Quin’s Shanghai Circus

Father Lamereaux

I had to sneak back and forth through the city, evaporate and materialize, die in doorways and resurrect myself in the moonlight of the cemetery.

There seemed to be only one thing to do, so I did it. I became a ghost.

Father Lamereaux peered down the corridor. The kitchen door was closed, a mop slapped the floor. He tiptoed out of his study. Just before he reached the garden door the mop stopped.

Master?

He held his breath. The voice spoke again from the blank wood of the kitchen door.

It’s raining, master. Use the toilet.

Father Lamereaux sighed. A little summer drizzle never hurt anyone. Besides, he had intended to go only as far as his favorite patch of moss beside the garden wall.

He left the toilet and sank into the chair behind his desk. Japanese urinals were the worst-smelling in the world, everyone knew that. They were so bad Japanese men never used them, which was a sound custom, practical as well as wise. It kept little boys from associating their tassels with dark, smelly places. In the West a boy had to hide in a closet, lock himself in. No wonder he grew up thinking his body and the demands of his body were impure.

Yet at the same time the little Western boy was enjoying himself, he had no choice. Eliminating waste was always enjoyable.

Guilt.

While in Japan, on the other hand, a boy was encouraged from the beginning to do his business out-of-doors. In public. His mother spread him over the gutter when he was a baby. Later, on the train, his older sister urged him to use an empty bottle rather than bother people by pushing up the aisle. Or if there wasn’t an empty bottle, she showed him how to stand on the seat and direct his aim downwind.

Women admired him. A natural act naturally performed. A world of sun and rain and men and flowers living together in harmony.

After fifty years in Japan a man couldn’t piss in his own garden?

Fifty years, half a century. A life that spanned three-quarters of a century. Nearly one-quarter of a century without a drink.

Father Lamereaux liked to think in terms of centuries, epochs, dynasties. When he first came to Japan it had helped him understand these people. Now it helped him understand himself.

He stirred. Someone was watching him.

He saw his housekeeper standing beside his desk, a tiny woman with a flat face, tangled hair, legs thinner than a man’s wrist. She wore yellow cotton trousers rolled up to her knees, a faded yellow blouse that hung open. But there was no sign of a woman there, only a pole of ancient polished wood. The womanly parts had dried up long ago.

Go away, he said. Don’t you know I lived half a century without you?

She stood with her arms hanging down to her sides, her eyes fixed on the middle of his forehead. Did she see anything when she stared at him like that? Or had she died at the end of the war as he often suspected, died in a fire bomb raid. So many had died then, almost everyone he knew. When the Americans arrived, there were only two million people living in the charcoal, two million from a city of five million.

He fumbled with the book in his lap, dropped it. A page ripped.

Now look what you’ve done, Miya. Go away and leave me alone.

You were going to the garden without your hat, she whispered. Without your rubbers.

Father Lamereaux crossed himself. How could he argue with a dead woman? She saw through doors, she saw in the dark. She heard the smallest sound no matter where he was in the house. She had the eyes and ears of a cat and she was always watching him. Listening. Watching. A dead cat.

Miya, leave me at once.

There are visitors.

What? Where?

Here. In the parlor.

Who are they?

Two men. Foreigners.

What do they look like?

Who knows? They all look alike.

But what do they want? Why are they here?

The housekeeper held out a letter. It was written by himself, signed with his name. The letter was addressed to someone named Quin and suggested an hour and a day when this Quin could come to call. The date, in his own hand, showed that he had written the letter several weeks ago.

Father Lamereaux frowned. He had not had a visitor since the war. Who was this man? Why had he come to call? Why had he agreed to let him come to call in the first place?

Father Lamereaux reached out for the sheaf of papers he always kept beside him no matter where he was in the house, whether in his study or his bedroom or the dining room. He never carried them into the parlor, but that was only because he never went into the parlor, because he never had any visitors anymore.

The sheaf of papers was the index to his memoirs, a manuscript on which he had been working for nearly a quarter of a century. The memoirs were not yet finished but the index was complete and up to date. He thumbed through it and found no one by the name of Quin listed there.

I’ll tell them you’re resting, whispered the housekeeper.

No, don’t do that, of course I’ll see them. It’s just that I can’t recall the man’s name at the moment.

Welcome. It’s raining. This house has not seen a caller since the war.

