CHAPTER 54
The doctor had appeared in the sickroom and was giving my father another enema in an attempt to ease his discomfort. The nurse, who had stayed up with him all night, was asleep in another room. Unused to such scenes, my brother was standing there looking unnerved. “Lend us a hand here,” he said when he saw me, and sat down again. I took his place by the bedside, helping out by holding the piece of oiled paper under my father’s buttocks.
My father began to look a little more comfortable. The doctor stayed with him for about half an hour and checked the results of the enema, then left, saying he’d be back. As he was on his way out, he made a point of telling us we should call him at any time if something untoward occurred.
Even though something seemed likely to happen at any moment, I left the fraught atmosphere of the sickroom to make another attempt to read Sensei’s letter. But I was quite unable to compose myself and give the words my attention. As soon as I was settled at my desk, I fully expected my brother to call out for me again, and my hand holding the letter shook with fear that this time it really would be the end.
I flipped abstractedly through the pages, my eyes taking in the careful script that filled the little squares of the manuscript paper but completely unable to concentrate enough to read it. I could barely even skim it for a general sense of what was written.
I went through page after page until I reached the last, then began to fold them up to leave on the desk. As I did so, a couple of lines near the close of the letter caught my eye.
“When this letter reaches your hands, I will no longer be in this world. I will be long dead.”
I caught my breath. My heart, until that moment agitated and distracted, instantly froze. I ran my eyes hastily back through the letter from the end, picking up a sentence here or there on each page. My eyes attempted to pierce the flickering words passing in front of them, in a desperate attempt to gain an understanding. All I wanted was reassurance that Sensei was safe. His past, that vague past that he had promised to explain, was completely beside the point in my present state of urgent need.
At length, having run through the letter backward, I gave up and folded the pages, infuriated by this long letter that refused to give me the information I sought.
I returned to the doorway of the sickroom, to check on my father’s condition. All was unusually quiet around him. I beckoned to my mother, who was sitting there looking faint from weariness, and asked how he was. “He seems unchanged for the moment,” she replied.
I lowered my head to his face and asked, “How are you? Was the enema any help?”
My father nodded. “Thanks,” he said in a clear voice. His mind seemed surprisingly lucid.
Retreating to my room once more, I checked the clock against the train timetable. Suddenly I stood, tightened my kimono belt, and thrust Sensei’s letter into my sleeve. I went out through the backdoor. Frantically, I ran to the doctor’s house—I had to ask him to tell me plainly whether my father would survive a few more days, to beg him to use injections or some means to keep him alive a little longer.
Unfortunately, the doctor was out. I had neither the time nor the patience to await his return. I climbed into a rickshaw and hurried on to the station.
Once there, I penciled a letter to my mother and brother, holding the page against the station wall. It was very brief, but I judged it was better than simply running off without apology or explanation, so I gave it to the rickshaw man and asked him to hurry and deliver it. Then, with the vigor of decision, I leaped onto the Tokyo-bound train.
Seated in the thundering third-class carriage, I retrieved Sensei’s letter from my sleeve and at last read it from beginning to end.