"December 6" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Martin Cruz)

6

IT WAS HARD to save a nation of sixty million souls. The Japanese let in few missionaries, including only twenty Southern Baptists, and those with the proviso that they accommodate the state by proving useful as teachers or doctors. They lived in Western houses, ate Western food, learned just enough Japanese to limp through a hymn. They performed good deeds and played bridge and waited for mail from home. All year they looked forward to summer, to well-earned vacations in the cool of the mountains, backgammon on the lawn, rowing on highland lakes, and over time the fiery evangelism they had brought to Japan seemed more and more like some outmoded, slightly ridiculous apparel.

Not Roger and Harriet Niles. To them, evangelism was the pure and ardent task of preaching the Word of God. That was their calling, the reason they had come halfway around the world, and they refused to dilute their time by spending it in a classroom or vaccinating the poor. People derided them as “railroad preachers.” They traveled the country from Kagoshima in the south to snowbound Hokkaido, and anytime Roger could corner a group on a ferry or train, he would bring out his Bible and Harriet would translate his message in her halting Japanese. They even moved Harry and his uncle Orin from the safe embrace of the Methodists’ compound to the rough streets of Asakusa to be more authentic and closer to the population they were trying to reach.

Still, for all their sacrifices, preaching to the Japanese was like trying to cleave water. The Japanese would smile, bow and say anything to move a gaijin along. Or would accept Jesus as a mere backup to Buddha. The truth was that for all their efforts, while Christian missions gathered converts by the millions in China and Korea, missions in Japan were a failure. Not just Baptists, all missions. It was for Roger, however, a personal failure, a crown of thorns sharp with mockery. He and Harriet would return to Tokyo exhausted only to see Orin wasted by drink, and their son Harry a sort of amphibian, neither honest nor stupid, neither adult nor innocent, neither American nor Japanese.

Harry found his parents’ visits like sharing quarters with the hounds of hell. It was embarrassingly clear when the family attended services how little of Harry the congregation had seen. Harry had the Bible down, though. The wild-eyed revelations of Saint John the Divine were Scripture Harry had memorized as an insurance policy for whenever his father examined him about the condition of his soul or the imminence of Judgment Day. All the same, Harry’s every word and move were followed by eyes quick to catch any deviation from a norm that was alien to him. He didn’t remind Roger and Harriet of themselves. He preferred sandals to shoes, samurai to cowboys, raw fish to red meat. Harry didn’t bring home tow-haired friends to play with; he didn’t bring friends at all, because he wasn’t going to expose his parents to a gang that included the unwashed Kaga twins or a criminal-in-training like Tetsu. So Roger and Harriet were only too happy to accept an invitation to Fourth of July celebrations at the American embassy. The entire American community would be there. It would be like going home.

Came the Glorious Fourth, and the embassy garden was decorated with bunting and paper lanterns in red, white and blue. On the terraces, Japanese staff in kimonos with American-eagle crests set out tables of tea sandwiches, deviled eggs, cucumber salad, sweet pickles, angel food cake and lemonade. Adults followed a path edged in azaleas to join a champagne reception in the ambassador’s residence, a white clapboard house and porch that could have been found in Ohio. Outside, children were entertained by blindman’s buff and potato-sack races across the lawn.

“This is actually American territory, Harry,” Harriet said.

“We’re in Japan.”

“Yes,” Roger Niles said, “but legally an embassy is the territory of the country of the ambassador. The American ambassador runs things here.”

“The emperor rules all Japan.”

“Not here,” Roger said.

Harriet said, “You’re in America just as if you were standing at the Washington Monument. And look, American kids.”

Harry was miserable. All the other American children in Tokyo went to the American School. He didn’t know them and he didn’t want to know them. Dressed in a new suit and oxfords, he felt as if he were in disguise. Also, it was embarrassing to see how pleased his mother was to visit the embassy. She believed that the special events in life were like a sachet in a suitcase, it sweetened the clothes and didn’t make the luggage one bit heavier. Besides, after a year of traveling among strangers, it was a relief for her to be patriotic, to be an American among Americans. She squinted up to admire how the Stars and Stripes basked in the rays of descending sun. There were supposed to be fireworks in the evening and skits performed by the kids. What Harry was going to do, he wouldn’t say.

Except for Episcopalians, who were practically Catholic anyway, missionaries abstained from champagne and stayed outside by the lemonade. Baptist families joined a circle of Synod of Christ, Dutch Reformed and Methodists.

