Quicksand Read online

  I waited outside the bathroom door and called in to ask how she was, but her groaning kept getting louder and louder.

  “I can’t stand it! Sister!”

  When I heard that, I burst in frantically. “You’ve got to be brave!” I cried, rubbing her shoulders. “Has anything come out?”

  She shook her head. Then, in a faint, breathless voice as if she really was about to expire: “I’m dying, Sister, I know I’m dying. . . . Help me!” Again she whimpered “Sister!” and clutched my wrists with both hands.

  “Oh, Mitsu! How could you ever die from something like this?”

  But in spite of my encouragement, she stared blankly up, seemingly barely able to make me out. “You’ll forgive me, won’t you, Sister? I’d be happy if I could just die here beside you. . . .”

  It sounded a little as if she was putting on an act, but her hands did seem to be getting colder as they gripped me.

  “Shall I call a doctor?” I asked.

  But she refused. “You mustn’t. That would only make trouble for you. If I’m going to die, let me die the way I am.”

  No matter what, I couldn’t simply leave her there, so I had Kiyo help me carry her upstairs to the bedroom. Anyway, it was all so sudden that I had no time to spread a futon out for her, and then too, although I had qualms about taking her up to our bedroom, all the doors and windows were open downstairs in the early-summer heat and people could see in, so that wouldn’t do. After I put her to bed I meant to telephone my husband and Ume. But she clutched my sleeve hard and wouldn’t let go.

  “Sister, you mustn’t leave me!”

  Still, she was a little calmer, she didn’t seem to be suffering so much, and I felt a wave of relief. Well, at this rate I won’t need to call the doctor, I thought.

  The way things were, I couldn’t leave her side, so I sent the maid back down and told her to clean out the bathroom right away. Then I thought of giving Mitsuko some medicine, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “No, no!” she said. “Just loosen my sash, Sister.”

  I undid her sash for her, took off her bloodstained white tabi socks, and brought in alcohol and cotton and wiped her hands and feet. Meanwhile she had started having convulsions again.

  “Ooh, it hurts! Water, water! . . .”

  She was tearing fiercely at the sheets and pillows and everything within reach, and writhing on the bed, curling her body up like a shrimp. I brought her a glass of water, but she thrashed around violently and wouldn’t drink it, so I held her down by force and gave it to her mouth-to-mouth. She seemed to like that and swallowed greedily. Then she cried out again: “It hurts, it hurts! Sister, for heaven’s sake get on my back and press hard!” Mitsuko kept telling me where she wanted to be massaged, where she wanted to be stroked, and I kneaded and rubbed away just as she asked. Yet the moment I thought she was feeling better she would utter an agonizing groan—it seemed she might never recover. And when she had even a brief respite she would weep bitterly and say, as if to herself: “Ah, I’m being punished for what I did to you, Sister. . . . I wonder if you’ll forgive me after I’m dead.”

  Soon she seemed to be writhing in worse pain than ever, and she insisted that a clot of blood must have come out. Over and over she cried: “It’s coming out, it’s out!” But each time I looked, there was nothing of the kind.

  “It’s just your nerves—I can’t see a thing.”

  “If it doesn’t come I’ll die! I think you don’t care whether you let me die or not.”

  “How can you say that!”

  “Then why won’t you help me, instead of letting me suffer like this? . . . I’m sure you know what to do, better than any doctor. . . .”

  That was because I had once told her: “There’s nothing to it, if you just have a little instrument.” But as soon as she began making all the fuss about it “coming out,” I realized that everything she was doing today was only an act. . . . To tell the truth, that had begun to dawn on me gradually, but I had played along, and Mitsuko herself saw I was pretending to be deceived and kept up her own playacting all the more boldly. After that both of us were simply trying to maintain mutual deception.

  . . . I’m sure you understand very well what was going on. The fact is, I had deliberately walked into the trap that Mitsuko set up before my very eyes. . . . No, I never asked her what that red stuff was; even now I wonder. Perhaps she smuggled in some of that fake blood they use in the theater.

