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 Lamereaux 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 and 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.
Mama smiled.
Northern yet southern. Our ancestors, after all, are a paradox. The house and the people in it contradict each other. Their three holy symbols were a round disk of polished metal, a curved piece of jade, a sword. The sun and the new moon and the lightning of fate. What plans do you have now?
I leave in a few days on a freighter.
Well, then it is over, whatever you hoped to do.
She was dressed in a black kimono. An emerald hung in the middle of her forehead. She touched the jewel now with a slender finger.
I didn’t know the name of the circus master then.
I didn’t know what became of the son your mother had by the General, nor what became of the son I had by your father. I didn’t know then, but no matter. What has been remains in our emerald world, the jewels of our minds where the circus of the past is never forgotten. The man I knew wanted to control his destiny. But lives cross, the sun and the moon contradict each other, we are enmeshed in a network of doing and feeling. Others become part of us and the pasts of others are beyond us. He sacrificed everything to build his own network of destiny. I met him only once for a few hours, yet it changed my life. Why is that?
He didn’t do it alone, he did it with another. When I went to the warehouse that night I thought my life was over, but when I listened to the words of the circus master I discovered this wasn’t so. An anonymous giant had already returned life to me although I didn’t know it until that moment. But then I knew it and knew that even then I had something to give in return, so I did.
Long ago they changed my life, those two anonymous men. The one by listening, the other by speaking. And although now I know the name of one of them, the one who was your father, the other is still unknown to me after all these years. Is this best? Perhaps. Perhaps it can be no other way with us. Perhaps that kind of mercy must always remain a mystery.
Yes, she added, it seems so.
She went on to speak of the General and his death, her flight to China, the year in a narcotized Shanghai dream watching false images being projected on the wall. She spoke of the night a rickshaw carried her down Bubbling Well Road to the outskirts of the city, to the gloomy cavern of the circus master’s last performance.
She took his hand.
When he was gone she went to her shrine and drew back the straw curtains. On the platform stood the ivory elephant supporting the dais in the shape of a lotus. The shrine faced west. She climbed up to the lotus and seated herself as the sun dropped over the city.
She sat in za-zen, her hands forming the mudra of knowledge. The first part of her life had been given to the ten thousand men who had come to explore her tattoo, the mythical epic of the dragon, the last part to the General and the circus master, so unalike and yet so similar in the grotesque ways in which they died.
She recalled the apocryphal chronicle from the Han dynasty that had described the terrors of the Gobi Desert. The chronicler had feared the sandstorms and the disappearing rivers, the mirages, above all the secret agents who represented the princes and despots of a thousand lawless regions, a danger thereby to the rule of the Son of Heaven.
He claimed this was his concern, but then he asked a question that revealed the true nature
of the fear that had made him tremble when the caravans passed, a possibility far more frightening than the massed armies that might be sent by a thousand lawless princes and despots, a vision that horrified him because it was the ultimate threat to the Son of Heaven and the integrity of his rule.
Or is it perhaps that they represent no one at all?
Mama sat in her thatched hut raised on stilts, a structure still used by peasants in the countryside in the tradition of a shrine first built in Japan two thousand years ago on a peninsula in the south.
The sacred object in that shrine was a round metal disk, the mirror that had belonged to the sun goddess before she was enticed from her cave by music, thereafter to become the ancestress of Japan’s emperors. For two thousand years, at the end of every second decade, the shrine of the sun goddess had been torn down and rebuilt exactly as it was before, thus to survive unchanged through the reigns of one hundred and twenty-four emperors.
And so it was with men who were destroyed in order that the shrine might never grow old, through change to remain the same, destroyed and resurrected by ten thousand men or by two men who painted tattoos on their minds, followed the tale of the dragon, joined a caravan that yet again was setting out across the desert in search of a fabled kingdom.
The tiny woman bowed her head. Fate had taken her sons and she had nothing else to give, but still there were no tears in the emerald eye that gathered together the final light of that autumn day above the Imperial moat.
Nichiren
No, they will not believe you but you must tell them the truth all the same. You must say that once a man dreamed a wind would come, he dreamed it and willed it, and because he did the wind came.
—The monk Nichiren speaking to his disciples after he destroyed the fleet of Kublai Khan
• • •
The day before his ship sailed Quin received a postcard at his hotel across from Tokyo station. The postmark showed that it had been sent to his old address at the time of Big Gobi’s funeral. There was a picture of a fishing village, an illegible message, and a scrawled signature.
Geraty.
Quin asked about the village and was told it was three hours away by train, on the coast south of Kamakura. For weeks he had been trying to find Geraty, but the answer everywhere was the same. No one had seen the giant with the bulging eyes since early in the summer. It was assumed that he had either died or left Tokyo.
There was only one train to the village and it left in a few minutes. Another returned late at night. Quin ran across the street to the station and found the train just as it was beginning to move.
They reached the tiny village early in the afternoon. Quin went first to the police box on the square. After that he intended to try the post office, the inn, lastly the shops that sold horseradish.
The policeman seemed to understand a few words of English. Quin used his hands to describe his man.
A foreigner. Also an American but much taller, much fatter. A long, filthy overcoat, a black hat pulled down to the ears. Layers of sweaters and a swath of red flannel at the neck. Alcohol. Horseradish. Head shaved, white stubble. Purple veins in the face. A gigantic nose, sacks for arms. A belly this far out. Eyes a skull could not hold.
The policeman watched him politely. When Quin finished he asked questions with his hands and his few words of English.
Huge? Yes, he understood.
Whiskey? Sake? He frowned. Impossible.
Prominent eyes? He smiled. Certainly.
A shaved head? The policeman looked confused.
An overcoat? No, nothing like that.
