The Woman in the Dunes

by Cobo Abe

  He closed his eyes. Spots of light seemed to float before him. When he tried to catch them, they suddenly swirled rapidly and escaped him. They were like the shadows of beetles left on the sand.

  He was awakened by the woman's sobbing.

  «What are you crying about?»

  The woman stood up hastily, trying to hide her embarrassment.

  «I'm sorry… I was just going to make you some tea…»

  Her tearful voice puzzled him. Her back as she bent over, stirring the fire in the hearth, made her seem strangely jittery, and it was some time before he understood the meaning of it. He was slow, as if he were forcing his way through the musty pages of some book. Yet he was able to turn the pages. Suddenly he seemed so miserable that he was sorry for himself.

  «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.

  PART III

  28

  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 fingerprint
s; 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.

  The cartoons were exceedingly stupid. They were meaningless, vulgar sketches that had been dashed off, and had he been asked, he would never have been able to explain why they were so amusing. One was so very funny only because of the expression on the face of a horse that had fallen down, its legs broken under the weight of the big bruiser who had mounted it. How could he laugh so when he was in such a position? Shame on him! There was a limit to how far he should accommodate himself to his present plight. He had intended this accommodation to be a means, never a goal. It sounded all right to talk of hibernating, but had he changed into a mole and lost all desire to show his face in the sunlight again for the rest of his life?

  When he thought about it, he realized there was absolutely no way of knowing when and in what way an opportunity for escape would come. It was possible to conceive of simply becoming accustomed to waiting, with no particular goal in mind, and when his hibernation was at last over, he would be dazzled by the light, unable to come out. Three days a beggar, always a beggar, they say. Such internal rot apparently comes on unexpectedly fast. He was thinking seriously about this, but the moment he recalled the expression on the horse's face he was again seized with moronic laughter. In the lamplight the woman, concentrating as usual on the fine work of stringing beads, raised her head and smiled back at him innocently. He could not bear his own deception, and, tossing the magazine away, he went out.

  A milky mist billowed and swirled above the cliff. Spaces of shadow, speckled with the remains of night… spaces that sparkled as if with glowing wire… spaces flowing with particles of shining vapor. The combination of shadows was filled with fantasies and stirred limitless reveries in him. He would never tire of looking at the sight. Every moment overflowed with new discoveries. Everything was there, actual shapes confounded with fantastic forms he had never seen before.

  He turned toward the swirling mass and appealed to it involuntarily.

  — Your Honor, I request to be told the substance of the prosecution. I request to be told the reason for my sentence. You see the defendant before you, awaiting your pleasure.

  Then a voice he remembered hearing before answered him from the mist. It sounded suddenly muffled, as if it were coming through a telephone. — One out of every hundred, after all… — What did you say?

  — I am telling you that in Japan schizophrenia occurs at the rate of one out of every hundred persons.

  — What in the name of…

  — Kleptomania also seems to occur in about one out of every hundred.

  — What in the name of heaven are you talking about?

  — If there is one per cent of homosexuality among men, then naturally there must also be about one per cent of lesbianism among women. Incendiaries account for one per cent; those who tend to be vicious drinkers, for one per cent; mentally retarded, one per cent; sexual maniacs, one per cent; megalomaniacs, one per cent; habitual swindlers, one per cent; frigid women, one per cent; terrorists, one per cent; paranoiacs, one per cent…

  — I wish you'd stop talking nonsense.

  — Well, listen to me calmly. Acrophobes, heroin addicts, hysterics, homicidal maniacs, syphilitics, morons — suppose there were one per cent of each of these, the total would be twenty per cent. If you could enumerate eighty more abnormalities at this rate — and of course you could — there would be statistical proof that humanity is a hundred per cent abnormal.

  — What nonsense! Abnormality would not come into being if there were no standard of normality!

  — Come, come. I was just trying to defend you…

  — Defend me…?

  — Even you will scarcely insist on your own guilt, I imagine. — No, naturally!

  — Then I wish you'd behave more obediently. No matter how exceptional your case is, there's absolutely no cause for worry. Just as people have no obligation to save a strange bird like you, they also don't have the right to judge you either.

  — Strange bird? Why does resisting illegal detention make me a strange bird?

  — Don't pretend you're so innocent. In Japan, a typical area of high humidity and heat, eighty-seven per cent of annual damage is by water; damage by wind-blown sand, as in your case, would hardly come to a thousandth of one per cent. Ridiculous! It would be like passing special laws against water damage in the Sahara Desert.

  — I'm not talking about special laws. I'm talking about the suffering I went through. Illegal detention is illegal, whether it's in a desert or a bog.

  — Oh, illegal detention… But there's no end to human greed, don't you see? You're a valuable possession for the villagers…

  — Oh, balls! Even I have more of a reason for existence than that.

  — You're quite sure it's all right to find fault with your beloved sand?

  — Fault?

  — I hear there are people in the world who, over a period of ten years, have calculated the value of pi to several hundred decimal places. All right, I suppose they have that much reason for existence. But you took the trouble of coming to such a place as this precisely because you rejected such a reason for existence.

  — No, that's not true. Even sand has a completely opposite face. You can use it to make casting molds. And it's also an indispensable material for setting concrete. Research is being done on improved farming by taking advantage of the fact that sand easily eliminates weeds and fungus growths. They have even experimented with changing sand into soil by using soil-disintegrating enzymes. You can't talk about sand so sweepingly.

  — Come, come, now. What proselytism! If you change your point of view so much I won't know what to believe, will I?

  — I don't want to die like a beggar!

  — Well, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, isn't it? The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.

  — Damn it, who are you?

  But the mist billowed in and erased the other voice. Instead, a hundred sheaves of light, ruler straight, slid down. His head spun, and he smothered a feeling of exhaustion which welled up in him like smoke.

  A crow cawed. Suddenly remembering the trap, he decided to go around in back of the house and take a look at «Hope.» There was no likelihood of success, but it would be better than the cartoon magazine.

  The bait hung just as it was when he had set the trap. The stink of rotten fish struck his nose. It had been over two weeks since he had set «Hope,» and nothing whatever had happened. What could the reason possibly be? He had confidence in the construction. If a crow would just take the bait, it would be nabbed. But he was completely helpless, since they paid no attention to it in the first place.

  But what could be so displeasing to them about «Hope?» No matter from what angle he looked, he could find nothing suspicious about the trap. Crows were uncommonly cautious because they scavenged for human refuse around where people lived. Well then, it was a question of who would have the most patience… until they became completely accustomed to the rotten fish in the hole. Patience itself was not necessarily defeat. Rather, defeat really began when patience was thought to be defeat. He had named the contraption «Hope» originally with this in mind. The Cape of Good Hope was not Gibraltar, but Capetown.

  He returned slowly to the house, dragging his feet. It was time to sleep again.

  29

  When the woman saw him, she blew out the lamp as if she had just remembered and changed her position to a lighter place near the door. Did she still mean to go on working? he wondered. Suddenly he felt an irresistible impulse. Standing in front of her, he struck the box of beads from her knees. Black grains, like grass seed, flew over the earthen floor, sinking at once into the sand. She stared at him with a startled look, but said nothing. All expression suddenly left the
man's face. A weak groan came from his sagging lips… followed by some yellowish spittle.

  «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.»