Thirst for Love

  The woman had no choice but to move cautiously into the room. Etsuko took boundless pleasure in having her husband see the woman’s trepidation.

  The woman took off her cape but didn’t know what to do with it. Any place where bacteria might adhere was out of the question. Even Etsuko’s hand was suspect, for she certainly emptied her husband’s bedpans. It seemed wisest to keep it on. She slipped her shoulders into it again. Then she dragged the chair back several feet and sat down.

  Etsuko relayed the name on the calling card to her husband. Ryosuke shot a look at the woman but said nothing. The woman crossed her legs. She sat pale and silent.

  Etsuko stood as if she were a nurse behind the visitor and watched her husband’s expression. A sudden anxious thought took her breath away: What if my husband doesn’t love this woman at all? What then? Then all my suffering has no basis, and my husband and I have been torturing each other in a ridiculous charade; my recent past is nothing more than a meaningless performance of shadow-boxing. Now I must find in my husband’s eyes some infinitesimal sign of love for this woman, or I won’t be able to go on. If he loves neither her nor the three other women whom I did not allow in to see him, how, after all that has happened, can I hear it?

  Ryosuke, still looking toward the ceiling, moved under his quilt, which was already somewhat askew. He raised his knees; the quilt began to slide to the floor. The woman shrank back somewhat. She did not so much as extend her hand. Etsuko ran to set the bed in order.

  In that space of a few seconds, Ryosuke turned his face toward his visitor. Involved as she was with the quilt, Etsuko couldn’t see them. Her intuition told her, however, that in those moments her husband and the woman had exchanged winks, two winks that denigrated her. This man with a fever raging had smiled and winked at this woman.

  It was not really intuition. It was surmise, rather, based on a movement she perceived in her husband’s cheek. She surmised it and thus experienced a sense of relief barred to those who judge by ordinary powers of understanding.

  “You’ll have no trouble recovering from this. It can’t really hurt somebody with your nerve.” The woman’s tone had suddenly lost its reserve.

  A gentle smile played over Ryosuke’s unshaved features—had he ever turned this smile on Etsuko? Then he said, his voice lilting: “It’s too bad I can’t give this illness to you. You’d outlast it.”

  “Why, how dare you?” She laughed, looking at Etsuko for the first time.

  “I can’t outlast it,” Ryosuke persisted. There was an awkward silence. The woman suddenly laughed a chirping laugh.

  A few minutes later she left.

  That night brain fever set in. The typhoid bacillus had attacked Ryosuke’s brain.

  The radio in the downstairs waiting room blared noisy jazz. “I can’t stand it,” Ryosuke moaned as his head throbbed violently. “I’m sick as a dog and that radio goes . . .”

  The lightbulb in the sickroom had been covered with a furoshiki so that the glare did not bother the sick man’s eyes. Etsuko had climbed on a chair and tied it there without even bothering to call a nurse for help. The light coming through the muslin had the unfortunate effect of imparting a greenish cast to Ryosuke’s face. In this strange green umbra his bloodshot eyes seemed overwhelmed by anger and tears.

  Etsuko put down her knitting and stood up. “I’m going downstairs,” she said; “I’ll ask them to turn it down.” As she reached the door she heard behind her a bone-chilling groan.

  It was a cry that might have been emitted by an animal being stepped on. Etsuko turned; Ryosuke was sitting up in bed. He clutched the quilt in both hands as a child might. His eyes stared blankly yet fixedly toward the door.

  The nurse heard and came into the room. She helped stretch Ryosuke’s body out, as if unfolding a collapsible chair, and placed his hands back under the covers. The sick man submitted, groaning all the while; then after a time he called, rolling his eyes from side to side: “Etsuko! Etsuko!”

  Etsuko heard and wondered how, of all the names he should be calling, he had chosen this one. He seemed not to be following his own will so much as hers. She had the strange conviction that he was saying this name at her command, as if reciting a rule.

  “Say it again,” she said.

  The nurse had left to call the doctor. Etsuko bent over as she spoke, took her husband by the arms, and cruelly shook him. Again he gasped: “Etsuko! Etsuko!”

  Late that night, Ryosuke shouted indistinctly: “It’s black! It’s black!” Then he propelled himself from his bed and knocked the medicine bottles and pitcher off the table, after which he walked around on the broken glass, cutting his feet horribly. Three men, including the janitor, came running and restrained him.

