A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Hands don't appear in my other nightmares, but I see paramecialike germs, a myriad of them, ravaging the back of Eeyore's head—Eeyore the newborn babe lying on the operating table. … If my subconscious was causing me to have these shocking dreams, then I detested myself for having such a subconscious. But quite apart from the dream itself, I was overcome with self-hatred, which made me repeatedly shudder. In any event, these were the things that prompted me to read Céline's novels, and go on to French literature in college.

  Well, what I want to focus on in my graduation thesis is Rigadoon. In this story, Céline does not allow any sentimentalism, though common in such relationships, to come between him and our little idiots. Instead of giving them an endearing “oh-you-poor-little-things” embrace, he uses his medical expertise to make the most strenuous efforts to help the children. The children themselves, though handicapped, give it their all, and their actions amid dire circumstances are as shrewd as Céline's. This is what I really like about Rigadoon.

  The time is toward the end of World War II. The locale is Germany. Air raids by the Allies have virtually paralyzed the railway systems, and multitudes of refugees are fleeing in confusion. The story progresses with the decrepit railway as the main theater of action. Céline is labeled as a Nazi sympathizer who ought to be denounced—though today the prevailing thought seems to be that the French public's denunciation of such individuals, both during the Resistance and alter the war, solely because of their antisemitic beliefs, was not appropriate—and because he cannot return to France, or remain in Germany, he tries to make off to Switzerland, or to Denmark, and ends up plying back and forth in Germany, as if he were dancing the rigadoon. And there's his wife, Lili, the cat. Bébert, and his actor friend, La Vigue.

  Relying on their uncertain lifeline, an obscure German officer, they continue their narrow escape by trains, on whose tracks bombs repeatedly rain down. To the bitter end, Céline writes, as he would speak, the details of the trips they made back and forth, and of the thoughts that arose in his mind at the time. He freely inserts movements of his mind that occurred to him as he wrote the novel in the French countryside in 1961. And I understand he died the day after he put his last idiosyncratic ellipsis points to the end of this novel. His style, I believe, is really egocentric. Moreover, the novel is full of the practically fanatical self-justifications of an out-and-out egotist. But, of course, this itself represents a spirited charm, which again is the mark of a great writer's work. …

  But Céline, who runs around amid the flames of war with the sole purpose of saving himself and his retinue, and who spits out cusses and curses everywhere, simply cannot turn a cold shoulder to the abandoned infant or to our little idiots he chances upon, which, admittedly, is a rather unnatural thing to do. Nevertheless, he writes with such feeling, and his words pierce the heart. This is what attracts me to Rigadoon, and why I think I now know how to help myself rise above the hurt I feel when someone says, “An innocent princess reading Céline, huh? … feigning the villain. … When did Céline turn into a cute hobbyhorse?” Were I to offer a slightly thorny rebuttal, I would say that those who say such things perhaps haven't read Céline well enough. …

  With no place to go. Céline, his wife, friend, and cat sneak into a village farm, but then, with a Reichsbevoll permit that may already have lost its validity, leave for Norbord on the opposite shore via Denmark—I understand Reischsbevoll means Reich plenipotentiary, but I'll have to look it up at the university library to find out more about it. They finally manage to scramble onto a flatcar guarded by a gunner, and halfway through their escape they are forced to disembark from the would-be Berlin-Rostock train. They have to melt into the crowd of evacuees from Berlin to search for another train. Upon learning that the French government has left Vichy for the town of Sigmaringen, near the Swiss border, they decide to mingle with the people returning to France via the same route. …

  The Ulm-bound train they get on—one passing through Leipzig—is also bombed, forcing them to escape into a tunnel, lest they be roasted by the liquid white-phosphorus shells. The circumstances are frightening, but when Céline sees, on the train, an abandoned infant in its swaddling clothes, he can't just let it be. There's no milk, no diapers: yet he can't keep from doing something for it.

