The Sun Gods (38 page)

Tearing at the hard, dry ground, Mrs. Wada's fingernails were soon streaming with blood, and still the baby would not come. “Take it out! Take it out!” were the only words that Mitsuko could catch amid her screams.

Suddenly the contractions stopped, and there was only the sound of the woman's panting. Then, with amazing calm, Mrs. Wada said, “If it's a boy, name it Tsuyoshi after my husband. If it's a girl, call it Tomoko.”

“That's for you to do,” said Mitsuko.

“Don't be stupid,” said Mrs. Wada. “I'm not going to live through this.”

Before Mitsuko could find the words to reassure her, the contractions started again. On and on Mrs. Wada screamed, until finally, with an enormous gush of blood, an inert lump of flesh disgorged itself from between the woman's legs and lay in Mitsuko's hands. Almost at the same moment, Mrs. Wada gave a long hiss, and her pain-racked body shriveled up like a pricked balloon. One corpse had given birth to another. The tiny dead creature would have been a girl.

Mitsuko carried the little thing to the side of the building and laid it on some roof tiles in a shady spot. She searched among the waiting victims for someone who might have the strength to help her carry the mother, but most had all they could do to remain on their feet. Wiping away as much of the blood and slime from the body as she could with the saturated cloth, she picked up what was left of Mrs. Wada and staggered to the place where she had laid the little girl, Tomoko, who had never drawn breath. She wished there were something she could cover the bodies with decently, but she realized that in the short time since they had arrived at the schoolyard, several more corpses had joined them on the ground. Mitsuko did her best to drag these out of the direct sunlight, after which she struggled through the pressing crowd to the nurse in the doorway.

“I can help,” she panted. “I've worked in a hospital.”

“In there,” said the nurse, motioning with a jerk of the head.

Mitsuko stayed “in there” for the next two days without sleep and little more than an occasional toilet break, helping the doctor oil wounds and extract glass splinters from eyes—when he could do anything at all for the lacerated remnants of humanity who streamed into the relief center. For a while on the first day, there was some talk that the building would have to be evacuated if the sudden wind that developed were to sweep nearby fires in this direction, but by six p.m. the winds had shifted and the danger of fire was not mentioned again.

The patients who could speak told of the skies burning after sunset, of new fires near the train station, of horrible swarms of mosquitoes attacking the suppurating skin of the victims trying to sleep in the schoolyard. Over and over word came that the area around Matsuyama had been decimated. The Mitsubishi Ordinance Factory had been destroyed, killing all the high school girls working inside. The Urakami Cathedral had been dashed to the ground. The handsome old camphor trees that shaded the Medical University campus had been uprooted or transformed into skeletal stumps, and the buildings reduced to smoking rubble. In some areas, corpses littered the ground so thickly that it was impossible for the living to walk in a straight line. In other areas, the destruction had been so complete that there were not even corpses left. Matsuyama was said to be one such place.

Alarms were sounded when enemy planes passed overhead, but no one seemed to care. All through the night the planes came, at one point in such numbers that the building shook with the roar of their engines, but at least they dropped no more bombs.

Mitsuko was still working like an automaton the next day when an advance party of doctors from the Sasebo Naval Hospital arrived. She put in one more unbroken night of work, during which time the school was being set up as sleeping quarters for the medical teams pouring into the city. Finally, nearly forty-eight hours after the bomb fell, she dozed for an hour in the corner of one “dormitory” room and then set out on foot for Matsuyama.

None of the rumors had prepared her for the totality of destruction that she found where her family had been living. It was impossible to tell where the streets had been laid out. Except for a few scattered stones, the slope was barren as if a gigantic bulldozer had scoured its way from top to bottom. She was almost thankful. How much more terrible it must have been for those people who had been trapped under buildings and slowly suffocated or burned to death. Here, there was nothing to react to. One day, she had had a family; today, they no longer existed. They had all been at home when she left, even Ichiro, who had little more to do in Nagasaki than tend the vegetable garden. Perhaps they had not even suffered.

