Thirst for Love (21 page)

What will I do if, on this evening when I want to tell everything to Saburo and endure his recriminations, I should have to sit by while someone else tells him? He wouldn’t show anger; he would just keep quiet, hiding his disappointment. Or, worse, he would be reticent with everyone present and smile as if to pardon me. And that would be the end of it all—of the pain I have anticipated, of my wild dreams, of my joyful annihilation. Nothing must happen until one o’clock in the morning! Nothing new is to come into existence until I do it myself!

Etsuko sat there without saying a word, her face drained of color.

It was Yakichi who came to her rescue. It was he, the unwilling and powerless sharer of her anxiety, who spoke up—he who, though only vaguely aware of the basis for Etsuko’s concern, had had enough experience to measure the depth of her panic. And it was he who, for the sake of the next day’s trip, rescued Etsuko from Kensuke and Chieko by launching into a long harangue filled with the party-killing propensities of the long-time company president.

“Yes, Saburo, you’ve had enough. When I was your age, now, I didn’t smoke, much less drink. Now, you don’t smoke, and that’s admirable. When you’re young, it pays not to have tastes you’ll regret later on. Now when it comes to getting to like liquor, even forty isn’t very late for that. It’s even early for someone like Kensuke. Of course, times and generations differ. There is the difference between generations, and you have to keep that in mind, but just the same . . .”

There was a period of silence, interrupted by a burst of hysterical laughter from Asako. “Look,” she said, “Natsuo’s dropped right off. Let me just put him to bed.”

She embraced the boy, who had fallen asleep on her lap, and stood up. Nobuko followed her out.

“Let’s take a lesson from Natsuo and behave ourselves,” said Kensuke, in a deliberately childish tone—aware of what Yakichi wished to achieve. “And, Etsuko, would you please give me the bottle back? I just want a drink for myself.”

Etsuko had placed the bottle at her side, almost without realizing it; now, again barely conscious of what she was doing, she slid it over toward Kensuke.

She tried to look somewhere else than at Saburo but ended up looking only at him. He uncomfortably avoided her gaze.

As she gazed at Saburo, Etsuko thought of tomorrow’s departure, which she had forced herself to consider inevitable. Now, however, that departure suddenly came to seem tentative, capable of alteration. The destination she was thinking about at that moment was not Tokyo, but—if one could call it a destination—the grape field behind the house.

The area the Sugimotos called the grape field was the section of their property once given over to grapes, occupied now by the peach orchard and the three abandoned greenhouses. It was the area through which they had walked on their way to view the cherry blossoms and to attend the festival, but outside of these occasions, the grape field was to the Sugimotos a spot seldom visited—a deserted island a quarter acre in size.

Etsuko could not keep from thinking about her preparations: how she would dress when she went to meet Saburo, how she would keep Yakichi from noticing her primping, what she would wear on her feet, how she would prop open the back door before retiring so that it would not creak and wake the household.

She realized that if what she wanted was a long talk with Saburo, she didn’t need to go through all this secrecy, at an hour like that, at a place like that. It was really a laughable waste of effort. Were it now a few months back, when nobody was aware of her love, it would have been different. But that love was now practically an open secret, and if she wanted to avoid needless misunderstanding, she would have been better advised to schedule that meeting outside in broad daylight. Yet all she wanted was to make an abject confession, nothing more.

What was it that made her desire this elaborate secrecy?

On this last night, Etsuko wanted her little secret, even if there was nothing to hide. It would be her first and perhaps her last secret with Saburo. She wanted to share it with him. Even if in the end he gave her nothing, she wished somehow to have him give her this trifling, not at all undangerous secret. She felt she had the right to ask this gift from him, whatever the cost.

From the middle of October on, Yakichi wore his knitted nightcap to bed to ward off the cold.

To Etsuko the nightcap had a strange significance. When he crawled into bed with it on his head, she knew she was not needed that evening. When he didn’t wear it, she was wanted.

