Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [6]
“I’d like to know your brother’s reason for not wanting you to do anything.”
“Ah, yes, I suppose …” Her expression became more and more distant, more and more vague; the dark spots under her eyes, like a veil enfolding her dream, suited her well. “I suppose my brother had a mind of his own. But it was too much for him after all. I couldn’t wait any longer either. Well, finally my brother gave up and we decided to go to you.”
“Mrs. Nemuro, are you something of a drinker?”
The bottle of beer she was absently pouring into her glass immobilized in mid-air; she was stunned.
“Once in a while,” she said, nodding her head distractedly, “since my husband’s been away. When I’m just waiting here alone, I dream with my eyes wide open. It’s a strange dream. I seem to be following him. And then he pops out right behind me and starts tickling me like this. I know it’s a dream, yet I laugh and laugh with the tickling … it makes me feel very funny. A strange dream.”
“It is indeed. I think it would be well if I met your brother.”
“I’ll tell him the next time he calls. But … I wonder … if he’ll be very anxious to meet you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“How shall I say? I just feel it. I’m afraid I don’t express myself very well.”
“Is it all right then? I’ve got to have information. I’m sure you understand, don’t you? I don’t intend to go prying into your brother’s affairs at all. I’d just like to get him to give me the information he has. Isn’t it a waste of time to start in all over again on what your brother’s already done? As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have anything more to say here.”
“I’ll tell you everything I know. But what?”
“Well … any clues.”
“Oh, but there aren’t any, no matter what you say.”
“All right then, let it go.” I too was ready to give up. “Now, let’s begin by your explaining things as they happened.”
“Well, it’s all terribly simple. Too simple, really … surprisingly so. Let me see,” she said, rising lightly from her seat and running to the window corner where she beckoned to me with a finger. “Over there. Can you see it? About ten paces in front of that street light. There, near the sidewalk on the lawn. See that small manhole? Right there, he vanished into thin air. Why? Why in a place like that? There was no need for it, absolutely none at all.”
THE DARK street … too dark … The street, which until a short while ago had been too white, linked as it had been with the milky sky, was now a street in the depths of a gorge, sunk at the bottom of a sky stained with street lights. I stepped off ten paces from the light, groping for the manhole cover with the tip of my shoe—the place where the husband had, so she said, vanished.
Women out for their evening shopping and of course the red baby carriage and the boy with his bicycle were wiped away with a paintbrush of darkness, workers who had gone directly home were already settling down in their respective filing-cabinet homes while their friends, thinking it too early to return, tarried along the way … the abandoned gorges of unfinished time. I stood motionless in the very place where he had vanished.
The wind blew, threading its way between the dwellings. Freezing blasts of air, striking the sharp corners of the buildings, howled in a bass that the ear could barely catch. Even so, the moaning of this great pipe organ penetrated to the very quick of me. My whole body became gooseflesh, my blood congealed, my heart was transformed into a red, heart-shaped ice bag. A trampled asphalt walkway. The broken, abandoned rubber ball visible as a white speck on the lawn. The cracked corpse of the street, illuminated by the street lights that gilded even my dust-speckled shoes. One could scarcely hope to arrive at any place worth mentioning along such a street.
Yes, of course, it was a half year ago, August to be exact, and the summer heat was at its worst. The asphalt was as sticky as gum and swarms of insects clustered around the street lights. The grass was a green pond rippled by