Thirst for Love (16 page)

He had expected that Yakichi would make them separate, which would have caused him little pain. Even after he had been informed of Miyo’s pregnancy, the consciousness that he was a father had still not been born in this young gardener.

In response to Etsuko’s interrogations, various recollections formed in his mind. One day, about a month after Etsuko had come to Maidemmura, Yakichi had sent Miyo to the shed for a shovel, which was wedged deep inside the shed so that she could not pull it out. She had gone to Saburo for help, and he pulled it out for her.

There she was while he strained at the shovel, her head just under his arms, perhaps to cheer him on, while she held back an old table that was lying against the shovel. Saburo could smell the strong odor of the cream she used on her face mixed with the moldy smells of the shed. He held the freed shovel out to Miyo, but she didn’t take it. Instead she stood there wordlessly staring up at him. Saburo’s arms reached out unconsciously and embraced her.

Was that love?

When the spring rains were almost over, and the hot chafing pressures of the last part of this captive season nagged at him, Saburo suddenly decided to slip out of his window into the night rain. He made a half circle around the house and tapped at Miyo’s window. Through the glass he could see Miyo’s face clear and white as she slept.

She opened her eyes and saw Saburo’s face peering from the shadows outside the window and then the white line of his teeth. With what strange swiftness this girl who did everything so slowly during the day now threw aside her bed clothes and jumped up! Her nightgown was loose at the neck; one breast was exposed. It was a tense, straining breast, like a bent bow, enough to make one believe that it was what had thrown the nightgown from her bosom.

Miyo opened the window, taking extreme care that she made no noise. Saburo stood before her, wordlessly pointing to his muddy feet. She ran for a rag, had him sit on the window frame, and then carefully wiped his feet clean.

Was that love?

This chain of associations passed through Saburo’s mind in an instant. He desired her, he was sure; but he did not love her. All day, every day, his thoughts turned only to when the weeding had to be done, to how, if war broke out again, he would fulfill his dreams of peril by enlisting in the navy, to reveries about the prophecies of Tenri and their fulfillment, to the day when the world would end and the manna would fall from heaven on Tenri’s manna table, to his happy grade-school days and romps through mountain and meadow, to what he would have for supper. He didn’t think about Miyo so much as one one hundredth of the day.

He desired her—even that notion seemed less tenable the more he thought about it. It was like a yearning for food. Any internal struggle to vanquish his desires was of no concern to this healthy young man.

Thus Saburo reflected for a moment on this incomprehensible question and then shook his head as if puzzled: “No.”

Etsuko could not believe her ears.

Joy flashed from her face like agony. Saburo did not see her expression; his eyes were caught by the Hankyu train that sped barely visible behind the trees. If he had seen that expression he would have been taken aback by the pain his answer seemed to cause Etsuko. Surely he would have changed it.

“If you don’t love her . . .” Etsuko spoke slowly, sucking the joy out of each word. “Was that your honest . . .” She seemed to be trying to induce Saburo to say that “No” again without running the risk of having him say the opposite. “It doesn’t matter whether you love her or not, so long as you say exactly what you feel. You don’t love Miyo, do you?”

Saburo barely heeded her repetition of these words. “‘Love her . . . don’t love her’—what a meaningless waste of time,” he thought. “She’s mouthing over this stupid matter as if it were enough to turn the world upside-down.” He thrust his fingers deep in his pockets and came upon some pieces of the dried cuttlefish he had eaten with his
saké
at the festival the night before.

“What if I start munching on a piece of this cuttlefish? I wonder what kind of face she’ll make,” he said to himself.

Etsuko’s seriousness made him wish to tease her. He took a piece of the cuttlefish out of his pocket, gleefully flipped it with his fingers, and caught it in his mouth as would a frolicking dog. Then he said, unabashed: “That’s right. I don’t love her.”

It wouldn’t have made any difference if this busybody of an Etsuko had gone to Miyo and reported to her: “Saburo said he doesn’t love you.” These impulsive lovers had never taken the trouble to discuss whether they loved each other or not.

