The Sound of the Mountain Page 14

  ‘What do you mean, this time?’

  ‘You know what I mean. She won’t have a baby with me as I am.’

  ‘While you have the other woman?’

  ‘I’d say so.’

  ‘You’d say so!’ Shingo’s chest was tight with anger. ‘It was half a suicide. Don’t you think so? It wasn’t so much that she was getting back at you as that she was half killing herself.’ Shuichi fell back before the assault. ‘You’ve destroyed her spirit and the damage can’t be undone.’

  ‘I’d say her spirit is still pretty strong.’

  ‘But isn’t she a woman? Your wife? If you’d done one thing to comfort her she’d have been happy to have the baby. Quite aside from the other woman.’

  ‘Oh, but it isn’t quite aside.’

  ‘Kikuko knows how much Yasuko wants grandchildren. So much that she feels guilty about taking so long. She doesn’t have the baby she wants to have, and that’s because you’ve murdered her spiritually.’

  ‘It’s a little different, actually. She has her own squeamishness.’

  ‘Squeamishness?’

  ‘Resents being put in that situation.’

  ‘Oh?’ It was a matter between husband and wife. He wondered whether Shuichi had in fact made Kikuko feel so debased and insulted. ‘I don’t believe it. She may have talked and acted as if she felt that way, but I doubt if she really did. For a husband to make so much of his wife’s squeamishness is a sign that he’s short on affection. Does a husband take a fit of pouting so seriously?’ Shingo had somewhat lost his momentum. ‘I wonder what Yasuko will say when she hears she’s lost a grandchild.’

  ‘I’d think she’d feel relieved. She knows now that Kikuko can have children.’

  ‘What’s that? You guarantee that she will have children later?’

  ‘I’m prepared to guarantee it.’

  ‘Anyone who can say that has no fear of heaven and no human affection.’

  ‘A difficult way to put it. Isn’t it a simple enough matter?’

  ‘It’s not simple at all. Think about it a minute. Think about the way she was crying.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want children myself. But with things between us as they are now, I doubt if it would be a very superior child.’

  ‘I don’t know about things with you, but there is nothing wrong about things with Kikuko. It’s only you that things are wrong with. She’s not that way. You do nothing to help her get rid of her jealousy. That’s why she lost the child. And maybe more than the child, too.’ Shuichi was looking at him in surprise. ‘Suppose you have a try at getting blind drunk with that woman and coming into the house with your dirty shoes on and putting them on Kikuko’s knee and having her take them off for you.’

  3

  Shingo went to the bank that morning on company business, and had lunch with a friend who worked there. They talked until about two-thirty. After telephoning the office from the restaurant, he started for home.

  Kikuko was sitting on the veranda with Kuniko on her lap.

  She got up hastily, surprised at his early return.

  ‘No, please.’ He came out to the veranda. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

  ‘I was about to change her diaper.’

  ‘Fusako?’

  ‘She’s gone to the post office with Satoko.’

  ‘What business does she have at the post office? Leaving the baby behind.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Kikuko to the baby. ‘I’ll get out Grandfather’s kimono first.’

  ‘No, please. Get her changed first.’

  Kikuko looked up smiling. Her small teeth showed between her lips.

  ‘He says I’m to get you changed first.’ She was in déshabillé, her bright silk kimono tied with a narrow obi. ‘Has it stopped raining in Tokyo?’

  ‘Raining? It was raining when I got on the train, but clear when I got off. I didn’t notice where it stopped.’

  ‘It was raining here until just a few minutes ago. Fusako went out when it stopped.’

  ‘It’s still wet up the hill.’

  Laid face up on the veranda, the baby raised her bare feet and took her toes in her hands. The feet moved more freely than the hands. ‘Yes, have a look up the mountain,’ said Kikuko, wiping the baby’s rear.

  Two American military planes flew low overhead. Startled by the noise, the baby looked up at the mountain. They did not see the planes, but great shadows passed over the slope. Probably the baby saw them too.

  Shingo was touched by the gleam of surprise in the innocent eyes.

