The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [75]
His heart began to jump irregularly, like a broken ping-pong ball. Why did he have to think up such sinister things?… A pretty sad association of ideas. And even if he hadn’t, the October wind carried an oppressive echo of regret, its reedy voice sounding through empty, seedless husks. As he looked up at the rim of the hole, faintly limned in the moonlight, he mused that this searing feeling of his was perhaps jealousy. Maybe it was a jealousy of all things that presented a form outside the hole: streets, trolley cars, traffic signals at intersections, advertisements on telephone poles, the corpse of a cat, the drugstore where they sold cigarettes. Just as the sand nibbled away at the insides of the wooden walls and the uprights, so his jealousy was gnawing holes in him, making him like an empty pot on a stove. But the temperature of an empty pot rises quickly. And it might happen that soon, unable to stand the heat any longer, he would give up. First came the problem of weathering this moment, before he could talk about hope.
He wanted lighter air! At least fresh air, unmixed with his own breath. How wonderful it would be if once a day, even for a half hour, he could climb up the cliff and look out over the sea. He should be allowed to do that much. Their check on him was too strict for him to escape, and then too it would seem to be a very reasonable request, considering the faithful work he had performed for them over more than three months. Even a prisoner in confinement had the right to a period of exercise.
“I really can’t stand it! If I keep on like this, sticking my nose in the sand every day in the year, I’ll turn into a human pickle! I wonder if I could get them to let me walk around once in a while?”
The woman kept her mouth closed as if annoyed. She looked like someone who does not know what to do with a peevish child who has lost his candy.
“I won’t let them say I can’t!” Suddenly the man became angry. He even mentioned the rope ladder, so hard for him to talk about because of the loathsome memories. “The other day, when I was running away, I saw it with my own eyes. Some houses in this row actually had rope ladders hanging down to them.”
“Yes … but …,” she said timidly as if apologizing, “most of those people have been living there for generations.”
“Well, do you mean that there’s no hope for us?”
The woman bent her head with resignation, like a dejected dog. Even if he swallowed the potassium cyanide before her very eyes, she would probably let him go through with it without saying a word.
“All right. I’ll try to negotiate directly with them.”
However, in his heart he did not expect that such negotiations would be successful. He was quite used to being disappointed. And so, when the old man at once brought back an answer with the second gang of basket hoisters, he was surprised and bewildered.
But his surprise was unimportant compared with the contents of the answer.
“Well, let’s see …,” the old man said slowly and falteringly, speaking as if he were arranging his old papers in his head. “It’s, ah … not … ah … absolutely impossible to arrange.… Well, this is just an example, but if the two of you came out front … with all of us watching you … and if you’d go to it … and let us see.… Well, what you want is reasonable enough, so we’ve all decided … uh … that it’s all right.…”
“What do you mean, let you see?”
“Well … uh … the two of you … doing it together … that’s what we mean.”
Around him the gang of basket carriers suddenly broke out in a mad laughing. The man stood numbly, as if someone were strangling him, but slowly he began to understand exactly what they meant. And he began to understand that he understood. Once he had comprehended, their proposal didn’t seem particularly surprising.
The beam of a flashlight skimmed by his feet like some golden bird. As if it were a sign, seven or eight more shafts fused into a dish of light and began