Somersault (82 page)

“You’d better believe that when Patron talks about this in his sermon at the summer conference, it is going to turn off those who followed him from before the Somersault. There’ll be a lot of people coming from the outside, the media included, and I’ll bet there’ll be some reporters who’ll mock him just as they did at the Somersault, calling it all
antichrist syncretism
or something. Still, I find a reality in him as a religious figure, a reality that includes the feeling that—before much longer—he’s going to find himself in a bind all over again. He’s an extraordinary person. And basically I think that the Quiet Women and Technicians sense the same thing. At the summer conference it’ll be those people who really believe that the new church will produce New Men who will get the ball rolling. Isn’t this exactly what Patron’s hoping for?”

After Ikuo finished his deliberate explanation, Kizu felt a rush of pride. Dr. Koga turned his deep set, darkly shaded eyes, with a glint of the impish in them, toward Kizu and said, “Your painting predicts this new relationship between Patron and Ikuo. I can’t think of anything better to have hanging in our chapel!”

3

After the “miracle” of his cancer disappearing, and after having completed the triptych, Kizu became aware of a harsh reality: He had a massive amount of time left to live. He still remembered how, after he was told his cancer was back, he had felt the richness of each and every moment. But what he felt now was something else again, a complete powerlessness in the face of all this newfound time. He’d felt the same thing on sleepless nights, but this was much more overwhelming. The sense of confusion hit him most in the early morning and late at night.

In the mornings, the sound of birds chirping from behind the house was enough to wake him. And at night he felt oppressed even more when he’d awake soon after going to bed. Though he knew it was a strange reaction, he found that at times like these the most appropriate attitude was to pretend he was already dead.

In the early morning all he had to do was stay in bed, half propped up, for two or three hours and wait for the first stirrings of activity in the monastery across the lake. The retired diplomat who’d designed his bed might have
spent the early hours of each day in much the same way, he mused. When there were still four or five hours left till dawn, though, Kizu fell into a space where he couldn’t just leave everything up to the passage of time.

He started going to bed early, as the church members in the Hollow were wont to do, except when he’d sat awake until late reading a critical work on Dante, donated to the junior high by the later Brother Gii, which he’d borrowed from Asa-san.

For times like these, when he went to bed late and woke up after sleeping only a short while, he kept the shutters open, of course, but also a space between the curtains so he might gaze out at the lake right after awakening. When he woke up he’d take the conductor’s baton the former diplomat had used to practice with, spread the curtains wider apart, and spend his time gazing at the chapel and monastery on the far shore.

Ever since the night when he and Ikuo had talked for hours, Kizu had a special affection for moonlit scenery, but even on moonless nights the chapel and monastery floated up faintly in the lamplight, and he found it enjoyable to drink in this scene with the eyes of an artist.

This particular evening, Kizu woke up in the middle of the night, checking the long, narrow fluorescent clock face sunken in the headboard of the bed, itself another leftover of the late owner. He propped himself on one elbow and pushed the curtains aside to get the widest possible view of the dark scene outside.

A light was on in the chapel across the lake, and something was moving inside. Kizu peered intently through the two oblong windows with their glass slightly out of alignment. He saw shadows of a person moving up and down. Kizu remembered that stepladders had been placed there; the shadows seemed to climb up, then down, then move the ladder, then climb up again. The shadows were of two people merging together, only to break apart.

Kizu’s heart beat violently. Was it two people about to hang themselves? One of them helping the other get to the proper height to do the job, then once the first person was dangling from the rope the second person follows suit? Is that what was going on? The movements seemed furtive yet bold.

Kizu had been holding his breath; and now he let out a ragged stream and pondered the situation. If he got Ms. Asuka up, she could call the office on her cell phone. But the office beside the chapel was dark, the monastery a pitch-black mass rising up in the lamplight.

Kizu adjusted the shade on his lamp so the light would shine straight down and switched it on. He got up from bed, but in the small circle of light he couldn’t locate his underwear. Flustered, he pulled on his trousers right over his pajamas. If he raced over to the chapel, yelled out to wake up somebody,
they’d be able to get the person down from where he was hanging by the neck. If only he was in time to revive him!

