Cobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes

«It's pointless. You might as well give up. It's all so pointless. The poison'll soon be in your blood.»

She still said nothing. The beads which she had already strung swung feebly back and forth between her fingers, shining like drops of molasses. A slight shaking rose through his body.

«Yes, indeed. Soon it'll be too late. We'll look one day and find that the villagers have disappeared to a man and that we're the only ones left. I know it… it's true. This is going to happen soon for sure. It'll already be too late by the time we realize we've been betrayed. What we've done for them up till now will be just a joke to them.»

The woman's eyes were fixed on the beads which she held in her hands. She shook her head weakly.

«They couldn't do that. It's not anybody can make a living once he gets out of here.»

«It all comes to the same thing then, doesn't it? Anyone who stays here is not living much of a life either.»

«But there is the sand…»

«The sand?» The man clamped his teeth together, rolling his head. «What good is sand? Outside of giving you a hard time it doesn't bring in a penny.» «Yes, it does. They sell it.» «You sell it? Who do you sell such stuff to?»

«Well, to construction companies and places like that. They mix it with concrete…»

«Don't joke! It would be a fine mess if you mixed this sand with cement — it's got too much salt in it. In the first place, it's probably against the law or at least against construction regulations…»

«Of course, they sell it secretly. They cut the hauling charges in half too…»

«That's too absurd! Even if half price were free, that won't make it right when buildings and dams start to fall to pieces, will it?»

The woman suddenly interrupted him with accusing eyes. She spoke coldly, looking at his chest, and her attitude was completely different.

«Why should we worry what happens to others?»

He was stunned. The change was complete, as if a mask had dropped over her face. It seemed to be the face of the village, bared to him through her. Until then the village was supposed to be on the side of the executioner. Or maybe they were mindless man-eating plants, or avaricious sea anemones, and he was supposed to be a pitiful victim who happened to be in their clutches. But from the standpoint of the villagers, they themselves were the ones who had been abandoned. Naturally there was no reason why they should be under obligation to the outside world. So if it were he who caused injury, their fangs should accordingly be bared to him. It had never occurred to him to think of his relationship with the village in that light. It was natural that they should be confused and upset. But even if that were the case, and he conceded the point, it would be like throwing away his own justification.

«Well, maybe you don't have to worry about other people,» he said, trying desperately to reestablish his position, «but someone is ultimately getting a lot of money out of this sneaky business, isn't he? You don't have to lend your support to people like that…»

«Oh, no. Buying and selling the sand is done by the union.»

«I see. But even so, with the amount of investments or stock involved…»

«Anybody who was rich enough to have boats or anything got out of here a long time ago. You and I have been treated very well… Really, they weren't unfair to us. If you think I'm lying, get them to show you their records, and you'll see right away…»

The man stood rooted where he was in a vague confusion and malaise. For some reason he felt terribly downhearted. His military map, on which enemy and friendly forces were supposed to be clearly defined, was blurred with unknowns of intermediate colors like indeterminate blobs of ink. When he thought about it, he realized there was no need to get so upset over such an insignificant thing as a cartoon book. There was no one anywhere around who would have cared whether he laughed stupidly or not. His throat tightened, and he began to mutter disconnectedly.

«Well, yes… Yes, of course. It's true about other people's business…»

Then words which he did not expect came by themselves to his lips.

«Let's buy a pot with a plant in it sometime, shall we?» He was astonished himself, but the woman's expression was even more puzzled, and so he could not back down. «It's so dreary not to have anything to rest your eyes on…»

She answered in an uneasy voice: «Shall we have a pine?»

«A pine? I don't like pines. Anything would be better than that — even weeds. There's quite a bit of grass growing out toward the promontory. What do you call that?»

«It's a kind of wheat or dune grass, I suppose. But a tree would be better, wouldn't it?»

«If we get a tree, let's get a maple or a paulownia, with thin branches and large leaves… something with leaves that will flutter in the wind.»

Ones that flutter… clusters of leaves, twisting and fluttering, trying in vain to escape from their branch… His breath, unrelated to his feeling, sounded shallow. Somehow he felt he was about to break out in tears. Quickly he bent down where the beads had spilled on the earthen floor and began to feel around over the surface of the sand with an awkward groping gesture.

The woman stood up hastily.

«Let it go. I'll do it myself. It'll be easy if I use a sieve.»

One day, as he stood urinating and gazing at the grayish moon, poised on the edge of the hole as if it wanted to be held in his arms, he was suddenly seized with a terrible chill. Had he caught a cold? he wondered. No, this chill seemed to be a different kind. Many times he had experienced the sort of chill that comes just before a fever, but this was something else. He had no gooseflesh, no sense of the pricking of the air. It was the marrow of his bones rather than the surface of his skin that was trembling. And it was like ripples of water, spreading in slowly widening circles out from the center. A dull and ceaseless ache echoed from bone to bone. It was as if a rusty tin can, clattering along in the wind, had gone through his body.

As he stood there, trembling, looking at the moon, a series of associated ideas occurred to him. The surface of the moon was like a grainy, powder-covered scar… cheap, dried-out soap… a rusty aluminum lunchbox. Then, as it came into focus, it assumed an unexpected form: a white skull — the universal symbol for poison… white, powder-covered tablets at the bottom of his insect bottle… an amazing resemblance between the texture of the moon's surface and that of the efflorescent tablets of potassium cyanide. He wondered if the bottle were still hidden under the ledge that ran around the earthen floor, near the entrance, where he had left it.

His heart began to jump irregularly, like a broken ping-pong ball. Why did he have to think up such sinister things?… A pretty sad association of ideas. And even if he hadn't, the October wind carried an oppressive echo of regret, its reedy voice sounding through empty, seedless husks. As he looked up at the rim of the hole, faintly limned in the moonlight, he mused that this searing feeling of his was perhaps jealousy. Maybe it was a jealousy of all things that presented a form outside the hole: streets, trolley cars, traffic signals at intersections, advertisements on telephone poles, the corpse of a cat, the drugstore where they sold cigarettes. Just as the sand nibbled away at the insides of the wooden walls and the uprights, so his jealousy was gnawing holes in him, making him like an empty pot on a stove. But the temperature of an empty pot rises quickly. And it might happen that soon, unable to stand the heat any longer, he would give up. First came the problem of weathering this moment, before he could talk about hope.