VIII
[[Clamping to his head a set of newly purchased earphones in addition to the underwater goggles covered with cellophane, which “he” continues to wear as usual, “he” listens all the day long to a repeating tape recording of Fischer-Dieskau singing the Bach cantata. Already “he” rejects all overtures to contact from the outside, except those over which “he” has no conscious control, like the medical treatment applied to his body. The person who has been relieved of duty as “acting executor of the will” has ceased to exist in his consciousness. Still, there are times when “he” resumes his “history of the age,” as if the tape recorder endlessly playing the Bach tape could record at the same time, or a newly-employed amanuensis were waiting at his bedside. “He” also sings his beloved song of Happy Days. To be sure, since the Bach cantata continues to reach him through the earphones, the melody and rhythm of the song “he” hums are frequently affected by it. If “he” understood German, the words “he” mouths would also be deranged.]]
The night a madman with beard all over his face very like a certain party had invaded his hospital room, he had thrown his Rotex rotary nostril clipper and cut an arabesque pattern in the fellow’s beard which he supposed would permit him to track him down, but for someone as prudent as himself he had been hasty and careless. For the bearded intruder was actually no madman at all but a madwoman! Undoubtedly she had thrown away the false beard that had been clippered, and with that the only clue had been lost forever. With abnormal alertness, he had seen through the madwoman to the bearded man the minute he had discovered, in the creature’s style as she spoke to him from, curiously, below the foot of his bed, probably squatting, something identical, though the words were different, to the voice that had shouted that night, foaming, What in god’s name are you? What? WHAT? To repulse the old woman whose madness was plain to see in the abnormal expressionlessness of her thin, egg-shaped face beneath her white hair, he should have screamed at her, just as he had screamed back at the bearded man, I’m cancer, cancer, the spirit and soul of liver cancer is ME! and instantly have put an end to the matter.
[[Having been thus shouted at, the other party can have had little to protest. To expand upon a line by an English playwright-actor, “Just as there is abundance in the world of the living, so there is abundance in the world of the dead,” so, to be sure, did the abundance of the world of the cancer-man actually exist in this world, and in the case of his own body in particular, in which cancer is proliferating at supersonic speed, his abundance is in fact cancer’s! “He” doubts not that his custom-made cancer has already spread to all his lymph glands and mucous membranes, or that cancer cells cover his body layer upon layer, like a detailed road map. On the other side, cancer’s side, of the pain “he” feels at present, before his transformation into cancer-man is complete, there is surely pleasure of equal value; the feeling of pressure on the surrounding organs “he” suffers as his liver enlarges, if “he” became the liver itself, would undoubtedly be rich with the joy of proliferating cancer’s vigor and vitality. “He” hopes somehow to sample however small a taste of that pleasure before “he” completes his transformation into cancer-man.
Covering his eyes with the cylinder-type underwater goggles and plugging his ears with the headphones, his mouth stretched open, “he” approximates the instant of death when at last the transformation will be completed. The most vital substance in his body until that instant, cancer, as death arrives, undergoes a subtle change of great interest, goes into motion placid and self-generated in the direction of decay and dissolution. It is a motion like the first bubble of methane gas rising to the surface of the water, a premonition of decay, and as “he” savors the sensation at the very core of his physical body, “he” strokes his withered arms and chest. Restlessly, hoping to verify the existence of as much skin as “he” can touch in the brief moment remaining, and as much of the wasted muscle just beneath. Nothing can move him so deeply or nourish him so richly now as the joy of experiencing the premonition of decay of his own body as the sensation of existence itself. So far as “he” is aware, his feelings toward the cancer that has overtaken more than half of his body-and-soul are his feelings toward a true brother. The instant his beloved brother has completed its enormous job, ineluctably, they will begin to decay together. Cancer, radiant and fresh compared to the body “he” has used for thirty-five years, will begin to decay in the bloom of its youth. “He” concedes that his attempt to reconstruct his own life has been defeated by the appearance of an unexpected sniper, but that no longer troubles him. Because, with cancer’s destructive help, “he” has stripped away the excess flesh that was loaded on his real body over the past twenty-five years and is now already reduced all the way to his body at three in the afternoon on August sixteenth, 1945. In all that madwoman’s tedious talking the only thing she said of even slight significance was that “he” had become so thin “he” had regained his face as a child at the end of the war. Lifting his voice shrilly in an imitation of a boy soprano, “he” sings Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again! Admittedly, the melody is transformed, by the music resounding incessantly through the earphones, into a melody appropriate to the shout da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab, to the prayerful shout understood by him to mean His Majesty the Emperor, with his own hands, shall wipe my tears away. At times, instead of Happy days are here again, “he” even sings Come, Oh Death, thou brother of sleep, Komm, o Tod, du Schlafes Bruder. Before long, without fail, cancer will eat away the useless outer layers of body-and-soul which have concealed his true essence ever since August sixteenth, 1945, and will whisper, in a voice that pierces all the way from the root of his body to his soul, Now then, this is you, there was no need for you to have become any you other than this, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again! At that moment, the clear, midsummer afternoon in 1945 will unfurl before him as a truly elastic “now” whose shape can be selected at will. Seconds before “he” completes his transformation into cancer-man, “he” will joyfully enter the vastness of that “now.”]]
