Читать книгу Still Life and Other Stories - Junzo Shono - Страница 8

at the pool, a series of spirited final sprints were in progress.

Chestnut-tanned swimmers hit the water in rapid succession, chased by the shouts of their coach.

One girl pulled herself up beside the starting block and collapsed on her stomach, her back pumping up and down as she struggled to catch her breath.

At that moment a commuter train came around the gentle curve of the tracks skirting the school grounds beyond the pool. Salary-men returning from work crowded every car, hanging onto the straps. When their view opened up as the train emerged from behind the school building, the blue of the water stretching across the face of the new pool and the swimsuited figures of the girls resting on the concrete deck leaped into their eyes. We may imagine this scene cast a measure of comfort upon the hearts of the sorry, wilted workers besieged by the heat of the day and a thousand private woes.

A single tall man stood watching the animated practice from the far end of the pool. He had the air and features of a gentle, easygoing man. He wore swimming trunks, and a cape hung from his shoulders.

The man’s name was Aoki Hiroo. He was an old alumnus of this school, and his two sons were now enrolled in its elementary division. He had long worked for a certain textile company, most recently as acting section head.

In the open lane at one side of the pool, Mr. Aoki’s boys frolicked like two happy puppies. The older boy was a fifth grader, the other a year younger.

The Aokis had first appeared at the pool four days ago, and they had returned each evening since. Mr. Aoki and the coach knew each other by sight, and the coach had agreed to let the boys practice their swimming so long as they didn’t get in the way of the swim team.

Every so often, Mr. Aoki would dive smoothly into the water and do a slow crawl to the other end of the 25-meter pool. He was quite an accomplished swimmer. Lest he distract the swim team, though, he mostly just stood at the side of the pool while his boys played in the water by themselves. Now and then the boys would ask him something, and he would give them a pointer or two about their form, but the rest of the time he gazed at the intense training of the girls with a look of quiet admiration.

After a while, Mrs. Aoki appeared at the pool gate leading a large, white, bushy-haired dog. When he finally noticed her several minutes later, Mr. Aoki immediately called to the boys, now engaged in a contest of who could send a bigger splash into the other’s face. The boys did not dawdle. They leaped from the pool and raced for the showers.

After changing into his shorts, Mr. Aoki went to thank the coach, ensconced as usual in his chair at the center of the starting blocks, and then followed the boys out of the enclosure. Mrs. Aoki smiled and bowed to the coach from where she stood at the gate. She handed the dog’s chain to the older boy and started off down the street, walking side by side with her husband. The family lived only two blocks away.

As he gazed after the Aokis disappearing into the shade of the Chinese tallow trees, the coach felt a wonderful warmth fill his heart.

Now that’s living, he thought. That’s really living the way we all should live. Going home together for a family dinner after an evening dip at the pool . . .

In the deepening shadows, the Aoki family walked homeward down the paved street with their large, white, bushy-haired dog leading the way. Awaiting them at home was a bright and joyous table, and a summer’s evening full of family fun.

But, in fact, it was not so. What really awaited this couple was something quite different—something neither the children nor the neighbors nor anyone else could be told.

It was hard to know just what to call it—this thing that lurked at home.

A week ago, Mr. Aoki had been let go from his job. The cause: embezzling company funds.

Now each evening, after the children went to bed, husband and wife were left to face each other alone. Stretched out on deck chairs on the patio beneath the wisteria arbor, neither said a word. Their only motions were to wave their fans in pursuit of an occasional mosquito hovering near their legs.

Mrs. Aoki was a smallish woman of trim build. When she came down the street in her red sandals with her hempen shopping bag over her arm, she was the picture of youthful buoyancy. Sometimes she could be seen with her dog in tow, eating ice cream at the coffee shop near the station; sometimes she could be seen running races with her boys and laughing gleefully when she won.

But her husband’s firing had come as no small blow to her. It was like the punch that sends a boxer down on one knee in the ring.

