by Неизвестный
The train stopped at a tiny mountainside station little different from a freight shed. We were met at the station by an elderly attendant wearing a jacket with the emblem of the highland sanitarium.
With Setsuko leaning on my arm, we walked to a little old car waiting in front of the station. I felt Setsuko stagger on my arm, but I pretended not to notice.
“You’re tired, aren’t you?”
“No, not very.”
Several local people got off the train with us. They seemed to be whispering about us, but when we got into the car, they faded away in the village, blending indistinguishably into the crowd.
Our car passed a row of miserable little houses in the village and then came out on a rough slope that opened to what we assumed to be the invisible ridge of Mount Yatsugatake. There before us loomed a large building with a red roof and several wings backed up against the forest.
“That’s it,” I muttered as I leaned into the lurching of the car.
Setsuko raised her head, and with a somewhat worried look she gazed blankly at the buildings.
Upon our arrival at the sanitarium, we were taken to room no. 1 in the second-floor ward at the back of the hospital nearest the forest. After a simple examination, she was ordered to go right to bed. The sickroom had a linoleum floor and a bed, a table, and a chair, all painted white. . . . All there was in addition were some trunks that the porter had just brought in. The two of us were now alone, but I was a little uneasy and did not go to the cramped little room next door that was provided for her attendant. I looked blankly around the room that seemed so bare and then went back and forth to the window to have a look at the sky. The wind was driving the heavy black clouds. Sharp noises crackled now and then from the woods. I stepped out onto the balcony and felt the cold. The balcony extended, without any partitions, past all the sickrooms. Not a soul was on it. I walked along heedlessly, looking into one room after the next. Through the half-open window of the fourth room I saw a patient in bed, so I hurried back.
The lamp had just been lit. We turned to eat the supper that the nurse had brought. This was the first meal the two of us had eaten alone together, and we felt a bit forlorn. While we ate, it became completely dark outside. We thought how quiet it had suddenly become. Before we knew it, the snow began to fall.
I stood up and closed the half-open window to a crack. I pressed my nose against the glass, and my breath fogged the window as I stared at the falling snow. Turning back and facing Setsuko, I asked “Well, what do you think . . . ?”
She looked up from her bed, appealing to me and putting her finger over her mouth as if telling me not to talk.
The sanitarium stood where the wide, uninterrupted, red ocher lower slope of Mount Yatsugatake began to level off. The building faced south with wings extending in parallel. Two or three small mountain villages perched tilting on the slope that extended downward until completely enveloped in black pine forest. There the slope disappeared into the invisible valley.
From the south-facing balconies one could look across the tilted villages and the broad sweep of red brown cultivated fields. On a clear day to the south and west and above the surrounding forests of pine, the southern Alps and two or three spur ridges appeared and disappeared amid clouds boiling up from below.
When I awoke in my little next-door room the morning after our arrival at the sanitarium, I could see through my little window a clear blue sky and many white peaks like cockscombs, looking as if they had sprung unexpectedly out of thin air right before my eyes. The spring sunlight was bathed in mist rising from snow that had fallen unseen on the balcony and the roofs during my sleep.
Feeling I had overslept, I jumped up hurriedly and ran into the sickroom next door. Setsuko was awake, wrapped in a blanket, her face flushed.
“Good morning,” I said cheerily, feeling my own face equally flushed. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “I took some sleeping medicine last night. It gave me a headache.”
As if to say that was nothing to be concerned about, I threw open the window and the glass doors that led to the balcony. It was so dazzling bright I could barely see at first, but when my eyes became accustomed, I saw a light mist rising from the snow-covered balcony and from the roofs, the fields, and even the trees.
“I had a funny dream. . . .” She spoke to my back.
I realized she was straining to make some difficult confession. She always spoke hoarsely like that on such occasions.
I turned toward her. Now it was my turn to put my finger over my mouth as a signal not to talk. . . .
