by Jack Hodgins
The old man bowed but still wasn’t able to take things seriously. Maybe the sound of his own words turned into English struck him as funny. He sucked air and chortled, and continued to shake his head. What a joke the whole world was, he seemed to suggest, and slapped a bony hand against his teeth.
Draw this face? Weins had had his photo taken a thousand times, but no one had ever offered to do a portrait. Maybe this would be something a person could use — in an autobiography some day, or a history book, if the historians ever got around to writing the story of Port Annie.
Weins shrugged. “Hell — if he wants to. Tell him my wife does sketches too but she’s never had the courage to tackle this mug. If he’s got the stomach for it he’s welcome. But tell him I’ll understand if he gets scared off and runs away.”
At Hiroshi’s translation the old man laughed again, shaking his head from side to side, pausing just long enough to bow a few more times in Weins’s direction. Then he scrambled away on his knees as far as the aisle and hurried with little shuffling steps across the space in front of the platform and squeezed into his own spot facing this way. He held up his pad and grinned, bowing again, then raised the other hand with a piece of something in it — charcoal? — which he slashed down across the paper in a dramatic gesture to show he was making a start. Too bad Mabel wasn’t here, she’d get a kick out of this.
Weins imagined the picture in a history book. There would, of course, be a caption under it. The portrait above was drawn by a famous Tokyo artist, shortly before Jacob Weins made the decision to enter the Foreign Service.
The Foreign Service? The idea had never entered his head before. Was it a natural choice for a man who couldn’t sit still? Maybe it was, but was it a natural choice for a man who couldn’t eat foreign food? The world was full of countries where people ate things as bad as they did in this place, or worse. He looked at the squid. He’d starve.
But it didn’t hurt to consider these things. “Do you think I’d make a diplomat?” he asked.
As if the shape of his body would provide the clues, Hiroshi looked him over. “Ambassador Weins?” He seemed to be tasting the words. “Your Excellency, External Affairs is the only sensible choice. I can see you eating jellied lizard with the King of Saudi Arabia. Munching ants with the Chief of the Oogabooga tribe. All this, of course, after you have whizzed through university, zoomed up through the ranks of the foreign service, and spent seven years arranging concerts for touring pianists.”
Perhaps he’d been a little too hasty. Obviously he’d read the caption wrong. Even for a man who intended to live for a long time yet, it was one hell of a lot of training. He needed something he could jump into right away. The portrait above was drawn by a famous artist while Jacob Weins was visiting Tokyo, shortly before he became a motion-picture star.
Well, why not? He was a natural for that as well. “How about a movie actor, Hiroshi, just like you?” Pretending he meant it as a joke was the safest way.
A joke was precisely how the youth decided to treat it. He laughed. “Of course. We could become a team. When I am offered a role that calls for a bigger man I will send for you. Naturally you would have to be prepared, like myself, to put in an apprenticeship in porno films.”
Weins saw himself undressing in front of a camera. A beautiful Japanese girl lay naked on a bed, waiting for him. When he stood in nothing but undershorts she started to giggle. At what? At his bulging stomach, or the mat of hairs on his back? When he stepped out of his shorts, the actress went into hysterics. He was not a tremendous success.
What he needed to find was something that required no training and demanded no qualifications. A politician! A politician was perfect, but wasn’t that only more of what he’d already been? He was looking for something new.
The artist raised his pad again and grinned, to show perhaps that he was making progress. Hiroshi dipped his head. “That old man told me you seem an important man to him. Perhaps in your country, he said, you are a wealthy businessman or a judge. I told him you were once the mayor of a town, and he said he could see it in your face. He said too that he can also see you will not stop at being a mayor but go on to higher things. Obviously he is preparing you for a portrait that may be a failure. With so many compliments surrounding it, you can’t be visibly disappointed.”
“Higher things?”
“Perhaps he means that when you get home your prime minister will invite you to be — what is it called? — the governor general?”
