The Early Stories (128 page)

Canus, inspired in his swarthier fashion, takes up one of the blunt tools from his bench and strikes his brother a firm blow.

“Devil!” exclaims Ablatus, sinking.

“Fool,” replies Canus, and, with one of the sharp tools from the same set, deftly finishes his brother off.

Ablatus abolitus est
. It does not arouse remorse in us when we slay a twin; it is too much like suppressing an aspect of ourselves. Serenely Canus carries off the body
(Ablatus ablatus est)
and digs the grave. The earth is heavy, Northern soil—more resistant and more rewarding than the earth the ancients scratched. In the distance, a scrimmage of nobility reverberates. A monastery bell—a silver thread thrown across a chasm—sounds from a muffling valley. The Dark Ages begin to fade. As Canus leans on the shovel, a breeze of evening caresses his face, and he idly reflects that here is power too, to be harnessed. He imagines sails, gears, driveshafts. Inside the hut, he composes himself for sleep. His muscles
agreeably ache from useful labor performed. The prototypical horse collar lies consumed beside the bench, but the ashes preserve the design. Tomorrow he will reconstruct it. The slippery little half-dreams that augur sleep begin to visit him. And tomorrow, he thinks, he will invent the horizontal-shafted windmill … and the next day,
Deus volens
, the wheelbarrow.…

Jesus on Honshu
 

T
OKYO—
A Japanese legend has excited some curiosity here, that Jesus did not die on the cross outside Jerusalem, but lived in a remote village on the northern part of the Japanese island of Honshu until his death at 106 years of age
.

The distances within His blue eyes used to frighten the children. Though toward the end, when His age had passed eighty, His stoop and careful movements within the kimono approximated the manner of an elderly Japanese, His face, up close, never conformed—the olive skin, the tilted nostrils sprouting hair, the lips excessive in flesh and snarling humor, the eyelids very strange, purplish and wrinkled like the armpits of a salamander. There was never much doubt in the village that He was some sort of god. Even had His eyes given on less immensity, had their celestial blue been flawed by one fleck of amber or rust, He would have been revered and abhorred by the children. His skin was abnormally porous. His voice came from too deep in His body.

Jesus, so the legend runs, first arrived in Japan at the age of 21 during the reign of the emperor Suinin in what would have been the year 27
B.C
.
He remained for 11 years under the tutorship of a sage of Etchu Province, the modern Toyama prefecture, from whom he learned much about the country and its customs
.

Strangely, the distances had melted within Him, leaving little more trace than the ice cakes along the northern shore leave in spring. What a man does when young becomes a legend to himself when he is old. The straight roads through drifting deserts, the goat paths winding through mauve mountains, the silver rivers whose surfaces He discovered He
could walk, the distant herds like wandering lakes, the clouds of birds darkening the sun, the delegations of brown people, of yellow people, the green forests where sunlight fell in tiger stripes, the purple forests (tree trunks shaggy as bears, star-blue butterflies fluttering in glades no man had entered before), emerald meadows sparkling with springs and freshets, sheets of snow a month of walking did not dismiss, and in the distance always more mountains, more deserts, the whole world then tasting of vastness as of nectar, glistening, men huddling in mud nests like wasps, the spaces innocent. He had walked because, obscurely, His Father had told Him to. His Father was an imperious restlessness within Him. At last He came to the land of Wa, beyond which extended only an enamelled sea without a nether edge. The sage of Etchu took Him in and taught Him many things. He taught the young Jesus that dual consciousness was not to be avoided but desired: only duality reflected the universe. That the eight hundred myriads of daemons
(yao-yorodzu-no-kami)
are false save in that they stand guard against an even more false monism. That the huntsman must bend his thought upon the prey and not upon the bow. That a faith containing fear is an imperfect faith. That the mountains wait to be moved by the touch of a child. That the motions of the mind are full of
kami
(holy force). That the ways of the gods
(shintō)
are the ways of plants. That a seed must die to live. That the weak are the strong, the supple outlast the stiff, the child speaks truer than the man. And many more such things He later preached, and forgot, as the ice cake deposits pebbles and straw in melting. After eleven years, the restlessness seized Him again, and He returned. The trip returning, strangely, was the more difficult of the two; He kept searching for familiar landmarks, and there were none.

Jesus returned to Jerusalem, passing through Monaco on the way, to tell his own people of his experiences in the Orient, it is said. It was his younger brother, known in Japanese as Isukiri, who was later crucified, according to the legend
.

