Читать книгу Soldier for Christ - John Zeugner - Страница 9

“So old Mioko’s gone round the bend,” the rector said just after Owen’s second Sunday school class on Judas.

“Apparently—I wonder. If I hadn’t been there, maybe she would have talked to Yasuko.”

“Ahenh, no. Not a chance. I’ve seen it so many times before. Past a certain age, everything starts to dissolve. The Church wasn’t bombed. The church wasn’t bombed. The simplest, most direct impressions give way, till there’s nothing left. It’s called getting ready for the end. Course, being in that home hasn’t helped much—nothing to keep her alert or focused. I’ve seen it all before. Lots of times. Poor old Mioko.”

“Well, I’m not ready to write her off yet.”

“Who’s writing her off? I’m just saying as a historical source she’s a dead loss. I’m sorry I put you on to her.”

“She seemed pretty lucid most of the time.” Owen said.

“It’s like short term and long term memory. Some older folks can remember exactly what happened on July 12, 1951 but can’t remember whether they talked to you this morning or not.”

“That’s not her problem.”

“Well it’s like her problem only reversed, I guess. Anyway I’ve seen it plenty of times before. I’ll put you on to some other sources—the church has had plenty of amateur historians. You’ve got to roll better with the punches, my boy. But you will, I know. I know it exactly. Now I can’t be late. You can, but I can’t.”

Owen thought, I can be more than late, I can miss the whole service. And he did. He went downstairs, turned away from the open chapel doors and went outside. The sunlight was harsh, brittle, crisp and the trek down the mountain to the train station was severely steep, upsettingly tilting so that he pushed toes against the pavement to prevent pitching off balance. It seemed he was always lurching ahead of himself, struggling to keep upright. The roadway was narrow, slick black macadam and there was a treacherous seven inch wide concrete trench on the side where he walked. Mercifully no car came up or down the slope. He walked gingerly along the edge of the drainage trench. Japan was no country for the infirm of step, he decided. After a certain age there’d be no way to walk to church. The taxis were expensive.

He imagined the rector had reached that part of the ecumenical service called The Pardon. The rector’s phrase was always predictable; “And so my friends believe the good news of Jesus Christ crucified, died, and resurrected for our sins. Believe the good news.”

Judas’s fate had been the subject of some debate at the lesson. Did the Jewish elders purchase the burying site for paupers or did Judas himself? Did he throw himself off a cliff or did he simply swell up and explode in blood on the ground? Akeldama meant exactly what, another stocky American executive wanted to know. Owen was unsure, but that is not what the fellow wanted to hear. He wanted an answer, opaque, solid, and significant. Something to hurl at skepticism, indeed to banish unbelief. Owen could not answer or mollify him.

“There ought to be some way to look it up, don’t you think?” The executive said.

“I’m sure there is—a lot of ways,” Owen lamely offered.

“Is the term Greek or Aramaic?” Jena asked, tossing Owen a dubious lifeline.

Owen couldn’t say, promised to look it up, but wondered now what sort of dictionary would have the term. And more importantly where he’d find basic biblical guides in English. The bookstores in Osaka and Kobe had a myriad texts on mastering English, and then spinning racks of Penguin paperbacks, but he was not sure about Biblical lexicons. Owen remembered hearing a strange lecture in divinity school on the term—a tortured linguistic tracing, all related to the classical notions of blood—but he could not recall the central point of the lecturer, or even who the lecturer was.

Owen’s western style house (for foreigners) was just beyond the college’s main gate a mile from Nishinomiya station. Near the gate was a short wall of 20 mailboxes arranged in three horizontal rows . Each box had a narrow, side-hinged door with a gap large enough above and below the door so that you could reach directly in and take your mail out. There was a coupling on each door for a small lock, but most boxes didn’t have one. Like most Americans Owen was bemused and awestruck by Japan’s safety.

“Who, after all,” his neighbors asked him, “would want to steal another’s mail?”

“Not even cash envelopes?” Owen once countered.

Yes, those would require some care—please be careful with them came the inevitable answer.

