Thirst for Love (11 page)

“We bustled the Equinox away, didn’t we? How would you like to go with me to the cemetery in Tokyo tomorrow?” he asked.

“Would you take me?” said Etsuko, her voice filled with something like joy. After a moment she went on: “Father, don’t be concerned about Ryosuke. Even when he was living, he wasn’t mine.”

Two rain-filled days followed. The third day, September twenty-sixth, was fair. Everyone was busy from early morning with the laundry that had piled up.

As Etsuko hung up Yakichi’s heavily darned socks to dry (he probably would be upset if Etsuko bought him new socks), she suddenly began to wonder what Saburo had done with the socks she had given him. This morning she had noticed that he was still wearing his torn sneakers over bare feet. That was when he said, with a smile that seemed to have grown in intimacy: “Ma’am, good morning.” A small sore that might have been made by a grass cut peeped through a hole in the canvas over his grimy ankle.

I suppose he plans to wear them when he goes out. They weren’t expensive at all, but that’s the way a country boy would look at them.

Nevertheless, she had no way of asking him why he wasn’t wearing them.

Lines had been stretched between the limbs of the four great pasania trees by the kitchen, and wash now took up every inch of the linen cords that webbed the trees together. The west wind blowing out of the chestnut forest made it flap and flutter. Maggie, tied beneath the lines, kept running back and forth under the white shapes sportively flapping over her head and every once in a while let out a prolonged howl. When the wash was hung, Etsuko walked around between the lines. As she did so a sudden gust of wind caught a still-wet apron and snapped it forcefully against her face. It was a refreshing slap that set her cheek glowing.

Where was Saburo? When she closed her eyes, the wounded, dirty ankle she had seen this morning floated before her. His smallest quirk, his smile, his poverty, the disrepair of his clothing—all of them struck her. His lovely poverty! That above all drew her. In Etsuko’s eyes his poverty played the fetching role usually portrayed by shyness in a girl. “Maybe he is in his room, quietly absorbed in a samurai tale.”

Etsuko crossed the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. Beside the back door stood a waste container. It was a large can into which Miyo threw uneaten fish and discarded vegetables. When it was full, she would throw it in the trench where they made compost.

Something in the can caught Etsuko’s eye; she stopped beside it. Out from under the yellowed vegetables and the fishbones a piece of brand-new fabric shone. It was a blue color she had seen before. She gingerly plunged in her fingers and pulled out the cloth. It was the socks. Under the blue pair, the brown pair came to light. She judged by their shape that they had not even been tried on. The price tag of the department store still hung to them by its staple.

She stood idly for a moment face-to-face with this perplexing discovery. The socks fell from her fingers and draped themselves over the fishy garbage. After two or three minutes, she looked around her, and then, as a mother might bury a fetus, she quickly buried the two pairs of socks under the yellowed greens and the fishbones. She washed her hands. As she washed them, and as she carefully dried them again on her apron, she went on pondering. It was not easy for her to get her thoughts in order. Before she succeeded in doing so, an unreasoning anger came over her and determined how she would act.

Saburo was in his three-mat room, changing into his work clothes. When he saw Etsuko appear between himself and the bay window, he dropped to a polite sitting posture and resumed buttoning his shirt. His sleeves were still unbuttoned. He glanced quickly at Etsuko’s face. She still had not said a word. He buttoned his sleeves and sat silent. Saburo was struck by her expression, which had not changed in the slightest degree.

“What about the socks I gave you the other day? Would you show them to me?”

Etsuko said this gently, but someone hearing it could catch in the softness an unnecessarily menacing note. She was angry. It was an anger whose reasons were inexplicable, born by chance in some corner of her emotions; Etsuko blew it up, amplified it. If she had not, she couldn’t have asked the questions she had in mind; her anger was born from the demands of the moment, a truly abstract emotion.

There was a movement in Saburo’s black puppy’s eyes. He unbuttoned his left sleeve and buttoned it again. Now it was his turn to be silent.

“What’s the matter? Why don’t you answer?”

