Mr Two Bomb (17 page)

All this and more I thought of as I watched the three soldiers at their work. Already they had started work on digging a fresh pit. Perhaps I do them a disservice. Perhaps the only way to have completed a job such as that was to be the automaton, switching your mind off and letting your limbs take over.

Shinzo and the girl had come out of the hall hand in hand and were watching the pyre beside me. Shinzo, his face streaked with tears, had shut his eyes and his mouth was moving in silent prayer. The girl was fascinated by the blazing pyre and how these things that had once been human were melting into ash. The smoke eddied up into the sky, the only memorial that these victims would ever know.

Behind us, we heard a gentle cough. It was the doctor, in his stained white coat. “I am sorry to bother you at a time like this,” he said, rubbing his hands down his sides. “I know that you are grieving. But, as you can see, we need help. Could you stay? Could you help us? If only for the night?”

How my stomach turned when I heard those words. Was there no end to the chores that I was being volunteered for? So I had been lucky and I had survived the bomb. But did that mean that I was indebted to every person I met? Did that mean that I had been forfeited into a life of service, where in every instance I had to think first of others? No, no! Never! I was my own man and would do as I pleased. For over a day now, I had – under sufferance – helped out as best I could. But because of my health, was I now morally obliged to tend the sick? And if for one day, then why not another week? A year? Was it suddenly my duty to care for them for the rest of my days?

Shinzo had turned to the doctor. “Of course,” he said. “Of course we will stay. We’re not trained, but will do what we can.”

“What?” I was maddened with rage, like a bull that has been pricked and pricked again until it would gore its own shadow. Who was this man, this idiot, to think that he could answer for me? Never mind that he had just lost his sister. Hiroshima was awash with grief that day. The girl had lost her grandmother; my Sumie was dead. So why did Shinzo suddenly think it was within his boon to offer us up for the night? And without even the courtesy of a ‘by your leave’.

The longer I dwelt upon it, the more enraged I became. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I said. “Just who the hell do you think you are? Are you some officer ordering his troops? Is that what you think?”

Shinzo stared at me in puzzlement. “I thought this morning you suggested helping out at an aid station. Did I misunderstand you?”

“I am sick of being taken for granted!” I said.

“I thought you wanted to help.”

“Well listen to this – I am off! I am going! I am leaving Hiroshima as soon as I can! I have had it! I have had it with you! I have had it with this city!”

Shinzo nodded in agreement, before bringing up his hands and bowing his head in a deep salaam. “You are right and I am sorry,” he said. “I have been thoughtless. I said that we would stay the night – when what I meant was that I would stay the night. It goes without saying that you are free to come and go as you please.”

“I am staying,” said the girl, agog at my fury.

“Good for you!” I was grinding my teeth I was so livid with anger. “Good for both of you! Do what you want! Spend the night! Spend the week! Save as many of these children as you want! I do not care! I do not care what you do! But please – please – do not bother to include me in any of your plans ever again!”

Shinzo again salaamed, bowing even deeper than before. “I am sorry,” he said. “I have taken you for granted.”

“Do not worry about that, Shinzo!” I said, my voice almost cracking I was in such a perfect fury. “It is a mistake that I will never allow to happen again!”

“I am sorry.”

“Goodbye Shinzo, and I hope to see you again, if and when you ever bother to return to Nagasaki! Goodbye!”

My eyes raked briefly over Shinzo, the girl and that stunned doctor before I turned on my heel. I stalked out of the compound, quite consumed with rage, and all I could hear was the dry crackle of those funeral pyres and the pleading cries of the girl.

The shallowness of that man that was myself almost makes me weep. To think that I could not even have spent a single night tending those burned wretches.

It would be easy to claim that the world was out of kilter that day and that we all of us in Hiroshima had gone a little mad. But the truth was that I was acting entirely true to form. I had been a beast since childhood. It was in my nature – and it was only in the aftermath of the bomb that my true character, red in tooth and claw, had been unmuzzled.