Quin found himself facing a tall, cadaverous priest in his middle seventies. The old man smiled gently. He sat down in a chair with horsehair arms and poured tea from a tray brought by the dwarf who had met them at the door. Quin introduced himself and Big Gobi.

It’s raining, repeated Father Lamereaux. Exactly half a century ago I came to Japan on a day much like this. At one time the Emperors of Japan were men of great stature, but all that changed when military dictators seized power and moved the capital to Kamakura. The young Emperor was left behind in Kyoto to barter his autograph for pickles and rice. That was in the thirteenth century. Then in the 1920s I went to Kamakura to study in certain Buddhist temples.

Father Lamereaux unbuttoned his coat. There was something wrong with the movement. Quin looked more closely and saw that the buttons were reversed, buttoning right side over left as with a woman. The priest turned his attention to Big Gobi, who had nervously taken out his small gold cross to polish it on the side of his nose.

Four decades ago, whispered Father Lamereaux, I heard the tale of a cross very much like that one. This other cross was a rare Nestorian Christian relic that had been in the hands of a Malabar trading family for hundreds of years, during which time the family made a fortune in peppercorns. A man named Adzhar married into the family and traveled east with his wife and the cross. Of course Adzhar wasn’t his real name, only the name we knew him by. He was a Russian from Georgia and I believe he adopted the name of the province where he had been born. He also died before the war.

Father Lamereaux paused. He looked thoughtful.

I hope we’re not disturbing you, said Quin.

Not at all. I was just working on my memoirs as I have been every day for the last quarter of a century. Did you know cannons were placed around the Shinto shrines during the thirties? Decrepit artillery pieces captured from the Russians in 1905?

Father Lamereaux rubbed the horsehair arm of his chair.

An ugly mistake. For me the best years in Japan were the 1920s. I was young and I had just arrived, so everything here appealed to me. My studies were in Kamakura but I came to Tokyo on the weekends, to this very house, which was filled with cats then. In those days Tokyo was constructed entirely of wood and every night there would be a fire within walking distance, the flowers of Tokyo they were called. There’s nothing more stimulating than watching a fire when you’re young. On Friday nights we had our meetings here, and if we had been to see a fire the discussions we had on No drama were always more spirited. Since the war I’ve been a strict vegetarian, honey and eggs excepted. Rice has a particular effect on the Japanese an hour or two after they’ve eaten it, which is undoubtedly the principal reason they prefer the out-of-doors.

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 ex-cepted.

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 out. 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 young 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.

Again it’s raining, whispered Father Lamereaux. Until you came no one had visited this house since the war, and now you’ve come many times. My housekeeper goes out to do the shopping but I never leave, I stay here and work on my memoirs. Occasionally I sit in the garden, but only when it’s warm and only when it’s not raining. Are you familiar with the Peram?

No, said Quin.

They’re a tribe in central Borneo that has a necrohym system. When a man’s grandfather dies, for example, the man takes the name Grandfather Dead. He keeps that name until another male relative dies, a cousin say, and then he becomes Cousin Dead. This continues until he has a son, then his name changes to Father of So-and-so. But naturally the son’s name will be Uncle Dead or some such thing. Thus we find that the brother of the dead man is called Father of Uncle Dead. It’s an odd way for a man to remember his brother. At first it seems unduly complicated and roundabout for such simple tribesmen. It suggests, in fact, that relationships between people are more complex than we often suspect. It leads one to the conclusion that simple acts may not be simple. That where God’s children are concerned, that can never be.

Father Lamereaux rubbed the horsehair arm of the chair. Quin nodded to himself and finally asked the question he had waited so long to ask.

Father, what does the name Quin mean to you?

The old Jesuit sighed.

Yes, I see. I’ve been thinking about it myself and it seems I’m not quite sure. It seems I’ve been alone in this house a very long time. This morning, or perhaps it was yesterday or several weeks ago, I looked through the index to my memoirs to see if I could find the name, and it wasn’t there. Is that possible? I’m afraid it is, and now I don’t know what to tell you.

The priest unbuttoned his coat the wrong way. He stirred. Some image had passed before his eyes.

The first time you came here, he whispered slowly, you had a friend with you who was wearing a small gold cross similar to the one that belonged to Adzhar. He was a most unusual man, Adzhar, he was a man of many surprises. What was the name of your friend? Ordos? Tarim?

No. Gobi.

Yes I see, the desert Adzhar crossed on his way here. Well there’s no mistaking it then. Forty years later we have the same three names again, we have Adzhar and we have Gobi and we have Quin. Was he a relative of yours, that other Quin?

