Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [81]
“Did I ever say anything like that?”
“I suppose you meant it was my brother’s child, didn’t you?”
“How can you say such a terrible thing with a straight face? I was only trying to say that one can pose all kinds of hypotheses. But I understood your brother’s tastes, and you did show me the album.”
“It’s curious, I felt that myself. And I talked about it with my brother. He was disgusted. He abhorred women and evidently he disliked children too.”
“You’re an amazing woman. I didn’t mean anything so far out as that by what I said. I meant something a lot simpler … a conventional ménage à trois or something like that. He might have pretended to be a brother so you could hide the relationship. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean, ‘pretended to be a brother’?”
“Frankly speaking, it was an equivocal situation.”
“I wish you had said that to my brother.”
“Of course, I’m not suspicious any more.” I quickly leafed through the album, trying not to look at her expression. I showed her the page with the picture of the brother and the car. “Look at this picture. It’s written here that you were the one who took it. Your husband has crawled underneath. Your brother’s standing to the side, looking rather absently at what your husband is doing. No, he is pretending to look, smiling like some accomplice in the direction of the person who’s taking the shot—that is, toward you. Naturally your husband can’t see his expression.”
“I wonder if he wasn’t beginning to be suspicious.”
“No. This is a record. It has been left specifically as such. That’s precisely the sense of The Meaning of Memories. Both the one who’s taking the picture and the one who’s having his picture taken must be very much aware of that. If the two of you had had anything to be ashamed of, you would have consciously avoided such a scene.”
“You’re a clever fellow, I knew it.” Suddenly her voice became animated, and she laughed as she filled up my glass, which for some time had been empty. I did not demur. There were only about two inches of beer left in the bottle. “I like this kind of talk. I want more of it.”
“What do you mean, ‘this kind of talk’?”
“Talk that reverses itself, where top becomes bottom, as you’re listening to it. Maybe I can do it too with one subject: my brother. Shall I try?”
“I’ve just about a quarter of an hour.”
“Some years ago my brother had a real lover. I mean a girl, of course … someone he had met in a student movement, he said. That was winter. He seemed terribly happy on through the spring. But one day in the summer the girl said he smelled like cat piddle and couldn’t he have some operation or treatment.”
“I suppose it was an underarm odor.”
“Anyway, my brother meekly began going to the hospital. But when the treatments were half over he decided to have nothing more to do with her. Instead his old dislike of women came back. I began to be more and more important to him. I was the only woman in the world who, for him, was not a woman. We loved each other … really. It was funny we didn’t have a child. But then my husband came on the scene. And I became a real woman.”
“Well then, they must have vied with each other.”
“On the contrary, they didn’t. Right away my brother got along perfectly with my husband. It was much better than if I had made friends with other women.”
“But he could have wanted exclusive possession of you, couldn’t he?”
“Well, he did have exclusive possession … of a boy.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I really liked everything about my brother.”
“Can’t you talk about your husband that way?”
“But my husband didn’t have such a double life.”
“Yet he was the one to run away.”
“Yes, and that’s why it’s so horrible.”
Terror flashed in her eyes, a pathetic fright like frost-covered wires moaning in the wind.
“You’re frightened because you’re thinking of your husband who’s not here. Try instead to imagine him being somewhere. You may suffer but your fear will go away.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Even if you imagined he was living with some other woman?”
“If I don’t understand why he isn’t here, it’s the same thing.