Roger Niles took the opportunity to ask the group, “You know what makes me sick?”

There was an uneasy pause. Niles had a reputation for zeal.

“What makes you sick, dear?” Harriet asked.

“The holier-than-thou act the China missions always pull. As if we were in league with the devil just because our call is in Japan.”

“True,” a Methodist minister named Hooper allowed. “We get it, too.”

“Well, I wouldn’t trade today for anything in China,” Harriet said. “What about you, Harry?”

“China is old and backward. Japan can help China back on its feet.” Harry had learned that at school.

“America can help China back on its feet,” Hooper said softly.

“Sometimes I think what Harry needs is a trip back home,” Roger said. “Would you like that, Harry, a good, long visit back home?”

“I am home.” Harry didn’t know much about Louisville, but he doubted that it measured up to Tokyo.

“Your real home,” Harriet said.

“Our folks have never seen Harry,” Roger told the others. “Harry, you have a lot of cousins you don’t even know.”

Harry had seen snapshots of them. The boys, slouching, buttoned to the neck, were always arrayed in ascending height before signs like RED MAN’S GORGE and STONEWALL JACKSON’S PLACE OF BIRTH. The girls had round eyes and dull, stringy hair just like the girls at the embassy.

A line of elderly Japanese guests cut through to reach the refreshments. Roger Niles said, “Look, they don’t even beg your pardon. Typical.”

Because they know you can’t speak Japanese, Harry thought, surprised by his own scorn. He’d heard his parents try.

“Maybe Harry needs to get out there and mix,” Hooper suggested. “My son would be happy to introduce him to the other boys.”

What Harry had planned to do was go along the river with Gen and catch fireflies they could sell to geisha houses at ten sen apiece for firefly lamps. It had rained in the morning, and a clear night after wet weather made fireflies rise so thick that a good catcher could fill a paper sack, both hands and his mouth with captive flies. Instead, a shorter boy in a baseball cap was leading him to a game of tug-of-war being refereed by two embassy clerks.

The boy gave Harry a skeptical examination. “My name is Roy, but my friends call me Hoop. What’s your name?”

“Oishi,” Harry said.

“Oishi? That doesn’t sound American.”

“Who said it was?” Still, Harry was amazed. “You never heard of the Forty-seven Ronin?”

“No. I’m going to recite ‘Casey at the Bat’ for entertainment. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to disappear.”

The clerks each had fat cheeks and shiny, lubricated hair. They arranged tug-of-war teams on either side of the embassy’s reflecting pool, smaller boys to the middle of the rope, larger boys at the ends. When one side had the advantage, the other side was dragged into the water. Almost immediately Roy Hooper lost his baseball cap in the pool, and Harry’s oxfords were soaked. By his third time in the water, Harry saw by the smirks on their faces that the larger boys on each side were having fun pulling and giving way by turns, staying dry while boys in front got drenched. The same poorly concealed smile spread through the clerks, a collusion of the strong against the weak. Harry found the cap, filled it with scummy water, marched to the last on the rope, a robust boy in a Hawaiian shirt with a patch of beard on his chin, and stuffed the cap over his head. The boy hit Harry so hard he collapsed like an accordion, but he hung on to the boy’s arm and dragged him to the ground. When the boy got on top, Harry head-butted him and bit his nose.

“Fight fair!” The clerks pulled the two up.

The bigger boy swung at Harry who ducked under the punch, grabbed him by the shirt and threw him down to the ground. It was what Harry had trained to do at school for years.

“Dirty fighter, are you?” someone said as Harry was pulled off again, but he broke free and ran for the trees and azaleas that screened the lawn from the street. The clerks got a late jump, and by the time they reached the trees, Harry was halfway up a pine and out of their sight. Their footsteps tramped around the needles.

“A missionary kid, can you believe that?”

“Almost bit his nose off, Jesus!”

“Probably went over the wall, the little son of a bitch.”

Roger Niles’s voice joined in. “Do you know where my son went?”

“No, sir. But it’s getting dark and he could be anywhere now.”

“Harry? Harry?”

“I wouldn’t worry, sir. An American boy in Tokyo, where’s he going to go?”

“Harry?”

“Got to go set up the fireworks, sir.”

“Kind of a wild boy there, sir.”