He was my father.

I see. I never knew about you, but then I knew very little about his personal life.

Where did you meet him?

Someplace. I can’t really recall.

Could it have been at a picnic?

It certainly might have been at a picnic. Adzhar and Lotmann and I used to enjoy having picnics at Kamakura. The pine groves in the hills above the sea are beautiful there.

Father, could this picnic have been by the sea? On a beach near the estate of Baron Kikuchi?

Baron Kikuchi? Which Baron Kikuchi? The first or the second?

The one who was important in the secret police. The Kempeitai, was it called?

It was, whispered Father Lamereaux. Indeed it was.

And could there have been four of you at the picnic? You and Adzhar and my father and one other? Three of you wearing gas masks?

Father Lamereaux sighed.

Gas masks, he repeated gently. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost in gas masks. What a curious scene to remember after all these years.

A clear autumn day. The year was 1929. Father Lamereaux had completed his Buddhist studies in Kamakura and was preparing to move back to Tokyo. Adzhar suggested a picnic and they walked together to the beach. Lamereaux expected to find Lotmann waiting for them there, but instead they were greeted by a couple, a young man and woman, Americans.

Adzhar introduced the couple. The man’s name was Quin. His wife was called Maeve.

Actually Father Lamereaux had met the woman once before under quite different circumstances. But either he had forgotten what those circumstances were or else he chose not to discuss them now, with her son, after all these years.

It was apparent to Quin that the priest hadn’t liked Maeve. It seemed their previous encounter had left him with the impression that she was hard and unsympathetic, excessive in some unexplained way, too willful perhaps.

In any case, when they were introduced that day on the beach the priest pretended it was the first time they had met. She did the same. Neither Adzhar nor her husband said anything, so it was unlikely that either one of them was aware that they already knew each other.

The gas masks were Adzhar’s idea. There was no one within a thousand yards of them, but Adzhar said that didn’t matter. The secret police might be using deaf people to read lips through binoculars. He had known that to happen elsewhere, he said, and they couldn’t afford to have anyone overhear the conversation they were to have that afternoon.

Quin agreed and the three men put on the gas masks Adzhar had seen fit to bring with him in his picnic basket. Maeve laid out the food but took no part in the discussion.

Adzhar began by saying he wanted to help but he knew he was too old for this kind of work. He had come only to make the introductions and offer advice, should any be needed. He then turned to Quin and asked Quin to explain.

Quin talked about Japan and Japanese politics, about the way the military was beginning to take over the country. In a very few years they would be ready to move into Manchuria, and after that they would attack the rest of China. War was inevitable, there was no escaping it, but a great many lives could be saved if the war were shortened. That could be done by sending information to China. Quin had sources who could provide the information. What he needed was a courier system that could secretly transport microfilm to the mainland.

Father Lamereaux was known to have many young Japanese friends who trusted him and would do what he asked. For the good of both the Japanese and the Chinese people would he take on the task of establishing a courier system?

The alleviation of suffering was Lamereaux’s vocation. He agreed at once to do what he could. Quin spent the rest of the afternoon explaining the methods they would use.

The information would be turned over to Lamereaux coded, on microfilm, along with instructions on where it was to be delivered in either Mukden or Shanghai. For safety Lamereaux would deal only with Quin, the couriers only with Lamereaux. Quin wouldn’t know who the couriers were, Lamereaux wouldn’t know the sources from whom Quin obtained his information.

The couriers would deliver the microfilm to places, not people, also for safety. At a certain hour on a certain day the capsule would be wedged behind the mirror in the toilet of a restaurant in Mukden. Or it would be taped under the lid of the water cabinet in the toilet of a bar in Shanghai. There would also be capsules that had to be retrieved in either Mukden or Shanghai and brought back to Tokyo.

The afternoon came to an end. The picnic was over. Young Quin said the only thing left to do was to give their network a code name.

Adzhar spoke up with a smile.

I’ve done nothing at all here today, he said. At least let me offer a suggestion for that. Don’t you think Gobi would do nicely?

The three men shook hands and took off their gas masks.

Toilets, whispered Father Lamereaux, always toilets. The result of the device I developed for the couriers. All systems have definitions, even the vegetarian system, honey and eggs excepted.

Quin nodded.

Father, did you know that Geraty claims he found a report on the network in the Kempeitai files after the war?

Geraty? Alive after the war? I thought he died in Shanghai.

