by Kōbō Abe
“Did your husband and your brother get along well?”
“Yes, they were like puppies, romping around and quarreling together with no inhibitions.”
“At the time this picture was taken, had your brother already entered the organization?”
“Let me see … I think so, but …”
“What was your husband’s opinion about that?”
“He didn’t agree, of course … but it wasn’t his business.”
“Well then—the question’s rather impertinent—did your brother think of you and your husband as one? Or did he draw the distinction that you were a relative in fact, while your husband was always a parenthetical relation, in the final analysis, a stranger … or how did he think? In other words, if some antagonism arose between you and your husband, did your brother as a matter of course act as peacemaker or did he clearly act to protect your interests?”
“I’ve never thought about such things.”
“Well, let’s look at it in another way. Supposing, to the contrary, your husband and your brother came to a definite parting of the ways over something or other and claimed they had to duel, what would you have done? There was no possibility of making peace, and you had to choose one of them—which one would it be?”
“What an idea. It’s nonsense.”
“But you’re obliged to choose.”
“But my brother helped my husband the way no one else could.”
“So in return your husband felt he owed him something?”
“Why should I have to answer such questions?”
“In the first place, because it’s my obligation to protect my client.”
“But my brother’s dead!” she suddenly screamed in a low, rasping voice. I was startled. Ah, that was it! How could I have been so blind?
“I must be going soon after six.” The watch on my wrist showed a little after five. “I’ve got an appointment to meet Tashiro. Maybe he’s got some clue. Whatever you say, he’s got more contacts within the company than anyone else.”
But she remained silent. She had doubtless understood my meaning. Intuitively, she may indeed have realized the intent that I myself had not yet been able to formulate clearly into words—my intent in repeating these ill-natured questions, attempting to estrange the husband and the brother—at this point, the one lost and the other dead. That intent there was I could not deny. Thus I felt that I had been seen through, and I was upset at the thought.
Subjects more appropriate to my role and to the play I was in were not altogether lacking after all. Even the report that I had prepared this morning was not completely worthless. The conversation with Toyama was suggestive; it had sketched for me the actual wiring chart for the connections between the husband and the Camellia. It was simpler and more reliable than any line that had come to me thus far. But something made me hesitate. As soon as I had put it into words I felt empty and uneasy, as if I had quite lost my reason for being. I could bring up the Camellia in a little more roundabout way.
“Oh, yes. I forgot to write up two or three things in my report about the Camellia. Let’s see. There’s a parking lot right in front of it, you know. It was there I met your brother for the first time. Accidentally. A little too accidentally, I think. But let that go. Did you know just why your brother happened to be in such a place?”
“Well …”
“According to his explanation, there was the possibility your husband had made the parking lot his base of operations for his second-hand car business.”
“Then what happened?”
At last I had provoked real interest. But was it because the information concerned her husband or because of the mention of her brother’s name? The two of us lifted our glasses of beer to our lips at the same instant, both of us feigning unconcern. Her glass was nearly half full; in mine there remained about an inch of beer.
“I really couldn’t get any evidence there, but I wonder why your brother suddenly appeared in such a place yesterday morning. He must have been investigating your husband’s case over six months now. Furthermore, from the looks of it he was lying in wait for me.” Her expression clouded over, and I listened to the alarm that began to sound within me. Any brakes would be useless; I should have to come to a natural stop.
“Even if our meeting was accidental, it was too much so. I suspected at once that your husband and your brother weren’t accomplices. I mean, your brother knew of your husband’s whereabouts, yet for some reason he attempted to conceal that from you and from everybody else.”
“What do you mean ‘for some reason’?”
“If we knew that, we’d have the solution. But we have to consider all possibilities. We’ve got to be suspicious of everyone … except you.”
“Why am I so special?”
“Because you’re the client.”
“But my brother also agreed about requesting you to investigate, you know.”
