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 leam 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 i/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 fingerprints; 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 talcing 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."
"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, if'sprobably
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 re-establish 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."
30
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 aw?y 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.
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 v/ere 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
reverbera tions, 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 of his 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.
31
MONOTONOUS weeks of sand and night had gone by.
"Hope," as before, lay neglected by the crows. And the bait of dried fish
had become not even that. Although spurned by the crows, it had not
been spurned by the bacteria. One morning when he felt the end of the
stick, he found that only the skin remained; the fish had turned into a
black, almost liquid pulp. As he was changing the bait, he decided at
the same time to check on the contraption. He scraped away the sand
and opened the cover; he was thunderstruck. Water had collected at
the bottom of the bucket. There were only about four inches, but it was
more clear by far—indeed it was almost pure—than the water with the
metallic film which was delivered to them daily. Had it rained some
time recently? he wondered. No. Not for a half month at least. If that
were true, then could it be the rain that was left from a half month ago?
He would like to think so, but what puzzled him was that he knew the
bucket leaked. And when he raised it up, as he had expected, water at
once began to fall from the bottom. At that depth there could be no
underground spring, and he was obliged to recognize that the escaping
water was being constantly replenished from somewhere. At least, that
must be theoretically so. But wherever could the replenishment come
from in the midst of this parched sand?
He could scarcely contain his gradually rising excitement There was
only one answer he could think of. That was the capillary action of the
sand. Because the surface sand had a high specific heat, it was
invariably dry, but when you dug down a little the under part was
always damp. It must be that the surface evaporation acted as a kind of
pump, drawing up the subsurface water. When he thought about it,
everything was easily explained—the enormous quantity of mist that
came out of the dunes every morning and evening, the abnormal
moisture which clung to the pillars and walls, rotting the wood. In
short, the dryness of the sand was not due simply to a lack of water, but
rather, it would seem, to the fact that the suction caused by capillary
attraction never matched the speed of evaporation. In other words, the
water was being constantly replenished. But this water circulated at a
speed unthinkable in ordinary soil. And it had happened that "Hope"
had cut off the circulation some place. Probably the chance placing of
the bucket and the crack around the lid had been enough to prevent
evaporation of the water that had been sucked up in the bucket. He
could not yet explain exactly the placing and its relationship to the
other elements, but with study he would surely be able to repeat the
experiment Moreover, it should not be impossible to construct a more
efficient device for storing the water.
If he were successful in this experiment he would no longer have to
give in to the villagers if they cut off his water. But more important, he
had found that the sand was an immense pump. It was just as if he
were sitting on a suction pump. He had to sit down for a moment and
control his breathing in order to quiet the wild beating of his heart. Of
course, there was no need yet to tell anyone about this. It would be his
trump card in case of emergency.
But he could not suppress the natural laughter that welled up in him.
Even if he were able to keep silent about "Hope," it was hard to conceal
the elation in his heart. He suddenly let out a cry and put his arms
around the woman's hips from behind as she was getting the bed ready.
And when she dodged away he fell over on his back and lay kicking his
legs and laughing all the while. It was as if his stomach were being
tickled by a paper balloon filled with some special light gas. He felt that
the hand he held to his face was floating free in the air.
The woman laughed reluctantly, but it was probably only to be
agreeable. He was thinking of the vast network of water veins creeping
up through the sand, but the woman, on the contrary, was surely
thinking that his actions were sexual advances. That was all right. Only
a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could
understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just
because he is able to breathe.
The fact that he was still just as much at the bottom of the hole as ever
had not changed, but he felt quite as if he had climbed to the top of a
high tower. Perhaps the world had been turned upside down and its
projections and depressions reversed. Anyway, he had discovered water
in this sand. As long as he had his device the villagers would not be
able to interfere with him so easily. No matter how much they cut off
his supply, he would be able to get along very well. Again laughter
welled up in him at the very thought of the outcry the villagers would
make. He was still in the hole, but it seemed as if he were already
outside. Turning around, he could see the whole scene. You can't really
judge a mosaic if you don't look at it from a distance. If you really get
close to it you get lost in detail. You get away from one detail only to
get caught in another. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now
was not the sand but grains of sand.
He could say precisely the same thing about the other woman and his
former fellow teachers. He had been con cerned up until now only with
curiously exaggerated details: nostrils in a thick nose, wrinkled lips or
smooth, thin lips, spatulate fingers or pointed fingers, flecked eyes, a
string of warts under a collarbone, violet veins running over a breast. If
he looked very closely at those parts alone he would feel like vomiting.
But to eyes with magnifying lenses everything seemed tiny and
insectlike. The little ones crawling around over there were his
colleagues having a cup of tea in the faculty room. The one in this
comer was the other woman, naked, on a dampish bed, her eyes half
closed, motionless although the ash of her cigarette was about to fall.