Prolonged suffering makes one stupid; but one made stupid by suffering knows joy when he sees it. It was from this standpoint that Etsuko watched, calculating all. She did not realize that she was a convert to Yakichi’s self-made code of justice. Saburo did not love Miyo; therefore he had to marry her. To make matters worse, she hid behind the mask of the hypocrite and took joy in goading Saburo by the moral judgment that says: “A man who fathers a child on a woman he doesn’t love must take the responsibility of marrying her.”

“You’re an awful rascal,” said Etsuko. “You don’t love her, but you made her pregnant; and now you have to marry Miyo.”

Saburo suddenly turned his sharp, beautiful eyes toward Etsuko and returned her gaze. Her voice became harder; it helped her to repel that look: “Don’t say you don’t want to. The Sugimoto family has always understood its young people, but it has never tolerated irresponsibility. Father has ordered that you two get married, and you’ll do just that.”

Saburo was shocked; he had not expected this. He had believed that, at worst, Yakichi would insist they have nothing more to do with each other. If, though, marriage was what he wanted, all well and good. The only consideration left was what his fault-finding mother would say.

“I’d better find out what my mother thinks.”

“And how do you feel?” Etsuko would not be content until she had personally persuaded Saburo into the marriage.

“If the master says I should marry Miyo, I’ll marry her,” he said. After all, it was not a matter of very great moment.

“It will be a load off my shoulders,” said Etsuko, cheerfully. It certainly did simplify matters.

She was beguiled by her own projections, intoxicated by the happy, happy situation of Saburo married to Miyo
against his will
. Was her intoxication like that of the woman who has assuaged her heart’s pangs with wine? Was it wine drunk not so much to gain inebriation as oblivion, not so much to induce visions as blindness—in short, to arrive deliberately at stupid judgments? Was not this overwhelming drunkenness part of her unconscious plan to avoid injury to herself?

The word marriage was absolutely terrifying to Etsuko, and she now wished to turn over the handling of this ominous term to Yakichi. It was his responsibility, conferred by his arbitrary ruling. In this respect she was dependent upon Yakichi, and she stared over his shoulder like a child on its parent’s back beholding some terrifying sight.

At the point where the road past the Okamachi station swung right to merge with the highway, they encountered two large, beautiful cars coming onto the concrete surface. One was pearly white; the other was a new, pale-blue Chevrolet. Motors purring soft as velvet, they curved past. The first vehicle was filled with laughing young men and women. As it moved past Etsuko, she could hear the sound of jazz music from the radio. The second car had a Japanese chauffeur. In the dim recesses of its back seat, a sharp-eyed couple—blond hair darkening into age—sat motionless, like birds of prey.

Saburo’s mouth opened slightly; he gazed at them in wonder.

“They’re going back to Osaka, aren’t they?” said Etsuko. As she spoke, suddenly the noise of all the turmoil of the city seemed to float to her on the wind and strike her ears.

To Etsuko, who knew how little was to be found by one who went off there, the city held none of the attractions it held for country folk. To be sure, the city was like a building that offered visions of ever-new mystery, but for Etsuko that soaring structure held no charm.

Etsuko burned with desire to have Saburo take her arm in his. Leaning on that arm, bordered with golden hair, she would walk down this road anywhere. Before long they would be in Osaka, in the very center of all that metropolitan congestion. Before long they would be washed forward by waves of humanity. She would wake suddenly and look around her in amazement. From that moment, it seemed, Etsuko’s
real life
would begin.

Would Saburo take her arm?

This stolid youth was bored by this widow older than he walking silently beside him. He was completely unconscious of her hair done up morning after morning with such care for him alone. Only curiosity led him to glance at the mysterious plaits of her splendid, fragrant coiffure. He would not have dreamed that inside this strangely distant, strangely haughty woman spun the girlish fancy that he might lock her arm in his. He stopped suddenly and did an about-face.

“Must we go back already?” asked Etsuko. Her eyes pleaded with him, brimming eyes tinged faintly with blue, as if reflecting the evening sky.

“It’s late, madam . . .”

They had come further than they realized. Far off above the shadowy forest the roofs of the Sugimoto home gleamed in the setting sun.

It took them a half hour to walk back there.