There was a large envelope in Owen’s mailbox, almost a packet. The return address was written in Japanese, with “Mioko Tanaka” in English at the top. He tossed the envelope on a table near his two-burner kitchen unit while he made tea. He suddenly felt skeptical about the packet. He decided to make hojicha, a stronger tea for staying awake—a student tea, a little bracing for the message from Mioko. He thought, while the tea steeped, that perhaps he had left a handkerchief, or maybe a flat notebook. But he sensed that would not be the case.

She wanted him to know something—she wanted to share something with him. He was sure of it. Then he thought about throwing the envelope out unopened. Curiosity was too strong, however.

Mioko’s note was terse, direct, entirely characteristic. “I’ve tried for several years to find someone to give this to, and then there you were—surely God’s will. Just as sure, I ‘m certain, that there was an extra T in your name some time back. Come and see me after you’ve read the enclosed. You’ll want to come alone.”

The enclosed were pages, each one with Mioko’s name at the top, on notebook lined paper, folded neatly in half twice. The paper was fragile, yellowing, flaking at the edges:

“Mioko—

I’m writing you on the extra page—or what Kawabata calls the extra page. I have to write two pages each day for the interrogators, but Kawbata brings me three. I can write you on that page and Kawabata says he’ll arrange for it to get to you via his own family in Kobe. Do I believe him? Or is it a ruse to get access to my honne thoughts beyond the official two pages? Is Kawbata a traitor to my friendship or is he a good man who understands the disease of this place and wishes to redeem himself somehow? You will have to ask him, should you ever meet him someday, after this war is over. Will it be over? I know now I won’t see the end of it. The world will surely end for me, my world at least, soon enough. And good riddance. But I have things to say to my children, and that’s where you come in. On the ‘extra page,’ I will document some of the horror here, and you can use that. But between those horrible things I want my children to know something better, something more hopeful. Will you help me in that need? Please.

This morning two boys, my son Peder’s age, ten, were taken outside and put into rain barrels, strapped in and left to freeze to death in Harbin’s minus thirty degrees. Left, but monitored every ten minutes by nurses in heavy fur coats, taking blood pressure, heart rate, consciousness and entering the data in green notebooks. I could watch and listen to their deaths from my window in the infirmary. After an hour another fur coat came and using a small curved saw severed the right arm of the boy nearest the building. He had mercifully already passed out from the extreme cold—maybe the arm itself was frozen, I couldn’t tell. And then they monitored the blood flow and whether the sawed-arm boy died more quickly than the other boy. It seemed they may have been twins. Pray for me. Mogens.”

Owen stopped reading, put both hands around the very hot handleless cup of hojicha, felt the heat flood into his fingers. He squeezed harder on the cup. He recognized it was the accepted Japanese way of banishing winter chill. From a department store you could buy a kotatsu table with a heating element underneath, so that you could sit with your kneeling legs covered by a thick blanket at the table and that would heat your lower extremities. And then you could grasp the tea cup to warm your arms. You could lean over the tea vapors and the steam would bathe your face. Three specific actions for three guaranteed results.

But with no one to monitor your warm descent into death. Owen wondered, why show me these things?

“Mioko, today buboes under my arms are oozing again, and even though the infirmary is warm I feel like I’m in an ice barrel myself, or floating on an ice floe. Kawabata says I’ve been given plague, but a mild kind. I’ll live. Pray for me. Mogens.”

“Mioko, fellow soldier for Christ!

Too sick to write. Mioko, too sick to write. Can’t write. But still writing. See what that means.”

And another page:

“Mioko, Children die here. You hear them crying. You hear them screaming. This morning I got to watch two of them die from exposure. Outside, in tanks—a green tank and a blue one. They were twins. Both about eleven years old. Chinese boys in identical black bathing suits. Immersed in water and left to freeze to death. But after two hours doctors came and fitted them with sensors. The boys were shivering so hard they had to use adhesive straps to keep the sensors on their upper chests. Their eyes were rolling, pleading. Then in another hour, the doctors came back. Lifted the blue tank boy’s arm and hacked it off at the elbow, then strapped the remainder to the boy’s side , then pushed him back in the thick, icy water. Kawabata says they were studying (yes studying!) how long it would take him to die of exposure while bleeding. His brother was intact. By standing on my cot I could see through the translucent window their rolling eyes and hear their softening screams. Children die here. In another hour their heads dropped. The shivering stopped. And I could hear the soldiers sent out to fetch the bodies, complaining that they had been forced to wait too long because the bodies were in semi-ice now and very difficult to extract. They were forced to use long iron spike poles to chip the boys’ hips loose. I wondered if they would want to reuse the tanks.

