The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [30]
Of course, he could not pretend there was absolutely no danger. There was no telling—their attitude might suddenly change in a half hour. For instance, there was that government man. The old man from the village had at first mistaken him for the government man and shown signs of extreme caution. They must have expected the government man to make an inspection in the near future. If that were so, village opinion would split over him, and they might possibly give up keeping him prisoner and concealing his existence. But by the same token there was no guarantee that a half hour would not stretch into a half year, a year, or even more. It was a fifty-fifty chance whether it would be a year or a half hour, and he was certainly not ready to lay a wager.
When he considered that relief might be at hand, he realized that things would go better for him if he were to continue with his pretext of illness. But this was indeed the point that perplexed him. He lived under a constitutional government, and therefore it was natural that he should expect help. People who vanished in a fog of mystery and remained incommunicado frequently wanted to do just that. As long as the case didn’t seem to be of a criminal nature, it would be entrusted to the civil rather than the criminal authorities, and thus even the police could not go too far into the matter.
But in his case the situation was completely different, and he was desperately reaching out for help. Anyone who saw his empty room would immediately understand what had happened, even if they hadn’t seen him or directly heard from him. The unfinished book that lay open to the page he had been reading when he put it down … the small change he had tossed into the pocket of his office clothes … his bankbook, which bore no trace of any recent withdrawals, despite the small amount in his account … his box of drying insects he had not yet finished arranging … the stamped envelope containing the order blank for a new collecting bottle, laid out ready for mailing—all this repudiated discontinuance, everything pointed to his intention to go on living. A visitor could not help but hear the plaintive voice from the room.
Well … if it hadn’t been for that letter … if it just hadn’t been for that stupid letter. Yet that was the point, it had been. In his dream he had told the truth, but now he was quibbling with himself. Why? He had made enough excuses. Lost articles no longer existed. And he had long since cut his throat with his own hands.
He had assumed an unreasonably mysterious attitude about this holiday, saying nothing to any of his colleagues about his intended destination. Not only had he left without saying a word, but he had deliberately made a point of the mystery. There couldn’t be a more efficient way of teasing his colleagues, glum and gray with their daily gray routine. He sank into an unbearable self-aversion with the thought that among the glum and gray, people other than he had colors other than gray—red, blue, green.
It only happened in novels or movies that summer was filled with dazzling sun. What existed in reality were humble, small-town Sundays … a man taking his snooze under the political columns of a newspaper, enveloped in gunsmoke … canned juices and thermos jugs with magnetized caps … boats for hire, fifty cents an hour—queue up here … foaming beaches with the leaden scum of dead fish … and then, at the end, a jam-packed trolley rickety with fatigue. Everyone knows this is fact, but no one wants to make a fool of himself and be taken in; so, on the gray canvas of reality, he zestfully sketches the mere form of this illusory