  “… empty … nobody! … wait! A baby on the middle sofa, in swaddling clothes! … a month old, perhaps less … not crying … abandoned there by its mother … I enter … I look … it's not doing badly … not breathing hard … a healthy baby … now what?”

  My stilted translation cannot properly convey the feeling, but as I copy the scene on my card in French—this scene, which starts from where Céline, or rather Dr. Destouches, finds a baby abandoned in the face of hellish circumstances, and then continues until be can entrust it to reliable hands—I feel his warmth directly communicated to me: his spontaneous emotions upon finding the child, his doctor's watchful eye ever on it, and his desperate feelings to want to somehow look after it. And the usage of the Céline-esque ellipsis points is so natural here. Simple though it may be, I imagine the following association: “What if I had been the rescued infant!—found by this diminutive man, who looks ferocious, like a dog, and yet is so kind and unhypocritical! How happy I must have been, picked up by this doctor's big, experienced hands!”

  Caught in one impasse after another, they continue their nightmarish railway journey with no alternative but to make repeated changes in course; and amid all this, Céline, who chances upon our little idiots, takes them with him, all of them, without a second thought.

  Just as I can't explain why he did what he did for the infant, I can't explain his behavior toward our little idiots, except to say that it's inborn in his nature. Right before this, too, when he got off at Ulm Station, which had not yet been bombarded, and started walking along the road in front of it, he met an old man with a goatee who claimed to be a fire chief. It was a beautiful May morning, perfect for a leisurely stroll, but Céline went out of his way to walk up to the fourth floor of the station building and examine the fire chief, who stripped naked, except for his helmet, before him. It was as though Céline had been taken by the snout and dragged all over the place, through the caprice of an old man living his second childhood. But the experience didn't make him any wiser. Soon after this, when he is asked to take care of our little idiots, he cannot refuse this request, though he has just sustained a head wound in a bombardment.

  This is how the story begins: Céline is lying in the Hamburg-bound flatcar, close to the engine, of all places, aware that his shirt is still wet. from his bleeding. He embraces an uncertain hope that, upon reaching Hamburg, they will somehow transfer to another train that would take them farther north. Suddenly, a French girl, who says she is qualified to teach German at university level, and had been an instructor at a college in Breslau, comes up to him and confides that she has fled from Berlin, where the Russians are taking over, and that she had been entrusted with the care of forty-two children—idiots all. Twelve of them, maybe thirteen, are left, she says, the rest having succumbed, one after another, to measles during their getaway. Céline immediately wants to go and examine their condition, but they are all on separate cars and cannot be easily found. The girl tells him that their ages range from four to ten, and that they have minds that don't understand a single word. The girl can no longer procure food, for she, too, is running a fever, and is coughing up blood, and so she has only Céline, the doctor, to turn to for the care of the children.

  The train arrives at a crippled Hamburg. The children manage to disembark on their own, and come toward him on the platform.

  “The kids come closer, boys and girls, they're no different … bundled up in the same weird woolen clothes … fifteen of them, perhaps … isn't hard to tell they're all cabbageheads … limping, drooling, and lopsided … asylum idiots, positively …”

  Suppose I were with Eeyore on a welfare workshop excursion, and I heard something like this at a crowded transfer s
tation or wherever: I would feel sick with anger. But Céline doesn't really mean it; for he speaks these words nonchalantly, and tells his wife, Lili, to take the cat, Bébert, out of its bag to let the children see it. And while they wait for the train that should, by midnight, take them to Magdeburg, he goes into a demolished Hamburg building to look for food. He takes the whole train of children with him. “‘Now, my children! Let's go! I want you all to follow me … I'll take the lead …’ This ‘Hang in there, kid!’ spirit, this doggedness, will probably be with me for all time, whether I go mad or remain sane. … Really, what you learn when you're young stays with you … everything after that is mere imitation, copying, labor, and competing to see who makes the more foolishly obsequious greetings …”