  “Then you aren’t still angry with me about the other day, are you, Sister? You’ll really forgive me?”

  “If you try to deceive me one more time, I will let you die!”

  “And you won’t get away with treating me so coldly!”

  In less than an hour we were back on the same old intimate terms, and suddenly I began to be afraid my husband might return soon. Now that we were reconciled, after all that had happened, my need for her was stronger than ever. I didn’t want to be apart from her a single moment, and yet as things stood how could we possibly meet every day?

  “What shall we do? You’ll come again tomorrow, won’t you, Mitsu?”

  “Is it all right to come to your house?”

  “I can’t say if it’s all right or not.”

  “Then let’s both go to Osaka! I’ll phone you tomorrow, anytime you’d like.”

  “I’ll phone you too.”

  We went on that way till late afternoon, and Mitsuko began getting dressed to leave. “I’m going home,” she announced. “That husband of yours will be coming back. . . .”

  “Just stay a little longer!” Now I was the one to plead.

  “Don’t be such a spoiled child!” she said. “You’re so unreasonable. I’ll call you tomorrow for sure—just be patient and wait till then.” She left around five o’clock.

  In those days my husband usually came home by six, but although I thought he might be anxious enough to turn up early, it seems that a certain case he’d been working on was keeping him at the office. An hour later he still hadn’t returned. In the meantime I straightened up the room, made the bed neatly, and picked up the stained socks that Mitsuko had dropped on the floor—she put on a pair of mine when she left to go home—and as I gazed absently at those red stains, I felt as if I were dreaming. How could I explain all this to my husband? Should I even tell him I’d been up here? Should I keep silent? What could I say that would make it possible for us to go on meeting?

  Just as I was revolving those thoughts in my mind, I heard Kiyo call upstairs that the master was home. I stuffed the socks away in a dresser drawer and went down.

  “What happened after that phone call?” he asked as soon as he saw me.

  “I had a terribly hard time,” I said. “Why weren’t you home earlier?”

  “I wanted to be, but there was some business I had to take care of. What on earth happened?”

  “They asked me to come right over to the hospital, but I didn’t know whether I should or not. Anyway, I had them let me wait till tomorrow. . . .”

  “So Mitsuko left, did she?”

  “Yes, but she made me promise to go along with her tomorrow, and then she went home.”

  “Aren’t you at fault for lending her that book?”

  “But she told me she wouldn’t let anyone else see it—really, I’m in an awful fix! Well, anyhow, I suppose I’ll have to go pay a sick call at the hospital. It’s not as if I’d never heard of Mrs. Nakagawa. . . .”

  With that, I had at least given myself a pretext for going out the next day.

  15

  THAT NIGHT I could hardly wait for daybreak, and as soon as my husband left the house, at eight o’clock, I flew to the telephone.

  “Sister, it’s dreadfully early isn’t it? Are you up already?”

  The voice that came over the receiver was the same one I had heard the day before, but its sweet familiar sound made my heart beat faster than when she had been there with me.

  “Were you still asleep, Mitsu?”

  “You
r phone call wakened me!”

  “I can leave anytime now. Won’t you come right away too?”

  “Then I’ll hurry up and get ready. Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?”

  “You’re sure you can?”

  “Of course I am!”

  “Are you free all day today, Mitsu? It doesn’t matter if you’re home late?”

  “It doesn’t matter in the least.”

  “That’s how I feel too,” I said.

  I got to the station at exactly nine-thirty, but Mitsuko hadn’t come. As time passed, I grew impatient, wondering if she was just taking as long as usual at her makeup or if she had deceived me again. I thought of trying to call her from a public telephone but gave it up, for fear she might come while I was gone and then leave herself.

  It was after ten o’clock when she finally came rushing through the station gate and over to me.

  “Have you been waiting long, Sister?” she asked, panting for breath. “Where shall we go?”

  “Mitsu, don’t you know some nice quiet place? I’d like to spend the whole day with no one else around.”

  “Then how about Nara?” she said.

