Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [48]
Somehow, it turned out well. Almost all the pursuers, unwilling to miss the ceremony in progress with the girls, had withdrawn there. Since my headlights were turned off, I did not know exactly what kind of ceremony they were enacting. My imagination went to work and I envisioned smooth hunks of meat suspended on hooks in a butcher’s refrigeration room, skinned and carved up. There was no light, but in front of them stood a great candlestick and they were filled with a tense feeling of solemnity. Thanks to the girls, my car was ignored. When at last I arrived at the embankment, I turned on my lights. Suddenly my whole body stiffened, my shoulders and legs began to shake, and it appeared darker to me than when the lights had been off. I shifted into high, and although my foot had the accelerator to the floor, the car moved no faster than a hand cart; the back of my head tingled with an unspeakable fear. There was a smell of burning. The hand brake was not completely released. I turned on the heater and left the window open. For the first time, I felt with relief the weight of inebriation between my eyes.
THERE WAS still no sign of intoxication in her expression. With her shoulder she brushed aside the curtain that served to partition off the kitchen and entered the room with an affectedly light, girlish step, her weight borne forward, carrying over her arm a man’s raincoat, on which she had placed a folded, used newspaper and on top of that her free hand.
Evidently she had made short work of putting on her make-up. The neat, velvety-soft color of her skin and even her freckles had restored her usual freshness, and her hair had been brushed. Perhaps the attempt to conceal her real face was because she had a woman’s consciousness of being seen, or it might on the other hand be a manifestation of caution. But even so, the effectiveness was open to question. This woman became more transparent by using cosmetics, and she could easily be seen through. A distant dream village enshrouded in mist. Before I became what I am now, my breast was filled with yearning for it—a remote village that seemed lost among the trees, where I remember spending several days. But precisely because a picture frame was attached to it, it seemed a landscape, and because I was convinced it was a landscape, it became transparent. If the frame were removed, the mist would be quite ordinary. Insofar as it could not be touched with the hands, it was no different from a wall of concrete in its nontransparency. Don’t be deceived. There was still no evidence that she was not an accomplice. Suddenly for no reason my ears were pierced by the weakened cries of the girls in the river bed, and the hunks of meat, cut into pieces, oozing a dark juice, appeared like small moons deep in the mist.
Crossing in front of the bookshelves, she laid the coat on a corner of the table, and slid the newspaper toward me. She seated herself on the same chair as last night, although it was now in a somewhat different position, and the line of demarcation between the bookshelves and the lemon-yellow curtains now fell to the level of her right ear, as fragile as china, ruined with rough handling. I suppose some men would feel protective toward it, while others might be carried away by the desire to break it into pieces. Which type was the husband? I wondered.
“This is the paper.”
It was a