Even if there wasn’t any emergency, they couldn’t blame him for hurrying over to the chapel simply out of fear that his newly displayed painting was about to be stolen.

Kizu shone his flashlight before him as he cautiously walked down the hard dirt and gravel path; then, as he came to the newly paved road from the dam to the north shore, he went faster in the lamplight. He was filled with a sense of gratification that he’d regained his strength so quickly.

He took the walkway behind to the back of the bleachers, ascended a short staircase, walked through the hushed monastery courtyard, and found the door of the chapel half open, light spilling out onto the base of the big cylindrical building. If there really were thieves inside about to make off with his painting, they’d make short work of an old man showing up out of the blue like this, but this didn’t deter Kizu.

Still, he trembled as he leaned forward in the open space and peered inside. Two beings were there, like big and little stuffed bears, one crouched at the top of the stepladder, the other clinging to the ladder supporting it. A moment later, Patron, who was standing on the floor, turned to face Kizu, while Morio, on top of the ladder, very carefully turned to gaze down. The two of them were dressed in identical thick yellow and dark green striped pajamas.

“It’s dangerous to turn around like that when you’re on a ladder, so face the wall again and climb down,” Patron said, his voice echoing in the chamber, and Morio, ever faithful to instructions, did exactly that. Then Patron spoke to Kizu for the first time.

“You’re up very late, aren’t you? Were you worried about your painting?”

Kizu waited until his heart stopped pounding before he replied. “From where I sleep I could see people moving around in here.… So you were examining the painting up close, you and Morio?”

“Yes, both of us have bad eyesight, you see. We were discussing the painting as we were getting ready for bed and decided to take another look. So, Morio, what do you think?”

“Ikuo in the painting looks just like the painting in the book.”

Kizu couldn’t understand what Morio’s slow, confident words meant. As Patron held on to the ladder and Morio climbed down, he thrust out his firm jaw and pointed to a faded old book on top of the piano. Kizu walked over and picked it up. It was Wolynski’s
Das Buck vom Grossen Zorn
, translated by Haniya Yutaka: an edition put out during the war, apparently, with a crudely done cover.

“Do you see the page slipped in as a frontispiece?” Patron asked, his voice gentle again. “Long after the war they came out with an edition that includes that frontispiece, and it’s important to have that frontispiece in order to understand the text. The edition you have there, though, is not bad, and ever since I first found it on my father’s bookshelf it’s been a favorite of mine, so I made a copy of the frontispiece in the revised edition and stuck it in.”

Kizu looked at the print. The background was a sculptured group like a relief of a scene from the Bible, and in the foreground there was a dark standing figure, a man facing forward, arms stretched out. His eyes were brimming with despair and rage, his mouth like an open hole, the barely suppressed outlines of his face with its broad manly forehead and strong jaw, all of which clutched at Kizu.

“The painting is Watts’s
The Prophet Jonah
. When I heard you were going to use Ikuo as your model for Jonah, I immediately remembered this drawing. Because before this, even, I’d projected Ikuo onto that drawing by Watts.

“You were released from cancer, Professor,” Patron went on, “and completed the triptych. And when Morio saw it he said that the face in the painting was the same as in
The Prophet Jonah
. After dinner this evening he didn’t seem to be able to get this out of his mind, and as we talked about it we decided, finally, to go over and see the painting again tonight. I think Morio’s right. Ikuo’s features do look exactly like that, but that’s not all there is to it. Morio understands things through hearing, rather than visually, and he says he hears the same chords, the same dissonance, emanating from both paintings. You, on the other hand, Professor, are a visual person, with a painterly intuition that sees down to the core of Ikuo’s being. That’s where you and Watts have something in common.

