Yakichi, however, was out of sorts as he worked at this task—expressionless, silent in his rubber boots, his army trousers tight on his legs as he stooped to pick up the roses. This uncommunicative, expressionless toil was the toil of a man whose blood still bespoke his farmer’s lineage. Even Etsuko was attracted to the Yakichi of times like this.
Then Saburo came down the gravel path before Etsuko’s eyes and called to them: “Excuse me. I didn’t know you were out here. I’ll get ready and do that for you.”
“We’ve finished. It’s all right,” said Yakichi, without looking at Saburo.
Saburo’s light brown face smiled at Etsuko from under his great straw hat. The battered brim of the hat was pulled down at an angle. The western sun etched a bright streak across his forehead. The stark whiteness of the teeth in his smiling mouth—the fresh whiteness of them, as if washed by rain—made Etsuko’s eyes open wider as she stood up.
“Just on time. I want to talk to you. Would you walk with me over that way?”
Etsuko had never before spoken to Saburo in such friendly tones in the presence of Yakichi. Her words suggested a free and easy association unmindful of Yakichi; one who heard these phrases alone could have taken them as boldly inviting. She had closed her eyes to the cruel duty she had to perform later and had uttered her words half drunk with the joy of them. As a result, an unanticipated, unrestrained sweetness floated about what she said.
Saburo looked doubtfully toward Yakichi. Etsuko, however, already had him by the elbow and was propelling him down the path in the direction of the entrance to the Sugimoto home.
“Are you just going to walk around and talk it over?” Yakichi called after them, in a somewhat flustered voice.
“Yes,” said Etsuko. Her quick reactions—impulsive, almost unconscious—had deprived Yakichi of the opportunity of being present at her confrontation with Saburo.
Her first words to Saburo were rather meaningless: “Where were you going just now?”
“I was going to mail a letter.”
“A letter? Let me see.”
Saburo politely displayed a postcard he had been holding rolled up in his hand. It was a reply to a letter he had received from a friend at home. The writing was quite childish; it set forth Saburo’s most recent history in only four or five simple lines: “Yesterday we had the festival here. I went out with the Young Men’s League and made a lot of noise. I’m really beat today. It was all very exciting, though, and fun.”
Etsuko’s shoulders shook as she laughed.
“It’s to the point,” she said, returning the card to Saburo. He seemed a little dissatisfied by her comment.
The gravel path through the kaede trees was splashed everywhere with spots of sun and drops of rain slipping through the leaves. On some trees the leaves were already red; their branches turned in the wind. As Etsuko and Saburo reached the stairs, the sky that had until then been hidden by foliage suddenly opened out. They were aware for the first time of the all-enveloping mackerel sky.
This joy beyond speech, this silent richness beyond words, created in Etsuko a kind of guilt. Here was this tiny period of peace vouchsafed her in order to make her misery complete. She began to be astonished at the joy she had been taking in it. Was she going to go on forever with this absurd conversation and never get to the unpleasant issue?
They crossed the bridge. The creek had swelled; in the muddy torrent great masses of water plants streamed with the current—fresh, green tresses appearing and disappearing. They went through the bamboo grove and came to a path from which a fresh view of the rain-washed ricefields spread. Saburo stopped and took off his hat.
“Well, goodbye.”
“Are you going to mail your card?”
“Yes.”
“I want to talk to you. Would you mail it afterward?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In Saburo’s eyes a tinge of anxiety showed. How could the ever-distant Etsuko deal with him here so intimately? This was the first time he had felt her and her words at such close range. He reached his hand to his back uneasily.
“Is something wrong with your back?” asked Etsuko.
“Yes, I got scraped a little in the festival last night.”
“Does it hurt much?” she asked, bringing her brows together.
“No. It’s better already,” he said cheerfully.
His young flesh is indestructible, thought Etsuko.
The mud and the soaking-wet weeds along the path dirtied their feet. After a time the path narrowed; they could no longer walk side by side. Etsuko went ahead, lifting her skirts slightly. She suddenly began to wonder whether Saburo was following her. She was tempted to call his name but found it awkward either to call to him or turn to look at him.
