The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [48]
He did not know whether he was dreaming or whether his musings had become real, but suddenly he was aware of a commotion around him. Coming to himself, he found that he was in the midst of a sand slide. He took shelter under the eaves of the house and leaned against the wall. His bones seemed to have melted like those of some canned fish. His thirst burst around his temples, leaving fragments lying scattered on the surface of his consciousness like dots standing out in relief. He gritted his teeth and held his hands over his stomach; at last he contained his rising nausea.
The sound of the woman’s voice came to him. She was facing the cliff and hailing someone. He looked up, squinting between his heavy eyelids. The old man who had first brought him here was just letting down a bucket, suspended at the end of a rope. Water! At last it had come! The bucket tipped and made a splotch on the sandy slope. It was water, unmistakably the real thing! With a shout he fairly flew through the air to get to it.
When he came within reach of the bucket he pushed the woman aside, trampling her with his feet, and took hold of it with both hands. He could hardly take off the rope before he impatiently thrust his face into the bucket, his body heaving like a pump. He raised his face and took a breath. The third time he rasied his head water spurted from his nose and his lips, and he choked painfully. His knees buckled limply under him and he closed his eyes. Now it was the woman’s turn. She was not to be outdone, and, sounding as if her whole body had turned into a rubber plunger, in no time at all she had drained half the contents.
Then she let go of the bucket and went back to the earthen floor; the old fellow began to haul in the rope. At once the man jumped up and grabbed it. “Wait!” he appealed. “Just a minute. I want you to listen to me. Wait, please! I just want you to listen to me!”
The old man gave in, and his hands stopped moving. He blinked his eyes in a puzzled way, but he remained almost expressionless.
“Since you’ve given me water, I’ll do what I’m supposed to. I promise you that. But I still would like you to listen to me. You have really quite misjudged things. I’m a teacher in a school. I have my colleagues and the union waiting there, and the Board of Education and the P.T.A. too. Do you think people will accept my disappearance in silence?”
The old man ran his tongue over his upper lip and grinned rather indifferently. It really wasn’t a grin, but probably only wrinkles in the corner of his eyes as he tried to keep out the sand that was blown along with the wind. But not a single wrinkle escaped the desperate man’s notice.
“What? What’s that? You realize, don’t you, that you’re pretty close to a criminal offense?”
“Why? It’s been ten days, but there’s been no notice from the local police.” The old man repeated his words meticulously one by one. “Supposing there was no notice even after ten days … what then?”
“It hasn’t been ten days. A week!”
The old man shut his mouth and said nothing more. Certainly the exchange of words had been to no purpose. He restrained his impatience and said in a tight voice: “Well, these are matters of little consequence. Won’t you come down so we can sit and have a leisurely talk? I will do absolutely nothing out of the way. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do a thing against such odds. I promise.”
The old fellow remained silent. The man began to breathe harder. “It’s not that I don’t understand how important this work of clearing away the sand is for the village. It’s a matter of life and death, I know. It’s very serious. I really understand that. If I weren’t forced into it, I might even feel like co-operating with you voluntarily. It’s really true. It’d only be human to co-operate when I see how things really are, wouldn’t it? Do you really think this is the only way to make me work with you? I doubt it. Haven