Cobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes

«I have failed!»

«Yes.»

«I have really failed!»

«But there hasn't been a single person who made it… not one.»

She spoke in an unsteady voice, but there was a certain strength in it, as if she were defending his failure. What pitiful tenderness. It would be too unfair if such tenderness were not rewarded.

«Well, that's too bad. If I had been successful in escaping, I was thinking of sending you a radio.»

«A radio?»

«I have been thinking about it for a long time.»

«Oh, no… you don't have to do that…» the woman said, flustered, as if she were making an excuse. «If I work hard at my side jobs, I'll be able to buy it myself. If I bought it in installments, the down payment would be enough…»

«Well… that's right. You could, if you bought it in installments…»

«When the water's hot, shall I wash your back?»

Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other's wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.

«I didn't understand. But life isn't something one can understand, I suppose. There are all kinds of life, and sometimes the other side of the hill looks greener. What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to. But obviously you can never know, no matter what sort of life you live. Somehow I can't help but feel it would be better to have a little more to keep busy with.»

«Shall I wash you…?»

She spoke as if she were encouraging him. It was a soft, moving voice. He slowly began to unbutton his shirt and trousers. It was as if the sand had filled his whole skin. (What was the other woman doing now? he wondered.) What had happened before yesterday seemed like ages ago.

The woman began to rub some soap on a wet cloth.

October.

During the day the traces of summer, reluctant to depart, still set the sand afire, and their bare feet could not stand it for more than five minutes at a time. But when the sun set, the crack-ridden walls of the room let in the cold night damp, and they had to get on with the work of drying out the wet ashes in the hearth. Because of the change in temperature on windless mornings and evenings, the mist rose like a muddy river.

One day he tried setting a trap to catch crows in the empty space behind the house. He named it «Hope.»

The device was exceptionally simple. It made use of the special properties of the sand. He dug a rather deep hole, and in the bottom he buried a wooden bucket. With three sticks the size of matches he propped open a cover slightly smaller than the mouth of the bucket. To each stick he tied a thin thread. The threads ran through a hole in the middle of the lid and were connected to a wire on the outside. To the end of the wire he attached a piece of dried fish as bait And the whole thing was carefully concealed with sand. From the outside the only thing visible was the bait at the bottom of a sand bowl. As soon as a crow took the bait, the sticks would slip out, the lid would fall down, the sand would slide in, and the crow would be buried alive. He had made two or three trial runs; everything worked perfectly. He could visualize the pitiful figure of the crow swallowed up by the sliding sand, without having had the time even to flap its wings.

And then he would write a letter and fasten it to the crow's leg. Of course, it was all a question of luck. In the first place, the possibility was very slight that, when he released the crow, it would fall into anyone's hands. He would never know where it would fly off to. Usually, the radius of a crow's flight was very limited. The worst risk was that the villagers would notice one crow in the flock with a piece of white paper attached to its legs and learn all about his plans. All his long-suffering patience would have been for nought.

Since he had failed in his escape, he had become extremely cautious. He adjusted himself to the life of the hole, as if it were a kind of hibernation, concentrating his efforts on making the villagers relax their vigilance. Repetition of the same patterns, they say, provides an effective form of protective coloring. If he were to melt into a life of simple repetition, there might possibly come a time when they could be quite unconscious of him.

There was another effective element in repetition. For example, the woman had devoted herself for the last two months, day in and day out, to stringing beads, concentrating so fiercely that her face seemed bloated. Her long needle seemed to dance as she picked up with its fine tip the metallic beads scattered in the bottom of a cardboard box. He estimated her savings to be around two thousand yen, enough to make a down payment on a radio in another two weeks.

There was an importance about the dancing needle that made him feel it was the center of the world. Her repetitious movements gave color to the present and a feeling of actuality. The man, not to be outdone, decided to concentrate likewise on some especially monotonous handwork. Sweeping sand from the ceiling, sifting rice, washing — such work had already become his major daily occupations. The time flew by, at least while he was at work. His invention of a small tent made of plastic to shelter them from the sand while they slept, and the device for steaming fish by burying it in hot sand — such things made time pass rather pleasantly.

Since he had come back, in order not to upset himself, he had really tried to get along without reading any newspapers. After a week, he had no longer thought about reading. After a month, he almost forgot there were such things as newspapers. Once he had seen a reproduction of an engraving called «Hell of Loneliness» and had thought it curious. In it a man was floating unsteadily in the air, his eyes wide with fright, and the space around him, far from being empty, was so filled with the semi-transparent shadows of dead persons that he could scarcely move. The dead, each with a different expression, were trying to push one another away, talking ceaselessly to the man. What was this «Hell of Loneliness»? he wondered. Perhaps they had misnamed it, he had thought then, but now he could understand it very well. Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.

And so, one bit one's nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of one's heart… one smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of one's brain… one had the shakes, unable to find satisfaction in sex alone. Breathing, walking, bowel movements, daily schedules, Sundays coming every seven days, final exams after every four months, far from quieting him, had had the effect rather of pushing him toward a new repetition of them. Soon his cigarette smoking had increased, and he had had terrible nightmares in which he was looking for a hiding place away from the eyes of people with a woman who had dirty fingernails, and when finally he noticed that he was beginning to show toxic symptoms, he suddenly awoke to the heavens governed by an extremely simple elliptic cycle, and the sand dunes ruled by the 1/8-mm. wavelengths.

Even though he felt a certain gentle contentment in the handwork which he performed daily and in the repeated battle with the sand, his reaction was not quite masochistic. He would not find it strange if such a cure really existed.

But one morning, along with the regular deliveries, he was presented with a cartoon magazine. The magazine was nothing in itself. The cover was worn and greasy with fingerprints; it must have been something they had gotten from a junkman. Yet, except for the fact that it was dirty, it was the kind of thoughtfulness the villagers were likely to display. What puzzled him was that he had rolled over in laughter at it, beating the floor and writhing as if he were having convulsions.