“What in the world for?” she had asked with rounded eyes when her dazed husband came home and told her he’d been fired.

Before this, he had seldom returned home until near midnight. Sometimes he was out even later and had to come all the way home by cab. But she’d gotten used to that and thought nothing of it anymore.

His explanation had always been the same: he was entertaining clients. That could hardly be every night, though, so a lot of those times he must have been entertaining just his own sweet self. As a matter of fact, she had no way of knowing where he went, or what he might be doing.

But what good would it do to make an issue of it? Since all those late nights didn’t seem to bother him, and since they didn’t seem to have any ill effects on his health, she figured she should count her blessings.

As far as his work itself was concerned, he had never had much to say, nor had she ever bothered to ask. So when he told her he’d been fired, all she could do was wonder what on earth could have happened.

“I borrowed some money,” he explained (the amount was equivalent to about six months of his salary), “and they found out about it. I was planning to pay it back, but, before I did, they found out.”

Common sense said he should have had to pay the money back even if it meant selling his house, but in this case the company had decided to forgive the debt in exchange for his immediate resignation.

How could this happen? Mrs. Aoki wondered. After working for a company for eighteen years, to suddenly get fired just like that. If only it could be a joke—a practical joke her husband was playing on her because nothing ever seemed to faze her. How happy she would be if that were all it was!

But, in fact, she had known from the instant her husband walked in the door that it could be no mere joke. The ominous cloud hovering over him had told her instantly that something serious had happened.

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t you ask Mr. Komori to help?”

“He was the angriest.”

On the board of directors, Mr. Aoki had been closer to Komori than anyone else. Mrs. Aoki had visited his house several times and enjoyed long talks with his wife.

“Maybe I could go and apologize,” she said.

“It’s no use. Everything’s already been decided.”

She fell silent, and, after a few moments, began to weep.

Soon the initial shock passed, and she was able to regain a certain calm. But then something akin to terror came to her all over again when she thought of how easily their secure, worry-free lives had crumbled to nothing.

It could almost be called spectacular.

This is what life is like, she thought.

When she looked rationally at what had happened, she had to admit it was not at all beyond imagining. Her husband had never been a particularly conscientious worker. Nor could you call him a man of strong character. Indeed, she had seen him make time, against all obstacles, for the sake of entertainment and drink. Who could ever have guaranteed that he would not make a mistake?

Even if some of the time he had gone out on company business other than entertaining clients, there had to be limits. And on his salary, he could hardly afford to go out much at his own expense. She had been a fool to take it so casually, and to never once question what was going on.

It had probably never occurred to her husband that things could get out of hand and lead to a crisis. He had a tendency not to take things very seriously to begin with, which, no doubt, was exactly what had led him to his ruin. If he had truly intended to pay the money back, it wasn’t such a large sum that he couldn’t somehow have done it. Her husband must never really have felt in his bones what a serious business his work was.

On the other hand, in fifteen years of marriage, it had never once occurred to her that she should be worried about her husband’s ways. She could not recall ever having reminded him how important his work was, and that he must never take it lightly.

When she reflected on her marriage like this, she realized for the first time just how foolishly and carelessly they had spent the time they shared as husband and wife. And suddenly the successful man who had risen all the way to acting section head only to be fired began to look like an absentminded half-wit. Her husband might be fun-loving and a bit of a heavy drinker, but these qualities were counterbalanced by his good work—wasn’t that how she’d reassured herself? Hadn’t she described her husband to her school friends exactly that way? Now she was furious with herself for it.

How in the world could a man thrown out of a job at the age of forty rehabilitate the family name? How in the world would he balance his accounts in this life?

Her head filled with questions that made despair raise its head with every turn of her thoughts. But they were not questions she could simply push from her mind and ignore.

An amazingly large, yellow moon emerged from among the leaves of the sycamore tree in the yard. As she gazed at it, an almost inaudible sigh escaped her lips.

