The Makioka Sisters Page 21

  At Motoyama the water was indeed frightening. Teinosuke went into the station to rest a moment. The street in front of the station was already under water, and students and station attendants were taking turns sweeping out the water that seeped through the barrier of sandbags and matting at the entrance. Teinosuke feared that if he loitered too long he too might have to man a broom. Finishing his cigarette, he started along the tracks in a yet fiercer downpour.

  The water was as yellow and muddy as the Yang-tze, and here and there spotted with something viscous and chocolate-colored. Soon Teinosuke himself was in water. He noticed with surprise that he was crossing the bridge over the little Tanaka brook, now a roaring torrent. Beyond the bridge the water was shallower again; but though the tracks were dry, the water was fairly high on both sides. He stopped and looked ahead, and saw what the students had meant when they said he would find “one solid sea.” It would have been out of place, perhaps, to use words like “grand” or “majestic,” but as a matter of fact Teinosuke looked first at the flood less with horror than with a sort of reverent awe. This was a region of fields, pine groves, and brooks, dotted by old farm houses and the red roofs of foreign-style houses on land sloping gently from Mt. Rokkō to Osaka Bay—Teinosuke was fond of saying that even for this bright, dry Osaka-Kobe region, it was bright and dry and good for walking. Now it had become a torrent that made one think of the Yang-tze or the Yellow River in flood. Even for a flood it was extraordinary: great waves rolled from Mt. Rokkō one after another, breaking and roaring and sending up sheets of foam, as if in an enormous caldron. It seemed less a river than a black, boiling sea, with the mid-summer surf at its most violent. The railroad stretched ahead like a pier out into the sea, in some places almost under water, in others a twisted ladder of rails and ties, the land beneath having been torn away. He noticed a pair of little crabs scuttling along at his feet. No doubt they were from one of the brooks, and had fled to the tracks before the rising water.

  If he had been alone, he would probably have turned back, but he was with another group of students from the Konan Boys’ Academy. The excitement had begun an hour or two after they reached school. With classes dismissed, they had walked through the swirling water as far as Okamoto Station only to find that the electric line was not running. They then walked on to Motoyama and found that the Government Line too was cut. After resting for a time in the station (it had been they who were sweeping back the water), they became uneasy at the rising water, and decided to divide into two groups, one headed for Osaka, the other for Kobe, to see how far they could go along the tracks. All healthy, vigorous boys, they had no sense of danger, and they would shout with delight when one of their number fell into the water.

  Following close after them, Teinosuke stepped uncertainly from one tie to another where the ground had been cut away and the torrent roared below. He had not noticed in the roar that someone was calling them. Fifty yards or so ahead a train was stalled, and students from the same school were leaning out the windows and urging them on. And where do you think you are going? the students on the train wanted to know. It was dangerous to go on, the Sumiyoshi River was terrible, there was no crossing, why not get on the train and wait? Teinosuke gave up any thought of going farther and climbed in with them.

  It was a third-class car on an express for Kobe. There were numerous people aboard besides the students. Several families of Koreans were huddled together off by themselves, no doubt driven from their homes by the flood. An old woman who seemed to be ill had her maid with her, and before long she was praying aloud. A clothes peddler shivered in a linen half-kimono and drawers, his wares in a large, muddy cloth bundle beside him, his kimono and woolen stomach-band spread to dry. Their number having increased, the students were livelier than ever. One of them took a box of caramels from his pocket and passed it around to his friends. Another pulled off his rubber boots, dumped out the gravel, and sat staring at his white, puffy feet. A third, taking off his student’s uniform, proceeded to dry himself. Others, reluctant to sit down in their wet clothes, stood in the aisles. They took turns at the windows. Look, a roof. A mat. Some wood. A bicycle —look, look, a bicycle!

  “A dog. Shall we help it in?”

  “It must be dead.”

  “It is not, it is not. Look, on the tracks.”

