The Ruined Map Read Free Page B

of a sky stained with street lights. I stepped off ten paces from the light, groping for the manhole cover with the tip of my shoe—the place where the husband had, so she said, vanished.
    Women out for their evening shopping and of course the red baby carriage and the boy with his bicycle were wiped away with a paintbrush of darkness, workers who had gone directly home were already settling down in their respective filing-cabinet homes while their friends, thinking it too early to return, tarried along the way … the abandoned gorges of unfinished time. I stood motionless in the very place where he had vanished.
    The wind blew, threading its way between the dwellings. Freezing blasts of air, striking the sharp corners of the buildings, howled in a bass that the ear could barely catch. Even so, the moaning of this great pipe organ penetrated to thevery quick of me. My whole body became gooseflesh, my blood congealed, my heart was transformed into a red, heart-shaped ice bag. A trampled asphalt walkway. The broken, abandoned rubber ball visible as a white speck on the lawn. The cracked corpse of the street, illuminated by the street lights that gilded even my dust-speckled shoes. One could scarcely hope to arrive at any place worth mentioning along such a street.
    Yes, of course, it was a half year ago, August to be exact, and the summer heat was at its worst. The asphalt was as sticky as gum and swarms of insects clustered around the street lights. The grass was a green pond rippled by the wind, into which the castaway ball had sunk to the bottom. One had to stamp one’s feet, not because of the cold but because of the swarms of mosquitoes that welled up from the manhole. Supposing the husband had paused at such a place … No, that was wrong. It was still morning when he had passed here for the last time. Moreover, early morning; the street lights had blinked off and the insects had sunk into the depths of the grass. It was the time when the gorges stripped themselves of their darkness and again became the hillside town, so white, so close to the sky. Perhaps it was a marvelous morning of blue sky, a day with a strong southwesterly breeze. The first beat of the city’s heart is a signal; within a five-minute period hundreds of filing cabinets are unlocked at one click and swarms of different but indistinguishable workers, like a wall of water released from the floodgates of a dam, suddenly throng the streets … a time of living.

                 “Y ES , it’s true. They’re like a legion of rats cast under a magic spell. You know, like in the fairy tale.” The woman spread her arms wide, perhaps intending to show the width of the street. Her eyes blurred, no doubt from having drunk the beer alone, and looking from one to the other of her outstretched arms, she murmured as if in surprise, “How dark!” Suddenly she stood up, switched on the light in the room, and then went into the kitchen. She continued speaking in the same tone through the curtain. “It’s not only the sidewalks; even the streets are packed. And they’re all rushing for fear they’ll miss their bus … little by little they swarm together in the middle of the street.”
    “But a bus can’t keep its schedule in such a crowd, can it?”
    “Of course not,” she said, holding in her hand another bottle of beer, as she came back into the room. “They rush all the more because it’s unreliable, I suppose.”
    Placing the bottle on the table, she casually turned toward the window. With the light on, it was already evening outside. The Picasso print was reflected in the panes. As if threatened by something, she roughly pulled the curtains that covered half the wall, and their lemon-yellow color transformed the room. Lemon-yellow it was, but it was notvery fresh. A rather withered and shop-worn lemon. The masterless room, which had been like a cast-off cicada skin, suddenly came alive again, thanks to the color. One