Morning Mist 289
“That was a mistake. I shall be home at five-seven.”
“Yes.”
Briskly and quite without concern, the wife put away the shoe horn and stepped into a pair of clogs. As if to follow him out or perhaps to chase him out, she went to the door, took a broom, and turned the corner toward the kitchen. She wasted neither time nor ceremony. The walk inside and outside the gate was to be swept.
The footsteps of X, who must by then have gone some distance, came nearer again.
“A little while ago—”
“Yes.”
“I said five-seven. But today it will be five-seventeen after all.”
“Yes. I see.”
Shifting the heavy briefcase to a hand constantly exposed to the ravages of chalk, X set off at his usual pace. The sound of the broom had not stopped.
My description of this ritual from the distant past, repeated each morning when X set off for work, need not end here. Indeed the retreating figure suggests that he may be back; but I shall eliminate the repetitions.
One knows that the wife’s answers were not an expression of that drying up of love one so often sees. Quite the reverse: to shore up his feelings of security and to speed his decision, she had to make her answers as unvarying as possible.
It had taken her some time to hit upon the dry ‘yes’. If the answer was even a little complicated—‘I understand’, or ‘Is that so?’—or if it was different from the answer of the day before, she would know the sorrow—she had known it more than once—of troubling his decision. One day he had come all the way back from Shibuya to inform her of a change in his schedule.
He was under no obligation to specify the time of his return. No complications in his family life required it.
I myself have been working for nearly ten years now; and