The going-away party had ended. It was eleven o’clock, and Etsuko could hear Yakichi breathing in sleep beside her. It is wise to get enough sleep the night before one takes a trip. His woolen nightcap had slipped to one side, exposing the ends of his oily white hair. His hair would never go snow-white; it would always be a rather untidy pepper-and-salt shade.

Etsuko looked at the black nightcap in the light of the floor lamp she used when reading in bed on nights she could not sleep. After a time she turned off the light. She did not want to have Yakichi open his eyes and get the impression that she was reading any later than usual.

She lay there in the dark and waited—almost two hours, an eternity of waiting. Her impatience and her feverish, unbridled imagination sketched the coming rendezvous with Saburo as something of limitless joy. The chore of confession by which she would bring Saburo’s hatred down on herself was forgotten, like the prayers of a nun who, gripped by passion, has forgotten to pray.

Etsuko went into the kitchen and pulled the work dress she had concealed there over her nightgown. Then she tied a vermilion undersash around her waist, wrapped an old wool scarf the colors of the rainbow around her neck, and donned her black figured-satin coat. Maggie was sound asleep inside the dog house by the front door; there was no fear she would bark. Etsuko passed out the kitchen door and into the night, clear and bright as day beneath the moon.

She did not set out directly for the grape field, but instead walked over to Saburo’s bedroom. His window was open. His bedclothes were thrown aside. He had swung out the window and preceded her to the grape field, of that there was no doubt. This evidence of his cooperation filled Etsuko’s breast with an unexpected sensual thrill of joy.

The grape field, though usually loosely described as “in the back of the house,” lay on the far side of a depression—practically a ravine—in which potatoes were grown. A bamboo thicket a few yards in depth ran along the edge of the grape field nearest the house, screening the greenhouses from view.

Etsuko passed through the potato gulley by a path deep in grass. She heard an owl call. The torn-up earth of the field, its potatoes already dug, loomed in the moonlight like a relief model of a mountain range fashioned of papiermâché. Briers blocked one part of the path, beside which the prints of sneakers—Saburo’s—showed for two or three paces in the loose earth.

She passed through the bamboos, climbed a small rise, and entered the shade of a
kashi
tree, from which she looked over a section of the grape field bright before her in the moonlight. In the doorway of the greenhouse, almost all its panes broken, stood Saburo, his arms folded, lost in thought.

The blackness of his close-cropped hair seemed to glow in the moonlight. He didn’t seem to notice the cold; he wore no coat, but only a hand-knitted gray sweater handed down from Yakichi.

When he saw Etsuko, he dropped his arms smartly, brought his heels together, and bowed from the distance.

Etsuko approached, but she could not speak. She looked about for a moment and then said: “There’s no place to sit down around here, is there?”

“Yes there is. In the greenhouse.”

Etsuko was slightly disappointed that his tone was marked by not the slightest hint of hesitancy or shyness.

He bent his head and entered the greenhouse; she followed him. The frame of the practically glassless roof and the shapes of dried-up grape leaves were etched in shadows on the straw-strewn floor. A small, round, rain-washed wooden stool lay there. Saburo took out a handkerchief, wiped the stool carefully, and offered it to Etsuko. Then he tipped a rusty iron drum on its side and sat on it. He soon found it to be an unstable perch, however, and moved to the floor.

Etsuko said nothing. Saburo picked up a piece of straw and wound it around his fingers so that it squeaked.

The words gushed out of Etsuko’s mouth: “I was the one who sent Miyo away.”

“I know,” said Saburo, looking up with perfect composure.

“Who told you?”

“Mrs. Asako told me.”

“Asako?”

Saburo looked down. He rolled another straw around his fingers. He found it awkward to look at Etsuko in her consternation. To Etsuko’s inflamed imagination the subdued demeanor of this boy with eyes downcast was part of his effort of the past few days at pretending to be happy in spite of the fact that he and his love had been so unreasonably separated. Now, after bearing this pain for so long, he still displayed this wholesome docility, this peerless gentility, behind which there lay only a wordless, indomitable resistance that wounded her more than the most violent imprecations. Her body coiled tightly on the stool.