Hiroshi was teasing but there was no question Weins could carry it off with class if the chance should ever arise. With class and considerable colour. It would be wonderful to have that uniform at first, with all those decorations. But he’d soon get tired of the repetition and set his imagination to work dreaming up some creative eye-catching alternatives to wear on public occasions. Wherever the law permitted it, of course.
And meeting the Queen. He would take the job just to see Mabel entertaining the Queen. If anyone in this world could handle the job she could. And love every minute, he was sure of it. He, of course, would be forced to wear regulation dress for royalty, no original inventions for her. No room for showing individual style in a case like that. In fact, it would probably be a frustrating job for a man like Jacob Weins. No allowances made for originality, or an active imagination. Since he’d probably get fed up and quit within the year, there was probably no point in taking the job in the first place if he were asked.
As if anyone anywhere knew he was still alive!
A sudden roar from the crowd reminded Weins that he’d neglected the action up on the platform. Several pairs of wrestlers had tested themselves against each other while he was preoccupied with his thoughts. Maybe it was because these fellows, unlike their cousins in American wrestling, didn’t try to make things worse than they were. You weren’t expected to hope that somebody would die, or scream out in terrible pain. “There is very little here that is done just for the show,” Hiroshi said. “Everything that is done is done for the sake of the gods or for intimidating the opponent, nothing is done for the sake of the spectator.” No need for acting, he added, the pressures were already enough. “This man in orange, now, must win this next match if he does not want to be demoted again. Things have been going badly for him, soon he will be forced to retire. He’s getting old.”
Weins looked at the two wrestlers stepping up onto the platform. The one in orange had white tape wrapped around one wrist and more around one ankle but he looked as young to Weins as any of the others. “You call that old?”
Hiroshi grinned. “Over thirty. In this business that is old.”
The wrestler in orange went into the fight exactly as you might have expected from a man on the brink of unwanted demotion, or retirement — impatiently. The spitting, the wiping, the salting, were all disposed of quickly and the two opponents froze in their crouch, refusing to turn away. They stared, glared, made enraged murderous faces at one another. The audience, screaming, smelled blood. They knew that much was at stake.
“And to make it worse,” Hiroshi said, “our friend is top-heavy. Look at that chest and those big shoulders. He is a different breed of man from this squat fat thing he is facing.”
The opponent, whose furious Buddha face was as red as his sash, pumped his nostrils like a fish’s gills. In his little eyes, even from this distance, Weins was sure he could see a passionate need to destroy the man in orange. If the rules of the game forbade mutilation and death, he looked forward to the next best thing — ending a career.
When it looked as if the two of them had revved up enough rage to bring the arena down, both leaped, and shuddered at the impact. Using his heavy shoulders, the man in orange ducked and pushed against the Buddha, driving him back a few steps. But the fat man used his mountainous stomach like a battering ram and bounced his chesty opponent towards the centre. Quickly, he jumped in close and pushed the flat of his hand in the other’s face, pushed again, slapped this side of his face, then
that side, over and over, driving him back. Alarmed, the man in orange dug in his heels and braced against the attacker, but the blows on his face continued. The hands were too quick to be caught, and trying to grab them only made him look silly. The slaps to the face, the hand-heel thumps to the jaw, drove him back. One hand dipped down and yanked on a tassel, pulling the apron off to drop to the sand. The man in orange was all but naked now. And his foot, one foot, was perilously close to the straw at the edge of the ring.
Weins could hardly stand it. If he had a gun he would shoot that piggish bastard. If he were close enough he would throw this sake in his face, or jab a vicious elbow into that belly. “Fight back, goddam it, fight back. How can he let that blubbery slob do this to him?”
Hiroshi shrugged, and broadened his grin. It was clear he found it more fun just watching Weins than watching the match itself. “He is trying.”
You could tell by the snorts and grunts he was trying — what you could hear between swells of audience noise. His back leg quivered, planted like a tree in the sand, bulging with desperate muscles. Its job was the job of a piston, to stop everything where it was and then push back. So far it had done only half its job. The rapid hands continued to slap, the belly continued to thump, the Buddha face, still furious, continued to show its contempt.