“That’s not particularly inconsistent. You hired me. I was given charge of the investigation. But since you were able to follow all my movements, I was exactly like a cat with a bell around its neck, wasn’t I.”
“But why would I do that?”
“Consider a completely opposite situation. Your brother knows the whereabouts of your husband, but since they were not accomplices, he has recourse to either psychological or physical blackmail so that your husband cannot come back again. How about that? Interesting, isn’t it? A given situation can be seen in different lights just by changing the point of view.”
“Very interesting indeed.”
“I’m not just making things up, you know.” I was inexpressibly angry both with myself and with her at my gradual loss of composure. Just a little more and I would put it into words, but the depth of the crevasse separating me from that little more was too great. “It’s an undeniable fact that my actions were observed by your brother, isn’t it? Aside from however you would explain that, his aim was simply to observe the way I worked, I suppose. I’m not angry, really. It’s very natural, psychologically, for people who deceive to be afraid of being deceived. But with such people it’s also most natural, psychologically, to think that we don’t know how deceptive they are with everybody else.”
“My husband and my brother got along very well.”
“Yes, of course. To the point of being purple with rage about a toy gun.”
I came to the last page of the album … a light sepia cardboard with nothing on it. It was the one I kept looking at longest of all. Slowly I closed the album, and again there appeared the words: The Meaning of Memories.
“My brother of course knew of my pregnancy.”
“If I were a police detective, as a matter of course I would have been suspicious even of your aborted child, you know.”
She raised her eyes from the foam in her glass. For an instant the thin, translucent ice shone blue between her eyebrows; with the next sparkle it had already melted. It would take considerable courage not to protect this woman. That was the only point I could understand about the missing husband. Anyway, the husband had had that courage. Even if one didn’t question whether that courage was one of life or death … She continued to stare directly at me. The line of her cheek became like moistened sand on a beach, the softness and hardness delicately mingled as she sat against the lemon-yellow curtains that had gradually begun to fade. The color of her skin was that of a mellowed piece of unpainted furniture in which age and freshness smoothly fused. As we sat there the color of evening deepened, and the freckles on her face blended into her skin. She said nothing. The hem of her mourning kimono formed a link with the dark floor; it was as if she had become some plant. From window to window a street peddler was crying his wares through a portable microphone. “The second time I met your brother …,” I began, lowering my voice slightly, following the progress of her eight fingers (the two thumbs were invisible) creeping like some optical illusion along the edge of the table. I continued: “No, I’m not talking about the place where th
e fight occurred. It was a little before that. It was right there in town, at the M Fuel Supplier’s about a mile from where the fight happened … the place I mentioned last in my report last night. Again it was a repeat of the same fishy accidental meeting. I had gone there to make inquiries, because I had the feeling that the documents your husband had arranged to give Tashiro on the day he disappeared were very probably destined for M Fuel Supplier’s. And then there he was again … it gave me a very funny feeling. We could wrap the case up pretty quickly if we could say that the fellow I was pursuing was the brother and not the husband. Do you have any idea what your brother was doing there?”
“Yes, if it concerns M, I do.”
“Oh, did you know M?”
“I’ve told you a hundred times,” she replied tonelessly. Was she stifling her feelings or was it something not worth expressing her feelings about? “The fact is that my brother was very cooperative with my husband in his work.”
“Do you mean that it was your brother who started the business with M Fuel Supplier?”
“He said it was really big business.”
“Yes, of course. But it looks like the business last evening wasn’t so above-board. It comes to the same thing, I suppose. In the end, it’s for the two of you. Yes, perhaps so. If you don’t know the means he used it doesn’t make any difference.”
“I wonder what the business was.”
“Blackmail.”
“Blackmail?”
Her faint voice and pursed lips gave the impression she was sucking on some ripe fruit. For her even blackmail was preserved in sweet syrup. When I thought about it, the very sound of “blackmail” conjured up in my mind the small fruit of some tree.
“Do you plan on my going on with the investigation after this week?”
“Yes, if I can.”
