Miya covered him with blankets and covered the windows. She heated the room and made a bed for him on the floor, for even though he was a skeleton she was still too small to move him. She sold a piece of furniture and bought medicine. She washed him and dressed him and called in a doctor to give him injections. The doctor told her what to feed him and she prepared it.
Twenty years went by.
Sometimes she was still frightened by the strange love she felt for this aging foreigner who had locked himself behind the darkness and doors of his years. But despite the corridors and eras that separated him from her, he needed her all the same, she knew that. She had saved him once and now she went on saving him, telling him what to do and when to do it, not letting him drink whiskey or eat the foods that upset his stomach, keeping him away from the garden when it was raining.
Long ago her orders had become a habit to him. In twenty years he had not once ventured beyond the grounds of the house.
To Miya this was proof above all else that she had at last succeeded in finding someone to love and serve. For in the end that was the only meaning she had been able to discover in the mysteriously gentle smile from the candlelight, that love was so fleeting a hope it had to be trapped like the expression on a mask and imprisoned.
So she kept watch. She guarded the house and the garden.
A footfall. The door. In the kitchen Miya abruptly raised her head, a movement so commanding it might have been perfected by her fathers, those tiny determined men who for thirteen generations had pursued the role of the princess.
Father Lameraux stood in the middle of the parlor with his back to the windows. His gaze fell on the long table where the Legion had met, on the formal chairs, on the horsehair couch. Miya watched him.
Master?
He turned, looking over her head.
Has he left?
Who?
The visitor.
Yes, he’s left.
Did he disturb you?
Father Lamereaux didn’t answer.
Would you like to rest?
No. As a matter of fact I want you to go shopping. I’ve decided I’ll have raw tuna for dinner. And rice and the best pickles and whiskey. Irish whiskey.
Why, master?
Father Lamereaux drew himself up. He clasped his hands behind his back and glared over the head of the little woman who was not half his height.
Why? What do you mean why? Those are my instructions. I used to enjoy life and now I want to enjoy it again. Do as I say.
Tuna fish is bad for you, master.
What do I care about that? I’ll do what I want. Now go and buy the whiskey and bring it to me in the garden. You’ll find me sitting in the rain beside the patch of moss, but don’t interrupt me. Just bring the bottle and a glass and leave me alone.
There are turnips for dinner, master. I’ll bring tea to your study.
He watched her leave. Stiffly, slowly, he crossed the room and went into his study. Books were piled up all over his desk. Books and the thick sheaf of papers he called the index to his memoirs. A thick sheaf of blank papers.
Did anyone know that he wasn’t really writing his memoirs? That he’d never written a word of them?
No. She knew but of course no one else did. No one else knew anything about his life since the war.
Once, not long after his release from internment in the mountains, he had thought of leaving Japan, Tokyo, this house, leaving everything behind and returning to Canada. He had thought of it for an hour or a day or a year but then he had decided it was already too late. Time moved in epochs and there were no hours or days or years in the life he had lived. He had loved his cats and the flowers of Tokyo, he had loved his legionaries, and now there was nothing left for him but the solitary empire where they roamed as ghosts.
He looked at the windows. The rain was still coming down. He opened the volume that lay in front of him and saw that a page was torn. That wouldn’t do.
He turned more pages. They were all torn. That wouldn’t do at all.
After dinner he sat in his study repairing books, patiently holding each page in place until the glue cemented itself. He seldom slept anymore. Often he sat up until dawn. So it was late that night, even later than usual, before his memories finally collapsed and led him into despair.
As always he was silent and rigid at that moment. So silent and rigid that even the woman who thought she loved him, who did love him cruelly as best she could, would never have suspected that the cry within him then was rising to a scream.
MAMA
4
Life is brief and we must listen to every sound.
HIGH ABOVE TOKYO, MAMA sat in her apartment painting her fingernails. Twenty-four floors below lay the Imperial palace, the swans in the Imperial moat little white dots, the pines on the Imperial slopes no bigger than bonsai. As with the aristocrats of old, she kept her nails long to show that manual labor was beneath her. Mama had last cut her nails in 1938 prior to the labor that brought forth her second son.
It was late morning and Mama had just taken her fifth bath of the day. No matter how late she stayed at her nightclub, Mama always rose at six o’clock in the morning to take her first bath. Then she breakfasted on tea and three raw oysters and arranged herself in front of the window, on a raised dais in the shape of a lotus that sat on the back of an ivory elephant.
Her posture was one of contemplation. Her legs were crossed, with the ankles tucked over the knees. Her hands assumed the attitude of the fist of knowledge.
This mudra was Mama’s favorite when facing the rising sun. The right hand was curled, with thumb touching forefinger, as if ready to grasp a cylindrical object. The left hand was held directly below, the thumb clasped by the three lower fingers, the forefinger pointing rigidly in the air. When all was in order the forefinger of the left hand slid up into the slot of the right hand.