“Was that a bicycle?” she asked, turning back toward him.
“No.” His bewildered face was right by hers.
“Oh, I thought I heard a bell,” she said, looking down. It pleased her to see his great, clumsy bare feet beside her bare feet, spotted with the same mud.
As usual, there were no automobiles on the highway.
The untraveled concrete surface had dried quickly. Only a few puddles here and there reflected the mackerel sky. Its vivid line, looking as if it had been drawn with chalk, disappeared into the horizon and the pale blue evening sky.
“Have you heard that Miyo is pregnant?” Etsuko asked, walking beside him.
“Yes. I’ve heard it.”
“From whom?”
“From Miyo.”
“I see.”
Etsuko felt her heartbeat quicken. She felt she had to hear the painful truth from Saburo’s own lips. There was at the root of her resolve a complex hope which made her think that Saburo might have contrary evidence. For instance, that Miyo’s lover was a certain Maidemmura youth, a notorious person whom Saburo had warned her about, though she had scorned his advice. Or, for instance, that she was involved with some married man among the union executives . . .
These possibilities and these impossibilities revolved in Etsuko’s brain, each in its turn threatening her, each alternately standing for the truth, with the result that her heart kept putting off the fatal question. What seemed like a myriad of joyful particles hidden in the rain-fresh air, what seemed like a myriad of elements hurrying, dancing toward a new combining—all these pellucid intimations struck their nostrils and made their cheeks glow as they walked in silence for a time on the untraveled road.
“Now Miyo’s child—” Etsuko said, suddenly. “Now Miyo’s child—who is its father?”
Saburo did not answer. Etsuko waited. Still he did not answer. When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning. Etsuko could not bear to wait until that period had elapsed. She closed her eyes. Then she opened them again. It seemed as if she were the one being pressed for an answer. She looked stealthily at the silhouette of Saburo’s stubbornly down-turned profile beneath his straw hat.
“Is it yours?”
“I guess so.”
“You guess so? And perhaps you guess not?”
“No.” Saburo’s face reddened. He forced a smile, though not very far: “It’s mine.”
It had been too quick—Etsuko chewed her lip in consternation. She had taken refuge in the faint hope that he would divine that common courtesy to her called for a denial, even a clumsy, outright lie. But now that hope was gone. If she held any part of his heart, surely he would not have made the admission he had just made. This truth that Yakichi and Kensuke had arrived at, and which she herself had already grasped as self-evident—the truth that Saburo was the child’s father—she had been convinced that Saburo would in the end, out of fear and embarrassment, deny.
“Well,” Etsuko said, as if she were tired. There was no power in her words: “Then you love Miyo?”
Here was a word that meant nothing to Saburo. It was out of his ken, part of the lexicon of luxury, of articles made to order. It was somehow superfluous, devoid of urgency,
forced. In the urgent but not at all lasting relationship that bound him and Miyo—like that of two compasses drawn to each other through force when within a certain radius of each other but not drawn at all when outside that radius—the word love had no proper place.
He had expected that Yakichi would make them separate, which would have caused him little pain. Even after he had been informed of Miyo’s pregnancy, the consciousness that he was a father had still not been born in this young gardener.
In response to Etsuko’s interrogations, various recollections formed in his mind. One day, about a month after Etsuko had come to Maidemmura, Yakichi had sent Miyo to the shed for a shovel, which was wedged deep inside the shed so that she could not pull it out. She had gone to Saburo for help, and he pulled it out for her.
There she was while he strained at the shovel, her head just under his arms, perhaps to cheer him on, while she held back an old table that was lying against the shovel. Saburo could smell the strong odor of the cream she used on her face mixed with the moldy smells of the shed. He held the freed shovel out to Miyo, but she didn’t take it. Instead she stood there wordlessly staring up at him. Saburo’s arms reached out unconsciously and embraced her.
Was that love?
When the spring rains were almost over, and the hot chafing pressures of the last part of this captive season nagged at him, Saburo suddenly decided to slip out of his window into the night rain. He made a half circle around the house and tapped at Miyo’s window. Through the glass he could see Miyo’s face clear and white as she slept.
