Thousand Cranes Read Free Page B

him, and came toward him. Her cheeks were flushed.
    ‘I waited for you. I wanted to see you again. I must seem brazen, but I had to say something more. If we had said good-by there, I would have had no way of knowing when I might see you again.’
    ‘What happened to your daughter?’
    ‘Fumiko went on ahead. She was with a friend.’
    ‘She knew, then, that you would be waiting for me?’
    ‘Yes.’ She looked into his eyes.
    ‘I doubt if she approves. I felt very sorry for her back there. It was clear that she did not want to see me.’ The words may have been blunt, and again they may have been circumspect; but her answer was quite straightforward.
    ‘It was a trial for Fumiko to see you.’
    ‘Because my father caused her a great deal of pain.’
    Kikuji meant to suggest that Mrs Ota had caused him a great deal of pain.
    ‘Not at all. Your father was very good to her. Sometime I must tell you about it. At first she would not be friendly, no matterhow kind he was to her; but then, toward the end of the war, when the air raids were bad, she changed. I have no idea why. In her own way, she did her very best for him. Her very best, I say, but she was only a girl. Her best was going out to buy chicken and fish and the like for him. She was very determined, and she didn’t mind taking risks. She went out into the country for rice, even during the raids. Your father was astonished, the change was so sudden. I found it very touching myself, so touching that it almost hurt. And at the same time I felt that I was being scolded.’
    Kikuji wondered if he and his mother might also have had favors from the Ota girl. The remarkable gifts his father brought home from time to time – were they among her purchases?
    ‘I don’t know why Fumiko changed so. Maybe it was because we didn’t know from one day to the next whether we would still be alive. I suppose she was feeling sorry for me, and she went to work for your father too.’
    In the confusion of defeat, the girl must have known how desperately her mother clung to Kikuji’s father. In the violent reality of those days, she must have left behind the past that was her own father, and seen only the present reality of her mother.
    ‘Did you notice the ring Fumiko was wearing?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Your father gave it to her. Even when he was with me, your father would go home if there was an air-raid warning. Fumiko would see him home, and no one could talk her out of it. There was no telling what would happen if he went alone, she would say. One night she didn’t come back. I hoped she had stayed at your house, but I was afraid the two of them had been killed. Then in the morning she came home and said that she had seen him as far as your gate and spent the rest of the night in an air-raid shelter. He thanked her the next time he came, and gave her that ring. I’m sure she was embarrassed to have you see it.’
    Kikuji was most uncomfortable. And it was odd that the woman seemed to expect sympathy as a matter of course.
    His mood was not clearly one of dislike or distrust, however. There was a warmth in her that put him off guard.
    When the girl had desperately been doing everything she could for his father, had she been watching her mother, and yet unable to watch?
    Kikuji sensed that Mrs Ota was talking of her own love as she talked of the girl.
    She seemed to be pleading something with all the passion she had, and in its final implications the plea did not seem to make a distinction between Kikuji’s father and Kikuji himself. There was a deep, affectionate nostalgia in it, as if she meant to be talking to Kikuji’s father.
    The hostility which Kikuji, with his mother, had felt for Mrs Ota had lost some of its strength, though it had not entirely disappeared. He even feared that unless he was careful he might find in himself the father loved by Mrs Ota. He was tempted to imagine that he had known this woman’s body long ago.
    His father had soon left Chikako, Kikuji