Thirst for Love

  Yakichi had indulged himself by installing a bathroom four mats in area, with a square tub and slatted floor all of hinoki wood. The tub was wide and shallow, and down its drain, now with the plug pulled, the hot water sucked with a sound like the inward rushing of small shells. Etsuko smiled a smile of childish satisfaction that surprised even herself as she gazed into the dark, slightly dirty water.

  What in the world am I doing? What’s so exciting about this mischief? Even children have a serious reason for their mischief: to call the attention of the inattentive adult world to themselves. Mischief is the only recourse of the world of children. Yet rejected women feel the same rejection children do. They occupy the same rejected world, in which they grow cruel despite themselves.

  * * *

  On the surface of the water tiny hairs, oily micalike soap residue, and wood chips spun in slow circles. Etsuko rested her arm on the edge of the tub and then pressed her cheek within the curve of her bare shoulder. Water suddenly appeared on her shoulder and arm. Richly warm from the bath, her skin shone with a subdued gloss under the dim light bulb.

  Etsuko’s cheeks suddenly sensed the futility of the two shining, elastic arms pressed against them, sensed the humiliation, the sterility they shared. It’s no use! No use! No use! she said to herself. The youth, the redundancy of this warm flesh—this blind, stupid animal—irritated her.

  Her hair was piled high and held up with a comb. Drops of water fell occasionally from the ceiling on her hair and the nape of her neck, but she did nothing to avoid them, cold as they were. Into the bandage on her hand, held outside the tub, the cold drops soaked and disappeared.

  The water slowly, ever so slowly, flowed down the drain. The line of the hot water and the air above it licked lazily down from her shoulder to her breast, from her breast to her stomach—delicate caresses that were soon gone, leaving her skin taut, her body swaddled in cold. Her back felt like ice. The water spun with a more rapid sound as it retreated from her hips and swirled down.

  This is what death is. This is death.

  Etsuko was about to scream for help when she came to herself. She was kneeling naked in the empty tub. Frightened, she rose.

  On the way back to Yakichi’s room, Etsuko met Miyo in the hall. She said, in a cheerful, yet bantering tone: “Oh, I forgot. You two haven’t bathed yet, and I’ve let out the water. I’m sorry.”

  The words were spoken so rapidly Miyo did not understand. She simply stood rooted, watching Etsuko’s bloodless lips quiver.

  * * * *

  That evening Etsuko’s fever began, and it kept her in bed for several days. On the third day her temperature was close to normal. It was October twenty-fourth.

  Her convalescence was marked by extreme fatigue, and she woke from her afternoon nap that day to find the night already well advanced. Beside her lay Yakichi, breathing as if asleep.

  The wall clock struck eleven softly yet uneasily; Maggie barked in the distance—endless repetitions of nights long ago dismissed as hopeless. Etsuko was struck with unbearable terror and woke Yakichi. He raised his checkered kimono-clad shoulder from the bed clothes, clumsily took Etsuko’s outstretched hand and emitted a bewildered sigh.

  “Hold my hand; don’t let it go,” said Etsuko, staring at a strange knot that loomed dimly in the wood ceiling. She did not look at Yakichi. He did not look at her.

  Yakichi grunted, then hawked the phlegm deep in his throat and lapsed into silence. Soon he reached under his pillow for a piece of tissue, into which he spat.

  After a time Etsuko said: “Miyo is sleeping in Saburo’s room tonight, isn’t she?”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t try to hide it. I know. I don’t have to see them; but I know what they’re up to.”

  “Tomorrow morning Saburo is going to Tenri. The festival is the day after tomorrow. After all, when he’s going away, what can you say?”

  “Yes, what can you say?” Etsuko withdrew her hand, pulled the quilt over her head and burst into sobs.

  Yakichi was puzzled by the strange position he had been placed in. “Why am I not angry?” he thought. “What does this mean—that I have lost the ability to be angry? How is it that this woman’s unhappiness has made Yakichi feel like a conspirator?” He started to address Etsuko in a husky, tender, deliberately drowsy tone (Before he could fool the woman with this bedtime story he had concocted, he had to fool himself—irresolute, hopeless, his thoughts as slippery a those of a jellyfish).