The children were delighted by their father’s unexpected vacation. The older boy begged to go hiking in the mountains, while the younger wanted to go on an insect-hunting excursion.

“No, your father is tired and needs to rest at home,” their mother headed them off.

Her husband smiled weakly. “That’s right. Daddy just wants to rest right now,” he said, “so please don’t ask me to take you anywhere far away this time.”

The boys reluctantly withdrew their requests. In exchange, beginning on the third evening, they dragged their father out to the new pool that had been built at the school. The high school girls’ swim team was in training camp for an upcoming meet, so normally the Aokis could not have used the pool.

To tell the truth, Mr. Aoki had no energy for stripping down to his trunks and diving into a pool. He really didn’t feel up to anything but lolling about on the tatami with his long legs and arms thrown out every which way. It was Mrs. Aoki who’d insisted he take his swimsuit and cape and get out of the house for a while.

“If all you do is lie around like that, the next thing you know you’ll get sick as well. Go swimming. It’ll help get you out of your doldrums.”

Mr. Aoki had always been fond of athletics. In his student days he had played on the volleyball team, and on Sunday mornings and such he often played catch with the boys in the street out front. During the college rugby season, he liked to take his wife and boys to see the games. And he’d started going to the beach with the boys when they were barely toddlers so he could teach them how to swim.

The first evening, when her husband and the boys had not returned by the time dinner was ready, Mrs. Aoki went to fetch them, and she found her husband quite changed from when she had watched him leave the house tagging along after the boys. Standing with folded arms, he gazed intently after the swimmers as they slowly pushed their kickboards across the pool, beating the water into foam behind them. He didn’t even notice her arrival.

Can you believe this man? she muttered inwardly, not knowing whether to feel shame or pity.

On the second evening she bought a box of chocolates as a thank-you to the coach and a treat for the swimmers. She called her husband to the fence and asked him to take it to the coach.

Her husband took the chocolates to where the coach sat at the center of the starting blocks and gave them to him with an amiable smile. The coach beamed back.

“Okay!” he boomed. “Whoever betters their record gets one of these chocolates from the Aokis. Come on! Let’s see what you can do!”

All around him swimmers sprang to life, and several shouted back:

“That’s mean!”

“Give us a chocolate first, and then we’ll beat our records!”

Mr. Aoki looked on contentedly, still smiling.

The coach opened the box to pass out the chocolates, and the swimmers quickly pressed in on all sides. Clamoring noisily, they took their pieces, called “Thank you” to Mr. Aoki, and tossed them into their mouths.

Why doesn’t he hurry up and come on back? Mrs. Aoki thought, but her husband continued to stand among the swimmers. Eventually, the coach held the box out to him and asked, “Would you like one?” Even her husband had sense enough then to say “No thanks” and excuse himself, and he finally returned to the far corner of the pool where his boys were playing.

Was he a big kid, or a fool, or what? Mrs. Aoki wondered as she watched him come.

When the Aokis started home in the gathering dusk, the swimmers by the pool turned toward them and called out in a chorus of charming voices:

“Goodbye! Thanks again!”

Looking rather embarrassed, Mr. Aoki returned an awkward wave.

The leaves of the Chinese tallow trees glowed an eerie green in the lingering light of the evening sky. As the family walked along beneath those leaves, Mrs. Aoki sensed the gloom slowly returning to her husband’s face. Even as she pretended not to notice, she could feel her own face sagging into much the same expression.

The two boys walked ahead, pulling the dog behind them. Now and then they would call out the dog’s name. The energy in their voices grated on Mrs. Aoki’s nerves.

“Talk to me,” she said. “All this silence only makes it more depressing.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said, as though noticing for the first time. “But what shall I talk about?”

“The bars,” she said.

He stared at her in bewilderment.

“Tell me about the bars you go to a lot.”

“There’s not much to tell, really.”