The cosmic soul enclosed the individual soul, the sun rose in the sky. Thus did she come to terms with the dawning day.
The fist of knowledge also had erotic connotations. The left forefinger that rose with the new sun could be interpreted as a lingam, the receptive palm or sky of the right hand as a yoni. But Mama was not one to question an ancient Tantric stylization. If the sexual act occurred during meditation, so much the better.
There was another reason why the fist of knowledge appealed to her. In that mudra the five senses of the left hand rose and found themselves completed by the sixth sense of the right hand. Physical nature entered into gnosis.
Or in everyday language, the woman took the position above, the man below. Over a period of years Mama had found that men grow heavy. The woman above, the man below, was a pleasing concept to her as well as a comfortable position.
Or as Lao-tzu had said, seize the way that was so you may ride the things that are now.
Or in everyday terms, choose the position of childbirth. The woman straddles the man so the manchild can be born, which is what the saga meant when he advised seizing the way that was. When the woman rides on top there will be a spurt of new life, for the couple at that moment is following the way of wisdom.
Complex metaphysical subjects. Mama would not have bothered with them had she considered herself an ordinary woman. As she looked down on the Imperial palace she recalled the words of the ancient Chinese chroniclers, the graybeards of the Han dynasty.
East and south of Korea there lies a kingdom known as Wa. The people are much given to strong drink, respect is shown by squatting. The men tattoo their faces and adorn their bodies with designs, the size and pattern indicating their rank in society.
And as the later graybeards of the Wei dynasty had remarked, the curious kingdom of Wa is a queen country, curiously ruled by a queen.
Now Mama was tattooed from neck to ankle and had been since she was a child, so who was to say? It might be that the curious kingdom of Wa had been ruled by one hundred and twenty-four successive generations of male emperors, but the curious question remai
ned, who had ruled curiously in the beginning?
In any case temporal history interested Mama less than spiritual, and the religious situation was much clearer. After years of meditation she could not deny that she and the Kannon Buddha had certain characteristics in common.
First, the Kannon was the only woman in the crowded pantheon of male Buddhism, just as Mama was the only woman who had ever worked in a brothel in Kobe without subsequently getting married. Second, like that goddess, she always followed the path of compassion and mercy.
Among the many males there were chanting and silent Buddhas, laughing and crying Buddhas, Buddhas for every purpose and occasion. But among all the confusing statues to be found in the temples of Japan there was only one woman, and she alone seemed to have a distinct personality.
Of course Mama had never actually seen a statue of the Kannon using the fist of knowledge. But as everyone knew, the statues had all been carved by men. What would have happened if women had been allowed to join the carvers’ guild? Would the Kannon always be shown with open hands, passive and accepting?
In addition to the fist of knowledge Mama used twelve other mudras.
Sincerity.
The empty heart.
The unopened lotus.
The newly opened lotus.
Intentions clearly made known.
Holding one’s water.
Seeking refuge.
The backhand or hindside.
The difficult back to back.
The equally difficult position of middles touching while the rest is held apart and erect.
The variation where middles touch with both hands on their backs.
The final position where both rest in the clasp of covering hands.
One mudra, in short, for each stage of the sexual act.
Mama sat on her ivory elephant contemplating the sky until eight o’clock. By then the sun had risen high enough to establish the pattern of the day. She then took a bath every hour on the hour until noon, when she lunched on tea and six raw oysters. Prior to her afternoon meditation she took another bath. At six in the evening she took her eighth and final bath before changing into an evening kimono and going to her nightclub.
One measure of her influence in Japan was her apartment, the only one in the skyscraper where she lived. The Imperial chamberlains had objected strenuously to a skyscraper beside the Imperial moat, and the only way it got built was through a promise that the building would be used strictly for offices, that it would always be empty at night.
The chamberlains felt that the Emperor, although not a god since the end of the war, still deserved some privacy at night. At the beginning of the century, after all, there had been one hundred and thirty-four living gods registered with the relevant ministry in Peking, and of these only the Japanese Emperor still survived as an institution.
Mama had used her business connections to make an exception of herself. Because there could be no lights in the skyscraper after dark, her apartment was furnished with infrared lighting invisible to the naked eye. From below, the immense tower looked deserted but high on the twenty-fourth floor, unknown to the twelve million inhabitants of Tokyo, a small elderly woman in infrared goggles watched over them. Every night she smiled benignly down on the world’s largest city as she ate her last meal of the day, tea and twelve raw oysters.
Although she was today the most powerful woman in Japan, life had not begun easily for her. She had been born to a peasant couple in the Tohoku, the poor northern district of Japan. Each year thereafter her parents had another child whom they suffocated at birth, the regular practice among farmers living in poverty. Mama was eight years old when the silk market in America collapsed for a season, leaving her parents no choice but to sell her to a brothel.
A house in the licensed quarter of Kobe offered the highest sum, and that was where she went. Her father blamed her mother for the silk disaster in America, since her mother was an Ainu and therefore of Caucasian origin. Before he went off to drink at night he beat her as hard as he could.