  “This boring country life must be getting on your nerves and pestering you with things that are of no importance. Soon it will be one year since Ryosuke died. I’ve promised you this before, but let’s go to Tokyo, to the cemetery. I had Mr. Kamisaka sell some Kinki Railroad stock for me, and if we want to live it up, we can even go second-class. But if we save money on travel we’ll have more to spend enjoying ourselves in Tokyo. We can go to plays, which neither of us has done for a long time. In Tokyo we’ll never be without enjoyment of some kind.

  “But the hope I have is much bigger than this. I’d like to leave Maidemmura and move to Tokyo. I’d even like to get back in harness. Two or three of my old friends in Tokyo have done it. They’re not ungrateful ones like Miyahara; they’re all men you can trust. So when we go to Tokyo I’ll talk to two or three of them.

  “That’s what I’d like to do. It’s not easy, but I’d do it for you. I decided on this for your benefit. If you’re happy, I’m happy. Once I was content here on this farm. But since you came I’ve become unsettled, as if I were a mere boy.”

  “When would we go?”

  “How about taking the Special Express on the thirtieth? The one they call the Peace Special. The Osaka station-master is a friend of mine, and I’ll go in during the next two or three days and get the tickets from him.”

  These were not, however, the words Etsuko wanted to hear from Yakichi’s lips. She had something different in mind, something so different as to freeze her heart, as she lay there ready to supplicate Yakichi’s assistance. She regretted having extended him her throbbing hand earlier. Even with the bandage off, the pain of that hand seared her as if she were grasping hot coals.

  “Before we go to Tokyo, there’s something I wish you would do for me. While Saburo is away in Tenri, please fire Miyo.”

  “What a strange thing to ask!”

  Yakichi was not entirely surprised. After all, is anyone surprised when a sick man asks for morning glories in the middle of the winter?

  “What will you achieve by getting rid of Miyo?”

  “Nothing, but I’m convinced she is the one who is causing me all this pain. Surely, no house would keep a maid around who was making the master sick, would it? Yet if things go on as they are, Miyo will kill me, I’m sure. If you don’t get rid of her you will be indirectly responsible for my death. Which of us should go, then, she or I? If you want me to go, I’ll take off for Osaka tomorrow and find a job.”

  “Stop it. Yet if I send Miyo away when she hasn’t done anything, what will people say?”

  “All right; then I’ll leave. I don’t want to stay here anyway.”

  “Then let’s go to Tokyo, as I suggested.”

  “And you’re going with me?”

  Her words had in them little of tone or inflection, yet they had the power to make Yakichi imagine vividly what words they could be the preamble to. As if to forestall her saying those unsaid words, this old man in a checkered sleeping-kimono started edging over toward Etsuko’s pallet.

  Locked in the security of her quilt, Etsuko did not move. But two unwavering eyes directed themselves to meet Yakichi’s gaze. They said nothing, those eyes, either of hatred or disgust—or love either—but they drove Yakichi back.

  “No. No,” she said, in low, impassive tones. “Until Miyo is told to go, it will be, ‘No.’”

  Where had Etsuko found the strength for this denial? Until this illness had come upon her, she had been accustomed to greet the approach of Yakichi’s clumsy, worn-out machine
by simply closing her eyes. Everything took place in the area around her—eyes tight-shut—on the periphery of her body. Even what took place upon her body was to her one of the events of the outside world. Where did her outer world begin? The inner world of this woman, capable of such delicate activity, was developing the captured, compressed, potential energy of an explosive.

  For this reason Yakichi’s confusion amused her.

  “So you’re being a coy damsel, are you? Very well. We’ll give you your own way. While Saburo is away, turn Miyo out, if that’s what you want. But—”

  “But Saburo?”

  “I don’t think Saburo will take it.”

  “Saburo will leave,” Etsuko said. “He’ll go after Miyo, certainly. They’re in love. In fact, letting Miyo go seems to me the only way to get rid of Saburo without firing him. It would be best for me if Saburo goes, but I don’t want to be the one to tell him.”

  “At last we agree on something,” said Yakichi.