  ‘She doesn’t know about air raids. There are all sorts of babies who don’t know about war.’ He looked down at the baby. The gleam had already faded. ‘I wish I had a picture of her eyes just now. With the shadow of the airplanes in it. And the next picture …’

  Of a dead baby, shot from an airplane, he was about to say; but he held himself back, remembering that Kikuko had the day before had an abortion.

  In fact, there were numberless babies like Kuniko as he had seen her in the two pictures.

  Kuniko in her arms and a rolled-up diaper in one hand, Kikuko went off to the bath.

  Shingo had come home early out of concern for Kikuko. He went into the breakfast room.

  ‘What brings you back so soon?’ said Yasuko, joining him.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I was washing my hair. It stopped raining and the sun came blazing out, and my head got to feeling all itchy. An old person’s head seems to itch for no reason at all.’

  ‘Mine doesn’t.’

  ‘Probably because it’s such a good head,’ she laughed. ‘I knew you were back, but I thought if I came in with my hair all which-way I’d get a scolding.’

  ‘The old woman’s hair all undone – why not cut it off and make a tea whisk out of it?’

  ‘Not at all a bad idea. Men have their whisks too. It used to be, you know, that both men and women cut their hair short and pulled it back like a tea whisk. You see it in the Kabuki.’

  ‘I don’t mean hair tied up. I mean hair cut off.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind. We both have too much hair.’

  ‘Kikuko is up and around?’ he asked in a low voice.

  ‘She’s been having a try at it. She doesn’t look at all well.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be taking care of the baby.’

  ‘Take care of her for a minute, please, Fusako said, and dumped her by Kikuko’s bed. The baby was sound asleep.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take her?’

  ‘I was washing my hair when she started crying.’ Yasuko went for his kimono. ‘I wondered if something might be wrong with you, too, you got home so early.’

  Shingo called to Kikuko, who seemed to be going from the bath to her room.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Bring Kuniko in here.’

  ‘We’ll be there in a minute.’

  Her hand in Kikuko’s, Kuniko was having a walk. Kikuko had put on a more formal obi.

  Kuniko clutched at Yasuko’s shoulder. Yasuko, who was brushing Shingo’s trousers, took the baby on her knee.

  Kikuko went off with Shingo’s suit.

  Having put it away in the next room, she slowly closed the doors of the wardrobe.

  She seemed taken aback by her face in the wardrobe mirror, and she wavered between going to her room and returning to the breakfast room.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be better off in bed?’ said Shingo.

  ‘Yes.’ A spasm passed across Kikuko’s shoulders. She went off to her room without looking back.

  ‘Doesn’t she seem strange to you?’ Yasuko frowned.

  Shingo did not answer.

  ‘And it’s not at all clear what’s the matter. She gets up and walks around, and then starts breaking down again. I’m very worried.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘You have to do something about Shuichi and that affair of his.’

  Shingo nodded.

  ‘Suppose you have a good talk with Kikuko. I’ll take the
baby out to Fusako and while I’m about it do some shopping for dinner. That Fusako – she’s another one.’

  Yasuko got up, the baby in her arms.

  ‘What business does she have at the post office?’

  Yasuko looked back. ‘I wondered myself. Do you suppose she’s written to Aihara? They’ve been separated for six months. It’s almost six months since she came back. It was New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘If it was just a letter she could have put it in the mailbox down the street.’

  ‘I imagine she thinks it will be quicker and safer if she sends it from the post office. Maybe the thought of Aihara comes into her head and she can’t sit still a minute.’

  Shingo smiled wryly. He sensed optimism in Yasuko.

  It would seem that optimism put down deep roots in a woman who had been given charge of a household on into old age.

  He took up the heap of newspapers, four or five days’ worth of them, that Yasuko had been reading. Though he was not really interested, his eye fell on a remarkable headline: ‘Lotus in Bloom, Two Thousand Years Old.’

