Quin’s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  Mama knew he must feel honored by this great responsibility before him, yet she also sensed something else in his manner, fear perhaps. She knew it couldn’t be a fear of failure. The General was too confident for that, too aware of his own competence and discipline. There was no question of his failing.

  A fear of success then?

  It seemed strange to Mama. Something was out of place.

  Later she never forgave herself for missing that opportunity to help him, to give him love in the way he needed it, by sharing with him his terrible secret. If she had pursued her feelings then, the two years that remained before his death might have been quite different for him, less anguished, at least less lonely. But at the moment she could only think of the son he had said he wanted.

  She thought giving him a son was the way to make him happy. Not until just before the end did she learn that he needed only her, no one else.

  When she had arrived at a scheme she called in the General’s chauffeur, a corporal.

  The corporal was a man about her own age. Although he came from a family of respected surgeons, he had long ago slipped into degradation. The first step was expulsion from a private school for recurrent masturbation in the classroom. His shame over being expelled from the school was so great that he went directly to his father’s clinic and stole a large amount of ether with which to commit suicide.

  Being afraid, he took too small a dose. The next day he tried once more, and the third day he tried again. A week or two went by and instead of vindicating his family’s honor he ended up becoming an ether addict.

  For about ten years following the First World War, a period of relative freedom in Japan, he supported his habit by hiring himself out for masturbation scenes in pornographic movies. During the Depression he blackmailed his relatives into giving him small sums of money by stationing himself in front of their homes and masturbating in full view of the neighbors. More recently he had turned to begging and stealing. He came to the General’s notice when he broke into a Kempeitai dispensary in search of gas to support his habit.

  Baron Kikuchi recognized his name at once, the young man’s father having been the surgeon who operated on his eye in 1905. Out of gratitude to the boy’s dead father he decided to help the boy if he could. He took him into the army and gave him medical treatment. He made him swear that he would never masturbate in public again. The corporal responded gratefully, so the General made him his chauffeur. He often had clandestine meetings in his car and the corporal’s loyalty to him was both deep and personal.

  Mama knew all this. She knew the corporal was an invert incapable of performing the sexual act with a woman. But she also knew he was her only hope. There were no male servants in the house and no other man ever slept there, except the corporal when the General was with her.

  She explained to the corporal that the General very much wanted to have a son but that he was unable to do what was necessary. The corporal understood at once. He hung his head and said he had a confession to make.

  Mama reassured him. She said that she knew about his condition but there was still a way he could help if he wanted to. The corporal replied that he would do anything at all that was within his power.

  She then asked him certain delicate questions. Somehow, despite his embarrassment, he managed to stammer out the answers.

  She thanked him and excused herself, returning with a large photograph. She gave the corporal instructions and told him he had only three days in which to practice. Three days from then would be the right time of the month for Mama and she dared not wait another month.

  It was a sign of the man’s profound love for Baron Kikuchi that he accepted the task of perfecting a technique, in only three days, that was entirely contrary to the habits of a lifetime.

  • • •

  Time was what she and the General lacked, timing was the hope of her scheme.

  When the corporal masturbated he became ecstatically dizzy. He sank into a realm of fantasy. But if anything other than his own hand touched his penis while he was masturbating, the dizziness left him. The flight was over, immediately he wilted.

  There was one exception to this and that was when his orgasm had already begun. Then his penis could be thumped or encased by any sort of foreign object and it would still remain erect for the two or three seconds the orgasm lasted. The difficulty, of course, was that he never knew when the orgasm was coming. In that other realm his mind was a blur. He was out of control.

  These were the facts he had admitted to Mama. Her solution was the large photograph.

  It was a formal portrait, the kind a family had taken on some very important occasion. Everyone was dressed in formal kimono, children and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents, the one surviving great-grandparent, the nurse who had served the family for half a century. The members of the family stood in straight rows, unsmiling, staring into the camera. In the front row was a stiff young boy wearing the same timid expression the corporal had worn at that age.

  The corporal knew the photograph well. Everyone in Japan knew it well. It was natural history, the world, existence.

  Yet there was something more in this photograph. Another photograph had been superimposed upon it, or perhaps a clever drawing, or perhaps merely the suggestion of an image, vague and undefined. At first the corporal had difficulty making it out, but the longer he stared at the photograph the clearer the vague image became.

  It was a ghostly naked boy lying on his back in front of the family. His elbow was bent, he was grinning, his fingers were flying.

  Maniacal freedom right at the feet of the solemn, unseeing assembly.

  The corporal practiced according to Mama’s instructions. He masturbated vigorously while concentrating on the ghost. The dizziness came, the ecstasy, he was out of control.

  His prearranged signal was a sound that resembled a clap of the hands, the sharp knock of two blocks of wood made by the man who passed the house sounding the hour. When the corporal heard the clap he shifted his eyes from the reclining ghost to the other boy, himself, the one who wore a formal kimono and stood in the front row of the family, transfixed, timid.

  Instantaneously he had an orgasm. It happened just as Mama had said it would. Due to the photograph he could control his fantasies to the second. The corporal practiced at the turn of every hour, day and night, and on the third day he was ready.