“Never mind that, just tell me about them. You know, now that I think of it, you’ve never said a word about the places you go— your favorite bars and whatnot. So come on,” she said, putting more cheer in her voice, hoping to raise both of their spirits. “Tell me about the places with the pretty girls where you spent all that stupid money.”

She was being deliberately flippant, but her husband grimaced. It brought her a twinge of pleasure.

“There were lots of places,” her husband said, recovering himself.

“Start in wherever you like, then, and take them in order.”

So, in the light of the moon filtering through the wisteria over the patio, Mr. Aoki began with a place he frequented when he didn’t have much money.

Two sisters ran the bar—the older one beautiful but brusque, the younger not at all pretty and very slow mannered. The place always looked as though it had gone out of business two or three days before, but if he went on inside and perched himself tentatively on one of the bar stools, the younger sister would soon emerge from the room in back. The way she came out invariably had a “Who cares?” sort of air about it.

He would half expect her to tell him they were closed, but she would sluggishly duck under the counter. After tidying up a bit, she would finally turn around to face him. At first he had thought she must be in a bad mood, or maybe she wasn’t feeling well, but he soon learned this was just her normal way.

For example, if a patron were to say, “No matter when I come, this place has about as much life as an empty depot in a cowboy movie,” she would break into a broad, happy smile.

The older sister was much the same—except that she seemed to care even less than the younger and wouldn’t come downstairs at all unless she had gotten herself into a really good mood.

As a bar, it made for a very odd atmosphere. If someone came charging in the door ready to party, he’d likely be thrown so completely off balance by the dull and indifferent reception, he’d be stopped dead in his tracks, unable either to forge ahead or to back out.

The bar’s drawing card was its cheap prices. Of course, for the patrons to be willing to put up with such indifferent service, the prices would quite naturally have to be low.

But Aoki did not frequent the bar solely for its prices. For him, the real attraction of the bar was the older sister. The very first time he went there with a friend, he’d been struck by the older sister’s resemblance to the French movie star M, with her worldly looks and otherworldly air. In her beautiful features he found something a tiny bit scary, but he also found something supremely romantic. What would it be like to go for a stroll down deserted nighttime streets with a woman like this? he wondered, and from that moment forth a vague desire arose in his heart. Before long, his wish was fulfilled.

He bought tickets to an international swimming competition in which a famous American swimmer was scheduled to appear, and he gave one of the tickets to this sister to see what she might do. He hadn’t really expected her to come, but when he arrived, she was already there.

Afterward they went from one bar to another, then hailed a cab and drove aimlessly around the late-night city streets. It wasn’t a “stroll,” but he could say that he had gotten his wish.

As they drove, the girl told him in a somber voice about living with her father in Harbin as a child. In the summer he would take her to the Isle of the Sun, where they mingled with Russian families for a day of fun on the banks of the muddy Songhua River. On the way home they stopped at a restaurant facing the promenade along the river, and at a table right in front of the orchestra her father would drink mug after mug of beer while she chewed on black bread. Together they gazed at the river in the twilight.

The girl spoke with her cheek pressed against Aoki’s shoulder. Now’s the time to kiss her, he thought, only half listening to her story. But what if he tried to kiss her and she got angry? That would ruin everything. Too worried about what terrible thing might happen if she got angry with him, he could not bring himself to do it.

Never again had another such opportunity presented itself. Several times he had wasted expensive tickets to the ballet or the symphony, hoping for a second chance. But as Aoki continued to observe the girl over the next few months, he came to understand that she had not been her usual self on the night of the swimming competition. If he were ever to have a chance, that night had been it.

In the days and months since, she had become like a castle with mirror-slick walls offering no holds to grasp. Each time he saw that miraculous smile of hers, he’d be filled anew with a longing to somehow make her his own. But he could not gain the faintest hint of what she might be thinking. Were her sights set on marriage, or did she not care? Had someone else already won her heart, or was she available?