No, he escaped to the Philippines and later came back here to take a job in the Occupation.

And he’s still alive?

Yes.

It’s hard to believe. I didn’t think anybody was still alive.

But, Father, I don’t understand. Geraty destroyed the report so the Americans wouldn’t see it, and the Americans had just finished fighting Japan. Why keep it from them?

From them or anybody, what does it matter now? The action in a No play occurs when no one is moving. The past reduces emperors to pickles who bugger and barter. Once there was rice beside the road where now there is only a forgotten signature fading on withered parchment, a lost sign on a wayside of the thirteenth century. The 1920s were the best years for me, before all this happened. They played the beautiful music for me then, music so rare it tempted the sun goddess from her cave, played and sang in the still small voice of a shoemaker’s son, sang at the shoemaker’s bench the epic of a dragon descended from the Lapps. I had my cats and the flowers of Tokyo, but in the 1930s they placed cannons around the shrines, they ignored the effect rice has on the bowels and went to war, and soon the flowers were gone and my cats were gone and the Legion was gone. Did you know Elijah? Did you know the sun goddess or the shoemaker’s son? They were gone and there were no more Friday nights. Everything I had ever known was gone.

The old priest turned. He stared at the rain running down the windows.

I could no longer meet the legionaries here, it wasn’t safe for them. I had to meet them one at a time for a minute or two behind a tombstone. I had to sneak back and forth through the city, evaporate and materialize, die in doorways and resurrect myself in the moonlight of a cemetery. There seemed to be only one thing to do, so I did it. I became a ghost. And Quin became a ghost as well. The idealist became violent and unsure of himself, I could see it in his eyes. You don’t understand, you say? No matter now. There’s nothing to understand anymore.

Father Lamereaux rose. He gazed at the windows.

How did it end, Father?

End? How can there be an end when Our Lady’s reign is forever? As for Quin, he went to Shanghai and never came back.

When?

Just before total war began, but in retrospect who can say? Artillery pieces were placed around the Shinto shrines in 1905.

Is there someone who might know what happened to him?

There was a woman who once played a thousand-year-old koto with indescribable tenderness across the hours of a spring afternoon in Kamakura. She might have been in Shanghai then, I’m not sure. I’ll give you her name.

No one else?

Father Lamereaux moved into the hall. He opened the front door and held out his hand. He wrote on a piece of paper, then stared at the drops of rain in his palm. Deep scars formed around his eyes.

In Tsukiji, he whispered. A gangster. Good-bye.

The door closed. Quin moved up the street in the rain reading the piece of paper. On one side Mama, The Living Room, an address. On the other side no address, a name, Kikuchi-Lotmann.

Kikuchi-Lotmann must be the gangster in Tsukiji, the fish market district of Tokyo. Mama must be the woman who had been in Shanghai. Beside the names two arrows were drawn pointing in opposite directions.

The rain came down and Quin watched the Emperor’s autograph dissolve in his fingers.

Miya sat in the kitchen slicing turnips. The shopkeepers in the neighborhood, who knew nothing of her forebears, assumed that tuberculosis had stunted her growth as a child and made her into a dwarf. But that wasn’t true. The men in her family had been tiny for generations, and they had always been careful to choose tiny women to bear their sons. They were No actors who specialized in the difficult role of the princess.

In the tradition of a family devoted to No, these severely disciplined men passed their stage name down from one generation to the next. Miya’s father had been the thirteenth actor to use it. Thus when she was born in 1905 the stern old man barely noted the fact. He had dedicated his life to No and there were no roles on the stage for women.

At the age of sixteen Miya ran away from her home in Kyoto to marry a painter, an act of abandon that gave her the only moments of happiness she was ever to know in life. Romantically she thought she might become a painter like him in the Western style, using oils rather than charcoal, but as it turned out her young husband never had time to teach her. He was dying and her escape ended within the year. She returned home with the two gifts love had given her, a child and tuberculosis.

Her father wouldn’t forgive her act of disobedience but he embraced his grandson, who he assumed would someday be the fourteenth actor in the family to bear the traditional name. Her father stopped speaking to her and never entered her room. A servant brought her meals. From her bed she could hear the old man and her son playing together.

When the boy was a little older her father got him admitted to the Peers’ School in Tokyo. At the same time he was enrolled in a No theater in Tokyo to receive his initial training.

