“What is it? What did you forget?”
O-Nobu appeared to be deliberating.
“Wait just a minute. I’ll be right back.”
O-Nobu directed her man to turn around. Left behind in a state of psychological limbo, Tsuda watched her receding back in silence. The rickshaw disappeared around the corner, and when it presently reappeared it bore down with reckless speed. When she had pulled alongside Tsuda, O-Nobu took from her obi a foot-long metal chain and dangled it for him to see. At the end of the chain was a ring of five or six keys of varying sizes; as she held the chain aloft for Tsuda’s inspection, the keys jangled.
“I forgot this—I left it on top of the tansu.”
In a household of only two and the maid, they took the precaution of locking up their valuables when they left the house together; accordingly, one of them had to carry the key chain.
“You keep them.”
O-Nobu stuffed the jangling keys back into her obi, patted them with her open hand, and smiled at Tsuda.
“Safe and sound.”
The rickshaws moved off again.
They arrived at the clinic slightly later than the appointed hour but not too late for morning office hours.
Troubled by the thought of sitting side by side in the waiting room, Tsuda stepped to the prescriptions window as soon as they were inside.
“May I go straight up to the second floor?”
The student at the window summoned from the back the apprentice nurse. No more than sixteen or seventeen, she bowed to Tsuda with an easy smile and then, noticing O-Nobu standing at his side, as though put off a little by her splendor, frowned as if to say, “Who let this peacock in?” When O-Nobu stepped into the silence and spoke first, thanking her in advance for her trouble, the nurse also dipped her head in her direction as though noticing her for the first time.
“Can you carry this for me?”
Tsuda handed the nurse the satchel he had taken from the rickshaw man and moved toward the stairs to the second floor.
“This way, O-Nobu.”
O-Nobu, who had been standing in the entrance peering at the patients in the waiting room, hastened to follow Tsuda up the stairs.
“My goodness! It’s gloomy in there.”
Fortunately, the second floor, open to the south and east, was light.
O-Nobu slid open the shoji and stepped onto the deck. Eyeing the clothes drying just below at the Western laundry, she turned back to Tsuda.
“At least it’s cheerier up here—this is quite a decent room. The tatami are stained, though—”
Formerly a house used by someone’s mistress, a contractor perhaps, even the second floor, which had been remodeled, retained somehow a hint of its flavorful past.
“It’s old all right, but it might just be nicer than our second floor.”
Having observed the dazzling white of the laundry in the sun in a fresh, autumn mood, Tsuda glanced around him as he spoke at the ceiling, soot-darkened over time, and the decorative posts on either side of the alcove.
[ 41 ]
THE SAME nurse brought in a small pot of green tea.
“It will be only a little while. Make yourselves comfortable.”
They had no choice but to sit down properly, facing each other, and sip their tea.
“I’m feeling too nervous to sit still.”
“It’s like being guests in someone’s house.”
O-Nobu withdrew from her obi a lady’s watch and glanced at it. Tsuda was less concerned with the time than the procedure he was about to undergo.
“I wonder how long it’s going to take. Even if you can’t see it, just hearing the scalpel is enough to make you feel awful.”
“It scares me just to look at something like that.”
O-Nobu arched her eyebrows as if she were actually afraid.
“That’s why you’re going to wait up here. There’s no need for you to go in just to watch that dirty business.”
“But you should have family with you at a time like this—it’s wrong not to.”
Seeing the serious look on O-Nobu’s face, Tsuda laughed.
“That’s if you’re so seriously ill it’s a matter of life and death. Nobody’s going to haul people in for a minor surgery.”
Tsuda was a man who disliked showing a woman anything dirty. Especially about himself. To dig deeper, it might be said that observing even his own dirtiness caused him more distress than it would another man.
“Then I’ll wait here,” O-Nobu said, taking out her watch again. “Do you think it’ll be over by noon?”
“I imagine. But now that I’m here, what difference does it make?”
“You’re right. I was just—”
O-Nobu didn’t continue, nor did Tsuda pursue her thought.
The nurse looked in from the head of the stairs.
“We’re ready—if you’ll just follow me.”
Tsuda rose at once. At the same time, O-Nobu started up.
“I told you to wait here.”
“I’m not going in with you. I want to use the phone.”
“You have business somewhere?”
“Not business—I wanted to let O-Hide-san know you’re here.”
His sister’s house was in the same ward, not far from the clinic. Tsuda, who hadn’t thought of O-Hide at all in connection with his illness, stopped O-Nobu as she attempted to stand.
“Don’t bother letting her know, you’re making much too much of this; besides, if that one shows up she’ll be an awful nuisance.”
Though she was younger than he, his sister’s temperament was very different from his own and he found her difficult to manage.
“But I’m the one who’ll be criticized afterward.”
Lacking a reason to require her to desist, Tsuda acquiesced in spite of himself.
“I don’t mind if you call but it doesn’t have to be now. Since she’s in the neighborhood she’s certain to show up. That means I’ll be listening to her carry on about me and my father, my faults and his virtues, and that will be an ordeal with my jittery nerves after surgery.”
