Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [21]
SOMEONE WAS following me. Paying no heed, I continued to walk.
Leaving Dainen Enterprises, I went about two blocks south, down the main street, turned right, and climbed the abrupt incline. I came to a railroad crossing with no gate. The street which lay alongside the tracks on the other side was, in this neighborhood, the only place where parking was possible. A line of cars stretched almost solid from there to the next main street. Most of the parked cars were small-sized trucks, since the whole area was crowded with small factories. Every time a train came by, it would raise a metallic dust, and here even the road appeared rusty-red.
My car was parked at the end of the street. When I turned and looked over my shoulder, the figure of the man shadowing me had vanished. There was nothing to get excited about. He would, I suspected, soon reappear. I got in the car and shoved the seat back as far as it would go, inserted a carbon between two sheets of paper on top of my briefcase, which I propped on my knees, and lit a cigarette. Putting records in order in places like this was a habit in which we had had to acquire some skill. The same was true for information and shadowing techniques. Yet, after the few lines of stereotyped opening, the following sentences simply didn’t come. “No results,” I wrote—an incredibly wretched expression that only corroborated my alibi. Fortunately I did have thesheet with the map of the meeting place at S—– station, which I had had young Tashiro draw up, a sketch like a plumber’s draft for some water conduit. That was something to pad out the report with. Nothing is so devastating at such times as one’s own incompetence. Well, maybe I was really incompetent. Had I ever once been competent? I wondered. Once in a long while, when my words flowed, when I was able to draw out my “No results” over thirty lines, I had the illusion of competency. Since I took a rather aggressive attitude toward my abilities, there was no need to be particularly competent. I would manage some way to forget about my inefficiency.
Tearing off a length of Scotch tape, I attached the piece of paper with the map to the left-hand corner of my report sheet.
A long freight train crowned with snow—it had come through the mountains—beating and bending the rails, taking an endless time, began to pass by. Once again the figure of my follower appeared in the corner of the rear-view mirror.
It was, as I expected, young Tashiro. He vanished into a dead angle of the mirror and was transformed at once into a real person standing at my window. Opening the opposite door, I signaled to him with my finger to go round to the other side. The window groaned as if it would break under the pressure set up by the train, and the report sheets on my knees fluttered violently. He pitched, almost collapsing, into the car, and I was struck with the pungent odor, like that of an old icebox, coming from his overcoat.
For the several minutes—actually a score of seconds—until the train had passed completely by, the pupils of my companion’s eyes became smaller