Two pairs of footsteps retreated. Roger Niles tramped back and forth calling Harry’s name for another minute before he left. Harry heard one more set of steps slip between the trees, then his mother’s voice. “Harry, I know we don’t see you as much as we would like, but I do feel you are a special child, that you are protected like Moses was protected even in a frail cradle of reeds. That an angel watches over you and that you may seem a prince of Egypt when you are truly something even better. Could you come out now, Harry, wherever you are? For the love of your mother, could you do that, Harry?”

But Harry noticed that one branch of the tree he was in reached over the embassy wall to the garden next door, a rich man’s garden banked with willows and maples, fountains of artfully worn stones and, over a pool, a haze of flickering yellow-green lights. As soon as his mother was gone, Harry climbed out on the branch and dropped into the garden.

The back of the house was a long balcony of summer screens made of threaded reeds, none lit from within that Harry could see. He slid a panel open and automatically slipped off his wet shoes before moving onto the mats of a richly spare room with a painted scroll hanging by a cedar post. Red lacquered sake cups seemed to float on a low table as black as ink.

“What are you doing here?”

Harry jumped, but it was only Roy Hooper at the open panel. Harry was surprised but turned the question around. “What are you doing here?”

“Following you.”

“Then take off your shoes.”

Harry moved from room to room. The owner had to be very rich judging by the screens of gold leaf and shelves of fine china that glowed in the shadows. Harry rummaged until he found a large glass jar with a perforated lid in the kitchen and black cotton cloth in a linen drawer.

“Are you stealing?” Roy Hooper asked.

“Don’t be stupid. Just taking what I need.”

By the time they returned to the garden, they heard the machine-gun report of firecrackers from the embassy and saw the occasional rocket zip high enough to be seen above the wall, followed by homesick renditions of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” Meanwhile, Harry and Roy Hooper caught fireflies.

Around the pond were maples, dwarf pines and pillows of moss where fireflies swarmed in luminescent clouds. The darker the evening grew, the easier they were to see. Fireflies spread like a pulsating carpet over the damp grass, congregated under a drooping mulberry, spangled the water. Roy Hooper would hold the jar while Harry caught a firefly with both hands and gently blew it through the mouth of the jar. Brooms were another good way to carry fireflies, and a broom could look like a jeweled fan but wouldn’t serve for this instance. Caught, fireflies flashed brighter in distress. Crushed, they emitted a burning green. In half an hour the glass jar was a glowing ball of captives, at least ten yen’s worth at a geisha house, and Harry wrapped it in the black cloth to carry back over the wall.

The entertainment had just concluded when Harry and Roy Hooper returned. A couple hundred guests were still gathered on the lawn in the red, white and blue illumination of lanterns. The diplomatic corps sat in chairs that had begun to settle and list in the soft turf. Babies slept in their fathers’ arms. A whiff of sulfur hung in the air.

“The prodigal sons,” announced the clerk functioning as master of ceremonies. “Too bad they missed out on all the fun.”

“They had sparklers,” Harriet told Harry. “You know how you love sparklers.”

“What have you got there?” Roger Niles asked. In the dark, despite its black cover, a faint halo surrounded the jar.

“Nothing.”

“It’s something worth making fools of us,” his father said. “Let’s see.”

“Let’s all see,” the clerk picked up.

Roy Hooper’s knees went soft as he felt the clamp of his father’s hand.

“I’m disappointed in you,” Reverend Hooper hissed.

“Or I’ll send you home to Louisville,” Roger told Harry under his breath. “I swear it.”

“It’s for the entertainment,” Harry said.

“The entertainment is over,” Roger said.

The clerk said, “One more act, that’s fine with us. Isn’t that fine, folks? This is a very different boy here. I bet he’s got real different entertainment.”

There was scattered applause in general, a snigger from the boy with a bandage on his nose. It was getting late. Most people wanted to go home. The ambassador yawned and fell into an expression of such boredom he could have been watching from the moon.

“Turn off the lamps,” said Harry. “Just for a minute?”

When the lanterns went dark, there was a reflexive whimper from the younger children. Harry unscrewed the lid, and the jar underlit his face.

“It’s a surprise,” he said.

Harry put his mouth to the jar. As he raised his head, a light rose from his lips, flashed and took wing. He took another breath from the jar and blew a green tracer bullet in the eye of a clerk, a deeper breath and poured a glowing machine-gun fusillade at the guests. Dipped into the jar to feed himself and blew until his fingers and lips were smeared with green fire. The ambassador tried to brush the luminescence off his sleeves, spreading it instead. Children squirmed from their parents, screamed and ran into the dark. For a brief moment before Roger Niles seized him, Harry ruled, marching with the roar of fireflies.