“In that case I suppose you had arranged with your brother about the expenses, hadn’t you?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly she had trouble breathing, as if she were choking on the beer. But the glass was on the table, softly reflecting the last faint rays of light. She was gagging on reality. No matter how much she hoped to float like a foetus in the lemon-yellow liquid, talking to herself, alone with her beer, the death of her protector, who had checked the encroachment of reality, was itself this very reality. She was gasping like a fish in a dry pond. “But there’s still the savings, and my husband’s retirement pay hasn’t been touched. And then, there’s the joint life insurance I have with my brother, though it’s not very much.”
“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 interruption of the role I was deliberately playing. It was the chief. Another tedious lecture. Why did he always have to start all over again from lesson one? Because an investigator was no more than a drain cleaner, that was why. He crawls around in the midst of filth, unexposed to light.—“I want you detectives to be far more careful about cleanliness and pay attention to your health.” I realized, without being told, the chief’s perplexity when without contacting him I broke my promise to put in an appearance at the office after noon. Although he was most considerate and thoughtful of others he demanded the strictness of an ascetic in matters of self-defense and the cash register, but only in these areas. My thoughts about a chief like this were never unhappy ones. I rather admired his professional conscientiousness when I reflected that many people put up a pretense of evil and hypocrisy as temporary painkillers.—“You had better watch out. As far as your client’s brother’s concerned, it’s a case of murder. It’s preposterous. May I remind you again, if you get involved in a police case without consulting first with me, from that instant on you’re going to have nothing more to do with this office. It sounds unfeeling, but I can’t do anything about it. It’s company policy. You get in trouble if you force a man to stay here who doesn’t really fit in.” I did not usually find this tone unpleasant. On the contrary, it usually made a favorable impression on me. But today for some reason it was without effect. My client came back at just the right point in the conversation. Moreover, she had, in the meantime, changed from her mourning clothes into an ordinary dress—extremely rapidly, I thought. Apparently I no longer had to fear being plagued by the stench of death. It was a dress of black crepe that loosely molded her body. I wondered if she remembered that I had said black became her. She tilted her head to one side. I shook my own from left to right, indicating with my free hand that the call was for me. She circled the table and sat down immediately in front of me. At the closest point we were about eight inches apart. Her hair was long, the peculiar waves equally divided between shallow and full ones. The curve of her shoulders would fit in the h
ollow of my hand, were I to place it on them. Without realizing it, I laughed, interrupting the chief’s words.—“Thanks for the enjoyable scolding. These days I’ve been doing nothing but walking around and looking for someone. It’s not at all unpleasant to have someone looking for me.” No, it was not a lie. But after saying that, I realized rather sentimentally that my words were those I might have used to my own wife rather than to my chief. Any number of times I had visited my wife and had got in touch with her, but when I thought about it she had not once contacted me. Perhaps it wasn’t right. The fact that I didn’t have the courage to wait in silence until she sought me out may have eroded our relationship.
I returned to my seat, appropriately leaving on the other end of the line the ceaselessly scolding chief. Her beer and her pathetic smile were not the slightest bit unnatural now. I too put my fingers on the corner of the table in the same way she had done and resumed the rather irritable conversation we had been having. I had that lazy Sunday-afternoon feeling that comes after the pleasure of an unaccustomed late morning in bed.
“But let’s forget about the business of expenses. There are still about four days to go. I’ll do the best I can in that time. We can think about expenses when the time comes.”
“When it comes to that point, I’ll try and get a job somewhere. My brother’s not here to scold any longer. I realize the world isn’t all he claimed.”
“Things are discouraging now, but the investigation has made some progress.”
“You said before you had to be suspicious about the child I aborted. What did you mean by that?”
The tone was casual, quite as if she were discussing the weather, but her innocent expression was not to be trusted. I had had enough of this strain.
“Did I ever say anything like that?”
“I suppose you meant it was my brother’s child, didn’t you?”
