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All God's Children Can Dance, Książki, Haruki Murakami collection, Short Stories, after the quake |
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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] Harper's Magazine: ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017000900/http://findarticles.com/... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to article page To print: Select File and then Print from your browser's menu. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from FindArticles.com, located at http://www.findarticles.com . ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Harper's Magazine Oct, 2001 ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE. Author/s: Haruki Murakami Yoshiya woke with the worst possible hangover. He could barely manage to open one eye; the left lid wouldn't budge. His head felt as if it had been stuffed with decaying teeth during the night. A foul sludge was oozing from his rotting gums and eating away at his brain from the inside. If he ignored it, he wouldn't have a brain left. Which would be all right. Just a little more sleep: that's all he wanted. But he knew it was out of the question. He felt too awful to sleep. He glanced up at the clock by his pillow, but it had vanished. Why wasn't the clock where it belonged? No glasses either. He must have tossed them somewhere. It had happened before. He managed to raise the upper half of his body, but this jumbled his mind, and his face plunged back into the pillow. A truck came through the neighborhood selling clothes-drying poles. They'd take your old ones and exchange them for new ones, said the loudspeaker, and the price was the same as twenty years ago. The monotonous, stretched-out voice belonged to a middle-aged man. It made him feel seasick, but he couldn't barf. The best cure for a bad hangover was to watch a morning talk show, according to one friend. The shrill witch-hunter voices of the showbiz correspondents would bring up every last bit left in your stomach from the night before. But Yoshiya didn't have the strength to drag himself to the TV. Just breathing was hard enough. Random but persistent streams of clear light and white smoke swirled together inside his eyes, which gave him a strangely flat view of the world. Was this what it felt like to die? If so, fine. But once was enough. Please, God, he thought, never do this to me again. "God" brought to mind his mother. He started to call out to her for a glass of water, but realized he was home alone. She and the other believers had left for Kansai three days earlier. It takes all kinds to make a world, and his mother was a volunteer servant of God. He 1 of 15 05-08-05 01.23 Harper's Magazine: ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017000900/http://findarticles.com/... still couldn't open his left eye. Who the hell could he have been drinking so much with? No way to remember. Just trying turned the core of his brain to stone. Never mind now; he'd think about it later. It couldn't be noon yet. But still, Yoshiya figured, judging from the glare of what seeped past the curtains, it had to be after eleven. Some degree of lateness on the part of a young staff member was never a big deal to his employer, a publishing company. He had always evened things out by working late. But showing up after noon had earned him some sharp remarks from the boss. Those he could overlook, but he wanted to avoid causing any problems for the believer who had recommended him for the job. By the time he left the house, it was almost one o'clock. Any other day he would have made up an excuse and taken off from work, but he had one document on disk that he had to format and print out today, and it was not a job that anyone else could do. He left the condo in Asagaya that he rented with his mother, took the elevated Chuo Line to Yotsuya, transferred to the Marunouchi Line subway, took that as far as Kasumigaseki, transferred again, this time to the Hibiya Line subway, and got off at Kamiya-cho, the station closest to the small foreign-travel-guide publishing company where he worked. He climbed up and down the long flights of stairs at each station on wobbly legs. He saw the man with the missing earlobe as he was transferring back the other way underground at Kasumigaseki around ten o'clock that night. Hair half-gray, the man was somewhere in his mid-fifties: tall, no glasses, tweed overcoat somewhat old-fashioned, briefcase in right hand. He walked with the slow pace of someone deep in thought, heading from the Hibiya Line platform toward the the Chiyoda Line. Without hesitation, Yoshiya fell in after him. That's when he noticed that his throat was as dry as a piece of old leather. Yoshiya s mother was forty-three, but she didn't look more than thirty-five. She had clean, classic good looks, a great figure that she preserved with a simple diet and vigorous workouts morning and evening, and dewy skin. Only eighteen years older than Yoshiya, she was often taken for his elder sister. She had never had much in the way of maternal instincts, or perhaps she was just eccentric. Even after Yoshiya had entered middle school and begun to take an interest in things sexual, she would think nothing of walking around the house wearing skimpy underwear--or nothing at all. They slept in separate bedrooms, to be sure, but whenever she felt lonely at night, she would crawl under his covers with almost nothing on. As if hugging a dog or cat, she would sleep with an arm thrown over Yoshiya, who knew she meant nothing by it, but still it made him nervous. He would have to twist himself into incredible positions to keep his mother unaware of his erection. Terrified of stumbling into a fatal relationship with his own mother, 2 of 15 05-08-05 01.23 Harper's Magazine: ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017000900/http://findarticles.com/... Yoshiya embarked on a frantic search for an easy lay. As long as one failed to materialize, he would take care to masturbate at regular intervals. He even went so far as to patronize a porno shop while he was still in high school, using the money he made from part-time jobs. He should have left his mother's house and begun living on his own, Yoshiya knew, and he had wrestled with the question at critical points: when he entered college and again when he took a job. But here he was, twenty-five years old and still unable to tear himself away. One reason for this, he felt, was that there was no telling what his mother might do if he were to leave her alone. He had devoted vast amounts of energy over the years to preventing her from carrying out the wild, self-destructive (but good-hearted) schemes she was always coming up with. Plus, there was bound to be a terrible outburst if he were to announce all of a sudden that he was leaving home. He was sure it had never once crossed his mother's mind that they might someday live apart. He recalled all too vividly the profound heartbreak and distress that she had experienced when he announced at the age of thirteen that he was abandoning the faith. For two solid weeks or more, she ate nothing, she said nothing, she