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PARTISAN REVIEW
twenty years later. And here I could see he was seated, by the lamp,
just as in those evenings when, after supper, over a game of cards,
I would preach to
him
about the evils of material desire and the
choice between God and Mammon. But he would stop my mouth
with what he called his 'discoveries about my private life'-a long
list of monstrous vices that seemed to have a very strong appeal to
his lurid imagination, debaucheries, atrocities, and practices of witch–
craft commonly attributed to the robber-monks in Chinese dime
novels, of which he _was an insatiable reader. He said that he had
found secret chambers in my church where beautiful naked women
were kept; that I preserved my youth and virility by feeding on the
fetuses taken from disemboweled women; that I held the souls of
my parishioners in bondage by nailing their effigies on little chips
of wood; that I sent little paper men in the night to rob the rich men
one thousand
li
away and to remove their hoarded gold to my own
cellar. But he would not expose me, fiend though I was, he would
continue with a laugh-oh, no, since I was going to share the gold
with him. What fantastic stories! How ridiculous!
"But those charges seemed again to be buzzing irritatingly around
my ears, accompanied by the distant echoes of that man's obscene
laughter. Twenty-five years had passed since he died and he was
back now. He had kept
his
promise, and the man seated before me,
I could recognize, was his reincarnation. So thanks to my long life,
I had the rare opportunity of meeting the same person in his two
existences. The inquisitor-the kidnaper-which was he? They looked
almost identical, but was I sure? For vague, elusive and shadowy,
the man's features looked rather like reflections in a cesspool. Or
as if they had belonged to a head hanging in the air, a head hoisted
high against a gray morning sky. Then at once
r
saw blood all over
that head and it was boxed in a cage. I blinked, and the cage was
gone. The horrible face remained, but I knew it was somebody
else's-the Boxer's. Just .as I was sure the inquisitor was a reincarna–
tion, I could see, too, that the kidnaper had been only the Boxer
reincarnated. So three existences in one single life, fifty years of my
personal history and your national history, were presented to my
eyes all in one moment. But now I had come to the end of the cycle
when hatred was to be appeased at last and debts long outstanding
were to
be
repaid. The mystery of life was grasped in one wink of
