Cobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes

A second sand slide began.

The woman stood up and took down a broom from the wall. «You can't work! You promised, didn't you?» «No, no. It's for the mattresses…» «The mattresses?»

«If you don't get some sleep pretty soon…» «If I get sleepy, I'll take care of them myself.»

He felt an earth-shaking shock and stood rooted to the ground. For a moment everything seemed misty with sand that fell from the ceiling. The consequences of having stopped the shoveling were at last apparent. The sand, having no way out, was bearing down. The joints of the beams and uprights groaned in agony. But the woman, staring fixedly at an inner lintel, did not appear particularly concerned. The pressure still seemed to be only around the base of the house.

«Damn them! Do they really intend going on like this forever?»

His racing heart! It was hopping about like a frightened rabbit, as if unable to stay in its own hole. It seemed ready to crawl in anywhere — his mouth, his ears, or even into his bowel. His spittle had become much more viscid. And the dryness in his throat was as bad. Perhaps it was because his thirst had not been adequately slaked by the cheap _sake_. As soon as the alcohol was dissipated, it would flare up again, and the flames would reduce him to ashes.

«They must feel fine… doing such things. They don't have the brains of a mouse. Just what would they do if I died?»

The woman raised her face as if to say something but, suddenly thinking better of it, maintained her unbroken silence. She apparently did not think it worthwhile to answer at all.

All right. If there was to be only one inevitable ending anyway, why didn't he try whatever he could?

He gulped down another mouthful from the bottle of _sake_ and, bracing himself, hurried outside. He reeled back as if molten lead had struck his eyes. The sand, which spilled over into the hollows left by his feet, eddied in whirlpools. Over there was surely the place he had attacked the woman and tied her up the night before. The shovel must surely be buried nearby. The sand slide had mostly stopped for a while, but even so, on the cliff toward the sea, the sand continued its ceaseless flow. From time to time, blown by the wind, it would drop from the face of the cliff, fluttering like a piece of cloth. Taking care not to start a slide, he fished around with the toes of one foot.

Although he probed deeply, his foot met no resistance at all. The direct rays of the sun soon became unbearable. The pupils of his eyes were compressed to pin points, and his belly began to throb like a jellyfish. A violent pain pierced his forehead. He must not lose any more perspiration. This was the limit. He wondered what he could have done with the shovel. He had taken it out with the intention of using it as a weapon; that was certain. So it must be around. Peering closely at the surface of the ground, he was suddenly aware that at one point the sand was standing out in a ridge in the form of the shovel.

He began to spit but hastily stopped himself. He must retain in his body even the slightest bit of moisture. He separated the spittle from the sand between his teeth and his lips and with the end of his finger scraped off only the portion that remained clinging to his teeth.

The woman, facing the other way in a corner of the room, was doing something with the front of her kimono. Perhaps she was unloosening her waistband or brushing off the sand which had accumulated. He grasped the shovel halfway down the handle and brought it up to the level of his shoulders. Aiming at the wall that surrounded the earthen floor, near the doorway, he heaved to with the cutting edge.

The woman cried out behind him. He lunged with the shovel, bearing on it with all his weight. Disappointingly, it passed through the wall boards. They had the resistance of a wet cracker. Washed by the sand, they had seemed quite new from the outside, but it was apparent they had already begun to disintegrate.

«What are you doing?»

«I'm stripping this stuff off to make some material for a ladder.»

He experimented again at another spot. It was the same. Apparently the woman had been right when she said that the sand rotted the wood. If the part of the wall that was most exposed to the sun was like this, he could imagine what the rest would be like. It was remarkable that such a flabby house could be standing at all. It was bent and warped as if paralyzed on one side. Maybe such flimsy structures were dynamically possible, since they seemed to be making houses out of plastic and paper these days, but… If that was the way it was with the boards, then he would try the cross-beams.

«You can't do that! Stop! Please!»

«After all, we're going to be crushed by the sand anyway.»

Without paying any attention, he poised his arm to strike, but the woman, screaming, rushed violently at him. He put out his elbow and twisted his body in an effort to ward her off. But he had miscalculated, and instead of the woman he himself was swung around. Instantly he tried to counter, but she held on as if chained to the shovel. He did not understand. At least he could not be defeated by force. They rolled over two or three times, threshing about on the earthen floor, and for a brief moment he thought he had pinned her down, but with the handle of the shovel as a shield she deftly flipped him over. Something was wrong with him; maybe it was the _sake_ he had drunk. Anyway, he no longer cared that his opponent was a woman. He jabbed his bended knee into her stomach.

The woman cried out, and suddenly her strength ebbed. At once he rolled over on her and held her down. Her breasts were bare, and his hands slipped on skin that was slippery with sweat.

Suddenly the two of them froze, as in a movie when the projector breaks down. It was a petrified moment that would go on and on, if one of them did not do something. He could sense vividly the structure of her breasts outlined against his stomach, and his penis seemed like a living thing completely independent of him. He held his breath. With a slight turn of his body the scramble for the shovel would turn into something very different.

The woman's gorge rose as she tried to swallow the saliva in her mouth. His penis received this as a signal to stir, but she interrupted in a husky voice.

«City women are all pretty, aren't they?»

«City women?» He was suddenly ashamed. The fever in his swollen member was abating. They seemed to have skirted the danger with good grace. He had not realized that soap opera could survive even in the midst of sand.

Yet the average woman was firmly convinced, it seemed, that she could not make a man recognize her worth unless every time she opened her legs she did so as if it were a scene in a soap opera. But this very pathetic and innocent illusion in fact made women the victims of a one-sided, spiritual rape.

With his other woman, he had decided he would always use a condom. Even now he was not convinced that he had been completely cured of the venereal disease he had once had. The results of the tests always came out negative, but after urinating his urethra would suddenly begin to hurt; and when he checked a sample in a test tube, there would be, just as he had feared, something floating around in it, something resembling a piece of waste thread. The doctor had diagnosed it as a nervous disturbance, but he could not get rid of the suspicion that it was still the same old trouble.

«Well, a rubber suits us pretty well, doesn't it?» Her small jaws and lips were covered with a thin skin, through which the blood seemed to be visible. She spoke with a certain calculated spite: «Between us it's like buying at a department store, isn't it? If you don't like it, you can take it back any time. You make your mind up, looking at something wrapped up in plastic — you can look without breaking the seal. You wonder what's inside. You wonder if you can trust it. You wonder if you won't be sorry later if you buy the wrong thing now.»