  Yes, of course; it was Nara where we went on that first delightful outing together, Nara that I had to thank for my memories of the evening landscape on Mount Wakakusa. . . . How could I have forgotten a place that meant so much to us?

  “That’s perfect!” I exclaimed. “Let’s go up Mount Wakakusa again!” I was truly happy at the thought of it. . . . As usual when I was deeply moved, tears welled up in my eyes. “Hurry, hurry. Let’s go!” I urged her, and my feet hardly touched the ground as we ran to a taxi.

  “I was thinking about it all night long, and I decided Nara would be best.”

  “I couldn’t sleep a wink myself last night, but I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Did your husband come back right after I left?”

  “It was over an hour later.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Let’s not talk about it—today I want to forget all that.”

  When we arrived in Nara we took a bus from the train station to the foot of Mount Wakakusa. This time it was a hazy, hot day, unlike our earlier visit, and we were streaming with perspiration by the time we had climbed all the way to the summit. After that we rested at the little tea shop at the top, and remembering how Mitsuko had rolled tangerines down the hill, we bought some mandarin oranges, which happened to be in season, and both of us rolled them down, startling the deer below into bounding away.

  “Mitsu, aren’t you getting hungry?”

  “Yes, but I’d like to stay up here a little longer.”

  “So would I,” I said. “I’d like to stay up on the mountain forever. Let’s just have a snack.”

  For our lunch, then, we ate a couple of hard-boiled eggs, as we gazed out over the Great Buddha Hall toward Mount Ikoma.

  “We picked a lot of bracken and horsetail last time, Sister,” Mitsuko said. “Weren’t they growing on the hill behind us?”

  “At this time of year you won’t find any.”

  “But I want to go over there again,” she said.

  We walked down to the hollow at the foot of the next hill. Few people had been there even in the spring, and now, in summer, it was utterly deserted, overgrown with rank grasses among the trees, the sort of place you would feel afraid to come to alone. But we were happy that no one else was there, and we found a hiding place among the tall, luxuriant grasses, with only the clouds in the sky to look down on us.

  “Mitsu . . .”

  “Sister . . .”

  “Let’s never part again.”

  “I could die here with you, Sister.”

  That was all we said to each other, and in the silence afterward I had no idea how long we were there. I forgot time, other people, everything. In my world there was only an eternally beloved Mitsuko. . . .

  Meanwhile the whole sky darkened, and I felt chilly raindrops on my face.

  “It’s started raining!”

  “How hateful!”

  “We mustn’t get soaked. Let’s go down before it begins to pour.”

  By the time we had hurried to the bottom, though, only a few scattered drops had fallen and the rain was over.

  “If that’s all there was to it, we should have stayed longer.”

  “What a sneaky rain!”

  By then we both felt hungry.

  “It’s just teatime. Shall we stop in somewhere for a sandwich?” I suggested.

  “I know a good place,” Mitsuko said, and took me to a new hot-spring inn not far from the station. I had never been there before, but it had all the facilities, private bathing rooms and the like, of the inn at Takarazuka. Mitsuko seemed familiar with it—she called the maids by name and knew the layout very well.

  So we spent the rest of the day there and got back to Osaka around eight o’clock. Yet I couldn’t bear to part and wanted to follow her no matter where. I went along with her on the Hankyu train all the way to Ashiya, and told her: “I’d love to go back to Nara again! Can you come tomorrow, Mitsu?”

  “Shall we make it somewhere closer? How about Takarazuka, since it’s been such a long time?”

  “That’s fine,” I said, as I left her. It was almost ten when I got home.

  “You’re so late I called the hospital a little while ago,” my husband remarked.

  I was startled but quickly thought of an excuse. “You couldn’t find out anything over the telephone, could you?”

  “No. They said they didn’t have a patient named Nakagawa. It makes me wonder if they weren’t trying to hide something. . . .”

  “You know, when I tried to go see her, it really wasn’t about Mrs. Nakagawa—it was all Mitsuko’s doing. Now that I think of it, she looked a little funny when she came here yesterday, but she says she used Mrs. Nakagawa’s name because she was afraid I wouldn’t have anything to do with her if she asked me herself.”

