Quin nodded. He was looking at the legs of Father Lamereaux’s chair. They ended in carvings of claws crushing the heads of rodents.
How is your work progressing, Father?
Slowly, a little bit at a time. I want my memoirs to be as nearly perfect as possible. To me it seems unworthy of a human soul to resign itself to imperfection. I think the early fathers made a mistake there, I’ve always felt it was the Virgin we should be imitating. Christ doubted himself in the end but not the Virgin. We’re not enough like her, yet those years in Kamakura were charming all the same. The temples in the hills were beautiful and the views of the sea, the pine groves, the gongs and the rituals and the hours set aside for contemplation. And there was a spring afternoon when I nodded with the flowers while they played the music that had once tempted the sun goddess from her cave, played and also sang the epic of the dragon in a still small voice, a song so strange and soaring it surely was descended from the distant Lapps. A sad tale and yet not so. The shoemaker’s son sang it, sang it from his shoemaker’s bench. Incredibly, his code name when he was still in the business himself was The Holy Ghost. Did you know him? Did you know Elijah or the sun goddess? Did you know Henry Pu Yi?
No, said Quin.
Father Lamereaux leaned forward and rested his long, thin fingers on the stack of papers he had brought with him into the room. The papers were wrinkled and soiled as if often consulted. Slowly, pondering, he ruffled through the stack with his thumb and forefinger. Nothing was written on the papers. They were empty save for the prints of his fingers.
Henry was the last survivor of the Manchu dynasty, whispered the old priest, the last survivor and a very naughty man. We had a chat once, that was when visitors still came to call at this house. For a time he was Emperor of Manchukuo, as the Japanese called the mythical kingdom they pretended they had set up in Manchuria. It didn’t last very long, but all the same, Henry was the last Emperor I talked to.
Father, said Quin, it was Geraty who recommended me to you.
The old priest smiled gently.
I see. Well just let me think for a moment, I’m quite certain I can remember him. Names come back to me slowly, but they always come back. Perhaps you could just refresh my memory. What was he doing before the war?
He sold patent drugs. Eventually he left Tokyo and went to Mukden and then to Shanghai.
Mukden and Shanghai? A man who carried a valise for his samples? Yes, I believe I remember him. He came to my Friday night meetings.
Which meetings were those, Father?
The Legion meetings, the Legion of Mary. After the meetings ended there would be a discussion on No drama, and if we had happened to have seen a fire earlier in the evening the discussions were exceptionally spirited. I can recall him quite clearly now. He was a spare, large-boned man, very tall and very lanky, quiet, rather pale. Introspective and solemn, sometimes too solemn, I had to warn him not to be morose in his attitude toward religion. After all, it should be a happy part of our lives. Of course he wore stylish suits and flamboyant ties to make himself appear vain and worldly, but that was just to hide the truth about himself. How he suffered, that man. Did you know, by the way, that they placed cannons around the Shinto shrines in the thirties? Decrepit artillery pieces captured from the Russians in 1905?
When did you last see him, Father?
Henry?
No, Geraty.
Oh yes, I see. Well the last time would have been the morning he came here with his valise and was afraid to open it. The day he broke down and cried.
And when was that, Father?
Before the war, naturally. A good thirty years ago. And then before that I had my studies in Kamakura, where the temples in the hills were so beautiful, and the pine groves and the views of the sea, and the gongs and rituals and the hours set aside for contemplation. And then before that in the thirteenth century military dictators seized power and threw the Emperor out in the streets where he had to bugger his autograph and barter his pickle for rice. Since then I’ve been a strict vegetarian, honey and eggs excepted.
Father?
Henry was the last Emperor I talked to, although of course Manchukuo was only a mythical country. Henry wouldn’t admit that naturally, Henry was a very naughty man. But admit it or not, the truth was still the same. There’s no escaping the fact that Henry was out in the streets like the rest of us.
It took Quin many hours and many trips to the Victorian parlor to gather even a few facts from the old priest, so accustomed had he become to dwelling in the familiar terrain of some faraway kingdom that had long ago become a private domain. But even a few facts were enough to make it clear that Geraty had lied when he claimed he had learned about the espionage network from Father Lamereaux.
The Jesuit had never described the famous picnic on the beach in Kamakura to Geraty, never mentioned Adzhar’s name, never told Geraty about the dead-drop device he had invented, never said anything to Geraty about any aspect of the clandestine work in which he was involved.
Yet other parts of Geraty’s account were accurate. In fact, there had been a meeting in a Tokyo cemetery one night between Father Lamereaux and a young Japanese army corporal, little more than a boy, who was working for the spy ring as a courier. And the corporal was the same young boy whom Geraty had met earlier in the cemetery, the boy to whom he had given a packet of stolen money in exchange for what he thought would be a valuable cache of pornographic films waiting for him in Mukden. The boy had passed on the money to Father Lamereaux before dropping his trousers and bending over a tombstone to receive the bamboo microfilm device, subsequently traveling to Manchuria where he was caught soon after his arrival in Mukden and beaten to death by the Kempeitai, an incident that had produced the one vague report on the ring to be found in the files of the Kempeitai after the war.