  In the totally devastated city of Hamburg, where even bodies lie on the streets, the children intrepidly slip into a hollowlike place between the bricks and clay. It's the ruins of a bombarded pharmacy and a grocery store, but from there they haul out round loaves of bread, and jam, and even cans of milk. They nonchalantly return from what Céline had thought was an impenetrable crevasse. While on the train they had sat limply, not a smile crossing anyone's lips, they now stand erect—though they're still drooling—as they head back to the station with the provisions they had procured so well by themselves. …

  December came, and because I was the person in charge of cooking, and since as I had taken it upon myself to see to the planning and execution of all the housework while our parents were away, I thought of a way to make Christinas enjoyable for Eeyore and O-chan. But before I knew it, there were only ten days left before Christmas, and I still had no idea what I was going to do. I have little talent for housework in the first place, and on top of this, my mind was preoccupied with something that made me feel restless, and I had yet to come up with a practical way to cope with the problem: my graduation thesis on Céline.

  The coward that I am. I had managed to acquire all required credits by the end of the first half of my junior year. And I had planned the second half so that, rather than spend a lot of time in the classroom, I would mainly sign up for courses that required only a term paper, and so he able to concentrate on my thesis. But because something had come up requiring that both Mother and Father go to California, I had to use the time I didn't have to be at the university for household chores, and to take Eeyore to the welfare workshop and back. While admittedly this has given me an opportunity to savor a sense of fulfillment I had never before felt, if it was going to continue until April, when Mother and Father would return, I was sure to be in a “pinch” as far as the writing of my thesis was concerned.

  I had the two Pléiade editions Father had given me, and they included annotations for most of the slang my adviser told me would be beyond me. And Father had told me where in his library I could find Céline's Notes I through VII. So if I used all the other commentaries, including the several that were in English, I ought to be able to get my thesis done—provided I had the French proficiency of an honor student. And so with the exception of Rigadoon, I wanted to follow and quote from any available Japanese translations as material for my thesis. Father had a large collection of studies of Céline in his library, but the books he collected reflected his peculiar leanings, so I wanted to look for something more general. This was why, if possible, I wanted to go to the university a few times a week to use the French literature study room and the library there. The all-around slow-mo that I am, though, I had to begin very early the next year, in fact right after the New Year's holidays, or I would really be in a fix. …

  I didn't say anything then about the anxiety I felt in my heart, but now I wonder if perhaps I wasn't crying it out in my behavior more eloquently than I could have in words. For despite his being an independent, go-it-alone person, O-chan is very sensitive, and he noticed it. He had probably been asking himself what was hounding me, though even if he'd asked I wouldn't have told him. Or perhaps it was the outcome of sheer coincidence, for it happened on the day the results of the year-end practice test at his cram school were released. He went up to his room after dinner that evening, and a good three hours later—that is, alter he had come up with his own idea—he again came down to the dining room. I was, as usual, adding a few more notes to my Céline reference cards, rearranging them, then putting them back in their original order.

  “Beginning next year, I'll take Eeyore back and forth to the welfare workshop,” he said quite unexpectedly. “I don't need to go to cram school every day anymore. Let me start from tomorrow so I can get the hang of it. Sorry I had you do all the housework all this while, Ma-chan!”

  With no further explanation, O-chan headed for the kitchen to look for something to eat, so I immediately called out to him.

  “Don t be silly, O-chan! You've got exams coming up! Now's the time for you to be putting on your last spurt. Mama will worry.”

  He seemed to be first registering my words of objection, then thinking of a way to respond. At the same time, he seemed to be cutting up, and placing on a dish, the imported beef steak that I hadn't finished, that I had only half eaten. Returning to the dining room with it, he sort of asked me, by way of being courteous, “Can I have this?” Then, without sitting down, he picked up a piece of the meat with his lingers, and while eating it, he methodically explained the reason for his volunteering to take Eeyore to the welfare workshop, an explanation he had probably thought he could skip.