Then the foot slipped, only inches. You didn’t even have to be watching to know what was happening now. Ten thousand people groaned. The foot slipped back in sand until it touched the straw. The referee sang out something and the wrestlers fell apart. Weins, who’d been upright on his knees, fell back on his heels, exhausted. He’d pumped more sweat than both of those wrestlers combined. Now what would the poor bugger do? “If you retire in your thirties, what do you do for the rest of your life?”
Was Hiroshi squeamish? He looked as if something he was about to eat had spat at him. “What does he do? He suffers from ulcers, liver trouble, kidney trouble, and diabetes.” It was serious enough that he put a hand on Weins’s arm. To hold off a blast he could see coming, or to express sympathy for something that hadn’t been said? “I know one who has lived into his sixties but most die around fifty.”
And while he was suffering and waiting to die? “I hope he lives like a king on a big fat pension. He’s a hero after all, or does he have to go out and look for another job?”
“The sumotori have no pension plan.” Poor Hiroshi was beginning to look as if he regretted bringing Weins to this thing. “They do what every man must do when he retires if he wants to stay sane, he looks at himself to see what talents he has developed in the course of his career and then he does what he can. A few become coaches, naturally. But most of them open up restaurants.”
Weins saw his big-chested friend sweating over a stove. Wiping tables. Punching a cash register by the door. While his muscles turned to flab and his insides painfully ate themselves away.
“Restaurants. Cafes.” Hiroshi’s voice was sad. “All those years of training they are forced to cook and serve the stew for their superiors. They become excellent cooks. Or at least careful and respected hosts. The man whose youth I portrayed in the movie runs a restaurant in the city now. Perhaps you would like to meet him?”
It wasn’t as if the poor guy would be doing it for long; apparently he could count on dropping dead before he got bored, Weins thought. Burned or buried before customers of his own age even started planning for their retirements.
“Of course our friend’s retiring will not be without ceremony. At an exhibition tournament he will be taken to the centre of the ring to have his topknot cut off, snip by snip. It is very sad — all his friends and colleagues will come up and cut off a piece of his long hair to remember him by.”
Weins could see in the posture of the retreating wrestler that the man could already hear those scissors cutting his hair. His own stomach rebelled. “Let’s go,” he said, and tried to stand up. But his legs had lost their strength. Would he be sick right here in this crowd? The box of food tipped over. The sake spilled. His shoes had to be dug out from under the cushion. One foot, with a mind of its own, kicked the man in the neighbouring stall, provoking a great deal of bowing and chatter. The other, dead as a chunk of wood, had to be lifted with both hands out of the way, and pinched back to life. He crawled past bodies to the end of the row (women giggling at him from behind their fingers), then limped, with his weight on Hiroshi’s shoulder, up the aisle.
Out in the lobby, among the busy employees of the tea-houses, Hiroshi asked if he wanted to use a washroom or just to rest on one of these stools with a cup of tea before going back. Alarmed, he appeared uncertain what he had on his hands. A sick man, or an old fool who was losing his marbles? “Some visitors find the crowds oppressive,” he said. “A few minutes out here where there is more space and you will be ready to go back in for the rest. The Grand Champions should be coming up soon.”
Squatting to slip on his shoes, Weins could see through the entrance to the arena that already things had changed. A fat wrestler in a thick, brilliantly embroidered apron that hung almost to his feet was up on the platform going through what looked like a slow-motion dance. A white rope, thick as an arm, was tied around his waist, with an enormous bow at his back. When this was the one experience he had wanted to get out of his trip, why was he so anxious now to escape? His stomach would not have permitted re-entry to that arena even if he’d still desired it. But the fact of the matter was that he didn’t desire it at all. He’d had enough.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We better get home so Mabel can see I’m not drowned in somebody’s lake. She’ll be so pleased to see me alive that she’ll rupture her voice-box giving me holy hell.”