never once took a bath or combed her hair or changed her underwear. She hardly even managed to attend to her period when it came. Yoshiya had never seen his mother in such a filthy, smelly state. Just imagining the possibility of its happening again gave him chest pains. Yoshiya had no father. From the time of his birth, there had been only his mother, and she had told him again and again, from the time he was a little boy, "Your father is Our Lord" (which is how they referred to their god). "Our Lord must stay high up in Heaven; He can't live down here with us. But He is always watching over you, Yoshiya; He always has your best interests at heart." Mr. Tabata, who served as little Yoshiya's special "Guide," would say the same kinds of things to him: "It's true, you do not have a father in this world, and you're going to meet all sorts of people who say stupid things to you about that. Unfortunately, the eyes of most people are clouded and unable to see the truth, Yoshiya, but Our Lord, your father, is the world itself. You are fortunate to live in the embrace of His love. You must be proud of that and live a life that is good and true." "I know," responded Yoshiya just after he had entered elementary school. "But God belongs to everybody, doesn't He? Fathers are different, though. Everybody has a different one. Isn't that right?" "Listen to me, Yoshiya. Someday Our Lord, your father, will reveal Himself to you as yours and yours alone. You will meet Him when and where you least expect it. But if you begin to doubt or to abandon your faith, He may be so disappointed that He never shows Himself to you. Do you understand?" 3 of 15 05-08-05 01.23 Harper's Magazine: ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017000900/http://findarticles.com/... "I understand." "And you will keep in mind what I've said to you?" "I will keep it in mind, Mr. Tabata." But in fact what Mr. Tabata was telling him did not make much sense to Yoshiya because he could not believe that he was a special "child of God." He knew that he was average, just like the other boys and girls he saw everywhere--or rather, that he was just a little bit less than average. He had nothing that made him stand out, and he was always making a mess of things. It stayed that way for him through elementary school. His grades were decent enough, but when it came to sports he was hopeless. He had slow and spindly legs, myopic eyes, and clumsy hands. In baseball he missed most fly balls that came his way. His teammates would grumble, and the girls in the stands would titter. Yoshiya would pray to God, his father, each night before bedtime: "I promise to maintain unwavering faith in You if only You will let me catch outfield flies. That's all I ask (for now)." If God really was his father, He should be able to do that much for him. But his prayer was never answered. The flies continued to drop from his glove. "This means you are testing Our Lord, Yoshiya," said Mr. Tabata sternly. "There is nothing wrong with praying for something, but you must pray for something grander than that. It is wrong to pray for something concrete, with time limits." When Yoshiya turned seventeen, his mother revealed the secret of his birth (more or less). He was old enough to know the truth, she said. "I was living in a profound darkness in my teen years. My soul was in chaos as deep as a newly formed ocean of mud. The true light was hidden behind dark clouds. And so I had knowledge of several different men without love. You know what it means to have knowledge, don't you?" Yoshiya said that he did indeed know what it meant. His mother used incredibly old-fashioned language when it came to sexual matters. By that point in his life, he himself had had knowledge of several different girls without love. His mother continued her story. "I first became pregnant in the second year of high school. At the time, I had no idea how very much it meant to become pregnant. A friend of mine introduced me to a doctor who gave me an abortion. He was a very kind man, and very young, and after the operation he lectured me on contraception. Abortion was good neither for the body nor the spirit, he said, and I should also be concerned about venereal disease, so I should always be sure to use a condom, and he gave me a new box of them. 4 of 15 05-08-05 01.23 Harper's Magazine: ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017000900/http://findarticles.com/... "I told him that I had used condoms, so he said, `Well, then, someone didn't put them on right. It's amazing how few people know the right way to use them.' But I'm not stupid. I was being very careful about contraception. The minute we took our clothes off, I would be sure to put it on the man myself. You can't trust men with something like that. You know about condoms, I hope?" Yoshiya said that he did know about condoms. "So, two months later I got pregnant again. I could hardly believe it: I was being more careful than ever. There was nothing I could do but go back to the same doctor. He took one look at me and said, `I told you to be careful. What have you got in that head of yours?' I couldn't stop crying. I explained to him how much care I had taken with contraception whenever I had knowledge, but he wouldn't believe me. `This would never have happened if you put them on right,' he said. He was mad. "Well, to make a long story short, about six months later, because of a weird series of circumstances, I ended up having knowledge of the doctor himself. He was thirty at the time, and still a bachelor. He was kind of boring to talk to, but he was a nice man. His right earlobe was missing. A dog chewed it off when he was a boy. He was just walking along the street one day when a big black dog he had never seen before jumped up on him and bit his earlobe off. He used to say he was glad it was just an earlobe. You could live without an earlobe. But a nose would be different. I had to agree with him. "Being with him helped me get my old self back. When I was having knowledge of him, I managed not to think disturbing thoughts. I even got to like his half-size ear. He was such a serious man, he would lecture me on the use of the condom while we were in bed--like when and how to put it on and when and how to take it off. You'd think this would make for fool-proof contraception, but I ended up pregnant again." Yoshiya's mother went to see her doctor-lover and told him she seemed to be pregnant. He examined her and confirmed that it was so. But he would not admit to being the father. He was a professional, he said; his contraceptive techniques were beyond reproach. Which meant that she must have had relations with another man. "This really hurt me. He made me so angry when he said that, I couldn't stop shaking. Can you see how deeply this would have hurt me?" Yoshiya said that he did see. "While I was with him, I never had knowledge of another man. Not once. But he just thought of me as some kind of young slut. That was the last I saw of him. I didn't have an abortion either. I decided to kill myself. And I would have. I would have gotten on a boat to 5 of 15 05-08-05 01.23
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