The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

by The Sailor Who Fell from Grace

  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.

  abandon

  By now this word was an old acquaintance: he knew it well.

  ability

  Was that any different from genius?

  aboard

  A ship again; he recalled the loudspeaker ringing across the deck that day when Ryuji sailed. And then the colossal, golden horn, like a proclamation of despair.

  absence

  absolute

  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.

  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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NOBORU 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 o
n 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.”