Quin?s Shanghai Circus (19 page)

I have to leave, he said.

I nodded.

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

Yes.

And your health is the same?

Yes. I take my injections.

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

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

The tea ceremony, he repeated now. She turned the bowl three times because that's the way it's done. Well, brother, there are three of us again.

I'm glad, I said. Who is this woman you love?

She's from a peasant family in the Tohoku.

They know a hard life.

She's nearly thirty years younger than I am. She was a prostitute.

No matter.

From childhood and for many years.

No matter.

She's known ten thousand men.

The number of creatures placed on earth by the Lord. In that case she understands many things and can love you well.

I've thought of asking her to marry me.

If you asked her, of course she would because she loves you, but is that best? She would be doing it only for your sake. If anything happens to you in the army the lands in the north would become her responsibility. Is it fair to make her the Baroness who owns the lands of the tenant farmers from whom she came?

I think not.

Rabbi Lotmann paused. He looked in silence at Mama for a moment.

That was as far as we got that afternoon. A headache struck him and he could say no more. I helped him into his car and he left. Do you remember that soon after that, in January 1932, he was away for a few weeks?

Yes, she answered.

Did he tell you where he went?

No.

It was Shanghai. A cousin of ours who lived in Shanghai was killed while he was there. It was an accident that he was killed but not an accident that he was attacked. My brother gave the orders, acting on higher orders. That was what he meant that day in December when he kept referring to doing what had to be done. He was thinking about that special assignment in Shanghai the following month. He wanted to tell me about it but couldn't because of the headache.

I don't understand. Surely he could have refused the assignment or even stopped it by saying a cousin of his was involved.

It seems to me he could and that's what worries me.

Did he tell you about this later?

No. I suppose that after it was over he didn't want to talk about it. I know about it because of the nature of his work, and because he had gone to Shanghai secretly, and because of the circumstances of what happened there.

I don't understand any of it.

As far as that one incident is concerned, it doesn't matter. As for the rest, I don't understand it myself. I only have a feeling he may be something more than just an army officer.

I don't know what that means.

Nor do I. But if there is anything I can ever do for you, or anything Adzhar or Lamereaux can ever do for you, you must come to us. They are close friends and you can rely on them as you would on me. That's all. That's why I wanted you to come today. To tell you that.

Thank you, she said. And thank you for what you said when he asked you about marriage.

He knew it himself, said Rabbi Lotmann. It was just his way of telling me the old
koto
had found a baroness again. I'll be sending it to you now. I've had that in mind for a long time, but first I wanted to hear you play it with me. I've always been sentimental, I'm afraid.

He laughed as he opened the car door.

We've heard that tale of Adzhar's many times, you know, many many times. He always has to tell it whenever I'm playing or Lamereaux is doing a scene from a
No
play. He's an active man and it's his way of taking part. He can't abide being just a spectator. Today it wasn't quite the same, though. For some reason he left out the last line.

And what is that?

A little trick of his that's supposed to prove the tale's authentic. At the end he waits a minute or two and then asks innocently if anyone is inclined to disbelieve him. When neither Lamereaux nor I say anything, he smiles.

Just as well, he says in the small voice of a child. Just as well, my friends. Just as well, as it turns out. For although I'm old now and it happened long ago, the boy on that dragon's back was me.

During the next two years she saw the General more than she had expected, for he frequently flew to Tokyo for a meeting of the General Staff. Often he had no more than an hour to be with her but he never failed to come, encouraging her during her confinement and later admiring their son.

Her love for the General continued to grow while he was away. Thus her confusion was complete when she learned that despite the vague suggestion made by his brother in Kamakura, she had never known anything at all about his real life.

The revelation came in the summer of 1937. Although they didn't know it, it was the last time they were to see each other. Once more the General was being transferred, this time to a high command post in central China. He was to lead one of the armies advancing on Nanking.

His visit coincided with
O-bon,
the midsummer Festival of the Dead, the day when dead souls returned to those who loved them to receive prayers and offer blessings in return. Having always been superstitious, she felt uneasy when he suddenly appeared that day.

He seemed restless when she played the
koto
in the evening, so she stopped and encouraged him to talk. Again she noticed in his manner the inexplicable hint of fear she had seen so briefly the night he told her he was going to Manchuria.

He began curiously. He talked about his childhood in the north, about the suffering he had seen among the tenant farmers who worked his family's estates. He talked about China and the corruption of the Chinese government, the resistance the Japanese army was encountering in China, the power of militarism in Japan. He mentioned a Japanese monk who had been murdered in Shanghai in 1932, immediately reminding her of his brother's reference to a cousin who had been killed there as a result of an order given by the General.

He grew more agitated. He began to pace the floor. He waved his arms, which was unlike him, and his voice broke, which was also unlike him. She wondered what he was trying to say when all at once he stopped in front of her. He took her hands.

I've loved one other woman in my life, he whispered. I loved her very much and we had a son. That was how it all began.

Her face showed no expression. She sat absolutely still. He dropped her hands and resumed his pacing, speaking in a low voice.

