Читать книгу Soldier for Christ - John Zeugner - Страница 13

“Well, of course the coy tease is her favorite pose,” Reverend Bonneau said. “You can’t blame her, can you? How could she keep you coming around if she spilled the beans entirely.

Or more likely she’s just floating in and out of coherence. It happens all the time.”

“All the time?”

“All the time, my boy. It’s the most time consuming of all your pastoral duties. It is, you know. No getting around it. Listening to the endlessly waffling bleatings of people nobody else cares to hear. You should hear the stories I’m partial witness to. On shipboard the toughest bos’nmates would come slobbering to me, about the woman who left them, or the parents who never cared one whit about them, or the incredible anger they felt toward some sibling. Or the money they owed.”

“But they came to you. She’s not coming to me.”

“True enough. Maybe you’re not sympathetic enough, although you seem pretty sympathetic to me, and to lots of others around here. Maybe you need to give her time. Or more likely she’s drifting around in some fog that only death will lift. That happens a lot too, you know.”

“She seems to be playing with me.”

“Of course, my boy. That’s in their nature you know. Learned at mama’s knee. Little fillips here and there to keep the groceries coming. Keep your interest up. Actually, the more I think about, I’d bet she’s got some dark secret eating at her and it’s only worming its way out over several attempts at dislodgement. She probably doesn’t know herself what is going on, but sooner or later, the truth will come sweltering out. You can count on it. Unless, of course, she’s already way around the bend. And that’s possible, you know. Highly possible. And if that’s the case, waiting around for some revelation is pointless. Often is. Very often is. So if you’re looking for solace, don’t look here. I’m no solace dispenser. Never have been, although I could easily have been I guess.”

“She just won’t tell me how she got Mogens’ letters, if in fact they are Mogens’ letters. Although she admitted Rielmann and Mogens did go to Tokyo, did somehow preserve the church from takeover. She admitted that.”

“And soon enough her part she’ll also admit . . . . or not, I suspect. Maybe she truly can’t remember what actually happened. Does she weep about it?”

“About what?”

“About what happened to Mogens, about reliving the whole episode.”

“No she doesn’t cry.”

“And how true that is. Mioko’s no crybaby. A lot of steel in the little lady. Yes indeed. A lot of damn steel. She showed me the blade once or twice and I got the message to give her plenty of room at the church. A wide berth in a very narrow berthing area. In the war we used to sleep four stacked high. Sometimes you’d be lucky to get a fist between your nose and the hammock overhead. Just a fist. But I’ll tell you something.” Bonneau stood up from the Sunday school table. “If she’s posing it’s because she’s got something she wants to tell you, something eating at her that she needs to get off her chest. “

”She has a very tiny chest.”

“All Japanese women do,” Bonneau answered. “My boy, you can’t shock me. I spent 27 years in the U.S. Navy. Mioko could shock me, maybe, but not you, my boy. Maybe you need to shock her. Did you think about that?”

“How shock her?”

“I have absolute confidence in you, my boy. Trust in the Lord to find a way.”

And on his next visit to Suma Owen believed the Lord wanted him to make Mioko listen to the most disturbing of all of Mogens’ pages—a choked passage detailing the contraction of plague. But although Mioko listened carefully enough she did not seem to absorb it as Owen assumed anyone must. To overcome her evident comfort in the silence of her reaction, he asked, “Do you want me to read it again?”

“Of course not, why would I want to hear it in the first place. It’s so terrible, so unthinkable.”

“Maybe if I read it again, slower this time, you’ll remember how you came by it.”

“Buy it. A favorite American expression, I understand. Buy it, now!”

He started in again on the flow from the buboes in the little girl’s armpits—the almost metered recitation of her labored breathing and the rats gnawing at her rotting calf.

“Oh stop. It’s inhuman.”

“Oh, I agree. Inhuman but by humans concocted. The cement buildings weren’t there naturally—they were constructed. Mogens wasn’t a tourist longing to see ice sculptures in Harbin, was he?”

“What do you want to know?

“I keep coming back to the basic question—how did you get the letters?”

“That’s not what you want to know,” she said firmly, suddenly looking directly into his eyes.

“A calculated distraction, but I’m not buying it. Not buying it. Did they arrive in the morning post?”

“I suppose they could have, but someone delivered them.”

“Who?”

“Someone I didn’t know. Someone I’d never met.”

“Who?”

“Someone you’ve encountered.”

“What?”

“Yes, someone you’ll recognize. Perhaps I should play more Chopin for you.”

“That won’t be necessary. No more Chopin. No more tea. Just the information—who gave them to you?”

“Surely you know that information is all that old people have, their only currency. They have to be chary trading it away casually. You’d stop coming. It’s not my appearance they brings you here, is it?”

He thought about how she might have looked in her twenties. For a moment he could meld her into Mariko’s body and the thought was exciting, embarrassing. Did she catch that, he wondered. “You’re attractive enough,” he said. “A rose in this dismal setting.”

“Dismal it is,” she answered. “But leaving takes such energy, and essentially I have no one.” She motioned to the outside beyond the courtyard.

“There’s the church.”

“A community for transient gaijin,” she observed. “Transient gaijin in need of some reminders I guess of something they left behind. And father Bonneau reliving his youth in the Navy.”

“Or maybe his earlier youth in Kobe,” Owen said.

