Quicksand (12 page)

. . . Well, that's what Mitsuko told me he said.

“
Please
, Sister,” she begged me, “I hate to ask you to do it, but the longer I let this go, the worse the pains are. It's too much for me, I may get horribly sick, so if you just say you'll take responsibility, I can go ahead and have that operation.”

“If I'm to be responsible, what am I supposed to do?” I asked. Either go to the hospital and make a statement witnessed by the director and a third party, Mitsuko said, or else be willing to write something down to be used later, if necessary. But I couldn't do that sort of thing lightly—and how far could I trust Mitsuko? For a person who had had a hemorrhage the night before, she didn't look a bit sick, and it seemed strange that she would be out walking too. Also, she said she'd had a staff member at the hospital call me, but why would anyone like that take part in a scheme to use Mrs. Nakagawa's name? I felt there must be more to it and hesitated to speak out, one way or the other. . . .

But just then Mitsuko cried: “Oh, it hurts! . . . It's hurting again!” And she began rubbing her stomach.

“
WHAT'S WRONG
?”

As I spoke, Mitsuko seemed to turn ashen and sank down, writhing with pain, on the tatami floor. “Sister, Sister! Take me to the bathroom!” she begged. I was anxious and upset and put my arms around her to help her up. Finally she began staggering forward, leaning against my shoulder and gasping for breath.

I waited outside the bathroom door and called in to ask how she was, but her groaning kept getting louder and louder.

“I can't stand it! Sister!”

When I heard that, I burst in frantically. “You've got to be brave!” I cried, rubbing her shoulders. “Has anything come out?”

She shook her head. Then, in a faint, breathless voice as if she really was about to expire: “I'm dying, Sister, I know I'm dying. . . . Help me!” Again she whimpered “Sister!” and clutched my wrists with both hands.

“Oh, Mitsu! How could you ever die from something like this?”

But in spite of my encouragement, she stared blankly up, seemingly barely able to make me out. “You'll forgive me, won't you, Sister? I'd be happy if I could just die here beside you. . . .”

It sounded a little as if she was putting on an act, but her hands did seem to be getting colder as they gripped me.

“Shall I call a doctor?” I asked.

But she refused. “You mustn't. That would only make trouble for you. If I'm going to die, let me die the way I am.”

No matter what, I couldn't simply leave her there, so I had Kiyo help me carry her upstairs to the bedroom. Anyway, it was all so sudden that I had no time to spread a futon out for her, and then too, although I had qualms about taking her up to our bedroom, all the doors and windows were open downstairs in the early-summer heat and people could see in, so that wouldn't do. After I put her to bed I meant to telephone my husband and Ume. But she clutched my sleeve hard and wouldn't let go.

“Sister, you mustn't leave me!”

Still, she was a little calmer, she didn't seem to be suffering so much, and I felt a wave of relief. Well, at this rate I won't need to call the doctor, I thought.

The way things were, I couldn't leave her side, so I sent the maid back down and told her to clean out the bathroom right away. Then I thought of giving Mitsuko some medicine, but she wouldn't hear of it.

“No, no!” she said. “Just loosen my sash, Sister.”

I undid her sash for her, took off her bloodstained white tabi socks, and brought in alcohol and cotton and wiped her hands and feet. Meanwhile she had started having convulsions again.

“Ooh, it hurts! Water, water! . . .”

She was tearing fiercely at the sheets and pillows and everything within reach, and writhing on the bed, curling her body up like a shrimp. I brought her a glass of water, but she thrashed around violently and wouldn't drink it, so I held her down by force and gave it to her mouth-to-mouth. She seemed to like that and swallowed greedily. Then she cried out again: “It hurts, it hurts! Sister, for heaven's sake get on my back and press hard!” Mitsuko kept telling me where she wanted to be massaged, where she wanted to be stroked, and I kneaded and rubbed away just as she asked. Yet the moment I thought she was feeling better she would utter an agonizing groan—it seemed she might never recover. And when she had even a brief respite she would weep bitterly and say, as if to herself: “Ah, I'm being punished for what I did to you, Sister. . . . I wonder if you'll forgive me after I'm dead.”

Soon she seemed to be writhing in worse pain than ever, and she insisted that a clot of blood must have come out. Over and over she cried: “It's coming out, it's out!” But each time I looked, there was nothing of the kind.

“It's just your nerves—I can't see a thing.”

“If it doesn't come I'll die! I think you don't care whether you let me die or not.”

“How can you say that!”

“Then why won't you help me, instead of letting me suffer like this? . . . I'm sure you know what to do, better than any doctor. . . .”

That was because I had once told her: “There's nothing to it, if you just have a little instrument.” But as soon as she began making all the fuss about it “coming out,” I realized that everything she was doing today was only an act. . . . To tell the truth, that had begun to dawn on me gradually, but I had played along, and Mitsuko herself saw I was pretending to be deceived and kept up her own playacting all the more boldly. After that both of us were simply trying to maintain mutual deception.

. . . I'm sure you understand very well what was going on. The fact is, I had deliberately walked into the trap that Mitsuko set up before my very eyes. . . . No, I never asked her what that red stuff was; even now I wonder. Perhaps she smuggled in some of that fake blood they use in the theater.

“Then you aren't still angry with me about the other day, are you, Sister? You'll really forgive me?”

“If you try to deceive me one more time, I
will
let you die!”