She opened her eyes and saw Saburo’s face peering from the shadows outside the window and then the white line of his teeth. With what strange swiftness this girl who did everything so slowly during the day now threw aside her bed clothes and jumped up! Her nightgown was loose at the neck; one breast was exposed. It was a tense, straining breast, like a bent bow, enough to make one believe that it was what had thrown the nightgown from her bosom.
Miyo opened the window, taking extreme care that she made no noise. Saburo stood before her, wordlessly pointing to his muddy feet. She ran for a rag, had him sit on the window frame, and then carefully wiped his feet clean.
Was that love?
This chain of associations passed through Saburo’s mind in an instant. He desired her, he was sure; but he did not love her. All day, every day, his thoughts turned only to when the weeding had to be done, to how, if war broke out again, he would fulfill his dreams of peril by enlisting in the navy, to reveries about the prophecies of Tenri and their fulfillment, to the day when the world would end and the manna would fall from heaven on Tenri’s manna table, to his happy grade-school days and romps through mountain and meadow, to what he would have for supper. He didn’t think about Miyo so much as one one hundredth of the day.
He desired her—even that notion seemed less tenable the more he thought about it. It was like a yearning for food. Any internal struggle to vanquish his desires was of no concern to this healthy young man.
Thus Saburo reflected for a moment on this incomprehensible question and then shook his head as if puzzled: “No.”
Etsuko could not believe her ears.
Joy flashed from her face like agony. Saburo did not see her expression; his eyes were caught by the Hankyu train that sped barely visible behind the trees. If he had seen that expression he would have been taken aback by the pain his answer seemed to cause Etsuko. Surely he would have changed it.
“If you don’t love her . . .” Etsuko spoke slowly, sucking the joy out of each word. “Was that your honest . . .” She seemed to be trying to induce Saburo to say that “No” again without running the risk of having him say the opposite. “It doesn’t matter whether you love her or not, so long as you say exactly what you feel. You don’t love Miyo, do you?”
Saburo barely heeded her repetition of these words. “‘Love her . . . don’t love her’—what a meaningless waste of time,” he thought. “She’s mouthing over this stupid matter as if it were enough to turn the world upside-down.” He thrust his fingers deep in his pockets and came upon some pieces of the dried cuttlefish he had eaten with his saké at the festival the night before.
“What if I start munching on a piece of this cuttlefish? I wonder what kind of face she’ll make,” he said to himself.
Etsuko’s seriousness made him wish to tease her. He took a piece of the cuttlefish out of his pocket, gleefully flipped it with his fingers, and caught it in his mouth as would a frolicking dog. Then he said, unabashed: “That’s right. I don’t love her.”
It wouldn’t have made any difference if this busybody of an Etsuko had gone to Miyo and reported to her: “Saburo said he doesn’t love you.” These impulsive lovers had never taken the trouble to discuss whether they loved each other or not.
Prolonged suffering makes one stupid; but one made stupid by suffering knows joy when he sees it. It was from this standpoint that Etsuko watched, calculating all. She did not realize that she was a convert to Yakichi’s self-made code of justice. Saburo did not love Miyo; therefore he had to marry her. To make matters worse, she hid behind the mask of the hypocrite and took joy in goading Saburo by the moral judgment that says: “A man who fathers a child on a woman he doesn’t love must take the responsibility of marrying her.”
“You’re an awful rascal,” said Etsuko. “You don’t love her, but you made her pregnant; and now you have to marry Miyo.”
Saburo suddenly turned his sharp, beautiful eyes toward Etsuko and returned her gaze. Her voice became harder; it helped her to repel that look: “Don’t say you don’t want to. The Sugimoto family has always understood its young people, but it has never tolerated irresponsibility. Father has ordered that you two get married, and you’ll do just that.”
Saburo was shocked; he had not expected this. He had believed that, at worst, Yakichi would insist they have nothing more to do with each other. If, though, marriage was what he wanted, all well and good. The only consideration left was what his fault-finding mother would say.