No one ever got it quite right, and He Himself ceased trying to understand. Judas (Isukiri) had not been His brother; he had been the troublesomely sensitive disciple, the cloying adorer. Selecting the twelve, Jesus had chosen solid men, to whom a miracle was a way of affecting matter, a species of work. Judas, with his adoration and high hopes and theoretical demands on the Absolute, had attached himself hysterically. The kiss in the garden was typical—all showmanship. Then, the priesthood proving obdurate (and why not? any Messiah at all would put them out of a job), Judas had offered to be crucified instead, as if we were dealing with some
Moloch that had a simple body quota to meet. The poor Romans were out of their depth; eventually they hanged Judas, as they generally hanged informers—a straightforward policy of prudence. For Him, there had been nails in the palms, and a crying out, and then dark coolness, a scuffle in which He overheard women's voices, and a scarlet dawn near the borders of Palestine. For the first days eastward, until the wounds in His feet healed, He was carried in a litter and had a mounted escort, He dimly remembered. Gruff men, officials of some sort.

Jesus is said to have escaped and come back to Japan after wandering through the wastes of Siberia. The legend has it that he landed at Hachinoe in Aomori, and settled in Herai, whose name, it has been suggested, derives from the Japanese for Hebrew (Heburai). He married and became the father of three daughters, according to the legend
.

Asagao was the oldest, Oigimi the youngest; both married before the age of fifteen, and in them and their children He saw no trace of Himself, only of His wife and the smooth race that had taken Him in, as a pond swallows a stone. Ukifune, the middle daughter, called Dragonfly, was tall like Him, with His wrinkled lids and big-knuckled hands and surges of restlessness and mockery. She never married; her scandals affronted the village until she was found dead in her hut, black-lipped, cold. He would have called her back to life, but her face had been monstrously slashed. Poisoned and disfigured by a lover or the wife of a lover. She left a fatherless male infant, Kaoru. Shared between the households of his aunts, the infant grew to be a man, living always in the village, as a mender of nets and thatching. Conscious of himself only as Japanese, Kaoru grew old, with white hair and warts, and Jesus, now over a hundred, would suddenly, senselessly, weep to see in this venerable grandson—hook-nosed profile bent above a chisel, his forearms as gnarled as grapevines—the very image of old Joseph of Bethlehem, seen upward through the eyes of a child. Things return, form in circles, unravel and reravel, the sage had insisted, crouching with the young traveller on a ledge in the mauve mountains of Etchu, in view of the enamelled sea. Jesus had argued, insisting that there was also a vertical principle in the world, something thrusting, which did not repeat. Now, Himself ancient, He had come to exemplify the sage's scorned truth. He lived in the village as a healer, and the healed kept coming back to Him, their health unravelled, and again He would lay on His hands, and the devils would flee, and the healed would depart upright and rejoicing; only to unravel again, and at last to die, even as He must. A soft heaviness sweetened His veins; His naps lengthened. As death neared, His birth and travail far ago, in that clamorous desert place,
among Rome's centurions, seemed more and more miraculous: a seed He had left behind, and that had died, engendering a growth perhaps as great as a mustard tree. Or perhaps His incarnation there, those youthful events, were lost in the scuffle of history, dust amid dust. Whatever the case, He never doubted that He was unique, the only son of God. In this, at least, He resembled all men.

One family in the village says it is descended from Jesus. Many of the children have the star of David sewn on their clothes, and parents sometimes mark the sign of the cross in ink on the foreheads of children to exorcise evil spirits.… An annual “Christ festival,” held on June 10, attracts many visitors
.

The Slump
 

They say reflexes, the coach says reflexes, even the papers now are saying reflexes, but I don't think it's the reflexes so much—last night, as a gag to cheer me up, the wife walks into the bedroom wearing one of the kids' rubber gorilla masks and I was under the bed in six-tenths of a second, she had the stopwatch on me. It's that I can't see the ball the way I used to. It used to come floating up with all seven continents showing, and the pitcher's thumbprint, and a grass smooch or two, and the Spalding guarantee in ten-point sans-serif, and—
whop!
—I could feel the sweet wood with the bat still cocked. Now, I don't know, there's like a cloud around it, a sort of spiral vagueness, maybe the Van Allen belt, or maybe I lift my eye in the last second, planning how I'll round second base, or worrying which I do first, tip my cap or slap the third-base coach's hand. You can't see a blind spot, Kierkegaard says, but in there now, between when the ball leaves the bleacher background—all those colored shirts—and when I hear it smack safe and sound into the catcher's mitt, there's somehow just nothing, where there used to be a lot, everything in fact, because they're not keeping me around for my fielding, and already I see the afternoon tabloid has me down as trade bait.