Thirst for Love Page 7

  Yes, and if I stay here, I don’t have to wonder what’s going to come up, thought Etsuko. Kensuke and his wife had, like all bored people, a sense of kindness that was close to disease. Gossip and a pushy kindness—these two qualities peculiar to country people—had already infected Kensuke and Chieko, without their knowledge, and made them don an upper-class camouflage—a camouflage of criticism and advice.

  “Don’t be nasty, Chieko,” said Kensuke. “I was just giving her advice. She was getting away while she could.”

  “Let her make her own excuses. I have some advice for Etsuko. I’d like to show her I’m on her side. Maybe I should call it goading. It’s close to that.”

  “Go ahead, let her have it. Give it to her good.”

  This newlywed repartee would have been hard for any third party to endure. It was a newlywed situation comedy played every afternoon and every night to a vacant house by this bored pair set down here in the middle of the country. In fact, they never tired of their well-studied parts, their hit show, nor questioned their credentials for the roles. They would be playing them till they were eighty—under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Turtle Dove, perhaps. Etsuko resolutely turned her back on them and went down the stairs.

  “Must you go?”

  “Yes, I have to take Maggie for a walk. When I get back, I’ll see you again.”

  “You have a will of iron,” Chieko said.

  It was a morning in the off-season on the farm, as quiet as such times in the lull of harvests are wont to be. Yakichi was in the pear orchard, looking for something to do. Atsuko, with Natsuo on her back or toddling beside her, had gone to the village distribution center to get government-issue baby food. She was accompanied by Nobuko, who had the day off for Autumnal Equinox day. Miyo was peacefully moving from room to room, cleaning. Etsuko went to the tree by the kitchen door and untied Maggie’s chain.

  Should she go out on the Mino road and make a long circuit as far as the neighboring village? Yakichi said that back in 1935, perhaps, when he had taken that road at night, a fox had followed him all the way to the highway. But that route took two hours. To the cemetery? That was too close.

  The dog’s activity at the end of the chain communicated itself to Etsuko’s palm. She let Maggie go where she wished. They went into the chestnut grove, where the autumn cicadas were in voice. Sunlight spattered the ground. The shibataké mushrooms were already visible here and there under fallen leaves. Only Etsuko and Yakichi were permitted to eat them. Yakichi had slapped Nobuko for picking some to play with.

  Every day of the slack period was another day of forced rest, all of which massed like a weight on Etsuko’s spirits, like so many hours of recuperation forced on a sick man who doesn’t feel ill. Sleeplessness piled up. What was there to live for in a time like this? Just living in the present made every day interminably monotonous. If she dwelt on the past, the pain of it dislocated everything. Over the landscape, over the season, the glare of the hiatus floated. Etsuko could not look at a vacation with any attitude other than that of the graduate who doesn’t have them anymore.

  Not even that. Even in her school days she had hated summer vacations. They were simply a duty—a duty to walk by herself, to open the door for herself, and to run out into the sunshine by herself. As a pupil she had never put on her own socks, never put on her own clothes, so that being forced every day to go out to school was the most delightful, euphoric freedom. Is there anything so mercilessly efficient at making one a slave to the languor of urbanity as a slack period on the farm?

  Something was pulling at Etsuko. It was a thirst that ate at her as if it were duty—a thirst like that of the drunk who, fearing that if he takes another swig he will become sick, lifts the bottle again.

  The elements of all these emotions were even in the breeze that blew through the chestnut grove. The wind had lost all the turbulence of the typhoon, and as it came, holding its breath, making the lower leaves tremble, it had the demeanor of a seducer. From the direction of the tenant farmer’s house came the sound of an ax cutting wood. The charcoal-firing would begin in a month or two. On the edge of the grove, a small charcoal oven was buried, where Okura every year fired the Sugimotos’ fuel.

  Maggie pulled Etsuko here and there in the grove. Etsuko’s languid, pregnant-woman’s walk was forced to become lively. As usual, she was wearing a kimono. So that she wouldn’t tear it on tree stumps, she had pulled up her skirt somewhat.

