Not a single person was laughing.
All of them – the Village Elder and the other seniors, the bearded man, the women – they’d all stopped clapping, and now cast their heads down with uneasy looks. The red-faced man and the train driver, visibly paler now, examined the bottoms of their liquor cups and scratched their heads in embarrassment. Even Luna, standing there on the earthen floor, looked down awkwardly at her feet.
With trepidation, I turned to the Village Elder to apologize. “I really am very sorry,” I said. “I, a stranger, have danced your dance badly and ruined your wake.”
“No, no. That’s not the problem.” The Village Elder lifted his face and looked at me with pity, shaking his head. “You sang and danced most well. Almost too well, in fact, for an outsider.”
“Oh?” I said. Maybe I was wrong to dance too well! “In that case, why did no one laugh as they did before?”
“The words you sang were not good.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “The words? But all I did was sing nonsense, like everyone else!”
“That’s true,” the Village Elder replied. “The others all sang nonsense because they were trying not to sing the real words. But you, intending to sing nonsense, accidentally sang the real words.”
“The real words?!” I said, aghast. “You mean, what I sang was the real Song of Bear’s Wood? That Bockay Bo-bo-bo-bo-bo?”
The very sound drew gasps and moans from the villagers as they squirmed in their seats.
“Why?” I asked the Village Elder as if to cross-examine him. “What is wrong with singing the real words?”
The Village Elder started to explain. “The Song of Bear’s Wood, it’s taboo. We’re forbidden to sing it. It’s been passed down since olden days here in Bear’s Wood, but we’re not allowed to sing it out loud in front of folk. For if we sing it out loud, something terrible will surely happen to this country of ours.”
“Oh?” I said with mounting incredulity. “You mean this whole country we’re living in?”
“That’s right.”
Superstitious nonsense! I just wanted to laugh it off. They’d all ganged up to make a fool of me. But as I looked around again, it didn’t seem like a joke at all. They all wore genuinely gloomy expressions and looked quite crestfallen.
I felt a shudder. Then I turned again to the Village Elder. “Please don’t make fun of me!” I begged. “I’m quite superstitious, you know, for my age!”
“There’s nothing superstitious about it,” said the Village Elder, looking at me sternly for the first time. “Whenever someone from this hamlet accidentally sings the song, something terrible happens to this country of ours. So we take special care to tell everyone, adults and children, not to sing it. But every now and then, some parent, through lack of care or attention, lets a child sing it, for whatever reason. And every time that happens, some awful disaster or misfortune afflicts this country. Well, until now, it’s only been children, so the punishment has not been too bad. It’s never been so bad that the whole country has gone to ruin. But tonight, a fine young man like yourself has come, and has sung the song, so loudly, so well. The punishment will surely be severe.”
“I just didn’t know.” An involuntary cry of anguish issued from my throat. “All I did was sing nonsense. I didn’t know what it meant! Will there be punishment even for that?”
“There will,” the Village Elder replied with horrible certainty.
I buried my head in my hands. “Why did you let me do the dance?” I cried. “If the song is so taboo and dangerous, why did everyone urge me to sing it? You’re all responsible too, you know! And anyway, why did you start singing the Song of Bear’s Wood in the middle of a wake?! Didn’t you think someone might just sing the real words by mistake?”
“It’s true. We’re partly to blame as well,” said the red-faced man, who’d been the first to dance. He spoke with true remorse, and shifted uneasily in his seat.
“Yes. We’d be wrong to put all the blame on you,” echoed the Village Elder, looking at me with sorrowful eyes. “The reason why we do so enjoy singing the Song of Bear’s Wood is that, one day, someone might just sing the real words by accident. It’s so miraculously funny, because the singer puts us all in a state of nervous excitement. And deeper down, there’s a feeling of pride that our clan holds the key to this country’s fate. That makes the song even funnier. On top of that, we all got a bit carried away tonight. When you said you would do the dance, I had a bit of a foreboding. I’ll wager the others did too. But none of us could ever have imagined, not even in our wildest dreams, that you would go and sing the real and proper words, sound for sound, without a single mistake from beginning to end. We were all just enjoying the thrill, the sense of danger. And now it has ended in this.”
I was almost crying. “Is there no way of purging it?” I asked.
They all shook their heads as one.
“No. There’s no way,” the Village Elder replied. “Well, what’s done is done. Let us not think too much about what might happen to our country now.”
“Yes, let us not think about it,” echoed the others, doing their best to console me.
“There’s no point tormenting yourself, thinking what might happen.”
“Put it out of your mind.”
“Do not concern yourself.”
The driver stood up. “Right, then,” he said. “Had we better be on our way? It’s half-past three.”
“Yes. You send the guest off, will you,” said the Village Elder.
“Goodbye then,” I said.
I got up with a heavy heart and bowed to them all.
The men and women all bowed back in silence. Luna, half hiding behind the middle-aged woman who looked remarkably like her, nodded to me from the earth-floored room.
I climbed back into the cable car. The young driver took me back down to the foot of the mountain, and from there to the little station at Deer’s Wood.
Just as he was leaving, the driver turned to me. “Would you kindly not say anything to anyone about this Bear’s Wood Main Line, or our Bear’s Wood clan, or the song just now?” he asked.
“Of course,” I replied. “I have no intention of telling anyone at all.”
Two days later, I finally returned home. And ever since then, I’ve been waiting, nervously waiting, wondering every day what terrible catastrophe will befall our nation. So far, to the best of my knowledge, nothing seems to have happened at all. Sometimes I think they were just making fun of me after all. But maybe, just maybe, something awful might just be about to happen. Or perhaps it already has happened, and I’m the only one not to know about it. Perhaps something really, really terrible is happening to our country at this very moment…
The Very Edge of Happiness
As I returned home from work one day, my wife looked up from her woman’s weekly magazine, opened her mouth until it was almost as big as her face, and started to scream at me.
“What a fool I was to marry you!”
“What?! What are you talking about?”
She smacked the open page of her magazine with the back of her hand. It was yet another ludicrous article – this time, ‘Measure your husband’s sex rating’.
“It says here your erection is the size of an eleven-year-old’s. Your staying power is no better than a chicken’s, and your technique is Grade C average. You do it as often as a fifty-year-old, yet you’re still in your thirties and I’m only in my twenties! What are you going to do about it?! You’ve been deceiving me until now, haven’t you! What a fool I’ve been!”
“Don’t be so bloody stupid! It’s just a lot of sex-obsessed nonsense!” I pulled the magazine from her hands and tossed it away. “Sex, is that all you’ve got left to think about? Shame on you! It was my payday today, and I’ve