Somebody was trying to shove something into his hands. The old man, the artist, was jabbing a rolled-up piece of paper at him and Weins was supposed to admire it. Admire it? When it looked like no one he’d ever seen? Certainly not himself. “Dammit, he’s made me a Jap . . . a Japanese! Look at those eyes.” They weren’t exactly slanted — a long way from being slits like the artist’s own — but they had a vaguely Oriental look about the eyelids. He’d given them mongoloid folds.
Hiroshi’s grin threatened to bubble into laughter. “Now you know how you look, to us. Or to him at least.”
“What? A Japanese with big ears and a long nose?”
“Perhaps to this old man all the rest of the world is populated by Japanese people who are hiding behind masks — only some have more successful masks than others.”
Apparently taking all this talk to be complimentary, the old man chuckled, sucking his teeth, and held the portrait up for the others to see. “Ahh!” Ladies in kimonos compared it with the original and found it perfect. Congratulations were offered, along with bows and titters. To everyone the artist bowed his gratitude, and shook his head. Did he believe he’d pulled off a miracle here? He seemed amazed at his own display of talent.
Before that amazement turned to greed, Weins rooted in his pocket for some change. Small pieces were worth less than big — that was all he could tell for sure without looking. Even looking he would have to have given it some thought. Instead, he used his thumb to push the larger coins off the cluster in his hand, drew the rest out of his pocket, and handed them to the old man. Once the old man had gone, however, Weins wanted to know what he should do with this stupid picture. “Where’s the garbage can?”
Hiroshi studied the charcoal face a moment, then looked up at Weins with eyes that were threatening mischief. “I think you should take it home. You can tell people you found a cousin who lives in Tokyo.”
Weins squinted at the face in the drawing. It did look half Oriental, half himself. “What is the bugger’s name?”
Hiroshi closed his eyes to think. “Jacobichi, uh, Weinsanaka?”
Weins whooped. His mood was lifting already. Even that waitress with the silver teeth was laughing.
“Yes,” Hiroshi added. “Famous sumo wrestler of the Yokojuna rank. Undefeated. Winner of the Emperor’s Cup, the
Prime Minister’s Cup, the Fighting Spirit Award, and the Pan Am Trophy.”
Weins displayed the picture for the waitresses who were peering curiously at this strange pair. “Jacobichi the Big Eared!”
Where did Japanese men learn how to laugh. Even Hiroshi had his hand over his mouth like a girl. “Jacobichi the Iron Belly,” Weins added. People probably thought they were drunk, they were getting far too loud. “Will they hoist this picture to the rafters do you think, to hang with the other champs?”
“Not big enough. We will have to call old Rembrandt back for another sitting. Something life-size this time, please.”
“To hell with that.” Weins looked at the portrait again, struck by a sobering thought. “Gentle Jacobichi the Eye-Gouger. He isn’t retired, I hope.”
Hiroshi, too, gazed at the face with some fondness. His voice took on a sombre tone. “They tried to retire him but when they started to cut his lovely locks he made a sudden come-back. Broke thirteen arms and tossed bodies through the air like matchsticks. He will last forever.”
Weins pushed through the door to the street and held it open while the youth went through. “Forever?”
Hiroshi assumed a mock-indignant tone as he scanned the street for taxis. “This is no ordinary man we are talking about. You can tell your people back home your grandma visited Tokyo once, where she was mistress for a short while to the Emperor. Jacobichi the Gentle Marauder is a descendant of that fortuitous mating.”
Why was it foreigners learned English words that Weins had never heard? “Does that mean I should be dropping over to visit cousin whatsisname at the palace before I leave?”
“If you don’t, you will hurt his feelings. When he learns you are a cousin of Jacobichi the Man of Steel he will insist on honouring you with the position of carp-herd in the imperial moat.”
“If I give him this picture do you think he’ll hang it in the royal privy?”
Now he was being silly. Worse than silly, childish. For all he knew there might even be laws in the country against making fun of the royal family. To suggest on a public street that the Emperor went to the toilet like normal people could be considered treason.
