Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [75]
“Well, he was enthusiastic about color and he was all the time going to a rented darkroom where he could develop his own pictures. He was proud of the one that seems to be rings of colors in a puddle of water.”
Colored rings … Apparently she didn’t know anything about the nudes. But there wasn’t much object in telling her at this point. The brown, faded portrait of an older woman appeared on the first page of the album. From the way the painted ocean and cliff stretched away in the background, I supposed it dated from the twenties.
“That’s my husband’s mother, who lives in the country with my sister-in-law,” she commented, peering at the picture. An odor of sun-drenched hair wafted to my nose.
The pictures of the husband alone stopped with this page. From the second page on, they abruptly shifted to the period just after his marriage. A souvenir shot of affectedly expressionless newlyweds.
“Aren’t there any pictures of your husband before you and he got married?”
“No. We collected them all, including the old ones, and left them with his mother in the country.”
“Did you have some reason for that?”
“We weren’t particularly sentimental about the past.”
The periods of the pictures kept changing as I turned the pages. But portraits of her occupied the most space, whatever the period. Apparently his interest in photography dated from some time ago, for they were arty shots taken from every conceivable angle. But what was even more disconcerting was her disagreeably aggressive attitude that was caught in them. One showed her face reflected in a mirror as if she were making herself up, quite devoid of timidity. A face clearly aware it was being looked at, a smile hovering about the slightly open mouth, veiled, pensive eyes dreamily looking into the distance. More surprising still was that there was even a picture of her in a peignoir, through which, the shot having been taken against the light, the contours of her body were almost visible. A strange woman. Had the husband taken them … or had she had them done? I should have to begin by looking into that.
Mixed in with these pictures, though rarely, were others of the family and him, souvenir photos of a time when the two of them had visited his mother. A country village … the front of a general store that served as a tobacconist’s. It was apparently summer and a bench had been brought out. The mother was in the center, with the two of them to her right; on her left were his elder sister and her husband. They were all holding cups of shaved strawberry ice in their hands and laughing happily. At once I scrutinized the expressions of the mother and sister. Wasn’t there some feature the three had in common? Some portent that hinted of his disappearance? Some genetic sign of insanity? I should have had a magnifying glass.
There was another picture in which he was fussing with a tree in the garden.
“Is this where you lived before you came here?”
“Yes. That was when he was an agent for Dainen Enterprises.”
“How did he first come to do that kind of work?”
“After the first business went bankrupt, he sold magazines for a while. And then, unexpectedly, a college classmate of my brother’s started a supermarket with capital he got from selling land: my husband bought his share of the store.”
“What about the money?”
“My husband finished paying it in monthly installments last summer.”
“So there’s nothing between them any more?”
“No. My brother did the negotiating from the very beginning.”
“Then I suppose your brother was also the one who received the title.”
“I really don’t know. Whichever it was, my husband was the one who was promoted from branch head to section head in the main office. There’s no problem there, I think.”
“You’re right. Of course, there was some kickback out of his earnings.”
“Oh, do you think so?” She smiled wearily as she refilled both our glasses with beer. “But we … my brother and I … lost our mother and father early and always had to lead a hand-to-mouth