Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [42]
Standing round the bonfire, the brother and the men were talking casually together. The three girls remained aloof and indifferent. I had the feeling that somewhere, some place, I had witnessed precisely the same scene. The air holes pierced in the body of the drum shone green. A red pillar of flame spewed up into the black sky, scattering a fiery dust. The chill penetrated my body from my feet upward. I could not feel much of a wind, perhaps because we were cut off by the embankment, but directly above my head the sky resounded. It was like the static of a radio turned to full volume on no wave length of any station. A thousand shriveled fingers were strumming on the twigs and branches of the copse on the hill. I measured with my eye the position of the veneer partition with its tiny door beyond the unshaven cook. It seemed closer to the driver’s seat than to the center of the bus. Indeed, if that were really true, there would seem to be enough room for a mattress. I flexed my toes in my shoes, trying to get the blood moving.
“Can you get it inside?”
“No, not here,” said the cook, skillfully scooping up the boiled noodles in a metal net and shaking them firmly to drain the water. He glanced at me probingly out of the corner of his eye. “Better drop it. You can’t call them women … coming to work in a place like this.”
“Well then, isn’t there any other kind of fun?”
“We just rent the room. It’s that guy’s regular pad. Unfortunately, I puke just seeing a female cat. I asked a doctor … said it was diabetes. I hate having a cat in heat hanging around: I want to club it to death. You can’t club people to death. What a laugh. Well, anyway, I wish I had had diabetes when I was young. Once I let those bitches in here, I’d never get out of it. These eggs here are raw and over there they’re hard-boiled. Besides, whether or not I let them use the place I have to pay squeeze money to the syndicate. So what’s the difference?”
I broke an egg in a bowl and warmed my palms on the hot porcelain.
“You think it’s interesting? Well, I wonder. I suppose I should thank my lucky stars if I can finish paying off the monthly installments by the time I shut this place down.”
“Are you in business with your own car?”
“It hasn’t been the paying work I expected. There’s a traffic law, you know. The Road Traffic Control Law, or something—anyway, even if you’ve got a car you can’t park just anywhere you want to do your business.”
“Pass the pepper.”
“After all, there’s a limit to places like this—a dry river bed or the seashore—places where the traffic laws don’t apply. Besides, I’m on the lookout for a spot that’d be good for business. If I don’t give my contribution to the syndicate, I can’t open up. That’s the trick of it.”
“You’ve only got to get in the good graces of some syndicate some place, don’t you?”
“It’s pat or be eaten. Nobody leaves me alone. But I’m not saying this because you seem to know that guy. He’s not too hard on me. And he’s not always plucking the goose. Like he promised from the first, we depend on each other. Well, when I finish my monthly payments and if the car lasts that long, I’m going to the seashore in the country this summer and try to get something.”
The brother had said it was useless to look for traces of the husband here. The Dainen Enterprises’ director and the young clerk Tashiro had stressed the same thing. And now … Having checked M Fuel Supplier with my own eyes and walked myself through F—— Town, I too was inclined more and more to the