Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima Read Free Book Online

There were only three rooms on the second floor of the tiny hospital. There was a window at the end of the hall—a blank window, giving a blank view of the neighborhood.
    That odor of Lysol in the hall! Estuko loved it. When her husband dropped off into short dozes, she walked up and down the hall boldly inhaling that scent, which she preferred to the outside air. The action by which this chemical purified death and disease was to her not the action of death but the action of life. This smell, for all she could tell, was the smell of life. Like the smell of morning, it stimuated her nasal passages—this relentless, cruel, chemical body odor.
    Although the fever had been 104° for ten days, Etsuko still sat by the frame of her husband as it enfolded that fever, painfully seeking an outlet for it. Ryosuke was like a marathon runner at the end of the race: gasping for breath, his nostrils flaring. In his bed, his existence was the epitome of the human body involved in ever-racing track competition. Etsuko was his claque: “Just a little more! Just a little more!” Ryosuke’s eyes rolled upward. His fingertips clawed for the tape, but all he grasped was the edge of his blanket, warm as hay and rank with the odor of the animal that slept in it.
    The head of the hospital examined Ryosuke as he made his morning rounds and exposed his chest, alive with labored breathing. When the physician touched the fevercrammed skin, it piled up under his fingers as if about to geyser hot water. Is sickness perhaps, after all, only an acceleration of life? When the doctor applied his ivory stethoscope to Ryosuke’s chest, the yellow ivory created slightly white pressure marks; then here and there in the skin suddenly charged with blood, fine, opaque, rose-colored spots floated up.
    Etsuko asked about the spots: “What are they?”
    “Well, now,” the doctor said in a detached, yet friendly tone: “Roseola. I’ll explain it to you later.”
    When the examination was over, he led Etsuko to the door and said drily: “It’s typhoid fever. We finally got back the results of the blood tests. Where on earth did Ryosuke pick that up? He said he drank some well water while on a business trip; maybe that was it. But it’s all right. If his heart can bear it, there’s no problem. It’s a rather strange case, though, so the diagnosis was slow in coming. Today we must take steps to move him to a hospital specializing in what he has. We don’t have an isolation room here.”
    The doctor drummed with his dried-up knuckles on the wall posted with “No Smoking” signs, and in an attitude tinged with ennui waited for this woman with dark circles under her eyes—exhausted by days of nursing—to shout something, plead something: “Doctor! Please! Don’t report it; keep him here! If you move that man, sick as he is, he’ll die! Surely a man’s life matters more than the law. Doctor! Don’t just send him to a hospital for infectious diseases. See if you can have him placed in the isolation ward of a university hospital. Doctor!” He waited with educated curiosity for hackneyed appeals like these to issue from Etsuko’s mouth.
    But Etsuko said nothing.
    “You’re tired, aren’t you?” said the doctor.
    “No,” said Etsuko, in a tone some might call heroic.
    Etsuko was not afraid of catching typhoid. (This seemed to be the only reason she escaped it.) She returned to the chair beside her husband and went on with her knitting. Winter was coming, and she was knitting him a sweater. The room was cool in the morning. She slipped off one zori , then picked up that foot and rubbed the instep of the other.
    “They know what I have, don’t they?” asked Ryosuke, his voice lilting like a child’s.
    “Yes.” Etsuko got up intending to sponge his dry lips, cracked in fine fissures by the fever, with a piece of wet cotton. Instead she pressed her cheek against his. His unshaven, sick man’s face burned hers like hot beach sand.
    “It’s all