But Father Lamereaux didn’t know Geraty had witnessed that scene in the cemetery. He didn’t know the source of the money given to him by the corporal. He didn’t know Geraty had watched him accept the packet and watched him insert the bamboo device with a deft flickering motion, that he had then fallen asleep listening to Father Lamereaux sing the Litany of the Saints to himself on his knees in the darkness.
On the contrary, it was Geraty who had confessed his secrets over two bottles of Irish whiskey the following day.
The two men first became acquainted when Geraty began attending the Legion meetings the priest held in his home on Friday evenings. Geraty affected the manner and clothes of a successful salesman, but Lamereaux suspected this bluff appearance had nothing to do with his true nature. He soon discovered Geraty was a sensitive man who tormented himself with obscure spiritual concerns that even to a Jesuit seemed remote. Obviously there was a contradiction in his gloomy approach to life. Geraty would never admit it, but the priest felt it had to do with religion. For some reason he sensed that Geraty yearned for a religious vocation yet at the same time could not bring himself to accept his natural inclinations.
Geraty had a great interest in No although Lamereaux didn’t discover this until the very last time they were together. Lamereaux was the spiritual director of the Tokyo presidium of the Legion of Mary, Geraty became its treasurer. While Lamereaux delivered an exhortation at the Friday night meetings, Geraty passed around under the table the secret-bag for the members’ contributions. He then left the house immediately after the meeting, claiming he had work to do. Thus he always missed the discussions on No led by Lamereaux.
A regional senatus of the various Asian presidia of the Legion was to be held in Shanghai. Geraty, who said he was due to make a business trip to Shanghai at about that time, was elected to be the Tokyo Legion’s delegate to the senatus.
The day before he was scheduled to leave for the mainland he turned up at Lamereaux’s house early in the morning. He seemed very agitated. Under his arm was the valise he used to carry his samples. Lamereaux wasn’t feeling at all well that day, but when Geraty begged to be allowed to stay for a few hours, to
be near a friend as he said, the priest put aside his own concerns to make him welcome.
Geraty drank tea and chewed fistfuls of aspirins. The pain in his face was evident, but it was just as evident that his suffering was more than physical. He was severely troubled.
Lamereaux invited him into the parlor. The moment Geraty laid eyes on the long table at the end of the room, the table where it was his duty to pass the secret-bag to the legionaries on Friday evenings, he buried his head in his hands and began to cry. Lamereaux gently bade him sit down and unburden himself. After sobbing helplessly for ten or fifteen minutes Geraty finally began to whisper.
He spoke first of an inconsequential matter. For some time he had been in the habit of going directly from the Friday night meetings of the Legion to Yoshiwara, the licensed quarter, to proselytize the harlots there. He would stand in the middle of the street facing a row of brothels and deliver a long sermon in a voice loud enough to be heard in every room.
Because he was such a large man, not only a giant but a foreign giant who spoke fluent Japanese, there was considerable curiosity over this spectacle. Often there would be hundreds of faces gazing down at him from the windows. Geraty began his preaching at midnight, when there was more chance the customers would be sleeping and the prostitutes would have time to listen.
Father Lamereaux knew that this was what Geraty had been doing after he left the Friday night meetings of the Legion. Such an activity was too flagrant not to be noticed at once and brought to his attention by his Japanese acquaintances. He had heard about it several years before and he didn’t like it. He found it overzealous and unseemly and not at all consonant with Japanese sensibilities. But because it obviously lifted Geraty’s spirits he allowed it to continue.
Hesitantly Geraty introduced his subject. He talked about girls from poor families who had to prostitute themselves for money during the first half of the evening and then spend the rest of the night lying beside a snoring man whom they had never seen before and would probably never see again. They were defiled and they knew it. They wanted to be cleansed, but they didn’t know how to go about it.
Father Lamereaux listened, fairly certain what would follow. Yet he said nothing. He smiled gently and made no effort to interrupt.
The confession was a long time in coming cut. From midnight until three in the morning Geraty preached to the prostitutes from the street, but as soon as the hour of three was sounded he sneaked around to the back entrances to the brothels, let himself in, and knocked on one door after another, desperately searching for a prostitute whose affections or sympathies he might have aroused with his oratory.
His aims were limited and abject. He wanted to perform cunnilingus on a prostitute, free of charge, at the foot of the bed where her paid customer for the night lay asleep. Geraty could probably have performed this service, without paying, on almost any prostitute in the brothel who was unengaged. Conversely, if he had paid, he could probably have performed it with most of those prostitutes who where engaged but whose partners were already asleep. But Geraty had to have it his own way. The girl’s immediate sin had to be evident, and he had to earn her redemption with his eloquence and his apparent conviction.
In the alleys behind the brothels Geraty shuffled his feet, stated his case, and begged for forgiveness. He had spoken forcefully during his three hours in the street, and more than once he was accepted.
When a prostitute agreed he locked the door behind him, got down on all fours and listened to her customer snoring only a few feet away, then insisted she stand over him and quietly insult him while he was at work.
