三十六

K would not easily drop the subject of his wife and daughter. In the end he even asked me things so personal that I could not answer them. More than being troubled, I was struck with a sense of wonder. When I recalled how he had been when I myself had once raised the two of them as a topic and spoken to him, I could not help but notice the change in his manner. At last I asked him why it was that he spoke of such things only today. Then he suddenly fell silent. But I watched closely as the flesh at the corners of his closed mouth trembled and moved. He was by nature a silent man. Even in ordinary times, whenever he was about to say something, he had the habit of working his mouth vaguely before speaking. The way his lips would not readily open, as if deliberately resisting his own will, must have also held the weight of his words. Once his voice broke from his mouth, that voice carried a force twice as strong as that of an ordinary person.

When I glanced at his mouth for a moment, I immediately sensed that something was about to come out, but I had no premonition whatsoever of what preparation it might be. So I was shocked. Try to imagine me, when from his heavy lips he confessed his agonizing love for his daughter. I was as if turned to stone all at once by his magic wand. Even the working of my own mouth was gone from me.

What was I then—a mass of terror, or a mass of suffering? At any rate, I was a single mass. From head to foot I had suddenly hardened like stone or iron. I had become so rigid that even the elasticity of breathing was lost. Fortunately that state did not last long. After an instant I recovered something of a human feeling. And then I immediately thought I had made a mistake. I thought I had been forestalled.

But no judgment at all arose as to what to do with that forestalling. Probably there was not even the composure for it to arise. I stiffly endured, not moving, as the unpleasant sweat from beneath my arms soaked through my undershirt. K, as always in the meantime, opened his heavy mouth and little by little confessed his heart. I was unbearably miserable. I think that misery was probably pasted upon my face like a great advertisement, in clear letters. Even K could not have failed to notice it, but he for his part was so concentrated upon his own affair that he had no leisure to attend to my expression. His confession was carried through from beginning to end in the same tone. Heavy and dull, yet it gave me the feeling that it could not be moved by any easy means. While my heart listened to half of that confession, the other half was constantly thrown into turmoil by the thought of what to do, so that as to fine points it was almost as if nothing entered my ears; still, the very tone of the words from his mouth rang strongly in my breast. Because of this, besides the suffering I spoke of before, at times I came to feel a kind of dread. That is, the dread that the other was stronger than myself began to sprout.

When K's talk was done, I could say nothing. Whether I too should make a confession of the same meaning before him, or whether it was wiser to leave it unspoken—I was not silent out of such calculation of gain and loss. I simply could say nothing. Nor did I feel like saying anything.

At luncheon, K and I took seats facing each other. waited on by the maid, I finished a meal more tasteless than any I could remember. The two of us scarcely spoke during the meal. When the wife and daughter would return, we did not know.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”