Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  Again it’s raining, whispered Father Lamereaux. Until you came no one had visited this house since the war, and now you’ve come many times. My housekeeper goes out to do the shopping but I never leave, I stay here and work on my memoirs. Occasionally I sit in the garden, but only when it’s warm and only when it’s not raining. Are you familiar with the Peram?

  No, said Quin.

  They’re a tribe in central Borneo that has a necronym system. When a man’s grandfather dies, for example, the man takes the name Grandfather Dead. He keeps that name until another male relative dies, a cousin say, and then he becomes Cousin Dead. This continues until he has a son, then his name changes to Father of So-and-so. But naturally the son’s name will be Uncle Dead or some such thing. Thus we find that the brother of the dead man is called Father of Uncle Dead. It’s an odd way for a man to remember his brother. At first it seems unduly complicated and roundabout for such simple tribesmen. It suggests, in fact, that relationships between people are more complex than we often suspect. It leads one to the conclusion that simple acts may not be simple. That where God’s children are concerned, that can never be.

  Father Lamereaux rubbed the horsehair arm of the chair. Quin nodded to himself and finally asked the question he had waited so long to ask.

  Father, what does the name Quin mean to you?

  The old Jesuit sighed.

  Yes, I see. I’ve been thinking about it myself and it seems I’m not quite sure. It seems I’ve been alone in this house a very long time. This morning, or perhaps it was yesterday or several weeks ago, I looked through the index to my memoirs to see if I could find the name, and it wasn’t there. Is that possible? I’m afraid it is, and now I don’t know what to tell you.

  The priest unbuttoned his coat the wrong way. He stirred. Some image had passed before his eyes.

  The first time you came here, he whispered slowly, you had a friend with you who was wearing a small gold cross similar to the one that belonged to Adzhar. He was a most unusual man, Adzhar, he was a man of many surprises. What was the name of your friend? Ordos? Tarim?

  No. Gobi.

  Yes I see, the desert Adzhar crossed on his way here. Well there’s no mistaking it then. Forty years later we have the same three names again, we have Adzhar and we have Gobi and we have Quin. Was he a relative of yours, that other Quin?

  He was my father.

  I see. I never knew about you, but then I knew very little about his personal life.

  Where did you meet him?

  Someplace. I can’t really recall.

  Could it have been at a picnic?

  It certainly might have been at a picnic. Adzhar and Lotmann and I used to enjoy having picnics at Kamakura. The pine groves in the hills above the sea are beautiful there.

  Father, could this picnic have been by the sea? On a beach near the estate of Baron Kikuchi?

  Baron Kikuchi? Which Baron Kikuchi? The first or the second?

  The one who was important in the secret police. The Kempeitai, was it called?

  It was, whispered Father Lamereaux. Indeed it was.

  And could there have been four of you at the picnic? You and Adzhar and my father and one other? Three of you wearing gas masks?

  Father Lamereaux sighed.

  Gas masks, he repeated gently. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost in gas masks. What a curious scene to remember after all these years.

  A clear autumn day. The year was 1929. Father Lamereaux had completed his Buddhist studies in Kamakura and was preparing to move back to Tokyo. Adzhar suggested a picnic and they walked together to the beach. Lamereaux expected to find Lotmann waiting for them there, but instead they were greeted by a couple, a young man and woman, Americans.

  Adzhar introduced the couple. The man’s name was Quin. His wife was called Maeve.

  Actually Father Lamereaux had met the woman once before under quite different circumstances. But either he had forgotten what those circumstances were or else he chose not to discuss them now, with her son, after all these years.

  It was apparent to Quin that the priest hadn’t liked Maeve. It seemed their previous encounter had left him with the impression that she was hard and unsympathetic, excessive in some unexplained way, too willful perhaps.

  In any case, when they were introduced that day on the beach the priest pretended it was the first time they had met. She did the same. Neither Adzhar nor her husband said anything, so it was unlikely that either one of them was aware that they already knew each other.

