Fire Flowers (37 page)

I glanced at the little wristwatch that Hal had bought me. It was very late. I wondered whether I had made our arrangement quite clear, whether Hal had understood me properly when I'd told him the time and place to meet. His cologne had been cedary and strong, the starched cotton smooth around the swell of his back as I'd buttoned his shirt that morning. In my mind's eye, I saw the pigskin suitcase, the locked type-writer case. A stab of panic suddenly went through me. Was he planning to leave? Had he already gone? Sailed away for America, without so much as a goodbye?

I struggled to recall the times we'd spoken those past weeks. There had been the joke about taking me to America, but nothing after that. Certainly nothing had been decided one way or another. Was I just his Japanese plaything? A temporary mistress? A pang of ridiculous jealousy went through me as I imagined his wife back home. She would be beautiful, charming, like Ingrid Bergman. My heart sank as I remembered the rash letter I had posted to Michiko. Blithely declaring that I'd soon be off to California, to take up my new life in the sun.

What an idiot I had been.

I prayed that the letter had never arrived, that it had been lost in the post before reaching her studio.

What a stupid, ignorant girl.

What had made me think that he was any different from the other Americans? What vanity was it that had let me flatter myself that I was somehow special? I was just one more girl amongst thousands. I clutched my swollen stomach, picturing myself from above, a pregnant, unmarried woman, sitting alone in the rain in a soaking kimono . . .

Footsteps thudded across the arched wooden bridge. Hal was stumbling toward me in the rain. As he came closer, I almost screamed. His trousers were dark and wet, ripped along the seam, buttons torn from his shirt. His eyes were wild as I reached up to embrace him, pushing my fingers through his soaking hair.

I cringed as I imagined some brutal gang of ex-soldiers assaulting him. “Are you hurt?” I asked, desperately.

He stood motionless as I buried my face in his chest. I held him for a long moment.

He wasn't responding. Something was wrong. I stepped back. His eyes were downcast, and his arms hung loosely from his sides. Finally, he lifted his head and gazed at me. He placed his hands upon my shoulders with a gentle, almost tender motion.

“Hal-san,” I murmured. “What is it?”

His mouth twisted into a terrible smile. Rain dripped down from his hair onto his cheeks.

I somehow knew that something dreadful had happened, something final and irrevocable. A hard lump rose into my throat as I pictured the hours I'd spent in Mrs. Ishino's parlour room that afternoon, as she brushed my hair and softly spoke to me, as if soothing a jittery horse. I'd imagined Hal and me, sitting on this bench in the last of the evening sunlight, his deep blue eyes filling with wonder as I told him about our baby, the child that was growing inside me. This wasn't how I'd imagined it. No—this wasn't it at all.

He was shaking his head. Over and over, he was shaking his head.

He took my hand. Barely able to swallow, I let him lead me through the park to the battered arcade where we sheltered beneath the eaves of an overhanging stall.

He patted his pockets for his cigarettes, and finally lit one with his metal lighter. His fingers were trembling as he turned to me with a terrible smile.

“Well, Satsuko,” he said. “I'm going home.”

Rain tapped on the wooden roof as I looked up at him. With my heart in my mouth, I held a hand up to his cheek.

A sharp image came into my mind. The day of the surrender, as we'd all knelt down in the gravel of the factory yard, the cicadas whirring, the hot sun on our backs, listening to the emperor's speech. I remembered how, just for a second, my heart had leaped when I thought his Imperial Majesty had said that Japan had won the war.

“Take me,” I whispered. “Please.”

He took my hand, kneading and squeezing my palm. Suddenly, he dropped my hand and slammed his fist against the wooden shutter of the stall. I cried out as it rattled in its frame. He put his head in his hands.

Rain was falling all around us, making patterns in the wide puddles in the gravel path. His clothes were saturated, his face hidden. A wave of hatred and revulsion suddenly clawed its way through my heart.

I had been right, after all. Mrs. Ishino had been wrong. He was just another American, like all the others.

“I'm so sorry,” he whispered.

So sorry
. I felt a cold sense of calm. He would go. I would stay. “Okay.”

