Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  Two factors influenced him. First, Lotmann was doing a translation and that made sense to Adzhar, since it seemed likely that anything worth writing had already been written somewhere.

  Second, he decided his subject should deal with the revolution he himself had recently undergone, his insatiable new love of lovemaking.

  In the monasteries in the hills above Kamakura he found certain manuscripts to his liking. These manuscripts had been compiled in the thirteenth century by vast armies of monks and were not only whimsical and fantastic but totally pornographic. Originally Adzhar had thought of rendering them into his native Russian, but he realized he was still too disgusted with Lenin’s New Economic Policy to do that. On the other hand, Roosevelt had just announced his New Deal in America and a new deal always appealed to Adzhar. For this reason and no other the most stupendous pornographic collection in modern times happened to be rendered into English.

  Day and night the retired Emperor could be found laboring in his pavilion to complete the prodigious task he had assigned himself. In addition to translating tens of thousands of documents, he cross-referenced them with an eccentric system of his own invention, numbers written into the margins. These swarming clouds of numbers had overwhelming implications, for the real task Adzhar had set himself was no less than a total description of love by way of endless enumeration, an Oriental concept whereby one blank face turns into an infinite array of masks, a process so unfamiliar in the West it is called inscrutable.

  In 1937, in honor of his eightieth birthday, Adzhar planned an extraordinary fortnight of unlimited libertinism. Both Lotmann and I warned him against it, but he was adamant. He wouldn’t listen to us.

  Early that summer, you see, a party of Kempeitai plainclothesmen had visited his house as they periodically did with foreigners. They perused his manuscripts and were shocked by what they found. In their view the very existence of such documents in English was a clear and present danger to the state, since mountains of ancient Japanese pornography compiled by monks tended to belie the official position that the Japanese were now and always had been morally superior to all races everywhere.

  Adzhar argued that he had no intention of showing his collection to anyone. He even offered to destroy the key or code book to his annotations, without which no one could hope to grasp the ultimate significance of the translations.

  But the Kempeitai confiscated the collection all the same. They brought a truck convoy down to Kamakura and carted the manuscripts away to their warehouse in Tokyo, where for some obscure reason they were stored in the wing containing secret files on China, perhaps because it was hoped that if the manuscripts were ever discovered they would be considered of Chinese rather than Japanese origin.

  Adzhar was outraged. Thus the strenuous abandon with which he planned his eightieth birthday. He called together all the women he had known in Japan over the last eight years, at least several thousand, and rented hotels throughout the Tokyo area to accommodate them. During the fortnight preceding his birthday he shuttled back and forth between these hotels satisfying all of his former mistresses.

  It was July and the weather was sultry, dangerous for a man of his years. Still he would not let up. The day before his birthday he returned to his home in Kamakura, to bathe prior to having tea with Lotmann and me. In the bath, however, he came across his housekeeper giving her great-granddaughter a shampoo.

  The housekeeper was eighty-eight. Her great-granddaughter was sixteen. Adzhar knew the girl because she sometimes came to clean, but he had always kept away from both her and her great-grandmother out of a notion that it was somehow better not to involve his home life with his sexual affairs.

  I’m sure it wasn’t part of his plan. Adzhar was a sensualist but he also had a philosophical turn of mind. I’m sure that after tea with Lotmann and me he intended to return home and spend the evening alone quietly welcoming in his birthday. But since his conversion in the Gobi Desert he had taught himself to let his smile fall where it might. Later, when the old woman and the young girl had recovered some of their strength, they told us what had happened.

  Adzhar surprised them. He smiled and said he would like to finish shampooing the young girl’s hair himself. This he did. He then shampooed the old woman’s hair, his own, and suggested they all three get into the large bathing pool together. Immediately he dove underwater and stayed there so long they might have feared he was drowning had they not known otherwise. Every so often he surfaced only to go under again at once, causing both of them to swoon a dozen times before he emerged for another gulp of air.