Miya objected to him being sent so far away, but her objections meant nothing. As she expected, his busy schedule kept him away from Kyoto for all but a few days out of every year. And even when he did come home he spent most of his time away from the house with his grandfather.

As he grew older he was increasingly ill at ease in her presence. He was silent and even sullen, as if embarrassed to be with her. She knew this was because she had always been sick and had never been able to be a mother to him. She also knew this couldn’t be helped, but that didn’t lessen the bitterness she felt toward the course life had taken.

Her father died suddenly one winter, and to her surprise Miya found herself relieved, perhaps even secretly pleased. Despite her sickness her son would now have to turn to her because she was all he had.

She wrote him a long letter praising his talents and talking about the future. With the letter she sent a small childish self-portrait done by her dead husband, the only memento she had from that short period in her life when both sickness and her son had come to her. The painting had hung by her bed since her husband’s death, so she was quite sure her son would understand what she meant by sending it to him.

A few days later she received a telegram from her son’s school saying he had disappeared upon learning of his grandfather’s death. He had not received her letter. She sent a telegram to his theater and learned that he had not been seen there either.

Miya left her bed and took a train to Tokyo. Her son’s classmates could tell her nothing, but at the theater she was given the name of a foreigner, a No scholar who had apparently befriended her son. Several hints or suggestions accompanied the information, but Miya was too agitated to hear them.

She went to the address she had been given and found a large Victorian house. The sun had already set. In her confusion she forgot to knock on the door.

Although ice covered the windows the house was insufferably hot, so hot she almost fainted when she stepped into the scene being enacted in the oppressive heat of that Victorian parlor, in near darkness, the outside world invisible beyond the frosted windowpanes.

A tall thin man floated between the pieces of stiff furniture, drifted across the floor in the wavering light of a single candle. He was toying with the folds of his formal kimono, a costume worn by virgins in No plays, and toying with the plaits of a black lacquered wig that only partially covered the wisps of graying hair flying in front of his face.

The shadowy figure held a whiskey bottle in one hand, a fan in the other. As he danced around the room he used the fan to reveal his genitals, which were fully exposed through the open kimono.

Near him on a horsehair couch, his middle raised by silk pillows, the candle resting on his belly, lay her son, naked and giggling.

Miya reached the door, the cold air, the icy wind. Somehow she made her way out of the neighborhood before she collapsed. She was found that night in a snowdrift and taken to a hospital. Weeks later she learned from one of her son’s classmates that he had gone to work briefly in a factory that manufactured military overcoats. When he was fired for incompetence he had lied about his age and gone into the army under a false name.

That was in 1935. In 1937, while serving as a corporal in a film unit near Mukden, he was arrested as a spy and beaten to death by the Kempeitai.

Miya had to sell her father’s house and her father’s valuable collection of No masks to pay for her long convalescence. When her disease at last subsided she managed to find a job with the army. She was trained as a film projectionist at a base near Tokyo. The general at the base was a follower of No who made her his private projectionist as soon as he discovered the identity of her father. The general was transferred to China and killed, Miya went to work for another general who was transferred to China and killed, then for a third general who was transferred to China and killed. At the end of the war she was working for General Tojo, the Prime Minister who was soon to be hanged as a war criminal.

The winter evening the wind drove her away from the Victorian parlor Miya thought she was entering a Buddhist hell, an infernal, suffocating vision where angry demons forever tortured their victims. She had been a victim before, she was a victim again.

Yet the demons of legend always wore fierce masks. They grimaced and scowled, while the face in the candlelight of the Victorian parlor had been gently smiling, smiling so gently she was curiously reminded in time not of the hate she had felt that night, before she collapsed in the snowdrift, but of the love she had lost in life, all the love she had never known.

During the war as she moved from one tiny cubicle to another the memory of the face in the candlelight was always with her, an expression beyond her comprehension, the mystery of a No mask that was not a mask.

And it was still with her in the winter of 1945 when she retraced her steps one night through the ruined city, hungry and cold and alone, making her way back through the snow to the Victorian house eight years after the death of her son, returning to the man who had destroyed him, the only person who had existed for her in the world.

She didn’t knock at the door, perhaps because that was the way it had been the other time. But if she had knocked no one would have heard her, for Father Lamereaux was not only alone but unconscious.

She found him on the floor of a back room where he had fallen, delirious and starving. The windows had been open since the previous autumn. Snow blew across the room and piled up in the corners. The thin cotton kimono the priest wore was stiff with frozen vomit and excrement.

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 Lamereaux 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.