  The spring before, in the course of a Yayoi excavation in the Kemigawa district of Chiba, three lotus seeds had been found in a dugout canoe. They were judged to be two thousand years old. A certain ‘doctor of lotuses’ succeeded in making them sprout, and in April of this year the shoots were planted in three places, the Chiba Agricultural Experimental Station, the pond of a Chiba park, and the house of a sake brewer in Hatake-machi, Chiba. The brewer apparently had been among the sponsors of the excavation. He had put his shoot in a water cauldron and set it out in the garden, and his was the first to bloom. The lotus doctor rushed to the spot upon hearing the news. ‘It’s in bloom, it’s in bloom,’ he said, stroking the handsome flower. It would go from the ‘vase shape’ to the ‘cup shape’ to the ‘bowl shape’, the newspaper reported, and finally, at the ‘tray shape’, shed its petals. There were twenty-four petals, it was further reported.

  Below the article was a picture of the bespectacled, apparently graying doctor, the stem of the opening lotus in his hand. Glancing back over the article, Shingo saw that he was sixty-nine.

  Shingo looked for a time at the photograph of the lotus, then took the paper into Kikuko’s room.

  It was her room and Shuichi’s. On the desk, which was part of her dowry, lay Shuichi’s felt hat. There was stationery beside it – perhaps she thought of writing to someone. A piece of embroidery hung over the drawer.

  He seemed to catch the scent of perfume.

  ‘How are you? You shouldn’t be jumping out of bed all the time.’ He sat down by the desk.

  Opening her eyes, she gazed at him. She seemed embarrassed that he should have ordered her to stay in bed. Her cheeks were faintly flushed. Her forehead was a wan white, however, and her eyebrows stood out cleanly.

  ‘Did you see in the paper that a lotus two thousand years old has come into bloom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, you did,’ he muttered. ‘If you had only told us, you wouldn’t have had to overdo it. You shouldn’t have come back the same day.’

  Kikuko looked up in surprise.

  ‘It was last month, wasn’t it, that we talked about a baby? I suppose you already knew.’

  Kikuko shook her head. ‘No. If I had known, I would have been too embarrassed to say anything.’

  ‘Oh? Shuichi said it was squeamishness.’ Seeing tears in her eyes, he dropped the subject. ‘You won’t have to go to the doctor again?’

  ‘I’ll look in on him tomorrow.’

  When he came back from work the next day, Yasuko was waiting impatiently.

  ‘Kikuko’s gone back to her family. They say she’s in bed. There was a call from the Sagaras, it must have been at about two. Fusako took it. They said that Kikuko had come by and wasn’t feeling well, and had gone to bed, and they wondered if they might let her stay and rest for two or three days.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I told Fusako to say we’d send Shuichi around tomorrow. It was Kikuko’s mother, Fusako said. Do you suppose Kikuko went to Tokyo especially for that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What can be the matter with her?’

  Shingo had taken off his coat and, lifting his chin, was slowly untying his tie.

  ‘She had an abortion.’

  ‘What!’ Yasuko was stunned. ‘Without telling us? Kikuko could do that? People these days are too much for me.’

  ‘You’re very unobservant, Mother,’ said Fusako, coming into the breakfast room with Kuniko in her arms. ‘I knew all about it.’

  ‘And how did you know?’ The question came of its own accord.

  ‘That I can hardly tell you. But there’s cleaning up afterwards, you know.’

  Shingo could think of nothing more to say.

  A Garden in the Capital

  1

  ‘Father is a very interesting man, isn’t he, Mother?’ said Fusako, noisily loading the dinner dishes onto a tray. ‘He’s more reserved with his daughter than with the girl who came in from outside.’

  ‘Please, Fusako.’

  ‘But it’s true. If the spinach was overdone, why didn’t he come out and say so? It wasn’t as if I’d cooked it to a pulp. You could still see the shape of spinach. Maybe he should have it done in a hot spring.’

  ‘A hot spring?’

  ‘They cook eggs and dumplings in hot springs, don’t they? I remember you once gave me something called radium eggs, from somewhere or other, with the whites hard and the yolks soft. And didn’t you say they could cook a fine egg at the Squash House in Kyoto?’

  ‘Squash House?’

  ‘Oh, the Gourd House. Every beggar knows that much. I’m just saying you can squash your ideas about good and bad cooking for all the difference they make to me.’

