Soldier for Christ. John Zeugner
seen it all before. Lots of times. Poor old Mioko.”
“Well, I’m not ready to write her off yet.”
“Who’s writing her off? I’m just saying as a historical source she’s a dead loss. I’m sorry I put you on to her.”
“She seemed pretty lucid most of the time.” Owen said.
“It’s like short term and long term memory. Some older folks can remember exactly what happened on July 12, 1951 but can’t remember whether they talked to you this morning or not.”
“That’s not her problem.”
“Well it’s like her problem only reversed, I guess. Anyway I’ve seen it plenty of times before. I’ll put you on to some other sources—the church has had plenty of amateur historians. You’ve got to roll better with the punches, my boy. But you will, I know. I know it exactly. Now I can’t be late. You can, but I can’t.”
Owen thought, I can be more than late, I can miss the whole service. And he did. He went downstairs, turned away from the open chapel doors and went outside. The sunlight was harsh, brittle, crisp and the trek down the mountain to the train station was severely steep, upsettingly tilting so that he pushed toes against the pavement to prevent pitching off balance. It seemed he was always lurching ahead of himself, struggling to keep upright. The roadway was narrow, slick black macadam and there was a treacherous seven inch wide concrete trench on the side where he walked. Mercifully no car came up or down the slope. He walked gingerly along the edge of the drainage trench. Japan was no country for the infirm of step, he decided. After a certain age there’d be no way to walk to church. The taxis were expensive.
He imagined the rector had reached that part of the ecumenical service called The Pardon. The rector’s phrase was always predictable; “And so my friends believe the good news of Jesus Christ crucified, died, and resurrected for our sins. Believe the good news.”
Judas’s fate had been the subject of some debate at the lesson. Did the Jewish elders purchase the burying site for paupers or did Judas himself? Did he throw himself off a cliff or did he simply swell up and explode in blood on the ground? Akeldama meant exactly what, another stocky American executive wanted to know. Owen was unsure, but that is not what the fellow wanted to hear. He wanted an answer, opaque, solid, and significant. Something to hurl at skepticism, indeed to banish unbelief. Owen could not answer or mollify him.
“There ought to be some way to look it up, don’t you think?” The executive said.
“I’m sure there is—a lot of ways,” Owen lamely offered.
“Is the term Greek or Aramaic?” Jena asked, tossing Owen a dubious lifeline.
Owen couldn’t say, promised to look it up, but wondered now what sort of dictionary would have the term. And more importantly where he’d find basic biblical guides in English. The bookstores in Osaka and Kobe had a myriad texts on mastering English, and then spinning racks of Penguin paperbacks, but he was not sure about Biblical lexicons. Owen remembered hearing a strange lecture in divinity school on the term—a tortured linguistic tracing, all related to the classical notions of blood—but he could not recall the central point of the lecturer, or even who the lecturer was.
Owen’s western style house (for foreigners) was just beyond the college’s main gate a mile from Nishinomiya station. Near the gate was a short wall of 20 mailboxes arranged in three horizontal rows . Each box had a narrow, side-hinged door with a gap large enough above and below the door so that you could reach directly in and take your mail out. There was a coupling on each door for a small lock, but most boxes didn’t have one. Like most Americans Owen was bemused and awestruck by Japan’s safety.
“Who, after all,” his neighbors asked him, “would want to steal another’s mail?”
“Not even cash envelopes?” Owen once countered.
Yes, those would require some care—please be careful with them came the inevitable answer.
There was a large envelope in Owen’s mailbox, almost a packet. The return address was written in Japanese, with “Mioko Tanaka” in English at the top. He tossed the envelope on a table near his two-burner kitchen unit while he made tea. He suddenly felt skeptical about the packet. He decided to make hojicha, a stronger tea for staying awake—a student tea, a little bracing for the message from Mioko. He thought, while the tea steeped, that perhaps he had left a handkerchief, or maybe a flat notebook. But he sensed that would not be the case.
She wanted him to know something—she wanted to share something with him. He was sure of it. Then he thought about throwing the envelope out unopened. Curiosity was too strong, however.
Mioko’s note was terse, direct, entirely characteristic. “I’ve tried for several years to find someone to give this to, and then there you were—surely God’s will. Just as sure, I ‘m certain, that there was an extra T in your name some time back. Come and see me after you’ve read the enclosed. You’ll want to come alone.”
The enclosed were pages, each one with Mioko’s name at the top, on notebook lined paper, folded neatly in half twice. The paper was fragile, yellowing, flaking at the edges:
“Mioko—
I’m writing you on the extra page—or what Kawabata calls the extra page. I have to write two pages each day for the interrogators, but Kawbata brings me three. I can write you on that page and Kawabata says he’ll arrange for it to get to you via his own family in Kobe. Do I believe him? Or is it a ruse to get access to my honne thoughts beyond the official two pages? Is Kawbata a traitor to my friendship or is he a good man who understands the disease of this place and wishes to redeem himself somehow? You will have to ask him, should you ever meet him someday, after this war is over. Will it be over? I know now I won’t see the end of it. The world will surely end for me, my world at least, soon enough. And good riddance. But I have things to say to my children, and that’s where you come in. On the ‘extra page,’ I will document some of the horror here, and you can use that. But between those horrible things I want my children to know something better, something more hopeful. Will you help me in that need? Please.
This morning two boys, my son Peder’s age, ten, were taken outside and put into rain barrels, strapped in and left to freeze to death in Harbin’s minus thirty degrees. Left, but monitored every ten minutes by nurses in heavy fur coats, taking blood pressure, heart rate, consciousness and entering the data in green notebooks. I could watch and listen to their deaths from my window in the infirmary. After an hour another fur coat came and using a small curved saw severed the right arm of the boy nearest the building. He had mercifully already passed out from the extreme cold—maybe the arm itself was frozen, I couldn’t tell. And then they monitored the blood flow and whether the sawed-arm boy died more quickly than the other boy. It seemed they may have been twins. Pray for me. Mogens.”
Owen stopped reading, put both hands around the very hot handleless cup of hojicha, felt the heat flood into his fingers. He squeezed harder on the cup. He recognized it was the accepted Japanese way of banishing winter chill. From a department store you could buy a kotatsu table with a heating element underneath, so that you could sit with your kneeling legs covered by a thick blanket at the table and that would heat your lower extremities. And then you could grasp the tea cup to warm your arms. You could lean over the tea vapors and the steam would bathe your face. Three specific actions for three guaranteed results.
But with no one to monitor your warm descent into death. Owen wondered, why show me these things?
“Mioko, today buboes under my arms are oozing again, and even though the infirmary is warm I feel like I’m in an ice barrel myself, or floating on an ice floe. Kawabata says I’ve been given plague, but a mild kind. I’ll live. Pray for me. Mogens.”
“Mioko, fellow soldier for Christ!
Too sick to write. Mioko, too sick to write. Can’t write. But still writing. See what that means.”
And another page:
“Mioko, Children