She kept grasping one hand in the other as she spoke, pleading with him in a low, feverish voice. At times her speech was interrupted by what may well have been sobs, attesting to the strength of the emotions she was holding back. At times she seemed actually to be angry: “Please, forgive me. I was suffering terribly. There was nothing else I could do. Besides, you lied to me. You told me that you didn’t love her, and all the while you and she were so much in love.

“How that lie made me suffer! I wanted to let you know the pain you were all unknowingly causing me, and felt I had to cause you to experience the same degree of unbearable agony. You can’t imagine how much I suffered! I wish I could have taken that pain from my heart and placed it alongside the pain you are feeling now. Then we would know which is worse.

“I even lost control of myself and deliberately burned my hand in the fire. Look! I did it because of you. This burn was for you.”

Etsuko held her hand out in the moonlight, exposing the burn. Saburo reached out his hand, touched Etsuko’s fingertips as if he were touching something horrible, and quickly let go.

“At Tenri, I saw beggars like this. Beggars show you their wounds to make you sorry for them. They’re horrible. And yet the madam is like some kind of proud beggar,” he said to himself.

This was as far as Saburo’s thoughts went. He did not know it was Etsuko’s pain that made her proud.

He still did not know that Etsuko loved him.

He strained to grasp in Etsuko’s rambling confession that kernel of truth he could understand. This woman was suffering. That much was certain. She was suffering, and though he couldn’t fathom why he knew that the reason was connected with him. When someone is suffering, you have to do what you can to make him feel better. If only he knew how . . .

“It’s all right. You don’t need to worry about me. Without Miyo around, it’s a little lonely once in a while, but that’s no great matter,” he said.

Etsuko could not believe he was telling the whole truth. She was dumbfounded by the extraordinary magnanimity he was displaying. Her highly skeptical glance was directed at finding, inside his simple, gentle sympathy, the self-abasing lie, the reserved decorum.

“You’re still not telling me the truth. The one you love has been forcibly dragged off, and you say it’s no great matter? How can that be? Here I’m telling you all this, apologizing to you, and you still refuse to come out and tell me how you really feel. Can’t you bring yourself to forgive me?”

In Saburo’s simple, transparent soul, there lay no defense, however unavailing, against this nebulous, romantic
idée fixe
held by Etsuko. He didn’t know where to begin. It seemed to him, however, that what she was basically concerned about was his lie, the great lie that she had just attacked: “I don’t love Miyo.” If he could somehow convince her that statement was true, surely she would feel better.

He pronounced his next words with great care: “It is not a lie. You really do not need to worry about me, madam, because I do not love Miyo.”

Etsuko was almost laughing—she certainly was not crying: “Again you lie! Again the same lie! Do you really think you’re going to fool me with a childish fib like that?”

Saburo did not know what to say. Before this woman with whom his words had no effect, he was completely without recourse. There was nothing to do but keep silent.

For the first time, Etsuko found herself relaxing in the presence of his gentle wordlessness. The sound of the whistle of a distant freight train flying through the deep night pierced her ears.

Saburo, deep in thought did not even hear it . . . “What can I tell her so she’ll believe me? Last time she went on about this ‘Love, don’t love’ business as if it were going to turn the world upside down. Yet, now, she won’t accept anything I say, telling me it’s a lie. All right, it seems she needs proof. If I tell her the whole truth, she’ll believe me,” he thought.

He moved into a half-crouching position and launched into a narrative: “It’s no lie. I never wanted much to have Miyo for my wife. In fact, I talked to Mother about that at Tenri. She’s against it. ‘It’s too early for you to get married,’ she says. I barely had the nerve to tell her that Miyo’s going to have a baby. Then Mother got even more against it. ‘Why do I want to take a stupid girl like that for a daughter-in-law?’ she says. ‘I don’t even want to see the face of a nasty girl like that.’ So she didn’t come to Maidemmura, and went straight home from Tenri.”

This artless tale, so haltingly recounted, brimmed with an elusive honesty. Etsuko abandoned herself to the intense joy, the dreamlike ecstasy of this fleeting moment. As she listened, her eyes gleamed, her nostrils quivered.