2
That weekend Kizu began officially to work on his tableau. Ikuo or Dr. Koga no doubt laying the groundwork, Patron had asked Kizu to paint a triptych for the wall of the chapel.
Kizu had already decided to use the book of Jonah as his theme for the tableau, and when Ikuo came to convey Patron's request, Kizu explained his plan for the painting.
"If it's a triptych I'd like the first panel to show Jonah inside the belly of the whale. Jonah hears the call from God and is told to proclaim the wicked- ness of the people of Nineveh. But he runs away. The part where he's on board the Gentile boat and the captain and the sailors berate him and throw him into the sea would be good too. But it's the three days and three nights Jonah spends inside the whale that show how the rest of the story will develop. All of Jonah's thoughts are summed up in his prayer to God while he's in the belly of the whale. There's my copy of the Bible on the shelf above the trunk. Would you read that part for me?"
'"In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me.
From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry.
You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me.
I said, "I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple."
The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head.
To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God.
'"When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple.
'"Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.
But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
Salvation comes from the Lord.'"
"I can tell from the way you read it that you've been studying the book of Jonah," Kizu said, impressed.
"Yes, I have read it a lot," Ikuo replied, "but I don't know where the Lord is or what he's like. And the same holds true for salvation."
"How do you envision the second panel of the triptych?"
"How about a picture of Jonah, furious as he confronts God?"
"Would you read that part, too?" Kizu asked.
" 'O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and com- passionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.'
"But the Lord replied, 'Have you any right to be angry?'
"Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, 'It would be better for me to die than to live.'
"But God said to Jonah, 'Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?'
"Í do,' he said. 'I am angry enough to die.'"
Ikuo closed the compact Bible. "I'm interested in the book of Jonah up to this point," he said, "but I don't like what God says after this. It's strangely human."
"The part where Jonah, angry, is sitting under the vine would make a clear theme for the second panel. What about the final panel? I'd planned for it to be the centerpiece of the triptych."
"I'm really interested in how you visualize that," Ikuo said seriously.
"It's important to me too."
"Well, what sort of mental picture do you have?"
Standing beside the window with the lake behind him reflecting the setting sun, the edges of Ikuo's bull head were tinged a reddish black. Look- ing down, it seemed as if he were holding his breath, gathering his thoughts before he spoke.
"What I always imagine is the huge city of Nineveh burning up, the scene of more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, children and countless cattle, all burned up. Not that Jonah's resisting God and asserting himself would lead to God's necessarily changing his mind and going ahead with the destruction he'd canceled."
"At any rate, with your help I'd like to begin painting the first panel,"
Kizu said, sounding like he hadn't really grasped the direction Ikuo's thoughts were heading. "When I start on the second, I think the concept for the third one will develop. Who knows? Maybe our lile in the church from now on will show me the way."
"Yeah, it might," Ikuo said, making Kizu think that his own words had flown right over Ikuo's head in the direction of the man-made lake. "Just reading the book of Jonah might not give you an idea for the third panel. I've mentioned this to you before, but ever since I was a child I've wondered if the book of Jonah in the Bible is really the way the story ended. You remember how Guide urged me to appeal to Patron, and you wrote that letter for me?
One of the questions I wanted to ask someone like Patron, who's suffered in reality and for his faith, was exactly that-about what happened afterward."
"How would the Technicians respond, do you think?" Kizu asked.
"Aren't they themselves like uncompromising Jonahs?"
"They've been trained by experience to be men of few words, which means that once they do decide to speak you can bet they'll say something worth listening to."
3
So Kizu began his painting. First he set up two easels in the studio next to the lake, a studio bright with the reflected light of the sky and water; then he laid out so many drawings and watercolors of Ikuo on the floor that there was barely space to walk to the part of the room used as a bedroom. As he worked on the painting he felt that, although the number of days left to him was clearly few, he'd never experienced the moment-to-moment reality of time as intensely as he did right now. Not once did he feel time hanging heavy on his hands, certainly not when Ikuo was modeling for him and not even when he was away at the farm.
In spite of a deep-seated sharp pain and a sense of wasted effort and anguish that had settled inside him, Kizu discovered that once he began his tableau his attitude toward his cancer started to change. The first panel, the depiction of the walls of the whale's stomach that surrounded Jonah, he painted to reflect an endoscopic view of the path from the esophagus to the stomach and from the anus to the colon.
Sketching with crayon or pencil the figure of Jonah lying down, sitting, standing in front of this backdrop, he experienced the feeling that the draw- ings and watercolors he'd drawn up till then were less studies for a painting- to-be than indexes of a completed work. Up till then he was used to his sketches not being bound by any overall concept, only connected by the fact that they were done at one particular point in his life. But now he felt a conceptual connection binding them all, something totally new and unexpected.
As Kizu quoted from these studies as he worked, he also came to sense the inner world of this young man Ikuo, yearning, as if writhing in pain, to be understood. An inner world that-just like Patron after a trance without Guide-he could grasp artistically but that refused to coalesce into words.