I looked behind. The firestorm was harrying at us, yipping at our heels. Occasionally we would make a little gain, and then it would come sweeping in from the sides in a hail of smouldering embers. They stung as they kissed your skin. Shinzo twisted in pain as a red-hot shard of wood landed on his neck.
One or two people were lying slumped on the road – either dead, or minutes from it. They did not even have the strength to cry out anymore. Not that we would have heard them anyway, as the howling roar of the firestorm drowned out all else.
The girl was trying to break into a trot, gesturing at me with her free hand to pick up the pace. I could feel the heat of the flames on the back of my legs. When I looked back, it was shocking to realise that our path where we had been walking barely a minute earlier was already engulfed in flames.
Shinzo was moaning to himself as we dragged him on, spittle dribbling from his slack ash-grey mouth. He broke into an ungainly trot, but after a minute was back to a stumbling walk.
The girl looked behind us. We would need a miracle to survive if we were going to stick with Shinzo. The smoke was so thick that we had lost all sense of direction. At our hobbling speed, it was only a matter of minutes before we were caught.
“Leave me!” howled Shinzo. “I cannot go another step!”
This time the girl cuffed him round the ear with the flat of her hand. “Save your breath!” she screamed, though I could hardly hear her over that terrible sound of the inferno.
Still clutching onto Shinzo’s hand, I darted another peek behind me – and even without this human millstone at my side, it was impossible to believe we could ever escape the firestorm. Our very footsteps in the dust seemed to be sprouting into flames. I had been reduced to nothing but a blind lab animal, scurrying onwards without any thought except to escape the searing heat and those choking clouds of smoke.
“Here!” The girl screamed so loud I could even hear her over the thunder of the flames. “I see something!” She wheeled off to the right, and Shinzo, his slack head bobbling from side to side, dumbly followed.
I didn’t know what the girl had seen. Suddenly through the smoke emerged a low stone wall. It had to be one of the river walls. I could not see what lay beneath, but without a thought I jumped over. I dropped perhaps three metres before sprawling into the muddy silt.
“It’s fine,” I called up. “A bit of a drop.”
Shinzo shrieked as he was pushed off the wall. His knees buckled as he pitched forward onto his fat stomach. The breath was punched out of him. A moment later the girl followed, agile as a cat as she landed lightly on the black mud.
We started helping Shinzo out of the claggy silt. He was in it up to his knees.
“Leave me!” he said. “Just go!”
“Will you shut up?” I said. All his bleatings suddenly put me in the most towering rage. “Get out of there now, right now, or I will kick you myself, and I tell you now that my boots are going to hurt a lot more than anything you have had from the girl!”
I channelled my rage into trying to haul Shinzo out of the mud. The girl tugged at one of his ankles which was still planted deep in the silt.
The poor man, the dear man, was snivelling to himself. He might even have been crying. “All I want is to be left alone.”
“Shut up! Imbecile!” I was seething. I do not know why I was so mad, but I was a tinder keg ready to explode. Perhaps it was my fury at the loss of Sumie and perhaps I was incandescent at Japan’s four wasted years. But the reason matters not for at that moment there was such awesome rage in my heart, and it was Shinzo who happened to be its focus. It was Shinzo who had set me off, Shinzo who was the catalyst for my explosion, and it might well have been that that saved him. “Get up!” I screamed.
“Get up you stinking bastard! Get up! Move!”
I grabbed him by the shoulders and started man-hauling him out of the mud. Through the smoke, still thick about us, the girl was fluttering at his feet, but there was no need as, for one minute, all my anger was concentrated into pulling Shinzo’s dead-weight body out of the mud.
I was now dragging him over the silt, my boots sinking ankle deep into the mud. “Get up!” I screamed at him. “If you do not get up I will... I will hound you... I will twist you... I will kick you and I will not stop kicking even when you are dead. Just. Get. Up!”
“Please stop screaming. I will –” he panted for breath. “I will try and get up.”
I hauled him to his knees and Shinzo used the girl as a leaning post as he got unsteadily to his feet. He eyed me up for a moment and opened his mouth, about to speak.
