Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

She was at the sink, washing coffee cups. Below her short skirt, her slim legs were like blown glass. Now that we were alone, she was somehow harder to approach.

“Never mind that,” I said. “I’ll do it afterwards.”

She froze for a few seconds, then looked at me without a flicker and asked, “What were you planning on doing first?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The dishes will come after something else, right?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Mean what?”

She turned off the faucet, went slowly up the stairs, and sat down on about the fifth step from the top, knees together, elbows in lap, chin in hands. Whether she was offended or being deliberately provocative, I couldn’t tell. Remembering when the insect dealer got such positive results by slapping her on the bottom, I thought that on the whole it was probably better to assume the latter, even if wrong. But the right words wouldn’t come. That’s the way it always goes. I let my best chances slip away.

“I must say I don’t like your attitude very much.” Her voice was flat and colorless.

“What attitude?”

“It’s like we’re playing parrot. ” She managed a smile the size of a gumdrop. “Oh, I hate it. Really I do.”

“Hate what? You can tell me.”

“Being a woman. It’s a terrible disadvantage.”

“Not always, is it? You don’t seem to be at a disadvantage.”

“I look completely harmless, don’t I?”

“Yes. I can’t imagine you hurting anybody.”

“That’s why I’m so well suited for this line of work. I make people trust me and let down their guard.”

“That’s right, you’re the shill’s partner. So you’re dangerous, are you?”

“Yes. Twice I’ve swindled men by pretending to want to marry them.”

After a short pause, I said, “But men do that sort of thing too.”

“It’s not the same. When a man does it, he’s a doctor, or the heir of a wealthy landowner, or a company executive, or something —hedangles his position or his property in front of his victim’s eyes as bait. But a woman’s only bait is herself. It’s a terrible disadvantage. A man can’t very well say he’s a man for a living, but no one thinks anything about it if a woman says, ‘Oh, I’m just an ordinary woman.’ ”

“Look, I haven’t got a job I can be proud of, either.”

“Why not? You used to be a firefighter, and then a photographer, and now you’re a ship’s captain.”

“Still, I could never carry off a marriage swindle on the strength of any of that. It would be a disaster.”

At last she laughed. “If a policeman asks you your occupation, all you have to do is speak up and tell him. They don’t even ask women. A woman is a woman, and that’s that.”

“It’s discriminatory, no doubt about it.” After another pause, I asked, “Shall I make some carrot juice?”

“Never mind that; let’s fix some rice for dinner.”

“I can do it,” I said. “I know my way around a kitchen, you know.”

“Lots of unmarried men say that. Those are the easiest ones to trap into a proposal.”

“But I haven’t had even a whiff of your bait.”

“Is that what you want?”

The conversation had again taken a dangerous turn. I measured out four cups of rice, put it in a pan and left the tap running while I washed it off. No matter how thoroughly I wash it, rice I make always has a peculiar taste. Probably because the rice is old.

“So are women always on the lookout for someone to deceive?”

“Sure. Most women are chronic offenders, aren’t they?”

“Nobody’s ever tried it on me. but that’s all right. It won’t be long now before the apocalypse, when everything’s wiped out and we start all over. ”

“When that happens, are you really sure you’ll be able to survive?”

“Of course. My life began with an apocalypse. My mother was raped by Inototsu, you see, and that’s how I came into the world.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said so much. But I wanted to impress it on her that I, for one, was not the sort of man who could go around brandishing the traditional male prerogatives. I was a mole, someone who might never fall into a marriage trap, but whose prospects for succeeding in any such scheme of his own were nil. Yet I was the captain of this ark, steaming on toward the ultimate apocalypse, with the engine key right in my hand. This very moment, if I so chose, I could push the switch to weigh anchor. What would she say then? Would she call me a swindler? Or would she lift her skirt and hold out her rump for me to slap?

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “our house had sliding shutters, and some birds made a nest in the shutter box outside my window. They were like crows, only smaller, and kind of brown. I don’t like birds. They’re noisy in the morning, and they carry ticks and mites, and if you look closely they have spiteful looks on their faces. I couldn’t sleep in the morning, so it got me mad, and I started to keep one shutter in the box all the time, narrowing the space so that they wouldn’t be able to get in. I forgot all about them until the summer was gone — and then one day I saw it: there in the space between the shutter and the box was the shriveled corpse of a baby bird, with only its head sticking outside. It must have put its head out to be fed until it got so big that it couldn’t get in or out. Isn’t that horrible? And I’ve always thought that that’s what a mother’s love is like.”

I finished washing the rice and put it on to boil.

“About once a year I have a nightmare,” I said. “It’s about rape. The rapist is me, but the victim is me too.”

“That’s fascinating. What sort of a child would be born of such a union, I wonder. I bet it would be wet and sticky, all tears and saliva and sweat, and nothing else.”

“That doesn’t sound like you. It doesn’t suit you very well, either, that kind of talk.”

“Frankly, I don’t care if it does or not.”

There was an awkward silence. How did we get started on this?

“What if the nuclear bomb went off right now, and you and I were the only survivors? What would become of us, do you think?” I asked.

“We’d end up like that baby bird in the shutter box.”

“Then there must be a mother bird somewhere. But where?”

“How do I know? Anyway, to the baby bird, the mother is nothing but a beak bringing food.”

A mole’s conversation: digging my way in further and further, with only my whiskers to guide me. Or else it was a heart-in-mouth dance on wafer-thin ice. But a dance, for all that. I was strangely buoyant. I wanted to grab this chance to come to an agreement with her about our life together here after the apocalypse, so that I could push the dynamite switch anytime.

“But we’re not like the baby bird,” I said. “We’ve got each other, and besides, rice is bubbling in the pot.”

“Anybody who’s leading a rotten life now isn’t going to do any better just because the slate’s wiped clean.”

“Shall I show you my maps? They’re three-D color aerial photos taken by the Land Board. Snapped every ten seconds from a plane, for surveying purposes. Since they’re taken from just the right angle, with three-quarters duplication, if you line them up and look at them with a stereoscope they leap out at you in perfect three D. You can make out all the houses, and people going by, cars, even the condition of the pavement. You’d be amazed. It’s as if you were actually there — TV towers and power cable poles stick right up off the page as if they might poke you in the eye.”

“Three-dimensional maps, eupcaccias. I see you have a definite taste for fakes.”

“Just take my word for it and give it a try. You can complain after that,” I said.