Somersault (36 page)

“You can call it a return or a resurrection or whatever, but what I want to know is what are his immediate plans? Now that Guide isn’t with him anymore.” This was asked by the old lady who was sitting up erect, her legs out to one side.

“I think Patron wants to take responsibility for the gap in time after he and Guide fell into hell,” Ikuo said. “Because he abandoned people like yourselves who continued to keep the faith. Actually, you should be getting a message from him quite soon.

“At the time of the Somersault, Patron stated that everything he’d said and done up till then was all a joke, a big gag. I don’t know anything about the real substance of this, so what I did was read through the transcripts of his sermons that predated the Somersault that were among the documents my colleagues have been looking at. In one of the sermons, Patron remarked on the increase in the number of people who need to be saved. This latent power of the soul’s thirst now, he said—and this was ten years ago—exists on a large scale, from urban areas like Tokyo to provincial cities, even reaching to disintegrating farming communities. In my visions, Patron said, these countless young people, filled with anxiety and pained frustration, all take on one face. And this face, he said, raises a silent cry:
The flames are coming!
Was this, too, just a joke? I think he’ll be taking action that gives us the answer to that.”

From over toward the mountains the same hand bell Kizu had heard at their office rang out, startling him. He looked out through the three-level window, and in the shafts of twilight sun shining through breaks in the wind-tossed clouds he saw the children who had earlier been gazing into the greenhouse all filing away, led by a tall girl ringing the bell.

“It’s five o’clock,” one strong-looking woman said, “time that we set aside for prayer. I don’t know how you all pray with this man you call Patron, but it would be nice if you would join us, like Mr. and Mrs. Sasaki do, in silent meditation.

“Today it’s my turn to say a few words as we pray. I’d like to express my thanks at having these unexpected visitors and being able to listen to what they have to say. As I listened to them, something welled up in me I’d like to talk about. A person told us once, also just before our prayer time, that the reason we felt close to each other when we were in the church was that we all share similar weaknesses. These are the kind of people who ran off and formed this group, yet to me it was only a very short time during which we suffered after being crushed by the crisis of the Somersault.

“Soon after the Somersault, we wanted to accompany Savior and Prophet to hell, to take care of them, but we knew that that was beyond our endurance. If it was something we
could
endure, why did the two of them take on the Somersault
alone?

“And so our communal life here continued. Every moment, we had engraved on our minds the fact that those two had fallen into hell to atone for our sins and were humiliated and suffered, and we prayed for them. We believed that when they were resurrected, they would lead a huge procession calling for repentance at the end of the world and we could join them once again.

“But just on the eve of this procession—just as the Savior was struggling to be resurrected—the Prophet passed away. I feel we’ve been very fortunate to be here these ten years, living a prayerful life. Just as Patron’s decision to be resurrected gelled, Guide suffered that terrible death—a death to atone for us all—not just us but for all people on this planet. And it was this act of atonement that gave Savior the strength to take the final step toward resurrection.

“So, through the intercession of the Savior, who is alive among us, let us pray for our dear departed Prophet!”

4

As Kizu closed his eyes and began to pray, he discovered something laughable about himself. Patron had dubbed him the new Guide, yet he’d never been in the habit of praying and no words of prayer came to him now. At a loss, he began mentally sketching a full-length drawing of Patron. He gave himself up to the feeling of moving a charcoal pencil, tracing Patron’s face, his body, and the way he held himself, and as he did so his imaginary Patron sprang to life. It
was quite realistic, yet it overlapped with what the reporter had told him, his mental image of Patron suddenly decked out in Spanish farmer’s dress from the Middle Ages. A round and chubby figure, certainly nothing martial about him, casual, yet surprisingly nimble. Come to think of it, didn’t Sancho Panza, too, get lost in thought sometimes just like Patron?