She stumbled up the hill to see what was left of the Urakami Cathedral, center of the city's Catholic community. How many of the faithful twenty thousand had been killed? How many of the huge, red edifice's six thousand seats had been occupied at the moment of destruction? What did the survivors think now of their God? The few remaining sculpture saints still cast their gazes heavenward as if seeking an explanation for the indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. But up there, in the heavens, lived no God. Up there were only the planes from Seattle, the Boeings, the B-29s, delivering their gifts of hate, as if sent by Tom for Mitsuko herself. Perhaps, between white saints and their white God, no explanation was necessary. Those who had died here had not been Catholics or Christians or even human beings. They were just Japs.

That day, she turned her back on Matsuyama and vowed never to visit this part of the city again. She returned to the relief center and worked long hours doing the only thing she felt there was left for her to do in this world. The best way she could serve her surviving family would be to join those who had entered oblivion. Mineko must never know she had existed. Yoshiko would go on with her life in America, and Mitsuko could never be part of that. Her “family” were those sick, blinded souls who had been pulverized between the millstones of honor and justice.

Almost before anyone had noticed, she had become a permanent part of the medical team. When the tension of those first days had abated enough for people to begin thinking about themselves as individual human beings again, a doctor smoking a cigarette asked her name. She hesitated only a moment before answering, “Tomoko Wada.” Through her, the dead child would have life.

As Tomoko Wada, she stayed on in the New Kozen Elementary School when it was taken over as a branch of the University Hospital. The government, in its wisdom, had stopped supporting it as a relief center in October despite the hundreds of patients still desperate for its services. She continued to be Tomoko Wada when the Occupation freshly outfitted and donated to the city of Nagasaki the old Japanese Army Hospital in Tokiwa-machi a few blocks away, moving both staff and equipment there from the school in December. She found a room nearby and spent most of each day in the wards of the new Nagasaki Citizens' Hospital.

It was not the life she would have chosen. She was not what anyone would call “happy.” But as she recalled the horrid images, she smiled to herself, glad at least that her anger was still there. It was this to which she had clung—this angry love for the individual men and women and children whose bodies had been broken by the bomb—some hurt so deeply inside that the damage was surfacing only now, eighteen years later.

Yet today those men stood before the television cameras, mouthing words of palliation, words that had nothing to do with the mortification of the flesh of real human beings. Only once had she seen words that came close to capturing the truth. Not surprisingly, the words had been written by a doctor, one who had cared for hundreds of the wounded, who had been one of the deeply wounded himself, and who had looked at the horror with unflinching eyes. The truth had frightened the American occupiers, and they had tried to suppress Dr. Nagai's words, relenting finally in 1949.

“Yes,” Mitsuko had said to herself upon reading
The Bells of Nagasaki
, “this is what it was really like.” But when she came to the end, her rage boiled over, for after his heroic act of witnessing one of the worst evils ever perpetrated upon man by man, the doctor had betrayed his own anger. After all the blood, all the fire and suffering, he concluded that Nagasaki should be grateful to God for having chosen the city as a sacrificial lamb to end the war. With that inflated sense of self-importance granted only to the religious, he concluded that Nagasaki was the one holy place in all of Japan and that God himself—not the American pilots—had actually directed the bomb to fall on the Urakami Cathedral. None of the other destroyed cities in the world had been a great enough sacrifice for this bloodthirsty god. But when holy Nagasaki screamed with pain, God had gone straight to the emperor and inspired him to surrender. Nagasaki had been a noble and splendid burnt offering to God because of its cathedral. When eight thousand Catholic believers and their priests entered eternal life burning with pure smoke, that had been beautiful and sublime. These faithful had been the only ones in Japan free from sin and worthy to be offered to God.