Shortly the head nurse came bustling in with a kindly manner. Every morning she visited the patients one by one in their sickrooms.
“Did you sleep well last night?” she asked in a cheerful voice.
The patient said nothing but nodded meekly.
Life in a mountain sanitarium like this has a special human quality of its own, stemming first from the average person’s belief that this is no more than a dead end. . . . I first became dimly conscious of this human quality, previously unknown to me, when shortly after our arrival the sanitarium director called me to his consultation room and showed me Setsuko’s X-ray.
He led me to the window and held up the film to the light for me to see. He explained the picture point by point. On the right side of her chest, several ribs could be distinctly seen. But on the left they were almost invisible. Instead there was a large infected spot like a strange dark flower.
“The infection has spread farther than I expected. . . . I didn’t think it would be as bad as this. . . . She may be about the second worst case we have in the hospital. . . .”
The director’s words were like a croaking in my ears. I felt I had lost the power of thought. The image of the strange dark flower I had just seen, unrelated to his words, jumped out vividly on the threshold of my consciousness. I left the consultation room. Nurses passing me in white uniforms, the naked bodies of patients sunbathing here and there on the balconies, the bustle in the ward, the twitter of birds, all rushed past without connection. I went into the farthest ward and slowed my steps mechanically to climb the stairs leading to our second-floor sickroom, when from a sickroom just before the stairway I heard a continuous hacking cough, strange and gruesome like nothing I had ever heard before. “Oh, there’s a sick person in here, too,” I thought as I stared blankly at the no. 17 on the door.
Thus began our extraordinary life of love.
When Setsuko entered the hospital, she was ordered to rest and she remained in bed. Before she entered the hospital, she had always wanted to get up whenever she felt better. Now she seemed more sickly by comparison, although I did not think the illness itself had worsened. The doctors always appeared to treat her as an invalid who was expected to recover soon.
“We’re getting a hold on that illness all right,” the director kept joking.
The season, which had seemed a bit delayed, now reversed itself and raced ahead. It was as if spring and summer had rushed in almost simultaneously. We were awakened each morning by the singing of bush warblers and cuckoos. All through the day, the fresh green of the surrounding forest invaded the sanitarium from all sides and colored the sickrooms an invigorating green. It seemed in those days that white clouds came boiling out of the mountains in the morning and returned to their mountain sources in the evening.
When I recall those first days that we were together and I was scarcely ever away from her bedside, one day resembles another. There was a consistent sameness to the charms of one day after the next, so that I cannot now distinguish what came before and what came after.
Yet now I feel that while we lived through day after day of repeated similarity, we somehow escaped completely from time. Every trivial detail of our daily life during those days free of time still holds a unique and distinctive charm. The warmish but fragrant being before me, her rather rapid breathing, the limp hand holding mine, her smile, and the simple conversation we someti
mes exchanged—if I lay all those things aside, there is a sameness to those days that leaves nothing in memory. —That’s really all there was to the essence of our life. The fact that we were so satisfied in this modest existence came, I am sure, because we two were together.
To mention the one and only event of those days, she would occasionally develop a fever that, little by little, wasted away her body. On those days we tried to savor the charm of the unchanging daily schedule a little more carefully and a little more slowly, as if we were secretly stealing the taste of forbidden fruit. We could cherish our joy to the fullest in a life that tasted somehow of death.
One of these evenings we gazed spellbound, I from the balcony, Setsuko from her bed, at the uncertain grayness vividly tinged with red that crept over the neighboring mountains, the hills, the forests, the highland fields, all bathed alike by the setting sun sinking behind the opposing range. I recall birds flying up occasionally, drawing parabolas above the trees. I thought how impossible it was for us, with our overflowing happiness beyond the moment, to grasp a scene like this, no matter how familiar, created on the instant of an early summer evening. Much later, whenever this beautiful evening came back to me, the dream brought memories, a perfect vision of our happiness.