A sudden urge to batter his face with my fists flashed through me. Instead, I leaned down and grasped him under the arm.

“Get up.”

He tried to clutch my hand again, but I slapped him away. Slowly he faced me, dripping in the darkness.

“You,” I said, pointing. “Come.”

I stalked away beneath the scaffold of the Treasure House Gate and into the precincts of Senso Temple, the hem of my kimono wet and heavy. Stray dogs lurked by the ginkgo stumps, barking from behind the stacks of timber that lay soaking in the yard.

The rain blew in fine, blustery clouds. At the far side of the shrine, I paused until I heard the American trudging behind me. He was calling out my name. I waited until he was a dozen paces behind me, and then turned sharply down Umamichi Street.

 

The patch of earth was overgrown with tall, wild grasses and littered with saturated lumps of charred wood and broken brick. Ghostly walls seemed to hang around me as I stood there, imagining the eel tank, the rows of tables. Up above had been the overhanging wooden balcony where we used to sit in the summer as the smell of broiling food floated up in the air. The room where Hiroshi and I had fallen asleep to the sound of the shop sign creaking like a frog in the summer rain.

The American was standing behind me. I pointed at the black, abandoned earth.

“Here,” I said, in Japanese. “My house.”

He nodded, a muscle trembling in his forehead. He tried to put his hand on my shoulder, but I jerked away.

I sprinkled my fingers in the air.

“Your planes,” I said. “Fire.”

A strange look came over his face, and he slowly squatted down. He looked up into the sky, as if he could see them now, roaring in over Tokyo.

I remembered the first vibration on the horizon, the air quivering like the struck string of a shamisen. The American was trembling, like a child left alone in the dark, and I hated him then, and I was glad, because I had never wished to hate anything as much before in my life.

 

The high wind came from the west, batting at the paper lanterns along the alley and rattling the wooden shutters of the shops. The last thing my mother did that night was to feed a few pinches of crumbled rice cracker to the goldfish that she kept in a bowl in the family alcove, and which she insisted were a lucky charm against fire.

I woke around midnight to a dull thudding. The roar of the American planes in the sky grew louder and louder until it sounded like a continuous peal of thunder. Then the house was shaking and Hiroshi and I sat up in bed, the room flickering with shadows. Outside the window the sky was as bright as day, filled with whirling orange flame.

Just then, there was a flash and a trail of blue sparks shot across the room. I screamed and leaped out of bed, pulling Hiroshi up as he struggled to put on his padded air-defence helmet. Together we tumbled down the stairs to go to the underground shelter, but it was already too late. Outside the house, the world was like a glowing orange playground, the wind blowing fiercely hot as incendiary bombs pelted down from the sky. Our screaming neighbours filled the street, dashing wildly to and fro, some with coats over their heads, others trying to throw hopeless buckets of water at the incendiaries as they landed. Mrs. Oka stumbled out of her house carrying her cedar buckets of pickles, the bran bubbling with heat smeared along their sides.

My mother's voice called out my name: she was leaning over our balcony in her nightclothes, screaming at us to get away.

“Hurry, Mother!” I shouted back at her. “Please hurry!”

I clung onto Hiroshi's hand as great gusts of hot wind blew around us. A tongue of blue flame was crawling up the eaves to the roof. I screamed at my mother: “Jump, Mother, please jump down!”

She dashed inside, wasting precious seconds, before she finally emerged in a loose blue kimono. The roof of our house suddenly crumpled behind her in a shower of sparks.

Most of the street was on fire now, the flames crackling in great swirls, the heat terribly intense as the fire ate away at the buildings. My mother was in the street now, waving at us. Just then there was a blinding flash behind her. Heat blasted toward us. The store beyond ours that sold cooking oil had exploded. I felt my eyelashes crinkle away and I looked up with streaming eyes. My mother was running toward us, screaming. Her kimono was a sheet of flame and her beautiful hair was a dancing halo of fire. She tottered forward, still holding out her arms, then collapsed onto the ground a short distance in front of us, writhing as the flames devoured her.

People were running past us now, screaming, “We're going to die!”

Hiroshi started to shout, refusing to move as I tried to drag him along the street.

