Thirst for Love (7 page)

I held the inhalator with all the power I could muster. In the end my hands cramped; my shoulders went numb. I called in what must have been close to a scream: “Somebody take over for me. Quickly!” The nurse jumped up in a flurry and took the inhalator from me.

Really, I wasn’t tired or anything; I was simply frightened. Frightened of those inaudible words my husband was uttering as he lay there facing he knew not what . . . Was it my jealousy again? Or was it my fear of my jealousy? I did not know. If I had lost control of myself, I might have screamed: “Die, will you! Die!”

There was evidence that I might. Far into the night, as his heart continued to beat, showing no signs of quitting, and two of the doctors stood up and walked off to bed whispering to each other, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s going to make it,” I watched them go with eyes full of hate. Was he not going to die after all? That night was the night of our last battle.

At that time, as I saw it, the uncertain happiness I divined for my husband and me if he recovered, and the present hopelessness that he would live were just about the same thing. Thus it seemed to me that now at any moment I would find happiness. But not that uncertain happiness! It was much easier to contemplate my husband’s certain death rather than his uncertain life. My hopes for my husband’s life, somehow maintained moment after moment, and my prayers for his death amounted to the same thing. But his body lived on! He would betray me!

“He’s probably at the crisis now,” the doctor had said hopefully. Jealousy swept over me. Tears fell on my right hand, which was holding Ryosuke’s face. My left hand, at the same time, struggled to pull the inhalator away from his mouth. In a chair nearby the nurse slept. The room was getting colder as the night deepened. Through the window I could see the signals of the Shinjuku station coming out of the darkness, and the lights of neon signs revolving through the night. The sound of train whistles, mingling with the sounds of passing car horns, cut through the atmosphere. I had a woolen shawl over my shoulders to protect my neck from the penetrating cold.

If I pulled away the inhalator now, no one would know. There was nobody to see it. I didn’t believe in any witnessing agency other than men’s eyes. Yet I couldn’t do it. I went on till dawn holding the inhalator alternately in each hand. What were the powers that made me hold back? Love? No, never. My love would have wanted him dead. Reason? No, not that either. Reason would have needed only the certainty that no one was watching. Cowardice? Not at all. After all I wasn’t even afraid of catching typhoid fever! I still don’t know what the powers were.

I found out, though, in the coldest hour before day break, that no untoward action was necessary. The sky was turning white. Great sections of cloud waiting to reflect the glow of morning’s coming stood in the heavens, but all they could do at this early hour was lend the sky a cast of severity. Suddenly Ryosuke’s breathing became extremely irregular. As a child who has had enough turns his face suddenly from the breast, so he turned his face from the inhalator—as if the cord that held him had broken. I was not surprised. I placed the inhalator beside him on the pillow and took my hand mirror from my sash. It was a keepsake from my mother—who died when I was young. It was an old-fashioned mirror, backed in red brocade. I brought it close to my husband’s mouth; the glass did not cloud. His lips, fringed with whiskers and pouting, appeared in the mirror bright and clear.

* * * *

Was Etsuko’s acceptance of Yakichi’s invitation to come to Maidemmura perhaps based on the same resolve as that which had brought her to the Hospital for Infectious Diseases? Was coming here like returning there?

Didn’t the air of the Sugimoto family seem to be, the more she inhaled it, the air of the hospital? An overpowering, corrupting spirit seemed to hold her in invisible chains.

It was in the very middle of April, that night when Yakichi came to Etsuko’s room to press her to finish some mending she was doing for him.

Until ten o’clock that evening, the whole household—including Etsuko, Kensuke and his wife, Asako and her two children, as well as Saburo and Miyo—had been in the eight-mat workroom busy making bags for the loquats, a little behind schedule. In normal years the task of making bags began early in April, but this year a bumper crop of bamboo sprouts had taken up their attention and made them late. If one did not cover the loquats with a bag while they were still the diameter of a fingertip, weevils would get into them and suck out the juices. Thus, as they went about fashioning the many thousand bags required, each person had beside him a pile of pages from old magazines, to which he applied the flour-and-water paste from a basin in the middle of the group. They were competing with each other, and many were the interesting pages they had to fold without reading.