She leaned her arm against the railing of the window. Then she looked mockingly at Saburo. Even in her anger, she savored this joy moment after moment. What a thing it was! Until now she had never imagined this. Indulging herself with this proudly victorious feeling. Observing this tanned, downward-inclined neck, this refreshingly shaven beard. Etsuko was not aware that her words were charged with caressing tones.

“It’s all right. Don’t be so crestfallen. I saw them, that’s all—thrown away in the garbage can. Did you throw them there?”

“Yes, I did.”

Saburo answered without hesitation. His answer unsettled Etsuko.

He’s protecting someone
, she thought.
If not he would have hesitated just a little
.

Suddenly Etsuko heard the sound of sobbing behind her. It was Miyo, crying into the skirt of an old gray serge apron far too long for her. Out of her sobs haltingly came the words: “I threw them away. I threw them away.”

“What are you saying? What are you crying about?” As Etsuko pronounced these words, she glanced at Saburo’s face. His eyes were filled with anxiety, with the wish to communicate with Miyo, in reaction to which Etsuko tore the apron from the girl’s face with a brusqueness verging on cruelty.

Miyo’s frightened, beet-red face was revealed. It was an ordinary country-girl face. There was something ugly about her tear-stained features: her cheeks like ripe persimmons, swollen and red, looking as if they would bruise if pressed; her thin eyebrows; her large, stolid, unexpressive eyes; her impossible nose. Only her lips unsettled Etsuko slightly. Etsuko’s lips were rather thin. Quivering with sobs, wet and shining with tears and saliva, these lips had just the right degree of roundness, like a pretty red pincushion.

“Well, why? I’m not particularly worried about the socks being thrown away. I just don’t understand—that’s why I’m asking.”

“Yes, ma’am—”

Saburo interrupted her. His glib speech made his normal self look like fraud: “Actually, it was I who threw them away, ma’am. They seemed much too fine for me to wear, so I threw them away, ma’am.”

“Don’t say such silly things; it won’t work,” said Etsuko. Miyo feared that Saburo’s actions would be reported to Yakichi, who would then certainly punish him. She could not allow him to protect her as he had been doing any longer. So she went on before Saburo could say any more: “I threw them away, ma’am. Right after you gave them to Saburo, he showed them to me. I was awfully suspicious and said you didn’t give them to him for nothing. Then he got mad and said, ‘All right, you keep them,’ and stalked off leaving them behind. Then I threw them away—women can’t wear men’s socks, after all.”

Again Miyo pulled the apron over her face. What she had said made sense—if one ignored that ingratiating white lie: “Women can’t wear men’s socks.”

Etsuko understood one thing now, and as a result she said resignedly: “It’s all right. Don’t cry. If Chieko and the rest see you, I don’t know what they’ll think. There’s no reason to make such a fuss about a pair or two of socks. Now, calm down. Dry your tears.”

She deliberately avoided looking at Saburo, put her arm around Miyo’s shoulder and led her outside. She studied the shoulder she was embracing, the slightly dirty neck, and the unkempt coiffure.

A woman like this! Of all things! A woman like this!

Through the row of pasania trees the fresh autumn sky gleamed; from it came the screams of shrikes, in voice for the first time this year. Miyo heard them and walked into a puddle, remnant of the recent rains, splashing muddy water on Etsuko’s dress. “Aaaa . . .” Etsuko said, and let go of the girl.

Miyo suddenly dropped to the ground like a dog and carefully wiped Etsuko’s skirt, using the same serge apron with which she had just dried her tears.

This wordless display of devotion was, in the eyes of Etsuko, standing there wordlessly permitting it, not so much a touching country-girl wile, as something charged with courteous, sullen hostility.

One day after that Saburo, wearing the socks, bowed to Etsuko as if nothing had happened and innocently smiled.

* * * *

Etsuko now had a reason for living.

From that day until the unpleasant incident of the October tenth Autumn Festival she had something to live for.

Etsuko had never asked for salvation. As a result, it was strange that a reason for living should have been born to her.

