三十七

The two of us withdrew to our respective rooms and did not meet face to face again. K was as quiet as he had been in the morning. I, too, was sunk in deep thought.

I felt that I ought naturally to have confessed my own heart to K. Yet it also struck me that the moment for doing so had already slipped past. Why had I not cut off K's words just now and launched my own counterattack? That seemed to me a grave blunder. I even thought that if only I had followed after K and spoken my mind right then and there, it might still have been better. Now that a close had been put to K's confession, for me to broach the same matter again from my side seemed, however I turned it over, utterly strange. I did not know how to overcome this unnaturalness. My head was rocked and reeled by remorse.

I wished that K would slide open the partition door again and come charging in from the other side. If you ask me, what had happened just now was no different from being taken unawares. I had had no preparation whatsoever to answer K. I harbored the secret hope of recovering what I had lost in the morning. So I would now and then lift my eyes and gaze at the door. But the door never opened, however long I waited. And K remained silent forever.

By and by my mind began to be thrown into disorder by that very silence. I wondered what K might be thinking behind the door just then, and it gnawed at me unbearably. Even in ordinary times we had often sat in just such silence, with a single partition between us, but since I was normally the sort to forget K's very presence the quieter he grew, my state at that moment must be judged as quite out of tune. And yet I could not bring myself to go and open the door from my side. Having once missed my chance, I had no choice but to wait for the moment when he would make the next move.

At last I could no longer sit still. If I forced myself to remain, I would want to burst into K's room. With no other way, I stood and stepped out onto the veranda. From there I came to the sitting room, and with no particular purpose, poured hot water from the iron kettle into a teacup and drank it down. Then I went out to the entrance. Deliberately avoiding K's room, I thus found myself out in the middle of the street. I had of course no destination in mind. I simply could not sit still. So, caring nothing for direction, I wandered aimlessly through the New Year streets. However far I walked, my head stayed full of K. Nor was I walking to shake K off. Rather, I roamed on my own accord, chewing over his image as I went.

Above all, he appeared to me a man impossible to fathom. Why had he suddenly confided such a thing to me? Why had his love swelled to the point that he could not help but confess? And where had the usual K been blown away to? All were problems hard for me to solve. I knew his strength. I knew his seriousness. Before deciding the attitude I should take, I believed there was much I needed to ask of him. At the same time, the prospect of dealing with him from then on filled me with a strange dread. Walking the town like one possessed, I kept drawing before my eyes the face of him sitting motionless in his room. And yet, from somewhere, came a voice saying that however far I walked, I could never move him. In short, he seemed to me a kind of demon. I even felt a fear that he might haunt me forever.

When I returned home, tired, his room was still silent, as if devoid of any living presence.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”