Kensuke’s impatience with this night work was vociferous. His folding was punctuated by incessant griping: “How I hate this. It’s real coolie labor. I don’t see any reason why we have to do this. Father’s gone to bed, I’ll bet. That’s just like him. But why do we sit here obediently working? What if we revolted? If we don’t fight for a raise or something he’ll keep right on with what he’s been doing. How about it, Chieko? Shall we ask for double what we’re getting? Of course, I get nothing, so twice that will amount to the same thing. Look at this magazine: ‘The Determination of the Japanese People over the North China Revolt.’ How do you like that? And on the other side: ‘Wartime Menus for Four Seasons.’”

Thanks to observations of this kind, Kensuke was barely able to paste two bags in the time everyone else made ten. Sometimes it seemed that all his wild complaints were designed to hide his embarrassment at the fact that his complete lack of self-sufficiency was so abundantly clear. Chieko saw a cynical heroism in the clownish pose he assumed voluntarily lest he fall into it involuntarily. She took pride in her ability to be as quarrelsome as he, yet she extended to her husband whole-hearted adulation. She recognized that as a good wife she should share her husband’s anger against her father-in-law, and along with her husband she despised Yakichi in her heart. While she folded her own share of bags, she quietly and ingeniously lent a hand to complete her husband’s allotment. Etsuko’s mouth unconsciously fell into a smile as she watched Chieko’s unobtrusive self-abnegation.

“You’re fast, Etsuko, aren’t you?” said Asako.

“Half-time score!” said Kensuke, and went around counting the bags each had completed. Etsuko was first, with 380.

Etsuko’s skill was lost on the insensitive Asako and on the unreflectively admiring Saburo and Miyo, but to Kensuke and his wife it was vaguely unsettling, a fact Etsuko herself perceived. To Kensuke in particular the very number she had attained was the index of her ability to survive, and at the same time it was a patent slur, on which he commented sarcastically: “Well, it looks like Etsuko’s the only one of us that could live off folding bags.”

Asako took him literally and asked: “Have you had experience folding envelopes, Etsuko?”

Etsuko found nothing appealing in the cloying class prejudice these people seemed to derive from their pitiful, niggling, country respectability. As one who had the blood of a famous general of the civil wars, Etsuko could not pardon their upstart pride. She struck out against it with a deliberately combative reply: “As a matter of fact, I have.”

Kensuke and Chieko exchanged looks. That night the subject of their intense bedtime conversation was the ancestry that permitted Etsuko such coolness.

At that time Etsuko paid no attention worthy of the word to Saburo’s existence. Later she could not remember clearly what he looked like. That was natural enough, since Saburo said not a word, smiled only occasionally at the prattle of his employer’s family, and clumsily applied his fingertips to the task of pasting up the paper bags. Over his usual patched shirt, he wore one of Yakichi’s old, overly-roomy suit coats, and sat respectfully in his brand-new khaki-colored trousers, head bent down in the dim light.

Up until eight or nine years earlier, the Sugimoto family had used Blanchard lamps. Those who remembered back that far said the rooms had been brighter then. Since the electricity had been installed, unfortunately, they had to light hundred-watt bulbs with a piddling forty watts of power. The radio was audible only at night and, under certain weather conditions, not even then.

Yet it wasn’t true that she did not pay any attention to him. As she folded her bags, Etsuko at times noticed how clumsy Saburo’s fingers were. Those stubby, ruggedly honest fingertips irritated her. She looked to the side and saw Chieko helping her husband fold his quota. The vague notion came to her that she might do the same for Saburo. She perceived, however, that Miyo, sitting over beside Saburo, quietly helped him when her assigned lot was complete. This relieved her.

I felt relieved then. Yes, without the slightest jealousy or anything like it. In fact I felt a faint joy at being divested of responsibility. I tried not to watch what Saburo was doing. That was easy enough. My bent back, my silence, my application to the task—all without seeing him—aped Saburo’s silence, Saburo’s bent posture, Saburo’s application to the task.

. . . yet there wasn’t a thing.

Eleven o’clock came. Everyone withdrew to their rooms.