  Yasuko laughed.

  But Fusako went on unsmiling. ‘If he takes it to a radium spring and watches the time and the temperature very, very closely, he’ll be as healthy as Popeye, even without Kikuko to look after him. Myself, I’ve had enough of all this moping.’ Pushing herself up from her knees, she went off with the heavy tray. ‘Dinner doesn’t seem to taste the same without a handsome son and a beautiful daughter-in-law.’

  Shingo looked up. His eyes met Yasuko’s. ‘She does talk.’

  ‘Yes. She’s been holding back both the talk and the tears because of Kikuko.’

  ‘You can’t keep children from crying,’ muttered Shingo.

  His mouth was slightly open, as if he meant to say more, but Fusako, staggering off toward the kitchen, spoke first. ‘It’s not the children. It’s me. Of course children cry.’

  They heard her flinging dishes into the sink.

  Yasuko half stood up. They heard sniffling in the kitchen.

  Rolling her eyes up at Yasuko, Satoko ran off after her mother.

  A most unpleasing expression, thought Shingo.

  Yasuko put Kuniko on Shingo’s knee. ‘Watch her for a minute,’ she said, following them to the kitchen.

  The baby was soft in his arms. He pulled her close to him. He took her feet in his hand. The hollow of the ankles and the swelling of the calves were also in his hand.

  ‘Does it tickle?’ But Kuniko evidently did not think so.

  It seemed to Shingo that when Fusako, still a babe in arms, had lain naked, having a change of clothes, and he had tickled her armpits, she had wrinkled her nose and waved her arms at him, but he could not really remember.

  Shingo had seldom spoken of what a homely baby she was. To speak of the matter would have been to bring back the image of Yasuko’s beautiful sister.

  His hope that Fusako would change faces several times before she grew up had not been realized, and the hope itself had faded with the years.

  His granddaughter Satoko seemed somewhat better favored than her mother, and there was hope for the baby.

  Was he searching for the image of Yasuko’s sister even in his grandchildren? The thought made Shingo dislike himself.

&nb
sp; And even while disliking himself, he was lost in fantasy: would not the child Kikuko had done away with, his lost grandchild, have been Yasuko’s sister, reborn, was she not a beauty refused life in this world? He was even more dissatisfied with himself.

  As he loosened his grip on her feet, Kuniko climbed from his knee and started off toward the kitchen. Her arms were bent in front of her, and her legs were unsteady.

  ‘You’ll fall,’ said Shingo. But the baby had already fallen.

  She fell forward and rolled to her side, and for a time did not cry.

  The four of them came back into the breakfast room, Satoko clinging to Fusako’s sleeve, Yasuko with Kuniko in her arms.

  ‘Father is very absent-minded these days, Mother,’ said Fusako, wiping the table. ‘When he was changing clothes this evening, he was quite a sight. He was starting to put on an obi, and he had his kimono and juban* with the right side pulled over the left. Can you imagine it? I don’t suppose he’s ever done that before. He must be getting senile.’

  ‘I did it once before. I had the right side over the left, and Kikuko said that in Okinawa it didn’t matter whether you had the left side or the right side over.’

  ‘In Okinawa? I wonder if that’s true.’

  Fusako was scowling again. ‘Kikuko knows how to please you. That was very clever of her. In Okinawa, was it?’

  Shingo controlled his irritation. ‘The word juban comes from Portuguese. I don’t know whether they wear the left or the right side on top in Portugal.’

  ‘Another piece of information from Kikuko?’

  Yasuko sought to intercede. ‘Father is always putting on summer kimonos inside out.’

  ‘There is a difference between accidentally putting a kimono on inside out and standing there like a fool bringing the right side over the left.’

  ‘Let Kuniko have a try at putting on a kimono. You can’t be sure which side will come out in front.’

  ‘It’s early for second childhood, Father,’ said Fusako, unflagging. ‘Isn’t it a little too much, Mother? So his daughter-in-law does go home for a day or two, that’s no excuse for losing track of which side of his kimono goes in front. Hasn’t it been six months now since his own daughter came home to Mother?’