二十七

I immediately picked up the hat. As I flicked off the red clay clinging to it here and there with my fingernail, I called to the teacher. "Teacher, your hat fell." "Thank you." The teacher, half-raising his body to take it, remained in that ambiguous posture—neither fully sitting up nor lying down—and asked me a strange question. "Sudden as it is, does your family happen to be quite well off?" "Not so much as to call it that." "Well, about how much? Though it's rude of me." "How much... just a little mountain land and paddy, and no money to speak of, I'd say."

This was the first time the teacher had put anything like a question to me about my family's finances. For my part, I had never yet heard anything about the teacher's own circumstances. When I first became acquainted with the teacher, I had wondered how he could afford to do nothing. Even afterward, that doubt never left my breast. But I had always held back, thinking it too blunt to bring such an overt matter before the teacher. My heart, resting its tired eyes on the color of the new leaves, by chance touched that old doubt again. "What about you, teacher? How much property do you have?" "Do I look like a man of wealth?"

The teacher ordinarily dressed rather plainly. Besides, his household was small. Consequently his residence was by no means large. Yet even to my eyes, which had never stepped inside his private life, it was clear that his living was materially abundant. In short, the teacher's life, if not luxurious, was not a meager, pinched, inflexible thing either. "I should say so," I said. "Well, I have about that much money, but I'm certainly no man of property. If I were, I'd build a bigger house."

Just then the teacher sat up and, crossing his legs on the wooden veranda, after saying this, began to trace something like a circle on the ground with the tip of his bamboo cane. When that was done, he next stuck the cane straight down as if to pierce it into the earth. "Even so, I was once a man of property, you know."

The teacher's words were half soliloquy. Having failed to follow up at once, I fell silent. "I was once a man of property, you see, my friend," the teacher corrected himself, then looked at my face and smiled. I still gave no answer. Rather, I was too awkward to answer. Then the teacher shifted the subject again. "How has your father's illness been since?"

I had heard nothing of my father's illness since the New Year. The brief letters that came each month with the money order from home were in my father's familiar hand as always, but complaints of illness were scarcely to be found among them. Moreover the script was steady. The tremor seen in such patients had not at all disturbed the flow of his brush. "He says nothing either way, but he must be better." "If he's better, that's well—but the ailment is what it is, you know." "Still no good, then? But he'll hold on for a while, surely. He says nothing of it." "I see."

I had listened to the teacher asking about my family's property and inquiring after my father's illness as ordinary conversation—ordinary talk, where whatever rose in the breast was spoken just as it came. Yet beneath the teacher's words lay a great meaning binding the two together. Having no experience of the teacher's own, I of course could not have noticed it.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”