  The dog followed scents busily. One could see her ribs move rapidly as she breathed.

  The ground of the grove was pushed up slightly in one place. Thinking it the track of a mole, Etsuko looked down at it as the dog did. Then Etsuko picked up a faint odor of perspiration. There stood Saburo. The dog jumped upon him and licked his face.

  Saburo held his mattock on his shoulder with one hand and, laughing, attempted to beat the dog down with the other. The dog insisted on leaping about, however, and he had to say: “Ma’am, pull back on the chain, please!”

  Etsuko came to her senses and pulled the chain.

  During these past few moments of absentmindedness, what she had been watching was the mattock on his shoulder leaping repeatedly in the air as his body writhed powerfully to keep the dog down. It was a bouncing, dancing motion—the blue blade, half covered with mud, catching the sun as it came through the trees. Watch out! What if that blade came down upon me?

  In that clear consciousness of peril, she felt strangely relaxed; she stood unmoving.

  “Where are you working?” she asked. Since she was standing still, Saburo did not walk on. If they talked here and turned back, Chieko would see them walking together from her second-floor window. If she went on, Saburo would have to turn back. These quick calculations led Etsuko to remain where she was as they spoke.

  “In the eggplant patch. I thought I’d turn over the places where we took plants out.”

  “Can’t you do that in the spring?”

  “Yes, but things are quiet now.”

  “You can’t sit still, can you?”

  “That’s right.”

  Etsuko looked long at Saburo’s slim, tanned neck. She found appealing this inner abundance that made it impossible for him to keep from taking up his hoe. Then she was struck by the fact that this insensitive young man, much as she did, found the agricultural off-season a bother.

  Then she glanced at his torn sneakers, pulled over bare feet.

  If the people who say awful things about me knew how long I’ve hesitated about giving him socks, I wonder what they’d think. The people of the village think I’m a fallen woman. Just the same they do with perfect composure things that are much worse than I would do. Why can’t I act? I ask nothing. I wish that some morning, while my eyes are closed, the whole world would change. It’s about time it came—that morning, pure morning. It would belong to no one, in answer to nobody’s prayer, that morning. I dream of a moment when, without my asking, my actions will betray completely this part of me that asks for nothing. Tiny, imperceptible actions . . .

  Yes, last night I felt that just thinking about giving Saburo two pairs of socks would be comfort enough. Now I’m not so sure. If I give him the socks, what will happen? He’ll smile a little, hem and haw a little, and then say, “Thank you.” Then he’ll turn his back and go away. I can see it now—I’ll be only too sad.

  Who could know how many months of troubled thought I have passed contemplating this painful alternative. From the Tenri Spring Festival late in April—May, June, the long spring rains; July, August, a cruel summer; then September. Somehow I would like to know again the terrible, fearful affirmation I knew when my husband died. That would be happiness surely.

  Etsuko’s thoughts took another tack. Yet, I’m happy. Nobody has the right to say that at this moment I’m anything but happy!

  She slowly and dramatically took from her sleeve the two pairs of socks.

  “Look, a present! I bought them for you yesterday in the Hankyu.”

  Saburo returne
d Etsuko’s look squarely, and—as Etsuko saw it—questioningly. Yet there was in his glance nothing but the most innocent of queries. There was not the slightest suspicion. He simply didn’t understand why this ever-distant matron older than he should out of a clear sky give him some socks. Then it struck him that it would be impolite of him to stand here too long saying nothing. He smiled and, after wiping his muddy hands on the back of his trousers, accepted the socks and said: “Thank you very much.” Then he brought the heels of his sneakers together smartly and saluted. When he saluted he always struck his heels together.

  “It won’t do to tell anyone you got them from me,” said Etsuko.

  “As you wish,” he said. Then he pushed the new socks unceremoniously into his pocket and left.

  That was all there was; nothing happened.