  A muddy, medium-sized cur, part terrier, one would have guessed, huddled shivering in the shelter of the car. Two or three of the students climbed down with much shouting to help it into the train. Once inside, the dog shook itself and lay quietly before the boys who had helped it, looking up at them with frightened, bewildered eyes. It only sniffed at the caramel one of them offered.

  Teinosuke, too, was wet and cold. He took off his raincoat and jacket and spread them on the seat, and, after a swallow or two of brandy, lighted a cigarette. Though his wrist watch said one, he was still not hungry. Looking to the north, he saw that the train was directly opposite the Second Motoyama Primary School, from the windows of which water was pouring as through a giant sluice. It would be no more than fifty yards or so to the Kōnan Girls’ Academy, then. On an ordinary day he could have been there in two minutes. The students were quieter. As if by agreement, they had all taken on solemn expressions. Even to the young, there was no denying that the time for laughter had passed. The tracks along which Teinosuke had walked from Motoyama Station were under water, and the short stretch the train stood on was now an island in the flood. Soon it too might be under water, or the water would be gnawing away the embankment.

  The level of the flood was meanwhile creeping up the embankment, here six or seven feet high. A muddy wave from the hills broke with a roar as of the surf upon a beach, throwing a sheet of spray into the cars. The passengers hastily closed the windows to the north. Outside, muddy current struck muddy current, boiling and whirling and foaming. A man in a postman’s uniform came running from the car ahead, and after him fifteen or sixteen other passengers, and the conductor.

  “Would you all move back one more car, please. The water ahead is over the tracks.”

  The passengers picked up their baggage and their wet clothes and boots and hurried into the car behind.

  “Can we use the berths?” It was a third-class sleeper.

  “Go ahead. This is no time to worry about fares,” said the conductor.

  Several of the students tried lying down, but most of them were soon up and looking out the windows again. The roar of the water was more and more ominous. The old woman was praying earnestly, and the Korean children were crying.

  “It is over the tracks.” Everyone got up to look out the windows to the north. The water was washing near the edge of this embankment, and had already begun to pour over the north embankment.

  “Will we be all right here?” asked a woman thirty or so, probably a suburban housewife.

  “Well—you might try if you think you can make it to a safer place.”

  Teinosuke stared absently at a cart tumbling over and over in the stream. He had promised his wife that he would do nothing rash, that he would turn back as soon as the way began to look dangerous. Now he faced a crisis, hardly knowing how it had happened. Even so he did not think of death. He was not a woman or a child, he could still tell himself, and when the time came he would escape somehow. He was worried about Taeko: he remembered that her school was a one-storey building. He had dismissed his wife’s fears as exaggerated and unreasonable, but had not the knowledge that someone near her was in very great danger come to her intuitively? The figure of Taeko dressed to dance “Snow” but a month before came into his mind, the more poignant for its freshness. And he thought too of how they had lined up for a family photograph with Taeko in the middle, and how for no reason tears had come to Sachiko’s eyes. Perhaps even now Taeko was on a rooftop crying for help—was nothing to be done, now that his goal was before his eyes? Must he sit here inactive? He felt he could not go back to Sachiko unless he braved a little danger. He saw her grateful face in alternation wi
th the desperate, tear-stained face he had left at the door.

  The water to the south of the tracks had receded a little. Here and there sand was showing. To the north, waves were breaking still higher over the track for Osaka.

  “The water is lower on this side,” said one of the students.

  “It is. We can get through.”

  “We can go as far as the Girls’ Academy.”

