It was a formal portrait, the kind a family had taken on some very important occasion. Everyone was dressed in formal kimono, children and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents, the one surviving great-grandparent, the nurse who had served the family for half a century. The members of the family stood in straight rows, unsmiling, staring into the camera. In the front row was a stiff young boy wearing the same timid expression the corporal had worn at that age.
The corporal knew the photograph well. Everyone in Japan knew it well. It was natural history, the world, existence.
Yet there was something more in this photograph. Another photograph had been superimposed upon it, or perhaps a clever drawing, or perhaps merely the suggestion of an image, vague and undefined. At first the corporal had difficulty making it out, but the longer he stared at the photograph the clearer the vague image became.
It was a ghostly naked boy lying on his back in front of the family. His elbow was bent, he was grinning, his fingers were flying.
Maniacal freedom right at the feet of the solemn, unseeing assembly.
The corporal practiced according to Mama’s instructions. He masturbated vigorously while concentrating on the ghost. The dizziness came, the ecstasy, he was out of control.
His prearranged signal was a sound that resembled a clap of the hands, the sharp knock of two blocks of wood made by the man who passed the house sounding the hour. When the corporal heard the clap he shifted his eyes from the reclining ghost to the other boy, himself, the one who wore a formal kimono and stood in the front row of the family, transfixed, timid.
Instantaneously he had an orgasm. It happened just as Mama had said it would. Due to the photograph he could control his fantasies to the second. The corporal practiced at the turn of every hour, day and night, and on the third day he was ready.
Mama had chosen raw oysters to serve the General that night. The basis of her sauce was ambergris, the grayish-white wax secreted from behind the ear of the sperm whale, a well-known aphrodisiac. To this she added musk and rhubarb and cinnamon for flavoring, lastly a dose of phosphorite. She hoped the General would benefit from the aphrodisiac, but if he didn’t the phosphorite would constrict his throat muscles, strangling him and thereby producing a sympathetic erection.
For as Lao-tzu had said, man is soft and weak in life but stiff and hard in death.
Timing.
The corporal and his family of respected surgeons.
An oyster and a sperm whale.
Poison and its antidote.
The scheme was dangerous because the antidote had to be administered quickly, otherwise the General would not only simulate strangulation but undergo it. And the antidote couldn’t be mixed beforehand. She had to do that part while the corporal was doing his.
Timing.
Time.
Mama decorated the platter with seaweed and placed it before the man she loved.
The General covered an oyster with sauce and swallowed. He gripped his throat. As he toppled backward his kimono fell open revealing an erection.
Mama slipped on top of him and moved up and down. The General seemed amazed and happy, but almost immediately his eyes began to close. Perhaps he had ejaculated, perhaps not. She left him unconscious on the floor and rushed into the pantry.
The corporal was waiting beside the medicine cabinet, masturbating, staring at the photograph. Mama raised her kimono and stepped in front of him, sharply clapped her hands, slid him into place. A few minutes later she was running back into the other room with the antidote she had mixed.
There was a smile on the General’s face when he fell asleep that evening. At the end of a month, just before he left for Manchuria, she was able to tell him she was going to have a baby.
The last night they stayed up together until very late. She played the koto as he sat with folded hands thinking of what was to come, the life he faced in Mukden. As the evening wore on she saw the signs come over him. She was sorry it had to happen then, for she knew he didn’t want her to remember him that way, the hands gripping each other and turning white, the good eye twitching more violently as it filled with water, closing finally under the weight of the sword.
The glass eye gazed at her helplessly, yet even then he still sat erect as she went on playing the quiet music for him.
The headache lasted longer than usual. Somewhere in the course of that intolerable pain the General once thought he heard a sound interrupt the music, a sharp sound, and another, a third, the sound made by a stone being slapped into place on a Go board, that ancient game of strategy and daring he had learned as a child. In fact he did hear the sound but it wasn’t made by black and white stones striking wood to acquire or lose territory. It was made by a hand on a face, her hand striking her face, a pathetic gesture of hopelessness because she could do so little for the man she loved.
The General went abroad early in 1935. In the spring of that year she received an invitation to visit his twin brother in Kamakura. Although she had never met him, she knew the history of this strange man who renounced his title and his wealth in order to become a Jew, whereupon he had at once begun to suffer uncommonly from hunger and thirst, to lose weight, and to pass an excessive amount of urine.
The more superstitious of his teachers in Jerusalem interpreted this as an immediate and sure indication that his conversion was in some peculiar way anathema to the Lord. They therefore inveighed against him to fore-sake what he had so recently achieved, to give up his dream of being a Jew and to reembrace his own culture where he was unmistakably, by birth and tradition, in the eyes of all who might look upon him, already both an honored man and an aristocrat.
But Rabbi Lotmann refused. He persisted. He had become a Jew and he would remain one. To allay the fears of his teachers he made reference to Elijah, his favorite prophet, and recalled for them that when the Lord had selected Elijah as His instrument and had feared for his life He had told him to turn eastward, to travel eastward, to hide by a brook before the Jordan where the Lord would then command ravens to feed him.
Now Rabbi Lotmann said that in his case, since he was Japanese, the Jordan must be the Pacific and the brook before the Jordan must be the brook that crossed an estate owned by his family in Kamakura. Thus he decided to turn eastward and travel eastward and go to that estate to await the sustenance God would send him, as He had once sent the ravens to Elijah.
As it happened, his reverence for Elijah saved his life. The level of medical practice available to the elite of Tokyo, many of whom lived in Kamakura, was far beyond anything to be found in Palestine. A routine medical examination immediately revealed that he was not suffering from some divine curse but from diabetes mellitus. Insulin injections had recently been discovered to be a totally effective mode of treatment, so he was on the estate in Kamakura, by the brook before his Jordan, but a short time before his hunger and thirst subsided and he ceased to pass excessive amounts of urine.
The General had spoken often of his twin, his elder by eight minutes, and Mama had long looked forward to meeting him. Ostensibly the occasion for the visit was a koto recital by Rabbi Lotmann. Mama went and found two other guests, both apparently good friends of the rabbi.
One of them was a priest, tall and gaunt, whom she would go to three years later with a request that was inconceivable to her then. But when the time came for her to go to him for help she knew he would do what she asked, for she had only to look once into his eyes on that spring afternoon in Kamakura to know he was a man who never refused anyone a kindness.
The other guest was also a foreigner, a short old man with a merry face who said the exotic name he went by, Adzhar, wasn’t his real name. Like the Rabbi, he was engaged in some massive translation project. After traveling half the world, he said, learning obscure languages and backing obscure causes, he had more recently turned his attention to women. And although he was seventy-eight, he had discovered that he could never be introduced to a woman without loving her completely and at once. So the moment the company of a priest and a rabbi proved tiresome to her he would be overjoyed to take her to his home and serve her iced vodka and iced caviar, which by coincidence he had set aside that very morning.