The Wild Geese by Ogai Mori

Author:Ogai Mori
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9784805308844
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

SUEZO had been at home reading his newspaper and smoking when Otsune went out shopping after clearing away the breakfast things, but when she returned, he was no longer there. This disappointed her, for on entering the house she had thought feverishly that if he were there, she would rush against him, and even though she couldn't speak to him, she would hold him somehow or other and strike with whatever words came into her mind.

But she had lunch to prepare and autumn kimonos to finish for the children. She mechanically went about these daily tasks, and eventually her wish to attack her husband subsided. How often she had challenged him violently! She was even prepared to crack her head against a stone wall if necessary, but when she attacked him, instead of the stone wall of resistance she expected, she found, to her surprise, a curtain that destroyed her energy. She would listen to her husband's sly reasoning stated with confidence, and then she would lose her resolution in spite of feeling that she hadn't been persuaded by him in the least. If she attacked him at such a time, she couldn't be certain that her first try would be successful.

She ate lunch with her children, settled a quarrel between them, sewed their clothes, prepared supper, gave them a bath, took one herself, and ate her dinner next to the burning mosquito smudge. After they had eaten, the children played themselves into tiredness outdoors. The maid finished her duties in the kitchen, laid out the beds, each in its appointed place, and hung the mosquito net. Otsune sent the children in to wash their hands and then to bed, spread a fly net over her husband's supper on his small table, and put a kettle on the fire in the charcoal brazier in the room next to the bedroom. This was the procedure she followed when Suezo did not return at night.

She had done all these tasks mechanically, and then taking a fan, got under the net and sat on her bed. Suddenly she imagined Suezo in the house of the woman. “I can't sit here,” she said to herself. “But what can I do?”

Somehow at the center of her confusion she felt that she ought to walk to Muenzaka. Once when she had bought some beancakes for the children, she had passed the house which Suezo had described as next to the sewing teacher's. She could identify it by its lattice door, the house that woman lived in. All she wanted was to see it. Would there be a light? Would she hear them whispering? If only she could know just that much! But no, she couldn't. In order to get out of her own house she would have to pass the maid's room along the corridor, and at this time of the year the paper sliding doors were removed. She was certain the maid was awake sewing.

“Where you going so late?” Matsu would ask her.

And what could she answer? She might say: “I'm just running out to buy something.

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