The Wild Geese (9 page)

She had done all these tasks mechanically, and then taking a fan, got under the net and sat on her bed. Suddenly she imagined Suezo in the house of the woman. “I can't sit here,” she said to herself. “But what can I do?”

Somehow at the center of her confusion she felt that she ought to walk to Muenzaka. Once when she had bought some beancakes for the children, she had passed the house which Suezo had described as next to the sewing teacher's. She could identify it by its lattice door, the house that woman lived in. All she wanted was to see it. Would there be a light? Would she hear them whispering? If only she could know just that much! But no, she couldn't. In order to get out of her own house she would have to pass the maid's room along the corridor, and at this time of the year the paper sliding doors were removed. She was certain the maid was awake sewing.

“Where you going so late?” Matsu would ask her.

And what could she answer? She might say: “I'm just running out to buy something.”

But Matsu would reply: “Certainly not! Let
me
go!”

No matter what Otsune wanted to do, she could not leave the house secretly. “Ah, what can I do?” she thought.

When she had returned home, she had wanted to go to her husband immediately, but what would she have said? She knew her own limitations, and her words would have been meaningless. And then her husband would have invented some tale to trick her and would have succeeded. “I'm not his match in a quarrel. He's too shrewd.” She wondered if she weren't better off to keep quiet. But then what would the result have been? “He'd still have his Muenzaka whore, and he'd have no use for me!” What could she do? What?

Again and again her thought returned to the point from which they had started. She felt muddled, and she was unable to separate one from the next. Yet somehow she realized that it would be useless to attack Suezo with violence, and she decided to give up that approach at least.

Suddenly her husband entered their room. Otsune intentionally picked up her round fan and, toying with its handle, remained silent.

“Oh?” said Suezo. “Strange looks again? What's wrong?” He was in such good humor that he wasn't in the least offended by his wife's failure to greet him as she usually did.

She still refused to speak. She had meant to avoid any sort of collision, yet upon seeing him she was so annoyed that it was almost impossible to keep herself from assailing him.

“Don't tell me you're worrying about nothing again? Forget it,” he said, repeating the last words and putting
his hand on his wife's shoulder. He shook her two or three times and then sat down on his bed.

“I'm thinking,” she said, “about the future, about what to do with myself. I don't have a family to go back to, and I've got children too.”

“What's that? Thinking about what to do with yourself? You don't have to do anything. The world's perfect as it is.”

“Go on. You can speak in such a happy-go-lucky way because it's all the better for you if I become something else.”

“You're really talking nonsense. That you should become something else? There's no need to change at all. Stay as you are!”

“Go ahead and mock me. You don't have to have anything more to do with me because you don't care if I'm here or not. No, that's wrong. I should have said that what you want is not having me around.”

“You're all mixed up. Do you honestly mean that it'd be better for me if you weren't here? Just the opposite! I couldn't do without you. I need you for a number of things, not the least of which is to look after the children.”

“Oh? A prettier mother will take my place and look after them. Though they'd be step-children.”

“You're really confusing me. We're their parents. They can never be that.”

“Are you sure? Do you really believe that? What an egotist you are! Do you mean then to have everything just as it is?”

“Of course.”

“Oh? Letting pretty and plain have the same parasols?”

“What did you say? Now what are you up to? Are you telling me the plot of a farce?”

“Yes I'm not allowed to have a part in a serious play.”

“Can't you talk about something more serious than a play? What do you mean by parasols?”

“You know what I mean.”

“How can I? I haven't any idea about them.”

“I'll tell you then. Do you remember when you bought me a parasol from Yokohama?”

“What about it?”

“You didn't buy it only for me”

“If I didn't, then who else did I buy it for?”

“No, that's not exactly what I mean, I suppose. You did buy it for me, isn't that right? Because the idea just occurred to you when you picked one out for the woman at Muenzaka.”

Otsune had injected the subject of the parasols into their discussion, and now that the words had taken definite shape, she couldn't help remembering her earlier rage.

Suezo was startled by this direct hit from his wife, and he almost said aloud: “She's getting closer!” But he was able to look astonished and said: “Impossible! Do you mean, actually mean that—that the same parasol I bought for you is owned by Yoshida's woman?”

“Why not? Since you bought her the very same kind!” she said, her voice suddenly turning into a shriek.

“Is that the only thing you're getting excited about? What an idiot you are! Look. I'm warning you—don't
carry your silliness too far. When I bought that parasol for you, they told me it had just come in as a sample. I'm certain of that. But the same kind must easily be available on the Ginza by now and in the neighborhood. I assure you that this case is the same as the play with the theme of the innocent man who was found guilty. Tell me, Otsune, have you met Yoshida's mistress? I don't see how you could have identified her.”

“Nothing's easier than that. Everyone in the neighborhood knows her because she's such a
pearl!
”

Otsune's hatred was bound up in her words. Before this she had let him take advantage of her with his lying, but now, as though she were vividly seeing the affair acted out in front of her eyes, nothing could make her feel that her husband's words were convincing enough.

All the while Suezo had been wondering how his wife had met his mistress and if they had spoken to each other, but he thought it would look bad for him at present if he asked Otsune any of the details.

“A
pearl
do you call her? Is that the kind of woman you call a pearl? I would think her face was too flat.”

