Quicksand Page 16

  At first I thought it was another nonsensical dream, but although the earlier dreams slowly faded as the medicine wore off and I began to come to, that scene alone burned even brighter in my mind—there was no longer any room for doubt. Actually, we both swallowed the same number of pills, but it seems that I was unconscious longer. Mitsuko had eaten her fill around eleven o’clock, combining breakfast with lunch, but I rushed out to the beach without a proper breakfast and had absorbed the medicine on an empty stomach. While I was still half asleep and dreaming, Mitsuko had long since vomited up the medicine and fully recovered consciousness.

  Later, though, Mitsuko herself told me: “I didn’t know what was going on, except that you were supposed to be lying there by my side, Sister.” In that case, my husband would seem to be the guilty one. But according to what he confessed, it was the afternoon of the second day at Hamadera; Ume went off to the main house, and he was fanning the flies away from my sleeping face, when Mitsuko murmured “Sister,” as if in her sleep, and began moving closer to me. Afraid she might waken me, he slipped between us and took her in his arms, lifting her away, and then put the pillow under her head and pulled the coverlet over her. . . . Convinced that she was fast asleep, he let down his guard and, before he realized it, found himself drawn into an unyielding embrace. Anyway, my husband was like a child, with no experience in such things, so I’m sure he must have been telling the truth.

  31

  WELL, THERE’S NO USE trying to find out who was to blame, but it seems that once they made that first mistake, even though they felt guilty toward me, they kept on repeating it. Considering all that, I can’t excuse my husband completely, and yet, for my part, I was able to sympathize with him. I knew we were hopelessly incompatible, as I’d told him over and over, and so, just as I was always seeking another love partner, he must have been unconsciously seeking one too. Besides, he didn’t know how to fill that lack by drinking and amusing himself with geisha, like other men, and so he was all the more susceptible to being seduced. What happened then was like a dam bursting: blind passion surged up, overwhelming his strength of will and reasoning powers, and he was far more violently carried away than Mitsuko. That was why I had no trouble understanding the change in my husband’s feelings.

  But how to account for Mitsuko? Had she really been almost asleep, acting on a moment’s impulse, or did she have some clear purpose in mind? Did she mean to get rid of Watanuki and take up with my husband, causing so much jealousy between us that she could manipulate us any way she liked? Of course it was her nature to want to attract as many admirers as possible, so perhaps she was back to that old habit. If not, maybe it was a trick to win his support. “I can see that it’s wrong,” she might have said to herself, “but still this is the best way to keep him on our side.” It was too complicated for me—you really can’t tell how a person as devious as that feels—but I suppose all those motives worked along with that chance moment together.

  Anyway, it wasn’t till long afterward that they both confessed to me; in the beginning I just lay there in bed feeling vaguely betrayed, without asking myself why. I was half pleased, half resentful, when Ume came to my bedside and said: “Mrs. Kakiuchi, you needn’t worry anymore. Your husband knows everything!” Since I obviously wasn’t all that happy about it, he and Mitsuko seem to have had an inkling that I suspected them.

  On the evening of the third day, the doctor told me: “It’s all right for you to get up now.”

  The next morning, we left Hamadera. At that time, too, Mitsuko made a point of assuring me: “Everything’s fine now, Sister. Tomorrow I’ll come to your house and talk it all over with you.” But she looked a little guilty, and her attitude toward me was curiously reserved. Somehow she and my husband appeared to be in collusion. As soon as he had taken me back to Koroen, he announced that he had to go to his office.

  “I have a little work to finish up,” he said, and promptly left the house. When he came home after eight o’clock that evening, all he said was: “I’ve had dinner.” He seemed afraid I’d want to talk.

  I knew that my husband wasn’t good at deceiving anyone, so I felt sure he’d soon come out with something or other. I’d let him stew in his own juice as long as he liked. I pretended not to notice how he was acting, and at bedtime I went straight to bed, ahead of him. He seemed more nervous than ever and at midnight was still tossing and turning as if he couldn’t get to sleep. Even in the dark I could tell that he opened his eyes now and then, glancing over stealthily to see if I was really asleep and breathing evenly.

