"I'm sure that's not true," Ms. Tachibana said, looking straight at Dancer so intently through her oval glasses that Dancer could only look down.
"I'd like to explain to Patron about the place we're going to use for the memorial service," Kizu said. "Could I see him now?"
"I'll go see if he's up. He hasn't been sleeping well lately and has been taking medicine during the day."
Soon after Dancer left, the sound of the hand bell ringing from Patron's room told them he was awake.
3
When Kizu went in, Patron was standing beside the armchair waiting for him, wearing what looked like a brand-new light-colored gown. To Kizu he seemed quite lively.
"I understand you negotiated with the people from the American uni- versity," Patron said.
Kizu proceeded to tell him about the underground lounge at his apart- ment. The building's main entrance was at the basement level, with the first floor facing an expansive garden in back with a pond; the gently sloping gar- den had a calmness about it you wouldn't expect to find in the heart of Tokyo.
The participants would walk down from the right side of the building and enjoy the vista as they headed toward the memorial service.
Kizu finished his explanation, but still Patron stayed beside him. He didn't seem to have anything he wanted to talk about but just cheerfully en- joyed gazing at Kizu. Kizu broached the topic of Guide's background and what he'd heard from the newspaper reporter, and Patron filled in even more of the details. Guide's uncle-who'd found the infant Guide beside his dead mother at a collection spot in Nagasaki for bodies of people killed in the bomb- ing and taken him home-was a man of strong faith. As he grew up, Guide mourned his absent mother; though he knew how she had died, he had no actual memories of her. He felt his mother's death and his father's disappear- ance after the war were part of God's plan for him and had led to his good fortune in being taken in by his kind, naively optimistic uncle, but still he struggled with a sense of guilt toward his parents whenever he went to church.
Guide's father was at the front in China when Nagasaki was hit by the atomic bomb. After he was repatriated, he made one visit to his brother-in- law's family, in the Goto Islands off the coast of Nagasaki, where they'd been evacuated. He didn't reclaim his son, and even after Guide's uncle had re- built the clinic and moved back to Nagasaki City, he didn't get in touch. The one time he was at his brother-in-law's in Goto, this repatriated officer was obviously greatly disturbed. He drank to excess and told them how in China, he'd witnessed unspeakable atrocities committed by Japanese troops. He had planned to resist if they tried to force him to massacre peasants and rape women, but he knew it wasn't enough just to sit by passively while others killed and looted.
The fact that he was an officer, a doctor, also weighed heavily on him, because of what the Chinese novelist Lu Shun had written: If you're going to war, it's best to go as a doctor… It's heroic, yet safe. You can't avoid beingtested.
Was this the will of GodP Ever since he was a child, Guide had thought often about God's will, no doubt because of his father's stories, as told to him by his adopted father.
The Nagasaki that his father saw after he was repatriated was utterly destroyed by an atomic bomb, the second to fall on Japan. Nagasaki had the highest concentration of Catholics in Japan. He'd committed no atrocities himself, yet his own wife, a woman of strong faith, was killed and her youth- ful body destroyed, leaving a baby behind. This had to be God's will, God's plan, he concluded. A sin is committed in a certain place, and just by being in that place aren't those who didn't participate equally guilty? Further, when God punishes us, he doesn't distinguish between the sinful and the blame- less. We're punished for the simple fact that we're human.
Guide's father understood this through his experience. He realized that to live is to suffer and through this he could find repentance. Nagasaki must be filled with people who feel the same way. Together with them, he wanted to make Nagasaki a shining example in Japan of a place filled with the re- pentant, and he began to work to see this happen. This was a huge undertak- ing, well beyond him no matter how much time he devoted to it. I won't be able to come see my son very often, he told his brother-in-law, but I hope you'll forgive me, as someone who shares my faith.
His brother-in-law, also a doctor, was much more of a realist. He was resigned to the repatriated officer's never regaining his mental stability and leading a steady life. Ever since he'd made his way through the still radioac- tive rubble of Nagasaki searching for his younger sister and his nephew, he knew that even a tragedy of this magnitude would lead only a small minority of people to repent. II someone were to stand at the ruins of Urakami Cathe- dral, show a charred Pietà to all the survivors milling about, and shout at them to repent, he might very well be stoned to death.
Guide's father disappeared after that, but his brother-in-law began to hear reports about him. They weren't detailed, but the outlines were clear enough. He didn't hear about any repatriated officer being stoned to death after shouting to people to repent in the nuclear wasteland of Nagasaki, but he did hear news of a young leader walking a tightrope separating the legal from the illegal in regard to concessions at the occupation force's base in nearby Sasebo. Had his young brother-in-law done a complete about-face? Was he doing his best to commit sinful acts, testing God's will and God's plan in an utterly un-Catholic way? After a while these rumors of a young leader in Sasebo faded away. This wasn't a time when the Japanese yakuza gangs were able to fight the MPs and survive.
So Guide was raised by his stepfather, who himself drank as he re- lated these stories. Kizu wondered how, because of Guide's past, the Som- ersault reverberated differently within his inner being from within Patron himself.
"I know even less about the Somersault than I do about Guide's back- ground, but I guess I'm digging into what makes me most anxious," Kizu said, summoning up his resolve. "Guide considered you his Patron, too, and the names you used were perfect for the kind of relationship you had. Didn't you take turns being the leader?"
"That's right," Patron replied. "Actually when it comes down to church doctrine and activities, I think Guide was much more the leader than I ever was."
"Which is exactly why I can't fill his shoes," Kizu insisted. "You're a unique person, and I know Guide must have been too. But I'm not. I want to help you out, but the one great hope of my life, my one and only desire for the future, is to be with Ikuo. Ikuo is absorbed in working for you, so here I am.
"Although I'm aware I can never measure up to Guide, I still want to do whatever I can. I was hoping you'd teach me what role you envision this new Guide playing. Otherwise I'll be lost. At my age it's not easy to take on new responsibilities without understanding what you're supposed to be doing.
It's very hard for me, a lovesick old man who wants more than anything else to hang out with a certain young person, to just slouch around the office with nothing to do."
After he said this, Kizu felt the blood rise to his face. And he felt Patron gazing at his hot, fleshy face-at first with a flash of surprise, then with a sense of sympathy tinged with sad resignation. Kizu knew that what he blurted out was considered beyond the pale here in Japan, but it did reveal his true feel- ings. And when he spoke with Patron, more than anything else Kizu wanted to show how he really felt.
After a moment of silence, Patron said, "Professor, I'd like you to under- take something that goes in a different direction from what Guide did but that's also absolutely essential to our movement. If I say this you might get upset, thinking it's something I just came up with on the spur of the moment, but as someone once said, a historian is a prophet who looks backward. The late Guide was a forward-looking prophet, and I've been thinking of having you be a backward-looking one. I'd like you to play the role of historian con- cerning the entire process of my constructing a new church."