Thirst for Love (6 page)

“They know what I have, don’t they?” asked Ryosuke, his voice lilting like a child’s.

“Yes.” Etsuko got up intending to sponge his dry lips, cracked in fine fissures by the fever, with a piece of wet cotton. Instead she pressed her cheek against his. His unshaven, sick man’s face burned hers like hot beach sand.

“It’s all right. Etsuko will make sure you get better. Don’t worry about a thing. If you died, I’d die too.” (Who would hold her to that false pledge? There were no witnesses anyway—not even God, whom Etsuko didn’t believe in.) “But that isn’t going to happen. You’re going to get better; that’s certain.”

Etsuko kissed her husband’s parched lips frenziedly. They were constantly exhaling hot breath, as if fed by subterranean heat. Etsuko’s lips moistened her husband’s blood-smeared lips, thorny as roses. Under his wife’s face, Ryosuke’s face writhed.

The gauze-wrapped door handle turned, and the door opened slightly. Etsuko heard the sound and released her husband. It was a nurse, beckoning to Etsuko with her eyes. They went out into the hall. A woman was there, in a long dress and fur cape, leaning by the window at the end of the hall.

It was the woman of the pictures. At first glance she seemed to be Eurasian. Her teeth were so lovely they looked false. Her nostrils were shaped like wings. The wet paraffin paper around the bouquet she was carrying struck to her red fingernails. There was something impotent, frustrated, about this woman’s bearing, as if she were an animal standing on its hind legs trying to walk. She could have been forty: the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes would suddenly spring out as if from ambush, belying the twenty-five years one might first have given her.

“How do you do?” the woman said. There was in her words a faint, elusive accent. Etsuko saw her as a woman stupid men might find exotic. Yet this was the woman who had caused her so much pain. Etsuko found it difficult at this short notice to bring together that past pain and this present embodiment of its cause. Her pain had already matured (strange way of saying it!) to the point at which it was something imaginative, having no connection with this concrete entity. The woman was an extracted tooth; it hurt her no more. Like a sick man who has weathered all the little, phony illnesses and now is face to face with the killer itself, Etsuko found herself demeaned by the thought that this woman had been the cause of all her troubles.

The woman held out a calling card with a man’s name on it, saying she had come in her husband’s place. On the card was the name of the general manager of the firm for which Ryosuke worked. “He is not supposed to have visitors,” Etsuko said; “no one is allowed in.” Something like a shadow darted across the woman’s eyes.

“But my husband asked me to see him and find out how he is.”

“Well, that’s how my husband is: no one can see him.”

“If I could just look in at him, my husband would be satisfied.”

“If your husband were here I would let him in.”

“Why is it that my husband could go in, but I can’t? That doesn’t make sense. The way you talk makes me feel you’re worried about something.”

“All right, nobody is to go in to see him. Does that satisfy you?”

“I find the way you speak extraordinary. Are you his wife—Ryosuke’s wife?”

“I am the only woman who calls my husband ‘Ryosuke!’”

“Please, may I, please, just look in at him? I beg of you. Here, this is not much, but I thought it would brighten up his room.”

“Thank you.”

“Mrs. Sugimoto, may I see him? How is he? He isn’t seriously ill, is he?”

“He may live, and he may die—no one knows.”

Etsuko’s derisive tone shook the woman. She threw etiquette aside and said: “Well, if that’s the way it is, I’m going to see him whether you like it or not.”

“Come right this way. If you don’t mind going in, make yourself at home.” Etsuko turned and led the way back to the room. “Do you know what my husband has?”

“No.”

“Typhoid.”

The woman stopped, her color changing. “Typhoid?” she whispered.

Here was an uncouth woman, surely. Her shocked reaction was that of the old wife who upon hearing someone has tuberculosis says: “Heavens preserve us!” She might even go so far as to cross herself! This foreigner’s concubine! What was she waiting for? Etsuko amiably opened the door. The woman’s startled reaction pleased Etsuko. She moved the chair at her husband’s bedside even closer to him.

The woman had no choice but to move cautiously into the room. Etsuko took boundless pleasure in having her husband see the woman’s trepidation.

