Fire Flowers (28 page)

“I wish I was,” I said. “But I'm just a reporter.
Shimbun kisha desu.
”

“Oh.” She raised her eyebrows. “
Repootaa.
Very good Japanese.”

She topped up my drink and poured one for herself.

“
Chis-u.
” She held her glass in the air. I clinked it against my own. She knocked hers back. I did the same and an agreeable warmth hit my guts. Why hadn't I visited pleasant places like this more often?

“Where you stay now?” she demanded.

I laughed again. “Well, that's a funny thing . . . ”

Leaning over the counter, as if I were a regular soak in a downtown speakeasy, I found myself explaining that I'd recently been obliged to leave my quarters. She looked me up and down for a second, then her eyes brightened and she hurried around the bar and took my arm.

“Come—look!” she said, pulling at me.

I was pleasantly tight by now, and I let her lead me away through a back door to a flight of narrow steps. At the top of the stairs, a door opened to a small room with a stained ceiling. There was a futon in the corner and a battered-looking desk pushed up beneath the window. Big raindrops were trickling down the cracked panes.

“You stay here,” she said, excitedly. “Very cheap!”

Stay there?
I thought. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. Privacy. Exclusive rights to my own reading lamp. A good place to lie low, plot out my next steps. I could rewrite my Hiroshima piece, take photographs, read books, drink whisky. What a change from the Continental, with its officers doing jumping jacks in the halls, scratching at their white bristles in the mouldering bathrooms.

I turned to face the lady and negotiate terms.

A mischievous gleam appeared in her eye: “One more whisky?”

 

The next day I heaved a knapsack and suitcase up the steep wooden staircase to my new home. I lined up my tattered collection of Japanese books along the window ledge and lay a typewriter case I'd requisitioned from the
Stars and Stripes
on the desk. The room was quiet, secluded. At one corner of the room, I prized up the floorboard with my jackknife. I placed my Hiroshima negatives beneath it, the envelope hidden inside a cigar box and wrapped up in a cotton sweater for good measure.

I lay back on the futon and lit a cigarette. The room was filled with a pale grey light, and I listened to the rain patter against the roof and the windows. The place reminded me of an old forestry hut in the woods near our home, where I'd hidden out for a week when I was a teenager, just after my father had died. My uncle had finally tracked me down. He'd put his arm around my shoulder: “Come on home, Hal. He's gone now. Your mother needs you . . . ”

Glancing, butterfly dreams. When I awoke, I was disoriented. Night had fallen, and the crackling voice of Josephine Baker drifted up from the bar below. As I came downstairs, I saw my new landlady, Mrs. Ishino, arranging bottles of liquor on the shelves. A portrait of a Japanese man in a flying jacket hung above them on the wall. Officers sat at tables; a couple of girls in plain dresses laughing away with them, hands over their mouths. They weren't exactly beautiful, I thought, but seemed warm and friendly and were somehow the more appealing for that. As I took a stool at the bar, Mrs. Ishino smiled indulgently and poured me a drink.

“On house,” she announced, proudly. From a tiny kitchen behind her, wisps of steam were emerging. She called out in sharp command. An answering voice sang out with a long, high-pitched, “
Hai!
”

She turned to me maternally. “You like room?”

“Yes. I sure do.”

“You welcome.”

A girl came out from the kitchen with a plate of small dumplings, which she set in front of me with an incline of her head.

“Lynch-san,” Mrs. Ishino said. “This is Satsuko-chan. My new favourite girl.”

The girl looked at me. She had the darkest eyes I'd ever seen—almost entirely black from the pupil to the iris. Her face formed a smooth oval, the lips slightly parted to show small, regular teeth. Her pale skin was flushed from the heat of the kitchen and there was a faint perspiration on her brow. She wore a blue cloth tied around her forehead, which gave her a vaguely boyish, piratical air.

“Well. Here's to her,” I said, raising my glass.

Hands tight against the sides of her apron, she bowed. Mrs. Ishino gave another sharp command. With another obedient “
Hai!
” the girl scurried back to the kitchen.

