We continued to roam through the ruins until the afternoon. It was as hot a day as I had known all summer and I was in a foul temper. Why was I wasting my time looking for a corpse in this city of corpses? Did I not have a wife and child waiting for me in Nagasaki? I admit that my reunion with Mako was not something that I anticipated with relish; I did not doubt that within five minutes of my arrival back home, the screaming would start – irrespective of the fact that I had just survived the world’s biggest bomb. But that boy, our dear little boy, I truly doted on him. I would have crossed oceans to see him – and can only wish that it was mere distance which kept us apart today.
I was mulling over these things as I sat on some concrete steps that led to another house that had been razed by the firestorm.
Shinzo, sweat pouring down his face and still toting his bucket, wandered over. “I thought we might have a look on the hill,” he said.
Hot, tired, hungry, I just stared at him, raising a single eyebrow. How much longer did he want to carry on searching for his sister before he got the message? She was dead – and if she was not dead, she was dying, and if somehow she had survived, then eventually they would meet up. What did he not understand?
“Will you come with us?” How forlorn Shinzo looked, standing there with that stupid bucket in those bedraggled clothes. His hairless paunch bulged through his shirt.
I looked at that great belly, flopping over his trousers – and realised something was missing. “Where is your moneybelt?”
“Lost in the bomb. Sorry.” He put down his bucket and scratched at his groin. “Will you come?”
I did not reply. With his money-belt had gone half my money too. I stared down at my boots, those heavy work boots that belonged to my father. They were caked in dry mud.
Shinzo moved onto scratching the lice at the back of his scalp. How often had I seen that particular action before? “We’ll not be long. You’ll still be here?”
I looked past Shinzo to the girl who was nosing through the wreckage of another house. It was all so pointless. Why were we spending another moment in Hiroshima? It had ceased to exist as a city.
“Yes,” I said – and when he lingered, feebly mopping at the sweat on his brow, I gave it him straight. “You’re wasting your time. You’re wasting our time. Your sister is dead. She was a nice woman, a kind woman. But she is dead and there is not a thing we can do about it. So I know that this hunt may be helping you to assuage your grief, but it’s hopeless. We can achieve nothing. Nothing! Your sister is dead – so why not start thinking about the living? You have a bride waiting for you back home in Nagasaki – and without a doubt, she currently believes she is your widow.”
“Tamiko might still be alive. Lots of people survived.”
“It is a waste of time. We could spend weeks here – and for what? So, that at the end of it, you can find a watch or a belt buckle that was once worn by your sister?” I clutched my hands to my head, my fingers kneading at my forehead. The sun and the lack of water had left me with a searing headache.
The girl had stopped roaming the ruins and had sidled over to Shinzo, where she clutched his hand.
“We’re going to search the hill,” Shinzo replied. “Will you be here in three hours?”
“Yes,” I said, spitting the word out in my anger. “You are wasting your time, my friend.”
Shinzo smiled, before pronouncing in courtly fashion, “Rejoice that I would do the same for you.”
They turned towards the hill – but I am sure that he was still able to hear my tart rejoinder: “Do not expect me to return the compliment.”
Then and there I was tempted to leave Hiroshima – and I would hook up again with Shinzo whenever fate decided it. But I was exhausted. I found a little patch of grey grass that was in the shadow of some rubble and cleared it of stones. Then, still cursing Shinzo and his fool’s errand, I went to sleep, promptly and with not a thought to my own selfishness.
Did I feel guilty? Not in the slightest. We must each of us take responsibility for our own decisions, and that especially held true for toiling over Hijiyama Hill in the heat of the day. In fact, it was not me that was being selfish, it was Shinzo! How could anyone have been so thoughtless as to take a seven-year-old girl out in that heat to search for a corpse?
I was awoken by the girl’s cries and could see from the long shadows that it was already late-afternoon. I had been asleep for over three hours.
I got stiffly to me feet, and could tell from Shinzo’s hangdog posture that they still had not found his sister. He looked shattered, his face, hair and clothes all matted with dust. I did not feel a gram of sympathy.
