Free The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe Page B

feeling beside me the hot reality of her eyes, still bloodshot with sleep, fixed rigidly on the peasant boy’s head, I abandoned any overoptimistic expectation that she would really start the new life sober. My one wish was to prevent an acute revival, here and now,of the dangerous emotional state associated with the baby’s tumor. But it was increasingly borne in on me that this wish wasn’t to be granted either. I keenly regretted the whisky she’d thrown away.
    The conductress advanced toward the rear of the bus with her stomach thrust forward to preserve her balance. The young peasant woman ignored her and scowled forbiddingly, gazing out of the window. The child made no response to the conductress either, but I could tell, having had him under constant observation, that he was getting steadily tenser and tenser. It looked as though they had come and sat in the seat by ours in order to avoid the conductress.
    “Tickets,” prompted the conductress. For a while the woman ignored the appeal, then suddenly broke into voluble speech. She attacked the conductress for demanding the prescribed fare for the whole run from the top of the hill down to the valley; she and the child had already walked two-thirds of the distance from the top; if the child hadn’t complained of bellyache (at this point she poked at the child’s shoulder as he clung to the wooden armrest), they could have walked all the way back. The conductress explained that the distance from the top down to the valley had recently been made the new minimum fare. It was a new policy of the bus company’s necessitated by poor returns on this route—another sign, I told myself, of the decay of the road through the forest. The conductress’s logic seemed temporarily to overwhelm the young countrywoman. But then there appeared on her ruddy plebeian face, hitherto so aflame with indignation, a reaction that struck me with mingled surprise and amusement. With a little giggle, she declared in a self-assured tone :
    “Ain’t got no money.”
    The boy was of course as pale and tense as ever. The conductress hesitated for a moment then, once more the helpless countrygirl, went to discuss the matter with the driver. It occurred to me that I might take advantage of the peasant woman’s odd little giggle as a first step to releasing the tension in my wife. I looked round at her and smiled, but saw that her neck and the lower part of her face were covered with goose pimples, even though the eyes fixed on the boy’s head gleamed with a feverish light. Seeing trouble in the offing, I hesitated, at a loss. Annoyance jumped about inside me with the aimless frenzy of a firecracker: why hadn’t I stopped her from throwing away the whisky bottle ? In desperation I took the plunge and made a choice.
    “Let’s get off,” I said. “Taka will probably be at the bus stop to meetus, so we can ask the conductress to tell him to come and pick us up in the car.”
    My wife looked at me doubtfully and inclined her head slowly, a diver moving against water pressure in the depths of fear. I could sense her mind teetering between the fear within herself and fear of being deserted by the bus in the heart of the forest.
    Realizing that I wanted somehow to persuade her before terror of the forest as such grew and pinned her to her seat in the bus, I had to admit that, of the two of us, it was I who was frantically trying to flee from the phantom of the baby evoked by the peasant boy’s shaven head and sickly skin.
    “What if the telegram hasn’t arrived and Taka and the others aren’t there to meet us?”
    “Even if we have to walk we can get down to the valley by nightfall. The kid was going to walk, wasn’t he?”
    “Then I’d like to get off,” she said with an air of liberation mingled with an indefinable lingering apprehension that made me feel both relief and pity.
    I signaled to the conductress, who was talking busily to the driver, all the while keeping a