Moreover, he felt, without the slightest jealousy, that the little insects
were like cookie molds. Cookie molds have only edges and no insides.
Even so, there was no need to be such a dedicated cookie maker as to
be unable to resist making unneeded cookies just to use the mold. If
the chance occurred for him to renew his relationship with them, he
would have to start all over again from the very beginning. The change
in the sand corresponded to a change in himself. Perhaps, along with
the water in the sand, he had found a new self.
Thus, work on a water trap was added to his daily occupations. Figures
and diagrams began to accumulate—the place to bury the bucket, the
shape of the bucket, the relationship between daylight hours and the
rate of water accumulation, the influence of temperature and
barometric pressure on the efficiency of the apparatus. But it was
incomprehensible to the woman why he could be so enthusiastic about
anything so insignificant as a crow trap. She recognized that no man
can get along without some sort of plaything, and if he was satisfied
with that one, it suited her. Moreover, she did not know why, but he
had begun to show more interest in her own craft work. It wasn't at all
a disagreeable feeling. The question of the crow trap aside, she had still
benefited considerably. But he too had his own reasons and motives.
His work on the device was unexpectedly troublesome, for it was
necessary to combine many elements. The number of materials
increased, but it was hard to find a law that would govern them all. If
he wanted to make his data more precise, he needed a radio in order to
tune in the weather reports. The radio had become their common
objective.
At the beginning of November he had recorded the daily intake of water
at one gallon, but after that the quantity began to fall off every day. It
was perhaps because of the temperature, and it appeared that he would
have to await spring to try a full-scale experiment. The long, hard
winter had at last come, and bits of ice were blown along with the sand.
In the meantime, in order to get a somewhat better radio, he decided to
give the woman a hand with her craft work. One good point was that
the inside of the hole was protected from the wind, yet it was
unbearable with the sun scarcely visible throughout the day. Even on
days when the sand froze over, the amount that blew along in the wind
did not decrease, and there was no respite from the work of shoveling.
Many times the chilblains on his fingers broke and began to bleed.
In some way, winter passed and spring came. At the beginning of
March they got the radio. On the roof they erected a high antenna. The
woman joyfully and repeatedly voiced her wonder, turning the dial left
and right for half a day. At the end of that month, she found herself
pregnant. Two more months went by. Large white birds kept flying over
from east to west for three days in succession, and on the following day
the lower part of her body was covered with blood and she complained
of violent pain. One of the villagers, who was said to have a
veterinarian among her relatives, diagnosed it as an extra-uterine
pregnancy, and it was decided to take her to the hospital in the city in
the three-wheeled truck. The man sat with her as they waited for the
truck to come, letting her hold one of his hands, while with the other he
kept rubbing her belly.
Finally the three-wheeler stopped at the top of the cliff. A rope ladder
was let down for the first time in a half year, and the woman, wrapped
in her blankets as in a cocoon, was hauled up by rope. She looked at
him beseechingly with eyes almost blinded by tears and mucus, until
she could see him no longer. The man looked away as if he did not see
her.
Even though she had been taken away, the rope ladder remained as it
was. He hesitantly reached out and touched it with his fingertips. After
making sure it would not vanish, he slowly began to climb up. The sky
was a dirty yellow. His arms and legs felt heavy, as if he had just come
out of water. This was the long-awaited rope ladder.
The wind seemed to snatch the breath from his mouth. Circling around
the edge of the hole, he climbed to a spot where he could view the sea.
The sea too was a dirty yellow. He breathed deeply, but the air only
irritated his throat, and it did not taste as he had expected. He turned
around. A cloud of sand rose on the outskirts of the village. It was
probably the three-wheeler with the woman, he thought. Oh, yes…
maybe he should have told her the real significance of the trap.
Something moved at the bottom of the hole. It was his own shadow.
Just near it stood the water trap. One part of the framework had come
loose. Perhaps someone had accidentally stepped on it when they had
come to take the woman out. He hastened back down the ladder to
repair it The water, as his calculations had led him to expect, had risen
to the fourth mark. The damage did not appear to be too great. In the
house, someone was singing in a rasping voice on the radio. He tried to
stifle the sobbing that seemed about to burst from him; he plunged his
hands into the bucket. The water was piercingly cold. He sank down on
his knees and remained inert, his hands still in the water.
There was no particular need to hurry about escaping. On the two-way
ticket he held in his hand now, the destination and time of departure
were blanks for him to fill in as he wished. In addition, he realized that
he was bursting with a desire to talk to someone about the water trap.
And if he wanted to talk about it, there wouldn't be better listeners than
the villagers. He would end by telling someone—if not today, then
tomorrow.
He might as well put off his escape until sometime after that.
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