Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [79]
“Ah. There!” I was badgering her in a way that surprised even me. My words poured out in a torrent. “That’s just what I was saying. I’ve been knocking myself out, trying to get you to give me information. Well, now look here, supposing for the moment that I had ferreted out the business about the life insurance and not heard it from you. I couldn’t have helped but suspect that your husband’s disappearance was a fake one, set up between you, the objective being the perfect crime: your brother’s death.”
It was already too dark for me to see her expression. I could only guess at it from the tense silence. One, two, three seconds, four seconds … the meaning and depth of the silence evolved with the passage of time. Suddenly her cheerful surprise lightly turned my aggressiveness aside.
“Oh. How dark it’s become!”
She turned on the lights and stood by the wall that cut off the kitchen. Bookshelves, lemon-yellow curtains, telephone, Formula I cutaway view, Picasso reproduction, stereo set, artificial lace throw … She raised her arm slightly, and pushing through the draped curtain, passed into the kitchen. Apparently she had raised her arm excusing her departure, or else it had been merely to look at the sleeve of her mourning kimono. As I filled my glass with beer and drained it in a draught, I felt the same eddying deep within me come slowly and quietly to the surface. Before I knew it we had finished off the third bottle of beer. I alone had surely emptied two. A good excuse for leaving my car where it was. A good excuse for being able to come back again when I wished. Unworried and composed, she had let a faint smile hover around her lips. Perhaps it was because she had left her seat … perhaps it was the fault of the beer … or again possibly it was because of the electric lights, symbols of security. No, more than anything, it was likely the mourning clothes. The offensive odor of death, like a light mist. It was the fault of the mourning clothes that had gone away, that were impregnated to their innermost fibers with death as with some volatile gas. Clothes for hire that had wandered among deaths too numerous to count. If that were true, my feeling of liberation would not last long. When she returned with her clothes of death, the air in the room would be thick, as it had been before, with that oppressive gelatinous liquid.
The telephone began to ring, breaking the impression that the lemon-yellow room was some solitary island; the outside world bored in through a black hole. I felt uneasy, for the spell had been broken. I was chilled and ill at ease as if the muzzle of a gun pointed at me from the hole.
Since, on the third ring, there was no sign that she was coming, I automatically called behind the curtain:
“Shall I answer it?”
An unexpected voice came from an unexpected direction. “Oh, yes. Would you mind?”
I had expected the kitchen, but she was in the next room. Most of all, I was intrigued that she could so simply entrust the telephone to me. I was not all that suspicious, and I certainly harbored no disgraceful thought that the husband’s disappearance was faked and that they remained in secret contact by telephone. More generally, the degree of transparency in her situation was greatly increased by the fact that no secret telephone call was expected. Apparently she was quite willing that I act as her official representative. Scarcely able to control my hard breathing and my tensed muscles, I rushed for the receiver, trying to get there before the telephone rang a fifth time.
However, my expectations were disappointed. A rude