His bayonet clanking at his side, he crawls toward the stone steps at the bank entrance where a certain party waits, bullet-riddled, an army sword held high in one hand, the other outstretched to embrace him, shot in the back and dying. His eyes, filled with tears and his own blood, are already blind to all things in reality, but the colossal chrysanthemum topped with a purple aurora illuminates the darkness behind his closed lids more radiantly than any light he has ever seen. His head nothing more than a dark void now, the blood all drained away, he is no longer certain whether the person awaiting him at the top of the stone steps is a certain party, but if he can crawl just one yard more, digging at the hot ground with his bullet-broken hands, he will reach the feet of the person unmistakably awaiting him, whoever he may be, and his blood and his tears will be wiped away.
[[Exasperated by his refusal to remove the headphones, a resourceful doctor plugs a microphone into the tape recorder, connects the headphones to a monitor and begins to speak through them, It’s time we started being honest with one another about your condition, you must understand and cooperate. Your condition … Having swiftly broken the connection to his consciousness, “he” is deaf to any further disturbance from the outside. Gasping in the shrill voice of a ten-year-old on the verge of death, distorting the melody in a multitude of ways, “he” continues to sing, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy Days are here again!]]
PRIZE STOCK
My kid brother and I were digging with pieces of wood in the loose earth that smelled of fat and ashes at the surface of the crematorium, the makeshift crematorium in the valley that was simply a shallow pit in a clearing in the underbrush. The valley bottom was already wrapped in dusk and fog as cold as the spring water that welled up in the woods, but the side of the hill where we lived, the little village built around a cobblestone road, was bathed in grape light. I straightened out of a crouch and
weakly yawned, my mouth stretching open. My brother stood up too, gave a small yawn, and smiled at me.
Giving up on “collecting,” we threw our sticks into the thick summer underbrush and climbed the narrow path shoulder to shoulder. We had come down to the crematorium in search of remains, nicely shaped bones we could use as medals to decorate our chests, but the village children had collected them all and we came away empty-handed. I would have to beat some out of one of my friends at elementary school. I remembered peeking two days earlier, past the waists of the adults darkly grouped around the pit, at the corpse of a village woman lying on her back with her naked belly swollen like a small hill, her expression full of sadness in the light of the flames. I was afraid. I grasped my brother’s slender arm and quickened my step. The odor of the corpse, like the sticky fluid certain kinds of beetles leaked when we squeezed them in our calloused fingers, seemed to revive in my nostrils.
Our village had been forced to begin cremating out of doors by an extended rainy season: early summer rains had fallen stubbornly until floods had become an everyday occurrence. When a landslide crushed the suspension bridge that was the shortest route to the town, the elementary school annex in our village was closed, mail delivery stopped, and our adults, when a trip was unavoidable, reached the town by walking the narrow, crumbly path along the mountain ridge. Transporting the dead to the crematorium in the town was out of the question.
But being cut off from the town caused our old but undeveloped homesteaders’ village no very acute distress. Not only were we treated like dirty animals in the town, everything we required from day to day was packed into the small compounds clustered on the slope above the narrow valley. Besides, it was the beginning of summer, the children were happy school was closed.
