The Great Fire (2 page)

'Yair, well. I suppose you can go over. He's not there, but, the Brigadier. Gone to Kobe.'

'And when will he get back?'

'Yair, well, should be tonight. I reckon he'll go straight home. Up in the hills, that's where he lives. Not on the island.'

'On the island, can they put me up for the night?'

'All the room in the bloody world. Buckingham Palace on Abdication Day.'

Leith went out with the driver. 'I'll need you tomorrow. I don't know your name.'

'Name's Talbot. First name Brian. Sir.'

Together they lowered Leith's gear into the launch, where a sailor stood silent at the helm. Leith dropping down beside his kit, called, 'Goodbye then,' and Talbot raised his hand. They were cast off, rocking on a swift sea, breeze rising and salt spray: a night sky starry above marching columns of cloud. The harbour lights drew away, and dim lights of the town. On hills and islands there was an ancient darkness, whose few lamps — of kerosene or tallow — were single, tremulous, yellow: frugal and needful.

'No fishing lights?'

The helmsman said, 'Minesweeping.' He added a comment that blew away, so that the soldier heard only 'Weeping.'

Behind them on the pier, Talbot would be showing the book — 'His father' — with a slight sense of betrayal. But it matters to have something to tell. Remarks would be made about the row of ribbons: 'The medal.' In the boat, Leith was silent as if alone. Solitude, flowing cold from the sea, fairly streamed, also, from his companion's back. Ahead, the island grew electrically present in a grid of lights.

In the pattern of disruption that had been Aldred Leith's life for years, arrival had kept its interest. Excitement dwindling, curiosity had increased. Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties. On the sea that evening, such expectation was negligible. Earlier in the day, in the swaying train, Leith had written to a wartime comrade: 'Peace forces us to invent our future selves.' Fatuity, he thought now, and in his mind tore the letter up. There was enough introspection to go round, whole systems of inwardness. The deficiency didn't lie there. To deny the external and unpredictable made self-possession hardly worth the price. Like settling for a future without coincidence or luck.

He thought, How mood changes all, like an accident.

Cascades of bitter drops came across the boat. Leith's coat unfurled like a jib. The little riding lights, rocking emerald and ruby, would have shown the man smiling — as a man may privately smile at almost anything: over the memory of a girl or the prospect of a good dinner; at the discomfiture of an enemy, or a friend. As a woman smiles over a compliment or a new dress. With Leith at that moment it was the shared incident of the book that pleased him, the young soldier turning up at Kure with the same book in hand — a long shot, yet familiar.

The engine subsided. They were settling into the lee of the island, which was coming to meet them on a branch of white lights. At the mole, a uniformed sailor waited with a boat hook. The launch paused, plunged, sidled, drawing raucous breath. There was a paved quay dashed by foam and stained by tides — a stage from which a grandiose stair mounted to a portico of angled columns: a travesty of Venice, owing much to Musso. The naval academy of the defeated had become a hospital for victors.

And when, he wondered, saluting the antipodean sailor, shall I mingle at large with the defeated themselves? — what I've come for. For that, and Hiroshima.

He heaved his kit bag out on the flagstones, sprang to the wet ledge, and waved off the boat. Stood a moment on the paved brink, scarcely thinking; only breathing the night and its black lappings.

Indoors, a foyer whose beams and architraves might bring down the house was floored with gritty terrazzo and seared with light. Another, huger stain resounded with Occidental boots and voices, and with the high speech, soft or yelping, of young Western women, astonishing because unheard in many months. Men and women in uniform, all Westerners, were going up and down: active yet not quite purposeful, unprepared for peace. They glanced at the new arrival climbing among them, and women noted a durable man.

When he had registered his arrival, he was shown to a high narrow room with an army cot, a blanket, and one infirm chair. The little room had an unconvinced Westernism: dimensions, door, window taken on faith by untravelled Japanese draughtsmen. The high window looked on a shaft. One lightbulb dangled. Leith's sole familiar was the heavy canvas bag that, resting by his feet as he sat on the bed, took on, with its worn and weighted fellowship, the speckled contour of an old dog: barrel-bodied, obedient.

Having flung a few things on the chair and closed a louvre on the cold shaft, Leith went out again. He found, in an office, an Australian woman in her shapeless forties, talkative, good-natured, in a brown wool dress. He enquired for Professor Gardiner.