O-Nobu laughed softly, as if she feared being overheard downstairs. But the white teeth she revealed informed her husband in no uncertain terms that she was feeling less sympathy for him than simple amusement.
“Then I won’t phone.”
O-Nobu rose to her full height and stood alongside Tsuda.
“You have other calls to make?”
“The Okamotos. I promised to phone them by noon, would you mind if I call?”
Descending the stairs one behind the other, they separated, one moving to the telephone, the other sitting down in a chair in front of the treatment room.
[ 42 ]
“I ASSUME you took the castor oil?”
The doctor’s freshly starched surgical gown rustled as he spoke.
“I drank it, but nothing much happened.”
Tsuda hadn’t had the leisure the day before to focus on the castor oil’s effectiveness. All day he had been obliged to concern himself with one thing after the other; the laxative’s effect had been psychologically negligible and unexpectedly feeble even physically.
“Let’s give you an enema, then.”
The result of the enema was also unsatisfactory.
When it was over, Tsuda moved straight to the table and lay down on his back. As his skin made contact with the chilly, rubberized sheet he shivered involuntarily. With his head propped on an unforgiving pillow he was struck full in the face by a beam of light from the opposite direction so that his eyes, as though he were sleeping with his face to the sun, were restless. He blinked repeatedly and repeatedly looked up at the ceiling. The nurse moved past him with a square, shallow, nickel-plated tray of surgical instruments, and a white metallic light glinted. Lying on his back, he felt that the glinting tray had registered in the far periphery of his vision; it was very much as if he had stolen a look at something awful he wasn’t meant to see. Just then a phone in the hall abrup
tly rang. He had forgotten about O-Nobu and now he remembered. As her phone call to the Okamotos was ending, his surgery was at last about to begin.
“Cocaine is all we’ll need. There shouldn’t be much pain. If an injection doesn’t work I’ll apply the anesthetic topically as I go deeper and that should do it.”
Spoken as the doctor swabbed the area clean, these words terrified Tsuda and at the same time struck him as nothing to worry about.
The local anesthetic worked well. Peering intently at the ceiling, he had no idea what sort of major incident was occurring below his hips. From time to time he was merely aware in one sector of his body that someone was applying pressure in a distant place. In that area he could feel a dulled resistance.
“How are you doing? No pain, is there?”
There was abundant self-confidence in the doctor’s question.
Tsuda replied with his eyes on the ceiling.
“It doesn’t hurt. I feel a heaviness.”
The words he needed to express appropriately the feeling of oppressiveness eluded him. Out of nowhere he found himself wondering if the ground might feel that way, the nerveless ground, when a shovel dug into it.
“It’s a strange feeling. I can’t explain it.”
“I see. Any dizziness?”
The doctor’s tone of voice, as if he were concerned about impeded blood flow to the brain, effectively churned the calmness Tsuda had been feeling. He had no idea whether it was customary in such a case to give a patient wine or something else to drink, but he hated the idea of receiving emergency treatment.
“I’m all right.”
“Good. We’re about finished.”
The doctor’s attitude as he conducted this conversation with the patient while his hands moved incessantly seemed to radiate the competence that can only have come from mastery.
The procedure, however, was not wrapped up as quickly as he had indicated.
From time to time there was the ping of a blade against the tray; the amplified echo of what sounded like scissors shearing through flesh reached him menacingly. Each time, he saw with a rich, fulsome bloodiness in the eye of his imagination the red gushing that had to be stanched and swabbed with gauze. His nerves as he lay there not allowed to move grew strained and taut to a point where holding still was agony. The feeling was of insects swarming in his veins.
Opening wide his eyes, he stared up at the ceiling. His beautifully attired wife was on the floor above. What she was thinking, what she was doing at this moment, he had no idea. He was overcome by a desire to call out to her in a loud voice. Just then the doctor’s voice sounded from down at his feet.
“Finished.”
He felt gauze being packed inside him endlessly, and a terrible itchiness, and the doctor spoke again.
“That scar was surprisingly tough so there’s a danger of hemorrhage. Try to lie as still as you can for a while.”
With this final word of caution, Tsuda was at last helped down from the operating table.
[ 43 ]
THE NURSE followed him out of the procedure room.
“How are you doing? You’re not feeling ill or anything?”
“No—do I look pale?”
Somewhat concerned himself, Tsuda couldn’t help asking. His wound had been stuffed with the maximum quantity of gauze that would fit inside it, and the feeling of oppressiveness it produced was beyond what anyone could have imagined. The best he could manage was a languid shuffle. Even so, climbing the stairs it felt as though the gauze and his torn flesh were rubbing abrasively.
O-Nobu was waiting at the head of the stairs. The minute she saw Tsuda, she called out.
“It’s over? How did you do?”
Tsuda entered the room without venturing a clear reply. As he had expected, a futon mattress wrapped in a white sheet had been unfolded on the floor to its full length, beckoning him to recline in comfort. Throwing off his kimono jacket, he stretched out on it. With a wan, deflated smile, O-Nobu, who had been holding up by the collar with both hands the silk jacket padded with gray flannel she had sewn for him with the intention of helping him into it from behind, folded it once again and placed it at the foot of his mattress.
