Free I Hear Them Cry by Shiho Kishimoto Page B

wouldn’t let anyone in to clean the space, not even my mother. There was an order to the chaos that only he understood. Any disruption to that order would infuriate him; a single piece of paper slightly out of place wouldn’t escape his notice. And it didn’t help to blame it on us children. He would still act bitterly and accuse my mother of failing to discipline us adequately. For my brother and me, our father’s office was off-limits.
    The room was stuffy with the smell of tobacco even with an air conditioner, a dehumidifier, and a fan—items my father considered indispensable. There was a bay window blocked by more books. But that’s where I found it, in that part of the dusky chamber where only half of the bay window let in the sunlight.
    It was a stack of ten sketchbooks, their spiral wiring reflected in the windowpane. Even then I was in love with pictures.
    (Does my father also draw?)
    Wanting to see his drawings, I approached the window carefully, so as not to move anything. I removed the books in order and opened one of the sketchbooks.

GRANDMOTHER: TWO
    My grandmother’s dementia progressed with age. It got so bad that she’d forget turning on her bedside lamp a split second after she’d done it. Consequently, my mother decided to turn on the house lights at four every evening.
    In the end, though, it was no use. One day, Grandmother began walking toward Hikami, her hometown of old in Hyōgo Prefecture. She stepped outside and set a newspaper on fire before ambling down the road, illuminating the area around her with the flame.
    Mother put out the torch with a bucket of water. But Grandmother got wet, too, and she caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. My father had objected to hospitalizing her at first, but in the end he gave in and Grandmother was hospitalized against her will. After returning home, my dad was in a bad mood, so he went into his study.
    (Did he go here to draw?)
    The day I’d snuck into his study and looked at his sketchbooks I found countless drawings of a naked man and woman entwined in a tangle of arms and legs, but with their navels always connected. Every sketch was drawn meticulously in pencil and was very detailed, as if he had been working fromreal-life models posing in front of him. The woman on these pages was not my mother.
    I couldn’t stop looking at the drawings. I’d discovered my father’s terrible, secret world. From that day on, every time my father went into his study, I imagined him drawing “that stuff,” as I came to call it in my head. Before I knew it, I came to hate him. Looking back now, I can’t help but wonder whether that room was a refuge from the messy feuds that erupted between Grandmother and my mom. These drawings were his secret pleasures. Was the woman in the sketches his lover? Were all those documents on the desk merely smoke screens to keep prying eyes off the drawings?
    Soon after being hospitalized, Grandmother passed away, and, without even waiting for me to graduate from art school, so did my father, having contracted a medical condition called subarachnoid hemorrhage.
    I wonder whether my mom was actually exacting revenge against my father, in her own underhanded way, when she tied my grandmother to her bed. Even the dousing of the old lady in such a callous, heartless way might have been driven by the impulse to get back at him for his secret.
    When I was a kid, there was a time when I pestered my mom to give me a younger sister. It was something I had said without understanding the workings of the adult world.
    “You know what?” my mother said to me. “Grandmother opened the
fusuma
door and said, ‘Enough with the children.’ ”
    Thinking about that now as I headed to see my mother, I realized what it meant for a grandmother to enter a married couple’s bedroom and say such a thing. In that house, the sounds of Grandmother’s breathing prevailed, and all semblance of a married life had probably vanished. My father