  After a while he called out to me and took my hand.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked. “Do you still have a headache? If you’re awake, there’s something I want to talk to you about. . . . You know what it is, don’t you? . . . Please forgive me—try to think that it was just our fate.”

  “Ah, so it wasn’t a dream. . . .”

  “Forgive me. Please, tell me you do.”

  As he spoke, I began sobbing. He stroked my shoulder gently. “I’d like to think it was only a dream,” he went on soothingly. “A bad dream, one I want to forget. . . . But by now I can’t forget it. For the first time, I know what it means to be in love. Now I realize why you were so infatuated. You kept telling me I had no passion, but it seems that even I can be passionate! If I forgive you, won’t you forgive me too?”

  “You say that because you want revenge on me, don’t you? You’re scheming with her to leave me all alone. . . .”

  “That’s ridiculous! I’m not a vindictive man! And now that I understand how you feel, why would I want to make you unhappy?”

  On his way home from the office that day, he had met Mitsuko and talked over the situation. If only I would agree to it, he’d assume all responsibility for the three of us and would see that Watanuki never gave us any more trouble either. Mitsuko herself would probably come to our house tomorrow, but she felt awkward about it and had said: “Please apologize to Sister for what happened.”

  That was what he told me, and he added that he wasn’t deceitful like Watanuki, so why shouldn’t something I had allowed Watanuki be allowed to him too? Of course even if my husband wasn’t going to deceive anyone, what worried me was Mitsuko. In his words, “You needn’t be concerned, I’m different from Watanuki”—but I was anxious simply because he was “different.” For the first time Mitsuko had known a real man, and that made it more serious than anything she had experienced before. Suppose she threw me over. She would have a splendid excuse (“It can’t compare with a natural love”), and she wouldn’t feel conscience-stricken either. . . . If Mitsuko took that line of reasoning with him, how could I resist? In the end my husband might be persuaded to turn around and say: “Let me marry Mitsuko.”

  “You and I were wrong to get married,” he might tell me one day. “We’re much too incompatible to be happy together, living this way. I think we ought to part.”

  If that day came, I could hardly object, what with all my talk about freedom in love. No doubt people would consider it quite proper for him to divorce a woman like me. Looking ahead, I couldn’t help worrying about that kind of outcome. But I felt as if it was bound to be my fate.

  Still, if I didn’t accede to my husband’s wishes I might never see Mitsuko again. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I told him, “but somehow I’m afraid of what will come of this. . . .” And I sobbed on and on, endlessly.

  “Don’t be foolish—it’s only your imagination running wild! If any one of us has to suffer, we’ll all three die together, won’t we?”

  My husband started to cry too, and we both wept the whole night long.

  32

  SO THE VERY NEXT DAY my husband began to exert all his efforts toward winning over Mitsuko’s family and resolving the trouble with Watanuki. The first thing he did was go to the Tokumitsu house, ask to see her mother, and explain that he was the husband of Mitsuko’s close friend, Sonoko, and that her daughter had asked him to come. In fact, Mitsu
ko was being pursued by an extremely unsavory man. . . . That was how he started off, and then he told her that fortunately the man hadn’t been able to damage her daughter’s virtue, since he had a certain physical incapacity, but he was a despicable fellow who had spread all sorts of groundless rumors—that Mitsuko was carrying his child, for example, and that she and his wife were lesbian lovers. This man had forced his wife to sign an incriminating document and might even come to them with his threats, but they should have nothing to do with him.

  I know better than anyone how innocent your daughter is, my husband had said. Above all, as Sonoko’s husband, I can assure you there is absolutely no truth to those vicious rumors about the relations between my wife and Mitsuko. And also, as a friend of your daughter, I’d feel obliged to protect her even if she hadn’t asked me to. Won’t you please let me handle this? I’ll take responsibility for your daughter’s safety, so if that fellow tries to approach you, just send him to me. Tell him to go to my office in Imabashi.

