“I’m sorry.”
“Go away.”
I had been through this scenario with my wife Mako many times before. If a person was not ready to accept your apology then there was no point in endlessly repeating it. I would wait a while in the hope that she might thaw.
I stood up. “What can I do to help?” I asked the doctor.
“Get some oil,” he said. “Any sort of oil – and bandages. We have nothing left.”
“I’ll find them.”
Candle in hand, I poked round the other rooms in the school. There were four or five rooms, though it was difficult to tell what they had been used for. Every room had gaping holes in the walls and ceiling, while the furniture had been reduced to splinters. I stumbled over some rubble, almost dropping the candle. I was in a room that may as well have been pulped by a wrecker’s ball. Most of the ceiling was on the floor, while one of the walls had been levelled to the ground. I had all but walked through the room before I saw a couple of metal sinks and the remains of a white tiled wall and realised I was in the school kitchens.
I placed the candle on one of the sinks and methodically cleared the debris, tossing the wood and the tiles straight out of the room and into the garden. Most of the contents of the cupboards had been smashed. Eventually, I came across a large drum of cooking oil.
I hefted it up onto my shoulder and carried it back to the main hall. The stench of the room hit me afresh, though the smell was soon mixed with the sweet aroma of peanut oil. Today, I only need to catch a single whiff of peanut oil and I am instantly back in that school hall with its scores of whimpering children.
I filled up two jugs with oil and steeled myself to do yet one more thing that I could not avoid any longer. Shinzo was in a corner of the room smearing the last of a tub of ointment onto a girl’s back. She whimpered at his every touch.
“Here,” I said. “I have found some more oil.”
He did not look up. “I heard you were back.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“It is not me you need to be apologising to.”
“I’ve already done that.”
He grunted to himself, smoothing the cream onto the young girl until her back looked as if it had been basted with white fat. “You did a wicked thing to that girl ”
“It was unforgivable.”
“I don’t know about that. But it’s good that you came back.” For the first time, he looked me in the eye, his black eyes glinting in the candlelight. “These are not easy times. But we learn – and we move on. I think we should start again.”
“Thank you. I would like that.” And as I walked away, Shinzo clapped me over the shoulder, and, even amidst all those horribly injured children, it gave me such a surge of joy. For even in my darkest hour, it was still possible to find redemption.
And that moment, more or less, was the very beginning of my rebirth. Not that there have not been many slips along the way. But for the first time, I had been granted a glimpse of the correct path, and ever since I have striven to be a kinder, more forgiving person. None of it could have happened though if it were not for three very kind people.
The first of these was Shinzo; the second was the girl; and the third well the third we shall come to.
For over an hour, I had been tending to the children as best I could. I poured peanut oil onto their burns and would try to bind their wounds with strips of an old sheet. And always they cried out. How they cried – they cried out for water, for their mothers, or simply called out that perpetual cry of the atomic bomb victim, “It hurts, it hurts”.
I was working on the swollen shoulders of a young boy. He had been burned and peppered with glass shards. I was pulling out the splinters with forceps, but most were so deep they could only have been retrieved with a scalpel.
Although I had never done it before, a part of me enjoyed the work. It called for the same sort of precision that comes to bear when making a kite. I am not sure it was of any use. Many of the splinters were so fragile that they crumbled at the first bit of pressure from the forceps.
There was little light, so I was largely working by touch. First I would feel the jagged glass with the tips of my fingers and would then try to grip anything that protruded through the flesh.
“Here. This may help.” It was the girl, who had brought over a candle in a saucer. She held it steady over the boy’s back.
“Thank you.”
I seized on a splinter of glass and pulled it smoothly from the boy’s shoulder. It tinkled as I dropped it in the saucer. “Much better. Thank you.”
“That’s alright, Beast.”
“Beast?”
“That is your new name and that is what I shall call you.”
“I deserve it,” I said.
“You do.”
“How long are you going to carry on calling me Beast?”
