The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [50]
The woman had already begun to work. Suddenly he was seized by a profound suspicion that she had finished drinking what was left of the water. He hurried back to the house.
The water was all there. Once more he gulped down three or four mouthfuls, and again was amazed at the limpid, mineral taste; he could not conceal his uneasiness. He couldn’t possibly wait until evening. Of course, it would be impossible to prepare supper if he drank all the water now. The villagers had counted precisely on this. They intended to get around him by subjecting him to the fear of thirst.
He pulled his straw sun hat far down over his eyes and hastened outside. His judgment and ability to think were no more than a snowflake on his feverish brow when he was faced with the threat of thirst. Ten buckets of water would have been candy, but a single one was merely a goad.
“Where’s that shovel?”
The woman smiled wearily, pointing to a spot under the eaves as she wiped the perspiration from her forehead with her sleeve. Although she had been overpowered, she did not appear for a moment to have forgotten the arrangement of the tools. It must be a mental attitude that people who lived in the sands learned naturally.
No sooner did he have the shovel in his hands than his exhausted limbs collapsed like a folding tripod. As a matter of fact, he had not slept a wink since the night before. Under any circumstances, it would probably be necessary to arrange in advance with the woman the minimal amount of work that had to be done. But he was already too tired to talk with her about it. His vocal cords were shredded like strands of dried squid—perhaps because he had strained them too much talking with the old man. Mechanically he took his place next to the woman and began to shovel.
The two, as if bound together, moved on with their digging between the cliff and the building. The board wall of the house was as soft as a rice cake that has not fully dried; it looked like a seedbed for mushrooms. Finally they piled the sand up in one place. They put it into the kerosene cans and transferred them to the clearing. When they had finished, they resumed the digging.
The man’s movements were almost automatic, involuntary. A frothy saliva that tasted like egg white filled his mouth. It ran over his chin and dribbled down on his chest, but he paid no attention.
“You know, you would do better to hold the shovel with your left hand further down … like this,” the woman remarked quietly. “If you hold your left hand still and use the right like a lever you won’t get half so tired.”
A crow cawed. Suddenly the light changed from yellow to blue, and the pain, which had become magnified, softly withdrew into the surrounding landscape. Four crows glided low, parallel with the coast. The tips of their outspread wings glittered dark green, and the man for some reason was reminded of the potassium cyanide in his insect bottles. Oh, yes. Before he forgot, he must transfer his speciments to another container and wrap them in plastic. They would dissolve into a mushy mess in no time if the dampness got to them.
“Shall we call it a day now?”
The woman looked up at the wall as she spoke. He realized that her face was dry too; she was pale through the layer of sand that clung to her. Suddenly everything around him grew dark, daubed with a rust color, and he realized his blood had lost its vital force. Groping through the tunnel of his dimming consciousness, he barely managed to struggle to his messed and grease-smudged bed. He had no memory of when the woman came in.
22
HE would have felt exactly