Children die here. A month ago Kawabata took me to another wing, a much warmer, much nicer area, something like a hospital to a really fine room with two beds and two chairs, and a toilet curtained off. “This is ‘medical research’” Kawabata said with evident pride at having mastered yet more English vocabulary. “We can have a nice chat, is that it? A chat?” “Yes,” I answered, “A nice chat. Good English.” But we didn’t chat. He left. Twenty minutes later he brought in a small Chinese girl, and said she was eight years old. He patted the bed for her and she obligingly lay down. He pulled the thick gray blanket folded at the end of the bed over her. She rather quickly fell asleep. “You’ll stay here with her. They want to study what happens.” “They?” “Well, Dr. Matsuno at least.” “What kind of doctor tortures children?”

“A researcher,” answers Kawabata, as if impressed by the term. “Researcher,” he repeats as if to sound it out. “To look again,” he says smiling at his memory of the dictionary.

This morning I began throwing up and when I tell Kawabata this, he nods and says we should go to see Dr. Matsuno, who turns out to be very young. Maybe still in his twenties and looking like a schoolboy. He wants to know when I began vomiting. The exact time, but I have no way of knowing. “You took my watch,” I tell him. But he insists we can estimate very exactly if I describe the light in the room when I first threw up. We spar about this issue for another few minutes. And finally I ask, “What did the girl die of?” “A kind of neurological trauma,” he answers automatically, earnestly. Then adds,” But not from fleas. Do your feet feel numb?” he asks in the same level tones. “No.” “Interesting,” he says. “Please take off your shirt. When your feet begin to feel numb, please tell Kawabata-san and he’ll bring you back.” ‘You have some medicine to cure that?” I ask. “No. There is none. At least there is none now. But I have an idea to keep the numbness from spreading. Neurology is so experimental, so trial and error. That’s why I like it. You can stumble on things no one could have thought of. You may urinate some blood. I studied in Seattle.” You may piss blood and I studied in Seattle. Some connection there. I answer in nauseated level-tone, “I understand everyone urinates blood in Seattle.” “Do you really think that?” “I’ve never been to Seattle.” “So you are joking, but joking is not appropriate to your situation.” I answer, “So desu neh.”

My feet do go numb, numbing and tingling. It seems golf balls of pain are shifting around on the soles of my feet. And the numbness moves up my ankles toward my knees. Kawabata, good solider, takes me back to Dr. Matsuno. “Did you eat any of the girl’s food?” “No.” “Hmnn, well we need to put you in the infirmary and watch what happens.” “What is going to happen?” “I can’t be sure, but I assume the numbness will move north.” “And then what?” “We’ll have to watch, you will be advancing research greatly.” “It hurts to walk. In fact I’m not sure I can walk.” “That’s an important sign. We’ll get you to the infirmary, even if we have to have soldiers carry you.” Kawabata says he cannot bring me extra paper in the infirmary.

Owen held up the page to the light on his desk as if to imagine mysterious writing able to appear on the remainder of the whitish yellow sheet. But there was nothing. He turned to the second packet and pulled off the thick rubber band, but then decided not to open the pages. He tossed the collection on his desk and went into the tatami room and sprawled out on the rush mats. The cool give of the tatami was, as always, relieving, inviting. The pages needed explanation—Mioko’s covering note said almost nothing. He wondered if she were playing coy with him, or had, in fact, simply lost the thread of coherence as she gathered them up for mailing. And why send them to him? The pages were fragile all right, almost brown on the edges, almost brittle and the ink had faded in some places to illegibility. So Mioko wanted to draw him back, was that it? Or was she just scattered and confused? He wanted information and without Yasuko around to deflect his inquiry. He assumed Mioko wanted that too. Why wouldn’t she?