“Come on!” I shrieked.

“Father's pot!” he shouted. “I promised him! I need to go back for it!”

“It's too late!”

Flaming beams crashed around us in showers of blazing sparks. The sky exploded with shells that spurted flame and hissing blue tendrils like blazing morning glory. People were running helplessly toward the Kamiarai Bridge, and we were swept along with them, past the police station and Fuji Elementary School. The shelters at the side of the public market were full of panicked people, pushing away the newcomers, shouting that there was no room left. As we approached the Yoshiwara canal, fireballs began to pelt down from the sky and a thick smoking wind gusted along so strongly that it almost swept me off my feet. We were in hell.

Through the cloud of whirling smoke, the buildings on the other side of the canal were on fire, red flame belching from inside the windows. The dark water was alive with dashing reflections, bobbing with people who had jumped in, steam rising from its surface. I held Hiroshi's hand, and together we leaped from the concrete bank, splashing down into the scalding water. When we came to the surface, he cried out. His face was yellow as we looked up at the burning buildings on the bank.

“Father!” he started to shriek. “I promised him!”

“Come back!”

I scrabbled for Hiroshi's fingers in the water, but he plunged away from me and seized hold of the iron ladder that led up to the bank. He clambered up, crouching down as he approached the flames. He turned back to face me, silhouetted by fire.

“Stay there, Satsuko!” he shouted. “I'll come back! I promise!”

It was madness. Overhead, the entire sky was filled with thundering silver planes, so low now that I could see the figures of the pilots behind the glass noses.

“Hiroshi!” I screamed, but he started sprinting along the bank, straight toward the firestorm.

A sharp whistle came from above, and there was a deafening explosion. The water swept up in a great boiling wave. The chemical works along the canal had exploded. The sky turned phosphorus white as I splashed forward and desperately tried to hoist myself up out of the boiling water onto the ladder. The iron rail was scorching now and the metal stuck to the skin of my hands. I wrenched them away in agony, the skin tearing away, sticking there like flapping cloth as I rolled onto the bank. People were crawling around me on all fours, their faces black, their clothes all burned away. Blazing timbers crashed into the water behind me and whirling figures screamed in pain as incendiaries pelted the water. I desperately searched for Hiroshi. There was nothing but fire. To the side of the street I saw an irrigation ditch and I crawled blindly toward it. A rushing cloud of black smoke blew toward me, and then the ground disappeared beneath me, and I was tumbling down the steep banks to the bottom.

 

The American was hunched over on the ground, rocking back and forth. I knelt down and wrenched his hand away from his face.

“Why?” I asked. “Why?”

His raised a shaking hand to my face, but again, I struck it away.

“I'm so sorry—” he whispered.

I stood up. “You go. I stay. Okay.”

Leaving him in the wet earth, I strode away, past the ruined houses, along the incinerated alley. A strangled noise came from behind me, half sob, half shout, but I didn't look back.

Asakusa Market was bustling with people and I walked on until I reached a group of low stalls. There, ignoring the looks brought about by my sodden clothes and tangled hair, I ordered a glass of shochu from the ugly stallholder and drank it down in one. I ordered another. The rough liquor burned in my belly, and I drank another glass, and another, before stumbling along the alleys in the direction of Matsugaya, then Inaricho. Without knowing how, I found myself climbing the metal steps of the bridge overlooking the mass of shimmering train tracks that snaked out of Ueno Station.

Trains were shuttling in and out, their carriages lit, their wheels sparking. Speckles of rain flew against my face as I watched the white and red lamps of the carriages worming into the violet black night that covered the distant hills.

Almost without thinking, I took a pot of rouge from my satchel, and with my fingertip smeared it heavily across my lips and cheeks. I tugged the combs from my hair and hurled them over the railing so that my wet hair dangled loose around my face. I started to walk across the bridge, my sandals slipping on the metal as I crossed over the tracks and walked down toward Ueno Station.

On the other side, I took out my pocket mirror. I grimaced in satisfaction. The reflection was that of the cheapest kind of slut.
This is what I am,
I thought.
This is what I have become
. I laughed, my voice shrill and uncanny in my ears.