'He's gone to rest.' As if Gardiner were a roosting bird, or had died.

'He's been with the doctors, and gone to take a nap. He's not that young, you know, and then he's been through the fire.'

'Can I leave a note?' Leith took a slip, wrote, and folded. Asked, fatally, 'Are you with the army, then?'

'Oh, an army wife, just helping out.' Becoming arch with the heroic male. 'Husband's with the Signal Corps. I only came here last week. We were a hundred wives in a little ship, all the way from Sydney to Kure, five weeks without stopping. Well, we did put in at New Guinea, but just for water, not to go ashore ... Oh, wonderful, my first holiday ever. Morning tea in our cabins, the Chinese stewards, the laundry done. Oh the tiny islands, the ocean. No worries, just to stop the kiddies from falling overboard.' She chatted on, five weeks without stopping. 'Some of the women hadn't seen their man in four years. Got married as hubby went to war. On the ship, the officers took to us. There was one lass —'

Leith handed over his note.

'So you're the major, then, Major Leith. He's been expecting you a couple of days. Been quite on edge.' Her glance went to the red inch of braid. 'He'll be down to dinner. They want you to stop by the main office.' She thought his eyes, well, beautiful.

A handmade arrow directed him to Administration. In poor light, a khaki soldier of his own age was tapping with index fingers on an antique typewriter and did not soon turn round.

Warrant Officer Wells, from Ballarat, said, 'You never took your key,' handing this over on a string. 'We never saw your papers.'

Documents were examined. 'Yair, they told us to look out for you. A room to yourself.' The antipodean note was peevishly struck: None of your Pom airs here.

'It doesn't matter, I'm only here overnight.'

'Ar, the room's there, you're in it, aren't you.' Leafing through credentials, some of which were in Chinese characters. 'How're we supposed to make sense of this?'

'The translation's attached.'

'What is it, Japanese?'

'No. I've been two years in China.'

'Welcome back to civilisation. You've got to sign for the key. You've got to turn it in when you leave. The mess is on the second floor, you'll hear the gong. Meanwhiles, you get a drink in the lounge.'

Going downstairs, Leith encountered on a landing the smell of hospital — of military hospitals behind the lines, to which regulation antiseptic soups and soaps were common. Field hospitals, by contrast, smelt thickly of mortality: reek of spilt intestines and festered blood, of agony, fear, decay. His own terrible wound, of which a long broad welt, down all his left side, was fading, had come in the last autumn of war, a year after the episode of the medal. On the earlier occasion, in Tunisia, he had been hit on the same side, heart and lung missed by a filament. 'You lucky bugger,' said the medical officer who dressed the wound; as if grumbling. The patient said, 'Fuck lucky.' And the doctor, saturnine: 'You're alive, aren't you. You can't have everything.'

A war was over, and he had been, he supposed, lucky. Having had much, though not, as yet, everything.

Long and narrow, the lounge had possibly been a dormitory. Furnished now by a scattering of vermilion chairs in false leather, and by an improvised bar, on trestles at the far end of the room, where a score of servicemen and a dozen nurses stood talking and laughing and flirting under a canopy of tobacco smoke; dropping ash from fingers and spilling drink from paper cups. The table was ranged with bottles and scattered with dropped nuts and flaked potatoes. The men were, in varying degrees, drunk. The younger women had unrolled their regulation hair for the evening. Some of them were pretty, and had exchanged their uniforms for coloured dresses; and wore, on slim wrists, the linked bracelets of gun-metal, black and gilt, improvised by Japanese peddlers from the fallen scraps of war and sold to conquerors on the streets of ruined cities. Two or three of the girls trilled and twirled to imaginary music while a soldier, who knelt at their feet, was setting up a gramophone from a ganglion of wires.

That was the scene, for those who might later recall it, on a spring night of 1947 on the island of Ita Jima in the Inland Sea of Japan.

Leith, entering, pausing, was struck again by the presence and voices of young Western women, and by the naturalness of it.

A lone elderly man in a pale suit, cast adrift in an armchair, had clearly never belonged to anything other than civil life: frail, gaunt, small, he looked civility. A crumpled linen man, a crumbled cast of a man.

A young officer nearby gave up his seat to Leith. 'I'm just off anyway.'