Especially frustrating were the days when she knew perfectly well that Aoki was waiting but still chose not to come downstairs. Times like that, he was left sipping drearily at his beer as he carried on an awkward, slow-moving conversation with the younger sister.

Even worse was when neither of the sisters appeared, and a prune-faced old lady took their place. If the disgruntled Aoki asked the sisters’ whereabouts, old Prune-face would tell him the older one had a visitor upstairs and the younger was in bed with a bad toothache, or something of the sort. In a fit of irritation Aoki would sometimes settle in on his stool for an even longer stay than usual, drinking to the old woman’s pouring. The old woman must have felt sorry for him at times like this: she would only charge him for one beer even when he had had three.

By probing Prune-face for information, Aoki managed to verify the sisters’ claim that the older sister had no patron or lover, and that they’d opened the bar on money from their father. He got her assurance, too, on the occasion when she said there was a visitor upstairs, that the man was merely a friend of their father’s and not anyone of questionable repute. Still, it irked Aoki to no end to think that the girl was alone in her room with another man, talking hour after hour about whatever it might be.

Actually, all the men who frequented this bar were, like Aoki, in thrall to the beauty of this older sister. The others, like Aoki, had all felt the same cold shoulder turned against their yearnings; and yet none felt able to make a clean break and give the girl up, either, so they kept drifting back for one more visit. Whenever Aoki happened to find himself with another of these men at the bar, they both could tell immediately by the other’s behavior. From this, too, Aoki knew it was nothing but foolishness to keep coming back, but he still couldn’t bring himself to turn his steps away once and for all.

One thing never ceased to puzzle him, though. How was it that a bar with so rare a beauty in the house could remain in such a fearsomely depressed state no matter when he went? Why had he never once seen the bar draw a large, boisterous crowd?

What Mr. Aoki told his wife was not exactly as written here, but it covered roughly the same ground.

“That’s it?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mrs. Aoki let out a little laugh. “You never told me anything like that before.”

“Well, if I’m always getting jilted . . .”

“But I don’t suppose you always were, were you?” she shot back.

His throat tightened.

“Never mind,” she went on. “You don’t have to tell me. I know you won’t tell me the truth anyway, so forget it.”

How could she have been so dense? she wondered. The news that her husband had been fired for embezzling money had put her in such a state of shock that she’d been going around as if in a trance.

There’s another woman! My husband spent all that money on another woman!

It had hit her like a thunderbolt as she listened to her husband’s story. A violent quaking seized her heart, but she took care to hide it, and when her husband was through, she moved swiftly to head off any further confessions of a similar kind.

The story her husband had told her meant nothing to him. The secret he had to guard was something else entirely, and the story of the girl who grew up in Harbin and looked like the French movie star was nothing more than a smokescreen. She knew this instinctively.

If she were to press him, her husband would no doubt entertain her with other stories about women—stories to make her think he was being open, while in fact steering clear of any real danger. But she would not fall for that.

The things that didn’t really matter he could speak of with abandon. But behind them all there was something this man would not touch with the tiniest tip of a needle.

A Medusa’s head.

She must not attempt to see it. She must not pursue. She must quietly pretend to suspect nothing at all.

“Talk to me,” she had said, but not in her remotest dreams had she anticipated this result. When she’d suggested he tell her about the bars he went to, she really had thought it might help raise their spirits. But look what had happened instead! Quite without intending, she’d built herself a trap, and she hadn’t even realized it until after she’d thrown herself into it.

The next evening, Mr. Aoki once again went off to the pool with the boys, and as she prepared dinner at home Mrs. Aoki wondered how long these curious days would go on. Their household kitty would be exhausted in two weeks. Their savings account had long been empty—they were both the kind who spent whatever money they had. So once they used up what was on hand, they would have to start pawning their possessions. Would that get them through another six months, perhaps?