When he had finished he carried her to the large Japanese bath on the premises, locked the door once more, and elaborately washed the girl, using an excessive amount of soap. He dried her and washed her again, using an even larger amount of soap, washed her tenderly a third time, and dried her tenderly a third time. After the third drying he was careful not to touch her with his bare hands. He put on gloves that he had brought with him in his valise and sprayed her with perfume that he had also brought with him in his valise.
Finally he carried her back to her bed and tucked her in beside her snoring, unsuspecting customer. He thanked her with tears and smiles and several quotations from the first chapter of St. Luke before proceeding down the corridor to knock on the next door.
Geraty continued in this manner as long as no hint of light showed through the rice paper sliding doors that served as windows. A peculiarity of this rite carried out under cover of darkness was that he remained fully dressed in his stylish suits and flamboyant neckties, never removing anything even while splashing water and soap over himself and the prostitutes in the bath. The result was that he was thoroughly soaked by the time dawn came.
He always walked home from the brothels as the sun came up, and this meant a perpetual cold in the winter, often amounting to mild pneumonia, and at the very least an annoying catarrhal condition throughout the rest of the year.
Geraty finished the description of his Friday nights in Yoshiwara with a grimace. He was even more agitated than when he had stepped into the Victorian parlor. Father Lamereaux was gently whispering a few consoling words about favors freely given and freely received when Geraty suddenly leapt to his feet. He snatched up his valise, couldn’t work the fasteners, sobbed compulsively, and ripped apart the sturdy metal locks with his hands.
The priest knew they were now getting down to the real purpose of Geraty’s visit.
The valise contained a map of Mukden, a thick wad of colorful neckties, and two unopened bottles of Irish whiskey. Without a word Geraty swung one of the bottles against the table, breaking off its neck. His hands were shaking so badly there was no other way he could have opened the bottle. He took a long drink and passed the bottle to Father Lamereaux.
For an hour or two they drank in silence. Geraty was apparently transfixed by what he had to say. He was paralyzed, an animal facing a torch in the dark.
As for Lamereaux, there was nothing he could be told that would surprise him. He had known suffering himself, but he also knew it wouldn’t make any difference for him to say this. He was there to listen, to try to help his friend to speak. Eventually he thought of a way to relieve the tension that was growing more profound between them as time went on.
The priest got to his feet and assumed a pose from a No play. He moved from that pose into another, a complex transition that required complete concentration. Geraty studied the movement, he considered it as Lamereaux held the pose, stiff and rigid, not one muscle contracting or expanding.
To anyone who understood No such finality and decision could not go unanswered. To his surprise Lamereaux saw Geraty getting to his feet and working himself into a pose from a different No play. It was the first time he had known that Geraty was also a devotee of No, an expert fully as skilled as he was. This information amazed and delighted him, for he knew there was now a way for him to help his tormented friend. So powerful was the discipline of No that it could contain any emotion no matter how painful, no matter how seemingly unbearable.
Lamereaux watched Geraty shift his pose. The giant sat down and the priest stood. The afternoon wore on. At some point they drained the first bottle of Irish whiskey and started on the second.
Night fell. The silent scenes from hundreds of No plays followed one upon another.
Late that evening the two actors broke into tears over the unparalleled performance they had staged together that day. Since early morning neither of them had spoken a word. Instead they had communicated through the abrupt, austere attitudes of their arms, their hands, their bodies. Even without masks they had completely understood each other.
Geraty had confessed utterly to stealing all the funds from the secret-bag of the Tokyo presidium of the Legion of Mary.
Lamereaux had reassured him by noting that St. Brigid in her charity had worked a miracle for him, had showed her love for him by already redressing his wrong, for just that previous night a youn
g legionary, wishing to make a last significant contribution before going abroad with the army, had unexpectedly provided a large donation to the secret-bag that easily made up for the missing sum.
And so they embraced and wept and prepared to part. As drunk, as Geraty murmured, as two butterflies circling a candle. For they were exiles far from home and war was coming.
At the end, at the door, they were crying in each other’s arms. It was then that the Jesuit whispered into his friend’s ear the opening line of the prayer that had sealed the meetings of the Legion and sealed as well Geraty’s stolen secret-bag:
Magnificat anima mea Dominum.
Remember it, whispered Father Lamereaux, for in those words you will find an end to your suffering. In them you will find what you seek within yourself just as the Savior was found within the womb of mankind. Go now and remember.
Geraty lurched away from the door knowing that he would remember, knowing also that he would never dare face Lamereaux again because the lesson he had learned that day was to be the travail of his life.
Thus he remembered the words when he escaped to Mukden to acquire a cache of worthless films and again when he escaped to Shanghai, there to undress nightly in a locked, shuttered room while projecting his worthless films on the wall, rendering himself naked night after night as he silently repeated the phrase he had learned at Lamereaux’s table, on Lamereaux’s motionless No stage, the words that were aged in two bottles of Irish whiskey and spun through the magic lamp of a battered Shanghai movie machine thirty years before they led him to his vocation, my soul doth magnify the Lord.
Quin?s Shanghai Circus Page 10