The year Mama left home a son was born to the couple. They kept him because their daughter was gone. After the war this man, who had the body hair of his mother, confessed a long list of crimes to Geraty, a heinous record of torture and arson, killing and sexual perversion that stretched from Siberia to Mukden to Shanghai and up the valley of the Yangtze, that included among many atrocities the murder of Miya’s son and the murder of the Japanese General responsible for the rape of Nanking. It was from him that Geraty stole the military greatcoat he was wearing the night he first met Quin, not by accident, in the bar in the Bronx once owned by Geraty’s father.
As for Mama, she never knew she had a brother, neither then nor years later when the night came for him to murder both her surviving son and Hato, the freighter passenger on the Pacific crossing who had worn a false moustache and false sideburns and so angrily kept the secret of his shoeboxes from Quin and Big Gobi.
Although she was only eight years old when she went to the house in Kobe, Mama soon came to know the customs of the world from the sailors who passed through that busy port. Throughout her childhood she was tattooed a part at a time, as was customary at the beginning of the century for Japanese children entering a serious life of prostitution or crime.
When puberty came her body was entirely covered with tattoos with the exception of her face and her hands and feet. The tattoos recounted the epic story of a dragon. The dragon’s tail curled around her waist, its fiery breath licked her stomach, its tongue forked into her crotch, its eyes peered from her nipples.
On her backside, in even more terrifying guises, the theme was repeated with variations.
Thus when a visiting knight sagged in bed, thinking he had met the challenge and triumphed, slain the dragon and earned a night’s sleep, Mama had but to whisper to him in the candlelight to prove that facts were always illusionary when compared to myths.
Turn me over, she suggested.
And sure enough, as soon as the tired warrior turned her over the dangers of the night returned and he was faced with a whole new saga of battles and miracles.
The dragon tattoo was a masterpiece, the most intricate anybody had ever seen. Her epic became legendary in the ports of Asia and soon she was in great demand.
In particular she appealed to opium addicts, who were convinced they would never be able to make love to a woman again. But Mama showed them there could be more to puffing the magic dragon than they had ever suspected.
Mama worked first in the Chinese wing of the brothel, since the Chinese were not only the principal opium addicts but also the principal seducers of virgins. The older Chinese men, bent on deflowering the world now that they had reached an advanced age, would pay almost any price if they thought they were getting a virgin. Being small, Mama was able to serve this lust in the Chinese wing for several years.
From there, for seasoning, she was sent to the Korean wing with its rich smells of garlic and fermenting cabbage, then back to the sailors’ section to relearn any of the international traits she might have forgotten from her childhood.
Lastly, sixteen years old and fully experienced in all carnal matters, she was certified an apprentice Japanese woman and allowed to enter the Japanese wing on trial.
Mama studied fortune-telling, music, conversation, and especially the match-stick games with which Japanese men were sexually aroused. She learned to arrange stones, to pour water over tea, to fold a piece of paper into the shape of a crane. In return she was given diamonds and emeralds and cameras, which were just then being developed.
When she was twenty she bought her way out of the brothel and established herself as an official second wife available by the year, month, week, or half-hour. Over the following four years an astonishing number of Japan’s future leaders passed her way, including, one weekend, an entire graduating class from Tokyo University that eventually produced three prime ministers, forty suicides, and the postwar head of the Communis
t party.
In 1929, at the age of twenty-four, she finally decided to stabilize her life by forming a permanent liaison. Because of the growing influence of the army in the country, she chose an army general, a man who happened to be not only wealthy but an aristocrat as well.
Baron Kikuchi’s fortune came from his large landholdings in the Tohoku, the same northern district where Mama had been born in poverty. He was the younger of twin sons, born eight minutes after his brother, so the barony had not originally been his. But when his elder brother converted to Judaism after the First World War, he inherited the title.
The twin boys never knew their father, a famous statesman in the middle of the nineteenth century who was one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, the movement that overthrew the military dictatorship that had governed Japan for two and a half centuries and returned the Emperor to power. The old Baron, a close friend of the Emperor Meiji, was instrumental in opening the country to Western ways. In fact, he was so involved with modernizing the country he didn’t marry until his eighty-eighth year, whereupon he fathered twins and died.
The twins were raised by their mother, a gentle, strong-willed aristocrat sixty-four years younger than her famous husband. Unlike him, she took no interest in ships or railroads or Western education. She preferred to occupy herself with the traditional arts, painting and tea ceremony and the koto or Japanese harp, and especially with the intricacies of Go, an unusual avocation for a woman since the ancient game had military overtones and was always played by men.
During their early years the twins were educated at home on the estate owned by their ancestors since the thirteenth century, another famous statesman in the family having gone to the aid of the warriors in Kamakura at that time and received land in the north as a reward. But although the estate was large and the family’s wealth great, the twins and their mother lived austerely in keeping with the practice of the northern Japanese.
Quin?s Shanghai Circus Page 12
