Quicksand by Junichirô Tanizaki Page B

than when she had been there with me.
    â€œWere you still asleep, Mitsu?”
    â€œYour phone call wakened me!”
    â€œI can leave anytime now. Won’t you come right away too?”
    â€œThen I’ll hurry up and get ready. Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?”
    â€œYou’re sure you can?”
    â€œOf course I am!”
    â€œAre you free all day today, Mitsu? It doesn’t matter if you’re home late?”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter in the least.”
    â€œThat’s how I feel too,” I said.
    I got to the station at exactly nine-thirty, but Mitsuko hadn’t come. As time passed, I grew impatient, wondering if she was just taking as long as usual at her makeup or if she had deceived me again. I thought of trying to call her from a public telephone but gave it up, for fear she might come while I was gone and then leave herself.
    It was after ten o’clock when she finally came rushing through the station gate and over to me.
    â€œHave you been waiting long, Sister?” she asked, panting for breath. “Where shall we go?”
    â€œMitsu, don’t you know some nice quiet place? I’d like to spend the whole day with no one else around.”
    â€œThen how about Nara?” she said.
    Yes, of course; it was Nara where we went on that first delightful outing together, Nara that I had to thank for my memories of the evening landscape on Mount Wakakusa. . . . How could I have forgotten a place that meant so much to us?
    â€œThat’s perfect!” I exclaimed. “Let’s go up Mount Wakakusa again!” I was truly happy at the thought of it. . . . As usual when I was deeply moved, tears welled up in my eyes. “Hurry, hurry. Let’s go!” I urged her, and my feet hardly touched the ground as we ran to a taxi.
    â€œI was thinking about it all night long, and I decided Nara would be best.”
    â€œI couldn’t sleep a wink myself last night, but I don’t know what I was thinking.”
    â€œDid your husband come back right after I left?”
    â€œIt was over an hour later.”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    â€œLet’s not talk about it—today I want to forget all that.”
    When we arrived in Nara we took a bus from the train station to the foot of Mount Wakakusa. This time it was a hazy, hot day, unlike our earlier visit, and we were streaming with perspiration by the time we had climbed all the way to the summit. After that we rested at the little tea shop at the top, and remembering how Mitsuko had rolled tangerines down the hill, we bought some mandarin oranges, which happened to be in season, and both of us rolled them down, startling the deer below into bounding away.
    â€œMitsu, aren’t you getting hungry?”
    â€œYes, but I’d like to stay up here a little longer.”
    â€œSo would I,” I said. “I’d like to stay up on the mountain forever. Let’s just have a snack.”
    For our lunch, then, we ate a couple of hard-boiled eggs, as we gazed out over the Great Buddha Hall toward Mount Ikoma.
    â€œWe picked a lot of bracken and horsetail last time, Sister,” Mitsuko said. “Weren’t they growing on the hill behind us?”
    â€œAt this time of year you won’t find any.”
    â€œBut I want to go over there again,” she said.
    We walked down to the hollow at the foot of the next hill. Few people had been there even in the spring, and now, in summer, it was utterly deserted, overgrown with rank grasses among the trees, the sort of place you would feel afraid to come to alone. But we were happy that no one else was there, and we found a hiding place among the tall, luxuriant grasses, with only the clouds in the sky to look down on us.
    â€œMitsu . . .”
    â€œSister . . .”
    â€œLet’s never part again.”
    â€œI could die here with you, Sister.”
    That was all we