Her own family had prospered in the foreign trade before the war, but they’d fallen on hard times since. As for her husband’s side, his three brothers all subsisted on the meager wages of civil servants and salarymen. She’d never given it the slightest thought before, but this crisis had awakened her to the fact that she and her husband were like orphans, without any family they could turn to for help in times of need.

Were it not for the children, they might somehow manage. If Mrs. Aoki went out and got a job, she no doubt could fill at least her own stomach—though, lacking any skills, she’d have to be prepared for the worst. But with two grade-school-age boys at home, any such plan was out of the question.

That meant that unless her husband succeeded in finding a new job, their family of four could no longer stay together. But where on earth was he likely to find an employer willing to take in and provide for a married man of forty who’d been fired from his job and thrown out onto the streets?

Mrs. Aoki tried to recall what kinds of things had gone through her mind while preparing dinner just one week before, but she could not remember a single thing.

Somewhere along the line, for some unfathomable reason, her whole world had been transformed. How could a single bolt from the blue have twisted the course of their lives so completely awry, leaving them to suffer such undue pain and fear? What sort of god had permitted this catastrophe to occur?

The motions she was going through now, lighting the stove or taking the frying pan off the heat: what meaning did any of this have? Why did her hands go on working so busily as though nothing were amiss? Why did she still find herself going through the same routine motions she had gone through day in and day out for as long as she could remember? Was the whole thing just some bizarre mistake?

All of a sudden she felt like everything was collapsing into an ever more incomprehensible jumble.

That night, after the boys were in bed, Mr. Aoki sipped at some whiskey and told his wife this story.

In the building where I work, there’s a mail chute next to the elevator on each floor. It’s essentially a long square tube running all the way from the ninth floor down to the first. The side facing the hallway is clear, so you can watch from the outside as your letter begins to fall. Sometimes when you’re walking by, you see a white envelope drop soundlessly through the chute from ceiling to floor; or you see several, one after the other.

The hallway happens to be very dim, and it can give you quite a start to see one of these flashes of white go by when there’s no one else around. I’m not quite sure what to say it’s like. It’s like a ghost, maybe—like some strange, lonely spirit.

One step away, in all the offices along the hallway, is a world where you don’t dare let down your guard for a single moment. That’s why you get such a start when you emerge into the hallway, to go to the bathroom or something, and you see one of those white flashes.

Some mornings, when I have something I need to get done early, I arrive at work before the normal starting time. I glance around the office, looking at all the empty chairs waiting for the people who usually work there to arrive. Each chair, in the absence of its occupant, seems to assume the shape of its occupant’s head, or the way he moves his eyes, or the turn of his lips when he speaks, or the curve of his back as he hunches over his desk.

The patent leather seat where the occupant will soon plant his bottom shines like it was polished with oils that oozed from his body. It’s as if, through the years, each man’s indignations and frettings and gripes and laments, or his incessant fears and anxieties, have been slowly secreted from his body in the form of an oil. At least that’s how it always seems to me.

Each chairback, too, uniquely bent by the press of its occupant’s own back, seems to express that man’s feelings about his workplace. Willy-nilly, day after day, he’s had to come into this office and set himself down on that same desk chair. Is it any wonder that something of his heart might transfer itself to the chair?

I look quietly down at my own chair as well, thinking, Ahh, what a pitiable chair. What a poor, wretched, acting section head’s chair . . .

And I wonder: When have I ever sat here without feeling afraid? If someone behind me suddenly clears his throat, it practically startles me right out of my seat.

I know I’m not the only one who trembles in such constant fear. I can see it in the others’ faces as they arrive for work. The few who come in looking cheerful and contented must really be happy. They’re the fortunate ones—the ones who’ve been blessed. But the vast majority aren’t like that, and they show it in the expressions they have on their faces the moment they push open the door and step into the office. What is it they’re so frightened of? Is it some particular person? Is it the company executives—their section head or department head, or the president himself, perhaps? That may be part of it, certainly, but it can’t be all. It can only be one of several elements, for those very section heads and department heads come in the door with the exact same look on their faces.