  These vigorous water games lasted for perhaps an hour. Adzhar then tucked one of them under each arm and carried them into the living room. Adzhar lived in Japanese fashion, so the entire room could serve as a bed if one were used to lying on tatami, which of course all three were. The great-grandmother was afraid the hot water might have weakened him, and urged him to rest while she gave him a massage. Adzhar agreed to the massage but found it impossible to rest. While she walked on his back he busied himself with the great-granddaughter.

  And so it went for hours and hours as the weather grew hotter and hotter. Adzhar never slackened, never stopped making love. Sometime in the course of the evening, small as he was, he managed to carry the two of them out to the kitchen, making love all the while, and get a bottle of iced vodka and a jar of iced caviar out of the refrigerator. These he consumed back in the living room without interrupting himself.

  At midnight, while copulating with both of them in alternate thrusts, the heart attack struck.

  They heard him groan, naturally they were groaning themselves. The three simultaneous orgasms lasted throughout the twelve chimes of the clock, at which time Adzhar turned eighty and died.

  Hours passed before the old woman and the young girl had the energy to crawl over to the telephone. They were too weak to speak, but we understood from the panting over the phone that something had happened. Lotmann and I hurried over and found Adzhar lying on his back, his member still erect, the same grateful smile on his face that he had worn that morning when he walked into the bath and found his housekeeper and her great-granddaughter there by chance.

  Lotmann and I pronounced our various Catholic and Buddhist and Jewish and Shinto prayers over the little old man. We carried him up to a pine grove on a hill behind Kamakura and there, as he had wanted, buried him in an unmarked grave with his head pointing to the east.

  A strange and restless journey? Could he have been that man who traveled out of the west to visit the court of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century?

  I don’t know. I only know that on the day Adzhar reached the end of his remarkable wanderings Japanese troops crossed the Marco Polo Bridge outside of Peking and brought war to all of China.

  Quin poured the last of the whiskey into Father Lamereaux’s glass. The Jesuit’s hand shook a little as he stiffly buttoned his coat the wrong way, but the only effect of the alcohol still seemed to be to recall a small part of that brilliance of memory that had once allowed him to memorize the entire Summa theologica, that in its day had reinforced an inner vision so unwavering it had been stared down only once, by the glass eye of a sleeping man, and even then only after a full hour of unblinking silence.

  Father Lamereaux sipped.

  And the other one? said Quin. The one known as Rabbi Lotmann?

  Yes, whispered the priest, there had been three of us who were friends in Kamakura before the war and now there were only two. Lotmann, as it turned out, like Adzhar, was also affected late in life by the founding of the Third International.

  As a young man at the beginning of the century his interests were archery and the paintings of the Impressionists. Because he had the vast Kikuchi landholdings behind him, he could indulge himself and did, making frequent trips to Paris before the First World War to increase his collection of paintings. In 1919, already middle-aged, he was off again.

  A fellow passenger on the Trans-Siberian Express was Kataya
ma Sen, who was on his way to Moscow to become a founding member of the Comintern. Baron Kikuchi was too much of an aesthete to care for politics, but his countryman’s zeal impressed him so much on the long trip that when he arrived in Paris he cabled for his collection to be sold and turned over the proceeds, as prearranged, to a Comintern representative in Paris. The address he was sent to was a shoemaker’s shop. The agent, of course, was Adzhar. They took an immediate liking to each other.

  Customarily the Baron stopped in Egypt to rest for a month or two before continuing on his voyage home from Europe. As an aesthete he enjoyed contemplating both the symmetry of the pyramids and the regularities of the Temple of Karnak. This time, however, he chose to tarry in Jerusalem rather than in Cairo. There he toured the normal spectacular sights, the Via Dolorosa, the garden of St. Ann’s, the Dome of the Rock, the Wall. Not only did he find himself remaining longer in the Middle East than usual but he also found himself, gradually, falling under the spell of Judaism.

  What is inevitable appears to be inevitable. Baron Kikuchi converted and began his training as a rabbi. At that point his title and his holdings in Japan automatically passed to his younger twin brother, younger by eight minutes, at that time a Colonel in the army but soon to become a member of the General Staff.

