Thirst for Love (17 page)

“Come up here,” said Saburo.

“Coming,” she answered, and climbed the tree with surprising swiftness.

Etsuko heard voices in the tree. She was wearing a cloth over her hair, and her sleeves were tied back with a cord as she approached with a pile of empty baskets. She could see Saburo defending himself against Miyo. He was trying to pry her hands loose from the branch she was holding to; she was screaming and reaching for his ankle, which hung down in front of her. They could not see Etsuko, since she was concealed by the branches.

Now Miyo bit Saburo’s fingers. He laughed and cursed at her. She climbed to a branch above that which he occupied and threatened to kick him in the face. He grabbed her knee and held it. Until this time the branches had moved in great swings. Now the branches gaily festooned with leaves and persimmons—still plentiful—tossed as if moved by gentle breezes. The branches nearby shook in concert.

Etsuko closed her eyes and moved away. Something like ice ran down her spine.

Maggie barked.

Kensuke was sitting on a mat outside the kitchen door, along with Mrs. Okura and Asako, sorting persimmons. It never took him long to find the job that took the least work.

“Etsuko? Where are the persimmons?” he called. She did not answer.

“What’s wrong? You’re as white as a sheet,” he said. Etsuko said nothing. She passed through the kitchen and out the other door and walked unconsciously to the shade of the pasanias. There she threw the empty baskets to the ground, slumped to her knees and covered her face with her hands.

That evening at supper, Yakichi put down his chopsticks and said cheerfully: “Saburo and Miyo are like a pair of puppy dogs. Miyo was making a fuss today about an ant crawling down her back. I was there, but figured it was Saburo’s job to get it off her. He went over to her looking as if it was all a great bother—like a monkey that doesn’t know any tricks.

“But somehow he couldn’t find the ant, no matter how much he felt around. It was hard to tell whether it had really been there in the first place. Pretty soon, though, Miyo began to get ticklish and started laughing, laughing and squirming about as if she’d die. Have you ever heard of someone having a miscarriage because she’d laughed too much? According to Kensuke, the child of a woman who laughs a lot grows fast after he is born because he gets massaged so well in his mother’s womb.”

This tale, combined with what she had seen earlier that day, made Etsuko feel as if every inch of her body had been impaled with needles. Her neck felt as if clamped in a pillory of ice. Spiritual pain was slowly taking possession of her body, soaking into it as a flooding river soaks the ricefields. Her spirit seemed tired of its role; it seemed to be sending out distress signals.

Are you all right? Your boat is about to go under. And haven’t you even called for help yet? You have abused the ship of your spirit and deprived yourself of harbor. So now the time has come that you must swim the sea by your own power. All you have before you is death. Is that what you want?

Pain alone can thus serve as a warning. In its last extremity, her organism was apt to lose its spiritual support. Her despair was like a headache pounding to the bursting point, a great glass ball sliding up into her throat from deep inside her.

I’ll never call for help
, she thought.

In spite of everything, Etsuko needed the wild logic that would help her to build a foundation on which she could call herself happy.

I must swallow it, no matter what . . . I must affirm—with eyes closed—no matter what . . . This pain I must learn to savor . . . One who pans for gold can’t expect to dip up only gold, or even attempt to. He must blindly scoop the sand from the river bottom. He doesn’t have the privilege of finding out in advance whether he will succeed. Maybe there’s no gold in it, but maybe there is. Yet the one thing certain is that the person who doesn’t pan for gold never gets any richer.

Her thoughts went on:
a surer way to happiness is to drink up the water that flows into the ocean from the rivers. That’s what I’ve been doing up to this time. I suppose that’s what I’ll continue doing. My stomach can stand it.

Thus the infinitude of pain leads one to believe in the indestructibility of the body by pain. And is that, after all, so silly?

* * *

The day before the market opened, Okura and Saburo took a shipment to the market place. After they had left, Yakichi swept up the scraps of twine, of paper, of straw, of fallen leaves and broken bamboo baskets, and started a fire. He had Etsuko watch the fire while he swept up what was left of the litter.