“And you won't get away with treating me so coldly!”

In less than an hour we were back on the same old intimate terms, and suddenly I began to be afraid my husband might return soon. Now that we were reconciled, after all that had happened, my need for her was stronger than ever. I didn't want to be apart from her a single moment, and yet as things stood how could we possibly meet every day?

“What shall we do? You'll come again tomorrow, won't you, Mitsu?”

“Is it all right to come to your house?”

“I can't say if it's all right or not.”

“Then let's both go to Osaka! I'll phone you tomorrow, anytime you'd like.”

“I'll phone you too.”

We went on that way till late afternoon, and Mitsuko began getting dressed to leave. “I'm going home,” she announced. “That husband of yours will be coming back. . . .”

“Just stay a little longer!” Now I was the one to plead.

“Don't be such a spoiled child!” she said. “You're so unreasonable. I'll call you tomorrow for sure—just be patient and wait till then.” She left around five o'clock.

In those days my husband usually came home by six, but although I thought he might be anxious enough to turn up early, it seems that a certain case he'd been working on was keeping him at the office. An hour later he still hadn't returned. In the meantime I straightened up the room, made the bed neatly, and picked up the stained socks that Mitsuko had dropped on the floor—she put on a pair of mine when she left to go home—and as I gazed absently at those red stains, I felt as if I were dreaming. How could I explain all this to my husband? Should I even tell him I'd been up here? Should I keep silent? What could I say that would make it possible for us to go on meeting?

Just as I was revolving those thoughts in my mind, I heard Kiyo call upstairs that the master was home. I stuffed the socks away in a dresser drawer and went down.

“What happened after that phone call?” he asked as soon as he saw me.

“I had a terribly hard time,” I said. “Why weren't you home earlier?”

“I wanted to be, but there was some business I had to take care of. What on earth happened?”

“They asked me to come right over to the hospital, but I didn't know whether I should or not. Anyway, I had them let me wait till tomorrow. . . .”

“So Mitsuko left, did she?”

“Yes, but she made me promise to go along with her tomorrow, and then she went home.”

“Aren't you at fault for lending her that book?”

“But she told me she wouldn't let anyone else see it—really, I'm in an awful fix! Well, anyhow, I suppose I'll have to go pay a sick call at the hospital. It's not as if I'd never heard of Mrs. Nakagawa. . . .”

With that, I had at least given myself a pretext for going out the next day.

THAT NIGHT
I could hardly wait for daybreak, and as soon as my husband left the house, at eight o'clock, I flew to the telephone.

“Sister, it's dreadfully early isn't it? Are you up already?”

The voice that came over the receiver was the same one I had heard the day before, but its sweet familiar sound made my heart beat faster than when she had been there with me.

“Were you still asleep, Mitsu?”

“Your phone call wakened me!”

“I can leave anytime now. Won't you come right away too?”

“Then I'll hurry up and get ready. Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?”

“You're sure
you
can?”

“Of course I am!”

“Are you free all day today, Mitsu? It doesn't matter if you're home late?”

“It doesn't matter in the least.”

“That's how I feel too,” I said.

I got to the station at exactly nine-thirty, but Mitsuko hadn't come. As time passed, I grew impatient, wondering if she was just taking as long as usual at her makeup or if she had deceived me again. I thought of trying to call her from a public telephone but gave it up, for fear she might come while I was gone and then leave herself.

It was after ten o'clock when she finally came rushing through the station gate and over to me.

“Have you been waiting long, Sister?” she asked, panting for breath. “Where shall we go?”

“Mitsu, don't you know some nice quiet place? I'd like to spend the whole day with no one else around.”

“Then how about Nara?” she said.

Yes, of course; it was Nara where we went on that first delightful outing together, Nara that I had to thank for my memories of the evening landscape on Mount Wakakusa. . . . How could I have forgotten a place that meant so much to us?

“That's perfect!” I exclaimed. “Let's go up Mount Wakakusa again!” I was truly happy at the thought of it. . . . As usual when I was deeply moved, tears welled up in my eyes. “Hurry, hurry. Let's go!” I urged her, and my feet hardly touched the ground as we ran to a taxi.

“I was thinking about it all night long, and I decided Nara would be best.”

“I couldn't sleep a wink myself last night, but I don't know what I was thinking.”

“Did your husband come back right after I left?”

“It was over an hour later.”

“What did he say?”

“Let's not talk about it—today I want to forget all that.”

When we arrived in Nara we took a bus from the train station to the foot of Mount Wakakusa. This time it was a hazy, hot day, unlike our earlier visit, and we were streaming with perspiration by the time we had climbed all the way to the summit. After that we rested at the little tea shop at the top, and remembering how Mitsuko had rolled tangerines down the hill, we bought some mandarin oranges, which happened to be in season, and both of us rolled them down, startling the deer below into bounding away.

“Mitsu, aren't you getting hungry?”

“Yes, but I'd like to stay up here a little longer.”

“So would I,” I said. “I'd like to stay up on the mountain forever. Let's just have a snack.”

For our lunch, then, we ate a couple of hard-boiled eggs, as we gazed out over the Great Buddha Hall toward Mount Ikoma.

“We picked a lot of bracken and horsetail last time, Sister,” Mitsuko said. “Weren't they growing on the hill behind us?”

“At this time of year you won't find any.”

“But I want to go over there again,” she said.