Some ten years before he had been sent to Shanghai as a colonel in intelligence. His main task was to gather information on the various Western espionage agencies operating out of Shanghai. An American came to his notice, but before he could learn much about his activities the American left for Canton. Still interested in the case, he arranged an introduction at a reception to the man's wife, who was apparently staying on in Shanghai.

Baron Kikuchi was already middle-aged. The wife turned out to be very young. In those days he tried to cultivate a more open manner with foreigners, he had to for his work, and often he was successful. He talked with the young woman about literature and painting. They met again. She asked him about Japan, its traditions, its art and philosophy.

For his part, what happened was understandable. She was vivacious and beautiful, passionate about everything. But she was also thirty years younger than he was. Why had she become attracted to him?

A few weeks, no more, and they were living together. They had to keep their relationship secret because it would have damaged his reputation in the army if he were known to be living with a foreign woman. Perhaps that was what spoiled their life together, or perhaps she had only been infatuated with him because of what he could teach her.

In any case, it didn't last long. When she left him she was pregnant, but she said she was going to have the child and she did. It was a boy whom she took to Japan. Later he heard she had joined her husband in Canton, without the baby.

During that time he discovered he wasn't the first older man to have had an affair with her. Several years before, when she had first arrived in Shanghai, before she was married, she had lived with a Russian named Adzhar, a man close to seventy although he was said to look and act much younger.

Out of jealousy, vanity, a mixture of pains, Baron Kikuchi had his agents check into the Russian's life. He found him to be a man devoted entirely to sensuality. Iced vodka, iced caviar, women. Those were his pursuits and his only companions. From a former wife, a rich Indian woman, he had inherited a fortune that allowed him to indulge in a totally dissolute life. There were still jokes told about his insatiable appetites and the ease with which he seduced the women he wanted.

Baron Kikuchi learned that she had become the Russian's mistress an hour after they met. The information angered him. He was surprised and hurt.

She was gone from Shanghai a little over a year. Baron Kikuchi, newly promoted to General, was being transferred to Kempeitai headquarters in Tokyo. A few days before he was to sail she telephoned him. She wanted to see him. They arranged to meet on Bubbling Well Road and walk beside the river.

The General stopped in front of Mama.

She talked about our time together, he whispered, about how happy we had been. After a while we came to a houseboat tied to the bank and she said that was where she was living. She asked me on board. I followed her across the gangplank and suddenly a man was welcoming me, shaking my hand.

It was her husband. Quin was his name.

Maeve apologized for the trick, I just stood there. She put her hand on my shoulder and thanked me for coming. She smiled, at me, at her husband. Then she laughed the way she always laughed when she had done something she liked, something she was proud of.

It was an odd sort of laugh, timid in a way, appealing, almost coy, as if she wanted to be praised but would be embarrassed when the praise came. I don't think I'm trying to make excuses for myself when I say there was a hardness in that laugh I hadn't noticed before.

I mentioned that she was passionate about everything, life, people, ideas. But in the year we'd been apart I'd come to suspect that most of that passion had nothing to do with life or people or ideas. Somehow it always seemed directed toward herself, toward proving that she was whoever she thought she was. She was fervent, but what did it mean? Did she really care about people? How they suffered? What was right and wrong in the world? How she could help?

She talked as if she did, but later I wasn't so sure. I had a feeling she was acting without knowing it. All those words and opinions were costumes she wore in order to be able to say,
this
is who I am.

The baby, for example. She had it because she wanted to have the experience, but then she gave it away for someone else to raise, to bother with, to love. She knew she couldn't love the child, yet she brought it into the world, which was selfish and even cruel. Another life was involved, after all, not just her own.

Love. How could she love anyone if she couldn't love her own child? I suppose she did love her husband in a way, but certainly no one else, and certainly not all those abstractions she pretended to care so much about.

And even with him I'm not sure. You could say the way she helped him in his work proved she loved him, but did she, or was that just the ultimate costume, the ultimate role, the one deepest inside her? A final way of saying, I love him and therefore this is who I am. Who
I
am.
Me.

I don't know. I'm not sure. At the time all I understood was that somehow she wasn't the person I'd thought she was a year before. But of course love does that to us. We hear with different ears and see with different eyes and I'm glad we do. The peace I saw on my mother's face has kept me alive for years. For years, even though I've known for years it wasn't peace but a mask hiding a lifetime of pain. Hiding it from my brother and me because she loved us.

Maeve. She laughed that laugh of hers, and then she went away and left the two of us standing there.

I was bewildered. Quin smiled and asked me to sit down. He poured me a drink and began to talk. Politics, China, Japan. He had a gift with words and he was fascinating to listen to. He had enthusiasm, a well-trained mind, an enormous grasp of history and its movements.

At some point he dismissed my affair with his wife. He said that kind of thing was inevitable when a husband and wife were separated for long periods. He told me it meant nothing to him and I believed him, for he was the kind of man who would have many women himself. He lived too much with ideas to be devoted to her or any woman. Other things were too important to him. She must have been only a small part of his life.

We talked for a long time and I found we agreed on almost everything, as I suppose he knew we would. Maeve and I had talked a lot when we were together. I suppose she had told him how I felt.

The General stopped in front of Mama again. He took her hands.