Thirst for Love Read Online Free PDF

another nuisance of a woman come to live with his nuisance of an employer .
    His voice! That slightly nasal, smoky, subdued, yet childish voice! Those words that seemed to be torn one by one from his uncommunicative tongue! How round those words, like plain wild fruit!
    Nevertheless, when Etsuko saw him the next day she was able to look at him without being moved in the slightest. No reproof—just a smile.
    That’s right. Nothing happened.
    Then one day when she had been there a month, Yakichi asked Etsuko to mend the old suits he wore for farming. He hurried her to complete the job, and it took her well into the night. At one o’clock in the morning, Yakichi, who should have been asleep, came into Etsuko’s room. He praised her diligence, slipped his arms into the jacket that had been repaired, and silently smoked his pipe for a while.
    “Do you sleep well now?”
    “Yes. It’s different from Tokyo—so quiet.”
    “You’re not telling me the truth,” said Yakichi.
    “Actually I’m not sleeping very well at all,” said Etsuko. “It’s just too quiet, quieter than I like it.”
    “That’s too bad. I shouldn’t have brought you away.” Yakichi’s reply had in it a touch of front-office sarcasm.
    Even when Etsuko accepted Yakichi’s invitation to come to Maidemmura, she anticipated the occurrence of nights like this. In fact she rather welcomed them. Earlier she had wished to die with her husband—the death of an Indian widow. It was an occult thing, that sacrificial death she dreamed of, a suicide proffered not so much in mourning for her husband’s death as in envy of that death. What she desired was not any common, ordinary death, but a slow death, over a protracted period of time. Was it not that in the depth of her jealousy she sought something that would enable her never to fear jealousy again? Behind this sordid craving, as wretched as a craving for carrion, did there not lurk a fervent desire to have everything for herself—a purposeless greed?
    Her husband’s death . . . It was a day toward the end of autumn. She could still see clearly the hearse pulled up to the back door of the Hospital for Infectious Diseases. The workmen had lifted the casket. There was the damp smell of incense and mildew and corpses in the basement mortuary, as well as the ghastly presence of the artificial white lotuses thick with gray dust, and the damp tatami for overnight mourners, and the couch used as the bier, its leather cover peeling. From this mortuary with its portable shrine—a waiting room in which the tablets of the dead keep changing—the workmen carried the coffin up the sloping concrete ramp. One of the workmen was wearing army shoes, and the hobnails in them struck the concrete with a sound like gnashing teeth. The door opened . . .
    Etsuko had never known a sunburst of such profusion, of such emotion, as that which she met in that moment. That flooding sunshine of early November, that transparent geyser filling and overflowing all.
    The back door of the hospital opened onto a flat basin of the city once completely devastated by fire bombings. On the other side ran the embankment of the Chuo line, overgrown with withered vegetation. Half the neighborhood was made up of new houses and houses under construction; the rest was still ruins of fire, given over to weeds, rubbish, and assorted debris. The November sunshine spread over everything. The handlebars of bicycles running along the broad avenue that traversed the area shone in it. Even from the rubbish piles in the ruins, bright shards, perhaps from beer bottles, dazzled the eye. The sunlight struck the casket and then Etsuko with the force of a cataract.
    The hearse started its engine. Etsuko got in behind the casket in the curtained interior.
    What she thought about on the way to the crematorium was neither jealousy nor death. All she pondered was the glare that had just struck her. In her lap her hands toyed with a bouquet of autumn flowers.