Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [7]
“YES, it’s true. They’re like a legion of rats cast under a magic spell. You know, like in the fairy tale.” The woman spread her arms wide, perhaps intending to show the width of the street. Her eyes blurred, no doubt from having drunk the beer alone, and looking from one to the other of her outstretched arms, she murmured as if in surprise, “How dark!” Suddenly she stood up, switched on the light in the room, and then went into the kitchen. She continued speaking in the same tone through the curtain. “It’s not only the sidewalks; even the streets are packed. And they’re all rushing for fear they’ll miss their bus … little by little they swarm together in the middle of the street.”
“But a bus can’t keep its schedule in such a crowd, can it?”
“Of course not,” she said, holding in her hand another bottle of beer, as she came back into the room. “They rush all the more because it’s unreliable, I suppose.”
Placing the bottle on the table, she casually turned toward the window. With the light on, it was already evening outside. The Picasso print was reflected in the panes. As if threatened by something, she roughly pulled the curtains that covered half the wall, and their lemon-yellow color transformed the room. Lemon-yellow it was, but it was not very fresh. A rather withered and shop-worn lemon. The masterless room, which had been like a cast-off cicada skin, suddenly came alive again, thanks to the color. One could say that it was not the lost man that had been missing but simply the lemon color. Suddenly a stuffed cat appeared above the bookcases. Below the cutaway view, Formula I, was a small sconce and on it a lace-net glove. A room well suited to lemon-yellow. A woman well suited to lemon-yellow. Her room. A room for her, adjusted to her life. I tilted my head. My sixth cigarette. And she with her second bottle of beer. Something was suspicious.
A place about ten paces from the street light in the direction of the hill. Where there was a small manhole on the border of the lawn. There he was, absorbed in his thoughts, walking slowly along the edge of the sidewalk, skirting the crowd of workers, hurrying down the street as if pursued. Someone in the neighborhood had observed him. Even if it was true that this was the last sight of him, what could it possibly mean?
“Wouldn’t it be more intelligent to assume that rather than running in the direction of the bus, which was unreliable, he had quietly gone down the hill with the intention of taking the subway from the very first? That very morning he must have had an appointment in S—– station, for if he were going directly to work the bus would have been more convenient.”
“But he didn’t keep the appointment.”
“It is significant that his not keeping the appointment was deliberate and willful.”
“You’re wrong there. I’ll put it another way. How shall I say …”
“Did you say he’d been going back and forth to work by car until three days before he disappeared?”
“Yes. He put it in the garage with something or other wrong with it.”
“And what about the car now?”
“Yes, I wonder what’s happened to it,” she said, her eyes wide in what