What did she feel, then, when at one in the morning Yakichi, smoking his pipe, came into her room while she was mending and asked how she had been sleeping lately? This old man with ears turned toward Etsuko’s bedroom every night—ears alive all night to the turnings and wakings of Etsuko in the room down the hall. Are not old men’s ears like pure shells, incessantly washed and filled with wisdom? The ears, which in shape seem more like the property of an animal than any other part of the human body, are in an old man the very incarnation of intelligence. Was it for these reasons that Etsuko saw something other than ugliness in Yakichi’s solicitude on her behalf? Was it as if she were guarded and loved by wisdom?

And yet giving it such a lovely name is perhaps going too far. Yakichi stood behind Etsuko, looking at her calendar on a doorpost.

“What’s this? You bad girl. It’s still at last week’s date,” he said.

Etsuko turned slightly: “Is it? I beg your pardon.”

“Beg pardon? You don’t have to say that.”

His voice was filled with good humor; as he spoke Etsuko could hear behind her the sound of pages being torn from her calendar. Then all sound stopped. She suddenly felt her shoulder being grasped, while a cold hand dry as bamboo slipped into her bodice. Her body recoiled slightly, but she said nothing. It was not because she could not cry out; she simply didn’t.

How can one explain the sense of resignation Etsuko felt at this moment? Was it simply lust? Sloth? Was it the way a thirst-crazed man swallows rusty water that Etsuko accepted this? No. Etsuko was not thirsty in the slightest. Her nature had suddenly become one that asked for nothing. It seemed as if she had come to Maidemmura to find again a basis for that fearful self-sufficiency she had contracted in the Hospital for Infectious Diseases. She drank perhaps like a drowning man helplessly swallowing sea water, in accordance with some law of nature. Not to ask for anything means that one has lost one’s freedom to choose or reject. Once having decided that, one has no choice but to drink anything—even sea water . . .

Afterward, however, Etsuko exhibited none of the gagging expressions of a drowning person. Until the moment of her death, it seemed, no one would know she was drowning. She did not call out—this woman bound and gagged by her own hand . . .

April eighteenth was the day for the “mountain journey,” as they called cherry-blossom viewing in this area. It was the custom for everyone to take the day off and gather in family groups to wander about the foothills looking at blossoms.

Everyone in the Sugimoto household except Yakichi and Etsuko had been eating more than they wished of
jami
—bamboo-shoot scraps. The former tenant farmer, Okura, would take the bamboo shoots they had harvested out of the shed, load them into the bicycle trailer, and take them to market, where they were graded and sold at three different prices. The bamboo shoots left over were swept up into a great pile and then cooked by the potful to make up the bill of fare for the Sugimotos other than Yakichi and Etsuko in April and May.

The day of the mountain journey, however, was a grand occasion. A whole feast had been crammed into nested boxes. Clutching decorated mats, the family started out
en masse
to enjoy their picnic. Asako’s older child, a girl, was in raptures; there was no school.

Etsuko recalled:
We passed a lovely spring day, quite like those one sees boldly pictured in schoolbooks. Everyone became a person boldly painted in a picture—or played that part.

There in the atmosphere charged with the intimate smell of manure—in the intimacy of country people, somehow the smell of manure is always present . . . And all those insects flying! And the air filled with the droning flight of bees and beetles! And the shining wind replete with sunlight! And the bellies of swallows turning in the wind!

On the morning of the mountain journey those in the house were busy with preparations. When Etsuko finished packing the
sushi
lunches, she looked through the lattice window at Asako’s daughter, who was playing on the flagstone floor of the entranceway. She was dressed, in accordance with her mother’s terrible taste, in a bright yellow sweater the color of mustard flowers. What was she doing—this squatting girl of eight, eyes fixed on the ground? There on the flagstones was an iron teakettle, steam rising from it. Nobuko was staring intently at something moving between the edge of the stone floor and the dirt in which it was laid.

It was a swarm of ants, floating about in the hot water that had been poured into their nest. Countless ants writhing in the boiling water that welled from the aperture of the nest. And that eight-year-old child, her bobbed head thrust deep between her knees, was watching them silently and intently. She held both hands against her face, oblivious to the hair that slanted down over her cheeks.