After the quake: stories Page 0,17
be sure to put it on the man myself. You can’t trust men with something like that. You know about condoms, right?”
Yoshiya said that he did know about condoms.
“So, two months later I got pregnant again. I could hardly believe it: I was being more careful than ever. There was nothing I could do but go back to the same doctor. He took one look at me and said, ‘I told you to be careful. What have you got in that head of yours?’ I couldn’t stop crying. I explained to him how much care I had taken with contraception whenever I had knowledge, but he wouldn’t believe me. ‘This would never have happened if you’d put them on right,’ he said. He was mad.
“Well, to make a long story short, about six months later, because of a weird sequence of events, I ended up having knowledge of the doctor himself. He was thirty at the time, and still a bachelor. He was kind of boring to talk to, but he was a decent, honest man. His right earlobe was missing. A dog chewed it off when he was a boy. He was just walking along the street one day when a big black dog he had never seen before jumped on him and bit off his earlobe. He used to say he was glad it was just an earlobe. You could live without an earlobe. But a nose would be different. I had to agree with him.
“Being with him helped me get my old self back. When I was having knowledge of him, I managed not to think disturbing thoughts. I even got to like his little ear. He was so dedicated to his work he would lecture me on the use of the condom while we were in bed—like, when and how to put it on and when and how to take it off. You’d think this would make for foolproof contraception, but I ended up pregnant again.”
Yoshiya’s mother went to see her doctor lover and told him she seemed to be pregnant. He examined her and confirmed that it was so. But he would not admit to being the father. “I am a professional,” he said. “My contraceptive techniques are beyond reproach. Which means you must have had relations with another man.”
“This really hurt me. He made me so angry when he said that, I couldn’t stop shaking. Can you see how deeply this would have hurt me?”
Yoshiya said that he did see.
“While I was with him, I never had knowledge of another man. Not once. But he just thought of me as some kind of slut. That was the last I saw of him. I didn’t have an abortion, either. I decided to kill myself. And I would have. I would have gotten on a boat to Oshima and thrown myself from the deck if Mr. Tabata hadn’t seen me wandering down the street and spoken to me. I wasn’t the least bit afraid to die. Of course, if I had died then, you would never have been born into this world, Yoshiya. But thanks to Mr. Tabata’s guidance, I have become the saved person you know me as today. At last, I was able to find the true light. And with the help of the other believers, I brought you into this world.”
To Yoshiya’s mother, Mr. Tabata had had this to say:
“You took the most rigorous contraceptive measures, and yet you became pregnant. Indeed, you became pregnant three times in a row. Do you imagine that such a thing could happen by chance? I for one do not believe it. Three ‘chance’ occurrences are no longer ‘chance.’ The number three is none other than that which is used by our Lord for revelations. In other words, Miss Osaki, it is our Lord’s wish for you to give birth to a child. The child you are carrying is not just anyone’s child, Miss Osaki: it is the child of our Lord in Heaven; a male child, and I shall give it the name of Yoshiya, ‘For it is good.’ ”
And when, as Mr. Tabata predicted, a boy child was born, they named him Yoshiya, and Yoshiya’s mother lived as the servant of God, no longer having knowledge of any man.
“So,” Yoshiya said, with some hesitation, to his mother, “biologically speaking, my father is that obstetrician that you . . . had knowledge of.”
“Not true!” declared his mother with eyes blazing. “His contraceptive methods were absolutely foolproof