Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

“Leggo — you’ll break a finger!” I yelled.

Flying to the right, careening to the left, we dashed furiously along. A shadow crossed the headlight beams. I slammed on the brakes and broke into a sweat as a stray dog, one hind leg missing from the knee down, slunk off deliberately into the grass with its head down. A white beard and a sagging back gave the animal a decrepit appearance, but he was a wily old rascal, boss of the seven or eight strays whose territory this was.

“So it was a dog’s footprints.” The insect dealer stiffened, and added grimly, “Bloodthirsty-looking creature.”

I turned off the engine. Low growls crawled over the ground, and a panting sound like the chafing of pieces of wood.

“Hear it?” I said.

“Are there more of them?”

“Seven or eight, as far as I can tell. The one you just saw is their leader.”

“Dogs seldom attack, I’ve heard,” he said hopefully. “They say if they’re not expressly trained to kill, they won’t.”

“These would. They don’t trust people.”

“They know you, though, don’t they, Captain?”

“Well, yes. ”

This time I caught a touch of sycophancy in his use of the word. Still, it was better than being laughed at. I switched the ignition back on, drove straight under the bypass, and pulled up as close as I could to the cliff ahead. Insects attracted by the headlights crashed into the windshield.

A mountain of garbage and trash reached nearly halfway up the cliff: besides the usual assortment of kitchen refuse, there were nylon stockings wound around a bicycle seat; homemade pickles, complete with pickling crock; a fish head, its mouth the socket for a broken light bulb; an old refrigerator, now a dog coffin; an empty Coke bottle crowned with an old shoe that had melted into gum; and a TV tube stuffed with an insect’s nest that looked exactly like cotton candy.

“Great — a garbage dump. Just great.”

“Camouflage,” I explained. “I’ll bet you can’t tell where the entrance is.”

“I’ll bet I can. Inside the body of that old junk heap on top of the pile.”

His powers of observation were impressive. I had to admit that if you looked carefully you could see a rope hanging down inside the rusty, abandoned car. But I had hardly expected my camouflage to be seen through so quickly. Even inside the car, it would have taken someone of enormous experience and insight to find anything suspicious in the smell of fresh machine oil on the door handle and hinges.

“You have good instincts.”

“Not bad. How the heck did you collect all this junk?”

“Easy. I just posted a sign on the road overhead reading ‘Private Property, No Littering.’ ”

“Ingenious. But doesn’t it make a huge racket when you climb up to grab onto the rope?”

“It’s all fastened down.”

“Let’s go.” The insect dealer slapped his hands on his knees and bounded out of the jeep. He spread his legs apart, placed his clasped hands behind his head, and began to do warming-up exercises, twisting right and left. He was more agile than I’d expected, and his oversize head was not terribly conspicuous. There probably were athletes of his build, I thought. “I’m ready for an adventure,” he said.

“Look in back under the canvas and you’ll find a box with rubber boots and cotton gloves inside.”

“I can see where you’d need the boots. Just the thought of worms and centipedes crawling in my socks gives me the creeps.”

As if they’d been waiting for him to go around in back of the jeep, several of the dogs began howling. They were apparently roving around in the shadows. Stray dogs are like volleyball players in the split-second timing with which they switch from defense to attack. Forcing open the canvas top with his whole body, the insect dealer dived inside.

“I told you once I don’t like barking dogs. And ones that bite are worse.”

“Don’t worry — they’re used to me.”

The flashlight beam served to increase the dogs’ frenzy: some jumped up and clawed the jeep, others started to dig in the ground for no reason, still others began to mate. After letting the insect dealer get a little scared, I decided to do my howling imitation. For some reason, that always dispirits them and leaves them docile. I leaned partway out the half-open window and let loose three long howls into the night sky. One dog nearby howled an accompaniment in a shrill, nasal voice, while another gave a plangent shriek. The insect dealer burst out laughing, his body rocking with mirth. I could certainly understand why he was laughing, and yet for someone who’d just been rescued, he seemed remarkably indiscreet.

“I had a dream like this once, when was it.?” He changed into a pair of rubber boots, bit off the string joining a brand-new pair of work gloves, and climbed over the backrest into the front seat. “Shall I go first? Two at a time probably wouldn’t work.”

“You’re probably right, although I’ve never tried it.”

“Then let me go first. I can’t think of anything worse than hanging from a rope, with a pack of hounds snapping at my rear end. It’s true, you know — round objects activate a dog’s hunting instincts. Must be the resemblance to animals seen from behind.” One foot on the running board, eyes casting about in the dark, he said, “Howl again to distract them, will you?”

I felt a sudden, inexplicable hesitation. Acquiring crew members was a matter of the deepest urgency, I knew all too well. But I had grown used to living in solitude. Logically I was prepared to welcome the insect dealer aboard, but emotionally I was terrified. I suspected that everything today had happened too fast. Certainly there had been times, after coming back from an outing, when the moment I inserted the key in the padlock I was assailed by an unbearable loneliness. But that never amounted to more than a fleeting spell of dizziness. As soon as I was settled in the hold, I would return to a mood of such utter tranquillity that the concept of loneliness lost all meaning. In the words of the insect dealer — or rather of something he had parroted out of the newspaper — I had perhaps fallen prey to the confusion of symbol and reality, to the longing for a safe place to hide.

“Hurry up and do your howl again,” the insect dealer urged. “I’m hungry.”

“First don’t you think we’d better work out a strategy?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just in case they did beat us here, what are we going to do?”

“You’re worrying about nothing. That’s impossible, isn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

I wasn’t in fact seriously expecting to find them there, but there were one or two signs that could have indicated an invasion during my absence. For example, that arrangement of chair legs and storage drums which I always inspected when I came back from my outings was noticeably out of order. Probably it meant nothing, considering the heavy downpour we had just had. Some caving in of the ground was only to be expected. It was equally possible that a cat had knocked the storage drum aside, using it as footing to escape the dogs.

A series of large trailer trucks went by overhead. When they were gone, the insect dealer said in a fed-up tone of voice, “All right, then, you want to bet? I say they’re not here. Are you willing to bet me they are?”

“How much?”

“The key to the jeep.”

Ignoring this, I said, “Actually I was talking about something different — a more general question of frame of mind. Having you here is naturally going to change the way I deal with unlawful occupation, compared to before. ”

“If it’s general frames of mind you’re talking about, how about cleaning up your front doorstep for starters?” He gave a laugh edged in irony. “Between your garbage dump and your pack of wild dogs, I’d say you don’t have too much to worry about. Nobody’s going to break in here. This place stinks to high heaven. Just trying to breathe gives me a headache.”