Thirst for Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

There were chrysanthemums. There was bush clover. There were Chinese balloon flowers. There were cosmos, wilted from the overnight stay. The front of her mourning dress was sprinkled with yellow pollen.
    What did she think in that light-bathed time? Of liberation from jealousy? From the myriad sleepless nights? From her husband’s sudden fever? From the Hospital for Infectious Diseases? From his horrible, delirious ravings in the dead of night? From the awful odors? From death?
    Was Etsuko even jealous that this abundant sunshine was a thing of this earth? And was that because jealousy had become the only emotion she could maintain for any length of time?
    A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him—the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Etsuko, however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.
    She could not help feeling that the sunlight that bathed her there by the back door of the hospital was a shocking waste committed by heaven, now gratuitously inundating the earth. She came to the conclusion later that she was much more comfortable in the half-light of the hearse. Each time the car bumped, something rattled in her husband’s coffin. Perhaps it was her husband’s pipe, placed with him because he treasured it, knocking against the wooden side. It should have been wrapped in something. Etsuko placed her hand against the white cloth that covered the outside of the casket at the spot the noise was coming from. The pipe, or whatever it was, went silent—as if holding its breath.
    She pulled back a corner of the curtain. After a time she saw another hearse ahead of hers slow down and swing from the center of the boulevard into a tasteless mall surrounded by benches and a preposterously large building that looked like a kiln. It was the crematorium.
    Etsuko remembered thinking: I have not come to cremate my husband, but to cremate my jealousy .
    But when her husband’s remains were burned, would her jealousy be consumed too? Her jealousy was in a sense a contagion caught from her husband. It had attacked her body, her nerves, her bones. If she wished to burn her jealousy, she must walk with her husband’s coffin into the innermost depths of that blast furnace of a building. There was no other way.
    For three days before he took sick, her husband had not come home. He went to work. He was not one to be so carried away by a love affair that he took a day off from the office. He simply could not bear to come home, where Etsuko was waiting. She went to the neighborhood public phone five times a day but hesitated about calling. Yet when she did call he always came to the phone. He was never brutal to her then. His soft, sweet, purring excuses, however, and his deliberate lapses into lisping Osaka speech reminded Etsuko of the way he would twist out his cigarettes in the ashtray and intensify her pain. She preferred abuse. Although at first glance he was a big man to whose lips abuse might spring readily, Ryosuke could repeat to her in gentle tones promises he had long decided not to fulfill. Etsuko could not combat it. She would have been much better off if she had not called him in the first place.
    “It’s hard to talk here, but last night I met an old friend. First he asked me to go play mah-jongg. He’s high up in the Commerce Ministry and I couldn’t be rude to him. What? Yes, tonight I’m coming home. Right after work, I’m coming home. . . . But I’ve got mountains of work. . . . Should you get dinner?