened. My grandfather, my mother’s father, died and my father rented an automobile to take the family to Rembang. I don’t really remember what happened there, but after our return to Blora, my mother was different. She seemed to droop, to lose all her strength. She mourned the loss of her father, I knew, but I also sensed there was something more. In the week after her father died my mother cried continuously.
“Everybody has to die sometime,” I heard my father say in an attempt to calm her. “That’s what life is about.”
But Mother wasn’t ready to receive that kind of solace, and her bouts of crying grew worse. I see now my mother must have felt that she had lost her last refuge, the only real place she had to run to outside of her religion.
A week went by, and if at that time I could have better expressed myself, I’m sure I would have said that Mother had finally surrendered herself to some greater force. When Father left the house at night, she never said a word. She acted as if nothing were wrong. At the same time, she seemed to grow even closer to us children. In the end we had become her refuge.
In moments of solitude—not when the world outside was quiet but when her own heart was still—my mother would take us for a walk. We’d hike one or two kilometers from the house, and she’d tell us stories about the things she saw in the world outside. She’d tell us about the birds, and their habits and food; about the waters of the Lusi as we crossed the bridge above it; about the fields and rice, and the insects that devoured both the farmers’ crops and their hopes; about the wind and clouds and the sun and the stars; and almost always about the lives of the poor. The knowledge I found as a child was increased greatly on these walks.
In the evenings my mother would gather us together around the bench in the garden and tell us about plants, the clumps of bamboo swaying in the wind, about fruit trees and ships and trains and automobiles and bicycles. My mother was a good storyteller, and sometimes she’d tell us about cities she had visited and about her own family or her studies and teachers in school. And even though we were just kids, she’d tell us about politics and Indonesia’s colonization by the Dutch. I can still remember her stories about people who had been active in the political struggle for independence and had been jailed or exiled as a result. But like all the other things, those times too have been carried away to disappear from the realm of our senses.
*
My mother’s real mother—not her stepmother in Rembang—lived near my hometown of Blora. She had moved there after remarrying, and sometimes she’d come to the house with fruit. She sold vegetables to make a living. Early in the morning she’d stop the farmers who were on the way to the market with vegetables and she’d buy their produce to sell to the city’s priayi, the “gentry” as it were, or those people who liked to think of themselves as priayi.
My grandmother’s husband made his living by selling roasted skewers of chicken at the market. About the only time he came to our house was to borrow money. He had once been a farmer, but for some reason his crops always failed. The people of my hometown believed that a man who fathers a child out of wedlock will forever experience misfortune. I didn’t hear about this until I was older, but when I did, I began to wonder if that is what had happened to my step-grandfather. Whatever the case, I never had the nerve to ask whether it was true.
Sometimes, when my mother’s stepfather came to the house, she’d get a look of intense irritation on her face. Once she spoke to me about him, though somewhat indirectly: “You must never do what is forbidden,” she advised. “Just look at your grandfather and you’ll see the consequence! Everything he does fails. It’s pitiful. His prayers and hopes are wasted.”
With my limited mental grasp, I didn’t understand what she meant, and I asked her more directly, “What about Grandpa, Mama?”
“When you’re older, you’ll understand,” was all she had to say. I never asked again.
My mother liked to work in the garden and, if I weren’t off playing, I would follow her there. As she worked, stories flowed from her mouth—instructive tales mostly, stories with morals to teach us to respect nature, to be proud of what we do, and to work hard. In my young boy’s mind I wasn’t always able to grasp what she was trying to tell me, and in numerous instances it was not until years later that I came to understand what she had been saying.
“People live from their own sweat, and when you’re an adult, that’s how it will be for you too. And anything you obtain, if it doesn’t come from your own hard work, will not be right. Even the things that people give to you.”
But like everything else, that is gone now, never to return, forever to reside in memory and the mind.
*
The waters of the Lusi flood and ebb; they rise and fall, become shallow and deep. So too with everything that took place in my childhood days.
“You can do whatever you want with the things you justly earn, even your own life and your own body. Everything,” my father once told me, “everything you justly earn.”
How long does it take to speak a sentence? The sound of his voice was but for a few moments. A momentary tremble of sound waves, and then it was gone, not to be repeated. Yet, like the Lus
i that constantly skirts the city of Blora, like the waters of that river, the remembered sound of that voice, coursing through memory, will continue to flow—forever, toward its estuary and the boundless sea. And not one person knows when the sea will be dry and lose its tide.
But all that is gone, gone from the grasp of the senses.
PATRIOTISM
Yukio Mishima
Translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey W. Sargent
Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, film director, founder of the Tatenokai, and nationalist. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the twentieth century. After failing to stage a coup d’état to restore the Emperor’s pre-war powers, Mishima committed ritual suicide by seppuku. His father, a man with a taste for military discipline, employed parenting tactics such as holding the young boy up to the side of a speeding train. Mishima was featured as a photo model in Young Samurai: Bodybuilders of Japan.
1.
On the twenty-eighth of February, 1936 (on the third day, that is, of the February 26 Incident), Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama of the Konoe Transport Battalion—profoundly disturbed by the knowledge that his closest colleagues had been with the mutineers from the beginning, and indignant at the imminent prospect of Imperial troops attacking Imperial troops—took his officer’s sword and ceremonially disemboweled himself in the eight-mat room of his private residence in the sixth block of Aoba-chō, in Yotsuya Ward. His wife, Reiko, followed him, stabbing herself to death. The lieutenant’s farewell note consisted of one sentence: “Long live the Imperial Forces.” His wife’s, after apologies for her unfilial conduct in thus preceding her parents to the grave, concluded: “The day which, for a soldier’s wife, had to come, has come….” The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep. The lieutenant’s age, it should be noted, was thirty-one, his wife’s twenty-three; and it was not half a year since the celebration of their marriage.