  The gas masks were Adzhar’s idea. There was no one within a thousand yards of them, but Adzhar said that didn’t matter. The secret police might be using deaf people to read lips through binoculars. He had known that to happen elsewhere, he said, and they couldn’t afford to have anyone overhear the conversation they were to have that afternoon.

  Quin agreed and the three men put on the gas masks Adzhar had seen fit to bring with him in his picnic basket. Maeve laid out the food but took no part in the discussion.

  Adzhar began by saying he wanted to help but he knew he was too old for this kind of work. He had come only to make the introductions and offer advice, should any be needed. He then turned to Quin and asked Quin to explain.

  Quin talked about Japan and Japanese politics, about the way the military was beginning to take over the country. In a very few years they would be ready to move into Manchuria, and after that they would attack the rest of China. War was inevitable, there was no escaping it, but a great many lives could be saved if the war were shortened. That could be done by sending information to China. Quin had sources who could provide the information. What he needed was a courier system that could secretly transport microfilm to the mainland.

  Father Lamereaux was known to have many young Japanese friends who trusted him and would do what he asked. For the good of both the Japanese and the Chinese people would he take on the task of establishing a courier system?

  The alleviation of suffering was Lamereaux’s vocation. He agreed at once to do what he could. Quin spent the rest of the afternoon explaining the methods they would use.

  The information would be turned over to Lamereaux coded, on microfilm, along with instructions on where it was to be delivered in either Mukden or Shanghai. For safety Lamereaux would deal only with Quin, the couriers only with Lamereaux. Quin wouldn’t know who the couriers were, Lamereaux wouldn’t know the sources from whom Quin obtained his information.

  The couriers would deliver the microfilm to places, not people, also for safety. At a certain hour on a certain day the capsule would be wedged behind the mirror in the toilet of a restaurant in Mukden. Or it would be taped under the lid of the water cabinet in the toilet of a bar in Shanghai. There would also be capsules that had to be retrieved in either Mukden or Shanghai and brought back to Tokyo.

  The afternoon came to an end. The picnic was over. Young Quin said the only thing left to do was to give their network a code name.

  Adzhar spoke up with a smile.

  I’ve done nothing at all here today, he said. At least let me offer a suggestion for that. Don’t you think Gobi would do nicely?

  The three men shook hands and took off their gas masks.

  Toilets, whispered Father Lameraux, always toilets. The result of the device I developed for the couriers. All systems have definitions, even the vegetarian system, honey and eggs excepted.

  Quin nodded.

  Father, did you know that Geraty claims he found a report on the network in the Kempeitai files after the war?

  Geraty? Alive after the war? I thought he died in Shanghai.

  No, he escaped to the Philippines and later came back here to take a job in the Occupation.

  And he’s still alive?

  Yes.

  It’s hard to believe. I didn’t think anybody was still alive.

  But, Father, I don’t understand. Geraty destroyed the report so the Americans wouldn’t see it, and the Americans had just finished fighting Japan. Why keep
it from them?

  From them or anybody, what does it matter now? The action in a No play occurs when no one is moving. The past reduces emperors to pickles who bugger and barter. Once there was rice beside the road where now there is only a forgotten signature fading on withered parchment, a lost sign on a wayside of the thirteenth century. The 1920s were the best years for me, before all this happened. They played the beautiful music for me then, music so rare it tempted the sun goddess from her cave, played and sang in the still small voice of a shoemaker’s son, sang at the shoemaker’s bench the epic of a dragon descended from the Lapps. I had my cats and the flowers of Tokyo, but in the 1930s they placed cannons around the shrines, they ignored the effect rice has on the bowels and went to war, and soon the flowers were gone and my cats were gone and the Legion was gone. Did you know Elijah? Did you know the sun goddess or the shoemaker’s son? They were gone and there were no more Friday nights. Everything I had ever known was gone.

