Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

And Guide as Don Quixote-his upright posture and thin figure and his long scrupulous face were perfect for the role. That morning in the hotel in New York came back to him once again, when the snow turned to rain before it reached the ground. Was he now supposed to join the antics of this man pretending to be mankind's Patron by performing antics of his own as the newly chosen Guide? Could a clowning pair really lead these praying women, with so much suffering behind them, in a march toward repentance at the end of the world? Wasn't this asking the impossible?

Kizu felt a burning sensation run up his back. He opened his eyes. He'd participated occasionally in silent prayer in America, but nothing that lasted as long as this. It was already ten minutes since they began, with no sign from the circle of women that they were nearing the end.

Eyes closed, heads held straight, the women looked totally transformed from when they had been packing lilies into boxes. And very different, too, from the way they were earlier today, listening to their colleagues' stories and to the replies of Kizu, Ikuo, and the husband and wife who owned the farm.

The women, their hats off now, looked irretrievably tired, as if they were pieces of machinery suffering from metal fatigue and about to break apart.

The face of the one old lady who, from the waist up had such good posture, reminded him of a death mask. And looking at the young woman with the scar running from her ear, over where one eye should be, and down her cheek, Kizu was shocked all over again.

"It's a good time for us to leave, don't you think?" the farmer's wife whispered into Kizu's ear. "Sometimes their silent prayers go on lor more than twenty minutes. Occasionally we do overtime till six, but five is their prayer time and after that they usually clean up and call it a day."

The farmer's wife had already stood up and was making her way through the cultivation equipment. Kizu followed after the farmer, bent over as he walked, with Ikuo bringing up the rear. There was no reaction from the praying women as they walked out. Despite the lighting inside, as they came out of the greenhouse it was like emerging from a dark cave into the brilliance of the snow. They felt liberated by the light and invigorating air- refreshing after the oppressive odor of the lilies. With the old school build- ing as a backdrop in the twilight, they could see the shaggy young leaves of an oak tree they hadn't noticed before. For a moment the leaves were rustled by a strong wind. Blue sky was visible through a few cracks in the clouds, which tumbled violently across the sky.

The farm owner turned his white-sideburned sallow face toward the hills and said, "There's going to be a storm, though it'll pass quickly. I'd bet- ter go check on the rest of the farm."

As her husband walked briskly away, the farm wife bowed to them, her red hands held to her face for warmth, and followed him toward where the blackened earth was filled with the brilliant green of mustard plants.

Kizu and Ikuo continued on to the road where they'd parked their car. The new leaves of the beech trees on the school grounds sparkled like gold paper, but when they passed by them the sun was blocked out by the clouds and the leaves turned dark. Right beneath the tree several of the younger chil- dren were squatting, drawing on the ground or otherwise amusing them- selves, no doubt, while waiting for their mothers to finish work. But they were so motionless; could they really be playing? And then it struck Kizu: These children, as well as the older children who were standing off at some distance, were praying.

The wind blew down to ground level, blowing straight toward Kizu and Ikuo. Thunder roared, and large drops of rain began to fall. Looking around, Kizu saw that the children had all sought shelter in the school build- ing. This was the first time today anyone had moved quickly.

Lightning flashed in the dark. As he watched the wind blowing the rain, Ikuo carefully pulled out onto the road. Kizu, too, gave himself up to watch- ing the force of the wind and rain. As the farm owner had said, the storm was soon over, but as they got onto the highway it was littered with broken tree branches and their new leaves. The Ford Mustang continued down the silent, thickly wooded dark slope, flicking aside the branches.

"Those women's prayers were pretty powerful, weren't they?" Ikuo said, after a long spell of silence.

"You and I have both spoken directly with Patron and Guide, and everyone's counting on us to help out with Patron's new movement. But I don't think that we-or myself, at least-can ever approach the depth of the prayers we just witnessed."

"There are lots of ways to contribute to Patron's new movement," Ikuo replied. "Never forget that Patron is counting on you. But yes, I'd agree- their prayers are pretty amazing."

"Did you notice that the children were praying too?"

"In his Somersault, Patron made fun of everything he'd done, right?

The thought just struck me for the first time that if he hadn't done that he would have had a lot more worries."

"You mean about what people who pray so intensely would do after they'd been abandoned?" Kizu asked.

"Right. When I was watching those women praying, I was thinking how extraordinary it is for them to live like this for ten years. And I was also think- ing that it was very possible they might not have put up with things passively but taken a different tack entirely. I know it must have been tough emotion- ally for Patron when he thought about having to abandon followers like these.

But isn't that why he had to make such a big joke about things-so these prayerful women would be shaken to the core?"

"I guess so, and yet he wasn't able to shake them," Kizu said. "Still, the worst-case scenario Patron feared didn't take place. For ten years they lived like we just saw, praying ceaselessly. I suspect if we met the radical faction who murdered Guide, who've lived their own kind of life of faith over the last decade, we'd find them pretty formidable too.

"I really don't have a mental picture of what the hell Patron and Guide fell into was like, but for Patron, who survived alone and was resurrected, I can't imagine life will be very easy from now on."

That evening, on the drive back to Tokyo, Ikuo said one more thing.

"I think the road ahead is going to be bumpy for you too, Professor, now that you've decided to be with Patron. But I really want to thank you for com- ing back from America!"

The day of the memorial service dawned clear and sunny, a typical end- of-spring morning. Since Kizu, officially a professor until the end of the aca- demic year, was the only one among the participants privileged to use the American university-owned facilities freely, he set out diligently that morn- ing to walk around the grove of trees and sloping lawn by the pond on the southeast side of the garden and see if there were any weak points through which outsiders could crash the service.

From his room Kizu couldn't tell, but the young trees bordering the grounds were slippery elms, the same as the young trees planted on the cam- pus of his New Jersey university to replace larger trees destroyed by insects.

These days he hadn't seen much of the squirrels from last summer, the ones whose vigorous movements among the green leaves of the wych elm had aroused him. They might very well have shifted over to these younger trees in order to eat the soft seeds or the young buds, for the branches had defi- nitely been gnawed. The ground was littered with twigs that had quickly dried up.

Kizu picked up one little branch, and in a flash of inspiration, while he was checking out its withered flowers, he solved a riddle that had bothered him ever since he moved to the United States. Within layers of anthers the color ot dried sunflowers, a dark-colored stigma poked out rigidly. It looked like a hankp, the kind of personal-name seals Japanese used instead of signa- tures. The word stigma came from the Latin for mark, or brand, which came in turn from a Greek word for tattoo, similar to a seal. One semester, Kizu had even lectured on the history of European seals.