“Actually, I’ve wanted for some time to talk with you about this. And here you are in front of us in the middle of the night. It’s fitting, don’t you think, to say I summoned you here? If so, Professor, then I think your—”

As if noticing that he wasn’t making much sense, Patron stopped speaking. Kizu thought,
That’s right! It
is
right to think of him as the one who made my cancer disappear!
Patron made Morio sit down on the barber chair set back near the light on the wall, and stroked back the sweaty strands of hair clinging to his forehead. Kizu found the scene of the three of them—two in matching yellow and green pajamas, one sunk back, face up in a barber chair, joined by Kizu himself in a pink and gray striped pajama top—like clowns in some old woodblock print.
And
, he thought,
my painting of Jonah is definitely like that frontispiece of the prophet Jonah
.

Before speaking, Patron waited for Kizu, who was poring over the book, to look up.

“When Ikuo first came to see me, just before I got to know you, Professor, I thought that the Jonah combined in Wolynski’s words and Watts’s drawing had come to life right before my eyes. When he started talking about the book of Jonah I was less surprised than struck by the feeling that it was meant to be.… Ikuo’s question was quite simple: Was it right to repudiate God’s decision to destroy a city and his order to carry that out? He asked this as if he were taking Jonah’s place. As the Fireflies say, it was
Jonah-life
.

“When Guide was still alive I couldn’t understand why he didn’t handle this troublesome young man himself. But what Guide did was coax Ikuo into questioning me. And you wrote the cover letter for his petition to me, didn’t you, Professor? I’m not sure I gave him a satisfactory reply, but at least he’s still with me, trying to get his questions ultimately answered. Didn’t you paint this picture sensing all this from the sidelines?”

This question—though not entirely unexpected—left Kizu at a loss for words. Patron didn’t pursue the point further. The topic was deep, but his manner was serene.

“At the summer conference where we launch our new church, Ikuo isn’t the only one who’ll press me for an answer,” Patron said. “The Technicians, who wanted to reverse the Somersault so much they ended up torturing Guide to death, are now helping me, the one who played dumb about the whole Somersault. I have to steel myself to the fact that they’re now going to turn the questions they had for Guide on
me
. And of course, there are the even more potentially troublesome Quiet Women ready and waiting in the wings.”

Patron said all this in a burst of speech; then he stopped and, pondering something, ran his fingers through Morio’s hair.

“Ah, Professor—could you pass me that book? I marked some lines in it. Jonah’s finally come to Nineveh to act as a frightening prophet. Jonah curses them in the name of God, saying they will all be destroyed, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they tore him limb from limb. But what about Jonah, who dared do something like that?

“However, here a great disillusionment lay waiting for him. When he saw the people of Nineveh repent, and God forgive them, he couldn’t grasp the complex elusive nature of the heavenly dialectic, the workings of divine wisdom, so filled with a mysterious dissension, and the infinite, all-encompassing divine nature—so Jonah was spurred on to resistance and anger.

“And thus he spoke to God this way.

“‘Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.’”

“Aren’t Ikuo and the Technicians and Quiet Women pressing me hard with that very same cry?

“There’s another thing I’d like to say, taking off from Wolynski’s theme, about Dostoyevsky. I find it fascinating that Ikuo is driven by these Jonahlike thoughts and takes so much time looking after the Fireflies. What I recall is a passage written by Wolynski’s translator, Haniya, about Aloysha’s love for the boys, and the boys’ ‘Hurrah!’ in response to this. I copied this down in the margins of this book.

“Not just Aloysha, who thirteen years hence is supposed to be crucified for being an assassin of the Tsar, but the lustful Dimitri, who carries the burden of a crime he didn’t commit, as well as the Grand Inquisitor Ivan, who cries out in his thirst for life—all of them make a complete change from their positions and reach the sublime at the chorus of shouts from the boys of ‘Long live Karamazov!’

“Into what terrible state will our country’s people have to descend in order to spark a worldwide repentance?” Patron said. “How far will Jonah have to step forward? . . . Oh no—this won’t do at all. I’ve gotten so excited, Morio’s having one of his attacks! Professor, let’s call it a night. You can borrow the book if you’d like.”