A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe Page B

from the foreign student elite, Bird stepped outside through a rear exit, avoiding the elevator in the teachers’ lounge, and started up the spiral stairs that clung like ivy to the outside wall. Not daring to look down at the prospect unfolding below him gradually, barely enduring the swaying of the stairs like the motion of a rolling ship produced by students pounding past him: pale, panting, belching with a groan every step or two of the way. So slowly did Bird climb that students overtaking him, dismayed for an instant by their own speed, stopped short and peered into his face, hesitated, then raced on again, shaking the iron stairs. Bird sighed, his head swimming, and clung to the iron railing. …
    What a relief to reach the top of the stairs! and then someone called his name and Bird’s uneasiness returned. It was a friend who was helping sponsor a Slavic languages study group that Bird had formed with some other interpreters. But since Bird had all he could do at the moment playing cat-and-mouse with his hangover, meeting someone he had not expected struck him as a terrific nuisance. He closed himself like a shellfish under attack.
    “Hey—Bird!” his friend called: the nickname was still valid in any situation, for all categories of friend. “I’ve been calling since last night but I couldn’t get you. So I thought I’d come over—”
    “Oh?” said Bird, unsociably.
    “Have you heard the news about Mr. Delchef?”
    “News?” Bird repeated, feeling vaguely apprehensive. Mr. Delchef was an attaché in the legation from a small socialist state in the Balkans and the study group’s instructor.
    “Apparently he’s moved in with a Japanese girl and won’t go back to the legation. They say it’s been a week. The legation wants to keep things in the family and bring Mr. Delchef back themselves, but they’veonly been here a little while and, well, they’re short of people. The girl lives in the slummiest part of Shinjuku, it’s like a maze in there; there just isn’t anyone at the legation who gets around well enough to search for strays in a neighborhood like that. That’s where we come in: the legation has asked the study group to help out. Of course, we’re partly responsible for the whole thing anyway—”
    “Responsible?”
    “Mr. Delchef met her at that bar we took him to after a meeting, you know, the Pullman Car.” Bird’s friend snickered. “Don’t you remember that small, peculiar, pasty-faced girl?”
    Bird recalled her right away, a small, peculiar, pasty-faced girl. “But she didn’t speak English or any Slavic language and Mr. Delchef’s Japanese is no good at all—how do they get along?”
    “That’s the hell of it; how do you suppose they spent a whole week, clammed up, or what?” The friend seemed embarrassed by his own innuendo.
    “What will happen if Mr. Delchef doesn’t go back to the legation? Will that make him a defector or something?”
    “You can bet it will!”
    “He’s really asking for trouble, Mr. Delchef—” Bird said glumly.
    “We’d like to call a meeting of the study group and think it over. Are you free tonight?”
    “Tonight?—” Bird was nonplused. “—I—can’t make it tonight.”
    “But you were closer than any of us to Mr. Delchef. If we decide to send an envoy from the study group, we were hoping you’d agree to go—”
    “An envoy—anyway, I couldn’t possibly make it tonight,” Bird said. Then he forced himself to add: “We had a child but there was something wrong and he’s either dead already or dying right now.”
    “God!” Bird’s friend exclamed, wincing. Above their heads the bell began to ring.
    “That’s awful, really awful. Listen, we’ll manage without you tonight. And try not to let it get the best of you—is your wife all right?”
    “Fine, thank you.”
    “When we decide what to do about Mr. Delchef, I’ll get in touch. God, you look run down—take care of yourself—”
    “Thank you.”
    Bird,