The Ruined Map Read Online Free PDF Page B

sound of a roughly closed iron door struck my ears like a sigh from the earth, reverberating back and forth through buried pipes. The feeble howling of a dog rent the air. I wanted to urinate. Involuntarily, my body began to tremble. I had apparently come to the end of my endurance. I thought that the snow had begun to sparkle, but it was manifestly an illusion from having strained my eyes too much in the darkness. Even when I shut my eyes, the snow kept falling behind my closed lids. But what was harder to believe than the snow was …
    The taxi came back with the For Hire light on. What was so difficult to believe? Filled with unbelievable things, I no longer knew what I was trying to be suspicious of. My mental faculties seemed to be numb. The lemon-yellow curtains showed no change. A glass bead in the mouth when I wanted a piece of candy. Well, I was lucky I hadn’t munched on it. I shuddered as I finished urinating, picked up my briefcase, and returned to the car. The engine sputtered and groaned. If things had gone as I had anticipated the sound of the motor would have announced my triumph to her, but now it was simply irksome and depressing. Well, if she maintained what she said to be the truth, there was nothing to do but begin with that truth.
    A photograph and a worn-out matchbox with advertising. There were too many blank spaces on the map. Therefore, I had no obligation to force myself to fill them in. I was no guardian of the law.

REPORT
    12 February: 9:40 A.M. —I investigated the origin of the matchbox. About twenty minutes by foot from the client’s house, I faced in the direction of S—– station on the main road, and looking to the right at the subway station at the bottom of the hill below the housing project, I saw on the left an open-air parking lot. Immediately diagonally in front, I could see a sign bearing the word “Camellia,” just like the name on the matchbox. A very ordinary coffee house: capacity about eighteen seats. Besides the owner, there was one waitress … about twenty-two, more or less … fattish, with a round face and small eyes … traces of pimples on her forehead. She had a liking for showy things and wore patterned stockings, but she was an unattractive girl. She is doubtless outside the scope of this investigation. On the door there was a sign “Girl Wanted,” and I imagined that someone must have quit recently. I inquired directly of the proprietor, but it was not that. They simply needed a new girl. They had no reaction to the picture of the missing man, no special comment; at least both agreed in testifying that he had not been a regular customer. (N.B. eighty yen for coffee.)

                 T HIS MORNING I was hung over. So, though I usually drink two cups of coffee, I decided to let it goat one.
    There was no intentional negligence in my report concerning the Camellia coffee house. The damaged condition of the matchbox, the worn label, the close yet inconvenient location of the coffee house itself—all coincided very well with the proprietor’s statement that Nemuro had not been a regular customer. What more could I add?
    The tired old walls with traces of former shelving had been left just as they were. Fastened on one wall was a color print of a coffee plantation, maybe in South America. Dust had gathered on the turned-up corners. The person who put it up would certainly not remember that there ever had been such a picture. And yet, in it everyone was wearing widebrimmed straw hats—if you stood in front of it the sun seemed to be shining brilliantly. But from over here, where the bleak dregs of the February day lay stagnant on the other side of the meshed curtain, there was only the red flame of the kerosene stove, smoking away under a faded rubber tree. Furthermore, I was the only customer the whole time I was there. The sour-looking girl stayed bent over a weekly magazine beside the counter, and the proprietor, too, with a puffyface,