Though it was quite dark, there was enough light from the sporadic fires to guide me north-west to one of the outlying stations at Hiroshima.

The lethargy that had been hanging over me that day had quite gone, replaced with a vast reserve of energy and determination. I was my own man again; I could do as I pleased. If I wanted to work in a hospital or an emergency aid centre then I could do just that – but it would be my call, my decision. And if I wanted to go directly back to Nagasaki, that was also my decision.

What had happened to Hiroshima was a tragedy. But was it of my making? Was I now bound to stay there until every last victim had been either saved or incinerated? And did I not have some obligation, also, to my wife and my baby boy – or did these thousands of injured strangers have a greater call upon my time?

And so, round and round, went my thoughts in this angry swirl, as I fulminated against Shinzo and all those other parasites who had impinged upon my time. In my rage, I lashed out at a rock. I gave it a full kick with the toe of my boot. It clinked satisfyingly through the ruins.

“Stop!” came a cry. “Stop!”

I didn’t stop. I wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping. I dug my hands deep into my pockets and continued to walk.

It was the girl and still she came after me, pattering down the street before tugging at my sleeve. “Please stop.”

I did not even reply. I shook her with a brisk flick of my arm. But she was having none of it. This time she ran directly in front of me. “Why will you not stop?” she said, holding her ground. “Are you frightened to talk to me?”

I didn’t even bother to walk round her. I shouldered her out of the way. She gave a little cry as she fell to the ground – but it didn’t stop her coming back for more. Again she darted in front of me.

“Please stop,” she said again. “We want you to come back. Please.”

This time I cuffed her round the ear with the back of my hand. She let out a squeal of pain.

“How dare you!” she said, and with that she started kicking me with her dainty little shoes and drumming her fists into my chest. “How dare you! You are a beast, a selfish beast, and you have been a beast since the day you were born. You never think of anyone but yourself and you never have. You are a beast! Beast! Beast!”

It was difficult to tell what angered me more. Was it her puny kicks and her feeble punches, or was it that I was hearing the truth?

Either way, my reaction was savage. I gave her a full roundarm slap across the face. Her head jolted to the side. She was flung off her feet, crumpling to the ground.

And what happened next. Did it really happen? Or is it one of those hideous memories which you can only peep at through clenched fingers? Have you ever regretted something so much that the very thought of it still makes you wince? Well, this was that memory tenfold.

Perhaps it did not happen. Now that I am in old age, I sometimes like to fancy that it’s just my memory playing tricks.

But in my heart, I know it to be true.

I kicked her.

Not content with knocking the girl across the street, I followed after her and then gave her a scything kick which landed – and I know this precisely – on her buttocks, so hard that she was lifted off the ground. She screamed in pain, mewling on the ground in a foetal ball.

For a moment I stood over her, the boxer triumphant who dares his opponent to get up for more. I glanced back. Shinzo was standing five metres away, his hands clutched either side of his head, as shocked as I had ever seen him.

He rushed over to the girl, cradling her in his arms. He never once looked at me nor said a word.

CHAPTER TEN

The destruction of Hiroshima would, you might have thought, have galvanised Japan’s leaders into action. Far from it.

Some, like the war minister General Anami, were all for continuing the fight. “Would it not be wondrous,” he said, “for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?”

Others hoped that a peace deal might yet be brokered with Russia; it would need only another 24 hours before the Russians nailed that particular lie.

And that night of 7th August, there was also a third argument going the rounds in Tokyo: that despite President Truman’s claims, it was not possible for an atomic bomb to have razed Hiroshima to the ground. It was a physical impossibility. Our scientists knew all about atomic bombs; we had even tried to make one ourselves and knew for a fact that it was quite impossible to have produced enough fissionable material to construct an atomic bomb.

