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By Root 217 0

you realize what I’m talking about? No, it doesn’t make any difference whether you do or not. I’ll tell you an amusing story. I used to keep a worthless mongrel at my boardinghouse. He had a terribly thick coat that scarcely shed even in summer. He was such a sorry sight that I finally decided to cut his hair. But just as I was about to throw away the hair that had been cut off, the dog—I wonder what could have been going on in his mind?—suddenly let out a pitiful howl, took a bunch of hair in his mouth, and ran into his house. He probably felt that the hair was a part of his own body and he didn’t want to be separated from it.” He furtively observed the woman’s expression. However, she made no attempt to move, remaining bent over in an unnatural position on top of the partition. “Well, let it go. Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn’t hold good for anybody else. Go on working your fingers to the bone with your sand sweeping or whatever else you will. But I can’t stand it. I’ve had enough! I could get out of here easily if I wanted to. And I’ve just run out of cigarettes.”

“Oh.… I wanted to say … about the cigarettes …,” she said, awkwardly and submissively, “when they deliver the water, later.…”

“Cigarettes? Do they bring you cigarettes too?” He laughed in spite of himself. “That’s not the question. I’m talking about the tufts of hair. Tufts of hair. Don’t you understand? What I’m trying to say is that there’s no sense in such futile concern over a tuft of hair.”

She was silent. She showed no sign of offering any explanation. She waited a moment, and when it was evident he had stopped speaking, she slowly turned as if nothing had happened and resumed her unfinished work. She slid back the cover over the top of the closet and crawled up, working the upper part of her body into the aperture with her elbows and wiggling her legs clumsily. The sand began to fall in thin rivulets here and there. He had the feeling that there was some strange insect inside the ceiling. Sand and rotted wood. No, thank you, he had had enough of strange things!

Then from one corner of the ceiling the sand began to pour out dizzily in numerous tapelike streams. The strange quietness was in eerie contrast to the violence of the flow of sand. The holes and cracks in the ceiling boards were quickly raised in exact relief on the straw matting. The sand burned in his nose and irritated his eyes. He fled out of the house.

Suddenly he felt as though he were melting away from his feet upward into a landscape of flame. But something like a perpetual shaft of ice remained in the center of his body. He felt ashamed in some way. An animal-like woman … thinking only in terms of today … no yesterday, no tomorrow … with a dot for a heart. A world where people were convinced that men could be erased like chalk marks from a blackboard. In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined that such barbarism still existed anywhere in the world. Well, anyway … if this was a sign that he was beginning to regain his composure and recover from his initial shock, his qualms of conscience were not a bad thing.

But he must not waste time. If possible, he would like to finish before it got dark. Squinting, he measured the height of the sand wall quivering behind a film of heat waves like molten glass. Every time he looked at it, it seemed to grow higher. It would be hard to go against nature and try to make a gentle slope abrupt—he only wanted to try to make a steep one more gentle. There was no reason to hang back.

The best way to do it, of course, would be to shave it down gradually from the top. Since this was impossible, he had no choice but to dig from the bottom. First he would scoop out a suitable amount of sand from below and wait for the sand above to cave in, then he would scoop more out and again let the top fall in. If he repeated this again and again, the ground level he stood on would gradually rise and ultimately reach the top. Of course, he might also be carried away by the flowing sand in the midst of the operation. But no matter how much sand flowed,