“Save your breath,” I said curtly. “We can talk in the river.”
“But –”
“Shut your mouth.”
“I cannot –”
“Shut up!”
In silence we stumbled over the silt and made our way to the river’s edge. It was muddy but so long as we kept moving, we did not sink down too much. The smell, blown in from the smouldering city, was repellent. Perhaps death does have a smell – certainly I will never forget it.
The smoke cleared a little and I could see that we were on a spit of land that jutted out into the river. Several hundred other people had already sought refuge there. Most of them were clustered about the water’s edge, paddling in the river, but for some reason not quite daring to take the final plunge. Many were lying in the water as they tried to ease their horrific burns.
It was hard to tell the living from the dead. Bodies, bloated and burned, drifted by on the current. It was a ghastly river of death.
We reached the riverside and my tide of rage had ebbed into nothing but slack water. It was almost hard to believe that Shinzo’s unheeding bulk had galvanised me into such a fury of action.
Still holding his hand, the girl plucked at my fingers and for a minute we stood there with the water lapping at our ankles. The firestorm was still raging in the city, enveloping us in a fog of smoke, but we shared a strange moment of tranquillity. Shinzo, the girl and I, we looked at each other and smiled, and we all had the good sense not to spoil it by uttering a single word.
Some people had crawled to the waterfront and were drinking the brackish water. I was parched and scooped up a cupped hand of water. It was so salty, I could not swallow it.
We had done everything that it was possible to do. So we stood in silence at the side of the river, the mud sucking at our feet, quietly accepting that the die was cast. We had no clue if we were safe from the firestorm, which even then seemed to be trying to burn up the very silt that we stood upon.
As always, it was the patriots who had to spoil it. How I have come to hate the patriots, those swaggering bullies who even yet use the smooth mask of patriotism to hide all manner of brutish behaviour. And it was in World War II that Japanese patriotism reached its absolute zenith. Every single excess, from torturing prisoners-of-war to sending schoolboys into battle, was suddenly deemed not just acceptable but desirable – just so long as it was done in the name of ‘Patriotism’. The cold-hearted and the callous could behave like mercenaries, just so long as they were acting for the greater good of the Motherland. And every little tin-pot official was suddenly allowed to wield more power than they could ever have dreamed of – so long as they dressed it up under that odious, despicable term of ‘doing one’s duty’.
It was on that riverbank, as we caught our breaths, that I was to witness yet two more instances of this insane patriotism in action. We were a few metres out into the river, when we heard a shout from behind us. “Make way for the Emperor!”
As I write those words, it seems so utterly fantastic that I can only laugh at the idiocy of it all. If only it had just been that little cluster of crazy men. They exuded thay lethal combination of patriotism and righteous fervour: the exact attitude which had been responsible for getting us into the war in the first place. It was endemic throughout Japan – and was to blame for yet one more little tragedy in Hiroshima. Such a waste on that terrible day of waste, but is a man’s life worth less just because his fellow citizens have been incinerated by the thousand? I had never thought about that before. I daresay, though, that on the day that Little Boy was dropped, life was indeed cheap.
“Make way for the Emperor!” came the shout again, and through the smoke I could make out a troupe of four uni- formed men – carrying, of all things, a picture of the Emperor. It was identical to the picture of Hirohito that I had been peering at that morning in the warehouse. As I may have said already, pictures of the Emperor were almost as sacrosanct as the man himself.
Two of the men had the Emperor’s picture hoisted above their shoulders, while the other pair carved a path through the crowds. I still have no idea whether they were trying to save this large black and white photo from the flames. Or whether they were using it as some sort of rallying symbol, as if to say, ‘Worry not – we still have the Emperor!’
Many people reverentially bowed their heads as the Emperor’s party shouldered its way through the milling crowds to the water’s edge. But I could only watch in stunned stupefaction at how in this time of utter crisis, Hirohito’s picture was still being paraded like a holy relic.