  The students jumped down and were on their way, and most of the other passengers, Teinosuke among them, followed with briefcases under their arms and bundles strapped to their backs. As Teinosuke stepped down from the embankment, a huge wave broke over him like a waterfall, and a log shot out from one side. He managed somehow to escape the muddy rush, but when he came to what he took for dry ground, he sank to his knee in the sand. He lost a shoe pulling himself free, and immediately the other leg was in the sand. Five or six paces with first one leg and then the other in sand to the knee, and he came to a swift current some six feet wide. The people ahead of him managed to cross after stumbling several times. The current was strong beyond comparison with the one he had carried Etsuko across. Two or three times he thought he was lost, and when at length he reached the other side, he sank to his hips in the sand. Falling against a telephone pole, he again pulled himself free. The back gate of the Kōnan Girls’ Academy was before him, no more than ten or fifteen yards away; but in the ten or fifteen yards was another current some ten feet wide, and it was not easy to see how he could cover even that short distance. Finally the gate opened and someone pushed a rake toward him. He was pulled safely inside.

  6

  AT ABOUT one o’clock the rain began to let up. The water showed no sign of receding until about three, when the rain had quite stopped and spots of blue were visible here and there through the clouds.

  As the sun came out, Sachiko went down from the terrace into the garden. Two white butterflies were dancing over the lawn, which was greener and fresher for the rain. Among the weeds between the sandalwood and the lilac a pigeon was fishing for something in the puddles. The tranquil scene carried not a hint that there had been a flood. The utilities were cut off, but there was no shortage of water, since the Makioka house had a well. Expecting Teinosuke and the rest to come home covered with mud, Sachiko ordered that the bath be heated. Etsuko had gone out with O-haru to look at the river, and the house was quiet. Maids and house-boys from neighboring houses came one after another for water, which they had to lift by hand. The well motor was not Tunning. Sachiko could hear splashing back by the kitchen, and the voices of O-hana and O-aki as they exchanged reports with the callers.

  At about four came the first inquirer after their safety: Shōkichi, the son of the man who was living in the main Osaka house. Since there had been nothing out of the ordinary in Osaka, no one had guessed the damage between Osaka and Kobe until, at about noon, an extra came out. Quitting work, Shōkichi had picked up a few essential supplies and started out immediately.

  He had been on the way ever since. He had tried the Government Line and the electric and he had taken buses. Sometimes he had had to stop a cab or a truck and demand a ride, and sometimes he had walked. His knapsack was full of food, he carried his shoes in one hand, and his muddy trousers were rolled up to the knees. When’ he saw the destruction around Narihira Bridge, he had wondered what might have happened to the Ashiya house, but he had felt a little foolish when he came to this street and found that the flood seemed a fabrication. “Well, young lady, it is good you are safe,” he said to Etsuko when she came back. He was a great talker. Presently he caught himself and asked whether there was anything he could do. What of Teinosuke and Koi-san? With that Sachiko told him of her anguish since morning.

  Each new report had only increased her concern. She heard, for instance, that in the upper reaches of the Sumiyoshi River a valley some hundreds of feet deep had so filled with sand and boulders that there was no longer a trace of it; that boulders weighing tons and trees stripped of their bark and turned into bare logs had piled up on the railway bridge across the Sumiyoshi and made it quite impassible; that a mound of corpses was heaped against the Kōnan Apartments, in low ground south of the tracks and some two or three hundred yards this side of the Sumiyoshi River; that with the corpses encrusted in sand identification was quite impossible; that Kobe too had suffered considerable damage; and large numbers of passengers had died in the flooded underground of the Kobe-Osaka Electric. There was no doubt a good deal of exaggeration in all the reports, but Sachiko was deeply disturbed by one of them: the story of the corpses at the Kōnan Apartments. Taeko’s sewing school was across the road and no more than fifty yards to the north; and if indeed there were mountains of corpses it could only mean great destruction in the area north of the apartments. This alarming conclusion was confirmed by information O-haru brought back. O-haru, as worried as Sachiko, had asked everyone she met for news of the sewing school, and her informants had agreed that in all the land east of the Sumiyoshi River the neighborhood of the sewing school was the most severely hit. Even though the flood had begun to recede everywhere else, she was told, it was as bad as ever there, in some places as much as ten feet deep.