  At that moment the whistle of the last express departing from Okamachi station shattered the night air.

  As Kensuke saw it, Etsuko’s burn as well as her illness were just so much draft-dodging. “Take it from one who was one,” he said, laughing. With Etsuko unavailable for help and Miyo—four months pregnant—unable to do heavy work, the burdens of weeding, harvesting the rice from the family’s half-acre rice plot, digging potatoes, and bringing in the fruit crop all rested heavily on his shoulders. He went around as usual, incessantly muttering his discontent, shirking as much as working. Even this handkerchief-size plot of land, which had not been registered as a ricefield before the land reform, now had a delivery quota.

  Saburo, his yearly participation in the Tenri Festival impending, worked with assiduity. The fruit crop was just about all garnered. In the intervals between crops he worked tirelessly, weeding, digging potatoes, and doing the autumn tilling. His labor under the clear autumn skies had tanned him further, turning him into a sturdy youth with a maturity that belied his years.

  His close-cropped head seemed to have the solidity of that of a young bull. Not long before he had received a passionate love note from a village girl he barely knew and read it to Miyo with glee. He had received another note from another girl but had not mentioned it to Miyo. Not that he had anything to hide. Not that he wished to keep it a secret, or answer it and arrange a meeting with her. He simply kept quiet out of his own predilection for silence.

  It was for him, however, a new experience. If Etsuko had so much as suspected that Saburo was aware that he was loved she would have considered it a momentous occurrence. He had become vaguely aware of the impression he made on the world around him. Until then he had considered that outer world not as a mirror but as just so much space through which he moved with perfect freedom.

  This new experience had combined with the tan the autumn sun had brought to his cheek and forehead to bring out in his bearing a delicate, youthful arrogance he had never shown before. Miyo, her sensitivities heightened by love, saw it; but she interpreted it as a husbandly attitude directed toward her alone.

  On the morning of October fifteenth Saburo set out, dressed in an old suitcoat given him by Yakichi, khaki trousers, the socks Etsuko had given him, and sneakers—his finest clothes. His luggage was a rough, canvas bookbag he carried slung from his shoulder.

  “Speak to your mother about the wedding. Then, so that she can meet Miyo, have her come back with you. She can stay here for two or three days,” said Etsuko. Even she was unaware why she was going over with him again this matter that was all settled. Was it because she considered these complications necessary so that she might force herself into an impossible situation? Was it because she wished to interrupt her plans by bringing herself to think about the terrible eventuality of having a mother come here and find the bride she had come to visit gone?

  At any rate this was what she told Saburo quickly when she stopped him in the hall as he was on his way to Yakichi’s room to say goodbye.

  “All right. Thank you very much,” said Saburo. His eyes gleamed with the restless energy of one setting out on a journey. His words of appreciation were somewhat exaggerated. He looked Etsuko full in the face—something he had never done before.

  Etsuko wished to shake his hand, to feel the pressure of his callused palm. She started to thrust out her healing right hand, but decided that the burned surface would leave an unpleasant memory on his palm and held back. Saburo stood bewildered for a moment, flashed a cheerful parting smile, turned his back to her and hurried down the hall.

  “That bag. My, it’s small. One would think you were going to school,” called Etsuko, behind him.

  Miyo alone walked with him to the other side of the bridge. That was her right. Etsuko observed every detail of that right as she watched them go.

  Where the gravel path ended at the steps leading down the hill, Saburo stopped, turned and saluted Yakichi and Etsuko standing in the yard. Long after his form had blended with the colored leaves of the kaede grove, the flash of his teeth, bared in a smile, shone in Etsuko’s memory.

  It was the hour for Miyo to set the rooms in order. In a matter of five minutes she reappeared, toiling languidly up the stone steps dappled with sunlight coming through the trees.

  Etsuko needlessly said: “Saburo has gone, hasn’t he?”

  Miyo needlessly answered: “Yes, he’s gone.” Her face exhibited no sign either of joy or sadness.

  Etsuko had watched Saburo depart with a heart gently, reflectively turbulent. Keen regret mingled with guilt feelings nagged at her. She toyed with the idea of wiping the slate clean by calling off the project of discharging Miyo.

