The Silent Cry Read Online Free PDF Page A

I could tell, I could conquer them and begin to regret having marked time for several years. On the other hand, if I gave way to them and set out on a course of self-destruction thatwould really make them the sum total of my life, then that too would gradually make the true nature of the knots clear. Admittedly,” he complained with a sudden, sad intensity, “the understanding in that case wouldn’t be any use to me personally. Nor would there be any way of letting anyone else know that someone who’d apparently gone mad had seen the light in extremis .”
    It seemed as if my friend had profoundly stimulated Takashi’s interest. But at the same time, my brother’s behavior showed signs of a desire to get away just as soon as possible, and it was from this that he realized that his appeal had touched some sensitive core in Takashi. At this point a bus drew up. Takashi got on it and, handing my friend a pamphlet through the window—in return, he said, for the cost of the medicine—was swallowed up without further ado into the vastness of the American continent. Neither my friend nor I had had any clear information about him since. True to the resolution he’d confided in my friend, he’d quit the company from that moment and set out alone on his travels.
    Getting into a taxi, my friend immediately opened the pamphlet Takashi had given him. It was about the civil rights movement. The frontispiece was a photograph of a black, his body so scorched and swollen that the details were blurred like those of a crudely carved wooden doll, with a number of white men in shoddy clothes standing round him. It was comic and terrible and disgusting, a representation of naked violence so direct that it gripped the beholder like some fearful fantasy. Looking at it unavoidably brought one face to face with the abject certainty of defeat under the relentless pressure of fear. With the inevitability of two drops of water merging into each other, the sight linked itself immediately with the ill-defined trouble in his own head. It occurred to him that Takashi had left the pamphlet with him knowing full well the significance of giving it and its photograph to him rather than to anyone else. Takashi, in his turn, had seen into something essential in my friend’s mind.
    “One sometimes realizes after the event,” my friend said, “that one’s consciousness has caught something unexpected on its very outer edge, as though two things had somehow got superimposed. Ferreting around in the dimmer corners of my memory, it came to me that when I went up behind Takashi he was staring at that photograph as he drank his lemonade. He seemed to be wrestling with some colossal problem. I think he wasn’t really worrying about that businessof the antibiotic prescription that he talked about in such detail, but about some essentially much more serious matter. Do you think Takashi’s the kind of guy who’d make a fuss about a slight dose of the clap? It gave me a peculiar shock when he said, ‘Shall I tell you the truth?’ and I suspect that what he had in mind was something quite different from what he actually told me. I wonder what it was, though?”
    Seated at the bottom of the pit on that autumn dawn, the dog on my lap, I couldn’t tell what it had been—that thing in my brother’s mind whose existence, if nothing else, my friend had made clear. Neither could I tell what it was that, growing and growing in his own head, had finally led him to death in such a bizarre guise. Death cuts abruptly the warp of understanding. There are things which the survivors are never told. And the survivors have a steadily deepening suspicion that it is precisely because of the things incapable of communication that the deceased has chosen death. The factors that remain ill defined may sometimes lead a survivor to the very site of the disaster, but even then the only thing clear to anyone concerned is that he has been brought up against something