  Judging from the final results released that afternoon, he said, he would be able to enter the university of his choice, so long as he stayed physically fit and did a little more preparation on his own. This, he said, was the diagnosis the cram school had given him. Then he went on to say that their evaluation was not groundless in light of his own assessment of what he had learned after his failure the year before. … He added, however, that he hadn't done any orienteering since the last First Morning OL, a meet held early in the morning on New Year's day, and his basic physical strength was deteriorating. Taking Feyore on the bus to and from the welfare workshop should put a more effective load on his legs than taking the train to cram school.

  I wasn't sure if I should accept his offer, and apparently he took my hesitation for doubt regarding the first half of what he had said, about his score on the practice test, for after he licked his fingers, which were sticky with the juices from the meat, he produced from a trouser pocket a crumpled piece of paper to show me. It was a list of top-ranking examinees, and his name was fifth among those choosing to major in science, in the column titled “Science II for Tokyo University.”

  “You must have decided this after careful thought,” I said, “and you'd easily convince me otherwise, wouldn't you, even if I presented a contrary opinion. So I'll accept your offer without any further resistance. Besides, I'd really appreciate some help now. …”

  “Good!” O-chan said, sounding just like Father when he brings a discussion to a close, and he took the steak plate back to the kitchen. Now two of the problems that loomed over me were headed for a quick resolution.

  “O-chan, what do you say to an early celebration, now that you foresee success in your exams?” I asked. “Why don't we go out for Christmas and have Peking duck? We haven't had that for some time.”

  Eeyore, who was lying in front of the stereo set, listening to music through the headphones so as not to disturb my card-editing—it seemed he had sensed my tacit irritation and lost some of his composure—suddenly raised his head and kept looking up at me with entirely different, eager eyes.

  “Eeyore,” I said, “we're going to Madame Chan's. The last time we had Peking duck was at our send-off dinner for Mama and Papa. O-chan's going to pass his college entrance exams, so let's celebrate.”

  Removing the headphones and carefully winding the leads around them, Eeyore stood up and held out his hand to O-chan.

  “Congratulations, O-chan!” he said.

  “Thank you,” O-chan replied, “but I haven't passed yet. The real tests are next year.” Appare
ntly he worried that Eeyore hadn't understood.

  “It's a dress rehearsal for when you pass your entrance exams, isn't it?” Eeyore said. He had, after all, correctly perceived the meaning of what O-chan and I had been talking about, through the ears of an aficionado of FM and television music programs.

  Eeyore then went upstairs with uncharacteristic vigor, and after spending some time there, returned with a cassette tape, holding it in front of him as when showing his commuter pass at the railway station gate. Skillfully switching the mode on the stereo, he inserted the tape and started playing it for us. It was a recording of the speech O-chan had given at the dinner we had for him to commemorate his success in passing his elementary school entrance exams. I knew we had the tape somewhere, but I hadn't heard it played for at least ten years. At first O-chan looked shocked, but apparently he didn't wish to stand in the way of Eeyore's firm resolve; nor did he retire to his room to demonstrate his feelings in even this passive form of protest.

  “Dear Father, Mother, Brother, and Sister. Thank you for your cooperation. Thanks to you, I passed my examinations. Although they were a little difficult, I did my best. There was an intermission, too … during the intermission, the quizzes were very interesting. We had fun with riddles, too. … My request is, when I pass a test or something, I want you all to say ‘Congratulations.’ … Someday I wish to become a scholar in eleven subjects. I want to know about the stars, the stars and the skies and the oceans; the mountains, rivers, and prairies; about everything that's happened since the Earth was formed; about life in the forest; the plants, that they, too, are living; the life of insects throughout the seasons; about the fishes; the snakes and frogs; the birds; the life of Japanese monkeys. … Well, I won't bother with the Japanese monkeys; and I won't bother with the part about the plants being alive. That's eleven already, isn't it? … And I want to know about mushrooms, too.”