  Was this all there was to be of the thing that Etsuko had waited and hoped for since the evening before? Of course not. To her this small occurrence was as carefully planned as a ceremony—minutely projected. Beginning with this small occurrence, a transfiguration would take place within her. Clouds would drift in; the face of the fields would darken; the landscape would become something of different import. Over human life, too, for a moment this change would seem to come and abide. It was just a tiny alteration in one’s way of looking at things, this change by which life would come to seem completely different.

  Etsuko was arrogant enough to believe that this change could come about all by itself—this change that would not be accomplished unless the eyes of human beings were changed to the eyes of wild boars. She still would not admit it: that we, as long as we have the eyes of men, no matter how our way of looking at things might change, will all in the end come up with the same answer.

  The rest of that day was suddenly very busy. It was a strange day.

  Etsuko emerged from the chestnut grove onto the bank of the creek, deep in vegetation. At her side was the wooden bridge that led into the Sugimoto property. On the other side of the creek was the bamboo forest. This creek would meet with the brook that ran along the Garden of Souls, merge with that, and suddenly change direction to flow northeastward, where the ricefields lay.

  Maggie looked down at the stream and started barking at some children wading in the water fishing for carp. The children jeered at the old setter and shouted rude approximations of what they had heard their parents say about the young window they could not see but assumed was at the other end of the dog’s chain. When Etsuko appeared on the bank of the creek, the children climbed the far bank, waving their fishing baskets wildly, and fled into the sunlit bamboo thicket. The lower leaves of the bamboos deep in the bright grove waved meaningfully, as if the children were hiding there.

  Then a bicycle bell sounded from within the thicket. Soon the mailman appeared on the bridge, walking beside his bicycle. This mailman, of forty-five or -six, had made himself unpopular with his habit of asking people to give him things.

  Etsuko went to the bridge and took the telegram he held. “If you don’t have a name stamp, sign please,” said the mailman. (He said: “Sainu”—English usage that had already penetrated this far into the country.) He started at the little ball-point pen Etsuko took out.

  “What kind of pen is that?”

  “A ball-point pen. They’re not very expensive.”

  “It’s odd, isn’t it? May I look at it?”

  Etsuko made him a gift of it—ungrudgingly, for it seemed he would admire it forever. Then she climbed the steps with Yakichi’s telegram in her hand. She was amused. All the difficulty she had had in giving Saburo just two pairs of socks; and yet how easily she had given that nuisance of a mailman a ball-point pen! That’s the way it should be. If it weren’t for love, people would get along fine. If it weren’t for love . . .

  The Sugimoto family had sold their telephone, along with their Bechstein piano. The telegraph now served for the phone; even matters of little urgency were communicated to them by telegraph from Osaka. The family did not find telegrams unusual, even in the middle of the night.

  When Yakichi opened this telegram, however, his face filled with joy. It had been sent by Keisaku Miyahara, the minister of state. He had been Yakichi’s immediate successor as president of Kansai Shipping Corporation, and after the war had ventured into politics. He was now on his way to Kyushu to make a round of election speeches. He had a half-day’s time and wished to stop by to see Yakichi for thirty or forty minutes. The most surprising thing was that the day of the visit was today.

  Yakichi was entertaining a guest at that moment, an executive of the local farm bureau. Though the heat of the midday sun was still fierce, this man walked around collecting assessments with his jacket draped over his shoulders like a bathrobe. The Young Men’s League had complained that corruption was rife among executive board members, and so this summer a new election had been held. This man, who had been newly elected to the board, made it his business to go around humbly asking the opinions of the old property owners. This area was a stronghold of the Conservative party, and he believed that practices such as this were the latest fashion.

  He saw that Yakichi’s face had lighted up when he read the telegram, so he asked what good news the wire had brought. Yakichi hesitated, as if in possession of a happy secret he did not wish immediately to divulge. He could not, however, keep it to himself. Too much self-control is bad for old bodies.