Here was God at his finest. Only God could justify the incineration of the innocent. Only God could dazzle the mind of a man whose eyes had seen so clearly. Without God, how tortured, how conscience-stricken must be the great killers of mankind. Someday, she knew, the makers of war would turn to Dr. Nagai with gratitude in their hearts for having shown them the way.

No, a blind woman with her skin peeling off was a wounded human being, not a lamb of God. Turn her into anything higher, nobler, purer or holier, and she ceased to be human. She became an abstraction, a symbol without feelings or pain. The eight thousand Catholics burning with pure smoke in Dr. Nagai's fevered imagination surely felt no pain; but to the eight thousand individual human beings—and the seventy thousand infidels who joined them in death—there was nothing beautiful, pure, or sublime in what happened to them. Of course, there was no way to ask them about that. They were dead now. And probably the partial human beings lying in the wards here wished they were dead, too. We, the living, the sinners, could do only one thing for the dead: to mourn them in anger. To love each other in anger. To resist the temptations of an evil God who would tear his children to pieces and command them to be grateful for it.

Mitsuko's own temptation over the years had been her children, one of her body and one of her heart. On days when her love for the victims did not seem great enough to sustain her, she would think of the baby she had left behind in Chiba and wonder what the child looked like, how she was growing, what kind of a person she was becoming.

Only once over the years had Mitsuko weakened. Knowing that Mineko's twelfth birthday was approaching, she traveled to Tokyo to present her the other mirror. Any younger, and Mineko would have been too much her parents' little girl; any older, and too many explanations would have been necessary. Mineko's beauty had been a thrill to her and brought her memories of Frank. Perhaps it had been with Frank that she had first tasted that love borne of anger which had carried her through the pain.

Sheer distance made Billy less of a threat to her peace of mind. Living across the ocean in the home of the Reverend Thomas Morton, he might, like other Americans, have learned to hate all Japs for the greater glory of God. By now, surely, there was nothing left of her inside him. Sometimes, though, she would imagine that Yoshiko had sought him out and given him the mirror, and that, perhaps, lingering reverberations of her bitter love for him had been transmitted from the carved wood through his hand to his heart.

There had been one instance of temptation regarding Billy, too. In 1951, she had been asked to interpret for a party of American pacifists and do-gooders who were visiting the hospital. The staff knew that she had useful English skills and pressed her to guide the group around. They were visiting Nagasaki to build homes for victims of the bombing. She wanted to ask, who had sent them, the president of the United States to lessen America's guilt? But she held her tongue and showed them around, making certain they saw the most grotesquely disfigured patients.

One especially tall, bony man in a white short-sleeved shirt was furiously taking notes on everything he heard. He had a camera slung over his shoulder and every now and then would ask permission to use it. Some members of the group tried to engage her in conversation, but she had all she could do to remain civil, and she barely looked at them. As the group was leaving, the tall, thin man thanked her for her kindness and asked her name. She looked him in the eye now for the first time and caught her breath. He was Reverend Emery Andrews of the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle. She recognized him from the crowd of well-wishers seeing the busloads of people off to Puyallup. And he was the father of Brooks, the other little boy Frank had saved from drowning at the Minidoka swimming hole.

For a split second, she thought of giving him her real name. Perhaps he knew Tom and could tell her about Billy. Perhaps he could deliver Billy a message, bypassing Tom. In the end, though, she said only, “My name is Tomoko Wada.”

“Tomoko Wada,” he repeated, scribbling her name in his notebook. “And where did you learn to speak such excellent English?”

When she hesitated again, he looked straight at her. “Are you sure we've never met before?” he asked. “In Seattle? Or Camp Harmony? Or Minidoka? You look so familiar.”

How could she utter the word “Seattle”? How could she tell him that she had been the wife of a man who had betrayed her and betrayed the community he served so faithfully?

“Never mind,” she said. “My English is not good.”

“Thank you anyway, Tomoko Wada,” he said. “You have been very kind and very helpful.” Before he closed his notebook, she saw him write a large question mark after her name.