“I shall decide that.” She spoke formally, but did at least have a hint of a smile.
“Thank you,” I said again, and then did something that I have never done before. I acknowledged her grace with a deep bow of my head. “Thank you. You are very kind.”
And that is what is so very special about children. They can forgive. Adults nurse their grievances and hug them close – and in my time, I had been one of the worst for that. But a child can let it all go in a moment. They do not even want vengeance. All they require is a smile and an apology and it is forgotten. They have moved on.
For me, that one act of forgiveness was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received, for it was the key to my redemption. And ever since, in thought and deed, I have done my best to acknowledge it. I am still fundamentally a sinner. But at least these days I am aware that there is such a thing as a correct path. I strive to take it.
There was one final event from that night which I must describe. Shinzo had shown me compassion. The girl had shown me forgiveness. My third encounter in that reeking, hellish hospital would reveal something else entirely.
I treated many children that night, but the one that I spent most time with was a girl who was but three years old. She had facial burns and some cuts on her back, though did not seem too severely injured. But how she screamed. Her mother had died in the school hall earlier that day. The girl had been found snuggling into her chest, quietly whimpering as if she realised the size of the tragedy that had engulfed her.
It might have been kinder to have left her there for the night, but the mother’s body was taken away and, without a second thought, was tossed onto one of the flaming pyres.
How that little girl howled as she saw her mother being carried from the hall. She tried to follow, but was barred from going outside. Instead, she planted herself into a pool of vomit on the doorstep and screamed her lungs out.
I had been nearby, pouring peanut oil onto a woman whose raw flesh had been flensed of its skin. Yet I found myself drawn to this tormented child. I went over and picked her up and, just as I would have done with my own son, I held her tight to my chest and kissed the top of her head.
She still screamed, but I didn’t mind. I carried her over to where her mother had died and sat down with her on the blanket. “What’s your name?” I asked, but she never replied, only whimpering into my ear as she clutched at my neck.
Back and forth I rocked her. I sang her the same little ditty that my father had used to sing to me. Gradually, the sobbing eased and with a final sniff she was fast asleep in my arms. I wrapped her in the blanket and with a final kiss on the cheek, I placed her on the ground.
I must have been with that three-year-old girl for 30 minutes.
I stood up. A last glance over my shoulder to check that the girl was still asleep.
Gagging at the smell of the entrance porch, which was thick with faeces and vomit. The smell of peanut oil, insanely mixed with the aroma of cooked meat. I went outside to relieve myself, but was back in the hall within minutes – and the three-year-old girl was dead.
I found her lying on the blanket with open eyes staring up to the ceiling. I couldn’t believe it. I looked her close in the face and then snatched her up to catch a trace of her breath. And yet – nothing. She had died and I will never know the reason why. Perhaps it was a broken heart.
After nearly two days of unremitting hell, it was that girl’s sad little death that sent me over the edge. I sat on the blanket, clutching her tight to my chest, and bawled my eyes out. It could have been my grief for the girl, for Sumie, or for the whole of Hiroshima, but the tears poured silently down my cheeks and would not stop.
I felt a hand touch me on the shoulder, but didn’t look up. “Come with me,” said a voice. I dumbly placed the dead girl back on her blanket and followed the woman, the doctor’s helper, outside. Without a word, she embraced me.
I held her so close, my tears now mixed with a chuckle of laughter. How seamlessly, how quickly, I had moved from momentous grief to the most inexpressible joy at being hugged by a beautiful stranger.
“See death – and embrace life,” she whispered into my ear.
“Embrace life?”
“Every time someone dies, it is a reminder to all of us. A reminder to embrace life.”
She didn’t need to say more.
The woman’s arms were still locked round my back, her hands tight against my shoulders, and that hug gave her words an extraordinary resonance. I was not just embracing that beauty, that sage, that angel that had been sent to me from heaven itself, but I was embracing life. Sixty years on, I still say those very words to myself every morning, for they are my abiding philosophy: embrace life.