Otsune said nothing about this reply, but the fault Suezo had found with the face of the hated woman appeased her somewhat.

During the night a conciliation again took place after the heated argument, but in Otsune's heart was the pain of a thorn not yet pulled out of flesh.

T
HE
ATMOSPHERE
in Suezo's house was gradually becoming more and more gloomy. Otsune was often seen gazing absent-mindedly into space and neglecting her work. At such times she paid no attention to the children and scolded them if they bothered her. But then she suddenly realized what she had done and said to them: “I'm sorry. What was it you wanted?” And later she would cry alone.

When the maid said: “What shall I prepare today?” Otsune often failed to answer. Or she might say: “Oh? Anything, anything you wish.”

Suezo's children were shunned by their classmates, who sometimes shouted at them: “Moneylenders! Money-lenders!” At Suezo's insistence Otsune had kept them unusually neat. But now they were seen playing in the streets with their hair full of dust and their clothing torn.

The maid went about grumbling at the carelessness of her mistress, and, like a horse that dawdles along the road with an unskilled rider on its back, also became negligent of her own duties so that the fish rotted in the cupboards and the vegetables dried up.

With his passion for order, Suezo found the slovenly state of his home painful. But he couldn't complain because he knew that the cause and the fault were his own. He had prided himself on his ability to correct others by alluding to their weaknesses in a light-hearted
manner, but he found that his wife became even more violent when he tried to humor her.

He began to observe her secretly, and he was surprised to find that her strange behavior was more noticeable when he stayed at home, for when he was out of the house she seemed like a person who had awakened from a stupor, and she went about her household tasks. When he learned this fact after talking with the children and the maid, he was at first startled. With his shrewdness in logic he tried to account for her conduct. Her illness, he reasoned, grew worse in his presence because she was dissatisfied with his behavior. He had tried not to act like a cold-hearted husband, and he had avoided any possibility of giving her the impression that there was any estrangement between them. But since he noticed that she was even more out of sorts when he purposely stayed at home, it seemed that his remedy only aggravated her illness. “I'll change my methods,” he said to himself.

He began to leave earlier and return later than usual, But the results were worse. The first time he went away earlier, his wife merely looked up in surprise, but when he came back late, instead of giving him a moody glance, she marched upon him with “What you been doing out this long!” Her behavior suggested that she was no longer able to put up with the situation, that she had reached the limits of patience and suffering. And then she burst out crying.

From that time on, whenever he wanted to leave before the usual hour, she tried to stop him with force, saying: “Why so early?”

And when he began to explain, she said: “You're lying!”

But when he started outdoors in spite of her protests, she pleaded: “Wait! Don't go yet! There's something I must ask you!” She would keep him there by holding on to his clothes or by standing in front of the door and refusing to let him pass. She did this even in the presence of the maid.

Usually Suezo would pass over anything unpleasant by joking about it in order not to make a great issue of a point, but sometimes the maid saw an ugly scene in which he shook off his clinging wife and she fell. But if Suezo said: “All right, I won't go. Tell me what you have to say,” his wife would submit a series of difficult problems by no means solvable in a day.

“What,” she would say, “do you want me to become?”

Sometimes she said: “The way things are, what will my future be?”

In short, Suezo's experiment of an early departure and a late return was totally ineffective in curing his wife of her illness.

He went about the problem in a different way. He realized that when he stayed at home his wife was worse. With this fact in mind he had attempted to be away, but then she had tried to force him to remain. This meant that she was deliberately making herself ill by deliberately keeping him at home. The situation reminded him of an experience he had had when the university medical school was still at Izumibashi.

A student, one Ikai, had borrowed money from him.
The boy would pretend he was unconscious of his own appearance, wearing a pair of high clogs on his naked feet and striding with his left shoulder two or three inches higher than the other. Ikai had put off paying Suezo back, had even refused to rewrite his bond, and somehow had always evaded Suezo's pursuit.

One day at the corner of an alley Suezo had come upon him and asked: “Where are you running to?”

“Oh? Why—just over to the jujitsu master's across the way. I say—about that business of yours. You can expect me one of these days.” And with that Ikai slipped away.

Suezo pretended to continue on ahead, but he secretly came back, stood at the corner, and spied on the boy. He saw him enter a high-class restaurant.

Suezo hurried through his business, and a short time later he dared to enter the restaurant, saying: “Where's that student Ikai?”

As you might have expected, Ikai was quite surprised to find Suezo there, but assuming his characteristic pose as a hero, called out: “Come into the room, Suezo! I've got a few geishas!” And then forcing the usurer to have some saké, he said: “Don't talk about business here. Just drink at my expense.”

This had been Suezo's first experience with geishas, and he couldn't help thinking that one of them, Oshun by name, was quite a filly. She had been drinking too much and, sitting before Ikai, had begun to denounce him for some reason or other. Suezo hadn't forgotten her words: “Ikai-san, you want us to believe you're brave, the way you put on those grand airs of yours! But you're really
nothing but a coward! Let me tell you something for your own benefit. A woman never loves a man who's not kind enough to hit her occasionally. Try to remember that!”

Suezo thought that this might be true not only of geishas but of women in general. Lately his own wife had tried to keep him near her with sulky looks and resistance. This meant that she wanted him to do something to her. “She wants me to hit her!” he said to himself. “Yes, that's it. To really strike her!”