“What is it? What did you forget?”
O-Nobu appeared to be deliberating.
“Wait just a minute. I’ll be right back.”
O-Nobu directed her man to turn around. Left behind in a state of psychological limbo, Tsuda watched her receding back in silence. The rickshaw disappeared around the corner, and when it presently reappeared it bore down with reckless speed. When she had pulled alongside Tsuda, O-Nobu took from her obi a foot-long metal chain and dangled it for him to see. At the end of the chain was a ring of five or six keys of varying sizes; as she held the chain aloft for Tsuda’s inspection, the keys jangled.
“I forgot this — I left it on top of the tansu.”
In a household of only two and the maid, they took the precaution of locking up their valuables when they left the house together; accordingly, one of them had to carry the key chain.
“You keep them.”
O-Nobu stuffed the jangling keys back into her obi, patted them with her open hand, and smiled at Tsuda.
“Safe and sound.”
The rickshaws moved off again.
They arrived at the clinic slightly later than the appointed hour but not too late for morning office hours.
Troubled by the thought of sitting side by side in the waiting room, Tsuda stepped to the prescriptions window as soon as they were inside.
“May I go straight up to the second floor?”
The student at the window summoned from the back the apprentice nurse. No more than sixteen or seventeen, she bowed to Tsuda with an easy smile and then, noticing O-Nobu standing at his side, as though put off a little by her splendor, frowned as if to say, “Who let this peacock in?” When O-Nobu stepped into the silence and spoke first, thanking her in advance for her trouble, the nurse also dipped her head in her direction as though noticing her for the first time.
“Can you carry this for me?”
Tsuda handed the nurse the satchel he had taken from the rickshaw man and moved toward the stairs to the second floor.
“This way, O-Nobu.”
O-Nobu, who had been standing in the entrance peering at the patients in the waiting room, hastened to follow Tsuda up the stairs.
“My goodness! It’s gloomy in there.”
Fortunately, the second floor, open to the south and east, was light.
O-Nobu slid open the shoji and stepped onto the deck. Eyeing the clothes drying just below at the Western laundry, she turned back to Tsuda.
“At least it’s cheerier up here — this is quite a decent room. The tatami are stained, though—”
Formerly a house used by someone’s mistress, a contractor perhaps, even the second floor, which had been remodeled, retained somehow a hint of its flavorful past.
“It’s old all right, but it might just be nicer than our second floor.”
Having observed the dazzling white of the laundry in the sun in a fresh, autumn mood, Tsuda glanced around him as he spoke at the ceiling, soot-darkened over time, and the decorative posts on either side of the alcove.
[41]
THE SAME nurse brought in a small pot of green tea.
“It will be only a little while. Make yourselves comfortable.”
They had no choice but to sit down properly, facing each other, and sip their tea.
“I’m feeling too nervous to sit still.”
“It’s like being guests in someone’s house.”
O-Nobu withdrew from her obi a lady’s watch and glanced at it. Tsuda was less concerned with the time than the procedure he was about to undergo.
“I wonder how long it’s going to take. Even if you can’t see it, just hearing the scalpel is enough to make you feel awful.”
“It scares me just to look at something like that.”
O-Nobu arched her eyebrows as if she were actually afraid.
“That’s why you’re going to wait up here. There’s no need for you to go in just to watch that dirty business.”
“But you should have family with you at a time like this — it’s wrong not to.”
Seeing the serious look on O-Nobu’s face, Tsuda laughed.
“That’s if you’re so seriously ill it’s a matter of life and death. Nobody’s going to haul people in for a minor surgery.”
Tsuda was a man who disliked showing a woman anything dirty. Especially about himself. To dig deeper, it might be said that observing even his own dirtiness caused him more distress than it would another man.
“Then I’ll wait here,” O-Nobu said, taking out her watch again. “Do you think it’ll be over by noon?”
“I imagine. But now that I’m here, what difference does it make?”
“You’re right. I was just—”
O-Nobu didn’t continue, nor did Tsuda pursue her thought.
The nurse looked in from the head of the stairs.
“We’re ready — if you’ll just follow me.”
Tsuda rose at once. At the same time, O-Nobu started up.
“I told you to wait here.”
“I’m not going in with you. I want to use the phone.”
“You have business somewhere?”
“Not business — I wanted to let O-Hide-san know you’re here.”
His sister’s house was in the same ward, not far from the clinic. Tsuda, who hadn’t thought of O-Hide at all in connection with his illness, stopped O-Nobu as she attempted to stand.
“Don’t bother letting her know, you’re making much too much of this; besides, if that one shows up she’ll be an awful nuisance.”
Though she was younger than he, his sister’s temperament was very different from his own and he found her difficult to manage.
“But I’m the one who’ll be criticized afterward.”
Lacking a reason to require her to desist, Tsuda acquiesced in spite of himself.
“I don’t mind if you call but it doesn’t have to be now. Since she’s in the neighborhood she’s certain to show up. That means I’ll be listening to her carry on about me and my father, my faults and his virtues, and that will be an ordeal with my jittery nerves after surgery.”
O-Nobu laughed softly, as if she feared being overheard downstairs. But the white teeth she revealed informed her husband in no uncertain terms that she was feeling less sympathy for him than simple amusement.
“Then I won’t phone.”
O-Nobu rose to her full height and stood alongside Tsuda.
“You have other calls to make?”
“The Okamotos. I promised to phone them by noon, would you mind if I call?”
Descending the stairs one behind the other, they separated, one moving to the telephone, the other sitting down in a chair in front of the treatment room.
[42]
“I ASSUME you took the castor oil?”
The doctor’s freshly starched surgical gown rustled as he spoke.
“I drank it, but nothing much happened.”
Tsuda hadn’t had the leisure the day before to focus on the castor oil’s effectiveness. All day he had been obliged to concern himself with one thing after the other; the laxative’s effect had been psychologically negligible and unexpectedly feeble even physically.
“Let’s give you an enema, then.”
The result of the enema was also unsatisfactory.
When it was over, Tsuda moved straight to the table and lay down on his back. As his skin made contact with the chilly, rubberized sheet he shivered involuntarily. With his head propped on an unforgiving pillow he was struck full in the face by a beam of light from the opposite direction so that his eyes, as though he were sleeping with his face to the sun, were restless. He blinked repeatedly and repeatedly looked up at the ceiling. The nurse moved past him with a square, shallow, nickel-plated tray of surgical instruments, and a white metallic light glinted. Lying on his back, he felt that the glinting tray had registered in the far periphery of his vision; it was very much as if he had stolen a look at something awful he wasn’t meant to see. Just then a phone in the hall abruptly rang. He had forgotten about O-Nobu and now he remembered. As her phone call to the Okamotos was ending, his surgery was at last about to begin.