I drummed my fingers on my chest, vexed at how he had so speedily wrecked my simple plan. I wondered whether to attempt swimming across holding Shinzo, but did not much like it. He was already nervous. I could almost sense how going into the water would trigger a panic attack. Could we leave him and arrange to meet somewhere later on? Would he even survive?
I stared at the wall of flames that appeared on the verge of eating up the very river itself. “That is... ” I said, breaking off to massage my temples. “That is a problem.”
“We will be alright,” said the girl. “We can go a little further out. We must get as far as we can from the flames. Then we drop down into the water. We only need to come up for air.”
“Very good,” said Shinzo. “You are so quick.”
We waded a couple more metres out into the river – any further and the current would have swept us off our feet – and submerged ourselves in the water. Bodies, brown and bloated, drifted by on the current, a constant reminder of the frailty of the thread that attaches us to life. But you quickly got used to it. Every time you looked out over the river, there would be another dozen bodies bobbing on the surface, their arms sometimes jutting perpendicular out of the water. And if anything went wrong, then in a few minutes I too could be just another body in the river, unrecognisable, merely one more Little Boy victim.
I arched my back so that my face was pointing straight to the sky and only my lips and nose were above the surface – and even then I could feel the raw heat and smell the acrid tang of destruction.
Shinzo clutched tight onto my hand, fearful that he might be swept out into the stream.
Only a few people were lingering with us in the shallows. The rest were taking their chances in the river, preferring a swim to the risk of being burnt to death on that little spit of land.
As I ducked myself fully beneath the water for the first time, it felt as if I had returned to the womb. Even through the warmed water, I could hear the heavy thrum of the firestorm. I opened my eyes to the sting of salt water. The sky had turned pink grey from the fire and the smoke.
I developed a rhythm. I would hold my head under water for about a minute, until I was nearly spent, and then would dip my lips above the surface to take one quick gasp of smoked breath. The heat of the firestorm was arcking out over the water, crisping the wet skin on my face. And as I bobbed for my life in the river, I relived all the shocking events of that day.
For most of us, our days are merely an endless series of routines. All we do, we have experienced before; not just once, but many times over. Then, once in a while, once in a lifetime, something occurs which is wholly outside our experience. Our mettle and our imagination are tested to the full, and we have to rely on that old-fashioned quality known as ‘Character’. And when this time of crisis occurs, you can be certain of one thing: your weaknesses will be found out. Like a diamond under pressure, your every flaw will be revealed in all its awful imperfection.
So, for a time beneath the waves as we waited for the firestorm to abate, I was able to take stock. At that early stage, I was not especially proud of what I had done. But I was not ashamed either. I had survived. That alone had merit.
My actions as I had returned to Sumie’s house may not have been laudable. I might have stayed longer with the schoolgirls who had been trying to rescue their trapped friends. I could have done more for the little girl who had followed me and begged for help. I might have rescued Sumie. Perhaps.
My behaviour had not been reprehensible. I could not have been faulted for it. Surely anyone else would have acted the same way. Besides, I had never set myself up as a saint. I was just a civilian trying to survive the war in any way I could.
We spent more than an hour in the river as we waited for a lull in the firestorm. By the time we stumbled back onto the muddy spit, our skin was spongy soft and as wrinkled as an old plum. Those who had been caught in the blast barely had the energy to leave the water. Much more bearable to die slowly in the cool of the river than to face the sting of fresh air on raw wounds.
I am sure that is why the rivers were so thick with bloated bodies. The water at least offered some respite from the pain.
They did not cry out as they left the water, but instead made a numbing low level moan. It is much worse than a shriek, as it is the sound of a soul wracked in torment. Pain such as you would not believe – and pain that would stay with them until the very moment they died. For those that lived longer, they had to endure months of the most unspeakable torture, incapable of thought or emotion, or anything at all except this unconscionable fizz of pain.
