train back from Suma if God knew whether his answers were correct or off the mark, and consequently, whether there would be further revelations or only smiling silence and feigned ignorance.
3
“Well, of course the coy tease is her favorite pose,” Reverend Bonneau said. “You can’t blame her, can you? How could she keep you coming around if she spilled the beans entirely.
Or more likely she’s just floating in and out of coherence. It happens all the time.”
“All the time?”
“All the time, my boy. It’s the most time consuming of all your pastoral duties. It is, you know. No getting around it. Listening to the endlessly waffling bleatings of people nobody else cares to hear. You should hear the stories I’m partial witness to. On shipboard the toughest bos’nmates would come slobbering to me, about the woman who left them, or the parents who never cared one whit about them, or the incredible anger they felt toward some sibling. Or the money they owed.”
“But they came to you. She’s not coming to me.”
“True enough. Maybe you’re not sympathetic enough, although you seem pretty sympathetic to me, and to lots of others around here. Maybe you need to give her time. Or more likely she’s drifting around in some fog that only death will lift. That happens a lot too, you know.”
“She seems to be playing with me.”
“Of course, my boy. That’s in their nature you know. Learned at mama’s knee. Little fillips here and there to keep the groceries coming. Keep your interest up. Actually, the more I think about, I’d bet she’s got some dark secret eating at her and it’s only worming its way out over several attempts at dislodgement. She probably doesn’t know herself what is going on, but sooner or later, the truth will come sweltering out. You can count on it. Unless, of course, she’s already way around the bend. And that’s possible, you know. Highly possible. And if that’s the case, waiting around for some revelation is pointless. Often is. Very often is. So if you’re looking for solace, don’t look here. I’m no solace dispenser. Never have been, although I could easily have been I guess.”
“She just won’t tell me how she got Mogens’ letters, if in fact they are Mogens’ letters. Although she admitted Rielmann and Mogens did go to Tokyo, did somehow preserve the church from takeover. She admitted that.”
“And soon enough her part she’ll also admit . . . . or not, I suspect. Maybe she truly can’t remember what actually happened. Does she weep about it?”
“About what?”
“About what happened to Mogens, about reliving the whole episode.”
“No she doesn’t cry.”
“And how true that is. Mioko’s no crybaby. A lot of steel in the little lady. Yes indeed. A lot of damn steel. She showed me the blade once or twice and I got the message to give her plenty of room at the church. A wide berth in a very narrow berthing area. In the war we used to sleep four stacked high. Sometimes you’d be lucky to get a fist between your nose and the hammock overhead. Just a fist. But I’ll tell you something.” Bonneau stood up from the Sunday school table. “If she’s posing it’s because she’s got something she wants to tell you, something eating at her that she needs to get off her chest. “
”She has a very tiny chest.”
“All Japanese women do,” Bonneau answered. “My boy, you can’t shock me. I spent 27 years in the U.S. Navy. Mioko could shock me, maybe, but not you, my boy. Maybe you need to shock her. Did you think about that?”
“How shock her?”
“I have absolute confidence in you, my boy. Trust in the Lord to find a way.”
And on his next visit to Suma Owen believed the Lord wanted him to make Mioko listen to the most disturbing of all of Mogens’ pages—a choked passage detailing the contraction of plague. But although Mioko listened carefully enough she did not seem to absorb it as Owen assumed anyone must. To overcome her evident comfort in the silence of her reaction, he asked, “Do you want me to read it again?”
“Of course not, why would I want to hear it in the first place. It’s so terrible, so unthinkable.”
“Maybe if I read it again, slower this time, you’ll remember how you came by it.”
“Buy it. A favorite American expression, I understand. Buy it, now!”
He started in again on the flow from the buboes in the little girl’s armpits—the almost metered recitation of her labored breathing and the rats gnawing at her rotting calf.
“Oh stop. It’s inhuman.”
“Oh, I agree. Inhuman but by humans concocted. The cement buildings weren’t there naturally—they were constructed. Mogens wasn’t a tourist longing to see ice sculptures in Harbin, was he?”
“What do you want to know?
“I keep coming back to the basic question—how did you get the letters?”
“That’s not what you want to know,” she said firmly, suddenly looking directly into his eyes.
“A calculated distraction, but I’m not buying it. Not buying it. Did they arrive in the morning post?”
“I suppose they could have, but someone delivered them.”
“Who?”
“Someone I didn’t know. Someone I’d never met.”
“Who?”
“Someone you’ve encountered.”
“What?”
“Yes, someone you’ll recognize. Perhaps I should play more Chopin for you.”
“That won’t be necessary. No more Chopin. No more tea. Just the information—who gave them to you?”
“Surely you know that information is all that old people have, their only currency. They have to be chary trading it away casually. You’d stop coming. It’s not my appearance they brings you here, is it?”
He thought about how she might have looked in her twenties. For a moment he could meld her into Mariko’s body and the thought was exciting, embarrassing. Did she catch that, he wondered. “You’re attractive enough,” he said. “A rose in this dismal setting.”
“Dismal it is,” she answered. “But leaving takes such energy, and essentially I have no one.” She motioned to the outside beyond the courtyard.
“There’s the church.”
“A community for transient gaijin,” she observed. “Transient gaijin in need of some reminders I guess of something they left behind. And father Bonneau reliving his youth in the Navy.”
“Or maybe his earlier youth in Kobe,” Owen said.
“Yes, he’s home in Kobe, isn’t he? Unlike his parishioners. He’s more Japanese than I am. People don’t