  To think that love would make a man talk like that, a man who hadn’t even known how to lie! After winning over Mitsuko’s mother, he went to see Watanuki. Here, the matter was settled with money, he said, and he brought home every scrap of evidence, including the photograph of the agreement, which Watanuki had threatened to sell to that newspaper, along with its negative and the receipt my husband had given him. In two or three days he seemed to have cleared up the whole affair, but Mitsuko and I were bothered by the thought that Watanuki had given up so easily. Even if he had handed over the negative, he might have had another copy made; there was no telling what he might do.

  “How much did you pay him?” I asked.

  “He wanted a thousand yen, but I got it down to five hundred,” my husband said, confident that our trouble were over. “He saw that I knew all the tricks he had up his sleeve and that his threats wouldn’t work anymore, so he decided to take the money.”

  Everything had gone according to plan. Ume was the only one who came out badly. “You let all that go on without reporting it to us!” Mitsuko’s mother told her, and dismissed her on the spot.

  Ume felt bitterly resentful. Well, we were thoughtless not to foresee that she’d be sent packing, in spite of all she had done to help us, and so at the time of her dismissal I tried to soothe her feelings by buying her off with a whole raft of gifts. I never dreamed that she might later take her revenge.

  My husband told Mitsuko’s family they had nothing more to be concerned about. Her father came all the way in to his office to thank him, and her mother came to thank me too: “She’s such a spoiled child; I do hope you’ll think of her as your own little sister and look out for her. As long as she’s at your house, we never worry. I wouldn’t let her go anywhere without you.”

  She had so much confidence in me that Mitsuko, accompanied by her new maid, Saki, who had replaced Ume, came to visit us openly every day. Even when Mitsuko stayed overnight her mother didn’t object. All this was going as smoothly as could be, but my own home life was more tense and suspicious than ever, worse than when Watanuki was involved. Day by day our torment deepened. There were various reasons: before, I used to meet Mitsuko whenever I liked at that Kasayamachi inn, and now I couldn’t; in any case, neither my husband nor I could go off with her and leave the other person alone. So we had to stay home, where one of us was always in the way, unless the other was tactful enough to withdraw. And yet Mitsuko, who knew just what she was doing, would telephone the Imabashi office before leaving home and say: “I’m going to Koroen now.” Then my husband would promptly return.

  Of course we had agreed not to keep any secrets from each other, so she had to let him know. Even so, she could have come earlier, she could have come in the morning, instead of waiting till two or three in the afternoon, when we would have hardly any time together. And my husband always seemed ready to drop his work and hurry home after she called.

  “Why do you need to rush home like that?” I would ask. “I never have a chance to talk to her.”

  Then he would reply: “I thought of staying at the office a little longer, but there was nothing more to do.” Or: “When I’m away, my imagination begins to bother me. I feel reassured as long as I’m at home—if you like, I can go downstairs.” Or else: “You have time alone with her, just the two of you, and you ought to realize that I don’t.”

  But when I pressed him about it, his answer was different. “To tell the truth, Mitsuko asked me why I didn’t come home immediately, as soon as she phoned. ‘Sister is the one who really cares for me,’ she said. She sounded angry.”

  Actually, I don’t know how much of Mitsuko’s jealousy was serious and how much was assumed for effect. But it went to crazy lengths—tears would well up in her eyes if I called my husband “Dear.” “You’re not husband and wife anymore, so you mustn’t talk to him like that,” she would say. It might be all right in front of other people, but among ourselves she wanted me to call him something else—“Kotaro-san,” for instance. And she insisted on having him call me “‘Sonoko-san” or “Sister,” instead of “Sonoko” or “Dear.”