“We know where she is,” said Shinzo. “An aid station has been set up in a primary school. A woman thought Tamiko might be there.”
“She did, did she?” I asked, brushing off the worst of the ash and dust from my trousers. “Why did she think that?”
“She had been searching for her daughter. She had seen some other girls there from the same work party.”
“Very well.” I replied curtly. My mind was made up. I wanted to get back home to Nagasaki as quickly as possible. As far as I was concerned, I never wanted to set foot in that perfect hell of Hiroshima ever again.
“The woman said it is close by,” said Shinzo. “It should be minutes away.”
It was dusk as we finally walked into the grounds of the Hijiyama Primary School. I was incandescent, steam practically venting from my ears. For although we had known the address, street names were meaningless in the wreckage of Hiroshima. Up and down those hellish streets we had roamed, each of them near identical to the next, as my smouldering temper was stoked into an inferno.
Shinzo had asked more than 20 people for directions before finally, and quite by chance, we stumbled across the school. We had smelt it long before we saw it – a quite horrible stench of cooked meat that wafted on the wind. The building was surrounded by blazing bonfires, at least ten of them and each over two metres high. They burned long into the night. I smelt that awful reek every day for well over a month, and never once got used to it.
The primary school, with those flickering fires all about it, looked the very epitome of a portal to purgatory. I do not know how the main building had withstood both the bomb and the firestorm, but its stark black lines brooded large against the starlit horizon. Satanic looking men laboured in the dark, their shadows stretching long over the rubble and the debris. Over the crackle of the flames could be heard the sound of children screaming; endlessly screaming for their lost mothers. The sound of those high-pitched screams drilled through my ears, reverberating in my skull until all I wanted to do was run for the hills.
Shinzo, holding the girl’s hand, led the way through the porch and into the main hall. I followed a few steps behind them. If the outside of the school had been purgatory, then this hall was hell itself, containing such a welter of indescribable misery that it is difficult to know where to begin. Lying in a disordered sprawl upon the floor were hundreds of victims. From their slight figures, they mostly appeared to be children, but burned and mutilated beyond all recognition. Some of the injuries were so appalling that it was difficult to believe these frail little bodies could still contain a flicker of life.
As I had walked in, my eyes had been caught by the body of a small child lying face down on a blanket, whose legs and back had been scorched quite black. The burns had gone so deep that the scored flesh looked like a piece of over-cooked meat, while through the back of the leg protruded the white tip of a shattered thighbone. I had thought the child was dead – had to be dead from such appalling injuries – and yet suddenly an arm was flung out to the side and she was calling for her mother.
A small boy, barely older than my son, screaming over and over again, “It hurts! It hurts!” His face had been so horrifically burned that it was nothing but a black mask, swollen eyelids sealed tight and white teeth stark against his charred lips.
I walked further into the candle-lit hall. There were a few people who were tending to their relatives, but the main work was being done by a man and a woman. The pair of them were pitifully outnumbered. They could do little more than apply oil to the burns in a vain attempt to ease the pain, before swiftly moving onto the next child. The man had a tub of ointment, while the woman carried a metal jug. She might have been a teacher at the school. Even in her drab clothes, I could see that she was beautiful, elfin – though she looked exhausted. I doubt that she had slept in 36 hours.
She cradled the children’s heads as she gave them a sip of water. I watched as she cosseted a boy who was calling for his mother. She was stroking his hair as he died.
I plunged further into the hall. Two young girls holding hands on a blanket – one dead from her injuries and the other about to die. “Don’t go,” she calls out to her sister. “Don’t leave me.”
A boy, savagely burned across his chest, thrashes his head from side-to-side as he manically chants, “Water! Water! Water!”
The misery and the pain was unending, and all of it voiced in a score of screams and shrieks as the children called out for their mothers, fathers, or just an end to the unbearable torment.
“Kill me,” pleaded one boy, whose arms and torso had been riven with glass shards. “Please Sir, kill me. Please kill me.”
I had to bury my nose into my fingers to mask the smell. It was not just the stench of rotting, cooked flesh. Most of the victims soiled themselves where they lay. The air reeked of death and that sharp, almost heady whiff of urine and all manner of other human waste. The victims would vomit onto their own bedding, just able to turn their heads to the side as they retched up what looked like a thin yellow gruel.