Harelip was standing at the entrance to the village, where the cobblestone road began, cuddling a dog against his chest. With a hand on my brother’s shoulder, I ran through the deep shade of the great gingko tree to peer at the dog in Harelip’s arms.
“See!” Harelip shook the dog and made him snarl. “Look at him!”
The arms Harelip thrust in front of me were covered with bites matted with dog hair and blood. Bites stood out like buds on his chest, too, and his short, thick neck.
“See!” Harelip said grandly.
“You promised to go after mountain dogs with me!” I said, my chest clogged with surprise and chagrin. “You went alone!”
“I went looking for you,” Harelip said quickly. “You weren’t around….”
“You really got bit!” I said, just touching the dog with my fingertips. Its eyes were frenzied, like a wolf’s, its nostrils flared. “Did you crawl into the lair?”
“I wrapped a leather belt around my neck so he couldn’t get my throat,” Harelip said proudly.
In the dusking, purple hillside and the cobblestone road I distinctly saw Harelip emerging from a lair of withered grass and shrubs with a leather belt around his throat and the puppy in his arms while a mountain dog bit into him.
“As long as they don’t get your throat,” he said, confidence strong in his voice. “And I waited until there were only puppies inside.”
“I saw them running across the valley,” my brother said excitedly, “five of them.”
“When?”
“Just after noon.”
“I went after that.”
“He sure is white,” I said, keeping envy out of my voice.
“His mother mated with a wolf!” The dialect Harelip used was lewd but very real.
“You swear?” My brother spoke as if in a dream.
“He’s used to me now,” Harelip said, accentuating his confidence. “He won’t go back to his friends.”
My brother and I were silent.
“Watch!” Harelip put the dog down on the cobblestones and released him. “See!”
But instead of looking down at the dog we looked up at the sky covering the narrow valley. An unbelievably large airplane was crossing it at terrific speed. The roar churned the air into waves and briefly drowned us. Like insects trapped in oil we were unable to move in the sound.
“It’s an enemy plane!” Harelip screamed. “The enemy’s here!”
Looking up at the sky we shouted ourselves hoarse. “An enemy plane …”
But except for the clouds glowing darkly in the setting sun the sky was already empty. We turned back to Harelip’s dog just as it was yowling down the gravel path away from us, its body dancing. Plunging into the underbrush alongside the path it quickly disappeared. Harelip stood there dumbfounded, his body poised for pursuit. My brother and I laughed until our blood seethed like liquor. Chagrined as he was, Harelip had to laugh, too.
We left him, and ran back to the storehouse crouching in the dusk like a giant beast. In the semidarkness inside, my father was preparing our meal on the dirt floor.
“We saw a plane!” my brother shouted at my father’s back. “A great big enemy plane!”
My father grunted and did not turn around. Intending to clean it, I lifted his heavy hunting gun down from the rack on the wall and climbed the dark stairs, arm in arm with my brother.
“Too bad about that dog,” I said.
“And that plane,” my brother said.
We lived on the second floor of the cooperative storehouse in the middle of the village, in the small room once used for raising silkworms. When my father stretched out on his straw mats and blankets on the floor of thick planks that were beginning to rot and my brother and I lay down on the old door which was our sleeping platform, the former residence of countless silkworms that had left stains on the paper walls still reeking of their bodies and bits of rotten mulberry leaf stuck to the naked beams in the ceiling filled to repletion with human beings.
We had no furniture at all. There was the dull gleam of my father’s hunting gun, not only the barrel but even the stock, as if the oiled wood were also steel that would numb your hand if you slapped it, to provide our poor quarters with a certain direction, there were dried weasel pelts hanging in bunches from the exposed beams, there were various traps. My father made his living shooting rabbits, birds, wild boar in winter when the snow was deep, and trapping weasels and delivering the dried pelts to the town office.
As my brother and I polished the stock with an oil rag we gazed up through the chinks in the wooden slats at the dark sky outside. As if the roar of an airplane would descend from there again. But it was rare for a plane to cross the sky above the village. When I had put the gun back in the rack on the wall we lay down on the sleeping platform, huddling together, and waited, threatened by the emptiness in our stomachs, for my father to bring the pot of rice and vegetables upstairs.