Free The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe Page A

elevator on the same floor as the operating theater. Eventually the outer doors had opened to announce the arrival of the iron cage of the elevator, but the second set of doors on the green wire-netting cage inside resisted the nurse’s efforts and refused to open.
    “Baby doesn’t want to be operated on,” said my wife, peering through the wire even as she recoiled in horror as though tempted to run away.
    Through the green wire mesh, in a dim, greenish light like sunlight filtering through summer foliage, we saw the baby’s head, shaven like a criminal’s, as he lay on the castered bed from the children’s ward. His tight-shut eyes were slits in skin that was whitish and dead-looking as though powdered. Standing on tiptoe, I could see on the far side of the head, in total contrast to its look of debility and uneasy tension, the orange-colored excrescence bulging with blood and spinal fluid, a living thing in vigorous yet mindless association with the baby’s head. The lump was awe-inspiring, a vivid witness to the presence of some grotesque power harbored within yet uncontrollable by the self. Might not we too—the pair who had given birth to this baby and to this growth filled with a power beyond his control—awaken one morning to find similar excrescences, crying out with life, protruding from our heads, while the spinal fluid metabolized rapidly and in great quantities between the lumps and all the organs associated with our souls? Might not we in our turn proceed to the operating theater, feeling with our shaven heads like brute criminals ? … The nurse gave the wire-mesh door a determined kick. The jolt made thebaby open his mouth wide, all toothless and dark red like a wound, and start to cry. At that time, he still had the ability to express himself by crying.
    “I feel as though the doctor’s going to come along and say, ‘Well, here’s your baby back,’ and present us with the amputated growth,” said my wife as the nurse bore off the baby’s bed through countless doors to the operating theater.
    Her words brought home to me that both of us, she as much as myself, had felt a more positive reality in the swollen orange excrescence than in the pale, limp-limbed baby lying there with closed eyes.
    The operation went on for ten hours. As we waited exhausted for it to end, I—not my wife—was summoned three times to the operating theater to give blood transfusions. The last time, the sight of the baby’s head all besmeared with his own blood and mine made me feel that he was being cooked in some bubbling mess of broth. So weakened were my mental faculties by loss of blood that an odd equation formulated itself in my mind : the removal of the baby’s lump was equal to the physical amputation of some part of my own body. I actually felt a sharp pain deep down inside me and had to struggle with an urge to demand of the doctors, so doggedly continuing the operation, “Are you sure you’re not robbing me and my son of something really vital?”
    Eventually the baby came back to us, a creature no longer capable of any human reaction apart from gazing back at one with placid brown eyes, and I felt that I too had had a whole group of nerves cut away, thereby acquiring a profound insensitivity as a new characteristic. Nor was the loss apparent only in the baby himself and me; if anything, it was still more directly visible in my wife.
    As the bus had plunged into the forest she had fallen silent, drinking whisky steadily from a pocket flask. Her behavior, I knew, would spread a ripple of scandal among the respectable provincials riding the bus, but I had no desire to stop her. Before going to sleep, however, she’d determined that she should be sober to begin the new life in the village in the valley, and had thrown the remainder of the whisky, flask and all, well back among the trees. I’d hoped that the moment of intoxication then leading her into sleep would be the last of its kind. Now, though,