Shinzo had already walked through the hall, hurriedly going from one victim to the next to check if they were his sister. The girl, who had been following, whispered something to him. Shinzo nodded and the next moment stood right in the middle of the hall and bellowed, “Tamiko! Tamiko Wakita!” His voice silenced all the moans and screams instantly.
“Tamiko!” he called out again. “Has anyone seen Tamiko Wakita?” The hall was so quiet that you could even hear the echo.
“Tamiko! Has anyone seen Tamiko?”
Nothing happened, and then from the far end of the hall came a small moan and someone raised their hand. Shinzo and I went over. She was a young woman whose swirling shirt pattern had been scorched into her skin in some ghastly parody of a tattoo.
“I was with Tamiko,” she said, timid eyes staring up at us. “She was in charge of our party. She came here with me. She was... ” The woman trailed off. “She was burned.”
“She is here?” Shinzo said in astonishment. “Tamiko is here? Here in this room?”
“Yes,” said the woman. “She was brought here.”
Shinzo bustled over to the man in a white coat who appeared to be in charge. The doctor had just finished applying a handful of salve to a boy’s legs. He glanced up at us.
Shinzo – still, unbelievably, carrying his bucket – was tongue-tied. “I... I was looking for my sister. I understand she is here, but I cannot find her. Are more survivors in another room?”
“This is all there is,” said the doctor, gesturing out over the hall. “I’m sorry. If she’s not in this room, then she will have been taken outside. There is a box of personal items that we have been collecting. You may have a look. Again, I apologise. We did what we could.”
Like a man in dream, Shinzo weaved over to the corner of the room, where there was a wooden crate on a table. He started to pick his way through the contents, holding broaches, bracelets, earrings and hair-clips up to the light of a lantern before carefully placing them to the side.
He soon came across what he had been dreading to find. Tamiko’s square-faced watch with its steel strap, and looped through it her belt. They were positioned near the top of the box; she must have died that afternoon.
How poor Shinzo’s shoulders slumped as he clutched those two little mementoes to his chest, the tears falling freely down his cheeks. The girl and I watched from a little distance as that great man stood in the corner, his shoulders quivering in pain, grinding the heels of his fists into his eye-sockets.
“Shall we go outside?” I said to the girl.
“You go. I’ll stay.” She trotted over to Shinzo and clasped both arms round his midriff, burying her face into his flank. How I wish I had done the same for my friend. But I did not. After a last peremptory look about the hall, and at the doctor and his pretty helpmate, I stalked outside. The hall and all those ravaged children had left me feeling nauseous. And I did not wish to intrude into private grief.
Out in the open air, there was a scene that was different but no less hellish. Three soldiers were hauling bodies over to the pyres. They had dug a shallow pit and were dragging the bodies towards it like so many haunches of meat. Two of them would hold onto the limbs and with a single swing the corpse would be flung onto the mound of bodies with arms, legs and naked torsos all on wanton display in a repellent orgy of death.
I was mesmerised. The three men stolidly went about their work with all the detachment of foresters who had been tasked to clear a wood. For them, the corpses had lost all trace of their humanity and were now nothing more than detritus which had to be cleared away.
The mound was now the height of a man. Who knew – Tamiko might even have been at the bottom of it. A soldier tossed one more body onto the top, a baby’s, so light that he slung it up single-handed as if throwing a stick for a dog.
The men conferred for a moment, before one of them picked up a can of kerosene or some other oil and doused it over the bodies. He sprayed all around the mound until the can was empty. Without any further ceremony, he struck a match and held it to a dead woman’s hair. With a dull, flat boom, the pyre exploded into flames. Even I, so heartless, spineless, was stunned at the lack of dignity, the lack of honour. Not a prayer, not a single acknowledgement to the victims’ humanity, as if they were so much rubbish that had to be disposed of. And now they were not even corpses any more, but had been reduced to one single burning mass of flesh, their only calling card being that awful smell of cooked meat which carried for kilometres in the wind.