And Guide as Don Quixote—his upright posture and thin figure and his long scrupulous face were perfect for the role. That morning in the hotel in New York came back to him once again, when the snow turned to rain before it reached the ground. Was he now supposed to join the antics of this man pretending to be mankind’s Patron by performing antics of his own as the newly chosen Guide? Could a clowning pair really lead these praying women, with so much suffering behind them, in a march toward repentance at the end of the world? Wasn’t this asking the impossible?

Kizu felt a burning sensation run up his back. He opened his eyes. He’d participated occasionally in silent prayer in America, but nothing that lasted as long as this. It was already ten minutes since they began, with no sign from the circle of women that they were nearing the end.

Eyes closed, heads held straight, the women looked totally transformed from when they had been packing lilies into boxes. And very different, too, from the way they were earlier today, listening to their colleagues’ stories and to the replies of Kizu, Ikuo, and the husband and wife who owned the farm. The women, their hats off now, looked irretrievably tired, as if they were pieces of machinery suffering from metal fatigue and about to break apart. The face of the one old lady who, from the waist up had such good posture, reminded him of a death mask. And looking at the young woman with the scar running from her ear, over where one eye should be, and down her cheek, Kizu was shocked all over again.

“It’s a good time for us to leave, don’t you think?” the farmer’s wife whispered into Kizu’s ear. “Sometimes their silent prayers go on for more than twenty minutes. Occasionally we do overtime till six, but five is their prayer time and after that they usually clean up and call it a day.”

The farmer’s wife had already stood up and was making her way through the cultivation equipment. Kizu followed after the farmer, bent over as he walked, with Ikuo bringing up the rear. There was no reaction from the praying women as they walked out. Despite the lighting inside, as they came out of the greenhouse it was like emerging from a dark cave into the brilliance of the snow. They felt liberated by the light and invigorating air—refreshing after the oppressive odor of the lilies. With the old school building as a backdrop in the twilight, they could see the shaggy young leaves of an oak tree they hadn’t noticed before. For a moment the leaves were rustled
by a strong wind. Blue sky was visible through a few cracks in the clouds, which tumbled violently across the sky.

The farm owner turned his white-sideburned sallow face toward the hills and said, “There’s going to be a storm, though it’ll pass quickly. I’d better go check on the rest of the farm.”

As her husband walked briskly away, the farm wife bowed to them, her red hands held to her face for warmth, and followed him toward where the blackened earth was filled with the brilliant green of mustard plants. Kizu and Ikuo continued on to the road where they’d parked their car. The new leaves of the beech trees on the school grounds sparkled like gold paper, but when they passed by them the sun was blocked out by the clouds and the leaves turned dark. Right beneath the tree several of the younger children were squatting, drawing on the ground or otherwise amusing themselves, no doubt, while waiting for their mothers to finish work. But they were so motionless; could they really be playing? And then it struck Kizu: These children, as well as the older children who were standing off at some distance, were
praying
.

The wind blew down to ground level, blowing straight toward Kizu and Ikuo. Thunder roared, and large drops of rain began to fall. Looking around, Kizu saw that the children had all sought shelter in the school building. This was the first time today anyone had moved quickly.

Lightning flashed in the dark. As he watched the wind blowing the rain, Ikuo carefully pulled out onto the road. Kizu, too, gave himself up to watching the force of the wind and rain. As the farm owner had said, the storm was soon over, but as they got onto the highway it was littered with broken tree branches and their new leaves. The Ford Mustang continued down the silent, thickly wooded dark slope, flicking aside the branches.

“Those women’s prayers were pretty powerful, weren’t they?” Ikuo said, after a long spell of silence.

“You and I have both spoken directly with Patron and Guide, and everyone’s counting on us to help out with Patron’s new movement. But I don’t think that we—or myself, at least—can ever approach the depth of the prayers we just witnessed.”

“There are lots of ways to contribute to Patron’s new movement,” Ikuo replied. “Never forget that Patron is counting on you. But yes, I’d agree—their prayers are pretty amazing.”