We could feel the heat lessening and could now sit easily in the river, our heads above the surface. The firestorm still raged all about us, but at our particular spot on the riverbank, it was all burned out. The thick fug of smoke was easing up and we could make out distant fires in other parts of the city. On the other side of the river, I could make out a cluster of children clinging to the pilings of a bridge. One let go. A desperate scream for help, before a small black head, arms thrashing in the water, was curled away in the current.
The girl was the first out of the water. She took off her top and wrung it out, before shaking herself like a dog, hair flailing from side-to-side.
Shinzo stared out at the firestorm. “There is going to be nothing left,” he said.
I also studied the fire. Through the smoke could be seen flickers of fire, like lightning flashes that prickle a stormcloud.
“And it was only a single bomb,” I said.
“Perhaps the Yankees have finally invented the matchbox bomb,” Shinzo replied “Should I know it?”
“They talked of it years ago. There was a theory that if you destroyed a piece of matter, you released the energy that bound the atoms together. No bigger than a matchbox, was what they said.”
“The papers spout anything these days.”
“That is also true,” pronounced Shinzo, with all the stoic wisdom of a Buddha.
He was squatting in the water with just the top of his head above the water. I was suddenly struck by how he looked exactly like a hippo, its eyes and flicking ears above the surface with the remainder of its vast bulk submerged beneath.
“Are you getting cold?” I asked.
“No.”
“Of course not – because you have got three inches of hippo blubber to protect you.” I smirked at him. “Tell me, Shinzo – how have you stayed so fat? Everyone else is starving. Yet somehow you are as fat as you were four years ago –”
“If not more so.”
“How do you do it?”
“I like it.”
“Do you have some hidden cache of food?”
“My wife likes it too.”
“Likes whale meat does she?”
“Loves it.” He smiled, like the good-natured fellow he was. “But tell me – what ever does your wife see in a scrawny devil like you?”
I laughed. “She would still hate me whatever I looked like.”
“That is so,” he said, pausing a beat before adding, “Your challenging character is not to everyone’s taste.”
What an extraordinary sight we must have made, chafing each other in the river while all about us the city burned and that never-ending stream of bodies floated past. But it is wrong to think – even on that day of such complete tragedy – that the shell-shocked survivors were incapable of levity. No, even during the worst of it, some of us would still quip and make a joke. Not that we were making light of the disaster; but for a few of us, it was our only way of coping. I believe that in English, the term is known as “gallows humour”.
“It is freezing,” I said. “Shall we get out?”
Stepping out of the water was like emerging into some ghastly charred world, where everything had been uniformly reduced to ash and cinders. We picked our way over to the girl, who was squatting by the bankside wall.
It was already dusk, the flaming city becoming ever starker against the enveloping darkness and the bodies looking like nothing more than black sacks on the river.
The girl proffered up something in her hands. “Look what I’ve found.”
It was an abandoned lunchbox, somebody’s little dinnerpail prepared that morning and whose owner was now nothing more than a memory. There was some rice inside, as well as a piece of fish and two pickled plums. All of it had been completely cooked through by the bomb. That was the first time, I think, that I ever wondered what the bomb had done to our own innards. Had we also been cooked through too?
The girl doled out the food. “A mouthful of fish for you – and a mouthful for you,” she said, before taking a bite herself. The rice was handed out in the same way.
In all the hue and cry, I had quite forgotten my hunger. I cannot remember tasting such delicious fish; if I’d had some clean water to wash it down with, it would been a meal fit for an Emperor.
Shinzo wolfed down his meagre portion, barely chewing the fish before swallowing. He rubbed his fingers together, and then – and I had seen this look many times – gazed eagerly down to see what else was left to eat. He stared at the pickled plums for but a moment before, with a wistful shake of his head, averting his eyes to stare out again over the river.
“Two plums between three of us,” said the girl. “We’ll each have a bite.”
“You have them,” said Shinzo. “I’ve always hated pickled plums.”
Shinzo not liking pickled plums? Next he would be telling us that he did not like pork ribs. I had once seen him eat a whole dishful, well over 30, in a single sitting.
