Read Thirst for Love for Free Online Page B

don’t want any coffee.”
    She hesitated, and he went on: “Move the knot of my sash toward the front. It’s digging into me, and I can’t stand it. I’d do it myself, but it’s too much trouble.”
    For a long time now, Ryosuke had not liked Etsuko to touch him. He didn’t even like her to help him put on his coat. What made him act this way today? Etsuko put the coffee tray down on his desk and knelt beside him.
    “What are you doing?” he asked. “You remind me of a masseuse.” She wedged her hand under his body and slid around the polka-dot sash and its perfunctory knot. He did not attempt to raise his body—his haughty, heavy trunk bearing down on Etsuko’s slender hand. It hurt her, but even in her pain she regretted that the task took only a few seconds.
    “Rather than lie here like this, wouldn’t you like to go to bed? Shall I lay it out?”
    “Leave me alone. I feel fine this way.”
    “How about your temperature? It seems higher than before.”
    “It’s the same as before—normal.”
    At this time Etsuko dared something that surprised even her. She pressed her lips against her husband’s forehead to determine his temperature. Ryosuke said nothing. His eyes moved languidly under his closed eyelids. The greasy, grimy skin of his forehead . . . Yes, it was a forehead that after a time would lose its ability to perspire—typhoid’s special effect—and then would dry up and burn like fire. A mad brow, and before long the dirt-colored brow of a corpse.
    The next evening Ryosuke’s temperature swiftly climbed to 103.4. He complained of low back pain and headache. He moved his head constantly, seeking a cool place on the pillow, and thus smeared his pillow case with hair oil and scurf. That night Etsuko brought out the water pillow. He could take only liquids, and those with difficulty. She pressed apples, put the juice in a feeding cup and gave it to him to drink. The next morning the doctor came and said he had only a cold.
    So I saw my husband at last come round to me, come round before my eyes. It was like watching a piece of flotsam wash up before me. I bent over and carefully, minutely, inspected this strange suffering body on the surface of the water. Like a fisherman’s wife, I had gone every day to the water’s edge. I had lived alone and waited. Thus I finally found, in the sluggish water among the rocks in the bay, this washed-up corpse. It was still breathing. Did I pull it out of the water right away? No, I did not. All I did was, fervently, with passion and effort, without sleep, without rest, bend over the water and stare.
    So I watched this still-breathing body, completely immersed in the water, to see if it would groan again, shout again, until finally its hot exhalations died away. I knew: if he were revived, this piece of flotsam would leave me. He would without doubt flee with the tide to some infinitely distant shore. He would not come back to me a second time.
    In my ministrations, there was a purposeless passion. Who would know? Who would know that the tears with which I washed my husband through his dying hours were shed in grief for the passing of the passion that had brightened those hours for me?
    Etsuko remembered the day she hired a car and took her recumbent husband to be admitted to the hospital run by a friend, a specialist in internal medicine. Three days later the woman of the pictures came into his room and met Etsuko’s wrath. How did she find out? Did she hear from one of his friends at the office? Surely they didn’t know. Maybe she smelled it out as a dog would. Another woman came—three days in a row, in fact. Still another came. Sometimes the women ran into each other, glaring at each other as they went by.
    Etsuko wanted no one to infringe upon their island for two. She didn’t inform those in Maidemmura of Ryosuke’s danger until after he had breathed his last. She still remembered the joy she felt the day her husband’s illness was diagnosed.