The woman took off her cape but didn’t know what to do with it. Any place where bacteria might adhere was out of the question. Even Etsuko’s hand was suspect, for she certainly emptied her husband’s bedpans. It seemed wisest to keep it on. She slipped her shoulders into it again. Then she dragged the chair back several feet and sat down.

Etsuko relayed the name on the calling card to her husband. Ryosuke shot a look at the woman but said nothing. The woman crossed her legs. She sat pale and silent.

Etsuko stood as if she were a nurse behind the visitor and watched her husband’s expression. A sudden anxious thought took her breath away:
What if my husband doesn’t love this woman at all? What then? Then all my suffering has no basis, and my husband and I have been torturing each other in a ridiculous charade; my recent past is nothing more than a meaningless performance of shadow-boxing. Now I must find in my husband’s eyes some infinitesimal sign of love for this woman, or I won’t be able to go on. If he loves neither her nor the three other women whom I did not allow in to see him, how, after all that has happened, can I hear it?

Ryosuke, still looking toward the ceiling, moved under his quilt, which was already somewhat askew. He raised his knees; the quilt began to slide to the floor. The woman shrank back somewhat. She did not so much as extend her hand. Etsuko ran to set the bed in order.

In that space of a few seconds, Ryosuke turned his face toward his visitor. Involved as she was with the quilt, Etsuko couldn’t see them. Her intuition told her, however, that in those moments her husband and the woman had exchanged winks, two winks that denigrated her. This man with a fever raging had smiled and winked at this woman.

It was not really intuition. It was surmise, rather, based on a movement she perceived in her husband’s cheek. She surmised it and thus experienced a sense of relief barred to those who judge by ordinary powers of understanding.

“You’ll have no trouble recovering from this. It can’t really hurt somebody with your nerve.” The woman’s tone had suddenly lost its reserve.

A gentle smile played over Ryosuke’s unshaved features—had he ever turned this smile on Etsuko? Then he said, his voice lilting: “It’s too bad I can’t give this illness to you. You’d outlast it.”

“Why, how dare you?” She laughed, looking at Etsuko for the first time.

“I can’t outlast it,” Ryosuke persisted. There was an awkward silence. The woman suddenly laughed a chirping laugh.

A few minutes later she left.

That night brain fever set in. The typhoid bacillus had attacked Ryosuke’s brain.

The radio in the downstairs waiting room blared noisy jazz. “I can’t stand it,” Ryosuke moaned as his head throbbed violently. “I’m sick as a dog and that radio goes . . .”

The lightbulb in the sickroom had been covered with a
furoshiki
so that the glare did not bother the sick man’s eyes. Etsuko had climbed on a chair and tied it there without even bothering to call a nurse for help. The light coming through the muslin had the unfortunate effect of imparting a greenish cast to Ryosuke’s face. In this strange green umbra his bloodshot eyes seemed overwhelmed by anger and tears.

Etsuko put down her knitting and stood up. “I’m going downstairs,” she said; “I’ll ask them to turn it down.” As she reached the door she heard behind her a bone-chilling groan.

It was a cry that might have been emitted by an animal being stepped on. Etsuko turned; Ryosuke was sitting up in bed. He clutched the quilt in both hands as a child might. His eyes stared blankly yet fixedly toward the door.

The nurse heard and came into the room. She helped stretch Ryosuke’s body out, as if unfolding a collapsible chair, and placed his hands back under the covers. The sick man submitted, groaning all the while; then after a time he called, rolling his eyes from side to side: “Etsuko! Etsuko!”

Etsuko heard and wondered how, of all the names he should be calling, he had chosen this one. He seemed not to be following his own will so much as hers. She had the strange conviction that he was saying this name at her command, as if reciting a rule.

“Say it again,” she said.

The nurse had left to call the doctor. Etsuko bent over as she spoke, took her husband by the arms, and cruelly shook him. Again he gasped: “Etsuko! Etsuko!”

Late that night, Ryosuke shouted indistinctly: “It’s black! It’s black!” Then he propelled himself from his bed and knocked the medicine bottles and pitcher off the table, after which he walked around on the broken glass, cutting his feet horribly. Three men, including the janitor, came running and restrained him.