  “It’s a wire from Minister of State Miyahara, who says he’s coming by to spend a few relaxed minutes. Since it’s an informal visit, I would appreciate your not telling the people of the village. Since he’s doing this for his physical welfare, it wouldn’t be right of me to let him be bothered. Young Miyahara was in school a class or so behind me, and joined Kansai Shipping two years after I did.”

  The two sofas and eleven chairs in the drawing room, long untouched by human hand, were very much like girls worn out with waiting. Above their white linen slipcovers floated an aura of desiccation beyond remedy. Yet, standing in this room, Etsuko’s heart somehow felt rested. On sunny days, it was her duty to open the windows of this room at nine o’clock in the morning. When she did so the eastern windows let in the rays of the morning sun. In this season, those rays barely reached the cheeks of Yakichi’s bronze bust.

  One morning not long after Etsuko’s arrival at Maidemmura, she was surprised to see a number of butterflies—evidently resting within a bunch of mustard flowers in a vase, waiting until this very moment—rise as the window was opened and crowd, with wings flapping, into the outside air.

  With Miyo’s help Etsuko tidied the room with feather dusters and dustcloths. They even dusted the glass case that enclosed the stuffed bird of paradise. They could not, however, wipe away the smell of mildew imbedded in furniture and woodwork.

  “I wish we could do something about this moldy smell,” Etsuko said as she polished the bronze bust and looked about her. Miyo did not answer. The seemingly half-asleep country girl was standing in a chair listlessly dusting the framed calligraphy.

  “The smell is awful,” said Etsuko again, as if she were, however clearly, talking to herself.

  Miyo looked over from her stance in the chair and said: “Yes, it’s awful—really.”

  Etsuko was angry. As her anger grew, she reflected on the dull rustic stolidity that characterized both Saburo and Miyo. To the extent that Saburo’s comforted her Miyo’s made her angry. There was only one reason: Miyo and Saburo were much more like each other than she and Saburo. That was what made her angry.

  Etsuko tried sitting down in the chair Yakichi would cordially offer to the minister this evening. As she did so her face took on the magnanimity tinged with compassion appropriate to a busy man surveying the living room of a friend forgotten by the world. The minister would be taking, it seemed, several minutes of his day, of which each minute and each second were practically objects at auction, and would be ceremonially carrying them and proffering them to his host as the only gifts of this visit.

  “Thi
ngs are fine as they are. It’s not necessary to prepare,” Yakichi had said to Etsuko, with a happy look on his sour face. This great officer’s visit could even bring about an unexpected renaissance in Yakichi: “How about it? Why don’t you come out again and stand for office? The time when new postwar men who didn’t know a thing ran rampant is gone; the time is coming back in government and business for their great forerunners, rich with experience.”

  Yakichi would hear this, and his ridicule, wearing the mask of self-deprecation, would quickly take wing and shine as only it could shine.

  “I’m through. This silly old man here is not good for a thing. Maybe I can imitate a farmer; but ‘Old men shouldn’t take cold showers,’ as they say. All I’m good for, really, is fiddling with bonsai, or something like that. But I don’t have any regrets. I’m satisfied as I am. I don’t know whether I should say this to your face, but in this time, I believe, nothing is more perilous than standing in the forefront of the age. No one knows when it’s going to turn upside down, does one? It’s a rigged world. Peace is rigged. By the same token, war is rigged and the prosperity is rigged. And in this rigged world a lot of people live and die.

  “Of course, all men live and die. It’s a matter of course. But in this rigged world, you don’t find anything to lay down your life for. Don’t you see? In a rigged life it has become stupid to risk one’s life. Yet a fellow like me can’t work without laying his life on the line. No, I’m not the only one. In fact, as I see it, nobody can do his work right without risking his life. But all there are around today are sad characters who carry on even though they don’t have jobs they would lay down their lives for. That’s how it seems, anyway. That’s how bad it is. And that’s why I’m an old man, with not much more to go.

  “But don’t get upset. Just take it as so much whistling in the dark. I’m an old fogy—just so much dregs. Only fit to be ground up for soup. To press these dregs again into second-rate saké would be a sad story indeed.”