by Неизвестный
“Isn’t that someone coming up the ravine?”
The squall had just stopped, and nothing was audible except the sound of the stream, and the occasional fall of a branch.
“Must be my ears,” he said lightly, and lay back and began again the low moaning at regular long intervals, until eventually he no longer responded to my chuckle but seemed to have fallen asleep without his moans ceasing. I found then that I seem to have taken over the role of sentinel. I couldn’t manage to get to sleep. To induce myself, I imagined the sleep of a timid animal. The instant it hears a sound that has some meaning for it, deep sleep becomes complete alertness. For this to happen, it must first be thoroughly asleep. It’s impossible to have that instantaneous reaction to a sound if you hear it through a wakeful doze. The eyes spring open, and it makes a hairsbreadth escaping leap aside from the claws of death. Then, once it has escaped to temporary safety, it immediately falls asleep again, oblivious to the screams of its companions. There is no consciousness of having been saved.
I was beginning to doze off with these thoughts when, from farther down the ravine, I heard the forced breathing of someone climbing a steep slope with a heavy weight on his back. The climber’s hot, uncontrollable panting, which seemed to be retching out his very heart with each gasp, was clearly audible in the lulls between the expressionless rustlings of the trees. No sooner did it seem to have approached somewhat than it merged with the stream’s sound and disappeared. Then, after a long time had passed, it was there again at just the point it had been before. I had many times had the experience of welcoming a climber who arrived late at night at a mountain hut. Climbers generally follow the principle of avoiding unnecessary intimacy with members of another climbing party, but when someone comes in very late he generally receives a carefully casual welcome from the unknown companions in the hut. They emerge half asleep from their sleeping bags, pretending they just happen to have woken, to stir up the now-dead fire and warm the remains of their dinner for him, sometimes sitting up half the night with him in desultory talk. No, the footsteps were coming no closer.
Then for a while the events occurred within a dream. I sank to sleep with my ears still straining to hear. As I slept, I could still distinctly hear the sound of the stream and Nakamura’s moans. In the distance, what could have been an owl’s cry stood out as a single point within the hollow darkness. Suddenly the footsteps rapidly approached and came to a halt outside the hut. Nakamura and I lifted our heads at the same moment. The man was having difficulty opening the door from the outside. We went to lend our strength from within and then, suddenly, a tall man had crossed the threshold and stood in the hut gazing blankly about. A single glance told us that he’d lost his way in the dark and spent a long time wandering out there. Nakamura went round behind him and released him from his rucksack, and I stood in front of him to help him off with his anorak. Just at that moment the man opened his eyes and mouth wide, uttered a voiceless cry, and slumped forward against me, and as he clasped my chest with both arms his body began to convulse. I staggered backward holding him, and managed to sit down on the edge of the raised wooden platform behind me, to sustain his weight; then I braced my legs and heaved his sturdy body up. When the two of us had finally succeeded in laying him down between our sleeping bags, his face was already that of a dead man.
“He’s dead,” we agreed with a hastily exchanged glance, and in a panic we set about trying to revive him. Nakamura knelt beside him, stripped back the sodden shirt and undershirt, and began to rub his blue chest fiercely with a dry towel. I quickly gathered firewood and lit the fire and, for some reason, set about boiling some water in the cauldron. But as fast as we worked, just as rapidly did his appearance transform itself. Nakamura’s massaging did not produce even the faintest flush on the man’s chest, and when Nakamura began to work up onto the neck, his movements pushed the man’s head so it lolled over sideways, and from the mouth and nose now turned toward me, dark clotting blood flowed.
“Come on, let’s sleep,” said Nakamura, tossing the towel to the floor; he hastily scrambled feet first into the sleeping bag beside the corpse and immediately set up the same regular moaning as before.
