Cobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes

He wanted lighter air! At least fresh air, unmixed with his own breath. How wonderful it would be if once a day, even for a half hour, he could climb up the cliff and look out over the sea. He should be allowed to do that much. Their check on him was too strict for him to escape, and then too it would seem to be a very reasonable request, considering the faithful work he had performed for them over more than three months. Even a prisoner in confinement had the right to a period of exercise.

«I really can't stand it! If I keep on like this, sticking my nose in the sand every day in the year, I'll turn into a human pickle! I wonder if I could get them to let me walk around once in a while?»

The woman kept her mouth closed as if annoyed. She looked like someone who does not know what to do with a peevish child who has lost his candy.

«I won't let them say I can't!» Suddenly the man became angry. He even mentioned the rope ladder, so hard for him to talk about because of the loathsome memories. «The other day, when I was running away, I saw it with my own eyes. Some houses in this row actually had rope ladders hanging down to them.»

«Yes… but…» she said timidly as if apologizing, «most of those people have been living there for generations.»

«Well, do you mean that there's no hope for us?»

The woman bent her head with resignation, like a dejected dog. Even if he swallowed the potassium cyanide before her very eyes, she would probably let him go through with it without saying a word.

«All right. I'll try to negotiate directly with them.»

However, in his heart he did not expect that such negotiations would be successful. He was quite used to being disappointed. And so, when the old man at once brought back an answer with the second gang of basket bolsters, he was surprised and bewildered.

But his surprise was unimportant compared with the contents of the answer.

«Well, let's see…» the old man said slowly and falteringly, speaking as if he were arranging his old papers in his head. «It's, ah… not… ah… absolutely impossible to arrange… Well, this is just an example, but if the two of you came out front… with all of us watching you… and if you'd go to it… and let us see… Well, what you want is reasonable enough, so we've all decided… uh… that it's all right…»

«What do you mean, let you see?»

«Well… uh… the two of you… doing it together… that's what we mean.»

Around him the gang of basket carriers suddenly broke out in a mad laughing. The man stood numbly, as if someone were strangling him, but slowly he began to understand exactly what they meant. And he began to understand that he understood. Once he had comprehended, their proposal didn't seem particularly surprising.

The beam of a flashlight skimmed by his feet like some golden bird. As if it were a sign, seven or eight more shafts fused into a dish of light and began to creep around the bottom of the hole. Overpowered by the burning, resinous ardor of the men at the top of the cliff he was almost caught up in their madness before he could resist.

Slowly he turned toward the woman. She had been wielding her shovel there until a moment ago, and now she had vanished. Had she fled into the house? He looked in at the door and called to her.

«What shall we do?»

The woman's muffled voice came from directly behind the wall. «Let them be!»

«But I want to get out I really do…»

«But how can you…»

«You mustn't take it so seriously.»

«Have you gone out of your mind?» the woman suddenly gasped. «You must have. You've left your senses. I couldn't do a thing like that. I'm not sex-mad.»

Was it really true? he wondered. Had he gone out of his mind? He winced from the woman's vehemence, but inside him spread a kind of perverse blankness. He had been trampled this much… what difference could appearances make now? If there was something wrong from the standpoint of the one who was being watched, then there was just as much wrong from that of the ones who were watching. There was no need to distinguish between watcher and watched. There might still be some difference between them, but this little ceremony would be enough to make it vanish. And just think what he could get as a prize… ground on which he could walk where he wished. He wanted to take a deep breath with his face above the surface of this stagnant water!

Sensing where the woman was, he suddenly threw his whole body upon her. Her cries and the sound of the two of them, entangled, falling against the sand wall, roused an animal-like excitement and frenzy at the top of the cliff. Whistling, clapping… obscene, wordless screams… The number of watchers had grown and now included some young women among the men. And the number of flashlights whose light flooded over the doorway had increased at least three times.

He had been successful, perhaps because he had taken her by surprise. Somehow he was able to drag her outside, holding her by the collar. She was a dead, baglike weight. The lights, in a tight semicircle around three sides of the hole, were like the bonfires of some nocturnal festival. Although it was not really that hot, perspiration like a layer of flayed skin poured from his armpits, and his hair was soaked as if he had poured water over it. The cries of the onlookers were like compressed reverberations, filling the sky over his head with great black wings. He felt as if the wings were his own. He could feel the breathless villagers looking down from the top of the cliff, so clearly they could have been himself. They were a part of him, their viscid, drooling saliva was his own desire. In his mind he was the executioner's representative rather than the victim.

The string of her trousers was unexpectedly troublesome. It was dark, and his trembling fingers seemed twice as clumsy as-usual. When at last he had torn them off, he grabbed her buttocks in his two hands and shifted his hips under her, but at that instant she twisted her body and wrenched away. He churned through the sand as he tried to catch her, but again he was pushed back with a steel-like resistance. He grabbed her violently, entreating: «Please! Please! I can't really do it anyway… just pretend…»

However, there was no need to grasp at her any longer. She had already lost all desire to escape. He heard a noise of cloth tearing, and at the same instant he was struck a terrible blow in the belly by the point of her shoulder, which bore the weight and anger of her whole body. He simply grasped his knees and bent in two. The woman, leaning over him, struck his face again and again with her fists. At first her movements seemed slow, but each blow, delivered as though she were pounding salt, carried weight. Blood gushed from his nose. Sand clung to the blood; his face was a lump of earth.

The excitement at the top of the cliff rapidly folded like an umbrella with broken ribs. Although they tried to join their voices of discontent and laughter and urging into one, they were already out of step and ragged. The obscene and drunken boos and hisses did nothing to arouse enthusiasm. Someone threw something, but he was at once reproved by someone else. The end was as abrupt as the beginning. Cries urging the men back to work trailed in the distance, and the line of lights disappeared as if they had been drawn in. All that remained was the dark north wind, blowing away the last traces of excitement.

But the man, beaten and covered with sand, vaguely thought that everything, after all, had gone as it was written it should. The idea was in a corner ofhis consciousness, like a sodden undergarment, where only the beating of his heart was painfully clear. The woman's arms, hot as fire, were under his armpits, and the odor of her body was a thorn piercing his nose. He abandoned himself to her hands as if he were a smooth, flat stone in a river bed. It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body.