  The old priest turned. He stared at the rain running down the windows.

  I could no longer meet the legionaries here, it wasn’t safe for them. I had to meet them one at a time for a minute or two behind a tombstone. I had to sneak back and forth through the city, evaporate and materialize, die in doorways and resurrect myself in the moonlight of a cemetery. There seemed to be only one thing to do, so I did it. I became a ghost. And Quin became a ghost as well. The idealist became violent and unsure of himself, I could see it in his eyes. You don’t understand, you say? No matter now. There’s nothing to understand anymore.

  Father Lamereaux rose. He gazed at the windows.

  How did it end, Father?

  End? How can there be an end when Our Lady’s reign is forever? As for Quin, he went to Shanghai and never came back.

  When?

  Just before total war began, but in retrospect who can say? Artillery pieces were placed around the Shinto shrines in 1905.

  Is there someone who might know what happened to him?

  There was a woman who once played a thousand-year-old koto with indescribable tenderness across the hours of a spring afternoon in Kamakura. She might have been in Shanghai then, I’m not sure. I’ll give you her name.

  No one else?

  Father Lamereaux moved into the hall. He opened the front door and held out his hand. He wrote on a piece of paper, then stared at the drops of rain in his palm. Deep scars formed around his eyes.

  In Tsukiji, he whispered. A gangster. Good-bye.

  The door closed. Quin moved up the street in the rain reading the piece of paper. On one side Mama, The Living Room, an address. On the other side no address, a name, Kikuchi-Lotmann.

  Kikuchi-Lotmann must be the gangster in Tsukiji, the fish market district of Tokyo. Mama must be the woman who had been in Shanghai. Beside the names two arrows were drawn pointing in opposite directions.

  The rain came down and Quin watched the Emperor’s autograph dissolve in his fingers.

  Miya sat in the kitchen slicing turnips. The shopkeepers in the neighborhood, who knew nothing of her forebears, assumed that tuberculosis had stunted her growth as a child and made her into a dwarf. But that wasn’t true. The men in her family had been tiny for generations, and they had always been careful to choose tiny women to bear their sons. They were No actors who specialized in the difficult role of the princess.

  In the tradition of a family devoted to No, these severely disciplined men passed their stage name down from one generation to the next. Miya’s father had been the thirteenth actor to use it. Thus when she was born in 1905 the stern old man barely noted the fact. He had dedicated his life to No and there were no roles on the stage for women.

  At the age of sixteen Miya ran away from her home in Kyoto to marry a painter, an act of abandon that gave her the only moments of happiness she was ever to know in life. Romantically she thought she might become a painter like him in the Western style, using oils rather than charcoal, but as it turned out her young husband never had time to teach her. He was dying and her escape ended within the year. She returned home with the two gifts love had given her, a child and tuberculosis.

  Her father wouldn’t forgive her act of disobedience but he embraced his grandson, who he assumed would someday be the fourteenth actor in the family to bear the traditional name. Her father stopped speaking to her and never entered her room. A servant brought her meals. From her bed she could hear the old man and her son playing together.

  When the boy was a little older her father got him admitted to the Peers’ School in Tokyo. At the same time he was enrolled in a No theater in Tokyo to receive his initial training.

  Miya objected to him being sent so far away, but her objections meant nothing. As she expected, his busy schedule kept him away from Kyoto for all but a few days out of every year. And even when he did come home he spent most of his time away from the house with his grandfather.

  As he grew older he was increasingly ill at ease in her presence. He was silent and even sullen, as if embarrassed to be with her. She knew this was because she had always been sick and had never been able to be a mother to him. She also knew this couldn’t be helped, but that didn’t lessen the bitterness she felt toward the course life had taken.

  Her father died suddenly one winter, and to her surprise Miya found herself relieved, perhaps even secretly pleased. Despite her sickness her son would now have to turn to her because she was all he had.

