Free Masks by Fumiko Enchi Page A

lamp.
    Claret-colored light filtered through the lampshade, and in it, sitting up in bed in her red-striped nightdress, she seemed as thin and frail as a girl.
    “Yasuko.” From beyond the heavy sliding doors, whose silver trim was black with tarnish, a voice called out. The adjoining room was Mieko’s bedroom. “You had a nightmare, didn’t you? I heard you. I was lying here half-asleep, and I thought I called your name and went to comfort you—but the next thing I knew, I was here, still in bed.” Her voice was drowsily abstracted.
    “I was so scared, Mother.” Yasuko crept over to the doors separating the two rooms and slid one partway open. Beyond it was a large Japanese-style room with an antique six-panel screen set facing the side doors to keep out the draft. A silver water pitcher and a lacquered clothes tray shone dimly by Mieko’s pillow in the yellow light from a lamp made of exquisitely tinted Italian glass.
    Mieko was sitting up in bed, her back to the deeply colored light. The sight of Yasuko coming toward her, her shoulders hunched with cold, seemed to awaken Mieko’s awareness of the shrill north wind outdoors and to deepen her sense of chill. “Goodness, Yasuko, haven’t you got a robe on? Come, get in here with me.” She made the invitation naturally, with one arm casually folding back her blue satin feather quilt.
    Whether from cold or from lingering fear of her recent nightmare, Yasuko trembled like a frightened kitten as she snuggled under the counterpane and sank into the soft mattress. Breathing heavily, she looked up at Mieko and said: “Mother, I saw Akio’s face just now—his face after they dug him up from the snow.” She lay encircled in Mieko’s arms, her chest heaving so that it brushed with each sharp intake of breath against the round swelling of Mieko’s breasts.
    “Ah, that face. That wasn’t really his face anymore, I know…yet there are times when it comes and haunts me, too. If that’s what your dream was about, then I want to hear it. Tell me—what was the face like?” Gently, as if it were a little child that she held in her arms, Mieko patted and brushed back the cold sweat-soaked strands of hair along Yasuko’s brow. At the same time her legs began a smooth, rotary motion like that of paddle blades, softly stroking and enfolding Yasuko’s curled-up legs. Slowly, as the sweet smell of Mieko’s body drifted warmly about her,fragrant as summer flowers, the look on Yasuko’s face became as tender and childlike as that of a contented babe at its mother’s breast.
    “This time was by far the worst. Do you remember, right after the accident, how I went up with the search party? They gave each of us a long steel rod to poke down in the snow and hunt for buried objects with. It was frightening—I kept thinking, ‘What if Akio is down there and I stab him with this by mistake?’—but every time I thrust down, when I pulled up the rod again, there in the snow would be a tiny deep hole of a blue that was so pure, so clear, so beautiful, it took my breath away. My arms have never forgotten that feeling of thrusting down…but tonight in my dream I
did
stab Akio with that rod: I stabbed his dead face straight in the eye.”
    “Yasuko, no!”
    “Why, Mother? Why should I have dreamed such a horrible thing?” Yasuko buried her face in the comforting circle of Mieko’s arms and shuddered.
    “Akio’s face—was it the way it was then, one cheek gouged out, the bones showing?”
    Whether it had happened when he was crushed and swept along in the avalanche, or whether it was a result of the unnatural position in which his body had lain for five long months beneath the snow, no one knew; but while one side of Akio’s face had been preserved intact like a wood carving, the flesh on the other side had been entirely torn away. Beneath the left cheekbone his upper jaw had been fully exposed, revealing a line of white teeth.
    Her face still buried in Mieko’s relaxed,