  That was all well enough, but then she brought sleeping powder and wine along with her and said: “I want you both to take this and go to bed. I’ll leave after I see that you’re asleep.” She wouldn’t listen to our objections.

  At first I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. “This is a special prescription, and it’s very effective,” she declared, placing two packets of powdered medicine before us. “If you both swear to be faithful to me, prove it by swallowing this.”

  Could one of them be poison? I wondered. Did she want me to take it and be put to sleep forever?

  That was what flashed into my mind, and the more she said, “Go ahead and drink it!” the more suspicious I felt. As I stared into Mitsuko’s eyes, my husband seemed gripped by the same terror. Holding an open packet of white powder, he seemed to be comparing it with the color of the powder in my hand, as he looked searchingly at both of us.

  Mitsuko became impatient.

  “Why don’t you drink it?” she repeated, trembling. “Ah, I understand! You’ve been deceiving me, haven’t you?” And she began to cry.

  There’s no way out, I thought. I’ll take it even if it kills me. Then I lifted the packet of medicine to my lips.

  “Sonoko!”

  My husband, who had been watching me in silence, suddenly grasped my hand. “Wait a moment! Now that it’s come to this, we’ll have to trust to luck. Let’s exchange packets and take the medicine!”

  “Yes, let’s count to three and take it together!”

  That was exactly what we did.

  33

  I’M SURE YOU CAN imagine how suspicious of each other, how jealous, this scheme of Mitsuko’s made us. Night after night my husband and I were given the medicine, and every time we took it I wondered if I mightn’t be the only one who was under its influence. Had he managed to fake it somehow? Maybe he wasn’t really being put to sleep after all! That made me want to see if I could just pretend to swallow the stuff and then spit it out, but the fact is that Mitsuko kept such a sharp eye on us that we couldn’t get away with anything. At last, probably still fearful of being hoodwinked, she announced that she would give us the medicine herself. Standing between our twin beds (she had insisted we replace our double bed), she administered the sleeping powder simultaneously to both of us, as if to avoid any possibility that we might resent her treatment as unfair. She held a packet of medicine in each hand and had us both lie face up and open our mouths wide, as she poured in the powder. Then she took two of those long-spouted drinking vessels—the kind they use for sick people, you know—and, tilting both of them equally at the same time, gave us warm water to swallow down the medicine.

  “It works better if you drink a lot of water,” she would say, and she’d fill the vessels two or three times and pour the water down our throats. I’d do my best to stay awake as long as I could, trying to look asleep, but Mitsuko tol
d us we mustn’t turn over, or lie on our side—she wanted us to lie so that she could see our faces clearly. She would sit between the beds, her eyes fixed on us steadily, and test us in all sorts of ways, watching our breathing, trying to make us blink, touching to feel our hearts beating. She wouldn’t leave until we were fast asleep.

  But how on earth could we have had anything to do with each other by this time? Even if we’d been left entirely to ourselves, neither of us had the slightest wish to lay a hand on the other; we were as passionless a couple as you could find. And yet Mitsuko said: “If you sleep in the same room, you have to take the medicine.”

  As the sleeping powder gradually became less effective, she would change the dosage and the prescription, so that we were still drowsy from that powerful medicine even after we woke up. Lying in bed with my eyes open, I felt awful: the back of my head was numb, my arms and legs refused to move, I felt nauseous and hadn’t the energy to get up. My husband had the same sickly pallor I did. Sighing, with his speech as thick as if he still tasted the medicine, he would say: “If we keep on like this we will be poisoned one of these days.”

  When I saw how he looked I felt relieved, thinking he must actually have swallowed the medicine, but then I began to suspect that I had been tricked again.

  “Really, why do we have to take that medicine every night?”

  My husband seemed suspicious too. Peering into my eyes, he said: “Yes, why should we?”

  “Obviously there’s nothing to worry about, is there, even if we were in bed together. She must have some other purpose.”

  “Do you know what that would be?” he asked.

  “I have no idea. I suppose you do, though.”