“Is he taking any medicine?”
O-Nobu addressed the nurse, turning to her.
“Nothing orally. I’ll be bringing his meal in just a minute.”
The nurse turned to leave.
Tsuda abruptly broke his silence without getting up.
“O-Nobu—if you want something to eat you should tell the nurse.”
“Yes—” O-Nobu hesitated.
“I’m wondering what to do—”
“It’s already past noon.”
“Yes—it’s twelve-thirty. Your surgery took exactly twenty-eight minutes.”
Springing the lid on her watch and looking at its face, O-Nobu announced the time precisely. All the while that Tsuda had been submissively enduring, laid out like a fish on a chopping block, O-Nobu, above the ceiling at which he had been obliged to stare, had been keeping track of the time, eyeing her watch as if in a competition to see which would blink first.
Tsuda spoke again.
“There’s no point in going all the way home now.”
“I know—”
“Then why not have them bring some Western food and eat here?”
“I suppose I could—”
O-Nobu’s responses continued to lead nowhere satisfactory. Finally the nurse went back downstairs. Like a man who feels in his fatigue a desire to avoid the stimulus of light, Tsuda closed his eyes. But O-Nobu’s reaction was to call his name repeatedly just above his head, obliging him to open them again.
“Are you feeling poorly?”
“I’m fine.”
Having persisted, O-Nobu immediately added,
“The Okamotos send their best. They intend to drop in shortly, as soon as you feel up to a visit.”
“Is that so?”
Tsuda started to close his eyes again, but O-Nobu wouldn’t allow it. “They insisted I should come along to the theater—would that be all right?”
Little was lost on Tsuda. A light came on his mind that illuminated all of O-Nobu’s behavior since that morning: her choice of an outfit too bright and showy for a trip to the hospital, her protest that today was Sunday, her distraction after arriving at the hospital, and her eagerness to phone Okamoto—all of this he now saw as part of the excitement provoked by a single word, “theater.” Seen from that vantage, it was impossible not to discover a seed of suspicion even in her motive for tracking so meticulously the passage of time the surgery was taking. In silence, Tsuda turned aside. His eye fell on the books, the scissors, the envelopes and stationery neatly piled on the tatami mat in the alcove.
“I asked the nurse for a small desk to put your things on but she hasn’t brought it yet. I put them there for the time being—would you like something to read?”
O-Nobu rose quickly and picked up a book.
[ 44 ]
TSUDA DIDN’T take it.
“You didn’t say no to Okamoto?”
Looking more disappointed than suspicious, he turned away, and as he shifted his weight on the mattress the floorboards creaked as if in accordance with his mood.
“I did. I declined.”
“And they insisted you come along even so?”
Tsuda looked at his wife for the first time. But no hint of what he was searching for appeared in her face. On the contrary, she smiled.
“I went ahead and declined, and they said I should come along by all means.”
“But that’s—”
Tsuda faltered. Because there were things he still wanted to say, his mind refused to function as rapidly as he wished.
“—how could they press you after you’d turned them down?”
“They just did—Uncle Okamoto is a mule.”
Tsuda went silent. He wasn’t sure how he ought to proceed with his inquiry.
“You won’t take me at my word?
I hate it when you doubt me this way.”
O-Nobu’s bunching eyebrows signaled emphatically her displeasure.
“I’m not doubting you—there’s just something odd about it.”
“Really! Then you tell me what you think is odd and I’ll explain until you’re satisfied.”
Unfortunately, Tsuda couldn’t say with any preciseness what was odd.
“So you are doubting me!”
Tsuda had the feeling that a failure to declare the absence of any particle of doubt would reflect on his character as a husband. At the same time, to be seen as a pushover by a woman would be painfully distasteful. Despite the battle for supremacy inside him between these two aspects of his ego, he appeared cool and collected on the surface.
“Aah—” With a faint sigh, O-Nobu quietly stood. Sliding back the shoji, which she had carefully closed, she stepped out on the engawa that opened to the south and, placing her hands on the railing, gazed vacantly up at the clear, high, autumn sky. In back of the laundry next door, white shirts and sheets, hung on poles to dry with no spaces between them, were swaying in the crisp breeze as before.
“What a beautiful day!”
O-Nobu spoke the words quietly as though to herself. Tsuda had the sudden feeling that he had been given to hear an appeal from a small bird in a cage. He felt vaguely sorry about tethering a weak woman to his side. He wanted to speak to O-Nobu, but he couldn’t think of an avenue back to the conversation. O-Nobu was still leaning against the railing, in no hurry to come inside.
At that moment the nurse reappeared from downstairs with their food.
“Here we are.”
Tsuda’s tray held only two eggs, a small cup of soup, and some bread. The portion of bread, ordained at some point by the doctor, was one-half of half a small loaf.
Lying on his stomach on the mattress, Tsuda wolfed his food and, when the moment came, spoke up.
“Which is it? Going or not going?”
O-Nobu lowered her fork at once.
“That depends on you. I’ll go if you say I may; otherwise I’ll stay.”