We lay there under the weight of the darkness, with the dead man between us. Whenever Nakamura moaned I had the illusion that it was the dead man, and turned to Nakamura to say, “Hey, he’s still alive.” And each time I did so, that blue face with its bloody nose and mouth laughed straight in my face. Beside me the corpse had the heavy cold weight of an object, and I felt it sinking interminably farther and farther down into the blackness, on its face an eternal grin of somehow mocking agony. The weight of it was being precariously suspended there between our combined breathing on either side. If we once relaxed our strength, the sinking corpse would pull us under with it. I was astonished at the quiet will at work in the very act of breathing. Then suddenly it seemed the roof and the floor had been removed, and we were floating free in space above the ravine, with the corpse slung between us. The sound of the flowing water connected directly with the expressionless weight of the corpse, and the soughing of the branches was now the sound of the monstrous expanse of time itself. In all that ravine, only we spread around ourselves a tiny warmth, within which we lived. I searched the water sounds desperately for the sound of another person—let it be a voice or footfall, a moan, a gasp, even a last dying cry, as long as it somehow, ever so slightly, shook the expressionlessness of the ravine.
And then a chill rain began to fall, and the ravine began to seethe again, and I awoke with the sound of sutra chanting in my ears, and a sense of having been saved.
It must have been the voice of the sutras that Nakamura and I had heard chanted countless times in the interval between Koike’s wake and the forty-ninth-day ceremony for the dead, which had sunk deep into my ears and now returned to me as a voice from the depths of the ravine. Yet the voice sounded so vividly human. It was a rich, ponderous voice, almost as if the human flesh itself had been tempered till it rang. It seemed, I thought, like a sound made in imitation of what one would imagine to be the sanctity of the first sound uttered from the silence of one newly dead. Straining my ears, I felt it was still implicit in the sounds of the stream—so indistinguishable from that natural water sound, yet so distinguishably a human voice, with the echo of every human passion within it.
The rain passed over and the ravine returned to a deep quietness, with only the constant sound of the stream. But the quality of that quietness was irrevocably altered for me. From every corner of the ravine’s darkness that wrapped me round, there now swelled intimations of all the breathings of the human flesh, which wove a thick silence all about me. There was even the suggestion of the trembling voice of a woman. Of course the only sounds that actually existed were the groans of Nakamura close beside me and my own breathing, and all these other sounds were no more real than the cicada’s song on that stormy night, the effect of my small life force pulsing softly in the ear drum or in the capillaries of the inner ear, which merely made deceptive imitation of the countless lives in that vast darkness beyond. Yet it was nevertheless the motion of life, and saying this to myself I called before my mind the image of Koike lying motionless on his hospital bed. . . .
Even after all signs of consciousness had ceased, Koike remained as a merely physical existence, and for two hours more he continued to groan. His wife called Nakamura and me into the hospital room, and we stood against the wall, watching over him, helpless in the face of his suffering. When Koike’s breathing had stopped and the doctors had left, Mrs. Koike gently wiped her husband’s forehead with a handkerchief, then put the handkerchief to her own eyes and drew a deep sigh. At that moment, the sounds of the distant street came surging into the sickroom. A soft sobbing flowed within the sounds. I didn’t so much hear this sound with my ears as greedily gulp it down into my cold chest. Cocooned in the survivor’s sense of reprieve, I had not the wherewithal then to grieve at the death of my friend. Nakamura too was le
aning heavily against the wall, face up and eyes closed, his shoulders heaving roughly, as though he had just managed to come through a difficult rock climb.
The deep sighing of a woman welled up in the darkness. The white swelling of the throat was implicit everywhere in the dark, unknotting and smoothing the stiffness of death. There was something in the sound that was akin to the sutra-chanting voice. Even the soft creaks of branches in the wind had about them a hint of woman. All the sounds in the world came whispering enticingly in with the sighing, like the soft rustle of clothing in a voiceless room.
As the voice of my dead friend’s wife, needless to say it smote my conscience, but it was at the same time some other woman’s voice. Koike had also heard that voice. He seemed indeed to keep the enticement of this voice before him right up until the moment of his death. . . . In the early autumn of the year we turned twenty, we three made a rare visit to the seaside. At midday we lay together in the pampas grass of a broad hill that extended out as a promontory above the sea, our bodies soaking up the warm heavy rays of the sun, unable quite to adjust ourselves to the leisurely pace of existence here compared with our trips to the mountains. As we lay there we talked about women, we who as yet knew nothing of them.