* * * *

Then Etsuko’s real misery began—that misery arranged so carefully in all its details. It was the misery of the unlucky man who has worked all his life to accomplish a task at last successful, who as soon as it is done must face death, suffer, and die. Those watching might not be able to decide whether he had striven all his days to complete the task or to gain the privilege of suffering and dying in his splendid, private hospital suite.

Etsuko had planned to wait patiently, joyfully, over any period of time, for Miyo’s unhappiness, for Miyo’s misery to grow like mold and batten on her. She would wait unfalteringly, eyes never swerving, as this loveless marriage developed and fell into the same wreckage Etsuko’s had fallen into some time before. She would give her life to see it with her own eyes. She would wait until her hair turned white if she had to. She did not insist that she be Saburo’s mistress. All that was necessary was that Miyo, before Etsuko’s eyes, should lose hope, should fall into agony, into distraction, into exhaustion, into collapse.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, that calculation had failed.

In accordance with Etsuko’s advice, Yakichi made public the relationship of Miyo and Saburo. To the queries of the backbiting villagers, he proclaimed: “They’re getting married.”

To maintain the order of the house, he had them remain in the same distantly separate rooms as before. Once a week, though, they were allowed to sleep in the same room. Saburo was waiting for the October twenty-sixth Tenri Fall Festival, and after he spoke to his mother there, arrangements for the marriage—with Yakichi to serve as matchmaker—would be completed.

Yakichi managed matters with a kind of passion. With a kindly old gaffer’s smile he had never worn before alight on his face, with a demeanor of all too perfect understanding, he grandiloquently tolerated the courtship of Saburo and Miyo. Needless to say, the thought of Etsuko was ever present in this, Yakichi’s new attitude.

What a fortnight that was! Etsuko relived with renewed force the sleepless nights of those tortured days of late summer stretching into autumn when her husband never came home. In the daytime how the time had dragged, how she had vacillated over whether she should or should not phone him, how every approaching footstep had caused her anguish! For days she had not been able to swallow food; she merely drank water and lay in bed. One morning when she took a drink of water and felt its coolness spread in her body, she suddenly thought of poisoning herself. As she imagined the joy of feeling the white crystals of the poison spread in the water and quietly penetrate her system, Etsuko fell into a kind of rapture and shed tears that caused her not the slightest pain.

She felt again the symptoms of that time—the unexplainable cold shivers, the paroxysms that brought gooseflesh even to the palms of her hands. Surely this was the cold of prison. Surely captive men shivered like this.

Just as once the absence of Ryosuke had tortured her, now the very sight of Saburo brought her pain. When, that spring, he had gone to Tenri, she had felt closer to him than when he had been nearby. But now her hands were tied. She had to sit by and watch him and Miyo indulge in all their intimacies and not raise a finger. Hers was a cruel, heartless punishment. Moreover, it was a punishment imposed by herself.

She hated herself for not having advised Yakichi to discharge Saburo and abort Miyo’s baby. Her regret was so deep that it cut the ground from under her. Out of her natural desire not to be separated from Saburo, she had brought upon herself this terrible agony.

Was there not, however, an element of self-deception in Etsuko’s remorse? Did she not realize this pain would reverse itself against her? Was it not a natural pain—one she might have anticipated, willed, in fact, coveted? Had not Etsuko herself, not very long before, fervently wished to bring upon herself the supreme pain?

On October fifteenth the fruit market was to open in Okamachi. Since the choicest produce would be sent to Osaka, the clear skies of October thirteenth seemed made to order. The Sugimoto family, along with the Okura family, therefore put all their effort into harvesting the persimmons, which were the finest of the fruits this year.

Saburo climbed the trees, and Miyo waited beneath him, keeping him supplied with empty baskets. The branches swung back and forth, making the blue sky, visible in patches through the branches, seem to reel and totter. Miyo watched Saburo’s feet as he moved about among the leaves.

“It’s full!” Saburo called. The basket full of shining persimmons struck the lowest branches and was received in Miyo’s upstretched hands. She lowered it impassively to the ground. She stood with her legs wide apart in their cotton pantaloons as she untied the basket and sent up an empty one.