  Mama had chosen raw oysters to serve the General that night. The basis of her sauce was ambergris, the grayish-white wax secreted from behind the ear of the sperm whale, a well-known aphrodisiac. To this she added musk and rhubarb and cinnamon for flavoring, lastly a dose of phosphorite. She hoped the General would benefit from the aphrodisiac, but if he didn’t the phosphorite would constrict his throat muscles, strangling him and thereby producing a sympathetic erection.

  For as Lao-tzu had said, man is soft and weak in life but stiff and hard in death.

  Timing.

  The corporal and his family of respected surgeons.

  An oyster and a sperm whale.

  Poison and its antidote.

  The scheme was dangerous because the antidote had to be administered quickly, otherwise the General would not only simulate strangulation but undergo it. And the antidote couldn’t be mixed beforehand. She had to do that part while the corporal was doing his.

  Timing.

  Time.

  Mama decorated the platter with seaweed and placed it before the man she loved.

  The General covered an oyster with sauce and swallowed. He gripped his throat. As he toppled backward his kimono fell open revealing an erection.

  Mama slipped on top of him and moved up and down. The General seemed amazed and happy, but almost immediately his eyes began to close. Perhaps he had ejaculated, perhaps not. She left him unconscious on the floor and rushed into the pantry.

  The corporal was waiting beside the medicine cabinet, masturbating, staring at the photograph. Mama raised her kimono and step
ped in front of him, sharply clapped her hands, slid him into place. A few minutes later she was running back into the other room with the antidote she had mixed.

  There was a smile on the General’s face when he fell asleep that evening. At the end of a month, just before he left for Manchuria, she was able to tell him she was going to have a baby.

  The last night they stayed up together until very late. She played the koto as he sat with folded hands thinking of what was to come, the life he faced in Mukden. As the evening wore on she saw the signs come over him. She was sorry it had to happen then, for she knew he didn’t want her to remember him that way, the hands gripping each other and turning white, the good eye twitching more violently as it filled with water, closing finally under the weight of the sword.

  The glass eye gazed at her helplessly, yet even then he still sat erect as she went on playing the quiet music for him.

  The headache lasted longer than usual. Somewhere in the course of that intolerable pain the General once thought he heard a sound interrupt the music, a sharp sound, and another, a third, the sound made by a stone being slapped into place on a Go board, that ancient game of strategy and daring he had learned as a child. In fact he did hear the sound but it wasn’t made by black and white stones striking wood to acquire or lose territory. It was made by a hand on a face, her hand striking her face, a pathetic gesture of hopelessness because she could do so little for the man she loved.

  • • •

  The General went abroad early in 1935. In the spring of that year she received an invitation to visit his twin brother in Kamakura. Although she had never met him, she knew the history of this strange man who renounced his title and his wealth in order to become a Jew, whereupon he had at once begun to suffer uncommonly from hunger and thirst, to lose weight, and to pass an excessive amount of urine.

  The more superstitious of his teachers in Jerusalem interpreted this as an immediate and sure indication that his conversion was in some peculiar way anathema to the Lord. They therefore inveighed against him to fore-sake what he had so recently achieved, to give up his dream of being a Jew and to reembrace his own culture where he was unmistakably, by birth and tradition, in the eyes of all who might look upon him, already both an honored man and an aristocrat.

  But Rabbi Lotmann refused. He persisted. He had become a Jew and he would remain one. To allay the fears of his teachers he made reference to Elijah, his favorite prophet, and recalled for them that when the Lord had selected Elijah as His instrument and had feared for his life He had told him to turn eastward, to travel eastward, to hide by a brook before the Jordan where the Lord would then command ravens to feed him.

  Now Rabbi Lotmann said that in his case, since he was Japanese, the Jordan must be the Pacific and the brook before the Jordan must be the brook that crossed an estate owned by his family in Kamakura. Thus he decided to turn eastward and travel eastward and go to that estate to await the sustenance God would send him, as He had once sent the ravens to Elijah.

  As it happened, his reverence for Elijah saved his life. The level of medical practice available to the elite of Tokyo, many of whom lived in Kamakura, was far beyond anything to be found in Palestine. A routine medical examination immediately revealed that he was not suffering from some divine curse but from diabetes mellitus. Insulin injections had recently been discovered to be a totally effective mode of treatment, so he was on the estate in Kamakura, by the brook before his Jordan, but a short time before his hunger and thirst subsided and he ceased to pass excessive amounts of urine.

  The General had spoken often of his twin, his elder by eight minutes, and Mama had long looked forward to meeting him. Ostensibly the occasion for the visit was a koto recital by Rabbi Lotmann. Mama went and found two other guests, both apparently good friends of the rabbi.

  One of them was a priest, tall and gaunt, whom she would go to three years later with a request that was inconceivable to her then. But when the time came for her to go to him for help she knew he would do what she asked, for she had only to look once into his eyes on that spring afternoon in Kamakura to know he was a man who never refused anyone a kindness.