A hat? A black hat? Nobody wore hats anymore, not even foreigners.
Layers of sweaters? A red scarf? A hat like that and an overcoat that big?
The policeman hid his smile. Not even an American would dress so strangely. For a moment he had thought he knew whom they were talking about but obviously it wasn’t the same person. He shook his head. Unfortunately he couldn’t help.
Geraty, said Quin. Ger-a-ty. He must have been here.
Suddenly the policeman’s face was serious. The word came out with a hiss.
Galatiiii?
That’s him, said Quin. Was he here?
The policeman laughed. He clapped his hands three times.
Galatiiii, he hissed triumphantly.
He lowered his eyes solemnly.
Galati-ti-ti, he whispered, rocking back and forth as he repeated the name. The first time he had said it with his head thrown back, smiling. The second time he pronounced the syllables respectfully with his head bowed.
Where? said Quin. Where?
The policeman pointed toward the square. He waved his hand for Quin to follow and started down a narrow street that led to the waterfront. There were a few small piers with fishing boats clustered around them. Although it was a cool October day the shops along the harbor were open to the sun. The policeman marched stiffly along the quay swinging his arms.
Galatiiii, he chanted. Galati-ti-ti.
A group of children playing in the street dropped their ball and ran up behind Quin. An elderly crone, her back bent into a question mark by a lifetime of planting rice, hobbled up to him and clutched his sleeve. She tugged, grinned, kept pace with him over the cobblestones tapping her cane. Women came out of the shops and fishermen left their nets to join the procession.
Galatiiii, hissed the policeman.
Galati-ti-ti, sang the marching crowd.
The procession stretched the length of the waterfront. First came the strutting policeman, then Quin with the dwarf hanging from his sleeve, the children, the fishermen and their wives and mothers.
They left the harbor and followed a road along the shore. Ahead lay a high, rocky point, perhaps a half-mile away, that formed the bay of the village. The point ended in pine trees and cliffs. The sandy road became an uphill path.
Someone had brought a crude set of chimes. Someone else had brought a drum. The chimes clanged and the drum boomed as they climbed through the rice paddies into a pine grove, along a ledge above the sea, through a defile in the rocks that led to an open clearing. Two hundred feet away a small Japanese house stood on the very edge of the promontory.
The policeman waited until the entire procession had wound through the rocks and entered the field. When everyone was standing along the fringe of the forest he bowed his head and clapped three times.
Galatiiii, he shouted.
Galati-ti-ti, chanted the congregation.
The policeman turned and went to stand with the rest of the crowd. The dwarf gave Quin’s sleeve a final tug and hobbled off on her cane. The crowd waited. Quin was alone in the middle of the clearing.
At last the door to the little house opened. A huge figure dressed in kimono wallowed out into the sun. He was enormous, his white hair long and silky. He smiled and benignly raised his arms. The multitude bowed.
Three claps from the giant. One hand went up, the forefinger and middle finger pointing skyward, the medicine and little fingers held down by the thumb to make the pillar and the circle, the symbol of life, the sign of the preacher.
A deep and resonant prayer in Japanese, a short sermon, a rousing benediction. Three loud claps again to end the ceremony. The crowd laughed happily.
Galatiiii, whispered a reverent voice.
Galati-ti-ti, shouted the multitude.
Chimes tinkled, the drum struck a beat. The villagers began to file out of the clearing, the old men rocking on the even ground, the women cackling noisily, the children pushing and pulling, the ancient dwarf rattling the stones with her cane. Quin stared at the huge fat man in kimono.
Buffalo. What in God’s name is going on here?
The giant tossed his head, his hair flew, he burst into laughter. Tears ran down his face, he choked, his massive belly heaved up and down. He howled and his feet broke into a clumsy dance that carried him across the clearing, an enormous Buddha prancing in the afternoon sun. He crashed into the trees and came thunderin
g back grunting and wheezing, gurgling, spinning in circles. He staggered, caught himself, hiccuped.
In God’s name, he moaned. That’s what you said, nephew, don’t deny it. That’s what you said, and as it happens the work that goes on here is no more and no less.
• • •
They sat on the narrow terrace of the house, the sea breaking on the cliff a hundred feet below. Behind Geraty lay the bay, the harbor, on the far side the fishing village.
He was wearing a formal black kimono and the short black jacket that went with it. A layer of immaculate white undergarments showed at his chest. The pock-marks had all but disappeared, his eyes no longer bulged from his head. He was heavier than ever, but his deeply tanned face and long, flowing hair gave him a robust appearance. A seagull glided over the house and dipped down the cliff. Geraty followed its flight.
Buffalo. Why did you really walk into the bar that night in the Bronx?
Geraty stirred. He turned away from the sea and gazed at Quin.
Because of my mother. Because I hated to think of her being forgotten after the way she died.
How did she die?
In more agony than you’ll ever see. We watched her. The old man insisted she be sterilized and took her to a quack doctor. He and the quack had some drinks and by the time the quack opened her up he was drunk. Instead of tying the fallopian tubes he tied a part of the intestines. She lasted three days.
How old was Maeve?
Eight. Only eight, saints preserve us. There were just the two of us, and I was old enough to take it but she wasn’t.
What happened to her?
A couple of years later the old man was locking up the bar one night. Drunk? Stinking as usual. He saw a light in the pool hall across the street and let himself in the back door to see what was going on. What was going on was three of his customers fucking Maeve on a pool table. He laid them out and then beat her until she was unconscious. The next day, when he saw what her face looked like, he locked himself in the cellar with a case of gin and swallowed the key. Planned to starve himself to death but it was winter, too cold for him down there. He died in that cellar all right, but not the way he expected. He ruptured his bowels digging for the key.
Quin’s Shanghai Circus Page 25