Still, if Shinzo wanted to play the martyr, I was not going to stop him – and nor was I going to donate my own plum to that chit of a girl. With a shrug, I picked up a plum and devoured it in two lusty bites. And, because I was a loathsome being, because I wanted to show Shinzo that his good-manners were wasted on me, I made sure that I ate noisily, smacking my lips with relish.
“Delicious,” I said. “The finest pickled plum I’ve ever tasted.”
“All food will taste good in Hiroshima today,” intoned Shinzo. “For the lucky ones who are still able to eat.”
A wisp of the moon peeked through the haze of smoke and dust. There were a few other people clustered along the riverbank, huddled together in the lee of the river wall. Shinzo and I sat on either side of the girl, who was so slight that she was quivering with the cold. Shinzo wrapped his arms round her. I could see the warmth return to her body, her shivers gradually replaced with the deep rhythmic breath of sleep.
And that was where we spent our first night in this awful new world. We could have tried venturing into the city, but it would have been pointless. We had no idea where we were, nor where we were going. As far as we knew, Hiroshima had been razed to the ground.
I slept a little, snatches of blissful unconsciousness before I would awake with a jerk, my eyes snapping open uncomprehendingly as I tried to make sense of why I was sleeping rough by the river. Was I grateful even that I was alive? That thought did come to me later, much later, after I had also survived Nagasaki. But that night, all I could think of was my raging thirst and the cold that knifed through my miserable clothing.
By sunrise, Shinzo and myself were fully awake, though we stayed tight in our huddle as the girl was still asleep. I will never forget waking up in Hiroshima that morning. The sound was the first thing I noticed. All I could hear was the eversame sound of the river as she cascaded into the sea. At first I could not put my finger on it – and then I realised. The moaning and the cries for water had stopped. Many of the victims’ torment had come to an end. What a terrible way to die, still tortured by pain even as you breathe your last agonised gasp.
Through the haze, I could see that, as the day before, it had all the makings of another blazing midsummer’s day. In other parts of Japan, people would be going about their everyday business, still pushing for the Motherland’s ultimate victory in the war. And yet there in Hiroshima, we had been burned so badly by the war that it had become an irrelevance. On that morning, it made no odds to us who won that damnable war. Our only concern was survival.
Perhaps I am wrong. In fact, I know I am wrong. There were many others who, even at that early stage, were striving with every sinew to help their fellow victims. Perhaps what I meant to say was that
my
only concern was survival.
“I would like to try and find my sister,” said Shinzo. He whispered so as not to wake the girl. “You do not have to come.”
Oh, how invidious those six little words were: “You do not have to come”. We have all heard them before, in countless delicate situations – where of course we do not ‘have’ to do anything, but where courtesy and kindness demand that we have to do it all the same.
It was annoying. In my self-absorbed idiocy, I had rather hoped that amidst all the carnage, Shinzo had forgotten his sister.
It was not that I did not like Tamiko. We had met several times and I had enjoyed her company. Spurred on by her brother, she had moved from Nagasaki to Hiroshima, first working in a communications centre before being ordered to join the demolition teams. She was every bit as engaging as her elder brother; attractive, even.
It really was nothing personal. But in such circumstances, are you allowed to be the realist? Is it permissible to state that some venture is hopeless? We could have spent a week searching every millimetre of the streets around Hijiyama Hill and might still be none the wiser whether she was alive or dead.
What I am trying to express are all the welter of feelings that bubbled up within me at the mention of this fruitless hunt for Shinzo’s sister. My every instinct told me that it was a waste of time, that our chances of finding Tamiko and then saving her were – how do the Yankees put it? – a snowball in hell. Actually, I can think of no more appropriate metaphor for Tamiko’s chances of surviving Hiroshima.
But I did still have some fellow feeling for Shinzo. I tried delicately to dissuade him from the search.
“She was working somewhere near Hijiyama Hill?” I asked.