  The other guest was also a foreigner, a short old man with a merry face who said the exotic name he went by, Adzhar, wasn’t his real name. Like the Rabbi, he was engaged in some massive translation project. After traveling half the world, he said, learning obscure languages and backing obscure causes, he had more recently turned his attention to women. And although he was seventy-eight, he had discovered that he could never be introduced to a woman without loving her completely and at once. So the moment the company of a priest and a rabbi proved tiresome to her he would be overjoyed to take her to his home and serve her iced vodka and iced caviar, which by coincidence he had set aside that very morning.

  They all laughed as they moved into the garden, where a beautiful old koto and a second slightly larger one lay side by side on a raised platform.

  Do you also play? she said, turning to Father Lamer-eaux.

  In music, he answered, God has given me the ears of an angel and the hands of an ape. As a child I was so clumsy on the scales the piano had to be moved out to the barn.

  Then you play, she said, turning to Adzhar, who gaily held up his stubby fingers in front of his face.

  With these? There have been too many nails in my life, too many blows from the hammer. I have a soul but alas, I was born the son of a shoemaker and a shoemaker’s hands can’t make that kind of music.

  And so? she said, turning to the General’s brother.

  When I was young, he answered, my mother and I used to play every day on these two instruments. You’ll forgive me, but I’ve been told how well you play and I thought that perhaps today, for a minute or two, you would join me. Will you?

  She bowed stiffly, color in her face, the first time she had known embarrassment with a man since she was a girl of eight. Rabbi Lotmann showed her to her place and she sat down beside him. She struck a chord, he answered her.

  The recital lasted until the shadows of the pine trees beyond the garden reached across the platform. Nor was it merely an afternoon of music wherein the former Baron Kikuchi and the mistress of the present Baron Kikuchi touched the strings of their separate memories, for as the gaunt face of Father Lamereaux swayed gravely with the flowers, the fourth member of the musicale recited a tale, sang an epic poem he had learned somewhere in his travels.

  The short old man with the exotic name spoke of wonders and miracles and voyages beneath the sea. He told of the adventures of a boy who was carried on a dolphin’s back to the emerald kingdom, where the boy met a princess who described the enchanted life that would be his if he remained there. But the boy elected to return home; he waved to the princess and rose above the waves again, waved to the dolphin and walked along the beach to find the trees moved, the houses gone, the familiar paths now leading elsewhere because one day on the dolphin’s back in the emerald kingdom was the same as one hundred years on earth.

  Or was it a dolphin? ended Adzhar. Have I been bewitched by my own tale and confused my creatures? Let me ponder for a moment and make sure I have it right. Yes, I’m certain of it now. It wasn’t a dolphin at all. Wait.

  They waited, the rabbi and Mama playing their music, the Jesuit nodding amid the flowers. Adzhar was staring at the small gold cross that hung from Mama’s neck, studying it as he had been all afternoon while recounting his verses. Now she looked up from her koto and their eyes met. He smiled and she returned it, plucked a string, knew exactly what his next words would be.

  A dragon, announced Adzhar. Dolphins exist and dragons don’t. Of course it had to be a dragon.

  They played the last chords. She said good-bye to Adzhar and Father Lamereaux in the garden and walked together with Rabbi Lotmann to her car. By the gate he stopped.

  Today, he said, you reminded me of the Baroness. When she married my father she was about the same age you were when you met my brother. Did you know he came to m
e three years ago to talk to me about marrying you? He was very disturbed that day but not about you, it was something else that bothered him. Shall I tell you about it?

  If you wish, she said.

  Yes, I’d like to. He spent the weekend here. On Sunday afternoon I played the koto for him and then it was time for him to return to Tokyo. It was December and we had snow that year, if you remember. It was snowing that afternoon. Ever since he had returned from his tour of duty in Shanghai I had been aware that he always wore a small gold cross around his neck. Before he gave it to you, as you know, he kept it hidden under his uniform, but when he was staying with me and wearing a kimono he made no effort to hide it. I had never asked him about the cross and he never mentioned it, but when I saw it was gone that weekend I suspected he might have something to tell me. When I finished playing he didn’t move, so I sat at the instrument and waited.

  I have to leave, he said.

  I nodded.

  It was a lovely weekend, he said in a low voice. I always enjoy the few hours I can spend here with you. It’s a good life you’ve made for yourself. Does the translation go well?

  Yes.

  And your health is the same?

  Yes. I take my injections.

  Of course, we do what we have to do. That’s what she taught us, after all, by performing the tea ceremony, turning the bowls at sunset. We do what we have to do.

  I waited. He hadn’t had a headache all weekend and I could see he was worried he might have one now, before he could say what he wanted to say. But some things can’t be hurried. We’ve always been very close, the two of us, even though we seldom discuss personal matters. It’s the way it was in our family, I suppose. When I wrote to him from Jerusalem that I was converting to Judaism, he never asked me to explain myself although it naturally meant trouble for him in the army. He would have to work twice as hard in order to make up for having a brother who had embraced a Western religion, and not only embraced it but been ordained a teacher. Still he never questioned what I had done. His answer was to congratulate me and wish me happiness.