That is not to downplay death or the grieving process. With every death comes its fair portion of tragedy. But if there is anything positive at all to be gained from death, then it is to serve as a reminder that we must embrace every day, every moment, of this glorious miracle of life.
The woman, that delightful elfin woman who was hugging me so tight, whispered again in my ear. “Thousands of people are dead. We have lived through it. Is that not special?”
In all my years, I have yet to hear the life-affirming nature of Hiroshima explained so succinctly. It was a disaster, a catastrophe. But for those that survived it, Hiroshima could be taken as the most powerful affirmation of life. I know of many bomb victims who are ashamed of their keloid scars and who led their lives feeling permanently embittered. I also have a keloid scar, a shiny stretched ripple of discoloured skin. But thanks to that woman, I wear it with pride, for I only have to glance at it to remind myself that I am blessed, blessed every day that I remain on this hallowed earth.
We gave the three-year-old girl a proper farewell. I wrapped her in her mother’s blanket, with only her face showing, as if I were about to put her to bed. Then, with a last kiss to her forehead, I placed her on one of the pyres.
We each said a prayer and I lit the pyre. My grieving was over, to be replaced with the most stunning tranquillity.
We were outside sitting on a piece of rubble. I looked at my angel properly for the first time. Her face was in exquisite profile as she gazed up at the drifting smoke. Lines of tiredness etched round her eyes, but to my mind she was still ravishing. She knew I was looking at her, but her gaze never faltered.
“Even strangers have much to teach us,” she said, sitting now on her hands to keep them warm.
“Yes?”
“When you came here this afternoon, looking for your friend, you didn’t want to get involved. You were here for your friend. The people in this school were all strangers. We were not your problem.”
“I am already quite ashamed at my own selfishness.”
“Yet you grieved for that girl as if she were your own child.”
“And you gave me a hug when it was the last thing I deserved.”
“I did,” she said, with a smile. “I gave you a hug because you needed it. And that is why I’m working here – because there are children in there who need help.”
“I wish I had met you years ago.”
“You would never have listened anyway,” she said, clapping me on the knee. “That’s all you have to do, stranger. Help those who need to be helped.”
“What’s your name?”
“Wisdom.”
“Seriously.”
She laughed and stood up, her short black hair flopping down over her eyes.
“Me? I am nobody.” And as she said that, she bent down to give me a brief peck on the lips.
I never did learn the name of my beautiful benefactor. But I have much to thank her for.
I worked through the night till dawn, when I joined Shinzo in the corner of the room. The girl was there too, curled up on her side.
Shinzo was still awake. “What are we going to do about her?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Shinzo yawned.
“We cannot take her with us. We cannot take her to Nagasaki.”
“Why not ask her?” Shinzo replied, and promptly fell asleep.
The school hall was quite different when we awoke two hours later. A squad of medics had arrived in the morning and trained doctors and nurses were now treating the victims. They had even started cleaning up the vomit and all the other stinking unmentionables. For a while I just lay there, happy to be in modest comfort and to be allowed to do nothing. I was – just as that beautiful woman had exhorted me the previous night – embracing life. I looked about the hall, but could not see her.
The medics had brought a sack of rice and boiled up a tub. When had I last eaten? I was famished. I sat outside with my bowl and savoured every grain of it. Even the pyres, now heaps of smouldering ash with limbs and bodies all burned to nothing, did not seem as awful as they had the previous evening.
They were another little affirmation to embrace life.The girl and Shinzo came out to join me and as we sat there eating, I realised that I was happy. I had not been so happy for a long time. The girl, perched on the edge of a rock, fiddled with her hair. Shinzo scratched at the lice in his armpit. And I revelled in the simple miracle of being born anew.
The doctor in charge came out to talk to us. His white coat was now a tapestry of different stains. “Thank you for staying last night,” he said. “You were very kind. And now, as you can see, we have people to help.”