“Yes, he’s home in Kobe, isn’t he? Unlike his parishioners. He’s more Japanese than I am. People don’t understand that. Can’t understand that. But Jesus wasn’t Japanese, was he?”

“Definitely not,” Owen answered.

“Too judgmental, don’t you think?” she asked.

“He never picked up the stone.”

“So he didn’t. But he expressed perfect displeasure, often enough.”

“They cut off Mogens’ ring finger with his wedding ring on it and sent it to Copenhagen, on the very same flight he was supposed to continue on from Harbin. I bet you didn’t know that.” Owen said.

“I did know that. I know about Unit 731 and their ‘medical research.’”

“How?”

“Kawabata told me.”

“Kawabata?”

“Yes.” Her sudden self-satisfaction seemed tinged with regret at his name.

“So he survived the war?”

“Of course he did.”

“Then he brought you the sheets himself.”

“It’s possible.”

“It’s possible? Such coyness, lady, doesn’t become you.”

“Yes, he brought them. There may have been others involved.”

“What others?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“He’s alive?”

“Of course. Sometimes Japanese live long lives. Longest in the world , you know. Are you surprised I’m alive? I don’t really think so. Kawabata is probably younger than me.”

“He’s alive ? Where is he alive?” Owen was furiously calculating. Kawabata would have to have been young in Manchuria, but that made perfect sense. The youth would see the atrocity clearly, and find a way to overcome it. Or at least live in conscience with it, but he’d read conscience was not a Japanese property. Those who argued God existed because something had to explain the presence in human beings of a sense of right and wrongness needed to live in Japan, Owen had decided.

There were no interior voices. Conscience quite kayoed. Instead, the antennae were supremely fixed on messages from the group outside. It was not that Kawabata was diligently listening to outside voices; a good Japanese he had never heard anything else. He knew he existed because neighbors existed. If they vanished so did he, was that it? But still he brought extra pages—the young supremely obedient, supremely fixed person opted to bring an extra sheet. Perhaps he was part Danish? He managed to store extra sheets safely somewhere and after the war bring them safely home. In the midst of the inferno a hand took hold of him and simply guided him through a simple kindness. The Samaritan paused on the roadway out of what? Messages directly from the supreme being? The example of Christ? It made no sense to think of Christ as a modest risk-taker, did it?

Owen repeated as if to savor the syllables, “Kawabata is alive?”

“Oh yes and very fit. A tennis player. I used to play tennis and I was very good. But not now,” her voice trailed off.

“A tennis player?”

“I said that.”

“Not a saint. A tennis player.”

“Yes, not a saint, but I suppose he might be—mightn’t he? No I think not. Too worldly. Like you.”

“And he comes to see you?”

“He came once. Just once. He’s not a regular. He’s not a ‘returner’. I didn’t have information for him.” She smiled.

“And tea sweets.”

“Boxes and boxes of them. This place is littered with them. And of course I offered him some, but he wasn’t much interested. Do you play tennis?”

“Avidly,” Owen answered.

“Then you must play with him some time.”

“Why?”

“Because I think he’d teach you something. He’s very precise in his demeanor and very serious. He always turned down the sweets. Unlike you.”

“I understand Japanese relentlessly push away proffered food,” Owen said quickly, smiling at her.

“And they squat on their haunches to smoke at train stations,” she replied.

“Before they serve and run to net.”

“They seldom go to net, as well you know. They’re back court players, and so is Kawabata, I bet.”

“So he came here more than once.”

“Never. I just surmise certain things. It’s a generalization I can offer after a long and thoughtful life.”

“I wonder if Mogens died thoughtfully.”

“I do wonder that myself, sometimes. And I wonder if he might be waiting for me in the afterlife.”

“Waiting with vengeance?”

“Oh yes. He might not believe, as we Japanese do, that the dead are all good. So there I’d be quite dead and quite good, but he might not believe it.”

“And would he have reason?”

“Perhaps Kawabata-san might know that.”

“You confided in him?”

“No. But perhaps Mogens did. He’d after all, be the one to know if vengeance was required, wouldn’t he?”

“Was it?”

“Perhaps. But we’re forbidden vengeance, aren’t we?”

“We are indeed,” Owen said. “But Kawabata might not be. Is Kawabata a Christian?”

“Heavens no!” she answered.

Her instant response surprised him, and he suddenly realized that in the non-Christian world, which presumably Kawabata inhabited, retribution might be more than just possible. It occurred to Owen that delivering the scribbled, emotional sheets to Mioko might have been more than simply informing her of Mogens’ situation——rather a sharing in its degradation, a sharing of pain. Or more than that, a getting even, perhaps a direct assault on her for whatever role she might have had in Mogens’ fate. Or might Kawabata be simply the supreme naif who did as he was asked—out of some strange very Japanese amalgam of obedience and compassion?

On the train back from Suma, the gentle rocking summoned Mariko again and her slick softness blended off into the darkness of the Inland Sea to his right, undulating in the reflected light of the train car in the window, gathering him up in the steady clicking of the steel wheels, spinning him back into that wavy beachball hard breathing so that he felt like a child slowly congealing in freezing slushy water whose arms were being hacked, then sawed off. He heard Mogens’ coughing question, “Why, Lord, do you show me these things?”

And he heard Mariko’s sly answer, beckoning him onward, “So you may go more deeply into them—more and more deeply.”