The afternoon was darkened by fog. One could not distinguish between the fog and the approaching darkness. Evening seemed to be coming on earlier than usual. The moody, smoky sunset exuded a strangely attenuated gleam; a faint drop of afterglow lit the gray, blotting-paper surface of the fog.

For some reason or other Yakichi felt uneasy about leaving Etsuko alone there, even for a moment. Perhaps it was the shadowy look of her in the fog at a distance of just a few yards. The color of the fire was breathtakingly beautiful in the mist. Etsuko was standing still, staring into the fire, and occasionally raking up scattered straw with a bamboo rake. The fire seemed to leap toward her hands as if enticing them.

Yakichi circled about Etsuko idly and left his sweepings beside her. Then he circled off again. When he came close he would look furtively at Etsuko’s face. She paused in her mechanical movement of the rake and, though she could not have been cold, held her hand up to a particularly high burst of flame emanating from one of the broken baskets that were constantly, noisily flaring up.

“Etsuko!” Yakichi shouted, throwing down his broom and running to pull her away from the fire. She had burned the palm of her hand in the flames.

This burn was beyond comparison with that she had suffered on her middle finger a while ago. Her right hand was, for the time being, useless. The soft skin of her palm was raised in one large blister. The pain of that hand, coated with salve and swathed in many layers of bandage, brought her little rest that night.

Yakichi recalled with terror how she had looked at that instant. Where did she get the composure with which she looked so fearlesly into the fire, with which she extended her hands to the flames—that firm, plastic composure? It was an almost arrogant
sang-froid
. This woman given over to confused tides of feeling had for a moment broken free from those tides.

If she had been left alone, perhaps she would not have been burned. Yakichi’s voice had awakened her from that state of equilibrium that is possible only in the doze of the spirit, and then, it seemed, her hand was burned for the first time.

* * * *

Yakichi was frightened simply by looking at Etsuko’s bandage. He seemed to feel that he himself had inflicted the burn. The wound was not a small thing with this woman one could never call careless, this woman whose customary composure was enough to make others uncomfortable. When, a few days before, she had worn the small bandage on her finger and Yakichi had asked her about it, she had answered simply that her finger was burned. Surely she had not burned it herself. With that bandage barely off she had now acquired a broad bandage covering her whole hand.

When Yakichi was young he told his friends that a woman’s health was made up of many illnesses. He was proud of that dictum, which he had arrived at by himself. One of his friends, for instance, had married a woman troubled by mysterious stomach pains. Soon after they were married her pains went away. Then, however, as their marriage dulled, she fell prey to recurrent migraine headaches. Her husband was exceedingly annoyed by them and began to turn to other women for solace. When his wife realized this her migraine disappeared. Then, however, her premarital stomach pains returned, and after a year she died of stomach cancer. One can never tell how much of a woman’s illness is lie and how much truth. When you think it’s a lie, suddenly she has a child or dies.

“A woman’s accidents are another thing,” thought Yakichi. “My friend Karajima was a great friend of the ladies. When he started to run around, his wife started accidentally breaking plates—one a day. It was pure accident; for his wife, it seemed, wasn’t really conscious that he was unfaithful. She was innocently amazed each day by the blunders unconsciously committed by her fingertips.”

Then one day Yakichi himself did something quite unusual; he ran a thorn into his finger while sweeping the garden. He left it alone, and the finger became slightly infected. But then the pus came out all by itself, and it healed perfectly. Yakichi didn’t like medicine, and never used it.

During the day he saw Etsuko’s distress at close range. At night he was aware of her restlessness beside him and caressed her more importunately for it. Naturally he was jealous of Saburo, and Etsuko was jealous of Miyo. He was also jealous of Etsuko’s unrequited love. Yet there was in his jealous heart a hint of gratefulness for the stimulation jealousy gave his love-making.

Thus he would exaggerate stories about Saburo and Miyo just to torture Etsuko, and at such times felt a certain affinity, in fact an affection, for them. Out of fear of losing her, however, he didn’t indulge in this sport too often. She had become something he could not do without—a necessity, like a sin or a bad habit.