  The next day he was injected with sedatives, placed on a stretcher, and loaded into an ambulance. He was an unusually heavy burden. It was raining. Etsuko held an umbrella over him from the door of the hospital to the gate where the ambulance waited.

  The Hospital for Infectious Diseases. With great joy Etsuko welcomed that ugly building, on the other side of the steel bridge that threw its shadow on the broken pavement of the road. Life on an island, life in its ideal form, which Etsuko had always pined for, was about to begin. Nobody could follow them here. Nobody could get in. The only people who lived here were those who made resistance to germs their only reason for being. Unceasing approbation of life; a rough, rude approbation that did not care at all about appearances. An approbation of life beyond law and beyond morality, dramatized and incessantly demanded by delirium, incontinence, bloody excrement, vomit, diarrhea, and horrible odors. This air which, like a mob of merchants shouting bids at a produce auction, craved in every second the call: “Still alive! Still alive!” This busy terminal where life constantly came and went, arrived and departed, boarded and debarked. This mass of active bodies, unified by the unique form of existence they bore, namely, contagious disease. Here the value of men’s lives and germs’ lives frequently came to the same thing; patient and practitioner were metamorphosed into bacteria—into such objectless life. Here life existed only for the sake of being affirmed; no pettier desire was allowed. Here happiness reigned. In fact, here happiness, that most rapidly rotting of all foods, reigned in its most rotten, most inedible form.

  Etsuko lived life to the full here among death and evil odors. Her husband was constantly befouled; on the day after he arrived here, he passed bloody stools. The dreaded intestinal bleeding had begun.

  Although his high fever continued unabated, he lost neither weight nor color. On his hard, uninviting bed, his lustrous pink body lay like a baby’s. He didn’t have enough energy to toss. He lay listlessly, both hands holding his stomach or stroking his chest with fists doubled up. His fingers ineptly played under his nostrils as he inhaled that odor.

  As for Etsuko, her existence was now one fixed stare. Her eyes had forgotten how to close, like unprotected open windows mercilessly searched by wind and rain. The nurses were amazed at her mad, feverish ministrations. She took only an hour or two of sleep a day at the side of this half-naked husband reeking of urine. Even then she would dream that he was being dragged away into some deep ditch calling her name, and she would wake.

  The attending physician suggested blood transfusions as a last resort, hinting vaguely at the same time that he didn’t expect them to do any good. As a result of the transfusions, Ryosuke became rather calm and slept continuously. A nurse came in with the bill. Etsuko went out into the hall with her.

  A boy stood there, his bad skin color partly concealed by the hunting cap he wore. When he saw Etsuko, he removed his hat and silently bowed. At one small spot above his left ear he had no hair. His eyes had a slight squint; his nose was extremely thin.

  “Yes, what can I do for you?” Etsuko asked. The boy did not answer but simply toyed with his cap and scraped meaningless circles on the floor boards with his right foot. “Oh, this?” said Etsuko, holding out the bill. The boy nodded.

  Etsuko wa
tched the dirty jacket of the boy as he departed with his money and thought about that boy’s blood circulating inside Ryosuke. As if that was going to save him! Couldn’t they get blood from someone who had some to spare? Taking that boy’s blood was a crime. A man with blood to spare? Her thoughts moved restlessly to Ryosuke in his sickbed. It would make more sense to sell Ryosuke’s germ-laden surfeit of blood. Sell that to healthy people. Then Ryosuke would become healthy and the healthy people sick. And the city would know that it was getting its money’s worth out of the Hospital for Infectious Diseases. But Ryosuke—it wouldn’t do to have him become healthy. If he were well he would take off again.

  Etsuko realized that her thoughts were running on confusedly—half-dream, half-waking. It seemed as if the sun had suddenly gone down; everything around her seemed in shadow. The windows stood in a line, each filled with a stark-white, clouded evening sky. Etsuko staggered and fainted.

  It was a slight attack of cerebral ischemia. The doctors insisted she take a short period of rest. After four hours, however, a nurse came in to tell her Ryosuke was dying.

  Ryosuke’s lips seemed to be trying to say something through the oxygen inhalator Etsuko held before him. What was it that his lips were inaudibly forming, incessantly, desperately, and yet rather joyfully?

  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, o
n 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.