Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [106]
The sky was covered over with a thin smooth blanket of blue-gray cloud, typical of the season, making the time—4:28 by my watch—an ambiguous early evening. The street was light enough for me to be able to make out the five-inch-spaced grooves, yet not light enough to cast shadows. On the protective wall to the left—doubtless due to its material—the moss, mottled with dampness, was rapidly absorbing the darkness, changing the surface into a mass of shadow. At the top of the wall a vague, weathered line diagonally blocked my view; only there was the sky suddenly bright. It was, of course, impossible for me to see what lay beyond, but, if I remembered rightly, there were only three small wooden houses and a building surrounded by clumps of trees that seemed to be an inn or a lodging house, forming a cluster half way up the slope. Another road led away from the foot of the slope, and as I had seldom been there it was not surprising that my memories of it were somewhat hazy. I wanted to pin my hopes on the fact that such contours of memory, vague as they might be, had been preserved. If the scene before my eyes was not opening up some avenue to the past, such memories would never have arisen. Actually, if I was imagining I recognized a completely unknown place, shouldn’t all the worlds outside my vision completely disappear? But it was only the town on the plateau beyond the curve that had vanished.
The low ground at the foot of the cliff on the north side—ha! I could even give the direction, though I couldn’t ascertain the position of the sun—was already well known to me. At this point a row of houses lay below, and I could see only a labyrinth of vegetable plots formed by the roofs of thatch and tile, a forest of antennae absorbing electric waves, and the chimney of a public bath, standing almost as high as the stone wall in front of me. But I was confident that I could faithfully follow in my memory the entire stretch of road that led to the public bath at the end, in the middle of the labyrinth. The street that the old men, smoking their cigarettes, sitting in front of the bath, waiting to be first in, used to like to walk down … the street where after three o’clock, women would hurry along, wash basins in hand. And the roundabout way by the edge of the cliff where the little trucks carrying fuel came and went. I seem to recall that once the broken handles and frames of placards had grown to a large pile by the side of the road.
Shifting my weight, I tried to reduce my breathing little by little. As I reduced it an uneasiness gradually welled up within me. Or was it perhaps that my breathing slowed down because the uneasiness had come welling up? Far from coming into focus, the town on the plateau beyond the curve became more and more of a blank as if continually erased by some supereraser. The color vanished … the contours, the forms vanished, and ultimately its very existence seemed to be negated. A sound of someone walking up the slope drew closer. An office-worker type passed me, carrying a document case under his left arm and an umbrella in his right. He was leaning forward, walking on the balls of his feet, and with each step he swung the handle of his umbrella forward. Apparently the snap was broken, for the folds of the umbrella opened and closed quite as if it were breathing. Of course, I did not have the courage to address him, but for an instant I felt inclined to follow him. Perhaps it was best to forge ahead unfalteringly like that. In any event, I should be able