  Before long Lotmann left Palestine and returned to Japan. There are two contradictory, or perhaps complementary, stories to explain it. One says that he was expelled from Palestine for excessive Zionist activities. The other says he was passing excessive urine at the time and had the good sense to know that medical advice in Kamakura would be vastly superior to anything available in Jerusalem.

  No matter which explanation is applicable, we find the former Baron Kikuchi, now Rabbi Lotmann, taking up residence in the early 1920s on a corner of the large estate in Kamakura formerly owned by him, now the property of his brother.

  By nature he was a delicate man. Just as Adzhar grew more sensual in his old age, an ineluctable process, Lotmann grew more ethereal. His favorite prophet was Elijah and he used to claim he heard the same still, small voice in his garden in Kamakura that Elijah had heard on Mt. Horeb.

  So perhaps his death, after all, wasn’t the accident it appeared to be.

  In the spring of 1945 the Americans were burning down Tokyo with their fire bombs. Lotmann was working on his Talmudic translations in the garden, as usual, when he heard a raid beginning over Tokyo. But the Americans never bombed Kamakura, so there was nothing to fear. Lotmann went on writing under the cloudy spring sky.

  At noon the sun suddenly broke through the clouds, an unusually bright sun for a spring day. Either one of the American bombardiers was momentarily blinded by the rich colors of the earth thus revealed, or else the sudden heat of the sun stirred a current of wind in some peculiar fashion. In any case one small cluster of bombs missed Tokyo by twenty miles and fell exactly on Lotmann’s garden, instantly consuming him and all his translations in a ball of fire.

  The fire burned so intensely it was out in a matter of seconds. The house and grounds were untouched. There was a black patch in the garden, otherwise nothing.

  Since the death of Adzhar there had been only the two of us. Save for Lotmann and his sweet music there was no one else to comfort me. And now?

  And now it came to pass as they still went on and talked that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire and horses of fire and parted them both asunder. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.

  Father Lameraux tipped his empty glass. He picked up the bottle and saw that it too was empty. He turned to face the window, scars appearing around his eyes.

  We’ll have no second bottle today, he whispered, we’ll have no second chance in life. That other day of acting is gone, the No masks are gone and the music and the poem, gone along with all I knew, gone with all I’ve known. Once I asked myself these questions. Why does Elijah call himself Lotmann? Why does the dragon call himself Adzhar? Why is the tea bowl turned three times? Why is the koto played only once in a thousand years?

  I examined these questions and many others when I was abandoned and left alone. In my solitude I looked for the mysteries that stir the facts of life. I looked but now the wind is rising. The typhoon will be here soon, and mysteries and facts alike will be of no avail when it comes. They are the driftwood on the shore to be found by you or another after the storm has passed. Gather them together if you wish and build a fire on the beach against the night. Watch the smoke rise into the darkness and wonder if those are stars you see up there. Listen to the rumble of the sea then, listen to the waves turn three times and turn a thousand years, listen and let your mind wander.

  Father Lamereaux sadly lowered his head. He gripped the horsehair arms of his chair.

  Even in the thirteenth century there was often confusion in the capital, which is to say we’ve made a mistake following Christ rather than the Virgin. Without a mother there would be no son and women who have children, even virgins, are seldom bothered by constipation. In the old days this house was filled with cats and there were always fires to watch, the flowers of Tokyo they were called. If we happened to see a flower before a meeting of the Legion, the conversation afterward was always exceptionally spirited.

  Turnips. For over two decades nothing but turnips. Half a century in this country. Three-quarters of a century of life.

  Father Lamereaux bent his head. His long white hair swung free. A blast of wind shook the house and then there was utter silence. For a minute or two he listened to the silence.