It is easy enough for people to see life as valueless. In fact, people with any degree of sensitivity have difficulty forgetting it. Etsuko’s instinct in these matters was strikingly like that of the hunter. If in the distant wood she should chance to see the white tail of a hare, her cunning would come into play, all the blood of her body would grow turbulent, her sinews would surge, her nervous system would grow taut and concentrate itself like an arrow in flight. In the leisurely days when she lacked this reason for living she was like quite a different hunter, passing indolent days and nights asking no more than a sleep by the fire.

To some people living is extremely simple; to others, it is extremely difficult. Against this unjust imbalance, more striking than the injustice of racial discrimination, Etsuko felt not the slightest rancor.

It’s best to take life lightly
, she thought.
After all, people to whom living is easy don’t have to give any excuse for living beyond that. Those who find it hard, though, very quickly use something more than just living as an excuse. Saying life is hard is nothing to brag about. The power we have to find all the difficulties in life helps to make life easy for the majority of men. If we didn’t have that power, life would be something without simplicity or difficulty—a slippery, empty sphere without a foothold.

This power is one that prevents life from looking like that, a power that people who never come to see life thus do not know. Yet it is not anything out of the ordinary as powers go; in fact it is nothing more than an everyday necessity. He who tampers with the scales of life and makes it seem unduly heavy will receive his punishment in hell. Even if life’s weight is not tampered with, it is like a coat, its weight barely noticed; only the sick man feels the weight of that overcoat and grows stiff in the shoulders. I have to wear heavier clothing than others
, she thought,
because it happens that my soul was born and still lives in the snow country. The problems of life are to me nothing but the suit of armor that protects me.

Her reason for living made tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and whatever the future might bring seem not at all heavy. They were still heavy, to be sure, but some subtle shift in her center of gravity sent Etsuko blithely and buoyantly into the future. Was it hope? Never.

All day she monitored what Saburo and Miyo were doing. It would gain her nothing but pain to discover them kissing under some tree, or to discover in the middle of the night some thread connecting their widely separated rooms. Since, however, uncertainty would bring her even greater pain, Etsuko was determined to stoop to any action that would enable her to search out proof of their love.

Judged merely by its end result, her passion was shockingly authentic evidence of the limitlessness of the human passion for self-torture. A passion lavishly expended in the destruction of her hopes alone, it was a scale model of human existence—perhaps streamlined, perhaps vaulted. Passions do have a form, and through their forms become biological cultures in which human lives can be fully displayed.

Nobody noticed, Etsuko felt, how she watched the other two everywhere they went. She was perfectly calm, and worked harder than usual.

Etsuko inspected the rooms of Miyo and Saburo while they were out, much as Yakichi had once done with her room. No evidence, however, came to light. This pair was not the diary-writing kind. They didn’t know how to write love notes; nor were they even aware of that gentle conspiracy of love in which the present moment seems to stand forth already endowed with the beauty of reminiscence. With these two there was neither evidence nor commemoration. When they met, surely, there was only a mingling of glances . . . of hands . . . of lips . . . of breasts. And after that, perhaps this here and that there . . . Ah! How easy! How simple, beautiful, abstract an action!

Words unneeded, meaning unnecessary; an attitude like that of an athlete throwing a javelin; a stance necessary and adequate to the simple tasks for which it was assumed. That action . . . that behavior that seemed to have been assumed entirely to conform with that simple, abstract, beautiful line—and of that behavior not one shred of evidence remained. It was an action like that of a swallow flying for a moment above the surface of the plain.

Etsuko’s dreams veered at times, and at one moment her existence seemed to be carried away into the darkness of outer space in one great swing of a beautiful cradle, turbulently tossed on a gleaming column of water.

In Miyo’s room, Etsuko found a cheap mirror in a celluloid frame, a red comb, cheap cold cream, Mentholatum, just one half-decent kimono of cheap, Chichibu
meisen
, arrow-feather fabric, some badly wrinkled sashes, a brand-new petticoat, a shapeless bag of a dress for summer wear and the slip that went with it (in the summer Miyo blithely went shopping in the village wearing only these two garments), an old women’s magazine with pages thumbed till they looked like dirty artificial flowers, a maudlin letter from a friend in the country, and, on closer inspection, clinging to all, strands of reddish hair.