But again, what is it that so frightens all these men? It is neither a particular group of individuals, nor anything else you can really put your finger on. It haunts them even at home, in their time for resting and relaxing with their wives and children. It enters even into their dreams and threatens them in their sleep. It’s what brings them the nightmares that terrorize them in the middle of the night.

Sometimes when I gaze around at the vacant chairs and desks, and at the hat stands with their empty hangers here and there, I find myself getting all choked up. Everything I see takes on the image of someone who works there, and seems to have so much to tell me.

“My old lady came on to me again last night with tears in her eyes, begging me, please, please, it’s okay if my pay is low and we’re always on the verge of going broke, just watch my temper and don’t do anything rash and never forget how important my work is. She cried and pleaded with me on and on like that, you know, and hey, it really made me stop and think.”

Pressed up against one desk is the chair of the man who spoke these words to me. Every time I look at that chair, I remember how he started in with a simple remark about making ends meet at home and wound up with this doleful lament. I remember it as clear as day—the tone of his voice and his embarrassed smile and every

thing. . . .

There Mr. Aoki’s story came to an end.

His story about the bar had been an eye-opener as well, but Mrs. Aoki now asked herself whether her husband had ever said anything like this about his anxieties at work before. Little had she imagined that he was going off to work feeling like this every day. How could she have missed it all those years? What in the world had they talked about in a decade and a half of living together in the same house as husband and wife?

Even if her husband never got home until midnight and then had to hurry off to work as soon as he got up the next morning, how could they have spent that many years together and never spoken about a single important thing? Even with his long hours, they’d always made a point of going somewhere as a family on Sundays. But what had her husband spoken of, and what had she asked him about, in the time they actually spent together? Never once had it entered her mind that her husband might hold such feelings about his work at the office. She’d always simply assumed that he stayed out late every night because he enjoyed a good time, and she’d thought nothing more of it than that.

He had tended to be out late every night from the time they first got married, so apparently that image of him had become etched in her mind at the very beginning. Their regular Sunday outings compensated for the lack of any kind of family life from Monday through Saturday, and she had always thought it more satisfying that way than if he came home earlier during the week but then had to go in on Sunday as well, leaving her to while away another dull day at home.

Having listened to her husband’s story tonight, she now understood why he never came straight home after work even when he had no clients to entertain. It was the deep anguish he felt about his life as a working man. And she understood, too, that he hadn’t felt he could find comfort for that anguish at home. Facing his wife and children apparently only increased his pain, while the women at the bars and cabarets let him forget it.

In that case, what had she been to her husband all this time? she suddenly wondered. If their marriage had not been one of fulfillment and trust and mutual support, then what had she been doing all this time?

But she also wondered: if her husband had never told her about the anxiety and pain he experienced in his job, didn’t that just go to prove that he had been unburdening his heart to someone else all along? And wasn’t it that very someone who was really to blame for their present troubles?

When her husband had told her about the sisters at the bar, the image of a woman had come before her like a flash of revelation. She shuddered at the terrifying reality of that image and tried hastily to push it from her mind, but it would not leave her.

At first she had found it a little bewildering to have her husband get up in the morning only to stay home all day, but by the time a week had gone by she began to think she preferred it this way.

If only their family could always live like this, she thought, without her husband having to go off somewhere to work every day! If only they’d been born in ancient times when this was how everyone lived! Having nothing to do, the man grabs his club to go on a hunt. He tracks down his prey, leaps upon it, and battles it to its death. He carries his trophy home on his shoulders and hangs it over the fire as his woman and the children gather about to watch it cook. If only their lives could be like this—how much happier they would be!

Instead, every morning the man dons his suit and rides the commuter train to a distant workplace, and every night he returns home sullen and spent. Wasn’t this the very prescription for an unhappy life? To Mrs. Aoki, it had certainly begun to seem so.