“What are you thinking about?” Setsuko’s voice sounded from behind my back.
“I’m thinking about how, long after this, we will remember how beautiful was our life here.”
“Yes. That may be true,” she replied, as if happy to agree with me. Then again without speaking, we gazed on that scene. Absorbed in my gaze, I sensed to my surprise a vague and incoherent pain, a feeling that I was not myself. At that moment I fancied I heard the sound of deep breathing behind me. I thought that maybe the sound was my own. Trying to confirm as much, I turned to her.
“Like this. . . .” She spoke in a hoarse voice, as she turned to look at me. Seeming to hesitate after starting to speak, she added quickly in a new and different tone of resignation, “It’ll be all right if we can just go on living like this.”
“What a thing to say!”
I exclaimed in my irritation.
“I’m sorry.” With this brief answer, she looked away.
I was gradually becoming irritated, but with a feeling that I did not understand. I turned to look again at the mountains, but the strange momentary beauty had already faded from the scene.
That evening when I was starting for bed in the neighboring room, she called me.
“Excuse me for that, won’t you?”
“That’s all right.”
“I wanted to say something else that time, but then I said it that way.”
“What did you want to say?”
“Once you said right out that you thought true beauty lay only in the eyes of one about to die. I remembered that then. To think like that about the beauty of such a time. . . .” As she spoke, she stared at me, complaining or appealing for something.
My heart was stricken at these words, and I had to look down. Suddenly a thought crossed my mind. The uncertain feeling of irritation became clear to me at last. “Yes. Why didn’t I think of that? It was not I that thought nature was so beautiful. It was both of us. Let’s say that Setsuko’s spirit saw the dream through my eyes and my fashion. Without knowing that Setsuko was dreaming of her final moments, I chose to think of our long life together. . . .”
She continued staring at me in the same way until, after pondering these things, I finally raised my eyes. Avoiding her glance, I leaned over and kissed her on the brow. I was heartily ashamed.
Midsummer came at last. It was more intense here than in the plains. In the forest in back, cicadas shrilled ceaselessly morning to night, as if on fire. The odor of resin was wafted through open windows. By evening many patients had their beds moved onto the balconies to breathe a little more comfortably in the outdoors. Seeing these patients, we realized for the first time how their numbers had grown. Yet we continued our life as two together without regard to others.
These days Setsuko had lost her appetite completely because of the heat, and often she could not sleep at night. To protect her afternoon nap I took extra care against footsteps in the hall and against wasps and horseflies coming in through the window. I also was worried about my own heavy breathing from the heat.
Watching over the sick one at her bedside and holding my breath as I watched, I myself was close to sleep. I was keenly and painfully aware of the changes in her breathing, speeding up and slackening as she slept. My heart was beating with hers. From time to time, she was attacked by spells of difficult breathing. Her hands would twitch, and she would clutch at her throat. I wondered whether she was having a dream, but as I debated whether to wake her, the spell passed and she relaxed. I was relieved, and her now quiet breathing gave me a sense of pleasure. When she awoke, I kissed her hair gently. She looked toward me with a tired glance.
“Are you there?”
“Yes, but I’m a little drowsy, too.”
That night when I could not sleep, I found myself imitating that gesture of clutching my throat. It had become a habit. When I noticed it, I too felt a real difficulty in breathing. To me, though, that was a rather agreeable feeling.
“The color of your face isn’t very good these days.” She looked at me steadily as she spoke.
“Haven’t you rubbed something on it?”
“It’s nothing,” I said in a satisfied manner. “Don’t I always look like this?”
“You ought to go take a walk or something and not stay too much at a sick person’s bedside, don’t you think?”
“How can I take a walk when it’s so hot? . . . Evening is evening, but then it’s all dark. . . . But then I’m always coming and going in the hospital every day.”