  She wrote him a long letter praising his talents and talking about the future. With the letter she sent a small childish self-portrait done by her dead husband, the only memento she had from that short period in her life when both sickness and her son had come to her. The painting had hung by her bed since her husband’s death, so she was quite sure her son would understand what she meant by sending it to him.

  A few days later she received a telegram from her son’s school saying he had disappeared upon learning of his grandfather’s death. He had not received her letter. She sent a telegram to his theater and learned that he had not been seen there either.

  Miya left her bed and took a train to Tokyo. Her son’s classmates could tell her nothing, but at the theater she was given the name of a foreigner, a No scholar who had apparently befriended her son. Several hints or suggestions accompanied the information, but Miya was too agitated to hear them.

  She went to the address she had been given and found a large Victorian house. The sun had already set. In her confusion she forgot to knock on the door.

  Although ice covered the windows the house was insufferably hot, so hot she almost fainted when she stepped into the scene being enacted in the oppressive heat of that Victorian parlor, in near darkness, the outside world invisible beyond the frosted windowpanes.

  A tall thin man floated between the pieces of stiff furniture, drifted across the floor in the wavering light of a single candle. He was toying with the folds of his formal kimono, a costume worn by virgins in No plays, and toying with the plaits of a black lacquered wig that only partially covered the wisps of graying hair flying in front of his face.

  The shadowy figure held a whiskey bottle in one hand, a fan in the other. As he danced around the room he used the fan to reveal his genitals, which were fully exposed through the open kimono.

  Near him on a horsehair couch, his middle raised by silk pillows, the candle resting on his belly, lay her son, naked and giggling.

  Miya reached the door, the cold air, the icy wind. Somehow she made her way out of the neighborhood before she collapsed. She was found that night in a snowdrift and taken to a hospital. Weeks later she learned from one of her son’s classmates that he had gone to work briefly in a factory that manufactured military overcoats. When he was fired for incompetence he had lied about his age and gone into the army under a false name.

  That was in 1935. In 1937, while serving as a corporal in a film unit near Mukden, he was arrested as a spy and beaten to death by the Kempeitai.

  Miya had to sell her father’s house and her f
ather’s valuable collection of No masks to pay for her long convalescence. When her disease at last subsided she managed to find a job with the army. She was trained as a film projectionist at a base near Tokyo. The general at the base was a follower of No who made her his private projectionist as soon as he discovered the identity of her father. The general was transferred to China and killed, Miya went to work for another general who was transferred to China and killed, then for a third general who was transferred to China and killed. At the end of the war she was working for General Tojo, the Prime Minister who was soon to be hanged as a war criminal.

  The winter evening the wind drove her away from the Victorian parlor Miya thought she was entering a Buddhist hell, an infernal, suffocating vision where angry demons forever tortured their victims. She had been a victim before, she was a victim again.

  Yet the demons of legend always wore fierce masks. They grimaced and scowled, while the face in the candlelight of the Victorian parlor had been gently smiling, smiling so gently she was curiously reminded in time not of the hate she had felt that night, before she collapsed in the snowdrift, but of the love she had lost in life, all the love she had never known.

  During the war as she moved from one tiny cubicle to another the memory of the face in the candlelight was always with her, an expression beyond her comprehension, the mystery of a No mask that was not a mask.

  And it was still with her in the winter of 1945 when she retraced her steps one night through the ruined city, hungry and cold and alone, making her way back through the snow to the Victorian house eight years after the death of her son, returning to the man who had destroyed him, the only person who had existed for her in the world.

  She didn’t knock at the door, perhaps because that was the way it had been the other time. But if she had knocked no one would have heard her, for Father Lamereaux was not only alone but unconscious.

  She found him on the floor of a back room where he had fallen, delirious and starving. The windows had been open since the previous autumn. Snow blew across the room and piled up in the corners. The thin cotton kimono the priest wore was stiff with frozen vomit and excrement.