  She was provoked, however, by Miyo’s face as she returned, already confidently settling down to her daily life with Saburo. Etsuko found herself smoothly slipping back into her original conviction that this project must not, by any means, be set aside.

  5

  “SABURO’S COMING! He’s taking the shortcut across the ricefields over by the government housing. You can see him from upstairs. But he’s alone—I don’t see his mother!” Chieko had come running into the kitchen to inform Etsuko. It was the evening of the twenty-seventh, the day after the Tenri Festival.

  Etsuko had been broiling mackerel on the small clay charcoal burner. She quickly moved the fish, along with the grill on which it had been broiling, to the counter nearby and placed the iron kettle over the coals. The simple serenity of her actions proclaimed the intensity of her emotions. She rose, gesturing to Chieko to accompany her upstairs.

  The two women hurriedly climbed the stairs to the second floor. “That fellow Saburo really gets people excited here,” said Kensuke, from the prone position he had assumed with his Anatole France novel. Shortly, however, he caught the mood of the women and came to stand beside them at the window.

  The sun was half submerged in the wood west of the housing development. The sky glowed like a hearth.

  The figure advancing across the stubbled fields was clearly Saburo, his pace firm, direction sure. Was there anything strange about this? This was the day; this was the time at which he had been expected all along.

  His shadow stretched obliquely before him. He restrained the bag slung from his shoulder with one hand, as would a schoolboy, so that it did not swing. He wore no hat. His strong gait was filled with a repose that knew neither fear, nor apprehension, nor even fatigue. The route he was taking led to the highway. He swung right and took the raised path between the ricefields. Every once in a while he had to pick his way around the racks on which rice was drying.

  Etsuko felt her heart beating wildly—from neither joy nor fear. She could not determine whether she was waiting for calamity or happiness, yet she knew that it had come—that which she awaited. The turmoil in her breast prevented her from saying what she knew she had to say. Somehow she managed to utter to Chieko: “What shall I do? I don’t know what to do.”

  How surprised they would have been, Chieko and Kensuke, if t
hey had heard these words from Etsuko a month earlier. She had changed. This once strong woman had lost her backbone. What she was looking forward to now was the last gentle smile Saburo would all unknowingly turn toward her, and the first terrible denunciation which—in the full knowledge he would have to come to—he would knowingly turn upon her. She was haunted by the memory of these past nights, filled with the turnings and returnings of those two anticipations.

  What would happen thereafter seemed to her already established. Saburo would revile her; then he would set out after Miyo. At this time tomorrow Etsuko would no longer ever be able to see him. In fact, for all she knew, the last time she would ever be able to look at him to her heart’s content would be here, from a distance, at this second-floor window.

  “Don’t be silly! Get hold of yourself!” said Chieko. “If you had the courage to fire Miyo, surely there’s nothing you can’t do. You really showed us. We admired you for it.” She reached one arm around Etsuko’s shoulder, as if encouraging a little sister.

  To Etsuko the action of getting rid of Miyo had been her first attempt to ease her own suffering; it was also a concession, a surrender to that suffering. To Kensuke and his wife, however, it had looked like her opening attack.

  To send a woman four months pregnant out of the house, wicker trunk on her back, is no small thing, reflected Chieko. Miyo’s sobs, Etsuko’s relentless determination, and the cold resolution with which she saw Miyo to the station and forced her onto the train—the melodrama which they had witnessed the day before—had moved Chieko and Kensuke mightily. They had never dreamed that such a performance would take place in Maidemmura. Her wicker trunk held to her back by a braided-palm cord, Miyo had descended the stairway, followed shortly by Etsuko looking like a constable.

  Yakichi had shut himself up in his room and did not even look Miyo’s way when she came in to say goodbye. “We appreciate your long service,” was all he said. Asako, shocked speechless by these events, silently hovered about. Kensuke and Chieko, however, took pride in the fact that they needed not one word of explanation to know what was going on. These two flattered themselves into believing that they were capable of immorality because they were capable of comprehending immorality and vice—an attitude like that of newsmen assuming the pose of guardians of society.