The next day he was injected with sedatives, placed on a stretcher, and loaded into an ambulance. He was an unusually heavy burden. It was raining. Etsuko held an umbrella over him from the door of the hospital to the gate where the ambulance waited.

The Hospital for Infectious Diseases. With great joy Etsuko welcomed that ugly building, on the other side of the steel bridge that threw its shadow on the broken pavement of the road. Life on an island, life in its ideal form, which Etsuko had always pined for, was about to begin. Nobody could follow them here. Nobody could get in. The only people who lived here were those who made resistance to germs their only reason for being. Unceasing approbation of life; a rough, rude approbation that did not care at all about appearances. An approbation of life beyond law and beyond morality, dramatized and incessantly demanded by delirium, incontinence, bloody excrement, vomit, diarrhea, and horrible odors. This air which, like a mob of merchants shouting bids at a produce auction, craved in every second the call: “Still alive! Still alive!” This busy terminal where life constantly came and went, arrived and departed, boarded and debarked. This mass of active bodies, unified by the unique form of existence they bore, namely, contagious disease. Here the value of men’s lives and germs’ lives frequently came to the same thing; patient and practitioner were metamorphosed into bacteria—into such objectless life. Here life existed only for the sake of being affirmed; no pettier desire was allowed. Here happiness reigned. In fact, here happiness, that most rapidly rotting of all foods, reigned in its most rotten, most inedible form.

Etsuko lived life to the full here among death and evil odors. Her husband was constantly befouled; on the day after he arrived here, he passed bloody stools. The dreaded intestinal bleeding had begun.

Although his high fever continued unabated, he lost neither weight nor color. On his hard, uninviting bed, his lustrous pink body lay like a baby’s. He didn’t have enough energy to toss. He lay listlessly, both hands holding his stomach or stroking his chest with fists doubled up. His fingers ineptly played under his nostrils as he inhaled that odor.

As for Etsuko, her existence was now one fixed stare. Her eyes had forgotten how to close, like unprotected open windows mercilessly searched by wind and rain. The nurses were amazed at her mad, feverish ministrations. She took only an hour or two of sleep a day at the side of this half-naked husband reeking of urine. Even then she would dream that he was being dragged away into some deep ditch calling her name, and she would wake.

The attending physician suggested blood transfusions as a last resort, hinting vaguely at the same time that he didn’t expect them to do any good. As a result of the transfusions, Ryosuke became rather calm and slept continuously. A nurse came in with the bill. Etsuko went out into the hall with her.

A boy stood there, his bad skin color partly concealed by the hunting cap he wore. When he saw Etsuko, he removed his hat and silently bowed. At one small spot above his left ear he had no hair. His eyes had a slight squint; his nose was extremely thin.

“Yes, what can I do for you?” Etsuko asked. The boy did not answer but simply toyed with his cap and scraped meaningless circles on the floor boards with his right foot. “Oh, this?” said Etsuko, holding out the bill. The boy nodded.

Etsuko watched the dirty jacket of the boy as he departed with his money and thought about that boy’s blood circulating inside Ryosuke.
As if that was going to save him! Couldn’t they get blood from someone who had some to spare? Taking that boy’s blood was a crime. A man with blood to spare?
Her thoughts moved restlessly to Ryosuke in his sickbed.
It would make more sense to sell Ryosuke’s germ-laden surfeit of blood. Sell that to healthy people. Then Ryosuke would become healthy and the healthy people sick. And the city would know that it was getting its money’s worth out of the Hospital for Infectious Diseases. But Ryosuke—it wouldn’t do to have him become healthy. If he were well he would take off again
.

Etsuko realized that her thoughts were running on confusedly—half-dream, half-waking. It seemed as if the sun had suddenly gone down; everything around her seemed in shadow. The windows stood in a line, each filled with a stark-white, clouded evening sky. Etsuko staggered and fainted.

It was a slight attack of cerebral ischemia. The doctors insisted she take a short period of rest. After four hours, however, a nurse came in to tell her Ryosuke was dying.

Ryosuke’s lips seemed to be trying to say something through the oxygen inhalator Etsuko held before him. What was it that his lips were inaudibly forming, incessantly, desperately, and yet rather joyfully?