  Teinosuke was not a reckless sort, and he had promised when he left that he would do nothing rash. Still, as the hours went by, Sachiko began to add worries about him to worries about Taeko. If the land around the sewing school had been so badly hit, he could not possibly have made his way through. He must surely have turned back—and why was he not yet home? Might he have gone just a little farther and a little farther until, without his knowing it, he was in the flood? But for all his cautiousness, he was not one to give up easily when he had set out to do something, and, having found one road blocked, perhaps he was trying another and yet another, and waiting for the water to recede along one of them. It would talce time for him to make his way back through the water, assuming he had found and rescued Taeko, and there would be nothing surprising about his not reaching home until six or seven. Thus Sachiko turned over all the possibilities from the best to the worse, until the very worst had come to seem the most likely. There was not the slightest chance that she was right, said Shōkichi, but, since she was so disturbed, he would go out and look for himself. Sachiko knew that there was very little likelihood of his meeting Teinosuke along the way. Even so, she thought she would feel better if he went. Would he mind very much?—Shōkichi got ready immediately, and at about five Sachiko saw him off from the back door.

  The front door and the back door opened on different streets. For the exercise, Sachiko walked around to the front. She went on into the garden from the gate, left open that day because the bell was not working.

  “Mrs. Makioka.” Mrs. Stolz was standing at the fence again. “Etsuko’s school. All right. You feel better?”

  “Yes, Etsuko came home safely, thank you. But I am terribly worried about my sister. My husband has gone out to look for her.” In language Mrs. Stolz could understand, Sachiko repeated the story she had told Shōkichi.

  “Really?” Mrs. Stolz clucked sympathetically. “I understand you are worried. I am sorry.”

  “Thank you. And what about your husband?”

  “He is not home. I am very worried.”

  “Do you suppose he really went all the way to Kobe, then?”

  “I think so. Kobe, flood. And Nada, and Rokkō, and Oishikawa, water, water, water. My husband, Rosemarie, Peter. What has happened to them? Where are they? I am very worried.”

  Mr. Stolz was a strongly built man whom one felt at a glance one could rely on, and he was a most intelligent German type. It did not seem possible to Sachiko that he could be harmed. As for Peter and Rosemarie, their school was on high ground even for Kobe, and no doubt they had only found the way blocked and were late getting home. But Mrs. Stolz was imagining the worst. Sachiko’s attempts to comfort her had little effect. “I heard about it, the water in Kobe is terrible, many people are dead,” she said. Looking into that tearful face, Sachiko
could not think of the German woman as a foreigner. At a loss for comforting words, she found herself only repeating the usual stilted phrases—everything was all right, she certainly hoped everything was all right.

  While she was having her troubles with Mrs. Stolz, she heard someone at the gate. The dog Johnny ran out to investigate. Would it be Teinosuke and the others? Sachiko’s heart pounded. But through the shrubbery she saw a dark blue suit and a Panama hat.

  “Who is it?” O-haru had come down from the terrace.

  “Mr. Okubata.”

  “I see.” Sachiko looked just a little confused. Although it had not occurred to her that Okubata would come calling, it was quite the most natural thing in the world that he should. But what could she do with him? She had decided, and she had been told by Teinosuke, that if Okubata came again she should be as cool and distant as possible, and turn him away at the door. But today was different. He had come all this way to inquire after Taeko, and if he asked permission to wait for her, it would be inhuman to send him off. And as a matter of fact today, only today, Sachiko felt that she would like to have him wait for Taeko and share their happiness when she came back safely.

  “He asked after Koi-san, and when I said she was not yet back, he asked to see you.”

  Okubata knew well enough that his relations with Taeko were being kept secret. A lack of self-possession that could bring him to make such an inquiry of the maid who came to the door seemed to Sachiko something she could forgive only in a crisis— but today she found this evidence of confusion rather appealing.