“Satsuko-chan . . . ” Mrs. Ishino began, but just then, a couple of officers wearing rain capes emerged through the curtain with Japanese dates on their arms. They held up hands in greeting, as if they knew the place well. Mrs. Ishino led them over to a table and I sat alone at the bar for a while, sipping my drink and feeling almost absurdly content.

The girl bustled in and out from the kitchen several more times that night, bringing small plates of chipped potatoes and fried egg sandwiches for the men. Before long, I realized I was drunk. The place filled up, and, at one point, I helped Mrs. Ishino move the tables aside to make a space for dancing. There was none of the wild jitterbugging of the Ginza clubs here—the men were stately and senior, and moved their partners gracefully back and forth like ballroom dancers, hands on backs, swaying expertly to the music. Others played cards while the girls poured their beer, and a soft haze enveloped the place as Saturday evening toppled gently into the arms of Saturday night.

Later on, the girl came out to me. She'd removed her head-gear and had her face made up now, a simple brush of powder and a crimson curve of lipstick. She wore a green flower-print dress, a red plastic peony in her hair. Eyes downcast, she placed a light hand upon mine.

“You sit with me?” she asked.

Her hand was cool, the impression of skin smooth upon my wrist.

“Let's see now,” I said, turning over her palm. She resisted, and I dropped her hand, afraid that I'd offended her. But then, with a curious look in her eyes, she relented, and held out her hand in front of me.

There were no lines on her palm at all, just a smooth, shiny surface, like polished marble. I had a sudden recollection of Eugene, in the Oasis that night, the girl pouring out his beer.
Hal, meet Primrose. She's a swell sort!

I studied her. It was the same girl, I was sure. I felt a strange collision of emotions as I looked into her coal-black eyes. Curiosity. Admiration. What kind of life had she lived? What bleak encounters had she witnessed since the last time we met . . . I felt a frank, swelling attraction as I glanced at the curve of her chest, the pale skin taut across her breastbone.

My throat grew suddenly thick, and from nowhere, a loud roar thundered into my ears.

Her smooth palm was touching my cheek, holding my head steady. She looked into my eyes with an expression of concern.

“You tired, I think?”

The thundering faded. The music from the gramophone and the sound of conversation gradually reasserted themselves.

“Yes,” I stammered. “Yes, I am tired.”

She patted the side of my face.

“You go sleep,” she said, before walking to a table in the corner of the bar. As I sat there, clinging onto my drink, she threw me occasional darting glances. Finally, I stood up, determined to approach her again, but just then, another Western man—a civilian—entered the bar and walked over to her table. They talked for a short while, and she stood up and took his hand. She led him away through a low door at the back of the room and I caught a glimpse of her bare arm as she pulled the door shut. Into my mind's eye came the unwelcome image of his scratchy white legs, the red peony askew amidst stray strands of the girl's black hair. I threw back my drink and said goodnight to no one in particular. Then I clomped up the stairs to my new abode. I took a long drink of water from the jug, and passed out on my new bed.

 

In the lobby of the press club, correspondents hammered out copy with typewriters on their knees. The long-distance booths were jammed, urgent stories being dictated into the glossy black telephones. The
Asahi Shimbun
that day
 
was dominated by stories of unrest sweeping steadily across the country in the wake of the crop failures. The first reports of starvation had already emerged; there'd been rice riots in the north and strikes at the coal mines and here at one of the Tokyo news- papers. A leading communist had been welcomed home from China that week like a movie star. Philip Cochrane from the
Baltimore Sun
told me that mobs had greeted the man at the station, the whole place a sea of red flags.

Mark Ward had an inch of beard on his face and a glitter in his eye when we sat down for drinks in the bar later on that evening with Sally Harper of
TIME
.

“Welcome home, Ward. How was the Snow Country?”

As we drank our raw Japanese whisky, he regaled us with stories of evenings spent in sharecroppers' huts, peasants gathered around fires with padded blankets on their knees, telling tales of despair as the oxen moved about in the mulch, the snow thick on the ground outside.

“This country's a tinderbox, my friends. Believe me. A powder keg, just waiting to explode.”