Shortly afterwards, a boat drifted by with a single man at the oars. It went without saying that the Emperor’s party was first on board. And so we watched them escape the firestorm, glad at least that the Emperor had survived. Many of the military men saluted the picture as it sailed away to safety.
The heat from the flames was so intense that we started to move out further into the water. The wind was blowing the blaze directly at us, fingers of fire creeping out over the mud. Still holding hands, Shinzo, the girl and I walked step by step out into the water until it was over our knees.
“Stop!” came a scream. “Do not try and swim the river. It is dangerous! You will not be able to cross the river!”
Although the firestorm appeared to be leaping at us across the silt, we all momentarily stopped. I could just make out the man who was ordering us not to move, a military policeman in the same mould as Akiba, with short bristling hair. He was standing up to his knees in the water and brandished a pistol over his head. But the heat from the firestorm kept driving us back and as one we edged further out into the water.
Over the roar of the flames, I heard the crack of the pistol as the policeman fired off a warning shot. “Stop that!” he screamed. “No-one goes into the river. It is dangerous! There is a firestorm on the other bank. I will shoot the next person who attempts to swim the river!”
The crowd was skittish, panicky. It felt as if we were about to be roasted alive. The policeman was jostled once or twice, as people bumped past him. He fired another shot overhead.
“Stop! I said stop!” he screamed, voice shrill with excitement. “I will shoot anyone who swims the river! I will!”
For one old man, with grizzled grey hair and wearing only a pair of ragged trousers, the heat was too much. His arms had already been skinned by the bomb, leaving nothing but raw flesh. He lingered at the river’s edge, torn between his desire to immerse himself in the cool of the water and his fear of the wild-eyed military policeman.
Eventually, the pain won out. The scorching heat must have been excruciating as it played over the old man’s red raw flesh. After a forlorn glance at the policeman, he dived head first into the river, pulling away from the bank in a limp breaststroke.
The military policeman stared at the man who had dared defy his authority. Then carefully raising his pistol with both hands, he drew a bead on the swimmer and shot him through the head. A red splot appeared on the back of the man’s scalp. His arms stopped moving and his head lolled red in the water for a few moments. before gradually slipping beneath the waves.
“You will all stop!” said the policeman, his pistol high above his head. “That is what will happen to anyone else who attempts to swim this river. It is dangerous!”
Oh, how I wish that I had been the man to have stopped the madness. But I wasn’t. At the sight of the gun and the dead swimmer, I had once again reverted to being a craven drone who automatically yields to authority. Besides, I was a coward. The policeman terrified me.
But one brave soul did put an end to the nonsense. The military policeman, with arm crooked and pistol pointing to the sky, was still glaring at the cowed crowd – and never noticed the roundhouse blow that caught him on the side of the head. He lurched backwards and was bringing his gun up when another solid blow caught him on the temple. The police officer sank to his knees, arm limp by his side.
His middle-aged attacker was a man slighter than myself, his clothes in ribbons. He stooped down to snatch up the pistol before hurling it far into the river. A ripple of shock pulsed through the crowd. None of us had ever seen such an open act of defiance. It seemed almost treasonable. It was just not within our compass to understand that authority figures could be – indeed should be – challenged.
The hero of the moment politely offered his hand to a woman and, without once looking back, they dived into the river. I do so hope that he survived. I never saw the man again, but if I did, I would shake him by the hand.
Everyone was suddenly pouring into the water, and the three of us followed. The fearsome heat was like a furnace blast. I lost sight of the policeman, who was sitting groggily on his knees and coming to the realisation that no-one cared a jot for his uniform or his threats.
The girl’s hand was tight in my own, the water now almost up to my waist. “Will you be alright to swim?” I asked her. “Yes,” she replied. “My grandmother taught me when I was six.”
“Good. Do not swim against the current. Go with the flow and we will make for the other bank. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” The girl had a little frown on her forehead, aware of the size of the task that faced her.
“Are you ready?” I asked. The heat from the flames was almost unbearable.
“Wait,” said Shinzo.
“What is it?”
He cocked his head sideways in apology. “I cannot swim.”