Suddenly from the bushes nearby there welled up the sound of a woman’s heavy dark panting.
Then followed a gasping cry, naked with painful physicality. We three sat up simultaneously and gazed in the direction of the voice. After a moment, a woman in a white dress emerged onto the road from the shadow of the nearby bushes and came walking past us with long leisurely strides, heel and toe, her arms folded down low on her belly, her back serenely straight. She headed into the sea breeze, half turning to send a vague glance in our direction as she passed, then was hidden again in the shadow of the bushes farther along the road. She appeared somewhat older than we were. It was difficult to imagine how that heavy panting of a moment before could have emanated from such a gaunt body. A tight black belt bit into her waist, and a straw hat hid her face from forehead to nose in deep shadow, with slightly parted lips and a thin pointed chin poking out below it into the sunlight. It was only the chin and lips that seemed to be turned on us briefly; the eyes gazed vaguely at some distant point far beyond our heads. Her neck, arms, and calves were white and lusterless, and the surrounding brightness made them appear somehow clouded and opaque.
We waited for the excitement that the panting had aroused in our bodies to recede, then got to our feet. When we emerged and set off after her, the woman was already far ahead along the gently winding road, on the point of disappearing into the pampas grass. Once we reached there, we had no idea where she had gone, so we stood stock-still, bathed in the light of sky and sea, feeling helplessly that something more ought to have come of this. I blinked slowly in the sunlight. When I closed my eyes my body seemed a soft transparent red, and on opening them, a darkness like heavy oil filled me. The repetition of this was like a listless breathing.
Even Koike’s sudden dash into the nearby bushes provoked no more than a dull surprise in me. I turned my gaze in the direction he had gone, and the top half of the woman’s body suddenly swam up above the grass heads, her oddly white and pinched profile turned to us, against the black glittering expanse of the sea. The figure was somehow difficult to get into perspective; she could have been a hundred feet or more away. I watched Koike’s mad dash toward her with a sensation of pleasure, almost as if it was my own sexual desire that was plunging headlong at her. The woman became aware of the footsteps behind her, turned quickly toward us, then, with a fierce look, disappeared as if sinking backward.
“You mustn’t die!” cried Koike, and he too disappeared, his diving body thrusting the grasses aside. Nakamura and I looked at each other in astonishment, then set off after them.
Koike was crouched facing the edge of the cliff, huddled paralyzed like a hunted animal, and tiny shivers ran over his body.
The woman had crossed the low iron railing, and with an almost graceful movement she sank down right at the cliff edge and slowly pushed her legs over the edge, her hectically flushed face all the while turned on Koike with a steady glare.
“Please don’t,” Koike pleaded, huddling still lower and slowly inching forward on his knees two or three shuffles at a time, judging the best moment to spring at her.
For a long time they remained staring at each other, waiting to see whose strength of will would win out and break the balance. Nakamura was preparing to make a simple lunge at her from the side, but this seemed a dangerous move to me and I stopped him. Koike was now gradually relaxing his pose, and the woman seemed to be slowly cringing before him.
He had reached a point where a single step would bring him within reach of the railing to which the woman’s hand clung, and suddenly he leapt at it. He missed his moment by the merest breath; the woman released her grip on the rail, slipped over the edge of the rock and disappeared, still in a sitting position, pitching forward with her back arched as if shouldering away the sky.
“Wait!” shouted Koike, straddling the railing, and with his left hand he clung to it for balance while he stretched his right hand down over the rock ledge.
Above the rim of the rock the woman’s face, her face only, rose up like a white death mask against the glittering sea.
“What is it, honey?” she said to Koike in a thin clear voice. Then her purple lips seemed to smile.