  “So Mitsuko was the one in the hospital?”

  “She wasn’t in the hospital either. I didn’t understand any of this and went to ask her to come along to see Mrs. Nakagawa. ‘Just stop in for a minute,’ she said, so I did, but time went by and she didn’t make a move to leave. I urged her to hurry up, and at last she spoke out. ‘Actually, I have to ask your help,’ she said. ‘I meant to tell you when I went to see you yesterday . . . but I haven’t been feeling myself lately. I think I’m pregnant. Won’t you give me some advice before it’s gone too far? I tried reading that book, but it’s in English; I can’t make head or tail of it, and I’m afraid I’ll botch the whole thing.’ That’s exactly what she told me.”

  “What an appalling girl! So that’s why she had the nerve to make up all those lies to you yesterday!”

  “I thought so myself—here she was deceiving me, giving me all that worry—but she said: ‘I only lied to you because I couldn’t think of any other way out—please don’t hold it against me.’ Ume came in to apologize too.”

  “Even so, there are lies and lies. She’s altogether too smooth.”

  “Well, yes, that’s true. But there was a man’s voice on the telephone yesterday, you know. I’m sure it was that Watanuki. He must have been secretly telling her what to do. Anyway, if it had just been Mitsuko, she wouldn’t have made up such a complicated story. I was so furious with her that I said: ‘I’m leaving—I won’t listen to anything of the kind!’ But when I started to go, she clutched me by the sleeve and begged me not to refuse her—if it ever got to her parents, she’d have to give up Watanuki, and then she simply couldn’t go on living. She even began to cry. Ume pleaded with me too, said I had to take pity on her mistress and save her life! After all that, I didn’t know what to do. Finally I gave in.”

  “Then what?”

  “Still, I couldn’t afford to be careless about it, so I said: ‘I’m not at all sure of those methods. Really, it was wrong of me to lend you that book—how can you think of trying anything so
dangerous! You’d better find a doctor you trust. . . .’ But before I finished speaking, Mitsuko felt another wave of pain, and we were all upset. . . .”

  That’s how I poured my story out to him, making up one thing after another and weaving in what happened the day before wherever it would fit. Last night it seems Mitsuko did try one of the medicines she read about in my book, I said, and it was aggravating her condition. I went into some pretty gruesome details, as vividly as if I’d seen it all myself, and told my husband that by this point I felt too responsible to just walk away from the situation. And so I had stayed with her all day, I said, neatly extricating myself from my predicament.

  16

  “I’LL BE GOING to visit Mitsuko again today,” I told him the next morning. “It worries me to leave her alone—anyway, now that I’m mixed up in this, I have to see it through.”

  For almost a week after that we met every day, somewhere or other, but I yearned for a regular place to spend a few hours alone together, where no one could find us.

  “If that’s what you want, it’s best to be right in the heart of Osaka,” Mitsuko said. “You’re less likely to be noticed in the midst of a noisy, bustling city. . . . What about the inn you brought the kimono to, Sister?” she added. “I know the people there, and we’d have nothing to fear. . . . Shall we try it?”

  For me, that Kasayamachi inn held an unforgettably bitter memory—the very mention of it was a calculated attack on my feelings—but in spite of that I said: “Yes, why not? It’s a little embarrassing for me, but let’s try it.” She was well aware of how weak I felt toward her, and I tamely followed her lead; I couldn’t even get angry with her.

  And yet my embarrassment wore off after the first day. The inn maids soon learned to telephone home for me when I was late in leaving, to give me an alibi. As time went on, we would go to the inn separately and call each other from there. Ume would call us too, if anything seemed urgent. . . . Not only that, but Mitsuko’s mother and their other maids all seemed to know the phone number and would sometimes call us. She must have really had them fooled at home, I thought. Once when I went to Kasayamachi early and was waiting for Mitsuko, I happened to overhear one of the inn maids talking on the telephone.