“I’d better find out what my mother thinks.”
“And how do you feel?” Etsuko would not be content until she had personally persuaded Saburo into the marriage.
“If the master says I should marry Miyo, I’ll marry her,” he said. After all, it was not a matter of very great moment.
“It will be a load off my shoulders,” said Etsuko, cheerfully. It certainly did simplify matters.
She was beguiled by her own projections, intoxicated by the happy, happy situation of Saburo married to Miyo against his will. Was her intoxication like that of the woman who has assuaged her heart’s pangs with wine? Was it wine drunk not so much to gain inebriation as oblivion, not so much to induce visions as blindness—in short, to arrive deliberately at stupid judgments? Was not this overwhelming drunkenness part of her unconscious plan to avoid injury to herself?
The word marriage was absolutely terrifying to Etsuko, and she now wished to turn over the handling of this ominous term to Yakichi. It was his responsibility, conferred by his arbitrary ruling. In this respect she was dependent upon Yakichi, and she stared over his shoulder like a child on its parent’s back beholding some terrifying sight.
At the point where the road past the Okamachi station swung right to merge with the highway, they encountered two large, beautiful cars coming onto the concrete surface. One was pearly white; the other was a new, pale-blue Chevrolet. Motors purring soft as velvet, they curved past. The first vehicle was filled with laughing young men and women. As it moved past Etsuko, she could hear the sound of jazz music from the radio. The second car had a Japanese chauffeur. In the dim recesses of its back seat, a sharp-eyed couple—blond hair darkening into age—sat motionless, like birds of prey.
Saburo’s mouth opened slightly; he gazed at them in wonder.
“They’re going back to Osaka, aren’t they?” said Etsuko. As she spoke, suddenly the noise of all the turmoil of the city seemed to float to her on the wind and st
rike her ears.
To Etsuko, who knew how little was to be found by one who went off there, the city held none of the attractions it held for country folk. To be sure, the city was like a building that offered visions of ever-new mystery, but for Etsuko that soaring structure held no charm.
Etsuko burned with desire to have Saburo take her arm in his. Leaning on that arm, bordered with golden hair, she would walk down this road anywhere. Before long they would be in Osaka, in the very center of all that metropolitan congestion. Before long they would be washed forward by waves of humanity. She would wake suddenly and look around her in amazement. From that moment, it seemed, Etsuko’s real life would begin.
Would Saburo take her arm?
This stolid youth was bored by this widow older than he walking silently beside him. He was completely unconscious of her hair done up morning after morning with such care for him alone. Only curiosity led him to glance at the mysterious plaits of her splendid, fragrant coiffure. He would not have dreamed that inside this strangely distant, strangely haughty woman spun the girlish fancy that he might lock her arm in his. He stopped suddenly and did an about-face.
“Must we go back already?” asked Etsuko. Her eyes pleaded with him, brimming eyes tinged faintly with blue, as if reflecting the evening sky.
“It’s late, madam . . .”
They had come further than they realized. Far off above the shadowy forest the roofs of the Sugimoto home gleamed in the setting sun.
It took them a half hour to walk back there.
* * * *
Then Etsuko’s real misery began—that misery arranged so carefully in all its details. It was the misery of the unlucky man who has worked all his life to accomplish a task at last successful, who as soon as it is done must face death, suffer, and die. Those watching might not be able to decide whether he had striven all his days to complete the task or to gain the privilege of suffering and dying in his splendid, private hospital suite.
Etsuko had planned to wait patiently, joyfully, over any period of time, for Miyo’s unhappiness, for Miyo’s misery to grow like mold and batten on her. She would wait unfalteringly, eyes never swerving, as this loveless marriage developed and fell into the same wreckage Etsuko’s had fallen into some time before. She would give her life to see it with her own eyes. She would wait until her hair turned white if she had to. She did not insist that she be Saburo’s mistress. All that was necessary was that Miyo, before Etsuko’s eyes, should lose hope, should fall into agony, into distraction, into exhaustion, into collapse.
Thirst for Love Page 12