“You're a true believer, Ward,” I said.

“Right.” His eyes narrowed. “Did you know G2 pulled me in yesterday?”

“Are you serious?” Sally said, her eyes wide with concern. G2 was Intelligence, the most muscular and secretive of the Occupation divisions, presided over by General Charles A. Willoughby—MacArthur's chief of intelligence, and, I recalled, Ward's nemesis.

“What did they want?”

“They wanted to ask me why I was writing a piece on Japanese union organizers. Whether or not I sympathized with them.”

“What did you say?”

“I told them that people were starving to death because our land reform directive was taking so long to draft, and that you could bet your bottom dollar that I sympathized with them.”

As I looked at him, I was put in mind of a painting I'd once seen in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Chagall: an old bearded man in a thick overcoat, a sack slung over his back, floating across a dream landscape of snow and yellow baroque architecture.

“What did they say to that?” Sally asked.

His voice fell in surly imitation. “They said: ‘Listen, Ward. Things have changed since we arrived. We're at war with the Russkies now. Whose side are you on?'”

He shook his big head, his voice sour. “You know they slung out two of your friends last week? Brown and Christo­pher?”

I vaguely remembered a demure, grey-haired Californian and an effeminate New Yorker, both of whom had been working at the
Stars and Stripes
when I'd arrived.

“You're kidding? For what?”

Ward waved his meaty hands in the air. “‘Communistic leanings!'”

I laughed. They'd been poring over baseball statistics when I'd first met them, apparently more concerned with sport than politics.

“They're Reds?”

“Sure! They've been sprinkling the whole paper with sub- version.”

“What's happening to them?”

“They've been sent to Okinawa. To keep them out of trouble.”

“That's real tough for them.

He glanced at me sharply.

“You don't understand, Lynch.”

The wattle of skin beneath his jowls swayed as he shook his head sullenly.

“Are you in some kind of situation, Mark?” I asked.

He stared at me, mildly incredulous. “Don't you get it, Lynch? I'm next on their goddamned list!”

Sally left us, and Ward and I went out to get a snack at a low noodle place. It was bustling with GIs and their dates and we drank lukewarm beer and slurped at our noodles in the Japanese fashion. Ward began to pluck at his plate of fried dumplings with his chopsticks.

“And how about you, Lynch?” he asked, absently. “The
Stars and Stripes
send you anywhere interesting?”

“They fired me,” I said.

The chopsticks paused in midair.

“What happened?”

“I took a train trip. To Hiroshima.”

The chopsticks clattered onto the table and an incredulous expression suffused Ward's face.

“You actually did it?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

The edges of his wide lips curled up.

“How did it look?”

“More or less the same as the last time I saw it. By the way, Disease X is real.”

The jowls shook and the inevitable cigar appeared. I told him of the long walk across the red fields, the pulverized city centre, the victims I'd met at the hospital. He clutched my hand, steam beading on his brow from the billowing stockpots.

“Did you take photographs, Hal? Please tell me you took photographs.”

I nodded.

“Where are they?”

“Safe. Most of them. The first prints got confiscated.”

“How? By whom? Got a name?”

“SCAP. Public relations.” I realized that I hardly knew. “They raked me over the coals when I got back, anyhow.”

His eyes narrowed behind a cloud of fragrant smoke.

“Who's the pigeon?”

“Does it matter?”

Eugene's face the next day had been grey and artless, though that could just as well have been his daily hangover. It could have been anybody in the newsroom, I thought. I'd been so tired that night I couldn't even remember if I'd shut my drawer.

Ward's face was animated now, the glow of the restaurant lanterns reflecting in the wide lenses of his spectacles.

“How are you going to play it, Lynch? I can help you. We could file the story here, overseas line. But what about the pictures? They'll never make it out. And the pictures are the story.”

“I know that, Ward.”

He frowned, puffing at the cigar, releasing several big clouds of smoke. Finally he spoke again. “There's only one way I can see it, Hal. You've got to get back to the States. Take the negatives with you. Or have someone else go for you. Then pound on some doors until they're published.”