“Please don’t,” Koike said thickly, and then he sprang away from her, scrambled back over the railing, and came tumbling over to us on all fours. As he did so, the woman turned her face to the sky and disappeared over the edge of the rock. There was a sense of something like a heavy sandbag sliding down the cliff face, then she was launched into the air with a wild scream that was neither man’s nor woman’s, which trailed off into a long moan, and finally at a dizzying depth her body thudded dully into the water. Koike put his hands on the earth, twisted sideways, and vomited. Then he shook his head violently from side to side, and soundlessly began to cry above the vomit.
I left Koike in Nakamura’s care and ran headlong back down the hill to the fishing village in the inlet below. At every turn in the zigzag road I was afflicted with the sensation that the sea’s horizon with its dense light was bearing down upon me. I rushed into the little police station and gave the news, but the officers seemed to be quite used to this kind of event; a group of people was quickly assembled, and they set off in a fishing boat from the pier, chatting together about the last time this had happened, and disappeared round the cliff, the motor making little soft explosions as they went. They took with them a net that looked just like a fishing net, saying they would drag the corpse to shore through the water. After a while Nakamura and Koike both arrived, each looking as pale as the other, and we three stood together in silence gazing at the sea.
“They’ve gone by boat to get her out,” is all I said to them.
“I should just have made a dash for her at the beginning without hesitating,” said Koike, in a dull voice.
“There’s a strong smell of fish around here,” Nakamura muttered, squatting down on the seawall, and then he vomited into the sea. The vomit spread out finely through the clear water and sank, and little fish gathered to sip at it, the sides of their bellies flashing.
Thirty minutes later the boat reappeared from the shadow of the cliff. I peered at the stern, but there was no sign of anything being dragged along behind. The men in the boat were smoking sullenly, in a mood quite unlike the one they had set out in. As the boat approached we craned forward with the urge to see what fearful thing could be seen, and there discovered in the bottom of the boat on the pile of brown fishing net a small wet collapsed shape. We could make out a white calf with the veins standing out blue in it, and an oddly elongated nape of a neck, and then two arms cradling a bowed head.
“She’s alive,” one of the men said to us, a little dejectedly.
We assumed that she would be, at any rate, close to death,
or badly hurt at the very least, but when the boat reached the pier and the men called to her, she lifted her head, pulled the wet hair back from her cheeks with both hands, and setting her hair in order stood up sinuously, with a listless air. Once she was helped onto the rock by both arms, she bent slightly forward, took her wet dress in delicate fingertips, and pulled the skirt away from her body, then with eyes modestly cast down to her bare feet, she began to walk off.
“You’re not, you’re not hurt?” Koike asked in a shrill voice, stepping backward as she walked past him.
“No thank you, I’m quite all right,” the woman replied in the same voice we had heard on the cliff edge, and off she walked between the men in the direction of the police station, her head meekly lowered, casting him not so much as a glance. To the children who came running up, she turned an embarrassed smile.
It was then that a cold fear finally gripped me. That body, with its white death mask of a face, which had been sucked out into space leaving in its wake a somehow hollow sound, that body was still alive. Drenched though it was, it now walked through the quiet fishing village looking like a normal woman. It was even smiling kindly at children. The stink of fish suddenly assaulted my nostrils. The bay, with its downpour of sunlight, went dark before my eyes, and the woman’s bare feet as they trod the sand grew harsh and vivid. Behind Koike and Nakamura, who stood there in astonishment, watching her go, I squatted in shadow and softly retched.
Since the woman had in the end been unharmed, it would have been sensible to laugh off our dismay when we recalled it later. This is what we always did after we had emerged from some dangerous situation in the mountains. But, apart from marveling together at the power of her good fortune, we didn’t speak further to each other about the event. We got the bus straight back to the town from there and caught the night train home, cutting our trip short by a day. As we sat in the bus, Koike muttered, “You know, it really is a weakness in us, not to have any way of praying in this sort of situation. It means that you end up bearing the brunt of everything yourself, even the things that are too much to bear.”
