Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [55]
If there was anything at all strange, it was perhaps a variation of my impression of his pride which became arrogance. Definitely my client had paid her money to retain me; she was my employer. But she usually made eyes like a begging dog or else flashed her servile smile as if she somehow felt guilty. At such times, in order to make her feel at ease, I would smile servilely along with her, thinking that people were like that. I would show her I was willing to handle her dirty wash. Since within our hearts we secretly want everything in existence to be dirty, we always recover our self-respect and discover light and hope in life. But her brother made no effort to show the slightest bit of this wretchedness. From the first, he did not try to conceal that he was covered with filth, but he stubbornly refused to let me see that filth, much less to touch it. He was quite different from the type of customer I had had up to now. It was true that he was a strange fellow, but I could not claim to be unprejudiced. When I realized this bias, I had the feeling of being able to recall, however, dimly, that I had overlooked—no, had actually tried to overlook—something. His earnest expression, for instance, the time he asked for my opinion of his “sister as a woman.” Or his thoughtfulness in details, as when he ordered a free egg from the owner of the microbus stall. If I hadn’t clung so to my preconceptions, if I had kept myself at the same level with him without deciding from the first that he was a wall obstructing my view, he might have surprised me by changing from a wall into a door, through which he might have invited me in.
Of course, the wall was no more. And with it the possibility of a door had vanished too.
It was already too late.
What he didn’t want to say as well as what he perhaps did want to say, as he crawled away through the dry grasses of the embankment like some broken umbrella, was now nonexistent. The puzzle ring forcibly taken apart has no more relation to a puzzle.
I glanced at my wrist watch. It was 11:08, but even if I entered that in my report sheets, there was nothing to write after it. No, it was not only this moment; I had practically no hope of anything to report on, even after an hour, three hours, or ten hours. Harassed by these thoughts, I downed the remaining coffee and rose. But what should I do? Was there something to be done? Again I stood there indecisively … just standing, like the girl I had left behind at the foot of the library steps. Being dragged around in the dark, deprived of freedom, ignorant of one’s whereabouts or objective, was vexing enough, but suddenly being picked up on the street with neither explanation nor excuse was really insulting treatment.
Behind the counter the proprietor of the shop was buried up to his neck in his newspaper. The sulky waitress, her elbow on the cash-register stand, held to her ear a small radio, the volume low, as she stared vacantly outside. As she stood there her lips were contorted in an unconscious sneer—was she laughing at the radio program, or at me standing there so indecisively, or was she laughing at something else? Following her gaze, I looked out of the window and saw something terribly unnerving. A group of three men, apparently salesmen, were passing by, discussing something among themselves. Each carried the same kind of briefcase under his arm, each had an expression filled with hostility. Beyond them, the endless flow of cars. And beyond that, the parking lot—something that stirred my memory irritatingly, like the edge of a broken molar. Digits … seven digits at the bottom of the parking lot sign. The telephone number!
The matchbox label … the Camellia coffee house … the classified ad in the old newspaper … the little