The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [51]
The kettle, lamp, and bottle of cheap saké stood beside his pillow. He raised himself at once on one elbow and rinsed out his mouth, spitting the water into the sunken fireplace. Slowly, relishing the feeling, he moistened his throat. He felt around the lamp, and his hand touched a soft package and some cigarettes and matches. He lit the lamp and put a match to a cigarette; then cautiously he tried a mouthful of cheap saké. His scattered faculties slowly began to arrange themselves.
The contents of the package consisted of a boxed lunch: three balls of rice mixed with wheat, which were still warm; two skewers of dried sardines; some dry, wrinkled radish pickle; and some boiled vegetable that had a bitter taste. The vegetable seemed to be dried radish leaves. He could eat only one of the skewers of sardines and one rice ball. His stomach felt like a cold rubber glove.
When he stood up, his joints creaked like the wind howling over the zinc roof. Nervously he peered into the water jar. It had been replenished and was brimming full. He dampened the towel and wiped his face. A shiver went through his whole body like a flourescent light. He washed his neck and flanks and shook the sand from between his fingers. Maybe he should be satisfied with creature comforts and let the rest go.
“Shall I fix you some tea?” The woman was standing in the doorway.
“No, thanks. My stomach is too queasy as it is.”
“Did you sleep well?”
“You should have got me up when you got up.”
The woman bent her head giggling. “Actually, I got up three times during the night and fixed the towel over your face.”
She had the coquetry of a three-year-old who has just learned to use an adult’s laugh. It was obvious she did not know how best to express her cheerful feelings or her embarrassment. He felt depressed and turned his eyes away.
“Shall I help you with the digging? Or would it be better if I did the carrying?”
“Well.… It’s about time for the next basket lift to come.”
When he actually began working, for some reason he did not resist it as much as he thought he would. What could be the cause of this change? he wondered. Was it the fear that the water would be discontinued? Was it because of his indebtedness to the woman, or something about the character of the work itself? Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.
Once he had been taken along—when was it?—by the Möbius man to a lecture-meeting. The meeting place was completely surrounded by a low, rusty fence, and within the enclosure the surface of the ground was almost invisible beneath paper refuse, empty boxes, and rags of indiscriminate origin. What had ever put it into the designer’s head to place such a fence around the site? Whereupon, as though his thoughts had materialized, a man in a tired suit of clothes appeared, leaning over the iron fence, earnestly trying to scrape it with his fingertips. His Möbius friend had informed him that it was a plain-clothes man. Then on the ceiling of the meeting place there was a huge coffee-colored leaky spot the like of which he had never seen before. In the midst of all this, the lecturer was speaking: “The only way to go beyond work is through work. It is not that work itself is valuable; we surmount work