Etsuko was a beautiful eczema. At Yakichi’s age he couldn’t itch without eczema.

Yet if Yakichi became a little more considerate and moderated his tales about Saburo and Miyo, Etsuko became strangely uneasy. She wondered if some new development had occurred that he did not want her to know about. Could there be any development worse than this? Such a question might have been asked by one who had never been jealous. Jealousy does not, after all, have to feed on factual evidence; in that respect its passions are close to the passions of idealism.

They bathed once a week, and Yakichi went in first. Usually Etsuko bathed with him, but this evening she felt a cold coming on, and he went in alone.

All the women of the Sugimoto family were in the kitchen. Etsuko, Chieko, Asako, Miyo, even Nobuko were washing their various dishes at the same time. Etsuko was wearing a white silk cloth around her neck because of her cold.

Asako mentioned her husband in Siberia: “I haven’t received a letter from him since August. He’s a terrible correspondent, I know, but I would think he could write at least once a week. Naturally, the love of a man and wife can’t be expressed only in words, but the great fault of Japanese men is their laziness about using words and phrases to express matters of the heart.”

Chieko was amused to think how Yusuke, perhaps burrowing under the tundra with the temperature far below zero, would react if he heard these words.

“Yes, but if he did write once a week they wouldn’t send that many letters. For all we know, he may be writing that often.”

“If so I wonder where all those letters are going.”

“They must be giving them to Russian widows, surely.”

After she said this, Chieko realized that her words might have offended Etsuko, but Asako’s reply, which showed that she did not see the joke, saved the day: “Maybe so, but surely they can’t read Japanese.”

Chieko dropped out of the conversation and turned to help Etsuko with her dishes: “Let me wash them; you’ll get your bandage wet.”

“Thank you.”

In reality Etsuko did not wish to be relieved of the mechanical chore of washing cups and dishes. Lately she longed with an almost sensual desire to turn herself into a machine. She looked forward to the time when her hand healed and with great speed she would sew fall kimonos for herself and Yakichi. The cloth for them had already been washed and seamed. Her needle would fly with superhuman speed.

The kitchen was lighted by only a naked twenty-watt bulb, which hung down between the smoky beams of the ceiling. There at the sink dark with their shadows the women had to do their washing. Etsuko leaned against the window frame and watched Miyo closely as she washed the pots. Beneath her shoddy, faded muslin sash, the flesh of her hips swelled faintly.

She looks as if she’s going to lay an egg right now. Robust girl that she is, she’s not troubled by morning sickness. In the summer she wears loose, short-sleeved, onepiece dresses, but she doesn’t even know enough to shave her armpits. When she sweats a lot, she takes a towel, no matter who is around, and wipes her armpits.

The ripeness of her hips—like fruit. Those curves like coiled springs that once Etsuko too had possessed. That expansiveness, like a heavy, massive flower vase brimming with water.

And Saburo did all that. That young gardener planted his seeds ever so carefully, cultivated them with such solicitude. Just as in the morning the petals of the tiger lily wet with dew cling together as if they’ll never part, her nipples and his breast had clung together wet with sweat.

Suddenly Etsuko became conscious of Yakichi, talking loudly in the bathroom, adjacent to the kitchen. Saburo was outside keeping the water heater supplied with wood. Yakichi was speaking to him.

The overexuberant way he splashed the bath water called up the image of his aging, cadaverous body, its collarbones filled with tiny pools of water. She could hear his cracked voice bouncing from the ceiling as he called: “Saburo! Saburo!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Be careful about the firewood. Beginning today you and Miyo bathe at the same time, and don’t stay in long. If you bathe one at a time, you take too long and use at least a log or two more than necessary.”

After Yakichi had bathed, Kensuke and Chieko went in. Then came Asako and her children. As they came out, Yakichi was surprised to hear Etsuko say she was going to take a quick bath.

Etsuko slipped into the tub and felt for the stopper with her toes. Only Saburo and Miyo had not yet bathed. She sank in the water up to her chin, reached down, and pulled the plug.