Even if it were true that she’d found out about last night, though, he’d be better off not to say anything. He couldn’t undo what he’d already done. Yes, he had lied to his wife, but it had all happened in the natural course of things, kind of like water seeking it’s own level, and there really wasn’t anything he could have done to stop it. Besides, what could he possibly say to his distraught wife that would actually make her feel better? At times like this, the thing to do was to act as though nothing were amiss, rather than to risk saying the wrong thing by trying to comfort her or cheer her up. If he responded to this outburst, she might start making a habit of such behavior, and he’d never see the end of it. Now there was a depressing thought. He’d never survive. She might be hurting, but his best bet at this point was to turn a cold shoulder. Surely she wouldn’t ever actually try to kill herself.
Rationalizing first one way, then another, the husband held his ground, but his wife’s sobbing showed no sign of abating. Though the sobs were far too deeply colored with the tones of despair to be regarded as a momentary fit, they were persistently deflected by the tough surface of the husband’s heart and failed to touch its inner core. Yet, could the husband really have been unaware of how deep his wife’s anguish had become? Was it not rather that he deliberately closed his eyes to her pain, to the blood spurting from her wounds, so as to save his own self from injury?
As the wife’s sobbing continued endlessly, on and on, the husband’s annoyance grew. What if Michiko should wake up and start crying? he scolded her in his mind. How could you respond to her needs when you’re in such a state yourself? Enough is enough already. What’s the idea, anyway—bursting out like this for no reason at all? It’s practically an act of violence, if you think about it.
He got to his feet and stomped loudly down the stairs, where he found his wife with both hands pressed to her face, leaning against the sliding doors that divided the kitchen from the dining room.
Her shoulders shook out of control with each sob, and she did not let up even when she knew he had come down.
An icy chill swept over the husband’s heart. He watched her in silence for a few moments, and then spat out venomously:
“You’re acting like some homesick housemaid just come down from the mountains—crying in the kitchen like this. Stop it! It’s stupid!”
Without waiting for a response, he turned on his heels and stomped back upstairs. The sobbing below changed to sniffles, but the sniffles still went on for quite some time before finally fading away.
By the next morning the husband was feeling sorry about how he’d treated his wife. He spoke to her at breakfast, this time in gentle tones.
“I’m sorry for the way I yelled at you last night. Please forgive me. I apologize. I think you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, and you’re tired. Isn’t that right? When you’re tired, it’s easy to let little things bother you more than they should—things that don’t mean anything at all. You have to realize, there isn’t a person on this earth who’s not unhappy. Everyone bears his own particular burden of unhappiness. That burden may not be obvious to others, but it’s always there, and even if it were obvious, no one else could really feel the unhappiness the way the person does himself. So what can you do? Basically, whatever may happen, you have to stop thinking that you’re the only one who’s unhappy. Everyone’s alone in this world, and everyone goes through life enduring his own unhappiness. That’s the way it is. You can’t be looking only at yourself. If you do that, then your own unhappiness starts to seem a lot bigger than it really is. You have to realize that there are lots of other people who are much, much more unhappy than you ever were. In fact, that’s the only way you can endure your own unhappiness. You have to go on living. No matter what happens, you have to go on living. Do you understand? I don’t want you to cry like you did last night anymore. It’s too depressing. It’s through things like this that you learn what life’s all about, little by little. You can’t let it get you down. You have to live on, strong and unflinching. You have to become invulnerable, and live a long, long life. Okay? Do you hear?”
Stringing together the kinds of phrases he’d read in books, the husband spoke as if with the wisdom of generations. They were selfish words, spoken very much for his own advantage. But they were also words that expressed his genuine feeling for his wife. His wife listened silently, nodding her head over and over, looking as meek and complaisant as a child after an outburst of tears. Seeing his wife this way brought the husband a small measure of relief. But as her husband’s words flowed over her, the wife could do nothing to stop the feeling that she was plunging deeper and deeper into a bottomless void.
“We’re eating upstairs today,” the wife said when the husband arrived home wiping perspiration from his brow. Making no response except an unimpressed snort, he ducked into the washroom to strip down to his undershorts and splash cold water over his head. Then he climbed the stairs.
“What in . . . ?” When he entered the room, he stopped short and turned around. His wife, following close behind, looked at him with a radiant sparkle in her eyes and let out a tiny giggle. She had brought up the small round table and folding chairs from the front hall and got everything ready for dinner. From the ceiling hung three cute little lanterns, red and yellow and light blue.
“Do you get it? Today’s the—”
“Oh, that’s right, it’s Bastille Day.”
This was the fourteenth of July.
Spread colorfully on the table was the kind of feast normally seen in this house only on one of their birthdays or on their wedding anniversary. A moment later the wife returned from downstairs with a bottle of ice-cold beer.
“Wow! This is great!” the husband exclaimed. But then he thought of their household finances, and his face turned sour.
“Now hold on just a minute,” he said. “If we start celebrating every time there’s a Bastille Day or an Independence Day we’ll go broke before we know it. There’s no sense in getting so carried away about foreign holidays. You should be thinking more about the long term.”
The wife smiled gently. “The long term?” she said, her tone a question.
But the first glass of cold beer quickly revived the husband’s initial cheer. He could hardly go on sulking in the face of so much fine food. With a special place set just for her, his daughter, too, had started eating amidst repeated squeals of delight. The husband felt the effects of the beer beginning to spread through his body and looked up at the evening sky beyond the sycamore tree outside the wide-open window. What a beautiful shade of blue it was!
“I’ll bet Paris is really hopping tonight,” he said. “Fireworks shooting up one after the other. Dancing everywhere.”
“I wish I could be there!”
“Nah, forget it. If you actually went, you’d be disappointed. Paris isn’t like it used to be.”
“As if you would know,” she mocked.
“The Paris of old in all its splendor doesn’t exist any more. Sure, it may look the same on the outside. But the people’s hearts have changed. The citizens of Paris are mostly no different from us, scraping along, trying to make ends meet. They limp from one day to the next