To avoid pursuing this conversation, I would go out every day into the corridors, meet people, and talk with other patients. I chatted with people about the cluster of young patients on the balcony who watched the drifting clouds and compared them to animals on a racetrack in the sky, and about the tall, weird, severely mentally disturbed patient coming and going aimlessly in the hall, clinging to the arm of the attendant nurse. I always avoided mentioning the patient whom I had never seen but whose gruesome cough made me shudder whenever I heard it as I passed room no. 17. I thought he might be the most severely ill patient in the sanitarium.
Although it was near the end of August, the sleepless nights continued. One of those nights when we could not sleep (it was long past the 9 p.m. bedtime), some hubbub erupted in the opposite ward on the floor below. There were mingled sounds of footsteps tripping along the corridors, the subdued, quiet voices of nurses, and the clink of utensils. I listened for a while in apprehension. When I thought the noises had subsided, a low murmuring sounded here and there simultaneously through the wards, finally ending in the room directly below us.
I realized that some kind of storm was raging throughout the sanitarium. Straining my ears, I went to check the sick one in the next room, where she might be sleepless, too, in the dark. She had not rolled over and was lying still. Stifling my breath, I waited quietly for the storm to subside.
Finally after midnight, it did seem to subside, and I dozed off for a bit unexpectedly, but suddenly I was awakened by two or three violent, nervous coughs that the sick one next door had been forcibly suppressing. The coughing stopped right away, but I didn’t like it, so I went into the next room. The sick one, alone and frightened in the total darkness, her eyes wide open, looked toward me. I went to her quickly without speaking.
“I’m all right.”
She smiled and spoke in a low voice that I could hardly hear. Without a word, I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Stay here, please.”
She spoke in a faint voice, unlike her usual tone. There we two stayed until dawn without a wink of sleep.
Two or three days later, summer suddenly faded away.
In September a series of rainstorms came and went, and in between it d
rizzled without a break. The rain seemed to rot the leaves before turning them yellow. Day after day the windows were closed and the sanitarium rooms remained dark. The doors rattled in the wind. Monotonous and heavy noises were wrenched out from the woods. On windless days we listened all day long to the rain falling on the balcony roofs. Early one morning when the rain was like mist, I looked vacantly out of the window into the dawning light on the long narrow courtyard facing the balcony. I saw a nurse coming toward me, picking all she could reach of the cosmos and asters blooming in profusion there in the rain. I recognized her as the attendant to room no. 17. “Oh, that patient whose wretched cough I heard all the time may have died.” I thought of that as I stared at the nurse, who was sopping wet from the rain but who continued excitedly picking flowers. I felt a sudden wrenching in my heart. “Wasn’t he the most severely ill one here? If he dies, who will be next? I wish the sanitarium director hadn’t said that. . . .”
I held my face pressed heedlessly against the window pane even after the nurse disappeared with her flowers under the balcony.
“What are you looking at?” she asked me from her bed.
“There was a nurse picking flowers there in the rain. I wonder who it was?”
I murmured that to myself and stepped away from the window.
All through this day I simply could not look directly at the sick one’s face. Deliberately I feigned ignorance even as I saw through everything, but at times I felt her eyes staring at me. That pained me even more. We began to share a kind of inseparable, mutual anxiety and fear. I thought it insufferable that the two of us were each thinking a little differently, and while I tried to forget the event as quickly as possible, I could keep nothing else in my head. In the end, the dream the sick one had on the snowy night when first we arrived at the sanitarium, the unfortunate dream that first I did not want to hear but finally overcome, I had to hear from her—the dream I had forgotten till now—abruptly it hit me again. . . . In that uncanny dream the sick one had become a corpse lying in a coffin. People were carrying the coffin across some unknown fields and in and out of some woods. The dead woman in the coffin was watching intently the withered wintry fields and the black fir trees and was listening to the lonesome sound of the wind blowing overhead. . . . When she awoke from that dream, she felt keenly that her ears were cold and were full of the soughing of the firs.