Further to that argument, Admiral Toyoda also stated that even if the Yankees had achieved the impossible and built themselves an atomic bomb, then they were certainly incapable of producing a second. That would have required twice as much uranium or plutonium, which was self-evidently impossible; in fact not just impossible, but exponentially impossible. It was not just doubly impossible, but impossible to the power of two.

So, two days after Little Boy had been dropped, Japan was not even close to surrendering. They were like the gambling addict who’s in so deep that he can never stop – and who yet hopes that everything might turn good on the last throw of the dice.

I shake my head with unconscionable weariness as I think of our war leaders. America had its Roosevelt and Britain had its Winston Churchill – not just great leaders, but perhaps their country’s greatest leaders of all time. And who did we have to lead us through the Second World War? The Big Six, those fusty throwbacks to the Samurai era, who still believed it better to die with honour than to surrender.

But did it all turn out for the best? Japan is definitely a kinder, more gentle, more considerate country than it could have ever have been without the war. And perhaps we needed this awful catharsis to break the mould? Perhaps -

I know I certainly did.

As I walked away from the girl, my boiling anger was replaced by the most toxic horror.

We all of us have an image of ourselves. It is our currency, our definition of self-worth.

And, though it had taken me nearly 30 years, I was suddenly going through the most harrowing re-evaluation. How often in our lives do we have a mirror held up to our own awfulness?

I had kicked the girl? I had clubbed a seven-year-old girl to the ground and then kicked her? And all because she had begged me to spend a single night tending the sick children at the Hijiyama Primary School? The girl was right – I was nothing but a beast, a foul-tempered, self-obsessed beast. In the whole of Hiroshima that day, there could not have been a single person who had behaved as awfully, as selfishly, as I had.

Was this what I had become? Had it taken the ending of civilisation in Hiroshima to turn me into an animal? Or, perhaps, I had always been like that.

All this and more I was to dwell upon for many days afterwards, but at that time, my steps slowed, they faltered, and there in the wilderness of Hiroshima I came to a dead stop and let out a great howling shriek to the moon – not for the dead, but for the monster that I had become.

I drummed my forehead on the heels of my hand and slapped myself hard twice on the cheeks.

If there is anything at all to say in my defence it is that, then and there, I endeavoured to make amends. It would have been easier to have continued on my journey. I could have been the coward and caught the first train to Nagasaki. I might never have seen the girl again – might never have had to stare into her unflinching eyes and apologise.

But, for what little that it is worth, I quickly realised the enormity what I had done.

It was going to be humiliating – mortifyingly humiliating. But if I were to retain even a sliver of self-respect in the future, I would have to apologise.

I retraced my steps, though not quickly, like a boy dawdling on his way to school as he tries to delay the inevitable. I tried to recall my actions of the previous 15 minutes. Had that really been me – me – who had refused to give up one single night to work in a children’s aid centre? Who had stormed out in a rage and who had then kicked a girl while she was on the ground? Was that really me?

Yes, it was me, and though I am now able, at least, to accept what I did, even 60 years on I still find the memory of it excruciating.

I found the girl lying on her side in the school hall where the doctor was inspecting her back and her bottom. The bruised skin was already a mottled purple-grey. The doctor delicately probed, feeling his way round the small of her back.

“Can you move your leg?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

The doctor worked his hands up her spine. “There are no broken bones,” he said, standing up. “But it will be sore for a while.”

His eyes turned to me. “You have returned to join us?”

“I have,” I said, before diving into that deep, deep well of remorse and apology. “I am sorry that I left you in the first place. For too long in my life, I have been a very selfish man.”

I knelt in front of the girl who was still lying on her side. She looked me gravely in the eye.

“I’m sorry. I truly apologise. I don’t know if you will ever be able to forgive me. But, if it is any consolation, I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive myself. I’m sorry.”

“Beast,” she said, and turned her head away. Given the pain, not to mention the humiliation of what she had just been through, I am surprised she did not spit in my face.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “So very sorry.”

I stretched my hand to touch her lightly on the shoulder, but she shrugged it off. “Go away.”