A Quiet Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

Then he raised the hand he had withdrawn from the front of his raincoat and waved it at me as though shooing away a dog.
    I furiously shook my head, so mortified I could have burst into a fearful wail. Then I caught sight of a woman, who appeared to be. in her mid-thirties, looking down from the second-story window of her boxlike house, which had been built on one of the lots the owner of the mansion beyond the unkempt hedge had divided off and sold.
    “Hey!” I hollered. “Please help!” The woman opened the window with a clamor, leaned out to look up and down the street, and with a quick thrust of her head over her shoulder called to someone behind her.
    Sensing a new turn of events, I looked back and saw that the man had released the girl. He was about to quickly walk away in the other direction, his shoulders slanted at an oddlyacute angle. Finally the girl began crying out loud as she hobbled on her knees to safety. Still ringing the bell, I slipped past her and went after the man. Noticing I was chasing him, he stopped in his tracks and turned to glare at me with those tiny eyes of his. And I stopped, for the most I could do was stare hack at him from a distance. Before long, the man dashed into a side street with an incredible vigor, his raincoat fluttering on his back like Batman's cape.
    The culprit was caught by the woman's brother, who had quickly wheeled out his motorbike and, unlike me, who had simply followed the molester, beaten him to the bus route. But I was the one—though all I did was belatedly give chase on my bike while furiously ringing the bell—who was able to point out to the police that the pale, perspiring, panting man who pretended to know nothing was indeed the pervert I had seen molesting the girl. In this sense, then, I believe I played my part well enough.
    The woman's brother and her husband pinned the man from both sides until the police came, while the woman stayed with the little victim and kept comforting her. I felt uneasy because the man with the brown-dot eyes, which were like those of a febrile catfish, was staring at me, even as he was being held. From what I later heard from the police, though, the man said he didn't make an all-out effort to flee because he knew I had remembered his face.
    The man apparently also admitted to bringing all those bottles to our house. Until hearing this, I had felt very queasy about the dampness on the front of my skirt. Then it dawned on me that the cork had come out of the bottle I had put in the basket on the handlebars.

    The next day, I came down with a fever and couldn't get out of bed, so Eeyore took a few days off from his work at thewelfare workshop, and O-chan prepared our meals. “I took nutrition and balance into consideration, sort of ,” he said as he prepared the table, but the assortment was all instant food he had bought at the supermarket—on sale, for that matter. It was funny, though, since what he set out gave the semblance of well-chosen fare. This was about the only time while I lay in bed that I felt my heart uplifted, for I was possessed by a ponderous fear, morning, noon, and night.
    Why had the water-bottle man been a molester? The police said that the bottles of water merely gave him an alibi. If someone had asked why he was loitering around this residential area, he would say he was merely delivering water to our house. To make his alibi even more plausible, he had intentionally chosen a house of a person whose name occasionally appeared in the papers. Still, I think there was something unusual in the way the man kept staring at me while he had the girl pinned down, or when he was trying to get away, and even after he was caught. I sensed those brown-dot eyes had revealed to me, my Father's daughter, the inside of a “fanatic's” mind with an interest in Father's prayers .
    Even as the night wore on, sleep did not come to me, and in that same half-dreamlike state I often fall into I thought of something even more