The man in the black robe just stares at him. Goto Dengo tries again:
'I didn't know Jews spoke Latin.'
One day a wheeled chair is pushed into his room; he stares at it with dull curiosity. He has heard of these things-they are used behind high walls to transport shamefully imperfect persons from one room to an other. Suddenly these tiny girls have picked him up and dropped him into it! One of them says something about fresh air and the next thing he knows he's being wheeled out the door and into a corridor! They have buckled him in so he doesn't fall out, and he twists uneasily in the chair, trying to hide his face. The girl rolls him out to a huge verandah that looks out over the mountains. Mist rises up from the leaves and birds scream. On the wall behind him is a large painting of I.N.R.I. chained naked to a post, shedding blood from hundreds of parallel whip-marks. A centurion stands above him with a scourge. His eyes look strangely Nipponese.
Three other Nipponese men are sitting on the verandah. One of them talks to himself unintelligibly and keeps picking at a sore on his arm that bleeds continuously into a towel on his lap. Another one has had his arms and face burned
Goto Dengo eyes the railing of the verandah, wondering if he can muster the effort to wheel himself over there and fling his body over the edge. Why has he not been allowed to die honorably?
The crew of the submarine treated him and the other evacuees with an unreadable combination of reverence and disgust.
When was he set apart from his race? It happened long before his evacuation from New Guinea. The lieutenant who rescued him from the headhunters treated him as a criminal and sentenced him to execution. Even before then, he was different. Why did the sharks not eat him? Does his flesh smell different? He should have died with his comrades in the Bismarck Sea. He lived, partly because he was lucky, partly because he could swim.
Why could he swim? Partly because his body was good at it-but partly because his father raised him not to believe in demons.
He laughs out loud. The other men on the verandah turn to look at him.
He was raised not to believe in demons, and now he is one.
Black-robe laughs out loud at Goto Dengo during his next visit. 'I am not trying to convert you,' he says. 'Please do not tell your superiors about your suspicions. We have been strictly forbidden to proselytize, and there would be brutal repercussions.'
'You aren't trying to convert me with words,' Goto Dengo admits, 'but just by having me here.' His English does not quite suffice.
Black-robe's name is Father Ferdinand. He is a Jesuit or something, with enough English to run rings around Goto Dengo. 'In what way does merely having you in this place constitute proselytization?' Then, just to break Goto Dengo's legs out from under him, he says the same thing in half-decent Nipponese.
'I don't know. The art.'
'If you don't like our art, close your eyes and think of the emperor.'
'I can't keep my eyes closed all the time.'
Father Ferdinand laughs snidely. 'Really? Most of your countrymen seem to have no difficulty with keeping their eyes tightly shut from cradle to grave.'
'Why don't you have happy art? Is this a hospital or a morgue?'
'La Pasyon is important here,' says Father Ferdinand.
'La Pasyon?'
'Christ's suffering. It speaks deeply to the people of the Philippines. Especially now.'
Goto Dengo has another complaint that he is not able to voice until he borrows Father Ferdinand's Japanese-English dictionary and spends some time working with it.
'Let me see if I understand you,' Father Ferdinand says. 'You believe that when we treat you with mercy and dignity, we are implicitly trying to convert you to Roman Catholicism.'
'You bent my words again,' says Goto Dengo.
'You spoke crooked words and I straightened them,' snaps Father Ferdinand.
'You are trying to make me into-one of you.'
'One of us? What do you mean by that?'
'A low person.'
'Why would we want to do that?'
'Because you have a low-person religion. A loser religion. If you make me into a low person, it will make me want to follow that religion.'
'And by treating you decently we are trying to make you into a low person?'
'In Nippon, a sick person would not be treated as well.'
'You needn't explain that to us,' Father Ferdinand says. 'You are in the middle of a country full of women who have been raped by Nipponese soldiers.'
Time to change the subject. 'Ignoti et quasi occulti-Societas Eruditorum,' says Goto Dengo, reading the inscription on a medallion that hangs from Father Ferdinand's neck. 'More Latin? What does it mean?'
'It is an organization I belong to. It is ecumenical.'
'What does that mean?'
'Anyone can join it. Even you, after you get better.'
'I will get better,' Goto Dengo says. 'No one will know that I was sick.'
'Except for us. Oh, I understand! You mean, no Nipponese people will know. That's true.'
'But the others here will not get better.'
'It is true. You have the best prognosis of any patient here.'
'You are receiving those sick Nipponese men into your bosoms.'
'Yes. This is more or less dictated by our religion.'
'They are low people now. You want them to join your low-person religion.'
'Only insofar as it is good for them,' says Father Ferdinand. 'It's not like those guys are going to run out and build us a new cathedral or something.'
The next day, Goto Dengo is deemed to be cured. He does not feel cured at all, but he will do anything to get out of this rut: losing one staredown after another with the King of the Jews.
He expects that they will saddle him with a duffel bag and send him down to the bus terminal to fend for himself, but instead a car comes to get him. As if that's not good enough, the car takes him to an airfield, where a light plane picks him up. It is the first time he has ever flown in a plane, and the excitement revives him more than six weeks in the hospital. The plane takes off between two green mountains and heads south (judging from the sun's position) and for the first time he understands where he's been: in the center of Luzon Island, north of Manila.
Half an hour later, he's above the capital, banking over the Pasig River and then the bay, chockablock with military transports. The corniche is guarded by a picket line of coconut palms. Seen from overhead, their branches writhe in the sea breeze like colossal tarantulas impaled on spikes. Looking over the pilot's shoulder, he sees a pair of paved airstrips in the flat paddy-land just south of the city, crossing at an acute angle to form a narrow X. The light plane porpoises through gusts. It bounces down the airstrip like an overinflated soccer ball, taxiing past most of the hangars and finally fishtailing to a stop near an isolated guard hut where a man waits on a motorcycle with an empty sidecar. Goto Dengo is directed out of the plane and into the sidecar by means of gestures; no one will speak to him. He is dressed in an Army uniform devoid of rank and insignia.
A pair of goggles rests on the seat, and he puts them on to keep the bugs out of his eyes. He is a little nervous because he does not have papers and he does not have orders. But they are waved out of the airbase and onto the road without any checks.
The motorcycle driver is a young Filipino man who keeps grinning broadly, at the risk of getting insects stuck between his big white teeth. He seems to think that he has the best job in the whole world, and perhaps he does. He turns south onto a road that probably qualifies as a big highway around these parts, and commences weaving through traffic. Most of this is produce carts drawn by carabaos-big oxlike things with imposing crescent- moon-shaped horns. There are a few automobiles, and the occasional military truck.
For the first couple of hours the road is straight, and runs across damp table-land used for growing rice.
