«Well, there's no reason for you to be so timid.»
«But there isn't any reason to go out!»
«You can at least take a walk.»
«A walk?»
«Yes. A walk. Wouldn't it be enough just to walk around a little? I mean, you used to take walks when you wanted to, before I came, didn't you?»
«Yes, but I get all tired out, walking for no particular reason.»
«I'm not joking. Ask yourself. You ought to understand. Even a dog'll go mad if you keep it shut up in a cage.»
«But I have taken walks,» she said abruptly in her monotonous, withdrawn voice. «Really, they used to make me walk a lot. Until I came here. I used to carry a baby around for a long time. I was really tired out with all the walking.»
The man was taken by surprise. Indeed, what a strange way of speaking! He was unable to answer when she turned on him like that.
Yes, he remembered, when everything was in ruins some ten years ago, everybody desperately wanted not to have to walk. And now, were they glutted with this freedom from walking? he wondered. And yet, even the child who wanted so desperately to go picnicking cried when it got lost.
The woman suddenly changed her tone and said: «Do you feel all right?»
Stop looking so stupid! He was angry; he wanted to make her admit her guilt even if he had to force it out of her. At the very thought his hair bristled and his skin felt scratchy like dry paper. «Skin» seemed to establish an association of ideas with the word «force.» Suddenly she became a silhouette cut out from its background. A man of twenty is sexually aroused by a thought. A man of forty is sexually aroused on the surface of his skin. But for a man of thirty a woman who is only a silhouette is the most dangerous. He could embrace it as easily as embracing himself, couldn't he? But behind her there were a million eyes. She was only a puppet controlled by threads of vision. If he were to embrace her, he would be the next to be controlled. The big lie that he had dislocated his spine would at once be revealed in its true light. He could not stand to have his life stop even in a place like this.
The woman sidled up to him. Her knees pressed against his hips. A stagnant smell of sun-heated water, coming from her mouth, nose, ears, armpits, her whole body, began to pervade the room around him. Slowly, hesitantly, she began to run her searing fingers up and down his spine. His body stiffened.
Suddenly the fingers circled around to his side. The man let out a shriek.
«You're tickling!»
The woman laughed. She seemed to be teasing him, or else she was shy. It was too sudden; he could not pass judgment on the spur of the moment, What, really, was her intention? Had she done it on purpose or had her fingers slipped unintentionally? Until just a few minutes ago she had been blinking her eyes with all her might, trying to wake up. On the first night too, he recalled, she had laughed in that strange voice when she had jabbed him in the side as she passed by. He wondered whether she meant anything in particular by such conduct.
Perhaps she did not really believe in his pretended illness and was testing her suspicions. That was a possibility. He couldn't relax his guard. Her charms were like some meat-eating plant, purposely equipped with the smell of sweet honey. First she would sow the seeds of scandal by bringing him to an act of passion, and then the chains of blackmail would bind him hand and foot.
13
He was melting away like wax. His pores were gorged with perspiration. Since his watch had stopped running, he was not sure of the hour. Outside this sixty-foot hole it might still be full daylight, but at the bottom it was already twilight.
The woman was still lost in sleep. Perhaps she was dreaming, for her arms and legs twitched nervously. He had tried to disturb her sleep, but he had failed. As for himself, he had slept enough.
He stood up and let the air strike his skin. The towel over his face had apparently fallen off when he turned in his sleep; so much sand had clung behind his ears, around his nostrils, and in the corners of his lips that he could scrape it off. He put some medicine in his eyes and covered them with the end of the towel; he repeated this several times and at length he was able to open them normally. But the eye medicine would be gone in two or three days. For that reason alone he wanted to bring things to a conclusion quickly. His body was as heavy as if he were lying on a magnetized bed in garments of iron. He made an effort to focus his eyes, and by the thin light that came through the door he wearily made out the newspaper print, like the legs of a dead fly.
Actually, he should have got the woman to read the paper to him in the daytime. That also would have disturbed her sleep: two birds with one stone. Too bad he had fallen asleep first. He had tried, but instead he had made a mess of things.
And tonight again he would curse that unbearable insomnia. He tried counting backwards from a hundred in rhythm with his breathing. Painstakingly he traced the road he was accustomed to walk from his boardinghouse to the school. He tried enumerating the names of all the insects he knew, grouping them by family and order. He was in far worse straits when he realized that all these devices had no effect at all. He could hear the sound of the wind sweeping over the edge of the hole… the lisp of the shovel cutting into the bed of wet sand… the distant barking of dogs… the faraway hum of voices, trembling like the flame of a candle. The ceaselessly pouring sand was like a file on the tips of his nerves. And yet, he must have the patience to endure it.
Well, somehow he would stand it. No sooner had the cooling blue light slipped down from the edge of the hole than everything was reversed, and he engaged in combat with sleep that sucked at him as a sponge sucks water. As long as this vicious circle was not broken somewhere, not only his watch but time itself would be immobilized, he feared, by the grains of sand.
The newspaper was the same as usual. He wondered if there had been a gap of a week, for there was almost nothing new to be found. If this was a window on the world outside, the glass was frosted.
Corporation Tax Bribery Spreads to City Officials. College Towns Become Industrial Meccas. Operations Suspended; General Labor Union Council to Meet Soon — Opinion to Be Published. Mother Strangles Two Children: Takes Poison. Do Frequent Auto Thefts Mean New Mode of Life Breeds New Crime? Unknown Girl Brings Flowers to Police Box for Three Years. Tokyo Olympics Budget Trouble. Phantom Stabs Two Girls Again Today. College Youths Poisoned by Sleeping PHI Spree. Stock Prices Feel Autumn Winds. Famous Tenor Sax, Blues Jackson, Arrives in Japan. Rioting Again in Union of South Africa — 280 Fatalities. Coed Thieves School Has No Tuition Fees — Graduation Certificate Issued on Successful Completion of Examination.
There wasn't a single item of importance. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of important things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.
Suddenly his eyes fell on a surprising article.
About 8:00 A.M. on the fourteenth, at the East Asia Housing construction site, 30 Yokokawa-ch6, a scoop-truck driver for the Hinohara Co., Mr. Tashiro Tsutomu (aged 28), received serious injuries when he was buried under a sand slide. He was taken to a nearby hospital but died shortly after arrival. According to the investigation carried out by the Yokokawa police, the cause of the accident appears to be that too much sand was removed from the lower part of a thirty-foot pile that was being leveled.
Aha! Doubtless this was the article that the villagers had intended him to see. They had not responded to his request for nothing. It was commendable that they had not circled the section in red ink. He was reminded of the dangerous weapon they called a blackjack. A blackjack is made by packing sand into a leather sack. It is said to have a striking power comparable to that of an iron or lead bar. No matter how sand flowed, it was still different from water. One could swim in water, but sand would enfold a man and crush him to death.