They thanked him. Gardiner shook Leith's hand. 'I saw you go up the stair this evening. I recognised you from your letters.'

Words, Leith thought, that a woman might have used. 'I was afraid I wouldn't get here. Been delayed everywhere.'

'I sail in the morning. We have the evening, the night.' These words, too, incongruously lover-like. They sat, silenced by all they might say.

Gardiner's pallor announced the cruel imprisonment of three years and nine months. His handclasp was a bone-china claw. Aquamarine eyes were overbright for his condition. Leith had been told, He can't last more than a few months, everything's giving up. Old beyond age, he was only in his sixty-first year.

Men and girls glanced out at them from the twirling end of the room. Gardiner said, 'You're awaited here with interest.'

'A curiosity.'

'A celebrity.' Gardiner used the word indulgently: an expression that had come to power during his absence from the world. 'Well, we've both weathered it all somehow. I've got tuberculosis, it turns out, on top of everything else. They're giving me a new drug from America, which plays merry hell. Side effects, they say. Side effects, aftereffects. Sending me back to Britain like this. Repatriation.
In patria.
But my territory has always been here.'

His parents, Orientalists, had settled in Japan long since. Born in Bremen, the father had taught at British universities, become a British subject. During the Great War, the name had been Anglicised, from Gaërtner. On the shortest day of the year 1941, the Japanese government had offered this only son the protection of the Axis, proposing that he reclaim his German paternity. He had chosen the prison instead.

'You call me Ginger. We don't have time for gradations. Ginger. I had hair once, and it was red.' The gramophone broke out:

A hubba-hubba-hubba, hello, Jack –

A hubba-hubba-hubba, just got back –

Well, a hubba-hubba-hubba,

Let's shoot some breeze,

Say whatever happened to the Japanese?

A hubba-hubba-hubba, ain't you heard?

A hubba-hubba-hubba, got the word

I got it front a guy who is in the know,

It was mighty smoky over Tokyo.

Men and girls were clapping and chanting along with the music.

A friend of mine in a B-29

Dropped another load for luck.

As he flew away he was heard to say,

A hubba-hubba-hubba, Yuk! yuk!

Professor Gardiner was making a low humming sound that was not the tune of any song. 'We might go down to dinner. One floor. Food's unappetising. My table manners are bad. I've got this tremor — you've noticed, no doubt. Had it since the first war, but more pronounced now. Effects, aftereffects. You won't mind if we go at a stately pace, stairs are the devil for me.'

Leith helped him up, coaxing the bones together.

A tinned meal was served, by Japanese, at a long table where there was shouting and smoking, like a students' hall, and beer and hard liquor set out in bottles. Gardiner was greeted by doctors and nurses, and by patients in dressing gowns.

'Decent people, but the place is laconic. Surprised by peace.'

'I should see the director tomorrow. I have to move into his establishment — a set of houses, is it, in the hills? I've been billetted there.'

Gardiner was struggling. 'My teeth are the devil, these new snappers they gave me. My own were all knocked in or gave out in the prison camp. Try not to mind me. In the hills, yes. The central house is pure, you know, not like this. The place itself, in woods, is quite beautiful. There's a small valley, deep like a fell, with a falling stream and a temple. The property was a retreat for an admiral when the academy, this building here, was created in the thirties. Now, yes, it's Driscoll and his crew. They've flung up a lot of prefabs, Nissen huts, that sort of thing, you'll probably get something of the sort.'

'I need to spread my papers about.'

But Gardiner was pondering the Japanese house. 'Yes, a fine place. It's under some protection or other. They only use it to dine in. Now it's Driscoll and his lot. Brigadier Driscoll.'

'He's a medical man?'

'An administrator of hospitals. I believe he qualified as a doctor.'

'And as a man?'

Slight gesture. 'They're not liked, Driscoll and his wife. Driscoll's an angry man. Hurt, you know, unsure. Drinks a good bit, blusters. Offensive. People don't like it, of course. Visitors are sent there, distinguished visitors, that sort of thing. Not so much Americans, Americans have their base at Kure, and all Japan to play in. British, rather, like yourself, or Australians like the Driscolls — scientists, historians, journalists. It's Hiroshima that draws them. They come to inspect the sites, spend a few days, sleep up there in the hills. Damp, I can tell you.'