The Silent Cry Read Online Free PDF Page B

name?” said the giant.
    The question was remote from all the possible remarks against which I’d been arming myself. Hauled safe, in that instant, onto everyday shores, I felt an immense, relaxing sense of relief. No doubt the gossip would spread around the neighborhood through this man, but it would be a scandal that in no sense stepped outside the everyday: not the kind that a moment earlier I’d contemplated with such fear and embarrassment; not the kind of scandal that would bring dog’s-bristles of terror and shame sprouting from every pore of one’s body, the kind that would brutally and aggressively scatter everything human to the winds, but a quiet scandal, no worse than if one had been seen, say, having intercourse with an elderly housemaid. The dog on my lap, divining that his protector had somehow been delivered from the peril associated with the grotesque thing above, fell silent, docile as a rabbit.
    “Fell in there while you were drunk, did you?” the man went on, totally and finally plunging my behavior into the realms of the everyday. “It was foggy this morning.”
    I nodded cautiously at him (his whole body stood out in such black silhouette that to him my face, however dark the morning, must have stood out light against the darkness), then got up with the dog still in my arms. Drops of water trickled like tears from the back of my thighs, wetting the skin around my knees, which had been dry so far. Vaguely apprehensive, the man took a step back so that I was able to get a view of the whole of him from a point about level with his ankles.
    He was a young milkman and wore a special tunic for carrying milk that looked like a life jacket with a bottle shoved into each of its air tubes. Whenever he took a breath, a jangling of glass striking glass arose around him. His breathing seemed to be somewhat heavier than it should be. He had a flat face like a halibut, with almost no bridge to his nose, and the whites of his eyes, like the eyes of primates, were almost invisible. He stared at me with those uniformly brown eyes, breathing heavily; his breath hung about his weak chin like a white beard. I shifted my gaze to the dogwood that displayed its autumn colors behind his spherical head, reluctant to see the emergence on his face of some expression that might mean something. Seen from a point two inches above the ground, the backs of the dogwood leaves were a burning red, threatening yet at the same time familiar, a redthat reminded me of the flames in the picture of hell that I’d seen in our village temple every year on the Buddha’s Birthday (it had been presented to the temple by my great-grandfather following the unhappy incident of 1860). The dogwood was a sign to me, its meaning only imperfectly clear, that produced a sudden resolve. I put the dog down onto the ground where the earth had been dug over to produce a dirty-looking mixture of black mud and withered brown grass. The dog ran away with every appearance of cheerfulness, as though to emphasize how long-suffering it had been up to now. Carefully, I climbed up the ladder. The song of at least three different species of bird bore down on me, together with the squeal of a car’s tires. I had to climb cautiously in case my legs, which trembled violently with the cold, made me lose my step. As the whole of me in my dirty blue-striped pajamas appeared shivering above ground, the milkman took another apprehensive step backward. I was tempted to give him a scare, but refrained, of course, and going into the kitchen closed the door behind me without further ado.
    “When I saw you in the hole, I reckoned you were dead,” the milkman shouted after me disappointedly, as though my going indoors without paying him any attention had made him see the affair as an outright swindle.
    I stopped for a moment in front of my wife’s room to see if she was still asleep. Then I took off my pajamas and rubbed myself down. I thought of heating some water and