  Do you hear it? Do you know it? It is the eye of heaven and we are in it. But there is but a short time to wait, eternity is brief. Soon the wind will be with us again, stronger than before, and the Emperor will pass unrecognized through the byways of his capital, his mark on the gate mistaken for the scratchings of a peasant, the palace a graveyard where his ghost drifts between the stones. There are so many shrines one Emperor cannot visit them all, sooner or later he must retire to his prayer wheels. And now I am afraid there is nothing more this court can do for you. The thirteenth century is coming to an end. Adzhar is gone, Lotmann is gone, I must join them. Our moment is over. The eye of the storm is about to close.

  Father Lamereaux stood. His hair streamed around his shoulders.

  Quin tried to thank him, but his words were lost in the wind. He reached out, but there was no hand there to take. The old priest’s gaze was fixed on an ancient domain bequeathed to poets and musicians. The door closed as Quin ran up the street looking for shelter.

  Father Lameraux returned to his study. His walls were lined with books. On his desk lay the manuscript he had never begun, the history of his reign, a work so massive there was no way to record it. The Emperor had ruled from his throne for seven hundred years and now his era was over. Time moved in epochs.

  A petitioner.

  A dwarf staring at the middle of his forehead.

  Master, I have closed the shutters. Go down to the cellar and stay there until the typhoon passes.

  Father Lamereaux listened to the temple bells tolling the stages of his soul. Certainly he could retire to the pine grove above the sea where he had long ago received instructions in the mysteries. Certainly he could grant her petition if first he resigned himself to imperfection.

  Go down, master. Go down. Do it now.

  My life, he whispered, has been devoted to the alleviation of suffering. In the years allotted me by Our Lady I have sought no other justification for life.

  His face tightened. The scars around his eyes deepened. His cheeks sank, the skin shrank into the bone. He reached out and put both hands around Miya’s neck, strangling her, letting her body fall to the floor.

  A window crashed. The front door blew open. He walked slowly down the corridor and paused at the kitchen. It was empty, the Emperor was alone in his palace. Even the princess had fled.

  Leaves and branches and earth, the whole world had been set loose in the air. Five thousand people would die in Japan that afternoon a
nd Father Lamereaux was but one of them, a forgotten priest whose kindness had soothed the lives of many.

  The wind knocked him down. With the last of his strength, he crawled across the garden to where the moss grew, to where there would be flowers and cats and tombstones for the boys he had loved in cemeteries, where the gong of the wind sounded down through the longest reign in the history of Asia.

  His head rested on the moss. He looked up at the sky, stared into the eye of heaven as the thick garden wall came apart, as the prison walls opened and he was crushed piece by piece under the smooth, weathered stones.

  There were only two buttons in the private elevator, one marked up and one marked down. The little woman met him when he stepped off on the twenty-fourth floor.

  The whole city is at your feet, said Quin. Is Fuji-san always that clear from here?

  Only at this time of the year, she said. Just after the typhoon season the air is peculiarly transparent. Distance seems not to count. The rest of the year the mountain is cloudy and mysterious, or dim and mysterious, or invisible and mysterious.

  He slipped off his shoes and followed her into a spacious room with tatami on the floor, empty of furniture, bare save for a primitive structure by the window. The Japanese shrine was raised on stilts, the thatched roof slanting sharply up to where the roof beams, two on each end, crossed in the air. The interior of the shrine was hidden by thin straw mats hanging on all four sides.

  When I was younger, she said, it puzzled me how that design found its way to Japan. The heavy roof and open sides suggest a tropical climate of rain and heat, a land of monsoons, thus the stilts. Yet Japan is a northern country and mountainous. Why fear coastal floods in the mountains? Why build without walls and foundations when the winters are severe? Why use thatch rather than earth and stone like other northern peoples? The Ainu, the first people on these islands, built quite differently. They fought quite differently as well, on foot with short weapons, which seems suitable to a mountain land. Yet the oldest objects of the Yamato peoples from whom we are descended are clay grave figures that show warriors on horseback with long swords. Horsemen with long swords in a tropical jungle? No. That would have to suggest the plains of Manchuria and Mongolia.