“Did you notice that the children were praying too?”

“In his Somersault, Patron made fun of everything he’d done, right? The thought just struck me for the first time that if he hadn’t done that he would have had a lot more worries.”

“You mean about what people who pray so intensely would do after they’d been abandoned?” Kizu asked.

“Right. When I was watching those women praying, I was thinking how extraordinary it is for them to live like this for ten years. And I was also thinking that it was very possible they might not have put up with things passively but taken a different tack entirely. I know it must have been tough emotionally for Patron when he thought about having to abandon followers like these. But isn’t that why he had to make such a big joke about things—so these prayerful women would be shaken to the core?”

“I guess so, and yet he wasn’t able to shake them,” Kizu said. “Still, the worst-case scenario Patron feared didn’t take place. For ten years they lived like we just saw, praying ceaselessly. I suspect if we met the radical faction who murdered Guide, who’ve lived their own kind of life of faith over the last decade, we’d find them pretty formidable too.

“I really don’t have a mental picture of what the hell Patron and Guide fell into was like, but for Patron, who survived alone and was resurrected, I can’t imagine life will be very easy from now on.”

That evening, on the drive back to Tokyo, Ikuo said one more thing.

“I think the road ahead is going to be bumpy for you too, Professor, now that you’ve decided to be with Patron. But I really want to thank you for coming back from America!”

13: Hallelujah

1

The day of the memorial service dawned clear and sunny, a typical end-of-spring morning. Since Kizu, officially a professor until the end of the academic year, was the only one among the participants privileged to use the American university—owned facilities freely, he set out diligently that morning to walk around the grove of trees and sloping lawn by the pond on the southeast side of the garden and see if there were any weak points through which outsiders could crash the service.

From his room Kizu couldn’t tell, but the young trees bordering the grounds were slippery elms, the same as the young trees planted on the campus of his New Jersey university to replace larger trees destroyed by insects. These days he hadn’t seen much of the squirrels from last summer, the ones whose vigorous movements among the green leaves of the wych elm had aroused him. They might very well have shifted over to these younger trees in order to eat the soft seeds or the young buds, for the branches had definitely been gnawed. The ground was littered with twigs that had quickly dried up.

Kizu picked up one little branch, and in a flash of inspiration, while he was checking out its withered flowers, he solved a riddle that had bothered him ever since he moved to the United States. Within layers of anthers the color of dried sunflowers, a dark-colored stigma poked out rigidly. It looked like a
hanko
, the kind of personal-name seals Japanese used instead of signatures. The word
stigma
came from the Latin for
mark
, or
brand
, which came in turn from a Greek word for
tattoo
, similar to a seal. One semester, Kizu had even lectured on the history of European seals.

Up till now, whenever Kizu had been teaching students to sketch flowers and spoke about the pistil he’d always wondered why the tip of this part of the flower was called the stigma. Whenever Kizu examined the pistil of a daffodil, he would rack his brain trying to figure out why the stigmata, the plural of stigma, shared its name with the stigmata of Jesus, the crucifixion wounds on his hands and feet. But suddenly he realized that the sacred wounds were like seals impressed on Jesus’ body, and the riddle was easily solved. Feeling this was a good omen for the upcoming memorial service, Kizu placed the small branch back on the soft young grass.

They had arranged for the front gate of the apartment building to be closed while the memorial service was in progress. Dancer and Ogi would be on the tiled carport just outside the main entrance, protected by the security force Ikuo was leading, as they checked their list of invitees against the invitation each person brought.

It was imperative that all participants come on time. After the start of the service the security guards planned to shut the side door and stand guard. Patron would wait in Kizu’s apartment, and then Kizu and Dancer, after she’d finished checking all the invitations, would escort him to the service. The other participants would enter the hall on the building’s south side, through a corridor below the veranda on the first floor, while Patron would take an elevator to the basement and proceed to the meeting room down a corridor between the bicycle racks and the laundry room.