In the darkness, her husband seemed lost in thought.

“You can’t get to sleep?” she asked.

“No, no,” he said in haste, “I was just starting to drift off.” After a pause he added, “I guess it’s because of that long nap I took.”

“Shall I do some magic that’ll help you sleep?”

She brought her face directly before his and edged slowly closer until their eyelids almost touched. It was not magic; it was a special caress she’d invented. With their eyelashes touching, she began blinking her eyes, stroking his eyelashes with the up and down of her own. It brought an odd sensation—like the rapid-fire chatter of two tiny birds absorbed in conversation, or like the last stage of a Japanese sparkler when the tiny ball of fire on the tip starts shooting snowflake sparks in every direction.

In the darkness, she went on blinking her eyes. The motion of her eyelids comforted and soothed, but she could not keep them from also questioning, reproaching.

Mr. Aoki decided to start going to work again.

His vacation of ten days was over. He’d had to call an end to it when the boys began to ask, “How long do you get to take off?”

He also had to consider the suspicious glances some of the neighbors had begun to cast his way. One of the ladies had even asked Mrs. Aoki some rather prying questions at the grocery.

Secrets like this had a way of spreading with astonishing speed. Though none of his former colleagues lived nearby, you could never tell where one of the neighbors might hear something through the grapevine.

But his more immediate concern was the boys. Since he had told them that he was on vacation, he could not simply go on lolling about the house forever; and in any case, he needed to start looking for a new job. Thus, Mr. Aoki decided to resume leaving the house every morning at the same time as he used to leave for work.

The first day, after her husband had gone, Mrs. Aoki suddenly felt limp with exhaustion. In her mind she saw the figure of her husband walking aimlessly through the city streets beneath the late summer sun. The pangs of her husband’s anguish as he trudged uneasily along the bustling street, ever fearful that he might meet someone he knew, seemed to pierce her own heart.

She imagined him gazing up at the screen in the darkness of a movie theater where he’d gone to escape being seen. Or she imagined him sitting on a bench at a department store, watching the mothers who had brought their children to play on the rooftop playground.

But then these images abruptly broke up, to be replaced by a vision of her husband quietly climbing the stairs to an unfamiliar apartment building. Her blood turned to ice.

“No! Don’t go there. Don’t, don’t, don’t!” she screamed, but her husband continued his slow ascent. “Stop!” she cried. “If you go there, it’s all over. It’s all over.”

The vision returned again and again no matter how many times she tried to drive it away.

Evening came, and Mrs. Aoki found herself in the kitchen once again. Like a person who has come down with a fever, a feeling of listless fatigue weighed heavy on every corner of her body.

In the street out front the boys jabbered back and forth as they played catch.

“They’re incredibly fast!”

“Mexican Indians.”

“They can chase antelopes all day and not even get winded.”

“The tribe’s name is Tarahumara. Ta-ra-hu-ma-ra.”

“I sure wish they’d come to Japan sometime.”

Disjointed snatches of the boys’ conversation came to her between pops of the ball.

Will he come home? she wondered miserably. I just want him to come home safe and sound—that’s all. I don’t care if he doesn’t have a job, I don’t care about anything else, just so long as he doesn’t abandon this family.

She took a match and lit the gas burner, then reached up to get a pan from the shelf.

“Just so long as he comes home . . .”

A quiet hush hung over the pool.

The ropes separating the lanes had been removed, and in the middle of the pool bobbed a lone man, only his head showing above water. The interscholastic swim meet would begin tomorrow, so today’s practice had been cut two hours short and the swimmers sent home early. Now the coach was picking up debris from the bottom of the pool with his toes.

The evening breeze sent a rush of tiny waves rippling across the surface of the water from time to time.

Soon a train slid into view along the tracks beyond the pool, and the eyes of the passengers returning from work took in the quiet scene. The usual girl’s swim team was gone, and a man’s head bobbed all alone on the surface of the water.